Bible

Zedekiah, king of Judah (597-587 B.C.) consistently expected that God would bring a last minute reprieve, and he and his people would not be conquered by the Babylonians. He underestimated the sin of his people, and he underestimated God's power to deal with that.

For this reason, the prophet Jeremiah consistently has to warn him that there will be no reprieve. Into exile they will go.

This post is prompted by a discussion on a friend's Facebook post. That friend was horrified to see a post on the Facebook Page of Truro Cathedral, and said as much on their own Facebook wall, and I shared a comment in response.

I assume colour is significant in the book of Revelation.

I was reading chapter 20, and realised that in Revelation 20:11 we have a "great white throne" and someone seated on it. This takes us back to Revelation 4:2, where we had a throne with someone seated on it. But this one is specifically white.

In this book we have

When I studied on the Cornhill Training Course (1997-8), Chris Green came as a visiting lecturer and took us through the letter of 2 Timothy.

I've said before how valuable I find the writing of David Gooding, particularly on the book of Acts (paid link). It turns out his writing on Luke's gospel (paid link) is just as sharp.

This is one of those posts I'm putting here because I know I'll look for this again, and if it's on my own website I can search and find it quickly. It might also help someone else.

Tucked inside The BHS (Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia) is a small piece of paper, containing the Tabula Accentuum (table of accents). On one side is a list of the accents deployed by the Masoretes when annotating prose, and on the other side the ones they used when annotating poetry.

I wrote a longer post in 2010 that gave some thoughts on the book of Psalms and how we read them.

Today, I've been working on some notes to equip our small group leaders to lead a Bible study in Psalm 31. This comes as part of a series of Bible studies that look at passages that speak on the theme of prayer.

Paul wrote to Timothy: "Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching." (1 Timothy 4:13)

A thought on why Ezekiel 40-48 are such important chapters.

The other day I was reading 2 Chronicles 6:36-39, the prayer that Solomon prays when he dedicates the new temple he's just built. If the people are exiled, they can pray towards the city and the temple and God will hear.

The parable of the lost sheep occurs in two of the gospels: It's in Matthew 18:10-14 and Luke 15:1-7.