Tag: yeshua
-
The Sermon on the Mount is one of Jesus’ most beloved teachings. It contains the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, the command to love our enemies, and many of the passages Christians know best. Yet these teachings are often read outside of the context of Jesus’ mission. In this article and the articles that follow we…
-
When reading through the Gospel accounts a reader is confronted with stories of other Jewish leaders (Pharisees and teachers of the law) challenging Jesus directly on his interpretation of Sabbath. Their challenge was that Jesus permitted His disciples, or performed Himself, actions they regarded as unlawful labor on the Sabbath. Unfortunately, nearly two thousand years…
-
Most Christians are familiar with the idea of “the end times” and are usually familiar with a modern concept of being removed from the earth to a place called “heaven” when you die. But few realize that Jesus and the apostles understood history and the end times through a very Jewish framework called the “two…
-
The Forgotten Bridge: Why 1 Maccabees Matters for Followers of Jesus If you’ve ever read your Bible straight through, you may have felt the silence between Malachi and Matthew. The story seems to pause, only to suddenly reopen in a world filled with Roman rule, Temple activity, and deep expectation for a coming Messiah. But…
-
When We Misread What We Don’t Understand There’s a peculiar phrase in an old American song that most of us have heard but few have ever really understood: “Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.” At face value, it sounds like nonsense. What does pasta have to do with a…
-
When Jesus declared, “There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2), He was not speaking into a quiet or uneventful time, but into the active Second Temple Period. Both the Gospels and Jewish sources remember the years surrounding His death as the beginning of a…
-
The Not So “Silent Years” When we open the pages of the New Testament, we step into a world already in motion—a world shaped by centuries of history, struggle, faithfulness, and expectation. That world is what scholars call the Second Temple Period, and without understanding it, many parts of Scripture can feel disconnected or confusing.…
-
Replacement theology—also called supersessionism in academic circles—is the belief that the Church has replaced Israel in God’s covenant plan. According to this view, the promises God made to the Jewish people in the Hebrew Scriptures are no longer directed toward them as a people. Instead, the Church is believed to have inherited those promises in…
-
The Gospel of the Kingdom When most Christians hear the word gospel, they often think of a simple statement such as, “Jesus died for your sins so you can go to heaven.” While that contains truth, the Scriptures describe the gospel in a much larger way. In the Bible, the gospel is not only about…
-
Free From What? Free For Whom? Few words are more celebrated in modern American life than freedom. Usually, we mean the freedom to choose, to define ourselves, and to live without restraint. Freedom sounds like autonomy. It sounds like answering to no one but ourselves. But in Scripture, freedom is not self-rule. It is deliverance…