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25
Oct
2019

Why Would Anyone Want To Study The Old Testament?

Visualization of Bible cross-references.
Visualization of Bible cross-references.

What’s the point of studying the Old Testament? It was written by ancient authors to ancient people concerning an obsolete covenant (Heb 8:13). One famous mega-church pastor said we don’t need the old testament scriptures to prop up the new covenant. So why would anyone want to study the Old Testament?

Why study the Old Testament?

The Bible is an interconnected whole. It is like a living organism that cannot be reduced to smaller pieces and retain its essence and being. Check out this marvelous graphic that depicts how the Bible connects and hyperlinks to different parts of itself. Along the bottom of this image is one vertical line for each chapter in the Bible. The longer the line, the longer the chapter. All of the colored arcs show 63,779 Bible cross-references. This is an incredible visualization that drives home the fact that the Bible is an astonishingly complex and interconnected collection of texts. Want to make sense of these scriptural hyperlinks in the New Testament without the Old Testament? Good luck with that!

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in Bible
11
Jul
2018

Clean and Unclean?

The Bible talks a great deal about purity laws; the idea of being clean or unclean. This concept is not very familiar to us today and it raises a number of questions. What exactly did it mean to be clean or unclean? What caused a person to be unclean? How did a person get clean again? What was the downside of being unclean? Was it a sin to be unclean?

What the Bible means by clean and unclean

The terms clean and unclean aren’t referring to how clean or dirty a person or thing is. Rather, it is a concept related to a person’s (or object’s) fitness or suitability for engaging in Tabernacle/Temple activities.

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in Purity
07
Jul
2018

Is The Clergy/Laity Distinction Biblical?

Clergy

One of the few things that most religions have in common is a clergy/laity distinction. The clergy are people appointed (ordained) to perform religious duties, rituals, and tasks. Some do not consider common people (lay people) qualified to do these tasks. Some terms commonly used to refer to clergy are priest, reverend, minister, preacher, bishop, pastor, father, etc. In short, clergy are the people behind the pulpit and laity are the people in the pews.

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in Church Leadership, Priesthood
04
Jun
2018

The 7th Day Is Not The Real Sabbath

The seventh day of the week (Saturday) was the day God gave to the ancient Israelites as a day of ceasing from their labor (Ex 16). To a nation of former slaves who had just left Egypt, a day off of work must have been both a welcome and strange idea.

The word Sabbath (שַׁבָּת shabbath, H7676) means to cease, but most people think it means rest. Rest is certainly part of the Sabbath, but rest is the result of ceasing from labor.

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in Sabbath
03
Mar
2018

What is the Gospel?

Christians use the word “gospel” a great deal in conversations. It’s not an everyday sort of word and therefore we may not intuitively know what it means. The English word gospel is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word “godspell.” It is a compound word from god (good) and spell (news). Over time, the spelling morphed into the modern word gospel. This is the English word that scholars have chosen to translate the Greek word euaggelion (εὐαγγέλιον, Strongs G2098) which simply means “good news.”

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Posted by Eddie Lawrence in Gospel