Daniel: Hope for the Faithful - Study Page

<p>A 12-lesson Bible Study on the Biblical book of Daniel, which is set during the exile of the Israelites in Babylon. It's about the near-martyrs and their heroic faithfulness to the God of Israel, about what happens when human kingdoms don't acknowledge God's kingdom, and about hope in God and how it leads us to faithfulness.</p> <p>This page contains all the class videos, reading assignments, and study questions for this discussion course.</p>

Galatians: A New Creation in Christ - Study Page

A 10-lesson Bible Study on the Biblical book of Galatians, the letter the apostle Paul wrote to several churches.

What was Paul so worked up about in his letter to the Galatians? Learn the fascinating backstory to the drama! We’ll discover how to follow the strange Old Testament stories to the true good news: that we are part of God’s new, multi-ethnic family of faith who live by the Spirit. We are new creations who live and love like Jesus!

Find all the class videos, reading assignments, and study questions for this discussion course.

What's Going on with the Tower of Babel?

Have you wondered what's going on with the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11? Did you know that the Hebrew word for Babel can also be translated Babylon? It's the same place! So what is so bad about building a tower? And why does God react as he does? Surely God isn't actually worried that they are going to get to "heaven" and reach him? Listen to this video lesson to hear how this story is the culmination of the sad story of fracturing humanity in Genesis 3-11, and why God reacts as he does.

This is a 15-minute video lesson that can be watched on its own, or as a bonus lesson in the series Daniel: Hope for the Faithful. Comment or message me to talk about it, or if you have questions!

Video Here!

About Bible Translations

I recently got to answer some questions about Bible translations, and since it was on my mind I recorded this video overview.  I may write more about this, so if you have questions you'd like answered, let me know!

Watch an introduction to Bible translations!

And, here's an answer to the question, "Is there a Catholic Bible that's different from the Protestant Bible?"

That Small-Caps, All-Caps LORD... and What it Means

Are you wondering why the Bible sometimes puts the word LORD in small caps, or in all caps, and whether it means anything? It definitely does mean something! It represents the personal name of God.

Something New: The Name of God

In the progressive narrative of Scripture (I talk more about Scripture being progressive in "What is the Bible?"), God reveals his personal name for the first time to Moses in Exodus 3, at the burning bush.

What is the Bible?

Recently I spoke for our local campus ministry, Longhorns for Christ, on the campus of the University of Texas. They were doing a series entitled Believable Lies, addressing one a week.

A Believable Lie: “The Bible Isn’t Very Important”

One of the ideas we sometimes hear, or think ourselves, is that the Bible just isn’t very important, or worth following closely. It was written a long time ago, when societies were very different. It’s a strange book, written over more than a thousand years, by many different authors, with a bunch of different kinds of stuff in it. The stuff in it is strange – when we look for instructions, sometimes we get poems. When we look for heroes, we get dubious moral choices.