Selah Session with Pastor Carlos

LESSON OBJECTIVES

Goals

1. For students to comprehend the organization and content of the Old Testament Major and Minor Prophets

2. For students to be able to recite those books in the order in which they appear

3. For students to enjoy learning the Truth about the Bible

Topics

Word of God

Scripture Memorization

The books of the Old Testament in order from Isaiah through Malachi.

1. For students to understand the organization and content of the books of the Old Testament and its divisions of Law, History, and Poetry

Bible, Word Of God

The books of the Old Testament in order from Genesis to Song of Solomon

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1).

In this verse believers are commanded to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God.” This same command is echoed in other parts of Scripture as well. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 5:20-21 we find Paul exhorting the Christians to not “despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good.”

1. For students to learn the basic organization of the Bible

Guidance, Prophecy, Truth, Word of God

2 Timothy 3:16-17

The most difficult thing about the Christian concept of the Trinity is that there is no way to

perfectly and completely understand it. The Trinity is a concept that is impossible for any human being

to fully understand, let alone explain. God is infinitely greater than we are; therefore, we should not

expect to be able to fully understand Him. The Bible teaches that the Father is God, that Jesus is God,

and that the Holy Spirit is God. The Bible also teaches that there is only one God. Though we can

understand some facts about the relationship of the different Persons of the Trinity to one another,

ultimately, it is incomprehensible to the human mind. However, this does not mean the Trinity is not

true or that it is not based on the teachings of the Bible.

David and Samuel appointed 212 gatekeepers for “positions of trust” in guarding the temple of the Lord (1 Chronicles 9:22), and those so appointed rotated through week-long assignments (verse 25). Verses 26–29 speak of the four principal gatekeepers, “who . . . were entrusted with the responsibility for the rooms and treasuries in the house of God. They would spend the night stationed around the house of God, because they had to guard it; and they had charge of the key for opening it each morning. Some of them were in charge of the articles used in the temple service; they counted them when they were brought in and when they were taken out. Others were assigned to take care of the furnishings and all the other articles of the sanctuary, as well as the special flour and wine, and the olive oil, incense and spices.” Temple gatekeepers were in charge of who went in and who went out. They ensured order and reverence for God’s house.

The Bible: God’s Words

Turn in your Bibles to 2 Timothy 3:16. Who can read it for us?

• What do you think that means, God-breathed (NIV)?

(The Greek word used here only occurs this one time in the scriptures. It is a compound word, God and breath, that means inspired.)

It’s important that we remember when we’re discussing the Bible, that it is God’s Words, not the words of man. For example, consider the people who wrote the Gospels—Matthew did not just sit down and write an account of the life and teachings of Jesus on his own. God, through the Holy Spirit, guided the process. That is one of the reasons why, for instance, that even though he probably never even met Luke, their accounts are so similar.

The Bible: Man’s Influence

That’s not to say that God just put all the people who contributed to the Scriptures in a trance and made their hands move. One of the unique features of the Bible is that regular people authored it.

Unlike many Holy Books, such as the Muslim's Koran or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' Book of Mormon, multiple people wrote the Bible; in fact, approximately 40 different people wrote it

Sermon on the Mountainside
Jesus’s best-known lesson is called the Sermon on the Mount—the mount
being the location where he begins to teach his disciples about a new way of
life. He is in the midst of bringing God’s kingdom to earth’s landfill, and such
things make people uncomfortable. Like the ideas of Chavez, this stuff runs
counter to the ways people think. It says up is down and trash is treasure. He
begins to introduce us to the great kingdom paradox: at the end of me, I find
real life in him.
Matthew 5:1 tells us that Jesus sees the crowds, climbs a mountain, and
sits down to teach. If you’re like me, you tend to skip over that scene-setting
stuff to get to the red-letter words in your Bible—the actual sayings of Jesus.
But let’s look a little deeper.
We find that if Jesus climbed a mountain, this is probably happening just
above the Sea of Galilee. There were revolutionaries in those times, and a lot
of them laid low in those mountains, avoiding arrest.
So this makes sense. Jesus is another revolutionary who has come up the
mountainside. He is saying, “Down with the kingdom of this world and up
with the kingdom of God.” And the new kingdom has new rules, many of
which are just the reverse of the old ways. Some New Testament scholars call
this Jesus manifesto the “Great Reversal” for obvious reasons. Even today it
all seems counterintuitive.
But Jesus doesn’t want to talk about tangible rules or laws. He isn’t into
current events either. Nothing about the Romans here. All that is on the
surface of life, and Jesus wants to go a little deeper to what’s inside us—what
makes the surface the way it is. The kingdom of God begins as an inside job.
Jesus launches his sermon with a list of very striking paradoxes. For our
purposes we will look at four of these statements that sound ridiculous at first
blush but start to make sense once you think a little deeper and compare your
personal experience.

Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in
him.

There was a man who had two sons. Luke 15:11