Mark 10:25 “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”
See also Mt 19:24; Lk 18:25.
It is occasionally claimed either that:
(a) kamelos (camel) should be read as kamilos (rope): the two words sounded the same in the days of koine Greek (Cole). According to Garland, the words of ‘rope’ and ‘camel’ are also similar in Aramaic.…
8:28 And we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose, 8:29 because those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 8:30 And those he predestined, he also called; and those he called, he also justified; and those he justified, he also glorified.
Baghdad, July 30th 1919.…
Jn 20:29 – ‘Jesus said to [Thomas], “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed.”’
2 Cor 5:7 – ‘We live by faith, not by sight.’
Heb 11:1 – ‘Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see.‘
The danger for preachers (and others) is to appeal to these texts to support the idea that [Christian] faith does not rely on evidence; that it is a leap in the dark.…
1 Peter 3:1-2 In the same way, wives, be subject to your own husbands. Then, even if some are disobedient to the word, they will be won over without a word by the way you live, 3:2 when they see your pure and reverent conduct.
It is fashionable these days for people to ‘big up’ this text in order to excuse themselves and others from the responsibility to witness verbally to the Lord Jesus Christ.
We say:
…‘Actions speak louder than words’.
2:6 While they were [in Bethlehem], the time came for [Mary] to deliver her child. 2:7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
‘No room in the inn’ (along with a grumpy inn-keeper) is part of the fabric of the nativity story, as popularly told. But the biblical text makes no mention of a stable, and the word commonly translated ‘inn’ may well mean something else.…
As popularly understood:
Cold = decidedly opposed to the things of God
Hot = enthusiastically committed to the things of God
Lukewarm = indifferent to the things of God
The implication would therefore be: better to be out and out against God than to sit on the fence.…
This teaching is found, with some variations, Mt 19:13–15, Mk 10:13–16 and Lk 18:15–17.
This is Luke’s version;
8:15 Now people were even bringing their babies to him for him to touch. But when the disciples saw it, they began to scold those who brought them. 18:16 But Jesus called for the children, saying, “Let the little children come to me and do not try to stop them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.…
4:1 One should think about us this way—as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.
The word ‘servants’, ‘hyperetas’, is thought to be derived from ‘eresso’, ‘to row’ and ‘hypo’, ‘below’, and thus to mean (‘literally’) ‘under-rower’. Lay preachers and popular writers tend to make much of this. Wiersbe, for example, writes:
…‘The word translated ministers is literally “under-rowers.” It described the slaves who rowed the huge Roman galleys.
As Jared Wilson remarks, this verse (in the wording of the Authorised Version) is widely misunderstood and misapplied in the evangelical world. With it we baptise and bless our dreams, our plans, our ‘visions’.
Consider this:
…‘In companies without a vision people come to work, they do stuff all day, they meet, they go home. In sports teams without a vision, people come to training, they train, the go home. In life, people without a vision, do stuff, go home and drift aimlessly in the winds of life through to death.
Rom 1:16 – ‘I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is God’s power for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.’
Because the Gk word for ‘power’ is ‘dunamis’ (from which we get the word ‘dynamite’), preachers have sometimes announced that according to this verse the gospel is the ‘dynamite’ of God unto salvation. But this is exegetically naive, for several reasons.
Firstly, to make this connection is to commit the ‘root fallacy’ (the fallacy that the meaning of a word can be explained in terms of its original meaning.…
