The main thing that the prophets dealt with was Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. They were calling the people back to God, and reminding them of the promises of blessing and cursing. Israel’s unfaithfulness was shown by their idolatrous worship of false gods, and it is likened to a marriage where the wife is unfaithful and…

For the past eight weeks, I have been reading the four Gospels for class. Alongside these readings, I have been studying the different forms of “criticism” that many have used in past decades, and also centuries, to try and find the “Jesus of history” as opposed to the “Jesus of faith.” While proper interpretation of…

When reading the Gospels, it could be easy to forget why they were written. While the Matthew and Mark do not state a purpose, and Luke states that he is mainly writing for Theophilus, the Gospel According to John gives a general purpose statement. It can be found in John 20:30-31 and it is this,…

In Mark 8:22-26, we are told of an instance where Jesus heals a blind man. The interesting thing is that Jesus has to touch the man twice before he is fully healed. We read “spitting on his eyes and laying His hands on him, He asked him, ‘Do you see anything?’ He looked up and…

    One thing that I believe many people forget about Jesus is that He was a Jew, and an Old Testament Jew at that. He often quoted the Old Testament, normally to point out where people had gone wrong in their thinking. One example of this can be found in Matthew 15:1-9. The Pharisees and scribes…

    This will be a look at the parable of the sower by reading “horizontally.” By that I mean looking at what each of the accounts has to say. There is another method, known as reading “vertically,” where you read what was happening before and after the passage as well and try to get a deeper…

    I chose this topic because it speaks to the heart of a God centered religion vs a man centered one. A man centered religion will be worried about following the law “to the letter” so as to appease God, and possibly show others how much better than them you are. A God centered religion, on…

    This is the first time that I have read The Wisdom of Solomon and Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach. After reading just the chapters mentioned in the title of this blog, I see somethings that are very similar to scripture in these books, and thought they might be good. But after quickly doing some…

    1 Maccabees is a book from the Apocrypha, meaning that it was not considered to be inspired by the Jews. The Protestant church follows their example, but the Catholic church (as well as some other Christian groups) do not, meaning that they include it in their Bible. Here are some of my thoughts after having…