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by on 12.18.09

an interesting resource

I just got an e-mail notification of a resource put out by Zondervan, the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: Old Testament. It looks like a fascinating source of information.

Readers should note that such publications often support liberal views on Biblical dates and tend to minimize the miraculous. Nevertheless, if read with discernment, such resources can provide valuable background material for studying and teaching the Bible.

A sample is offered where you can read the Ezra-Nehemiah section and see what is offered in this set.

[Read more…]

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by on 7.7.09

sinaiticus

Sinaiticus is available to view online.

This might be of interest to only a select few, but the various libraries that own sheets of Sinaiticus have cooperated to make the entire codex available.

You can see photographs of each page (or fragments of pages), jump from page to page by Bible reference, see a transcription of each page as well as a translation.

Regardless of your views of the textual issues, it is tremendous that this most important manuscript of the Bible is now available for anyone to see.

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by on 12.4.02

cafe, solid under pressure

Mysterious Coffee Confounded by Coffee

This is the headline of today’s article on NASA’s site. I get a regular daily e-mail from the site, mainly in the hope of illustrations for sermons. Today’s article ‘stirred’ my thoughts!

The article explains some of the physics behind the difference between that hard vacuum packed brick of coffee that you by at the store and the soft, pliable open bag you have once you break the seal. Each coffee grain is jagged and irregular in its shape. The pressure of the atmosphere squeezes in on all sides when the grounds are ‘under seal’. Their irregular shapes interlock and resist being broken apart as long as the pressure is maintained. As soon as the vacuum seal is broken, the pressure has an outlet and the grains are free to tumble in whatever direction they like.

Isn’t this like the pressure of accountability one finds in a local church? Christians who submit themselves to the authority of a local church find themselves ‘interlocking’, replicating the form and function that Christ intended. Those who will not submit to the accountability of the local church find themselves drifting, led first by this whim, then that, never stabilizing spiritually.

Some pressure is good in our lives, the pressure of accountability to a God-honouring local church is one of them.

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by on 12.4.02

making the calendar more inclusive

NATIONAL POST Museum abandons Christian year system

Yet another attack, very subtle, on our Lord Jesus Christ, by “tolerant” Canadians. The Royal Ontario Museum is going to change it’s exhibits from reading AD and BC to the Christ-denying CE and BCE. Here is the justification:

“Dan Rahimi, the Toronto museum’s director of collections management, said the intent of the change ‘is just to be more inclusive, let’s say, in how we even describe the years.

”’A lot of people accept the reality of Jesus as a historical figure but don’t accept him as Christ, and to use the words ‘before Christ’ is really quite ethnocentric of European Christians. And to use ‘the year of our Lord’ is also quite insensitive to huge populations in Toronto who have other lords.'”

What claptrap! Jesus is the pivotal figure of human history, the hatred of mankind notwithstanding.

Ironically, the first exhibit displaying the new designation is the “James Ossuary”, possibly the burial coffin of James, the brother of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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