Bible Commentary

It was inevitable. Jesus had been teaching his recruits about God's grace and demonstrating the kingdom way of living in the real world, so they should have suspected there would be a sending out.

Choices have consequences, whether it be eating a second donut or buying a new car. Then there are the really big choices such as honesty, marriage and money management. But the biggest choice of all is God!

We forget – it’s either a human flaw or a convenient habit. Our forgetfulness means we often repeat the mistakes of previous generations and we settle for what is easy or convenient to the moment, learning the same hard lessons over and over.

What is the secret to being a truly good national leader?

The biblical account of Israel's kings is a saga of failure because, to the human eye, power appears too often as truth.

When we talk about the United States we cannot avoid the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, our documents of origin and vision. Truth involves both heart and head. Ignore either one and the other becomes compromised.

Moses learned key lessons from his life as a stepson in Pharaoh’s palace, as an exile with a price on his head, as the deliverer of his people from slavery in Egypt and as spokesperson for God in a forty-year wilderness wandering. But the single truth that was his strength is expressed in his last words to a people who would experience the Promised Land.

Our story begins with Judah, the southern kingdom of the Jews, where the fabled city of David and Solomon was located, along with the temple of the true and living God, in Jerusalem. But the glory days are long gone, faith in God has been reduced to public rituals and the land is blighted with altars to pagan gods.

History teaches a timeless truth: When faith is co-opted by a government or politicians the result is not only social injustice, but a rise in class and ethnic divisions.

For all its exotic stories, strange cultures and colorful characters, the Old Testament is remarkably relevant to our modern world. No matter how odd the story may seem, we can learn valuable lessons about life because God is God and we are humans who are incomplete without God's love and grace.

I fell in love with literature when I was a boy, immersing myself in the tragedies and heroics of characters that sometimes confused, disappointed and amazed me. When I followed Jesus a new literature captured my attention, at first because it was introduced as my Christian operations manual. But very quickly I discovered the stories of real people who are like me, struggling to maintain spiritual balance, imperfect and sometimes foolish beyond belief.