Thought Exercise on Genealogies

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Patrilineal & Patrilocal Life in Ancient Israel

Author

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 35:, Genesis 36:, Numbers 26:33, Numbers 27:1-11, Numbers 36:1-12, Joshua 17:3-6, Matthew 1:

The term patrilineal has to do with tracing ancestral descent (and therefore tribal affiliation and inheritance) through the male line. In Israel the possessions of a particular lineage were carefully...

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The Prayer of Jabez Revisited

Author

Ben Witherington III

Keywords

Scripture

1 Chronicles 4:9-10, Matthew 6:6, Luke 11:9, Philippians 4:6, James 5:16

First Chronicles 4:9-10 could be forgiven for being called the text that roared, once Bruce Wilkinson got his hands on it and wrote a little book called The Prayer of Jabez. This book, which was relea...

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Decended from Royalty

Author

James Merritt

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 1:

The actress Brooke Shields has quite an impressive family mosaic. Hanging from her family tree are the likes of Charlemagne, El Cid, William the Conqueror, the royal houses of virtually every European...

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I will be Good

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Exodus 3:10-12, Esther 4:14, 1 Samuel 16:12-13, Luke 15:17-20, 1 Peter 2:9, Psalm 139:14, Matthew 1:

On March 11, 1830, a young English girl was studying a lesson on the royal family with her tutor. As she examined the genealogical chart, she suddenly realized the astonishing truth—she was next in li...

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The Holy Spirit’s Literary Genre Of Choice

Author

Eugene H. Peterson

Keywords

Story is the primary way in which the revelation of God is given to us. The Holy Spirit’s literary genre of choice is story. Story isn’t a simple or naive form of speech from which we graduate to the ...

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Quarreling Yesterday & Today

Author

Tim Muehlhoff & Richard Langer

Keywords

In Paul’s day the church quarreled over the Jewish law and over genealogies, over meat sacrificed to idols and sabbath practices, and over favoritism shown to the rich patrons and negligence shown to ...

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The Ancestry of Jesus

Author

Nancy Guthrie

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 1:1-6, Luke 5:31-32, Matthew 9:12-13, Matthew 5:3, Galatians 3:26-28

We find hope in the ancestry of Jesus that no matter what we’ve done or where we come from, we too can be included in Jesus’ family. Jesus does not look for people who are perfect and have never faile...

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A Christian Alzheimer’s Disease

Author

Sandra L. Richter

Keywords

Two-thirds of the story of redemption is known to Christians as the Old Testament. Yet in the decades that I have been teaching Bible, I have found that most Christians, if allowed to answer honestly,...

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Our Overstory and Understory

Author

Mark Batterson

Keywords

In the world of ecology, the tallest trees in a forest form a canopy that is called the overstory. It provides shade for the understory—all the vegetation that grows beneath the uppermost layer of fol...

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Our Stories, Incarnated by God

Author

Casey K. Tygrett

Keywords

Scripture

1 Corinthians 11:26, Romans 6:3-4, 2 Corinthians 3:2-3, Revelation 12:11, Colossians 2:11-12

Every person in Scripture lived out a personal story incarnated by an even greater story about God, life, and the world. That story came from the politics, theology, and culture ingrained in their mem...

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God Gets His Family Back

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Keywords

In my lifelong study of the Bible I have looked for an overarching theme, a summary statement of what the whole sprawling book is about. I have settled on this: “God gets his family back.” From the fi...

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The Covenants of Scripture

Author

Merrill F. Unger

Keywords

Covenant

Scripture

Hebrews 13:20, Genesis 1:26-28, Genesis 1:26, Genesis 3:14-19, Genesis 3:14, Genesis 8:20-9, Genesis 9:5-6, Genesis 12:1-3, Galatians 3:16, John 8:56-58, 2 Corinthians 3:7-9, Deuteronomy 30:1-10, Deuteronomy 30:1, 2 Samuel 7:4-17, Luke 1:31-33, Acts 1:6, Revelation 19:16, Matthew 26:28, Mark 14:24, Luke 22:20, Hebrews 8:8-12, Galatians 3:13-20

Eternal covenant, Heb 13:20—The redemptive covenant before time began, between the Father and the Son. By this covenant we have eternal redemption, an eternal peace from the ‘God of peace’, through th...

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His Tree, My Tree

Author

James Merritt

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 1:1-17

Every year at Christmastime, the world looks back two thousand years to the birth of a baby. But for more than four thousand years, people living on the other side of that birth looked forward to the ...

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The Story of Joseph & High and Low Cultures

Author

E. Randolph Richards and Richard James

Keywords

We individualists generally belong to what anthropologists term low-context cultures. That means that when we communicate, we assume a low level of shared information. We therefore assume it is good c...

