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Terry L. Brensinger explains the ups and downs of the Israelites during the period of the Judges. By tracing developments under each judge, he shows how Israel's condition deteriorates to near-total chaos. The book of Judges begins with depictions of Israel's obedience and faithfulness but ends with disunited and leaderless tribes. The people tend to take their focus away from serving the Lord. Instead, they follow other gods, seek false security, and do what is right in their own eyes. The author provides practical applications for such contemporary issues as religious unfaithfulness, the nature of community, the roles and responsibilities of leaders, and war and violence.
Terry L. Brensinger explains the ups and downs of the Israelites during the period of the Judges. By tracing developments under each judge, he shows how Israel's condition deteriorates to near-total chaos. The book of Judges begins with depictions of Israel's obedience and faithfulness but ends with disunited and leaderless tribes. The people tend to take their focus away from serving the Lord. Instead, they follow other gods, seek false security, and do what is right in their own eyes. The author provides practical applications for such contemporary issues as religious unfaithfulness, the nature of community, the roles and responsibilities of leaders, and war and violence.
A fresh look at our core values In the twenty years since a group of Brethren in Christ pastors, educators, administrators, and laypeople first met to identify ten core values for the North American church, much has changed—including the continuing decline of the church in the west; dynamic social movements for racial, gender, and economic justice; vast advances in technology, and a worldwide pandemic. With so much happening on both the national and international stages, it seems vital that we as Brethren in Christ prayerfully reflect not only on our core values and their application, but on how those values might help our churches engage a dramatically new social context. Are these values merely sentimental slogans? Or do they constitute compelling convictions, genuine guiding lights orienting us and motivating our mission in a rapidly changing world? The answer to that all-important question depends largely on how we use them. In this forward-looking book, essays from Brethren in Christ pastors and leaders from across the globe call us into the future of the church—to unleash our creative energies, roll up our sleeves, and put these core values to good use.
Romans was written by Paul, apostle of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles. As an apostle Paul spent his life traveling the Mediterranean area preaching the gospel and establishing churches. In the course of his missionary career, Paul wrote numerous letters to the churches he had established as a way to pastor them in his absence. Romans is the longest and most complex of Paul’s letters. John E. Toews explores why Paul writes to remind the Roman churches of God’s purpose for both Jew and Gentile and to reconcile Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Gentile church relationships.
To whom does primary allegiance belong? To great human empires, or to the God whose elusive presence we can never fully grasp? Waldemar Janzen offers a fresh approach to the book of Exodus. The liberation from Egypt is a prelude to Israel’s unique calling to model before the nations a new life of service under God. Exodus portrays how God, through his servant Moses, wages a dramatic battle with Egypt’s mighty ruler for the release of enslaved Israel. The watching Israel wavers: “Is the Lord among us or not?” Even after Israel covenants to be God’s priestly kingdom and holy nation, Israel worships a golden calf. Once more God’s grace wrests Israel away, this time from slavery to doubts, fears, and self-centeredness. The people then focus faith on the imageless presence of God in their midst. God still wrestles for his people today.
If prophets are called to unveil and expose the illegitimacy of those principalities masquerading as the right and purportedly using their powers for the good, then Will D. Campbell is one of the foremost prophets in American religious history. Like Clarence Jordan and Dorothy Day, Campbell incarnates the radical iconoclastic vocation of standing in contraposition to society, naming and smashing the racial, economic, and political idols that seduce and delude. Despite an action-packed life, Campbell is no activist seeking to control events and guarantee history's right outcomes. Rather, Campbell has committed his life to the proposition that Christ has already set things right. Irrespective ...
As modern society becomes increasingly secular, Christians today find themselves living in a world that is not only diametrically opposed to their faith, but also downright hostile about it. While living in what has been deemed an anti-Christian culture, characterized by a vehemently negative view of both Christianity and Christians, we are locked in a fight-to-the-finish battle with the forces of evil. Rory Noland calls and equips twenty-first century Christians to engage in spiritual warfare by praying the Psalms—the same book of prayers that ministered to the Israelites of old and served as their collective voice in turbulent times. He highlights a group of psalms that address three spe...
As part of his effort to make the Bible an effective instrument of reform in society, church, and everyday life, Erasmus composed the Paraphrases. In these series of texts, the Holy Scripture provides the core of a work that is vastly expanded to embrace the reforming "philosophy of Christ" in all of its forms. This volume contains two sets of Paraphrases, one on the Corinthian letters (circa. 1519), and the other on the group of letters from the Ephesians to the Thessalonians (circa. 1520). The first set presents an epistolary narrative which not only enlivens the events described but revisits them from a sixteenth-century perspective. Together, they form a sharpened portrait of the primiti...
This work is a study in the attribution, aesthetics and representations of Yahweh’s speeches in the Hebrew Bible. It describes the literary elegance and beauty of the speeches of Yahweh in the Abrahamic narratives. Employing a synchronic reading of the Abrahamic cycle, it underscores the presence of various literary devices in the divine speeches (12:1-9, 13:1-18, 15:1-21, 17:1-27, 18:1-33, and 22: 1-19). Specifically, it engages the high concentration, literary effects and use of metaphors/metaphoric language, similes, alliterations, wordplays, euphemisms, hyperboles, repetitions, allusions and other distinctive literary features in the speeches of Yahweh which are deliberately denied, an...
Elmer A. Martens explores the message and insights of Jeremiah for today. In Jeremiah, God disciplines people and punishes them. Yet there is also forgiveness and thepromise of a new covenant. This ancient book is strangely relevant to our generation. The more we learn about the stressful times in which Jeremiah lived, about the passionate prophet himself, and about the arrangement of the book that bears his name, the more forceful the message becomes.