The Bible is great

English: Pregnant woman at a WIC clinic in Virginia (vertically mirrored image). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was reading Exodus the other day. Right in the middle of a bunch of rules about what should happen to people who beat up other people there’s this little passage:

When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman’s husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (Exodus 21:22-25)

Observation one – this is a pretty standard go-to verse to demonstrate that the Bible is pro-life. The whole idea of ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth’ is within the context of harming the unborn. Interesting.

Observation two – this is the only bit in the passage which involves men ‘striving together’ – each other one is just ‘if someone…’, which is interesting, isn’t it?

Observation three – if the unborn child is not harmed, the one who chooses the punishment is the woman’s husband, the child’s father. In other words, the punishment will be chosen by an angry man.

Observation four – this is all about Jesus. The Son of God came to earth, and men strove (is that a word?) together to kill him; humanity killed him – guilty as charged – but although we should pay life for life, what we receive by faith in him is new life for old life!

That’s the Great Exchange – that’s amazing grace!

How the fruit of the Spirit grows

A plant finds a nook and grows on the side of a building. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Galatians 5 records the fruit of the Spirit: ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.’

Sounds lovely.

A couple of observations for what that looks like, though:

1. They’re not the fruits of the Spirit; you don’t grow a ‘love’ tree and reap love. Plant the seed of the Spirit (i.e. be a Christian) and the fruit will grow.
2. Fruit can take a looooong time to grow.
3. Fruit grows in seasons.

I don’t get chocolate Advent calendars

Advent Calendar (Photo credit: Jon Newman)

As I opened the door to my Advent calendar this morning I was greeted with a little picture of a white lady in a blue robe (I’m guessing it was Mary), and I started to think that even Christian Advent calendars don’t seem to mention Jesus right until at least Christmas Eve…it must have been early. Of course the whole point of Advent is that we anticipate – firstly the birth of the Messiah, and secondly his second coming.

So am I allowed to ask: how do chocolate Advent calendars fit into this? All we anticipate is getting the choccy. So I just don’t get chocolate Advent calendars.

How bitumen shows that the Bible’s all useful

The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah, a painting by John Martin (painter), died 1854, thus 100 years. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Partly in response to this post I recently decided to knock my Bible reading plan on the head and just go ahead and read the thing from start to finish. (Or should that be ‘the Thing’?)

Anyway, I opened at page one and went to work, and it struck me pretty quickly that the book of Genesis moves through events way faster than I’m used to in a book. The author (Author?) decided that descriptions that would give you a sense of time or position are simply not as important as the things that needed recording, so a conversation is recorded over 500 words, immediately followed by hundreds of years of people having babies over 500 words, with seemingly random bits and bobs thrown in here and there.

I was thinking this when I was reading Genesis 14. Verse 10′s an odd one, which shows this off perfectly. Right in the middle of an account of a battle we’re told that ‘the Valley of Siddim was full of bitumen pits, and as the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, some fell into them, and the rest fled to the hill country.’ Why are we told that some fell into the bitumen pits? Who knows? Nothing else happens to them, and they’re never mentioned again in the entire Bible. Maybe they’re still there now!

But the reason it really stood out to me was that a couple of chapters earlier I’d just been introduced to bitumen.

…they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens…” (from Genesis 11)

That’s the start of the Tower of Babel, which led to the peoples of the earth being scattered and unable to communicate with one another. But again we have this question: why mention the bitumen so specifically?

2 Timothy 3:16 tells us that all Scripture is useful: why is this useful?

Well, I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the material used to build a tower designed to escape from God is the same material that ends up as the downfall of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah! At this point none of the horrific scene involving Lot and the angels has happened yet, but it just goes to show that God is in complete control. Every little detail in the Bible is there for a reason.

But the reason for the bitumen is even more mind-boggling.

Bitumen is mentioned one other time in the whole of Scripture, in Exodus 2. It’s the material that’s used to keep the baby Moses’ basket waterproof. This is how God shows redemption in bitumen:

• Man used it to try to become like God.
• Man fell into it and suffered as a direct result.
• God took what we intended for evil, and used it for good.

God’s grace is phenomenal.

Why the church should break the law

Priest in Eucharistic vestments (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the immediate aftermath of the recent Anglican vote against having female bishops the press was pretty much universal in its hatred for the decision. One particular title to a letter from a reader caught my eye:

The church isn’t above the law

Obviously the opinion stated was that if the Church of England is going to continue operating as a charity in the UK with the significant position it does, it should at least obey equal opportunities laws and so on.

But that doesn’t really work when it comes to faith, does it? The church must submit to a higher authority than the Government, so if the Bible says ‘you must’ when the Government says ‘you must not,’ the church ‘must’. Agreed?

‘Well,’ comes back the response, ‘that’s all well and good when you’re talking about what days of the week to work on, but really you Christians should catch up with modern society.’

Now, that all sounds ok until you ask where the line is; a couple of hundred years ago it would have been completely irrelevant for the church to have women leading churches at all, let alone as bishops! How would a woman, whose role in life was to be wife and mother before anything else, have anything useful to say to men? And before that offends you, think a couple of hundred years into the future. What will western society look like in 2100? Maybe we will continue on the same trajectory of the past century and become even more liberal (I can’t even imagine how!) but maybe we’ll end up having our minds changed and swinging in the opposite direction – we can’t predict the future.

But God can, which is why in his grace he wrote us a book.

Mark by R.C. Sproul

This book is essentially a collection of sermons working through the Gospel of Mark verse by verse. It’s a sort of light touch commentary.

It does what it says on the tin really well. If you want someone to preach the entire Gospel of Mark to you in book form, look no further than this one. Each passage is included in the text together with, as you’d expect, sermon illustrations and points for application throughout.

I want to say this is a good book, but to be honest I’m not really sure who I’d recommend it to. It’s certainly not an academic work and doesn’t try to be a detailed exegetical commentary, but the sheer scale of it I think makes it a but daunting for a casual read. Perhaps it would work well as part of a daily devotional or something.

Sproul does well not to repeat himself too often so it can work simply as a book to read. In short, if this sounds like the sort of book you’d like to read, I think you would.

I got this book for free from Reformation Trust Publishing in exchange for an honest review.

Lifted By Angels by Joel J. Miller

This book is a study of who angels are and what they do, drawing on the Bible and early Christian teaching. It looks at the different roles of different angels, including the fall of Satan, guardian angels and the eternal future.

It’s well written in that the style is pretty straightforward, and it’s clear where Miller is taking his information from. There aren’t that many good books about angels out there, so if you’re looking for one this is a reasonable bet.

That said, I wasn’t in awe of it. Because of the heavy use of early Christian writing there are several words used which I simply didn’t understand (maybe I’m just not academic enough) so had to revert to the dictionary on more than one occasion. The chapters are separated into sections with numbers as the headings, for no good reason that I could see, and due to the source material it’s sometimes hard to determine what’s biblical truth and what’s interpretation.

So I liked it, but I didn’t love it I suppose. It’s definitely good as a collection of the early church’s view of angels, but I doubt I’ll be returning to it for anything more than that.

I got this book for free from Booksneeze.com in exchange for an honest review.