Genesis 1:2 describes what the earth was like after God’s initial creative work. “Without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep”. That sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? The Hebrew of the first section is very poetic; “without form and void” in Hebrew is “bohu and tohu”. The earth was a dark …
In Genesis 6:6, we’re told that God regretted that he made man on the earth. This is a difficult thing for us to understand, and I don’t know if we can fully. God, of course, knew this would happen. Yet God, in a sense, wished it had not. This is trying to explain to us …
In the famous flood narrative from Genesis 6-8, God instructs Noah to build an ‘ark’. Many of us are so used to that word that we don’t realise it is an odd choice to label the giant boat. There are several words for ‘boat’ that God could have used to describe this vessel, but he …
The first four verses of Genesis 6 are some of the most challenging to understand in the whole Bible. Let me explain how we’re going to approach them today. We’ll look at the complications and see the options we have. This is a help for us, instruction in how to read difficult passages. And once …
There is a much-debated word in Genesis 2: the word “helper”. God made woman to be a helper for man. Almost every single Bible translation uses the same word to translate the Hebrew here; it is the best word in English. Yet we often think of a helper as a secondary person, an inferior person, …
Exam times bring a special level of stress to most people who go through them. The better students push themselves, driven by a desire to get into the course they want or to achieve a score they have in mind. Struggling students can be driven by fear they won’t pass. Everyone feels the pressure of …
In Genesis 1 and 2, we notice a repeated chorus, that God said that various parts of the creation were “good” as he made them. And when it was completed, he declared it “very good”. Yet in this perfect world, in Genesis 2:18 we see the first thing that God says is “not good”. It’s …
Life has some big important moments and a lot of smaller moments that seem less important. The big moments might include deciding to get married, accepting that job offer, or deciding to move countries. We want to make the right decisions at those key times in our lives. The big things do indeed matter a …
It is Reformation Day this week! (It happens to coincide with a large cultural festival marked by pumpkins, skeletons and ghosts, which is far less encouraging). Reformation Day is when we remember the time on October 31, 1517, when the German monk Martin Luther made his complaints about the state of the Roman Catholic Church …
There has been so much commentary in the past few years about the transgender movement. This has often ended up with Christians and transgender activists lining up on opposite sides from one another shouting opinions at on another. Too often the Christian traditional teaching on gender (which I hold to) comes across so poorly as …