Sabbath School From Home

How do you know when a message is from God? This week we turn to the listeners. 2 Chronicles 36 gives a blunt summary of Judah’s last kings: they mocked God’s messengers until there was no remedy. But the story that holds our attention is Josiah, the righteous king, who ignores a warning from King Neco of Egypt that the text says came from God. If even the best of the kings could get this wrong, h...

Why would God ask a prophet to write things down? Jeremiah 36 is a gripping story about exactly that: decades of prophecy dictated to Baruch, read in the temple, passed up the chain to the king, and burned in the fire one section at a time. Writing lets a message travel further than one voice can, in the hope that people will repent and the prophecy will never need to come true. We also wonder wha...

Can a message from God be objective? We start by asking whether any message can be: the same words can arrive as very different messages depending on the medium, the context and the listener. That leads us to look closely at the lesson’s claim that there are no degrees of inspiration. A message could be fully inspired and still be incomplete, misunderstood or misused, as Jonah and the many reading...

We spend this episode with the female prophets of the New Testament — Anna in the temple, the daughters of Philip, and others — and find a picture of prophecy that looks quite different from the confrontational Old Testament model. Anna’s story is told in three verses: she prayed, fasted, turned up at the right moment, and couldn’t stop talking about what she’d seen. But the episode keeps circling...

What distinguishes a true prophet from a false one? The lesson this week offers several criteria, but we find ourselves drawn into the story of Micaiah and Ahab in 1 Kings 22, which we think might be one of the most searching explorations of that question in Scripture. The 400 court prophets tell Ahab what he wants to hear; Micaiah alone refuses. We explore what’s really going on: the false prophe...

What is a prophet, and what does a prophetic call look like?  In this episode we discuss the call of several prophetic and prophetic-adjacent figures from the Bible and discover very little in common. God seems fully capable of speaking to different people in different ways to equip them for different messages to different audiences. One thing becomes clear, however, as we look back on the history...

We open a new season on the theme of prophecy by going back to the beginning — literally. The lesson frames prophecy as God's response to the breakdown of communication in Eden: God comes looking for the humans who are hiding, and keeps looking ever since. We find that a compelling framing, but want to add something the lesson doesn't quite say: prophets are rarer, stranger, and harder to deal wit...

Thirteen weeks on 1 and 2 Corinthians, and we attempt a summary. The thread that keeps returning is Paul's pastoral instinct — not the rigid doctrinearian of some people's Sabbath School memories, but a writer who knows his congregation well and keeps refusing to answer many of the questions they're actually asking. Who's better, Paul or Apollos? Married or single? He sidesteps them, or answers th...

"False teacher" is an accusation easy to throw around, but who gets to decide? The receiver of a teaching is not always the best judge of whether it was false — or even whether it was worthwhile. Paul's concern in 2 Corinthians 11 is real (charlatans do exist), but surely there are many people earnestly sharing "the gospel" as they believe it to be true, while being labeled "false" by others? Even...

Paul tells the Corinthians that since they excel in so many things — faith, knowledge, enthusiasm, love — they should excel also in giving. It's an interesting framing: giving as something you can be genuinely good at. We sit with why generosity can feel uncomfortable to discuss in church, and explore a real tension in the passage between giving proportionally — sustainable, allows you to keep giv...

Paul opens 2 Corinthians 3 with a small piece of wordplay that turns out to carry a large idea: the Corinthian believers themselves are his letter of recommendation — written not in ink but by the Spirit, not on stone but on human hearts. That observation seems almost to launch Paul's thinking toward the old and new covenants, and the contrast between letter and Spirit. We trace that thread throug...

Almost every New Testament epistle opens with "grace and peace" — and it turns out to be a phrase worth pausing on. It captures something essential, and makes an excellent email sign-off. Paul's opening to 2 Corinthians also includes an apology for changed travel plans, which the lesson uses as a springboard for discussing flexibility in ministry. But changing travel plans is a fairly trivial kind...

