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To believe in God is to believe that life is going somewhere. It is to believe that the universe is part of a grand narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. And by “end” I don’t mean “the point after which there is nothing,” as in the end of a movie or end of a book. Rather, I mean “end” as in purpose,...
A few years ago author Eugene Peterson (The Message translation, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction) gave an interview in which he discussed how he learned to read Scripture contemplatively. “In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There’s too...
If you think about it, Jesus could be horribly inconsistent in the way that he treated people. On the one hand, he could treat people with such grace and kindness that it almost seemed as if he was cavalier about their sin, enjoying dinner fellowship with cheating, traitorous tax collectors and letting...
In the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve committed the original sin—“original” not in the sense that it was The-First-Sin-Ever but rather that it’s the first sin that any of us take that leads to all the rest—when they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In other words,...
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. In Numbers 21 God has just helped the Israelites defeat a Canaanite king. They are heading to the Promised Land, and they start complaining about the food. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water,...
William Cumpiano is a Massachusetts luthier, which is a general term for a maker of stringed instruments; someone who makes violins or dulcimers is a luthier. Cumpiano builds guitars. He is co-author of Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology, considered to be the Bible of guitarmaking. His guitars, if...
The End of Creation
Savoring Scripture
Inside Repentance
Let God Be God
Jesus Ain’t No Snake-on-a-Stick
The Importance of Failure in Discipleship
Welcome!
I am a lifelong student of the Bible, and have been a pastor for over twenty-five years. My desire through this blog is to help people see things in the intersection of Scripture and real life that they might have missed. The careless handling of the Bible is causing a lot of problems in our churches and our culture--and is literally turning people away from the church, and, sometimes, God. I hope to treat Scripture with the respect it deserves, and, even if you don't agree with what I say, give you some insight.
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