Every Day with Jesus

It may have crossed your mind that it seems pernickety of God to plunge the whole human race into sin because of one transgression regarding a choice in the Garden of Eden restaurant. Wouldn’t one warning have been enough? Paul would later say that in Adam all have sinned. 

It’s not altogether obvious why eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil led Adam and Eve to realise they were naked. Some have speculated that the glory of God surrounded them, which was then removed when they disobeyed God. 

Having been deceived into thinking that God was withholding something, Eve now saw that the fruit was desirable for gaining wisdom, so she ate and gave some to Adam. This apparently ‘innocent act’ leads to catastrophe for the first couple. Now we can be sure that God had made Adam and Eve to relate with Him: there was no defect in them that meant they were deficient and so needed an outside agent....

The heart of sin is the belief that God cannot be trusted to look after us. Look at the Ten Commandments and see how the breaking of the prohibitions suggests we need to take matters into our own hands.

The very start of the fall of humanity came with a question. The narrator tells us of the craftiness of the serpent (3:1), as if to suggest that the succeeding narrative may not be all that it seems, and so begins the journey for Eve and Adam to eat the prohibited fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

The New Testament has verses that we can barely comprehend, and this is one of them. The trouble is we have all been taught that if it’s too good to be true it probably is! Ever been seduced by an advert only to be caught out by the small print? But we have tons of evidence that the Bible is 100% trustworthy, and so how likely is it that the writers and in this case, Jesus are going to mix in some...

Around 760 BC, God sent Jonah to warn the people of Nineveh, the Assyrians, that judgment was coming. When the Assyrians repented, God withheld His action. At the time, the Assyrians were the superpower of the day, they ruled the world, from Libya and Ethiopia to Babylon and beyond. 

This letter by Jesus’ half-brother doesn’t mince its words, as Jude feels the need to ‘contend’ for the faith (v3) and warn his readers to stick with it. These closing words to his short letter remind us that there is no ‘one size fits all’ response to people we might regard as struggling with their faith. 

Our English word ‘love’ is how translators typically translates each of four Greek words: philia , eros , storge and agape . This fourth is often, though not exclusively, used of God’s love, and this is the word for Christ’s love. 

Depending on what you count, there are forty-three occasions when Paul’s prayers are recorded in the Epistles, but this is one of Paul’s four main prayers, and the Ephesians knew exactly what he was asking God to do. 

You would think Israel would have learned their lessons. ‘The evil’ they do is not specified but likely to have been following the local gods, where shrine prostitution was part of their practices. This time it’s the Moabites, Ammonites and Amalekites who oppress Israel, and this time it’s for eighteen years. 

The book of Judges relates the story of twelve Judges. The likes of Gideon, Samson and Deborah are well known but some, like Othniel, have just a few verses devoted to them. This is in the pre-monarchy days, and we see the classic cycle within Judges: Israel sins, God allows enemies to defeat them, they cry out to God, God sends a deliverer. 

The book of Judges outlines the way God provides a series of deliverers to rescue God’s people from their surrounding enemies. For a while they learn their lesson and return to God, only to backslide again, until the pain becomes so great, they call out to the Lord again. 

The stereotypical view of Jesus is of a man who showed up for occasional talks in the open air and had down time with His disciples between events. Doubtless this pattern did prevail. But this verse in Mark and parallel verses in the other Gospels paint a more complicated picture. 

Jesus is said to be indignant on two occasions in the Gospels: when the disciples stopped children approaching Him (Mark 10:14), and here when the man with leprosy approached Him. His indignation (could be translated anger) can be read in a few ways: that the leper wasn’t sure He would be willing to heal him, or that He was angry at how sin had messed this man’s life up, or maybe that He knew the...

This opening chapter of Mark paints a picture of who Jesus is. Having gathered His team of disciples, His first public actions are to teach and cast out an evil spirit. 

If Jonah had been in the modern day, his ministry newsletter would have made interesting reading. An astonishing revival comes about such that God does not bring on the people the judgment He had promised. You can imagine the book deals and the conference invites that Jonah would garner off the back of this. 

It was seven words (five in Hebrew) and a whole city turned around. Now of course it may be that we have just a summary of what Jonah said but, even so, it was a simple message. Why the turnaround?

We wouldn’t have the Jonah story if God had let Jonah go. After all, He could have raised up another prophet who would be more willing. But He had His purpose in sending this prophet to these people and so God intervenes with a storm, and we have the oddness of pagan sailors calling out to their gods with Jonah prayerless. 

Jonah certainly has a bad reputation as a disobedient and grumpy prophet who fails to go where he is told to go and is angry with God when his warning is heeded by the people. 

God’s love and concern for all people is demonstrated throughout the Bible. Everyone you clap eyes on today is loved by God and precious to Him. God has made it possible for all to know His embrace. 

This is not just the first psalm but a ‘gateway’ psalm introducing the whole psalter comprising 150 psalms and arranged in five ‘books’. These verses declare that those who avoid certain pathways and embrace God’s ways will be blessed. Walking, standing and sitting suggest increasing affinity with evil, and are contrasted with the delight that comes from meditating on God’s Word. 

We need each other – we see this reflected in Paul’s list of people who send their greetings to the new church. Notice how diverse the people are, from Luke the doctor to a former slave to Gentile believers to Jewish people who have converted to the Christian faith. After all, as Paul said earlier, Christ is all and Christ is in all (Col. 3:11). In Him there is no room for discrimination. 

We’ve looked at Paul’s letter to the Colossians mostly from a point of view of our own personal growth in our commitment to Christ. In this passage, however, we see that we cannot forget the gospel imperative to share our faith with others. We shouldn’t live in a closed-off colony where we’re concerned only for fellow believers, but rather should seek that others too will know the life-saving natu...

We might be surprised at the length of Paul’s household instructions regarding slavery, especially compared with the short directives regarding husbands and wives and parents and children. Perhaps Paul treats this subject in more detail because of the situation with Onesimus, who was a slave of Philemon’s who ran away after wronging his master, probably by stealing money.