In the end the glory of the Lord leaves one mountain to take up residence upon another; but even this is just the beginning. Moses calls the people to shape the pieces of the tabernacle and then assemble it — according to a ritual more ancient than mankind. The Lord finally gives Moses his answer, […]
Back in the Book of Genesis, there is a very strange story about human sacrifice — or, what was almost a human sacrifice. Way back near the beginning of the Book of Genesis, God had called a man named Abraham out of the ruins of a civilization that had been built on a plain beside […]
In the beginning, Moses says, God created the heavens and the earth: God created our universe. Now, ancient people thought that the primordial universe was a massive ocean. And they believed that this universal ocean was an extremely violent place, a universal storm of chaos and darkness. But then, as Moses kept writing, he went […]
So last week we looked at the story of King David and what happened to his kingdom after him. Because of Solomon’s idolatry, God allowed the kingdom to be split in two: north and south. The northern kingdom rejected God completely, and so after three hundred years God brought judgement upon them. They were conquered […]
When Moses wrote Genesis, he structured it very carefully into a series of books, or parts: Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, and so on. But back in Moses’ time, they did not use chapter divisions like we do today. Instead, they would use certain key phrases to signal the beginning of a new chapter, […]
All right. Let’s start with just a brief recap of where we are in the Book of Exodus: Six weeks after the people of Israel escaped from slavery in Egypt, they arrived at Mount Sinai on the far side of the Arabian wilderness. But they did not find their way to the mountain all on […]
In the beginning, people thought of our physical cosmos as a massive ocean, a place of storms and terrifying destruction as titans the size of galaxies fought against one another in the darkness. And so, when we look at the creation myths of most ancient nations, what we often find are stories of an earth […]
So, in the Old Testament, when God brought the Jewish people back to Jerusalem after their exile in Babylon, he gave them two simple instructions: build the temple, and live truthful lives with one another. And God promised that, one day, people from all nations would come streaming into that temple to worship alongside the […]
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth — That is how Moses began the book of Genesis. And by this point we are very familiar with what followed: over the course of seven days God brought the earth up out of darkness and chaos and turned it into an orderly temple filled […]
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Bong-bongggg… Last week, on “Echoes of a Far-Off Country”: King Xerxes: “Esther, what do you want? Even up to half my kingdom, I will give it to you!” Queen Esther: “What do I want…hmmm, what do I want? My Lord King, what I want is to invite you and Haman to dinner — twice! — […]
So, you all remember what Jesus came to do, right? He came to make war on the devil, the ancient dragon, who took mankind captive. He came to set those captives free. And he’s been doing that ever since Chapter 4. And then in the last chapter, Chapter 8, we saw the war escalate. Previously […]
It is Judgement Day in the garden, Judgement Day for Adam and his wife, and for the serpent that convinced them to break covenant with their Father. God had told Adam — the Prime Minister of God’s garden kingdom — to protect the tree of knowledge and reserve it for God alone. Instead, the man […]
Moses introduced the idea of the city very early in the book of Genesis: right after Cain murdered his brother Abel, Moses tells us, he ran away from God’s presence in the Garden of Eden and settled in lands far away to the east. And there he built a city. And as the story went […]