Size isn’t everything

Thought I'd do a little post on what I look for in a Bible. One of the most important criteria for me is that it lay out the text in paragraphs. As Fee and Stuart say in "How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth", we must learn to THINK PARAGRAPHS. It's vital to remember that the Bible is not a collection of golden nuggets and trite sayings, but rather it advances via paragraphs of thought. My reading of Scripture grew in leaps and bounds when I started using a Bible that laid out Isaiah or Mark's Gospel paragraph by paragraph. So much so that I'll rarely pick up a good version like the NASB95 because it doesn't place spaces between paragraphs. (For those who want to use the KJV, I believe Cambridge puts out a beautiful paragraph edition. The Penfold-Newberry is OK. The Scofield's paragraphing is too arbitrary, it seems to me.)

What criteria are important to you in selecting a Bible? Hopefully not size!

There IS one stupid question (at least):

Can I ask a question?

Something worth reading

Two excellent articles: The President, the Passenger, and the Patience of God (John Piper), and Obama's Sermon on the Steps (Dave Black).

The power of repetitive Bible reading

A month of listening to his parents read Luke 2 enables little Orison Piper to be able to do this.

Also, Justin Taylor posts some excellent Bible reading plans. I'm going to follow Robert Murray M'Cheyne's this year, using one of Don Carson's books as an aid.

OK, so I've talked about Bible reading and Bible memorizing. That leaves biblical praying. John Piper has provided a very helpful list in answer to the question: what should we pray for? It's worth printing out and praying through.

For the love of free software

The Tyndale Tech is an invaluable place to bookmark if you're into research and stuff. Posts are few and far between, but every one of them is worth waiting for. The latest one is on New Essential Research Tools. Here's a snippet:

With the following free software you can:
* access your work on any computer, and write it at the same time as a colleague
* never lose your work - automatically save to the internet every few seconds
* never ruin your work - previous versions of a document are always available
* add library catalog entries to your bibliography automatically, in your chosen style
* attach notes to a book or article which you can search and find later
* copy web pages or articles or documents which you can search later
* search videos from many sources (like YouTube) and save them (increasingly important!)
* copy pages from online books and save them as searchable documents
* save photocopies online and search them as though they were text documents

While you're there, you might want to download the Tyndale toolbar.

A bundle of books

Win a bundle off of Trevin Wax. As in $260 worth of books (and that's not even exponentialised into Canadian dollars). And yes, my main motive in posting this is to increase my chances of winning. But wait, if all you go and sign up, then I've decreased my chances. This is when I'm glad my blog has such a small readership I guess!

While I'm at it, you can also enter to win Dandelion Fire at N.D. Wilson's blog, and two great Children's Bibles at Abraham Piper's blog.

Some interesting John Lennox interviews

Here.

HT: Justin Taylor

The church as family

Alan Knox asks the question, "What would happen if your family acted like a church?" Maybe something like this?

Two young men walked in the den where grandma was watching her "stories". They shuffled their feet, made small talk, but finally got down to business.

"Grandma, we've all talked about it, and we don't think you're doing your job the way you once did - the way we need you to," the first man started.

"What do you mean, son?" the older lady asked, trying to see the TV around the two men.

"Well, you can't cook or clean anymore. You don't tell us stories of the old days. We haven't heard any wisdom from you in a long time. You usually just watch television and sleep. We're going to have to let you go," the second man said.

Grandma hung her head. "I realize that I'm getting older and can't carry out my duties that I once did. Will you at least give me a few weeks to find a new family?"

"We'll give you two weeks and a good recommendation. I'm sure that God is calling you to a good older family out there somewhere," her son said.

Read the whole thing. Of course, the question is not meant to drive us from church, but to drive us (the church), to Christ.

The best Bible commentary series of them all

Which is it? Baker's?










No. Then surely the New International series.





Not even. How bout the Pillar series?








Close. But THE BEST commentary series on the Bible of them all is....











...The Chronicles of Narnia. Buy them. Read them. Read them to yourself, read them to your spouse. Read them to your kids, read them to your parents. They're so good that even grown-ups will be able to understand the Bible!

Hebrew for the rest of us

The happiest part of my day was learning that the companion to Mounce's Greek for the Rest of Us has been written. I've been hoping someone would write this for five years. Well, Lee Fields has now done it: Hebrew for the Rest of Us. Thank you Mr. Fields, and thank you Zondervan. This could be a $20 birthday (or Christmas) present that would provoke me to a $200 smile, for those family members of mine who are listening... :)

Sermonic ironies

Just helped my neighbour get his keys out of his locked-up car, and get his car out of the snow. And now he's coming to church this Sunday. Which is funny because I was somewhat reluctant to help what with all the sermon prep I was engaged in. That said, I hope my Sunday sermon is as good as my Friday night one.

More Dawkins and Lennox

Michael Bird recounts hearing a lecture by John Lennox, sitting down to a meal with the man, and provides us an interesting portion of a Dawkins interview.

