James's Weblog

Smalley (paid link), commenting on 1 John 2:3, is very helpful on the place of obedience in the Christian life.

Steve Leighton, proprietor of Has Bean Coffee, has been on a trip to Kenya.

Naturally, this is doubly close to my heart, and so it was interesting to read his thoughts on his return.

There's an encouraging twist in there that we can expect some good Kenyan coffees to land in the UK in a few months time as a result of his trip.

Some of you are thinking "that's obvious!".

This blog has posts on a number of themes, and this one is technology related; for the rest of you, I shall see you later on. If you don't understand the title of this post, then it's probably not written with you in mind!

Genesis 2:18 describes God making Eve as a "helper" (עֵזֶר) for Adam.

This particular word occurs 19 times in the Old Testament, and it pays to notice carefully what it does and does not mean elsewhere.

What was the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and why was it a sin to eat its fruit?

Bruce Waltke is very helpful, on page 86 of his Genesis commentary (paid link):

One of the values of having a blog, is it gives me somewhere to put notes that will almost certainly not make it into the next sermon, but may interest some people. "If you're interested, for further reading,..."

Here's Bruce Waltke (paid link) on Genesis 2:

Doug Wilson is on fine form as he reflects on the popular Christmas Carol, Hark the Herald-Angels Sing.

Go read - it's worth it just for the list of possible biblical references within the carol. Indeed, just the other day someone had asked me where "sun (sic.) of righteousness" comes from.

I'm not sure anyone has taken the (alleged) implication Mayan prediction that the world will end on 21st December 2012 totally seriously. Actually, what the Mayans and others really thought about this is somewhat more complex, although unsurprisingly the media aren't terribly interested in nuance.

I've posted a couple of times before about the Mollom service I use to filter comments and e-mails from this site for potential spam.

Lately, the spam on this site has gone just crazy. Happily, Mollom has caught it all - I've not had one get through.

In case you can't see the numbers on the graph, here's how it's gone: