Skip to main content

The New Testament

Hello all. First off I realize that this isn't the normal day for this. I accidentally hit the wrong day on the post planning app. So that is due to human error.

This post is going to be short because I want to outline how we are going to tackle the New Testament. For the Old Testament we went in canonical order; meaning the order the books appear in the Bible. This works really well for the Old Testament as a lot of the books were connected and told one big story.

For the New Testament I am going to try something a little different. Instead of going in canonical order, I am going to go in the order they were written in. Why? To make it easier on all of us.

Now I am a big proponent of the canonical order. I think it is worthwhile to read the books of the Bible in this order. For the purposes of this blog, where we are going over the major themes, it might get a tad confusing. This is simply because the four gospels are all together and Paul's letters are all bunched together. If we spread them out a little bit it will help us all understand the themes and see the distinctions among them. Trust me, when you are on the third gospel in a row they can start to blend together.

So this is how it's going to be. Each week I will be sure to mention at the end of each post what the next book will be, in case you want to read ahead. I pray that you find our study of the New Testament just as enlightening as the Old.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Thankful

Today is Thanksgiving, the day that we are supposed to celebrate all the things we are thankful for. It is a time of family reunions, football, and turkey eating. I sincerely pray that each and every one of you has a good day today. I'll admit that being thankful has not been easy for me this year. As pretty much all of you know, my mother passed away December of last year. Though she had been in the hospital for months, we were not expecting it. In fact I was sure she would be finally able to come home within a matter of weeks. Instead she peacefully passed on into the arms of Jesus, whom she loved more dearly than anyone else. As you can imagine, the entire family was heart broken. After what can easily be described as the worst Christmas ever, I returned to home to Illinois. It was here that I finally broke down. I spent the next months doing everything except being thankful. I cursed God, wept, screamed, begged to have her back, and was generally not the nicest person to be...

Proverbs, Wisdom

Wisdom is an essential part of living a godly life. The ability to make good judgments and identify potentially sinful situations are skills all Christians should have. The Bible repeatedly emphasizes that it is the duty of parents and older Christians to pass on these skills and train younger generations in wisdom. The book of Proverbs is a book all about wisdom. The various authors of the book are trying to pass on the things they have learned to a younger generation. They want all that come after them to know that true wisdom comes from God. Background Like the book of Psalms, the book of Proverbs is a collection of various sayings and proverbs from many different people. The primary author we associate the book with is King Solomon, who wrote the most out of any single author, but he is just one of several writers. It is a very interesting book in this regard. The book of Proverbs can be tricky because it isn't always consistent in how the text flows together. Some...

Ordinary Means

The Bible is a book. Think about that for a minute. One of the primary ways God chose to communicate to humanity was through a book. Think about just how many books there are in the world. We have entire stores dedicated to selling books and government departments whose sole job is preserving books. Almost every culture on the planet, in some form or another, has used books.  I think we often forget just how ordinary something like the Bible is. Is it inspired by God? Yes. Is it authoritative? Yes. Is it also a book? Yes. It amazes me more and more the more I think about it that God chose to communicate to us not by some miraculous arrangement of the stars or a telepathic message but rather through a book.  Just like any other book, the Bible was written by ordinary people in their specific cultures, languages, circumstances, genres, styles, and purposes. God chose this ordinary, mundane thing to communicate eternal truth of the most fantastic sort. God took the ordinary and t...