Here we see the first excuse. The man has been caught red-handed, having eaten the forbidden fruit. He does not try to lie to God. But he does avoid taking responsibility for his...
I remember playing hide and seek with my children when they were very young. Their hiding places were ineffective, to say the least. I could usually see or hear them right as I...
Do you remember your teachers? Do you remember thinking that they were ...
As soon as the man and woman sin by doing that which God has prohibited, they feel shame. The Hebrew literally reads: "they knew that they were naked." But this isn't simply a...
I like to win. I hate to lose. When the Oakland A’s (my favorite baseball team) win, I feel giddy. When they get beat in the first round of the playoffs (as has...
Temptation rarely comes in obvious, in-your-face ways. We're rarely tempted to do that which we know to be horribly wrong. Rather, temptation sneaks up on us and tries to catch us unaware. It asks,...
The word for competition in the New Testament is the Greek word athleo, from which we have the English word athletic. St...
In polite speech, we sometimes speak of people "being intimate" rather than using the blunt phrase "having sex." Intimacy can involve our bodies, to be sure. In fact, the original Hebrew for...
When you're lying on your deathbed, you're not likely to wish you'd spent more time at the office and less time at...
You and I are unique. I can't prove this, but I believe it. We hear phrases like "very unique" and "more unique," but we cannot in fact compare uniqueness. To be unique is...
Here we see a striking image of the kind of relationship God intends for marriage. The man and woman are "united into one." The Hebrew original, with its vividness, say that they are...
What an amazing act of delegation! God made a perfect, beautiful world, and then turned it over to the man. Here's the beginning of human management over God's creation, or to use more theological...
If God wanted his created beings, including humans, to survive, then he would have to provide some means of nourishment. So the fact that trees produced fruit makes practical sense. We might even...
Maybe you haven't seen the wonderful interviews over at Spaghettipie yet. But her recent interview with Brenda Nixon takes things to a...
Human beings come from the dust of the ground. We are of this earth, made from the gritty stuff of creation. Yet we are also a product of God's own breath, the breath...
Though we tend to think of God creating the world in six days and then resting on the seventh, the Hebrew of Genesis 2:2 makes it clear that God finished his work by resting.
Throughout the creation story in Genesis 1, God sees his creation and judges it to be good. Now, as his work is completed, he sees that it is "very good." The religious world...
Why are we here on earth? For centuries, philosophers and theologians have debated this question. No doubt the debate will continue for centuries to come. The first answer we find in Scripture...
For centuries, theologians have debated the precise nuances of our being in God's image. Does it suggest our intellect? Our will? Our spiritual capacity? Our life in community? We may never know...
Several years ago, I was sitting on an oceanfront cliff in Southern California, preparing a sermon. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye I saw something peculiar, a black...
