The Coffee Sweet Symphony – I found this highly amusing and entertaining. This guy is singularly focused on one thing, and it is like a symphony on the taste buds. Enjoy!
Inside Amazon Warehouse – As large as Amazon is, it’s often mind-boggling and pretty amazing how they manage to fulfill all those orders with few problems. Here is a peek at how they do it.
In last week’s passage, Paul reminds Timothy of his upbringing, and how he had been taught the Scriptures since childhood. In that passage, he states again the relationship between the Scriptures and salvation. From there, he state just how critical the words of God are for ministry, giving Timothy a brief explanation of their origin.
You can see this week’s passage in 2 Timothy 3:16-17:
In this passage, Paul gives what has become one of the most often quoted sections of Scripture concerning Scripture itself. The point Paul is making here is that Timothy should continue in the Word, just as he was raised in the Word. The main reason for this is that Scripture is of divine origin; it is from God himself!
Some understand Paul to be referring only to Old Testament Scripture here, since that is what he knew, and the New Testament wasn’t fully written yet (and much of it was written by Paul himself, anyway). However, in 1 Timothy 5:18, Paul refers to Luke’s gospel as Scripture, and in 2 Peter 3:15-16, Peter includes Paul’s writing in the category of Scripture. So a strong argument can be made that this passage to Timothy includes both Old and New Testament writings.
The first step toward attaining a higher standard of holiness is to realize more fully the amazing sinfulness of sin.
The Pastoral Epistles, which include 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus, are by far some of the most practical letters in the New Testament when it come to ministry. In these short epistles, Paul writes to two young men who are leading churches: Timothy, in Ephesus, and Titus, in Crete.
These letters are full of incredible advice and spiritual insights for growth, both as a Christian and as a leader and minister. One of my personal goals over the past year and a half has been to study and memorize both of the letters to Timothy, and Titus is next on the list for this fall.
I think these are pretty important letters for us to examine in detail.
I’ve read several other books from The Good Book Company in this series, covering Galatians, Romans 1-7, and Judges. I’ve enjoyed each one of them immensely. So, when I saw an opportunity to read this one on Titus, I was pretty excited. At first, I wasn’t sure how it would compare with the others, since all of the ones I have read were written by Timothy Keller, and this one is by Tim Chester.
My fears were ungrounded. Chester hit a home run with this look at Titus. I feel like he did a great job dividing the letter up into sections to examine in detail. The chapters he writes here follow the natural breaks in the text itself, lending itself well to easy reading, or even to fit a preaching schedule.
I’ve long had a fascination with the early chapters of Genesis, and the early earth history that they contain. Almost everything I’ve ever read centered around these chapters is centered upon the text themselves.
However, early Judaism has several traditions concerning those early centuries that are not found in the book of Genesis. Although these documents date much later than early Genesis, they point back to those times and contain some very interesting information. One such document is 1 Enoch.
This document plays an important role in early Judaism, and several scrolls containing this document were discovered at Qumran. Most of the document is dated to the last three or four centuries before Christ. Because of the distance from the time of Genesis, and the life of Enoch, their authorship is suspect enough to deny them entrance into the canon of the Old Testament.
However, the traditions and stories that they contain shed a lot of light on ancient Jewish thought on Genesis and the lives that formed the first few centuries of human history after creation.
I recently received a translation of 1 Enoch, along with the first volume of a new commentary from Fortress Press. I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with the level of scholarship evident in these volumes. I’ve never had the opportunity to use anything from Fortress Press before this, and I found this commentary to be pretty exhaustive.
As in my review of the translation itself, I discovered a lot of information in this ancient Jewish text that shed some light on how Judaism has viewed and handled some of the early history from the book of Genesis. While I disagree in some of the interpretations that the book of 1 Enoch draws, the translation and commentary seem to be spot on.
Based on the life of Enoch, from the fifth chapter of Genesis, but written during the intertestemental period, 1 Enoch gives some good insights into Jewish thought and theology. And this is only the first volume of the commentary. From what I have on hand, and when you add the second volume into the mix, this creates a very exhaustive and well-researched study tool for the ancient document of 1 Enoch.
Philosophers have wrestled for centuries with the question, “What is man?” It’s not a new question. And it’s a topic that has been on my mind a lot recently, with a new role in life as a lead minister, the size of my family growing, and the fact that I’ve reached the mid-point of my life.
A few weeks ago, I took my son to Oklahoma and we went fossil hunting. We stayed with a friend of the family, and went with him to teach an astronomy lesson to a group of people that Friday night. My son and I were able to view several planets, various stars and star formations, a binary system, and even the Ring Nebula!
It was pretty cool. But my son made a comment in passing, that he felt small and insignificant because of the vast grandeur of the universe.
I know how he feels. It’s slightly overwhelming. Several years ago, I met a man who severely struggled with his faith because of the same reasons. He had watched one of Louie Giglio’s videos that examined God’s creation of the stars. This man’s question was, if God could create such a colossal universe and fill it with so many incredible things, then who was he to think that he held any significance at all in God’s mind?
It’s a common question. And it’s been asked for centuries.