Bible805 Podcast

As we learned in our previous lesson on Acts and Hebrews, when Paul first began preaching this new message of salvation in Jesus, he began by showing how Jesus was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. As he moves further away from Jerusalem and begins to preach to people who aren’t as familiar with the Bible, he runs into both new questions and new challenges. Many of these are specific to t...

Hebrews has a reputation for being a difficult book to understand and it is if you simply pull it out of context and without at least some knowledge of the Old Testament that it is based on, try to figure out what it is talking about. This is sad because Hebrews was intended to be a book of explanation—of how Jesus fulfilled all that was pictured in the Old Testament, how His life was the reality...

What is the point of being a disciple? We certainly don't hear a lot about it in churches today with the emphasis from many pulpits is a combination of happy life promises, and moral outrage over whatever the latest conservative news channel is reporting, mixed in with pleas for money. What an extraordinary shift that is from the message of Jesus, from the first of his ministry when he called...

It's common to hear, even from those who seem very knowledgeable about the Christian faith and the Bible that "the Trinity is very hard to understand" or that "the Trinity is a mystery," or a similar statement. I STRONGLY disagree! Our God wants us to know Him and understand Him and I don't believe the essential doctrine of the Trinity is difficult when it is explained...

A primary criticism of the New Testament is that critics say that Christians intentionally left out and/or suppressed certain writings, primarily what we call the Gnostic Gospels, and that they should be part of our New Testament and aren’t. We need to take their challenges seriously because our New Testament contains both how to be saved by faith in Jesus AND how to live our lives after we accept...

How do we know what we’re told about Jesus is true? Wasn’t the New Testament written hundreds of years after He lived? How do we know it isn’t just legends about a good teacher? And why did some books get included and others didn’t? In addition to that, from the start, John the Baptist and Jesus both talked about the importance of the Kingdom of God—that with Jesus the Kingdom was now present. The...

The New Testament makes some extraordinary claims including that the long-prophesied Messiah came into the world, lived, taught, died, and rose again to offer a restored relationship to God to all who believe in Him. For claims of such importance, naturally, not everyone believed them then or now and questions like these come up: Wasn’t the New Testament written hundreds of years after the events...

From the close of the Old Testament to the start of the New Testament, it is a VERY different world—so many things had changed. There is a an infographic that goes through the changes that goes with the lesson. In this lesson,  we’ll go over how the changes came to be. We’ll also look at the various groups that emerged during this time, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and others we find in the New T...

The book of Malachi begins… with God saying, “I have always loved you, but you retort, “Really? How have you loved us?” Malachi 1:2 In some ways, these brief statements sum up the entire history of the Old Testament. God again and again both shows and declares His love for His people. And His people again and again, don’t believe Him, go their own ways, reap the punishment from it, repent, God lov...

These books were written 14‐16 years after the Jews returned to the land after their captivity. The return itself was a glorious work of God. Once in the land, there were challenges when the surrounding people tried to stop them, but God intervened there also. The Israelites had seen God conquer and give victory in much greater problems and He took care of this situation also and they got permissi...

Though God had to punish the Children of Israel for their many sins by sending them into exile in Babylon, the punishment had a promised limit of 70 years and at the end of the 70 years, He miraculously returned them to their land. In this lesson we’ll go over the return and the leadership God used to make it possible. This is a lesson where knowing the correct chronology is especially important (...

The setting for this episode is that time has run out. After hundreds of years of warnings and challenges, it’s over for Judah. Daniel and Ezekiel are in Babylon taken there in an early deportation before the end came in Jerusalem. What seemed horrible to them at the time was a great blessing in disguise— they were kept from the horrors of the siege, the total destruction of Jerusalem, and final d...

This is a special podcast inspired by the Global Leadership Summit we recently attended. You are never too old, too young, too anything to not follow God's leading in your life and the dreams He gives you!

When we read through the Prophets in the Old Testament, particularly when we get to Ezekiel and Daniel we are introduced to fantastic images, whirling wheels, fantastic beasts, and world-shaking prophecies. This type of writing is what is known as “apocalyptic” and it’s useful to take some time to understand this type of writing, this genre in the Bible to understand the books that contain it. The...

How are we supposed to act when things go wrong? Especially if we had nothing to do to cause the problems that plague us? How can we help others who are going through a hard time? I have answers to these questions and more in this lesson. First, the lesson goes into a little bit of history to set the stage. For centuries God has been patient, but now things are falling apart. After repeatedly send...

Is it really OK to ask God “why?” We all have questions like these: Why does God allow evil? Why do evil people get away with things? Why do good people get caught up in the mess others make? In this lesson we’ll look at the prophet Habakkuk and what happened when he not only asked God “Why?” but when he kept asking God when he didn’t like how God answered him the first time. In addition to the ba...

The best-selling book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People totally revolutionized the lives of millions of people and one of the habits he talked about is a great summary of our lesson today. The habit I’m talking about is Habit #2— Begin With the End in Mind The prophets who preached after the fall of Israel and before Judah was conquered by Babylon preached to challenge people to do this....

When God delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt, they met God at Mt. Sinai and there God not only gave them the 10 Commandments and His other laws for how to live, but He offered them a covenant, an agreement with Him that if they would obey and follow His commands, they would be His people, His treasured possession who He would bless. He also told them that if they did not follow His laws and wor...

Just before Hosea appears, God sent the prophet Amos to condemn the sins of Israel. Amos preached forceful, harsh messages for about 3 years. With Hosea God gives his people a similar message that they have violated his covenant and judgment is coming, but in a very different way. In Hosea, his overall message is of God’s incredible love for His people, no matter how badly they treated him. The bo...

Reading the prophets can be confusing and to help, and Bible805 did a preliminary lesson to help you understand them, CLICK HERE to go to it. As I was preparing this section on the prophets, especially as you start to read Isaiah, I realized that an explanation of two more things are very important to keep in mind as we study the prophets as we go through the Bible. They are: The prophet’s expansi...

The prophet Amos and his message has captivated preachers, reformers, and Christian leaders from the earliest days it was preached until today, particularly with its emphasis on justice. Martin Luther King used it in his I Have a Dream speech where he quoted the verse “Let justice roll down…” from Amos 5:24. And in June 2023 Pope Francis chose “Let justice and peace flow” (citing the book of Amos)...

We all know about the fish swallowing Jonah, but there is more in the book including the answers to these questions: What about people who haven’t heard the gospel if Jesus is the only way to God What do we do about bad people, or when people treat us badly? What does God expect from us as His followers? How should we respond to continuing trials? Answers to these questions and other elated applic...

When people think of the Old Testament prophets, most often two areas come to mind: First, most people think of the prophecies of Jesus’ coming, and though that is important and a significant validation of the truth of the Christian faith, only 2% of prophecies are about the coming of Jesus. Second, many think of the Old Testament prophets as a group of angry old guys railing against evil and the...

After studying the life of David, we couldn’t have a greater contrast between his life as a man “after God’s own heart,” than what we find in his son Solomon. This lesson will show you the solid foundation of Biblical instruction he had, how he started well, but progressively deteriorated into self-indulgent sins that destroyed not only his life but split his nation and condemned it to continual w...

The Bible calls David, a man “after God’s own heart.” Thisphrase is part of a sermon of Paul’s in the NT Acts 13:22—where he is talking about the history of Israel, and Paul says, “After removing Saul, he made David their king. God testified concerning him: ‘I have found David son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.’” It’s a goal I think we’d like to describ...