Even though the Bible is really a library of 66 individual books written on three continents in three different languages over a period of approximately fifteen hundred years by more than 40 authors who came from all walks of life, the Bible remains one unified book from beginning to end, without contradiction.

Some may object to the idea that there are no contradictions in the Bible, but there has been no other book so scrutinized over such a long period of time in an attempt to find real contradictions, and yet there’s not a single alleged contradiction that does not have a satisfactory explanation. This unity sets the Bible apart from all other books as utterly unique and is evidence of the divine origin of the words that God moved men to record.

The Bible is a true collaboration between God and human beings. It's a library of books by many human authors and a unified work by One Divine Author, 100% Divine and 100% human without diminishing either.

We all approach the Bible with our own ideas about what the Bible is, which shape the way we read it, which shapes our understanding of ourselves, the world, and God. Most of our ideas about Scripture are shaped by good intentions, but do they reflect what the Bible has to say about itself? This season is about learning to read the Bible along the grain of its own design because when we learn to see Jesus in every theme, law, story, and symbol we will be transformed into his image from glory to glory.

I got to record my testimony when introducing the series to the Next Steps class this past Sunday. I'll just post it here in case anyone is interested. The sound quality isn't great, sorry about that.

The Fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10). What is the relationship of emotional experience to knowledge and wisdom? It may appear to us that the two are completely unrelated, but the Bible teaches that a right emotional relationship to God is the foundational principle for knowing anything rightly. In that sense, our emotional connection to God has priority over our knowledge about him.

Is fear a good thing? On the one hand, the most common command in the Bible is "Don't be afraid!" It occurs 365 times, one for every day of the year. But, on the other hand, the fear of Yahweh is the fundamental principle of all knowledge and wisdom (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10) and the defining characteristic of Jesus' delight (Isaiah 11:1-3). How do we reconcile the concept of fear in the Scriptures with everything our modern culture of fear is telling us about fear as a purely negative reality?

Anger is the emotional response to injustice and evil. It's an emotion designed by God to destroy obstacles to justice and provide the energy for bringing restorative justice. But handling anger can be like handling dynamite. You can use it to move mountains, but handled without due care, it will destroy you. Psalm 137 gives us a model for owning, praying, and limiting our anger that is shocking and scandalous, but if we take the time to listen, we'll find anger a manageable and powerful tool for justice and holiness.

In the Lord’s Supper, “remembrance,” means that the past act of Christ’s redemption and the future hope of consummation become contemporary to the people remembering. In a similar way, the generations of Israelites after the Exodus who had never even seen Egypt were to confess at the Passover Feast, “We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, and Yahweh our God brought us out from there with a mighty hand” (Deut 6:21). When we partake of the Lord’s Supper in the present, we participate in his redemptive death and resurrection in the past, and we proclaim his death until he comes in the future.

If you've spent much time in the church in America, you might have a view of God's anger that is far too simple. The Bible gives a complex portrait of God's anger that often gets dumbed down by reading it in where it isn't. In today's podcast, we take a look at the first three instances of God's anger in the Bible (Exodus 4:14; 15: 4-8; 32:10) and learn some surprising things about why God gets angry and how he expresses his anger.

We typically think about grief, sorrow, or sadness as "negative" emotions. But, God has given us the capacity for grief as a reflection of his own nature and to accomplish his purpose of making us more like Christ. Grief is the emotional equivalent of physical pain and, as when we feel physical pain, we must learn to use emotional pain to find what's out of joint so we can begin to heal. In Psalms 42 and 43, we have a front row seat to someone analyzing his emotional pain through the process of lament. We're looking at the condition of grief and its causes and cure.