exultemus

Tag: bible

  • My Father was a Wandering Aramean

    My father was a wandering Aramean (Deuteronomy 26.5). These words are a reference to Jacob. His grandfather Abraham lived a nomadic lifestyle. He drove sheep and wandered from place to place, setting up camp where he found good pasture. Sometimes he stayed for a short tRefugees_on_a_boatime and sometimes he remained for weeks, months or even years. But nowhere did he settle long enough to call it home. His son Isaac and his grandson Jacob (who was renamed Israel) lived this same nomadic lifestyle. In this way they accumulated great wealth but called nowhere home.

    But they travelled always with a promise. God had made a covenant with Abraham in which he promised that Abraham would be the father of nations (it’s what his name means) and that God would provide him with a homeland and that his descendants would become a people beyond counting and a blessing to the world. (more…)

  • In Raptures

    The fact that you’re reading this suggests that the “Rapture” did not take place as scheduled on 21st May. But then, I don’t suppose that you thought it would. Neither did I.

    The whole idea of the rapture grows out of a particular way of reading the bible. The idea that scripture can be read in such a way as to make it possible to predict the date of the Second Coming requires an especially literal understanding of the text.

    Such an understanding of scripture is remarkably modern. Certainly those who wrote the books of the bible would be surprised, and perhaps a little amused, that people would try to make sense of the stories in this way. Of course, believing that things are either literally true or untrue is very modern way of looking at things. And today we are not used to handling texts that give what look to us like factual accounts of events as if there might be a different way of understanding them. We may still like metaphors as a literary device in a piece of descriptive writing or in a poem but we are not at all comfortable with an extended text which we need to understand metaphorically. And so we fall into the trap of interpreting the bible as if its reliability were simply a case of black or white. (more…)