Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
G.K. Chesterton assumes a surprising and memorable perspective from which to view the events of Palm Sunday (Matthew 21:1-11) The Donkey by: G.K. Chesterton When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head…
There is a common biblical principle: you must give back what you steal. In the Bible, restitution is repayment with interest. If you rob someone of their money, you have to pay back double what you stole. A thief must pay back fourfold if he steals a sheep, and if…
Identifying Isaiah’s suffering servant with the promised Messiah is unthinkable for a Jew because it combines the offices of humble priest and victorious king. While it is frustrating that Jews refuse to see the sufferings of Christ in Isaiah 53, the reluctance of Christians to interpret the passage in its…
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Psalm 150:6 (ESV) The command to praise God is pervasive throughout Scripture. In the verse above the Spirit calls all things with breath to praise the Lord. Song is also clearly featured all throughout Scripture and is a featured…
“Gender is a social construct.” That’s shocking to people who have assumed that gender and sex were synonyms but at least since I was in college, in the ‘80s, we were taught that “gender” refers to the forms, the customs, the traditions that our culture teaches us to define what…
In Genesis 49, Jacob prophesies about (blesses and curses?) his twelve sons. The first three of them don’t fare well. Jacob recalls Reuben’s offense of taking his concubine (Genesis 35:22) and the murderous violence of Simeon’s and Levi against the Canaanite inhabitants of the city of Shechem (Genesis 34). He…
Showing page 45 of 309
Showing page 39 of 43
Zedekiah was the last Davidic king in Judah, and like many of his predecessors he “did evil in the sight of Yahweh.” We might imagine he oppressed the people, promoted idolatry, persecuted prophets, ignored God’s commandments and His prophets. We know from the book of Jeremiah Jehoiakim did all this,…
Louis Dupre suggests that modern thought is riven by a fundamental tension. On the one hand, the real is still conceived, as it classically has been, as an unchanging order, while on the other hand the subject determines meaning and value. Modern thought, to put it otherwise, is caught between…
Proverbs 15:6, translated according to the original Hebrew order, reads: “In the house of the righteous treasure aplenty; but in the revenue of the wicked disturbance.” Two structures overlap and interact here. There is the chiastic order: A. house B. righteous C. treasure C’. revenue B’. wicked A’. disturbance According…
Jesus said that we should be wise as serpents, but how are serpents wise? Genesis 3:1 says that the serpent was more “crafty” (ARUM) than any of the beasts of the field, and the same word is used a number of times in Proverbs, often translated as “prudent.” A crafty…
OK, one trouble, a trouble: There are, we are told, “three views” of the function of Matthew 1:1 - it’s the heading for the genealogy, it’s the heading for the whole book, or it’s the heading for the first section of the book (perhaps extending to 4:16). Why has it…
The logic of Scripture often moves from head to body: What Jesus did, His disciples are to do; we are to have the mind that was in Christ Jesus; we are to follow Him, not He us. Yet, the sequence of Matthew is inverted in several places. Before Jesus is…
Showing page 1831 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