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Story as Worldview and the Example of Passover

Author

N. T. Wright and Michael Bird

Keywords

Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes ...

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The Dickensian Approach to Storytelling (Or, Rather, the Biblical Approach)

Author

Mark D. Roberts

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:, John 1:1-3

Sometimes great stories introduce the protagonist in the very first paragraph. In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, for example, we are immediately introduced to Pip, the central figure of the nov...

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The Bible has its Own Garden Path

Author

Murray Andrew Pura

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 2:8, Genesis 3:23-24, Exodus 15:27, Song of Solomon 4:12-15, John 18:1, Matthew 26:36

The Bible has its own garden path. It runs from Genesis to Revelation. In fact, some of the most important events in the Christian faith take place in Biblical gardens, evens around which Christianity...

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Leaving Home

Author

E. Randolph Richards and Richard James

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 12:10-20, Exodus 3:15

“When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman” (Gen 12:14). What is considered beautiful is one of those things that often goes without being said. Sarah was about...

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Two Examples of Long Memories

Author

Kenneth E. Bailey

Keywords

The Reliability of Scripture

As an amateur yet serious student of the American Civil War, I am constantly amazed at the sheer volume of material, which was preserved orally for half a century and longer, surrounding the key figur...

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Comparing the Genesis Creation Account with their Neighbors

Author

A. J. Swoboda

Keywords

Scripture

John 1:3, Psalm 104:24, Genesis 2:2-3, Genesis 1:27, Genesis 1:31

The Jews were not the only religious people in the ancient world. There were others, such as the Akkadians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians, and they had their own creation stories. When one compares the ...

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Polemic Against Paganism

Author

Nahum Sarna

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:, Genesis 2:, Exodus 3:14, Deuteronomy 4:14-19, 1 Corinthians 1:16-17

Whether the Hebrew Genesis account was meant to be science or not, it was certainly meant to convey statements of faith. As will be shown it is part of the biblical polemic against paganism and an int...

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Memories and Trauma Can be Inherited

Author

Casey K. Tygrett

Keywords

Scripture

Deuteronomy 6:20-23, Exodus 12:26-27, Joel 1:3, Psalm 78:4-7, Romans 5:12

Some stories, however, have been handed down to us. For some, we were not yet cognizant, and for others, we weren’t even born when experiences, memories, and stories affected our family and communitie...

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From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem

Author

Jen Pollock Michel

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 25:8, 1 Corinthians 15:52-53, Revelation 21:1-4, Revelation 22:1-5, Philippians 3:20-21, Hebrews 13:14

The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem we are hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long fo...

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Jesus: The Story-Tellin’ Man

Author

James Boice

Keywords

Scripture

Mark 12:37, Matthew 19:24, Matthew 7:5, Mark 3:25, Mark 7:27, Mark 8:15, Luke 15:11–32, Luke 10:25–37, Luke 18:9–14-, 25:31–46

One of my daughters has been singing a song about Jesus that contains the line “Jesus was a story-tellin’ man.” When I first heard that line it seemed a bit flip, as so many contemporary Christian son...

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An Unfinished Story

Author

Vaughan Roberts

Keywords

Old Testament

Andy’s children are avid readers. He has just bought the latest whodunnit for Matt. Lizzie announces that she wants to read it too. The bookshop is out of stock and Lizzie will accept no substitute, n...

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The Central Vision

Author

Walter Brueggemann

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 15:5, Isaiah 41:8, Isaiah 2:2-4, Matthew 28:16-20, John 12:32, Acts 2:1-11

The central vision of world history in the Bible is that all of creation is one, every creature in community with every other, living in harmony and security toward the joy and well-being of every oth...

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Shepherds versus Farmers?

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

In Understanding Genesis Nahum Sarna explodes the myth that in the story of Cain and Abel represents a biblical preference for the shepherd over the tiller of the soil. He points out that “there is no...

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Where do Humans Come From?

Author

Source Unknown

Keywords

We all know children sometimes ask difficult questions. One day a young girl asked her parents where human beings come from. “Well,” the mother said, “God created Adam and Eve and Adam and Eve had chi...

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God’s Story or Our Story?

Author

Gregory Koukl

Keywords

Our Story starts with a person for another reason…God is the very first piece of the Christian Story because the Story is all about him. God is the central character. The Story does not start with us ...

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Bit Actors in a Drama Produced by Another

Author

Ashley Hales

Keywords

One of the most fascinating features of the Bible is that it tells what is ahead for our world. Both Old and New Testaments contend that history is moving to a climax and that the sovereign God is in ...

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