Theology

TL;DR A great book on lamentation and vigorous prayer. Just don’t get triggered by passing references to left-leaning socio-political stuff, which is very few and far between. Contents This may be a strange thing to start a review off, but I’ve always found presenting the table of contents for a book useful for any potential reader. I don’t know how many people skip the TOC or actually read it, but I find that showing it here at least gives one a bird’s eye view of what he’s getting out of it. So here’s the road map for this book: ...

I recently had at a Bible study with a good friend, and we’re going over the book of Revelation together. On the night we tackled Revelation chapter 13, we had some interesting chatter. For those who don’t recall, this is a very famous chapter talking about John’s vision of the sea and earth beasts, and the very popular mark of the Beast. Now, as we were going through this book, we weren’t approaching it as if what John was seeing were in literal, chronological events and concrete things, but rather from a symbolic or spiritual sense that points to historical and current Patterns as well as future and final Prophecy. How we view the book, at least currently in this juncture of our lives, is less like an itinerary and more of a recursive narrative with multiple “camera angles” of this ancient, ongoing, and final war between two kingdoms and their citizens. ...

Some time last year I ran across an old blog whose author had keen insight on the book of Ecclesiastes. I couldn’t decide what which post to reference, so I’ll reference some of them. You can peruse the list of his articles on the book here. It’s Not Meaningless Original Article If you read the words of Kohelet (the author of Ecclesiastes) in some modern translations you will find that the endless repetition of the word “meaningless” is like Chinese water torture. Work is meaningless, pleasure is meaningless, money is meaningless, life is meaningless, wisdom is meaningless and even death is meaningless. With all this “meaningless” talk its no wonder that the book has been written off as the depressed rant of a bitter old man. ...

This is part of a series in which I hash out my notes I have scribbled on my bulletin from the Sunday sermons. As such things may be messy and abruptly end. Today’s sermon was about the importance of sound doctrine and about good theology. Here are some of my notes. The itemized material below are more paraphrase than the actual words that were said as the recording for it isn’t up yet. I also don’t want to unnecessarily name out my own church in such a public manner anyhow. ...

In the Scriptures, being dead is sometimes used metaphorically. While modern Christians understand death as referring to being inert or unresponsive or unable, we would be remiss if we didn’t take into consideration the aspects of Corruption and Alienation. Some quick commentary. Death as Alienation The parable of the prodigal son: But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to be merry. - Luke 15 ...