Waiting for God’s time and God’s way (2 Sam 2:1-11)
2 Sam 2:1-11 ‘I want patience – AND I WANT IT RIGHT NOW!’, goes the humorous saying. In our instant culture where we can order something online before midnight and get it delivered the next morning, patience is a scarce…
How to cultivate a generous spirit (2 Samuel 1)
2 Sam 1:1-27 At the 1956 Australian National Championships race, a runner fell on the tracks towards the last mile. John Landy, another runner coming closely behind, could not quite clear his body and the spikes of his shoes made…
Introduction to 2 Samuel
The Book of Samuel describes how Israel asked God to give them a human king to rule over them and follows the career of its first two kings, Saul (1 Samuel) and David (2 Samuel). There is tension between having…
Who rules the world? (Psalm 2)
Psalm 2:1-12 What are the things that most worry you when you listen to or watch the news? Is it the way our Western world is increasingly antagonistic to Christian values and becomes more and more confused and erratic in…
The secret of a flourishing life (Psalm 1)
Ps 1:1-6 Part of the year that I worked for a mission reaching out to international students in the UK, I was hosted by an elderly couple who had several grandfather clocks in their house. These cheerfully chimed every fifteen…
What Zechariah 14:9-21 teaches about God and His ways
Zech 14:9-21 This next part of Zechariah 14 has a jarring note for those of us who have grown up with ideas of tolerance and freedom of religion on the one hand and Christian love and forgiveness on the other.…
What Zechariah 14:1-8 teaches about God and His ways
Zech 14:1-8 Few passages baffled commentators quite as much as Zechariah 14 but, as I explained in my previous post, our best approach is to remember that prophecy is not primarily prediction but a form of preaching which may have…
How to read future-related prophecy (Zechariah 14)
Zech 14:1-21 When reading Zechariah 14, Luther famously wrote, ‘Here, in this chapter, I give up. For I am not sure what the prophet is talking about.’[1] Most of us, I suspect, would agree! In fact, commentators differ over how…
Gaining an insight into God’s sovereign plan (Zech 13:7-9)
Zech 13:7-9 The pastor of a large and successful church was invited by a smallish congregation to preach. Wanting to emulate the incredible growth of the invited preacher’s church, his listeners kept asking him for the secret of revival. The…
What choice do we make between loyalties? (Zech 13:2-6)
Zech 13:2-6 I remember reading the testimony of a Jewish man who, on reading the New Testament, came to believe that Jesus was indeed God’s Messiah. Yet for a long time, he struggled with conflicting loyalties. He had relatives who…