Road trip top 5

Just got an email asking how the Bible conference went last weekend in Saskatoon. Here's my top five highlights:

1. Seeing how God had raised a friend's marriage from the grave.
2. Talking with an old hippie-turned-Christian.
3. Watching the above man's eyes fill with tears when he recalled what Jesus Christ crucified meant to him.
4. The comradeship of travelling and hanging out with two great buddies of mine.
5. Seeing a billboard in Saskatoon on which a wife says: "I kissed my husband and I loved it!"

Pray for the unborn in North America

I'm not under any disillusionment that my teeny space on the web here will influence American voters. But it can influence a handful of people to pray, and prayer (and fasting) is what we need at this point. I'm not going to tell people what to pray for, just what to pray about. Pray about the future of the unborn in America. We are weeks away from seeing a pro-abortion individual of the most reckless kind entering into one of the most powerful positions in the world. If you don't believe me read Robert George's latest essay: Obama's Abortion Extremism. If you want to read a succinct summary of the essay, read Justin Taylor's.

A few quotes, just to wreck your appetite:

Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.

***

It is as if Obama is opposed to stem-cell research unless it involves killing human embryos.

***

What kind of America do we want our beloved nation to be? Barack Obama’s America is one in which being human just isn’t enough to warrant care and protection. It is an America where the unborn may legitimately be killed without legal restriction, even by the grisly practice of partial-birth abortion. It is an America where a baby who survives abortion is not even entitled to comfort care as she dies on a stainless steel table or in a soiled linen bin. It is a nation in which some members of the human family are regarded as inferior and others superior in fundamental dignity and rights. In Obama’s America, public policy would make a mockery of the great constitutional principle of the equal protection of the laws. In perhaps the most telling comment made by any candidate in either party in this election year, Senator Obama, when asked by Rick Warren when a baby gets human rights, replied: “that question is above my pay grade.” It was a profoundly disingenuous answer: For even at a state senator’s pay grade, Obama presumed to answer that question with blind certainty. His unspoken answer then, as now, is chilling: human beings have no rights until infancy—and if they are unwanted survivors of attempted abortions, not even then.

New online Bible study resource

There's a great website dedicated to biblical arcing. Arcing is a helpful strategy for determining an author's flow of thought. Biblical arcing helps us do what many commentators (and preachers!) fail at: following a biblical author's flow of thought.

John Piper has a very useful booklet explaining the process or arcing. I would encourage all serious readers of the Bible to download it for free and use it.

HT: Justin Taylor

The ocean in a nut-shell

In an effort to please C.S. Lewis, who instructed us to avoid "chronological snubbery", I've been reading some 18th century Jonathan Edwards sermons. Talk about a different world and a different language, but also an older world. Or a younger one--you know what I mean. Edwards knew God and experienced God; and he preached God.

Here are some lines that hit me from his sermon on Psalm 46.10.

What are we? and what do we make of ourselves, when we expect that God and his ways should be upon a level with our understandings? We are infinitely unequal to any such thing, as comprehending God. We may less unreasonably expect that a nut-shell should contain the ocean: Job xi. 7. "Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven, what canst thou do? deeper than hell, what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea." If we were sensible of the distance which there is between God and us, we should see the reasonableness of that interrogation of the apostle, Romans ix. 20. "Who are thou, O man, that replies against God?"

The sermon ends with even less foolin' around:

You shall consider it; you shall know it; God will make all men to know that he is God. You shall either know it for your good here, or to your cost hereafter.

Media chuckle

A lesson that can never be remembered often enough: read the media with a well-tuned baloney detector. Here are two (more) reasons why.

Roger Bolton writes a piece about Codex Sinaiticus. Sample:

For those who believe the Bible is the inerrant, unaltered word of God, there will be some very uncomfortable questions to answer.

Dirk Jongkind (the guy who wrote the book) responds. Sample:

What can we say about this article? It took me till the seventh paragraph before I found a paragraph without a factual mistake (oops Roger Bolton, this is even for sensationalist journalism rather poor).

Then there's the U.S. veep debate between Biden and Palin. The media were quick to record Biden's factual superiority of the two. But see the pieces by Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg (HT Douglas Groothuis), remembering that the point here is not about the potential veeps themselves, but rather the majority in the mainstream media who were so impressed with Biden's command of the "facts".

[Jongkind also responds to Bolton's BBC programme.]

Piper preaching through John's Gospel

The first message is up. John Piper gives his reasons for preaching this series here. I missed his massive series through Romans, but I'm anticipating following along through John.

Apologies aren't supposed to be THIS embarrassing

So in the ultimate load of hooey, the Church of England is going to issue an apology to Charles Darwin! Doug Wilson has a good article on just how hooetical it is. Apologies are supposed to be embarrassing because of what they reveal about past actions, not present ones, no?

My notes from Lennox's book on the whole Galileo / RC Church thing are here. Scroll down.

Anti-theft sandwich bags

I wish I would have thought of this....It's a sandwich bag that deters thieves. The question is, come 12:00, would it also deter me?