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Subverting Abraham’s Bad Rap

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I am grateful to T.M. Suffield for his courage to take on (and take down) our widespread presumption that Abraham was a cowardly liar. Suffield takes us deep into the argument of Genesis and the overall message of the book.

What I am suggesting is that we should read these texts looking at the warp and woof of the Bible, the texture of the whole story, and considering why these stories are in Genesis at the point that they are. We’ll notice that they have more to do with the grand narrative and with Jesus than we might just think; this isn’t just by contrast either. Jesus does treat his wife differently in the presence of evil kings to Abraham. The point isn’t that he doesn’t disown us, because Abraham doesn’t and Jesus is our brother, but that he can protect us from snake-like kings. Some of them might even turn to God because of the church’s beauty.

And I think Suffield is exactly right. My co-blogger Ryan has written a wonderful piece on how we love to give gold stars to Bible characters. And that tendency too often leads us to draw all the wrong conclusions, sometimes missing the explicit assessment of Bible characters given in the text itself.

For example: Here is my not-at-all-controversial list of things I’ve found people typically get wrong:

  • Noah’s drinking wasn’t the issue; Ham’s rebellion was (Gen 9:24-25).
  • Abraham’s description of his wife as his sister wasn’t the issue; the evil king’s oppression was (Gen 12:17, 20:6-7, 20:18).
  • Jacob wasn’t as much a wicked trickster as he was a courageous fighter for the promises of God (Gen 25:34b, 32:28).
  • Moses: an out-of-control hothead and murderer? Try again: He was an attempted—albeit rejected—deliverer (Acts 7:24-25).

I can’t say whether Suffield would agree with all the items on my list here. But his piece on Abraham and Sarah is well-argued and worth your consideration.

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5 Good Reasons to Mark Up your Bible

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Kevin Halloran wants you to mark up your Bible. Don’t be shy. We agree that it’s a worthwhile practice.

Halloran gives 5 good reasons:

  1. Marking up my Bible helps engage me in more careful study.
  2. Marking up my Bible helps with future reading of the Bible.
  3. Marking up my Bible helps remember past experiences.
  4. Marking up my Bible helps me to encourage other saints who see my marked-up pages.
  5. Marking up my Bible is visible evidence that I treasure God’s revealed Word.

Halloran also suggests what exactly to mark when you study your Bible. For more information, check out our reasons for getting a markup Bible. If you’d like ideas for a new markup Bible, see our post comparing the options.

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The Sluggard in Every One of Us

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Scott Hubbard wants you to know four things about the Bible’s portrait of a sluggard:

  1. ‘A little’ adds up.
  2. Neglect grows weeds.
  3. Our desires often deceive us.
  4. Hard work flows from the heart.

Hubbard does a great job correlating the teaching of Proverbs on the character of the sluggard. In the process, Hubbard models terrific head and heart application.

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Salted With Fire

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“Everyone will be salted with fire,” says Jesus in Mark 9:49. But what does that mean?

Alistair Begg makes skillful use of the literary context (the argument of the larger passage), biblical context (Old Testament background), and cultural context (practices contemporary to Jesus and his disciples) to unravel this mysterious saying.

It’s clear that Jesus deals here with weighty truths. And it’s against the backdrop of verse 48 (in which He describes hell as a place where the “worm does not die and the fire is not quenched”) that His puzzling teaching on salt appears. With the costliness of discipleship and the picture of fire fixed in His disciples’ minds, Jesus asserts, “Everyone will be salted with fire.” How should we understand this peculiar phrase?

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How to Read the Sermon on the Plain

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When studying a passage in the gospels, we must handle parallel passages with care. We’ll make better use of the parallels if we don’t merely harmonize but illuminate.

For example, let’s take Luke’s Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6. Much time could be spent on the question of harmonization: Is this the same sermon as Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, or not? How do we harmonize these two extensive teachings of Jesus?

But that question of harmonization is not nearly as important as the following:

  • What is Luke’s message in Luke 6?
  • What is Matthew’s message in Matthew 5-7?

Those questions may not have the same answer!

To help you with this example, let me recommend an article called “The Sermon on the Plain: What It Is & How It Differs from the Sermon on the Mount.” I wrote this article to analyze some of the similarities and differences between the two sermons. But ultimately, I wanted to get to these four suggestions:

  1. Don’t be distracted by the Mount/Plain question
  2. Read the entire sermon as a sermon
  3. Read the sermon in the context of Luke’s Gospel
  4. Read, read, and read again

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3 Fruits of Engaged Bible Reading

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Because Karrie Hahn believes the Bible is precious, she wants you to read it for the right reasons. She gives three quite compelling ones.

