Ask any Biblically literate person about the expression the finger of God and he will either refer to God writing the Ten Commandments with His own finger (Exod 31:18) or to the mysterious fingers of a man’s hand that appeared out of nowhere and wrote a mystical message on the wall in Dan 5:5, 24.

The Church’s First Fight Although our Lord was more often confronted by Pharisees, the infant Church finds its first clash with the Sadducees. While Pharisees represent religious hypocrisy, the Sadducees represent religious unbelief. 4:1-2. And the Sadducees came upon them. While the Pharisees hated our Lord manifested in flesh, as a sect, the Sadducees seemed

There are some people who have the mistaken idea that people in the OT received eternal life by works. Often, this erroneous view maintains that a person in the OT had to keep the Law of Moses. Of course, nobody believes a person could have kept the Law perfectly, but if a person in the

The Warning of Zane Hodges in 1983 I was taking a Greek course on the exegesis of James and the Johannine epistles with Zane Hodges as my professor. I remember the day we discussed Jas 4:4, which says, “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to

Introduction (3:1-12) 3:1-8. In Acts 3, Peter and John heal a man who was lame from birth. There are three ways to look at the miracle of this passage. First, we can look at the man himself. Over 40 years old (Acts 4:22), he was doubt- less a pitiable sight. It is not unlikely that

By Al Acevedo It was the winter break before my last semester of seminary at Liberty University Online, and I did not know where I stood on the Calvinism/Arminianism debate. Was I a Calvinist? If so, how many of the five points did I accept? Maybe I was more Arminian? After all, it was hard

Study I: Four Simple Observations from the Evangelistic Ministry of the Lord Jesus I recently did a Logos software study revealing four facts which, while simple, have significant implications: 1. Jesus Christ did not spend a lot of time convincing unbelievers that they were sinners. 2. The Lord also did not spend much time convincing

Where We Come From One day a seminary student saw his advanced Greek professor reading a book. He noticed that it was the textbook used by first-year Greek students. The professor was extremely knowledgeable in New Testament Greek, and the student was intrigued as to why he was reading it. When he asked the professor

Many Christians find our Lord’s Gethsemane prayers perplexing, even downright troubling. Seemingly, Jesus tries to convince the Father into allowing Him to avoid crucifixion. How could that be? The Cross Was Unavoidable Jesus’ repeated predictions of the cross and resurrection—starting with John 2:19—prove that He knew that His death on the cross was unavoidable. Note

A few years ago a member of my congregation told me about a book by a Baptist pastor entitled 10 Things Your Minister Wants to Tell You (But Can’t, Because He Needs the Job). I was intrigued: Was this a book to help the average Christian understand what a pastor really thinks? Or maybe a