Jesus’ encounter with the demonic forces on the Lake Gennesaret (Sea of Galilee) occurs as he is trying to get to the region of Gedara. The name of the city itself means “border country” and it is essentially the eastern edge of Jewish influence. Beyond Gedara was the Decapolis, an entirely new municipality founded by… Read More »
A Closer Look: The Historical Reliability of the New Testament
***This is a repost of an excellent article from Ed Stetzer. You can find the original here.*** One of the great benefits of the articles in found in the HCSB Study Bible is the high academic quality of the content. These articles aren’t fluff. They are seminary-lecture-quality articles. Last week’s hermeneutical look at the word… Read More »
Genre: Epistle
The final genre I am going to write about is epistle. I think that by and large, the church gets the reading of an epistle pretty close to right. In a way, that is the problem with how we read everything else. We tend to apply the interpretation schemes we use for epistles to everything… Read More »
Genre: Gospel
There are four gospels in the Christian Scriptures. There were dozens of others circulated for the first couple centuries after Jesus, but only four stood up to the scrutiny of the early believers. Gospel is not modern biography. While scholars have shown that the gospels all conform to what the ancients would have considered bios… Read More »
Genre: Apocalyptic Literature
There is no more confusing genre in the Scriptures than the apocalyptic literature. In a literal sense, an apocalypse is the unveiling of the future. We have charged the word with violent overtones in our culture, although originally the word did not have a negative meaning at all. It simply means “unveiling” or “uncovering.” In… Read More »
Genre: The Law
Of the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), a large proportion is legal code. Leviticus in particular focuses on a lot of “do this” and “don’t do that”. When reading these codes, you must remember that they were the “Law of the Land” and not simply moral codes… Read More »
Genre: Narrative
Hebrew narrative is generally poetic in nature, but it is not true poetry. It sets up poetry, but it has a different feel and rhythm. Often narrative sets the scenes between poetic portions. So, for example, we have a narrative passage that introduces and connects the various poetic portions of the Exodus story. (YHWH’s words… Read More »
Genre: Poetry
The Old Testament was composed almost entirely in Hebrew. First and foremost, Hebrew is the language of Scripture. In other words, Hebrew is a language quite literally formed around its use in the composition of sacred writings. This means that Hebrew has a unique structure and style. It is highly poetic, almost intentionally designed for… Read More »
Putting Church in the Blender
When we started the merger process between Grace Baptist Church and Heritage Baptist Church back in 2009, our elders and I did a lot of digging and found few resources to guide us. There just wasn’t much out there on church mergers, and what was out there was overwhelmingly negative. Despite this, we decided that… Read More »
The Big Reveal
All of you have been waiting patiently! This morning, Heritage made the BIG REVEAL! Here is what we’ve been working on.
