The Bible

There is a real danger that we are so familiar with John the Baptist fulfilling Isaiah 40:3 that we lose sight of the staggering implication this has for Jesus.

So France comments:

It's easy to trot off the tongue that we believe in a doctrine called "the priesthood of all believers".

It's harder to explain what we mean by that, and what we don't mean.

It's harder still to articulate the cash-value: What impact does this doctrine make to the lives of Christians and churches on a daily basis?

Well, my friend of many years, Jules Beauchamp, has just put up a website to develop some of these things further. There are already some very helpful posts there coming at this from various angles, but I get the impression that there's more to come.

Go take a look at http://www.biblicalpriesthood.co.uk.

Jesus... born in a manger.

From Peter Leithart's blog post entitled "Oxen and Mangers"

Yahweh appears to Job in a whirlwind and challenges Job by reminding Him of His infinite creative power. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” He asks. “Who set its measurements? Where were you, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:1-7).

Yahweh’s infinite liveliness and power continue to energize everything. “Do you know the time the mountain goats give birth? Do you observe the calving of the deer?” He points to the most powerful herbivores He can find: “Who set the wild donkey free?” and “Will the wild ox consent to serve you? Can you control him so that he spends the night at your manger?”

Yahweh can, and He has in the incarnation of the Son. Israel is a wild ox. He has the strength of an ox to break the bones of his enemies. Joseph is a wild ox, with horns that push the people to the ends of the earth. Jesus is born as the true Israel, the new Joseph, the untamed wild ox, who spends the night in the manger.

This is the Christmas gospel, the good news of an infinite and infinitely uncontrollable God, who has been domesticated in a manger.

Helpful words from R T France on the visit of the Magi. The star's role changes as they leave Jerusalem for the final leg of their journey to Bethlehem:

“Whereas hitherto Matthew has described them as travelling to Jerusalem because they saw the rising of the star, not as actually led by it, his words here indicate that the star now first moved ahead of the magi and then stopped … in a position which indicated the location of the child. What sort of phenomenon gave this impression to expert observers as they travelled south from Jerusalem must be a matter of conjecture. They already knew from Herod that Bethlehem (a mere five or six miles from Jerusalem) was their destination, so that they did not need the star to tell them that; their extravagantly expressed joy is hard to explain unless the star somehow indicated the actual house rather than just the village as a whole. It seems, then, that the star’s movement gave them the final supernatural direction they needed to the specific house ‘where the child was’.” (Page 74)

That is one of the most fruitful questions I've asked of this familiar Psalm.

As I explained about a year ago, the book of Psalms is not 150 prayers and hymns in random order. It's sometimes hard to know exactly what conclusions we should draw from the order the Psalms are in, but that they have been carefully arranged is beyond doubt.