Do you ever feel like a nobody in God’s plan for this earth? Like nothing you do really matters or is seen by God? When Jesus was born to an uncelebrated Jewish virgin and a Jewish carpenter who adopted Jesus as his own, it was a bunch of nobodies in the world’s view. Three people […]
Continuing our look at the remnant visible in Jesus’ lineage, we can see that remnant not only as Adam’s true image in Seth, but Seth’s remnant of faith heralded with the birth of Enosh. Genesis 4:26 Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to call on the […]
If you look at Jesus’ genealogies recorded in Matthew 1:1-17 and Luke 3:21-38, you’ll notice Matthew looks forward through the lens of Judaism beginning with Abraham. Luke’s record looks backward through the family of man, all the way to Creation. Both display a remnant which is the theme for our 2022 Advent Devotionals. Let’s look […]
Can you imagine life if Christians were to look different after they commit their lives to following Christ? We could spot believers a mile away and focus our evangelism on those who still looked fallen…lost…or hopeless. But that’s not how it works. The Spirit is invisible, but His actions are visible. As Jesus says in […]
Seriously? During Advent? Yes. With Kanye West and Kyrie Irving in the news recently over accusations of antisemitism, God laid it on my heart to address Jesus’ lineage and patterns of a remnant I see in the Old Testament, with the threads of a remnant winding all the way to Revelation. I see a time […]
No amount of good works we do can provide us with a new nature. This was a hard lesson for me. There was pride involved in doing all the good I could to distract from the sinner Scripture says that I am. I didn’t feel like a big sinner. I wasn’t an axe murderer, terrorist, […]
Jesus was no whipping boy or scapegoat. There’s far more going on here than punishment which happened when He took away our sin (which was both the offense and the point source of all our guilt and shame). Here’s the key: we don’t just start with a clean slate, as good news as that is. […]
Now, whether you look at the Hebrew language or the Greek language of the Bible, the very same word for sin is, at times, also translated sin offering. Doesn’t make sense, right? From a purely human perspective, sin cannot be a sin offering. But from God’s viewpoint, all our iniquity (sin) was laid upon Jesus […]
As I continue to ponder whether Jesus experienced shame, there is no denying what the Apostle Paul was careful to describe: “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21) Jesus had no sin. That’s the easy part. […]
There will never be such a lasting and consequential failure as that of Adam and Eve in Eden when a single bite of fruit from the forbidden tree plunged all humanity into guilt and shame. Nothing we can do will be able to cover our guilt and relieve our shame because it all goes back […]