  1. Awe
  2. Transformation
  3. Endurance

Sometimes application means simply letting the Bible shape us in these areas. For example:

An encounter with the God of the universe can’t help but produce awe and wonder in those to whom He reveals Himself. He is glorious and majestic, unlike anyone or anything else:

The LORD reigns; he is robed in majesty . . .  Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the LORD on high is mighty!” (Ps. 93:1, 4)

His greatness is unsearchable, and He is glorious, splendid, and majestic (see Ps. 145:3, 5). Holy Scripture is how we come to better know the God who has called us to Himself.

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Rescuing the One Anothers from our Presumptive Familiarity

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The greatest enemy of observation is familiarity. When you think you know something, you stop trying to learn from or about it. Perhaps you understand that in theory, but what does it look like in the practice of our Bible study?

I recently published a piece on the Logos blog with “4 Tips for Reading the One Anothers in the Bible.” In this post, I evaluate the practice of mushing together the many “one-another” commands of the New Testament into an overarching framework for Christian ethics. Along the way, I attempt to show how our broad familiarity with these one-anothers as a whole has prevented us from properly understanding some of them.

What are the four tips?

  1. Remember that you are reading someone else’s mail
  2. Consider the historical context
  3. Consider the train of thought
  4. Focus on the main point

The article will explain these tips further, with examples along the way.

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The Tightrope of Bible Application

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For a few months I’ve been writing on the importance and the process of determining the author’s main point in Bible study. And one reason we should care about the main point is because of how dramatically it affects the way we apply the Bible.

To explain this further, I recently wrote for the Logos blog a piece called “Legalism, License, and the Tightrope of Bible Application.” Here is a taste:

So you want to apply the Bible to your life, do you?

That’s wonderful news, since the Lord Jesus (Matt 7:21–27) and his apostles (Jas 1:22–25) want you and me not only to hear the word but also to do it. But what should that “doing” look like?

Sometimes people warn of the danger of creating behavioral rules to either attain or maintain God’s favor. And at other times, people warn of cheap grace, where the gospel’s freedom is misunderstood to mean repentance is unnecessary. The tug-of-war between these perspectives may cause Bible application to feel like crossing a lava pit on a tightrope.

Both sets of warnings are on to something; the dangers on either side are real. And both sets of dangers may have the same solution: holding fast to the main points of biblical texts.

In the piece, I show how holding fast to the author’s main points provide a safeguard against drifting into either legalism or license in our application of Scripture. I’d love to know if you find my case persuasive.

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Guidance for Psalms

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Ian Hamilton wants you to know 3 things about the Psalms.

  1. The book of Psalms was written over a period of one thousand years.
  2. Approximately 40 percent of the psalms are laments.
  3. The Psalms are all about God’s promised Messiah-King, Jesus Christ.

In only a few minutes, his brief article will provide a wealth of guidance to help you grasp the big picture of this glorious book of poems.

The Psalms portray the life of faith with searing honesty. They poignantly remind us that the pattern of death and resurrection that was etched into the holy humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ is the pattern that the Holy Spirit seeks to replicate in the lives of all God’s children. The book of Psalms is a divinely inspired songbook that reflects the highs and lows, the triumphs and tragedies, of God’s covenant people over a millennium. John Calvin described the Psalms as “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.” Let us sing the Savior’s songbook, lest we risk impoverishing our worship and robbing ourselves of the rich spirituality contained within its songs.

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How to Respond When People Treat the Bible Like a Code to Crack

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I really appreciate this recent piece by Mark Ward entitled “The Secret Meaning of YHWH.” He responds to a widely shared social media post about how each Hebrew letter has a particular “meaning,” leading the posted to identify the meaning of the Lord’s name as “Behold the nails in my hands.”

When such “deeper” or “secret” meanings of Scripture get circulated, how ought we to respond? How does one evaluate or rebut such claims?

Ward’s primary approach is to show what sort of absurdity results when the method is applied to other biblical words or sentences. By this method, God’s title Adonai must mean “Ox door serpent hand.” And the secret meaning of Genesis 1:1 is “The house’s head ox had a tooth in his arm—marked with a house head ox, in fact. And an ox goad in the window had a hand on the water ox. But, mark well, the window tooth also had a water arm, a water hook, and an ox mark window. Ox heads are papyrus plants.”

Ward show us how to respond to such theories with grace and kindness—along with a strong dose of reality. Remember that studying the Bible is not code breaking.

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