God 's Rescue Operation By Wright Essay

Even in the days of Jeroboam I, the man who founded the Kingdom of Israel, God already knew that Israel would be troublesome. It was forewarned that, “…the LORD will strike Israel, so that it will be like a reed swaying in the water. He will uproot Israel from this good land that he gave to their forefathers and scatter them beyond the River, because they provoked the LORD to anger by making Asherah poles.” The Israelites’ reason of doubt for God was that they were unsure that they could take over their promised land. God told them that they could remove the current inhabitants, but they were convinced that they could not. Not believing in the word of the Lord led to their exile for forty years of “wilderness wandering.” They had forgotten all of the great things that He had done for them, such as delivering them from Egyptian enslavement. Hope was given up on Him

Albert Einstein once said “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” This is an extremely powerful quote, and I will seek to convey its strength, as applied to our lives as Christians, upon the careful review of Sandra L. Richter’s The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament. Richter designed this text as merely a tool by which we might further our understanding of the Old Testament narrative. With one minor glitch in her system, Richter handled the task as that of an expert in the field would - with patience, attention to central detail, and arresting

Without devotion to God, violence and death would flourish in Israel. These factors would impede God’s blessings of security and life; thus, the Mosaic covenant demonstrates the continual faithfulness of God in the Old Testament. Finally, God is faithful to Israel during the people’s complaints in the desert. Rather than abandoning the nation for its faithlessness, God provides them will nourishment and protection during their journey. These acts further reinforce the faithfulness of God, even when his followers stray. In all, the Pentateuch demonstrates the theme of God’s faithfulness.

In the book Simply Jesus, N.T. Wright makes three different claims throughout. N.T. Wright's first claim is about the “perfect storm”. The “perfect storm” takes up a large section of the first few chapters, and in those chapters N.T. Wright writes about that to enter the “perfect storm” you must step out of your own storm that is happening in your life, you must jump back into the “perfect storm” just as Jesus did in his own life. N.T. Wright fails to fully support the idea of the “perfect storm” throughout the book. Wright writes about the two myths that create the “storms”, the first is “… the high-pressure system of conservative Christianity” and the second is “... the new classic modernist myth…”. N.T. Wright loses his credibility to his claims by never giving evidence that disproves they myths. N.T. Wright states that the stories in the bible “...’really did happen’. And there the matter ends…. Facts or no facts”. N.T. Wrights claims are never fully

What God reveals to humanity, is not given all at once. He progressively reveals Himself and His strategy of redemption. The Scriptures affirm to God's progressive revelation of Himself in the fact that He does not fully reveal His truths from the beginning. However, all He reveals to the world is always true. Each Scripture builds on the previous one, revealing a little of God’s mystery at a time (Rom. 16:24). Theses factors of revelation inform understanding of God’s progressive revelation of redemption as

Reflect on several ways in which the contemporary nation state of Israel may be viewed by various Christian communities.

The first foundational aspect of the worldview is who God is. The Christian’s worldview of who God is that God is part of the Trinity. The Trinity is made up of three persons: The Father, the Son (who is fully God and man), and the Holy Spirit, but they are all one God (Diffey, 2014). Existence is possible because of God. God, “created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1, English Standard Version). God created the world and is still actively involved in it because, “If God’s creative activity is needed to account for the first existence of the world, there is every reason to think that it would be needed to account for the world’s persistence” (McCann, 2012, p. 24). God did not create the world and leave it because, “God’s act of creation is an act of the purest sort” (Dodds & Dodds, 2011, p. 210). God’s love goes hand in hand with God’s wisdom. Wisdom is a

I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.” Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’ “This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation. “Go, assemble the elders of Israel and say to

In part two, Wright explores God’s future plan. He suggests there are two secular ways to look at the future of the world. These myths have crept into modern day Christian beliefs. The first way is the myth of progress. This is was Wright calls “evolutionary optimism” (p. 81). This states that humans and the cosmos are in a continual state of improvement, moving toward perfection. The problem with this myth, as Wright points out, is that is cannot deal with evil. The second myth is the idea people are souls in transit. It was early philosophers like Plato and the Gnostics who claimed that people are all immortal souls just passing through this world on the way to their spiritual destiny (p. 70-71). This myth obviously dismisses creation and the responsibility to care for creation.

In the poem “A Blessing,” James Wright analyzes the relationship between human beings and nature through the descriptive explanation of an encounter between his friend and himself and two Indian horses. He shows that although we are able to relate and interact with the animals we don't have the ability to join them or as Wright puts it: “break into blossom” (26-27). Wright uses imagery and personification to describe the nature he witnesses as he escapes from the stress of human life. The ponies in this poem are personified by comparing them to human beings, mainly through the description of their emotions. This personification lessens the gap between the author and the horses and separates him from civilization represented by the highways

For my book review I chose The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. I have read this book before, but I wanted to go through again, summarize and analyze it. The purpose of this paper will be to summarize The Reason for God and analyze it’s writing style and arguments. The Reason for God defends knowledge of God and is naturally an apologetic work. Interestingly enough though, it reads more like a pastoral than it does an apologetic work.

Mouw mentions that there are several ways in which humans have used the Old Testament in order to justify and reinforce racial prejudice (Mouw 71). He wants us to see the Holy City as a multinational world with no distinctions between God’s people. He says, “Christians should point to the love of neighbors as the ethical norm for the regulation of relationships among people” (Mouw 72). As it says in the Bible, Israel is God’s people and acts as a representative of the nations. Mouw indicates that both Jews and Gentiles will receive the benefits of God’s redemption. He uses the prophecy of Isaiah 19, in which the Lord refers to the Egyptians as “[His] people” (Mouw 76). People argue that the Old Testament supports the opposite view, in which gentile people are seen as inferior. In the beginning of time, God did make a covenant and established Israel as the representative of his kingdom, but he didn’t forget about everyone else. God has a plan for his creation and both blessed and cursed Israel for its position. The Holy City that Isaiah talks about reverses the curse of Babel. The curse of Babel is where God’s people let greediness and egocentrism take over their lives and God punished them by confusing their tongues and dividing them throughout the earth. Mouw believes that it’s the duty of the Christian community to pursue racial appeasement: “We must voice our protest against the suffering caused by the kinds of

This paper will address these biblical passages in Isaiah 52 and 53, which describes a “suffering servant” to the Lord God. There has been a debate as to whether these passages where describing the Messiah who would come to restore Israel as God’s chosen people or if the passage was describing the nation of Israel as the “suffering servant”. Christian scholars and clergy view these passages as describing Jesus who they affirm as the Messiah. The text is written in a poetic form and flows from one subject to another, however, many view these passages as being extremely detailed prophecy about the Messiah to come. I will point out key passages and explain how these passages provide clarity about whom the writer was speaking. This paper will point out why Jesus is the “suffering servant”, who is mentioned in Isaiah and explain why the “suffering servant” is not the nation of Israel as others propose.

that if one asserts something then one must deny something. He then goes on by

Religion is a vital part of daily life in every Middle Eastern country, informing the ways in which most ordinary citizens understand politics as well as their own place in the world. Today, the political left in Israel views the Israel state more as a protector of the Jewish community than as a strictly religious state. On the right, Zionism is broadly viewed as an effort to realize God’s intention that the Jewish people establish a Kingdom of God in that specific land. Today, Judaism