Bible

I'm finishing off preparations for a training day I'm leading on Saturday, entitled "Preaching Christ from the Old Testament".

The bookstall arrived today. The good John Telford, manager of Wesley Owen on Wigmore Street in London, was tremendously helpful in recommending titles for me and finding ones that our local Christian bookshops said they wouldn't be able to sell. Thank you John, and an excellent parcel of books it is. Shame the Griedanus is temporally unavailable.

Anyway, why did I not know of Mark Dever's The Message of the Old Testament before now? It was only published in May, so fair enough. But Mark sets out, for each Old Testament book, to print a sermon on the entire book. A brave project, but oh so helpful. So thank you Mark Dever too.

Thanks, again, David for this:

http://davidpfield.blogspot.com/2006/09/living-in-sodom.html

Indeed! And I remain convinced that one of the most important books of Scripture to teach our children is the book of Daniel.

"But you would say that", I hear. Yes - but which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Indeed! And I remain convinced that one of the most important books of Scripture to teach our children is the book of Daniel.

I'm just finishing reading through 2 Samuel. Joab and Abishai, the two (surviving) sons of Zeruiah, remind me of the role that James and John, the two sons of Zebedee, sometimes play in the gospels.

The assassination of Amasa in chapter 21 seems as much to do with Joab's determination to continue in charge of the army as it is about Amasa's slowness to muster Judah. In short, he wants to be David's right-hand man. Compare Mark 10:35-45. Joab's hastiness to slay Absalom is deemed too hasty by David, cf. Luke 9:54-55.

I'm just trying to tap consciously into something I had noticed instinctively. The question is: I'm I noticing something that isn't objectively there? Even if it is a valid observation, so what?

Enough subconscious blogging for one morning! Bye all

OK. Let me try and be a little clearer.

John Frame says (if I understand him correctly) that, in the act of God making himself known to me, there are 3 perspectives through which this can be viewed.

Yet again, I'm sure this has been said numerous times. But I'll record it here by way of "note to self"...

Richard Pratt's book He Gave Us Stories discusses handling OT narratives. Recommend it. Part 1 of the book discusses how we approach stories - not in terms of techniques to follow, but in terms of the kind of approach we need. He only mentions Frame very occasionally, but a lot of what he says is along the lines of "Don't set this method / approach over against that method / approach, as if you must pick one or the other. You need both."

[Edit: This post originally had a lot more after this point, but I've since managed to write what I was saying more clearly. Have a look at the post immediately after (chronologically) this one. So I've removed the unclear stuff I wrote originally. Cut!]

Thanks to Chris Green and Dick Lucas in their BST commentary on 2 Peter for the following paragraph. 2 Peter 2 really is frighteningly contemporary in the scenario it describes.

Having flow charted 2 Peter, the main points stand out quite clearly from the subordinate ones.

Again – just in case this is helpful for anyone, here are two summaries of 2 Peter.

Summary

I’m doing some study of 2 Peter, and have prepared for myself a flow diagram of the English text. For those not familiar with flow diagrams, the idea is that the text is laid out to show the grammatical structure. Main clauses are placed against the left hand margin, and all dependent clauses are indented. Where it makes sense to do so, those dependent clauses are indented so as to place them directly beneath the word they depend on.

Many thanks to Peter Davies, vicar at Audley for his permission to reproduce this morning’s sermon here. Very helpful, I thought, for how clearly he put things. Echoes of Rich Lusk at one point – which certainly is not a criticism!

I have to say that this familiar passage is such a shock to the system.

Re-reading Mark 14 is interesting. In Gethsemane, the disciples were urged to stay awake, watch and pray so that they might not fall into temptation. Jesus himself stayed awake and prayed – presumably including prayer to remain faithful under the forthcoming trial.

A sobering statement on human nature. The disciples could see Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, praying to his father that he might not yield to temptation. Yet they thought (implicitly or explicitly, it doesn’t matter) that they could endure without the Father’s help. Astounding – and sobering.

That also gives a point of contact between chapters 13 and 14. The concluding exhortation in chapter 13 is “stay awake”, the same thing Jesus has to tell the disciples in chapter 14. Could this be one key to working out Mark’s intent in these chapters?