Category Archives: Bible

Dipping my toes in the waters of the lectionary

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(I try not to bore you with too much behind-the-scenes technical info. Let me just say that not everything is working as it should. For now, I can post, and you can comment; that’s the most important stuff, right?)

The other day I talked about the Christian calendar. Along the way, I mentioned that I’ve been following the lectionary. Let me comment on that.

  • To me, the lectionary is basically a structured Bible reading plan. At its core, it’s merely a listing of Bible verses to be read at a certain time.
  • At a deeper level, I think the lectionary provides me with a community to read and study with. It’s a broad community, made up largely of people I don’t know. Their views are widely divergent, which in this case I view as a good thing. I need to hear the views of people I disagree with, not just those that see things as I do.
  • The lectionary leads me to places in Scripture I wouldn’t necessarily go. I don’t mean interpretations, but parts of the text that I might not read otherwise. I’ve found the same to be true when teaching through a book or even teaching a book that I’ve never taught before. (Paul wisely observed the other days that there are holes in the lectionary’s selections; this is very true, as is true of every systematic approach to teaching Scripture I’ve seen)
  • So far, I haven’t seen much interest in those that fill in when I’m not preaching. However, the lectionary would provide continuity should they choose to follow the readings.

A couple of resources that I use are lectionarypage.net and textweek.com. Take a look at those pages if you want to learn more about the lectionary.

Rebekah watered the camels

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01_ge_24_04_rgI forgot to share something that I heard from Tony Fernández a few weeks ago. He was preaching at a church in Chicago, and I was his translator. He was talking about the incident in Genesis 24 where Abraham sent his servant to find a wife for Isaac. The servant traveled back to Mesopotamia and asked God to help him in his search. He asked that a woman come to the spring where he sat and offer water to him and to his camels. Rebekah did just that, and the servant knew she was the one.

Tony pointed out that the servant had ten camels. They had just crossed the desert. Ten thirsty camels can easily drink more than 400 gallons of water.

Imagine how long it took Rebekah to draw that much water from a spring with a jar! It would have taken hours.

No wonder the servant knew that Rebekah was the one God had chosen. Not just anyone would do that. Thanks, Tony, for showing me something new in a story I’ve known most of my life.

Image courtesy of Sweet Publishing

Just how clueless were the biblical writers?

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Apostle PualThe title to this post reflects a question that’s been growing in my mind as I read what many are writing about the Bible these days. Seemingly, the biblical writers were pretty clueless.

You know, like when the Pentateuch talks about God wanting people to offer sacrifice for sin. Fortunately, later writers (the prophets) corrected this misconception. There’s no sin between people and God. Just bad feelings and frustration. God didn’t want sacrifice. He just wants people to feel better.

And that talk about God being angry? That’s just ancient writers projecting their feelings into the text. God is love. God is forgiveness.

Hints that salvation is a privilege and not a right? Merely a reflection of the views of ancient people living near God’s people. God wants everyone to be happy and plans to save everyone. The apostles risked their lives preaching the gospel to let people know that they would be saved no matter what they did or believed.

And as clueless as the biblical writers were, I must be even more so. Because I just can’t wrap my mind around the rewrites of the Bible progressive Christianity offers. And I’m silly enough to think that inspiration counts for something. Go figure.

How the Bible’s format affects us

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scrollsI’ve been sharing some thoughts and musings about the format of the Bible, the fact that we have it as one volume when it is in fact many books put together. Some of my thinking on this came from a conversation I had in Cuba.

A man who was visiting Cuba from another Latin American country shared with me some thoughts on sin. As he laid out his arguments, he pulled together passages from several different New Testament books. No regard for context. No regard for differing authorship. Sentences and phrases cut and pasted together to make an unusual point.

As you can probably tell, I was quite dismayed at this man’s approach. (He was there to do training) Later I got to thinking that people might be less inclined to build unbiblical arguments using biblical texts if the different biblical books were bound separately. Maybe we would have a better grasp of context, literary style, authorial intent, etc. if each book were a separate volume on our shelf.

Maybe, maybe not. As we ponder such things, we also have to think about the nature of inspiration… but that’s a discussion for another post.

Anyway, I’m back to the question I raised a few posts ago:

We talk about “Scripture,” viewing the writings as a singular work. One book. The Bible talks about scriptures, the holy writings, a group of books.

Doesn’t it seem like that affects how we view the contents?

Hebrew scriptures

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scrollsLike many in churches of Christ, I grew up with an understanding that the Bible basically had two parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament contained an old law that we were no longer under; the New Testament contained the law that replaced that old one.

Jews have never seen their scriptures as a single unit, the Old Testament that I grew up with. And they certainly never considered it all to be law.

There is the Torah. This is Scripture, with a capital S. This is God’s Law. This is The Law.

The other writings are exactly that… other writings. The Prophets are a Word from God for his people and are treated as such. (Some books which we consider to be “history” are considered prophetic books by the Jews, such as the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings) Then there are the poetic books: Psalms, Proverbs, and Job. There are the Five Scrolls, the five books that are read on the different Jewish feast days. And there are the other books. But none of them compares with the Torah in terms of weight and authority.

There’s a vast gulf between that view of Hebrew (and Aramaic) scriptures and the flat view I grew up with. Again, I have to wonder how the different ways of viewing God’s Word affect our understanding.