Sound hermeneutics requires an understanding of how communication works. The Bible, after all, is God’s authoritative communication to us. There are three components of communication: words, genre, and message. “Words” refers to what we say; “genre” to the way we say it; and...

“You can’t really believe in the Bible, right? It’s been translated so many times! Not to mention the thousands of errors and the fact that the Council of Nicaea totally suppressed stuff they didn’t like. There’s just no way you can know what it originally said.” If you’re...

“One thing my dad always used to say was that it was only fair for him, or any pastor for that matter, to receive the same sort of compensation as any other teacher in that local market. Besides… being poor doesn’t make you any holier.” For whatever reason, about 4 years ago, this...

“I can’t help but feel a little offended by Paul.” This phrase might be one you would expect to hear from one who has for the first time come across some of Paul’s passages for the first time. Perhaps from one reading his emotional introduction to Galatians. Or perhaps from another who...

A few weeks ago I posted a link to an article that I co-wrote with Dr. Jonathan M. Lunde for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. That article was on the use of Isaiah in Ephesians 5.14. This new article — “Paul’s Creative and Contextual Use of Psalm 68 in...

Next week begins a new opportunity for me. After several months of networking new connections, broadcasting my interest, data mining essential research, the Lord has truly provided an opportunity for advancement in my work that is beyond what I could have even crafted for myself. Looking...

The new issue of JETS (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 55/1 [2012]) is now available. I co-wrote one of the articles with one of my professors from Biola, Dr. Jonathan M. Lunde. The article is titled, “Paul’s Creative & Contextual use of Isaiah in Ephesians...

As fun as flannel-gram Bible stories were, I always found it frustrating (especially when trying to teach with them) that so often, you are short the people and the objects necessary to tell the entire story. Sometimes you just don’t have enough Galilean common folk to make two crowds, or...

I recently went to an Intervarsity meeting where we read the first half of Luke 18—the parable of the widow, and the prayers of the Pharisee and the tax collector. While everyone else read Luke, I was searching for the Old Testament parallel: what is Luke intending to echo in this story? The...

When I was kid, I learned all about Jesus’ miracles from boards covered in flannel.  An old Egyptian woman named Anna would use tiny—also flannel—cutouts of biblical characters to painstakingly illustrate the story of Jesus raising Lazarus, walking on water, or feeding the five...