Monthly Archives: March 2021
Started reading Amos last night. I decided to try something different and after reading the first chapter I went ahead and read the last chapter.
In chapter one, the prophet says he is going to give a prophecy against Jerusalem, the capital of the southern Jewish Kingdom. Yet I know from having studied Amos before that although he himself was a southerner, he had traveled north to the breakaway northern Kingdom to give oracles against them. Perhaps that means in God’s eyes there was still but one Kingdom? Or perhaps the northern Kingdom was too far gone and the southern still had time to repent?… Continue reading
Lenten Reading: On the Lord’s Prayer published by SVS Press.
We have extant three pre-Nicene treatises explaining the meaning of the petitions in the Our Father which the early Christians were encouraged to pray very often.
They are all in this volume: Tertullian, Origen, and St. Cyprian of Carthage.
One of the more enigmatic petitions in the Lord’s Prayer is, “Lead us not into temptation”. What does this mean?
How can God lead us into temptation when James said, “When temptations come, let no one say, “I am tempted by God,” because God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one.” (James… Continue reading
Finished up Tobit the night before last. It is always a favorite book to reread because it is such a good story, it has a strong Christological spiritual sense, and it is one of the few places in the Scriptures where dogs are given a positive presence.
In most other places in the Bible, dogs get a bad rap. To be called a dog, a dog’s head, or a dead dog was an insult. Dogs were unclean and ate unclean things- sometimes even human carrion. Apparently, packs of feral dogs roamed in urban areas back then (Ps. 58:7, 15 and Ps. 21:17, 21 [that’s Psalms… Continue reading
