May 2 2014
Jesus in Joseph
Genesis 45:1-10, Luke 24:36-44
‘God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.’ Do you know who said this? It sounds like the kind of thing Jesus would say, but it wasn’t him. It was Joseph. He said it to his brothers when they discovered he was alive and had become ruler of Egypt (Gen 45:7). But it’s not the only statement made by Joseph that resembles Jesus. In fact the whole pattern of Joseph’s life had strong similarities to Jesus. As a result some Bible scholars even consider Joseph to be a kind of ‘Jesus’ of the Old Testament.
In this post I will highlight a number of parallels between Jesus and Joseph, but I will focus on one specific one; the moment that Joseph revealed himself to his brothers after his promotion and how it compares with the moment that Jesus revealed himself to his disciples after his resurrection. More
May 8 2014
What it means to be blessed
Psalm 1:1-6, Matthew 5:3-12
Why do we say ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes? Apparently it comes from the time of the Bubonic Plague in 590 AD. Sneezing was the first sign that you had the killer disease and Pope Gregory ordered that the sick stand in lines to receive a blessing in the hope that they would be healed. But here we are hundreds of years later still saying ‘bless you’ and there is no plague! We bless the sneezing person as a matter of tradition. But it isn’t the only time the word ‘blessed’ is used in such a frivolous way. In some church circles now days when someone says, ‘Hi how are you’ the response is a traditional ‘I am blessed brother.’ Usually the person says it without even thinking what they’ve said. So I want to address this question today: What does it mean to ‘be blessed’ – what does the Bible say about it? More