Whether we live as students, employees, or church leaders, we are often confronted with the question of how will we live and how we will decide how to live. Recently, I read the following suggestion: We need to be less concerned with the method (traditions) and more concerned with results. But is that really true? Our methods determine our results. As we know, ends do not justify the means, and our traditions guide us towards positive results & guard us from negative results. For example, our theological traditions, such as the creeds, guard us against false doctrine and false practice. The process…
There are two ways to read the Bible. The one way to read the Bible is that it’s basically about you: what you have to do in order to be right with God, in which case you’ll never have a sure and certain hope, because you’ll always know you’re not quite living up. You’ll never be sure about that future. Or you can read it as all about Jesus. Every single thing is not about what you must do in order to make yourself right with God, but what he has done to make you absolutely right with God. And…
In our current global milieu, we live in a “world of religions,” and increasingly, Christians are confronted with how to relate to these religions. Ida Glaser approaches these issues with clarity and authenticity in her book The Bible and Other Faiths: Christian Responsibility in a World of Religions. As a Jewish Christian who reaches out to Muslims, Glaser has firsthand experience in how crucial and delicate these matters can be. With an important contribution to Christian theology, Glaser helps Christians distinguish between primary and secondary questions, focusing believers on what we can genuinely know and cannot know from Scripture. In…
The book of Leviticus can seem daunting, irrelevant, boring, and downright frightening. Honestly, I have avoided the book from time to time, as have many others. It is easy to overlook the book because the “rituals” no longer apply to us, and it can be difficult to discern what those rituals teach us. After reading just the first few chapters, though, here are a few reasons that we can be thankful for its message: * God has a plan for His people. * God gives answers, so we don’t need to figure out problems on our own. * God sets…