Theology

This morning in our sermon we're looking at the names of God from Psalm 86. Specifically we're looking at God's name, Adonai. It means, "my Master." To help us appreciate how David the Psalmist would have used the names of God, I switched out the English translations of God's names for the Hebrew originals. Sometimes it helps us to do this in our minds as we read the Old Testament to cause us to slow down and reflect on how much God's names reveal about him. Here is Psalm 86:

Psalm 86
A Prayer of David.
Incline…

On September 7th we are providing an opportunity for water baptisms, so this is a good time to revisit what we believe about baptism. The basic idea is that believers should be baptized by immersion in water as a believer. The two halves of this idea are equally important to get straight in our minds: (1) believers and (2) baptized by immersion in water. Thus, the simple test of whether you (or your child) should be baptized is whether or not you (or your child) believe in Jesus and haven't already been baptized as a believer.

In our last post we introduced Daniel's seventy weeks, this mysterious reference from Daniel 9:24-27. It is often used as a defense of a 7-year time of hardship called "the great tribulation." Yet, we are taking a different approach to the passage. We began with verse 24 yesterday, and today we will look at the rest of the passage going verse-by-verse.

If you've read much of anything connected to the end times, you've likely heard about "the great tribulation." Or maybe you've even heard about Daniel's 70 weeks. These issues are connected to our view of the end times or eschatology, "the study of the last things." All of this can be endlessly fascinating but also wildly speculative. Arriving at solid conclusions from the biblical text can be difficult at times, impossible at others. Here we want to examine one piece of this complex puzzle, Daniel 9:24-27.

This past Sunday I preached on the seven seals from Revelation 6-8. In the sermon I touched on the 144,000 from 7:4-8 and said that they represented all the elect from the nation of Israel (with the new covenant people represented by 7:9ff.). Well, that wasn't correct. Looking again at this symbolic group, I missed a key parallel text in Revelation 14:1-3:

To say that God is immutable is to say that he is unchanging. It is to say that he is constant and consistent. It is to say that he is not fickle. The God who reveals himself in his creation and in his Word is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. With this in mind, there are at least four ways in which we can speak of God as being immutable.

In the first chapter of the gospel of John, John introduces readers to the Word. He tells his 1st century audience (primarily Jews and Greeks) a number of surprising things about the Word. We’ll look at four of those traits followed by a few points of application/significance.

In Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote that Abraham Lincoln "has unequalled power to captivate the imagination and to inspire emotion." For me, King David is the Bible's Abraham Lincoln equivalent in his power to capture imaginations and inspire emotions.