His Burden is Light

It occurred to me today that the New Testament is all about being like God. It begins with Jesus who is the exact image of God and it moves on to tell us that through His atoning death for our sins, burial, and resurrection from the dead, we can be born again and receive His Spirit, which means we can become the sons of God and walk even as He walked. This is absolutely tremendous, but I thought about it from a slightly different angle today. Jesus taught His disciples to be perfect and that means going beyond what is 'just enough' to what is full and overflowing . It may be 'just enough' to greet those who are your friends and like-minded, but it is full and overflowing to greet those who are outsiders and differ, as well. He gives a number of examples to illustrate this but at the heart of His message is that we should be like this because our Father in heaven is like this. We are truly His children if we walk in likeness to Him. But the scandal of it occurred to...

When the Lord Jesus was talking to the Pharisees, he pointed out that they tithed even of their garden herbs. In other words, they were very scrupulous about this down to the last mite. However, they ignored the more important matters of the law, as Jesus said, judgment, mercy, and faith. They strained out a gnat but swallowed a camel (Luke 11:39-42, Matt 23:16-26). Christians are not automatically immune from falling into the same pattern of blindness. If we were immune, the Lord would not have warned us to beware of the doctrine of the Pharisees and the Sadducees (Matt 16:12). There are many important lessons to be learned from this parable but the part that I want to talk about today is the curious conclusion of Jesus' teaching: He said that they should have paid attention to the weightier matters of the law and also not neglected to tithe of their garden herbs. So Jesus is not reproving the Pharisees for their fastidious attention in tithing, He is reproving them for their negl...

You might think this is impossible to know but it is possible! It is amenable to Biblical discernment. As we elaborate the answer we will see that many verses in the Bible encourage by agreement our developing conclusion. This is how we can know that we are still on the right track. And of course the answer to a question as fundamental as this will tell us a lot about the world, the state of fallen mankind, and most importantly, about Christ in His difference from the first man Adam. This study is particularly for those who are already familiar with the Bible, and have true faith in Christ. Otherwise there's no way you're going to agree. We start not in Genesis but in 1 Timothy 2:14! "And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression." The key here is that Adam was not deceived. That means he ate the fruit knowingly. Now we must go back to Genesis. When God told Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil,...

As we study the Bible we find some interesting correlations between the circumstances of the birth of Jesus and His death, burial, and resurrection. In fact, they appear to be parallel. Let's take a look: Jesus was born to a young woman who had not yet known a man (Luke 1:34). Jesus' body was laid in a new tomb (Matt 27:60). The betrothed husband of Mary was named Joseph (Luke 2:5). The owner of the new tomb was named Joseph (Matt 27:57-60). Joseph, Mary's husband, was a just man (Matt 1:19). Joseph, the owner of the new tomb, was an honourable counsellor (Mark 15:43). And it is the Bible itself that directs us to expect this parallelism between birth and death. Consider Job 1:21a, "And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither" I believe this is one of the many things in the Bible that are hidden in plain sight. If we read it carefully, we will find this commonly known verse to be in fact astonishing! What ...

I have been thinking lately a lot about so-called "Artificial Intelligence" and androids and in order to really understand them and the deception that will accompany them, it is imperative that we understand Biblical anthropology, that is, the make-up of a human being according to the One who made us. The Bible teaches that we are body, soul, and spirit.  The scripture tells us that the word of God "pierces even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit" (Heb 4:12). This teaches me that by means of study of the word of God we can distinguish between what is a soul and what is a spirit.  Furthermore, there is mind and heart as components of the human person. So this is not simple. Before we can say what is different between an android and a human being, we must have a good understanding of what is a human being! So at first I wanted to try and tackle the question of mind, asking, "What is a mind?" both in itself and in relation to these other component...

As Christmas approaches, I thought it would be fitting to consider an issue I've heard raised in a few places over the years. The most famous example might be when the Hasidic-clad diamond thieves are discussing the Virgin Mary at the start of the movie, "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels", written and directed by Guy Ritchie who was married to Madonna at the time. I believe without a doubt that this was expressive of her view of Isaiah 7:14 as interpreted by the Kabbalah, which she was/is following. In any case, the issue, briefly summarized, is this. In Isaiah 7:14, the scripture says, "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." The Hebrew word here translated "virgin" is 'almah, which arguably means girl or young woman of marriageable age. So some have claimed that 'virgin' is not necessarily part of the essential meaning of the word and so it ...

I was listening to an audio recording of Exodus and a verse jumped out at me, Exodus 21:35. This is what it says, "And if one man's ox hurt another's, that he die; then they shall sell the live ox, and divide the money of it; and the dead ox also they shall divide." What surprised me about it is that rather than give the live ox to the owner of the ox that was killed, the judgment is to sell the live ox and divide the money and also divide the dead ox. Why? Well, to answer that fully we must also see the next verse: "Or if it be known that the ox hath used to push in time past, and his owner hath not kept him in; he shall surely pay ox for ox; and the dead shall be his own." The next verse has a different circumstance and a different judgment. So, since the judgment of v. 36 is for an ox that was not properly kept in even though its dangerous behaviour was known, we can conclude that the ox in verse 35 was not known for prior dangerous behaviour. As ...