1 Corinthians 15 centres on the idea of resurrection. We explore what the chapter has to say to Adventists specifically, for whom the state of the dead and the mechanics of resurrection are dear doctrinal territory. But the discussion finds its heart in the mystery of what the resurrection body actually is — and what continuity might exist between who we are now and who we will be. George MacDonal...

1 Corinthians 13 is possibly the most well-known chapter in the Bible, and for good reason — it speaks for itself. Love is preeminent. The heart of our discussion is the second half, where Paul's argument is harder to follow: what does it mean that prophecy, tongues, and special knowledge are, in some sense, the milk of infancy? Growing in the Christian life may mean being consumed by fewer things...

1 Corinthians 14 opens in a way that might feel familiar to Adventists — an emphasis on prophecy over tongues. But Paul's description of prophecy diverges quickly from how we typically think of it. His critique of tongues is that it doesn't build up the community; but that same standard has to be applied to prophecy too. And his picture of the congregation is striking — widespread prophetic gifts...

Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 8 is elegant: food sacrificed to idols is fine to eat, since idols are meaningless — but avoid it if eating would lead a fellow believer astray. Context matters, and so does audience. We explore the analogy of modest dressing, where modesty is always partly defined by who you expect to be seen by. But the nuance emerges quickly: almost anything could offend somebod...

Paul is not afraid to talk about sex — but his approach is more nuanced than the church's reputation suggests. In 1 Corinthians 5 he tells the church to get involved when something has gone badly wrong; by chapter 7 he is describing singleness and marriage as different gifts, resisting the idea that one way of living is spiritually superior. We explore what shifts when the question changes from "w...

What would Paul make of denominational pride? We can sincerely reject division within our own tradition while quietly celebrating everything that makes us distinct from other Christians — and not notice the tension. In 1 Corinthians 4, Paul cuts through it: "Isn't everything you have and everything you are sheer gifts from God? So what's the point of all this comparing and competing?" In this (aga...

The gospel has always looked foolish to the wise — and Paul in 1 Corinthians 1 seems untroubled by this. In this belated episode (holidays interrupted the edit process, sorry) we explore what it means that God chose the foolish things to shame the wise. Even Israel fits this description geopolitically at the time of Jesus. But we push back gently on any sharp divide between faith and reason: scien...

What is an apostle, and what does it mean to be called? We open a new season in 1 and 2 Corinthians by sitting with Paul's own answer — which turns out to be surprisingly counterintuitive. His calling isn't grounded in competence or confidence; in 1 Corinthians 2:3 he identifies it with weakness. We explore what it means for Jesus to be not just something Paul thought about often, but the presence...

A season about growing in relationship with God ends not with a method or a programme, but with a recurring cry. Psalm 80 turns out to thread through almost everything we've discussed this season — community vs individual, unanswered prayer, setbacks that arrive despite clear promises, and what honest faith actually sounds like from the inside. The lesson guide even suggests replacing the Psalm's...

"Friendship evangelism" can sound like ulterior-motive friendship, and that discomfort is worth taking seriously. We explore what separates genuine friendly witness from something more cynical, and find an unexpected parallel in international aid: the same sensitivity to context, the same need to avoid condescension, the same openness to learning from the people you're supposedly serving. The diff...

Setbacks don't only happen when you can't see the big picture. Job is a famous example of hardship accompanied by confusion about what God is doing, but we focus a bit on another kind of setback. The stories of Abram and Joseph begin with unusually clear divine promises, and still go sideways for years. God's promises can perhaps be as hard to live with as the setbacks themselves. We explore a thi...

In this episode we look at the themes of repentence and forgiveness.  God tells us in Exodus 20 that he shows love to a thousand generations to those who love him, but also that he does not overlook sin.  In Hosea 6 he describes his justice-inducing words as slaughtering the listener!  Is there a way to see God's grace as the force behind, and present throughout, and the end goal of his calls for...

Romans 7 names the experience precisely: the things I want to do, I don't; the things I don't want to do, I end up doing. We explore how sin, gospel, and law fit together in the practical lived Christian life — and push back on the idea that sin is just human nature indulging in pleasure. A thing isn't sinful because of the magnitude of its consequences; it's sinful because it takes us further fro...