1 and 2 Kings for Everyone - Enter the Queen of Sheba
1 and 2 Kings for Everyone - Enter the Queen of Sheba
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Enter the Queen of Sheba 1 Kings 10:1-29 The news yesterday reported on one of the unbreakable rules of capitalism: whatever regulations are put in place to control capitalism, people will find a way around them. Interestingly, one of its examples was the Old Testament ban on len…
Job for Everyone - Eliphaz Tries Again
Job for Everyone - Eliphaz Tries Again
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Eliphaz Tries Again Job 15: 1-35 Today’s newspaper contains a long excerpt from a book about a gigantic fraud that brought about the collapse of a Wall Street financial empire during the financial crisis of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The head of the business in…
Job for Everyone - Eliphaz Rewrites Job's Life Rather Than revise His Own Theology
Job for Everyone - Eliphaz Rewrites Job's Life Rather Than revise His Own Theology
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Eliphaz rewrites Jo’s Life Rather Than Revise His Own Theology Job 22: 1-30 My early years of teaching coincided with a time when many churches were rediscovering the possibility of praying for sick people to be healed and of finding that many were healed. It was an exciting redi…
Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone - Ensuring justice
Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone - Ensuring justice
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Ensuring Justice NUMBERS 35:1- 36: 13 A Florida lawyer commented this month that it is becoming more and more common to hear news accounts of people convicted of first-degree murder, sentenced to death, then released many years later after it is determined (usually through DNA te…
Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone - Eating with God
Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone - Eating with God
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Eating with God NUMBERS 28:1- 29: 40 A week ago, our church had a homecoming/harvest barbecue. Alas, I missed it because I had arranged to be elsewhere, but I was there in my imagination, partly because I know these guys know how to barbecue. As I write now, in my imagination I c…
Exodus and Leviticus - Enjoying Fellowship and Gaining Cleansing
Exodus and Leviticus - Enjoying Fellowship and Gaining Cleansing
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Enjoying Fellowship and Gaining Cleansing LEVITICUS 3: 1- 4: 35 I just had an invitation to a Thanksgiving dinner and was in a quandary about how to respond. Our first one or two Thanksgivings were very meaningful because we were thankful for God’s goodness in connection with our…
Isaiah for Everyone - Egypt My People
Isaiah for Everyone - Egypt My People
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Egypt My People Yesterday I had dinner with two people home from working in the Middle East, one in a Christian university to the north of Israel, the other in a seminary to the south. In both countries the Christian community is a minority in a tough context where increasing num…
Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone - Finding Yourself in Your Family Story
Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone - Finding Yourself in Your Family Story
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Finding Yourself in Your Family Story NUMBERS 1: 1-2: 34 My son Mark just came across a photo from exactly twelve years ago. My wife, Ann, and my mother are sitting at a picnic table; I am lying on the grass (“typically,” Mark said; I am not sure what to make of that). Somewhere …
1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - Far Be It from Me to Sin by Not Praying for You
1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - Far Be It from Me to Sin by Not Praying for You
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Far Be it from Me to Sin by Not Praying for You 1 Samuel 11: 14- 12: 25 The day of my wife’s memorial service was also the day I received the page proofs for a writing project. Someone who was reading those proofs, when he heard that Ann had died after living with multiple sclero…
Genesis for Everyone Part 2 - Fear
Genesis for Everyone Part 2 - Fear
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Fear Genesis 31:55- 32:24a There is something to be said for fear. On one seminary study tour to Israel and Palestine, we were on our way back from Beersheba to Jerusalem. The Israeli authorities were advising groups to follow a route that stayed in Israeli territory rather than …
Genesis for Everyone Part 1 - Filled with Violence
Genesis for Everyone Part 1 - Filled with Violence
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Filled with Violence Genesis 6: 9-22 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire undertook a systematic attempt to annihilate the Armenian people in Turkey. One to one and a half million people were killed. In the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi govern…
Psalms for Everyone Part 2 - Facing the Other Set of Facts
Psalms for Everyone Part 2 - Facing the Other Set of Facts
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Is Anything Stable? Psalm 89: 1-37 My wife once lived in a house on the side of a canyon in California that seemed capable of tumbling into the ocean if there was an earthquake, and after one worrying quake not far away she took to checking the weekly earthquake reports. Apparent…
Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone - False Prophets
Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone - False Prophets
by SPCK - John Goldingay
False Prophets Deuteronomy 13: 1- 18 I received an e-mail this morning from a friend troubled by the evil in the world, as we often are, and wondering why God bothered to create it “if he is all-knowing and so on, and knew that there would be evil, genocide, starvation, dictators…
Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone - Five Pushy Women
Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone - Five Pushy Women
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Five Pushy Women NUMBERS 26:52- 27: 11 I just came across someone’s list of the five feminist biblical scholars who had most influenced him. The idea of “feminist” biblical scholars is that these are people who in their study of Scripture are conscious of their particular identit…
Psalms for Everyone - Father of the Fatherless, Protector of the Widow
Psalms for Everyone - Father of the Fatherless, Protector of the Widow
by SPCK - John Goldingay
Father of the fatherless, Protector of the Widow Psalm 68: 1-18 In conversations with people who have inquired about getting married or having children baptized in our church, I have been struck anew by how many are children without fathers or mothers without husbands. I think of…
Joshua, Judges and Ruth for Everyone - How Naomi's Life Falls Apart
Joshua, Judges and Ruth for Everyone - How Naomi's Life Falls Apart
by SPCK - John Goldingay
How Naomi’s Life Falls Apart RUTH 1:1-9 One Sunday in the church to which we belonged in England that story was the set Old Testament passage on a day when I was due to preach. My default instinct is to look to the Old Testament passage as the one on which to preach (someone has …
1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - How Not to Display Accurate Empathy II
1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - How Not to Display Accurate Empathy II
by SPCK - John Goldingay
It Takes a Miracle 1 Samuel 1: 12-19a A little while ago a woman came to see me to talk about the way her husband was abusing her. It involved some physical abuse; he had hit her once or twice, but the background was not that he was an inherently violent person or a drunkard. The…
1 and 2 Samuel for Everyone - How Not to Display Accurate Empathy I