As we continued to study the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its Biblical history, we next looked into the book of Ezekiel. The Israelites have been in exile as a result of the Babylonians conquering them and taking their leaders into Babylon, dispersing the Israelites outside of Israel. Now Ezekiel prophesies that the Israelites will return to […]
Now, the Israelites have moved into the land of Canaan and have been battling the people there, following the plan that God had set out for them. As each of the tribes settle into their land, God remains the King over all of them with a series of “judges”, who are more like leaders to […]
This morning, we continued reading with our kids on the Biblical history behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I had them scan through their memory and understanding of history from Isaac to Moses until we arrived at the point that God approaches Moses from the burning bush: The LORD said, “I have indeed seen the misery of […]
Last Sunday, we took a walk into the center of Catania where we encountered a protest on behalf of the Palestinians in the most recent flare-up between the Israelis and Palestinians. As far as protests go, there weren’t a lot of people there, but one interesting thing that I noticed was the mix between the […]
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The Kingdom of God
God’s plan, from the beginning of time to the end, has been to create a place on earth where he reigns and his people follow him. Let’s start at the beginning and work through each of the steps along the way. First, the Garden of Eden was a place that God made and where he […]
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For His Glory
This is the third lesson in a series on the mission of God. I started previously with a series of thoughts initially on the image of God filling the earth and then wrote the lesson itself over on the Search Party site. From there, we moved on to underline the idea that God’s mission should […]
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Among All Nations
Last week, we started a new study on the mission of God, considering how God originally made man in his own image and commanded them to spread out across the face of the earth. We contrasted this with the Great Commission in Matthew 28 and asked the question: Has God’s mission changed? What do we […]
Back in 2009, shortly after taking a new job and moving our family from St. Louis to Denver, I started to wonder whether or not we should have moved to China to help run an orphanage that we had become familiar with in 2006, around the time that we had adopted our daughter Ellie, also […]
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Verses in the Quran about Jesus
Having many Muslim friends, I have found that many say that they know that the Quran speaks about Jesus, but most of them have never read the Quran. Over at the North American Mission Board, I found a list of verses about Jesus, although I was looking for a specific translation, so I went through […]
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Sabbath Rest
Where we are here in Catania, we have taken particular notice that the churches that we are connected with don’t celebrate, or really barely even mention various religious holidays. For example, neither Christmas nor Easter, days that in America, we in the church would consider to be fairly important for remembering the birth of Jesus […]