Gospel

I notice people, and passionately collect their stories. My favourite stories include those small cracks that allow one to peek inside another soul, those moments when their voice is almost imperceptibly altered, the eyes light up for a reason I do not know, and their gestures are unexpected.

When we are isolated with our family, problems that are sometimes easy to ignore become more acute, and the need to receive and offer forgiveness to those around us becomes increasingly evident.

The question in the title is a protest which expresses a fair amount of suspicion towards God. It is a barely concealed condemnation of God and His actions, the strange rebellion of a world that sees itself as morally superior to God. People forget Scripture's words in the book of Job: Beware lest wrath entice you into scoffing (Job 36:18, RSV).

The Bible is not the product of an event or a circumstance, but of time, study and especially of the journey that humanity took on its way to its development. But could it be that all the time that has passed has also eroded its relevance? How much confidence can we still have in the Bible, in the 21st century?

God is never the one to leave. He is the one who is abandoned. Even when Scripture describes Him as turning His face away, we understand that this is in fact the reluctant and painful recognition of man's decision to go beyond the point of no return in his relationship with God.

Benjamin Solomon Carson is the famous American neurosurgeon who, in 1987, became the first to successfully separate twins conjoined at the head.

The stakes are high when it comes to identifying the one to whom we should pray, and we can discover who by answering an apparently simple question: Can we expect prayers to be heard no matter who we address them to?

On the basis of ancient, hidden non-canonical gospels, some commercial and half-learned scholars propagate sensational discoveries, which are in fact both old and novel speculations arising from the Bible’s silence on some aspects of Jesus’s life.

Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive. – C.S. Lewis

Plato may have been one of the first to think this way, but in modern sociology it was Walter Lippmann who made history with the idea that people do not have access to reality in all its complexity, but operate on images of that reality that they construct for themselves.

Sartre may have been right when he said Hell is other people. Yet, for some, their first step toward Heaven is meeting the God who shelters in someone else's soul.

Why couldn’t God simply have forgiven sinners? Precisely because sinners cannot be forgiven until they completely understand sin, with all its far reaching consequences, or before the wages of sin are paid.

As we know all too well, life can be hard. Even in the best of times, life can be hard. But now this, a pandemic? How are we to cope?

I have read the Parable of the Talents many times, and have understood it in different ways at different times in my life. During my last read, I came across a commentary concerning the man who was given only one talent, which he chose to bury. Author Ellen White writes: The Lord desires His people to reach the highest round of the ladder...

I am not an expert on the phenomenon of death. But like all of us, I have to live in its shadow, and watch the restlessness and greed it causes. The same gloomy reports that circle the planet also reach me. I feel especially conscious of this as COVID-19 claims its first victims in my country.