The God of Our Own Image

“And in the greatness of Your excellence You overthrow those who rise up against You; You send forth Your burning anger, and it consumes them as chaff.”  Exodus 15:7  NASB Burning anger– God is mad!  Watch out!  That’s what Moses is talking about in this verse.  The Hebrew verb is ḥārâ, “to burn (of anger).”  The verb is always…

Where Are You?

and after he brought them out, he said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” Acts 16:30 NASB Saved – “Religions may be classified as those of self-satisfaction, of self-annihilation or of fellowship. In the first worship is a quest for satisfaction of personal needs like salvation or desire for immortality. In the second…

Agape Again

Let all that you do be done in love.  1 Corinthians 16:14  NASB Love – An overworked word loses its meaning.  An overlooked word has no meaning at all.  Such is the case with the Greek noun, agape.  We may realize that agape is connected to the Hebrew ‘ahav, but did we know this? Love…

Conditional Prayers (2)

You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.   James 4:3 ESV Passions – But I thought being passionate was a good thing.  Ah, if we only read it in Greek.  Hedonais, the plural noun, makes it quite clear that James is talking about self-centered pleasures, not passions. …

Passion Fruit

and there was not a man to till the ground  Genesis 2:5  (Hebrew World translation) To till – There is no difference between sacred and secular.  Better read that again since nearly everything about our culture is based on separating sacred and secular.  We have church and state, spiritual and carnal, righteous and wicked and…

Sin Revisited (3)

And YHWH Elohim formed Man out of dry, loose earth dirt Genesis 2:7a (my translation) Formed – “To bring desire into existence.”  That’s yatsar.  God desired partnership in the regulation and enhancement of His creation.  That desire was manifested in the formation of Man.  Because the desire to bring into existence is the essence of…

Sin Revisited (2)

And YHWH Elohim formed Man out of dry, loose earth dirt Genesis 2:7a (my translation) Formed – We’ve learned that this occurrence of yatsar contains a double Yod.  The rabbis tell us that this indicates the two impulses of Man, the yetser ha-tov and the yester ha’ra.  It’s pretty clear that tov (good) and ra…