The Merciful Priest
“And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the saying of the Lord, how he had said to him, “Before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times.” ” (Luke 23:61). It was natural to turn to the…
Category Bible
The Father’s Will
Inconceivable I came across an intriguing line of Calvin about the ‘love of God’ in Packer’s Concise Theology. Calvin said: ‘In an inconceivable way he loved us even when he hated us’ (p 132). Here’s what Packer wrote: “Every member…
Stott – faith and waiting
“Be thou there until I bring thee word.” I came across this sentence in the biography of John Stott. It was in a letter he wrote to someone about his experience of becoming Rector of All Souls Langham Place. I…
Flame of Fire
The Hebrew language can have some curious links which are obscured in English bible translations. The burning bush is one example with the word ‘flame – labba‘, which seems to have a cognate link with the word for ‘heart’. “And the…
More Scope!
Psmith is a character in some PG Wodehouse novels. Even as I type the name, my computer’s autocorrect seeks to eliminate the P and make it ‘Smith’. Wodehouse would no doubt be delighted as he often played upon the ‘silent…
Man of Blood (2 Samuel 16:7-8)
Man of Blood (2 Samuel 16:7-8) The last post about ‘the blood of Jesus’ brought to mind the time when David was accused of being a ‘man of blood’. The setting is David’s escape from Jerusalem due to the Absalom…
The Blood of Jesus
In her novel, A Taste for Death, PD James opens with this vivid description of the discovery, by an elderly spinster, of two bodies in a church: “There were two of them and she knew instantly, and with absolute certainty,…
Until now
“But you have kept the good wine until now.” (John 2:10). David Ford comments upon this statement of the steward or master of the feast at the wedding at Cana: These final words of the story are “a typical multilayered…
Earnest Prayer
Brian Edwards hammers home the vital nature of prayer in revival: “In the first month of the first year of his reign, [Hezekiah] opened the doors of the temple of the LORD and repaired them (2 Chronicles 29:3). That is…
She Crushed his head
“But Jael, Heber’s wife, picked up a tent peg and a hammer and went quietly to him while he lay fast asleep, exhausted. She drove (taqa’) the peg through his temple into the ground, and he died.” (Judges 4:21). In my last post…