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Good Friday: Meditations from Genesis
Last year was so busy, I confess that I didn’t celebrate holidays all that deeply. This year I’m determined to make more of the time. Today is Good Friday, and while it’s not the first significant day in what some call Holy Week, it is one of the biggest. Christmas gets more attention because the holiday has come to celebrate much more than Jesus’s birth. Easter isn’t celebrated quite as much these days, but we still have our sanitized festivities to share with our neighbors. But I’ve never known Good Friday to get much attention outside of Christian circles, and frankly, I’m grateful. There are no gifts today, no candy,…
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Not for His Sake Alone
One of the better known stories of the Old Testament is the time God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. It plays an important role not just in Christianity, but in Judaism and Islam. It’s also a prime subject of study for philosophers, such as when Kierkegaard used it as an example of an existential leap into the darkness. I’ve heard many talks and sermons on it, and inevitably the question comes up: why? Why would a loving God ask a faithful man to do such an awful thing? The other gods of the time demanded child sacrifices; this God was supposed to be different! How could He command…
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Father Abraham
When my son was just an infant, I would hum the song “Father Abraham” to him. It’s a good song (even if I didn’t understand it as a kid—or what it had to do with my right arm, left arm, right foot, left foot). I often make up songs around the house, especially when I sing to my kids and “Father Abraham” lends itself to this, too, because all of my children have three-syllable names. Just like Abraham. The syllable thing was planned, but the Abraham portion was an added benefit. I do like singing that particular song over them because my most earnest prayer for all of my children…
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This is Your Conscience (part 5)
We’ve been talking about the conscience, and last time we focused on the idea that your conscience is like an instrument that can be tuned. It’s supposed to tell us right from wrong, but it’s not perfect. We can pursue actions that bring it into alignment with reality, or we can pursue actions that draw it further out of tune. Besides the “seared” conscience that we mentioned last time, there is another category of conscience referenced in Scripture. It’s called the “defiled” conscience. And it’s probably not what you think. The seared conscience has become dead to sin, insensitive to evil. But the defiled conscience actually has the other problem:…
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This Is Your Conscience (part 2)
Last time I began talking about the conscience. You may have noticed that while I said I was going to give a biblical talk and that the Bible has a lot to say, I didn’t actually reference the Bible at all. The reason is this: the Bible doesn’t actually define the conscience. That’s not at all strange; the Bible uses many words that it never defines because its original readers were expected to know them. This is one reason why it’s important to study the original languages, or at least to have trustworthy people you can rely on to do this for you. (Not everyone should take up the languages.…