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Lent, Lament and Lockdown

Lent is a time of self denial and of giving things up, and also a period of lament in the lead up to Easter where we remember the Passion and death of Christ before we celebrated the glorious resurrection.  Often this is a personal affair on the discipline side of things, even if it's a practice shared within your church community, but this year has been so very different. With the outbreak of the coronavirus, or COVID-19, the whole world has slowly gone into lockdown country by country, creating a strange sort of global “Lent” where everyone is having to practice self control and self denial. This has been underpinned with a sense of lament at the way thi...

Does Christmas have pagan origins?

...death and resurrection which held a far greater importance and cause for celebration. Easter was really the first major festival of the Church in its early years over and above anything else that came to be recognised. The next real reference to Jesus’ birth being on the date we are more familiar with, comes from an important early theologian called Hippolytus of Rome, around the year 220 AD, in his Commentary on Daniel: For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, eight days before the kalends of January [December 25th], the 4th day of the week [Wednesday], while Augustus was in his forty-second year, [2 or 3 BC] but from...

The Deity of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew - Part 2

...owing the resurrection, with this promise of Jesus; (Matthew 28:20): “…teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew emphasises the point at both beginning and end that Jesus is “with us”. First, in 1:23 he combines this with calling Jesus God. Second, he records Jesus as claiming his perpetual presence with his people wherever they are. To understand the importance of Matthew’s choice of this theme an overview of this subject in the Old Testament is needed. In the book of Genesis man is created (and woman from his side), then they are placed in the garden of Eden where they en...

The Eighth Day

...se of the resurrection – this day was to be a celebration of what Jesus accomplished and what that now means for the rest of us who are in Christ: being a part of the New Covenant, which makes us a new creation through baptism and through our outworking of the faith, we reconcile the world back to God as co-workers with Jesus (1 Corinthians 3:9)! 2 Corinthians 5:18-19 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.   Resting with...

Jesus was a pagan copy, and other Christmas myths

...ainst the resurrection: Dr. Norman Geisler, author or coauthor of more than 80 books, writes, “The first real parallel of a dying and rising god does not appear until A.D. 150, more than a hundred years after the origin of Christianity. So if there was any influence of one on the other, it was the influence of the historical event of the New Testament [resurrection] on mythology, not the reverse.  If you don't want to read a long essay on the subject though, this video by Inspiring Philosophy breaks it down nicely in just under 5 minutes: Other myths debunked If not Osiris, Jesus is often claimed to be copied from the Egyptian god Horus... or the Ro...

The Coming Kingdom of the Son of Man

...death and resurrection, and subsequent coming Kingdom. Taken in the context of verse 27, this again harkens back to the prophecy in Daniel 7 about the Son of Man coming into power with his eternal kingdom and the position of judgement he will have over the nations: "For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done" (v.27). After saying this, Jesus emphasises the imminence of this event by saying that "there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom". The Futurist argument says that coming kingdom is referring to the trans...