Award-Winning, Bestselling Christian Author
ALL I NEEDED was an oil change for my Toyota Sienna, which has over 200,000 miles on it (322,000 km). I suspected I might need more, once the auto shop got my better-than-an-SUV vehicle up on the rack. Charles from the repair shop called back and …
Adam wasn’t the only human created from the ground, according to another ancient Middle Eastern story: Epic of Gilgamesh. In this story from what is now Iraq in the 1700s BC the earth goddess Aruru made a man named Enkidu from clay. Wild animals …
IF I HAD LIVED this year 3000 years ago, maybe I would have written a psalm to express the joylessness that I sense among many Christians during this bizarre and wrenching election cycle. The psalm might have gone something like this. With a …
IT’S THE KIND OF CANAANITE CITY Joshua would have loved to have destroyed: Nahariya by the sea, in northern Israel. Who knows, maybe he did take it out. The ruins of this fort-like city in what is now northern Israel date back to his time, some 3,400 …
When the Bible says “God formed the man from the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7 NLT), that’s a play on words and a clue about the future of humans. In Hebrew, “man” is pronounced adam. “Ground” is the similar-sounding adamah. We came from the …
IT WASN’T A NORMAL HUG. I had tears in my eyes at the time. My wife had just finished telling me why she got home from work late. She’s a nurse who works 12-hour night shifts at a hospital. On her way home from work Tuesday morning, she stopped off …
I’M STRUGGLING OVER how to put the Bible word “blessed” into today’s English, for folks who don’t read the Bible. I’ve been paraphrasing parts of the Bible lately. Genesis and the Gospel of Luke will go live as soon as the website coder puts the …
Out of respect for God, Jews avoid saying or writing his name. When they write it, they will often drop a vowel and spell God’s name “G-d.” When they say it, they will call him Adonai (ADD oh ni), which means “my Lord.” A Visual Walk Through Genesis, …
I HAVE AN ODD SCHEDULE these days, as I write my easy-reading Bible background books. It has to do with grandkids and dogs. Take Tuesday, for example. It was a three-dog night. But I was happy the dogs survived until night. We have one dog, Buddy, a …
PAUL COULD BE A JERK when he wasn’t in jail. A free man, he could sometimes get a little too blunt. His bluntest: “I wish the people who are bothering you would castrate themselves!” Galatians 5:12 He wrote that letter of Galatians to Christians …
No one today seems to know how to pronounce God’s name. Most English Bibles translate it as “LORD” (Genesis 2:4 NLT). But the Jews who copied the stories onto scrolls used shorthand. They spelled God’s name without vowels: YHWH. Scholars today …
Donald Trump's favorite Bible verse is an ancient law of retaliation that involves black eyes and knocked-out teeth. Jesus declared it obsolete.
