Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
Have you ever been reading the Bible and suddenly thought, “Gee, that’s odd”? I have been going through the book of Numbers. In chapter 11 I read how unhappy God was with Israel for complaining about their troubles in the wilderness (especially about not having meat) even after God had freed them from the Egyptians. …
We often consider unbelief and doubt to be enemies of faith. After all, if we perpetually embrace them, we never embrace God. But a very different response can also be the enemy—certainty. As Tobias Wolf said, “Certainty is one of the greatest spiritual problems of our time.”* When we are absolutely sure of what we …
Fifty years ago next week, a manned spacecraft for the first time entered orbit around another celestial body–the moon. The year 1968 had been a harrowing one for the country and the world. It began with the devastating Tet Offensive in Vietnam and was followed by the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and …
In my previous post, I asked, What exactly is meant that people are in the image of God? The answer Psalm 8 offers reinforces these thoughts. As the psalmist reflects on the creation described in Genesis 1 and our place in it, he wonders what makes humans so special. He then responds, “You made them …
What does it mean that we are made in the image of God? Over the centuries many options have been proposed for what Genesis 1:27 means. So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them
Why would a old, white, North American, evangelical male be interested in the Africa Study Bible? I’ll get to that in a minute. First, a bit of introduction to this remarkable volume.
Are science and religion enemies, each seeking supremacy over the other? Or do they simply look at the same thing from different, perhaps complementary, perspectives? In The Penultimate Curiosity, Wagner and Briggs propose a very different relationship than either of these options.
I have lived with the New Testament letter of James for many decades. And I frequently puzzled over one aspect of a particular verse: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” …
Election is controversial. Of course, I’m talking about the Christian doctrine, not any recent political events. For five hundred years Protestants have gone back and forth on the topic of predestination and all its implications. The effect for sensitive souls, however, can be to worry and wonder, “Am I one of the elect? Am I …
Throughout my life I have attended worship services in a variety of traditions, but they tended to have one thing in common–they began with praise to God and then moved to confession. This is an appropriate model to follow with much merit. When we see how holy and good God is, we see more clearly …