Don’t keep asking God for forgiveness. Do judge one another. And you’re not going to heaven for all eternity! How have we misunderstood the teachings of Jesus? Often His message to the leaders and disciples was: You’re getting this wrong! Somewhere along the way you got confused, lost, way off track. Would He have the same assessment of us today? In Reading the Bible, Missing the Gospel, pastor and author Ben Connelly shows us how to recover God’s original intentions in light of the story of redemption. Connelly helps us celebrate and understand how Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are truly good news for the tangible situations in our everyday lives. Biblical misunderstandings can lead to a small view of God—but truth overturns that. It expands our hearts for God and enables us to truly love others! Using theology, humor, and practical examples the author reveals shockingly common ways we get the Bible wrong. Connelly invites Christians to see themes and teachings with new eyes—or, rather, with old eyes—on topics like confession and forgiveness . . . what it means to be blessed or happy . . . whether we’re commanded to or prohibited from passing judgement. How does the gospel inform our understanding and answer these questions? Connelly gives readers a new gospel-focused lens that addresses common frustrations and helps them see with renewed hope, clarity, and courage.

Recovering a neglected chapter of reception history, this unique volume gathers select writings by thirty-five nineteenth-century women on the stories of several women in Joshua and Judges, including Rahab, Deborah, Jael, and Delilah. (Back cover).

There is: One God over all gods. The Most High God of them all. In Primordial Genesis, God takes on the most powerful god of ancient times...His grandmother/mother. Armed with the auras of all the other gods, who were unable to defeat her, as well as the four (North, South, East and West) winds, gifts from His uncle, and with the seven powerful winds He created (the atrocious wind, cyclone, hurricane, fourfold, sevenfold, whirlwind and tornado), He makes His way to battle her. With a charming smile, God defeats her and destroys the head of her army. This act guaranteed that He would become the Most High and most powerful God. After this act of war, He is celebrated and when the celebration is over He creates! After six days of creation and saying it is good, He rests on the seventh day and says it is very good! God, then brings Adam into His personal garden in Eden and has him work the garden. Adam becomes the world's very first gardener! As Adam is working, God saw that it was not good for Adam to be alone, so He caused a deep sleep to come over him and He created Eve. With only one command, "You can eat of every tree EXCEPT the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" Adam and Eve were bound to this command if they were to stay in God's garden. Armed with Free Will they had multiple trees in the garden that they could choose to eat from including the "Tree of Life" ...then temptation slithered in with thoughts and ideas that they could have it all and still live their best lives... You think you know their story...but do you?

The Scriptures are an essential aspect of the Christian faith. But we have often equated them with the living Word Himself, even elevating them above the One to whom they point. In doing so, we have distorted their central message—and our view of God. Tragically, this has caused multitudes of people unnecessary doubt, confusion, and pain in their encounters with the Scriptures. Many people understand God as being truly loving and good. Yet, they struggle with depictions of God in Scripture as wrathful, violent, and genocidal. These “toxic texts” have caused some to set aside their Bibles as R-rated and unreliable. They have led others to completely reject their faith. Author and theologian Bradley Jersak has wrestled deeply with such passages over many years. He has experienced the same questions, doubt, and pain. In A More Christlike Word, he offers a clarifying and freeing path forward. Whether readers consider themselves believers, doubters, or skeptics, all are invited to a more beautiful and ancient way of reading the Scriptures. Bradley calls this path the “Emmaus Way” because it demonstrates how Jesus regarded all Scripture as fulfilled in himself, the final Word of God who reveals the true nature of the Father. After deconstructing the modern biblicist/literalist approaches to Scripture interpretation that have failed us, Brad turns to the early church for a hermeneutic of prefigurement, treating the Bible as the grand narrative of redemption, told through a polyphony of voices and worldviews, culminating in the arrival of Christ as the eternal Word of God—what God has to say about himself. The interpretive system of the church fathers and mothers who gathered the New Testament and preached the gospel from the Old Testament has largely been ignored or dismissed by both evangelical and liberal movements, the twin children of modernity. The patristics explain and model the apostles’ Christ-centered interpretation of the Scriptures. Brad applies their approach to “unwrath” sample passages from each genre of the Bible, showing how even the cringe-worthy texts have an important place in the Christotelic saga of divine love. Your journey on the Emmaus Way will open up to you the fullness of the Scriptures, and, most important, lead you to the God who deeply loves and welcomes you.

A groundbreaking reinterpretation of early Judaism, during the millennium before the study of the Bible took center stage Early Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. But in The Closed Book, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that Jews didn’t truly embrace the biblical text until nearly a thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. She tells the story of the intervening centuries during which even rabbis seldom opened a Bible and many rabbinic authorities remained deeply ambivalent about the biblical text as a source of sacred knowledge. Wollenberg shows that, in place of the biblical text, early Jewish thinkers embraced a form of biblical revelation that has now largely disappeared from practice. Somewhere between the fixed transcripts of the biblical Written Torah and the fluid traditions of the rabbinic Oral Torah, a third category of revelation was imagined by these rabbinic thinkers. In this “third Torah,” memorized spoken formulas of the biblical tradition came to be envisioned as a distinct version of the biblical revelation. And it was believed that this living tradition of recitation passed down by human mouths, unbound by the limitations of written text, provided a fuller and more authentic witness to the scriptural revelation at Sinai. In this way, early rabbinic authorities were able to leverage the idea of biblical revelation while quarantining the biblical text itself from communal life. The result is a revealing reinterpretation of “the people of the book” before they became people of the book.