For this nineteenth tool in the New Earth series I’d like to discuss a tool whose power I have only recently come to recognise: compassion. That itself seems weird, because I consider it to be one of the four key values of Jesus: non-judgment, forgiveness, compassion, and unconditional love. Although the word doesn’t appear in the Bible […]
On Easter Sunday I heard a sermon that included a recapitulation of Genesis chapters 2 and 3: Adam and Eve, temptation and Fall. The preacher phrased this as Adam and Eve making the wrong choice, a mistake for which humanity has been paying ever since. This is a superficial reading of the text, but it […]
In this New Earth Tools series we’ve looked at a lot of useful emotional tools. Some of the tools we need at our sides all the time, like a carpenter who wears a tool-belt of essential tools. Other tools sit in our toolbox and gather dust till we need them. Today’s tool is a little bit […]
The structure of the Bible bears a specific resemblance to a blockbuster Hollywood film. Blockbusters start by presenting us with a problem to be solved. They introduce a hero or heroes, and at the end of the film we discover if or how the problem is solved. The Bible varies from conventional Hollywood film structure […]
When we’re caught in the middle of an emotional crisis, under incredible pressure yet simultaneously trapped, the question arises: what do I do? Which tool in the emotional toolbox do I turn to? The answer is vulnerability. In our patriarchal society, we confuse vulnerability with weakness. The Old Testament has a particular negative view of […]
The journey to Christ is a perplexing one, an endless series of shifts, reversals and abrupt changes of direction. It’s like a stock market graph—gradual gains over an extended period interspersed with calamitous crashes as we experience breakdowns and breakthroughs. The last word we’d associate with this journey is balance. In the midst of this […]
The Christian mystic William Blake wrote that “It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun / And in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn”. At such times it’s easy to be content with out lot in life. What happens when the waggon of our life isn’t loaded […]
There are many references to love in the Bible. A drop-down list on Bible Gateway of the various kinds of love references ‘love is patient’, ‘love your enemies’, and ‘love God’. Yet there is not a single reference to self-love. The most extraordinary declaration of love in the Bible is in John 3:16. “God loved the […]
The Old Testament is an incredibly accurate emotional account of its time. In it, I see the eternal brilliance of God shining through very temporal commands. Paul understood their transient nature: “[The Law] was only supposed to last until the coming of that descendant who was given the promise.” (Galatians 3:19) Then came Jesus: “The kingdom […]
The first five books of the Bible—the Pentateuch—contain 613 commands [1]. Rules were necessary to bond tribes together against outsiders, to stop tribes weakening themselves through infighting, and to normalise the taboos on all things feminine that arose from environmental stress: Reward togetherness: “You will get more and more cattle, sheep, silver, gold, and other possessions.” […]