I am exhausted from my calling out. My throat is hoarse. My eyes fail from hoping for my God. Psalm 69:4 [Hebrew Bible] Robert Alter Eyes fail – In Hebrew the expression is כָּל֥וּ עֵינָ֑י (kalu enay). From our perspective, it seems a bit odd. We don’t hope with our eyes. For us, hope is…
and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away. Revelation 21:4 NASB Death – Inevitability! The quip “death and taxes” isn’t always true, but “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” and “the…
But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. Galatians 3:25 NASB Under – Paul’s view of the Law is probably the most controversial element of all his writings. It certainly separated Christianity from Judaism and it contributed to replacement theology and anti-Judaism, perhaps even to pogroms. When the Church interpreted Paul…
If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. Romans 8:10 NASB Dead/alive – If there were ever a verse that makes Paul look like a student of Plato, this is probably it. The apparent dualism between body and spirit, dead and alive,…
while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:18 NASB Eternal – The commitment of the West to the Platonic ideal of unity found in the…
Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?” John 18:38a NASB Truth – Plato is in many respects the founder of Western civilization. His teacher, Socrates, and his pupil, Aristotle, completed a trinity of minds that literally shaped our conception of the world, God and Man. A product of wealthy and aristocratic Athenians, Plato’s ideas have…
For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For indeed in this house we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven, 2 Corinthians 5:1-2 Earthly tent – Mas. Chagigah…
FOR EVERYONE WHO LISTENED TO the discussions recorded in Israel about the afterlife, the influence of the Cult of Souls, Dionysus worship and the development of Christian and Jewish thinking about death and the olam ha’ba, here is the last lecture covering the origins of the popular Greek belief in the eternal soul, life after death and…
Christians who follow the theological bent of Augustine and Luther claim that these men derived the doctrine of sinful nature from Scripture, particularly the Genesis account of the Fall. Luther’s articulation depends on Augustine, one of the early church fathers, in spite of the differences between the two on soteriology. However, since the rabbis worked with…
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 NASB In the beginning – We just can’t get away from the opening verse, can we? Genesis 1:1 stands as a clarion call for everything that’s different about the Hebrew worldview. Not only does it soundly deny all of the opening ideas of…
