Over the first few months of 2023, I plan to preach through the book of Esther. Below are my notes, resources I found worthwhile, and other things that I found useful. This is a work in progress – feel free to recommend resources to me! Structure Structure: On either side of the turning point are repeated phrases, some reiterated in reverse order and unusual idioms used three times (first half, second half, and in Esther 5:11-6:3. Note also that entire verses from Esther 3:10-15 are repeated in chapter 8. Recommended Reading Articles Duguid, I. M. (2006) “But Did They Live Happily Ever after? The Eschatology of the Book of Esther,”…
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CU Weekend Away
I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the weekend away of Bedfordshire, Brunel and Hertfordshire CU's...
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Pentateuch Overview
Over the past year (September 2021 to July 2022), at our midweek small groups, I took my church through the Pentateuch. The plan was to cover as much of the key storyline as we could in the number of weeks available. This of course meant that bits that I would have loved to cover were cut. We also ran Topic Nights looking at some of the big themes that appeared, and review sessions at the end of each book. These were all filmed for members who could not make it, or who wanted to review (videos are at the bottom of this page). Passages Here are the passages we studied…
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The revelation of the Trinity in Scripture is perfect
“The revelation of the Trinity in Scripture is perfect”, says Fred Sanders in ‘The Triune God'[1]Sanders, F., 2016. The Triune God, M. Allen & S. R. Swain, eds., Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.. As Sanders says this, he means that the disclosure in Scripture of God’s identity is complete, sufficient, and the way it is meant to be. Or, to put it another way, we could not have done a better job of revealing the Trinity if we wrote the Bible ourselves. When you really think about that statement, it leads to a realisation that, in Scripture, we have all the information that the True and Living God wants us to know.…
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Logos 9 | 6 months later…
It has been six months since Faithlife released Logos 9, and I thought it would be a good time to look and see the parts that I have used the most.According to my ‘screen time report’ from macOS, Logos is my most used application during the week, which already speaks for how prominent it is in my daily workflow. So I took note of the features that I use regularly, and the things that keep me coming back to them. Hopefully you, as the reader, will find this beneficial for seeing how you could do similar! Preaching mode When I started my detailed log, the very first entry was the…
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Are you sure you’re an agnostic?
Surely sitting on the fence is the easiest place to get the best view? The big problem is that Christianity doesn’t rest on things we can take a ‘don’t know’ position on. Christianity rests on facts. Either facts you believe or facts you don’t believe. Error happened.
