Building on the Foundation

  In the course of studying Biblical covenants these past months, I became a little puzzled by the story of the Gibeonites. As you may recall, when Israel invaded the Promised Land, the people of Gibeon dispatched ambassadors to the Israelites and asked Israel to make a covenant with them (Josh. 9:3-6). Knowing that Israel’s Divine mission required destroying every nation in that land, the ambassadors pretended to have journeyed from another land far away (v. 6). As we’re told in v. 14, Israel didn’t seek God’s advice in this matter. They simply believed the Gibeonites and made a covenant with them (v. 15). Though obtained by fraud, this covenant held fast. Many generations later, God punished Israel because King Saul had violated the covenant and murdered some of the Gibeonites (2 Sam. 21:1-3). Now, this raises some eyebrows. Number one, this covenant had been obtained by deceit. Number two, God had explicitly commanded Israel to make NO covenant with the peoples of the land (Ex. 23:3

  We all have people in this life that we find hard to be around, people that we strongly dislike and would enjoy seeing trip over a rake or two. Most of us probably have great reasons for thinking what we think about these people, too. They may have hurt us, or said something nasty about us, or they were downright awful to us, but our reasons for holding it against them are pretty good solid reasons, at least, they are in our minds. As humans, we are great at holding grudges, and we are awful at letting things go. What's the harm in holding things against someone? Our thoughts don't hurt anyone, do they?  It's true that our thoughts don't really affect the other person, at least right away. Eventually, it might lead to us being nasty towards them or hurting them, but they probably deserved that pie in the face anyways. We are Christians, though, and as Christians, we have an obligation to be Christ-like (that's what Christian means). Being Christlike means we walk

  Last time , we saw how God’s Word often compares His people to newborn babes and little children. When a person repents, gets baptized, and receives the Holy Spirit, then he or she also receives new life. That person becomes, as Peter described in 1 Pet. 2:2, a newborn babe consuming the milk — the most basic principles (Heb. 5:12-13) — of God’s Word, and spiritually growing thereby. And if one is a newborn babe, then one must also have been born again. You cannot be a newborn babe without being born! As we also saw, God’s Word nowhere compares His people to babes in the womb. No such analogy exists in Scripture. Furthermore, both the Greek gennao and the English “begotten” mostly refer to those already born. For example, Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of His Father, even though He has long since been born. To this, it could be added that gennao doesn’t mean “conceive”; there are other Greek words for that. Likewise, in the Hebrew language of the Old Testament, yalad (“born

  Have you ever tried to wrap your mind around the concept of eternity? That God has always existed and always will? Heb. 7:3 describes Melchizedek, the form of Jesus Christ who appeared to Abraham, this way: “without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God….” For me personally, it’s mind-boggling to think that someone had no beginning, that He always existed. Though I know it’s true, I can’t wrap my brain around it. Everything we see came into being at some point, but God didn’t. He was always there. And can you imagine never growing older? Never getting tired, hungry, or thirsty? Or what about possessing all power and wisdom? Not being bound by any physical laws, but able to walk through walls, read everyone’s thoughts at once, hear everything anyone says anywhere in the world, and process it all instantly? The spiritual realm is hard for us human beings to comprehend. Though we’re aware of it, it’s as