Genealogies, such as the one found in Matthew 1:1-17, are often thought to be deadly boring. I disagree!
(a) In Matthew’s list of 46 names, spanning 2,000 years, you will find non-descripts, heroes, women (each with an interesting story to tell!) and villains. See if you can find three examples of each of these types.
(b) What does this genealogy tell us about Mary and Joseph and their son Jesus? And what does it tell us about God’s purposes for the world?…
Tax collectors and other notorious sinners often came
to listen to Jesus teach. This made the Pharisees and
teachers of religious law murmur, saying, “This man
receives sinners, and eats with them!” Luke 15:1-2
The beings whom Jesus sought out,
and drew around Him, were . . . .
the burdened,
the bowed down,
the disconsolate,
the poor,
the friendless,
the helpless,
the ignorant,
the weary.
He loved to lavish upon such the fullness of His
benevolent heart, and to exert upon such the skill
of His wonder working power.…
“May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world!” Galatians 6:14
In the cross we see . . .
the rights of divine justice maintained,
the designs of divine mercy revealed;
sin appearing exceedingly sinful;
the law magnified and honoured, and
the law-breaker pardoned and delivered!
At the cross, God and sinners meet — and a reconciliation takes place.…
Ian Paul has commented on the thoughts of David Walker, Bishop of Manchester, about the distinctive needs of occasional church attenders (i.e. those who might attend an annual carol service, but not much else).
In addition to some sensible, if unremarkable, suggestions (stick to traditional words of carols, mention other events coming up in your calendar, and so on) David Walker offers the following advice:-
Ian Paul rightly asks, Why?…
When preachers compare the response of the crowd on Palm Sunday (“Hosanna!”, Mk 11:9; Mt 21:9; “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”, Lk 19:38) to that of the crowd just a few days’ later (“Crucify him!”, Mk 15:13; Lk 23:21; Jn 19:15) they often explain this in terms of fickleness (“How quickly they change their minds about Jesus!”). I’ve done it myself.
So also in the hymn ‘My Song is Love Unknown’:
Sometimes they strew his way/And his sweet praises sing…Then “Crucify!”…
As with the Temple and Israel itself, ‘the land’ points to something beyond itself and to a greater reality than a mere piece of real estate. Just as God’s presence could not be confined to a single building, so his blessing could not be restricted to one parcel of land.
We should not be surprised, then, to discover that God’s promises relating to the land find their fulfilment in Jesus (and not in a literal future return of the nation of Israel to the land). …
One of the central themes of the Bible is God’s promise that he would make a great people for his praise, and the fulfilment of that promise. Key Scriptures are Gen 12:1-3 (God’s promise to Abram), and 1 Pet 2:9f (the declaration that the followers of Jesus constitute ‘a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession…the people of God’.
Back in Gen 1-2, God’s purpose for his people was ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen 1:28), to ‘rule’ and ‘subdue’ the earth (Gen 1:28) to ‘cultivate’ and ‘keep’ the garden (Gen 2:15), and to live in community with one another (Gen 2:18-25). …
All God’s promises (including those relating to the temple, the people of God, and the land) are fulfilled in Jesus, 2 Cor 1:20. It is in him that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden, Col 2:1-3. It is this which gives a reliable hermeneutic for understanding the entire Bible. We are not at the mercy of idiosyncratic interpretations of individual verses.
How are we to understanding Christ as the fulfilment of the Bible’s teaching about the Temple?…
Recently, British scientists have teamed up with Israeli archaeologists to construct what is believed to be the most accurate representation of what Jesus looked like. The final picture was put together by Richard Neave, forensic anthropologist from Manchester University.
The reconstruction was based on the assumption that Jesus would have looked like an ordinary Jew of his day, in terms of skull shape, eye colour and hair colour and length. They concluded that he would have been bearded, again like most other Jews at the time.…
At Christmas, fact and fiction, truth and legend, are mixed so thoroughly that even preachers include what they should have left out, and leave out what they should have included.
The late Dick France wrote:-
…‘Most people’s awareness of the Christmas story is derived mainly from school nativity plays, in which Luke’s tea-toweled shepherds rub shoulders with Matthew’s magi (promoted to royal status), and a surly innkeeper and his wife are surrounded by infant angels with tinsel halos.
