One of our bloggers’ wife went into labor today! We’re extremely excited for them, but it does mean that posting is going to be a bit lighter around here for the next week or two while his family adjusts to the new addition to the family.
We appreciate your understanding, and please pray for a safe and sound delivery!
The next issue of Lee Strobel’s Investigating Faith newsletter goes out tomorrow, April 5th, and it’s not too late to sign up!
Investigating Faith is broad look at the contemporary issues surrounding faith. Lee is a respected and skilled communicator with an extensive knowledge of apologetics. In the following excerpt from the last Investigating Faith newsletter, Lee answers a reader’s question about the Bible story in which Jesus sweat blood:
Q. The New Testament says that Jesus sweat blood when he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Isn’t that just hyperbole that we shouldn’t take literally?
A. That’s what I thought when I was a skeptic. Then I went to California to interview Dr. Alexander Metherell, a physician, former research scientist and expert on the crucifixion of Jesus.
“This is a known medical condition called hematidrosis. It’s not very common, but it is associated with a high degree of psychological stress,” he told me.
“What happens is that severe anxiety causes the release of chemicals that break down the capillaries in the sweat glands. As a result, there’s a small amount of bleeding into these glands, and the sweat comes out tinged with blood. We’re not talking about a lot of blood; it’s just a very, very small amount.”
Interestingly, it was Luke, a physician, who notes this phenomenon. He said of Jesus in Luke 22:44: “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.”
Jesus’ anguish and passionate prayers over his impending torture could certainly have been enough to trigger this medical phenomenon. A 1996 article in the Journal of Medicine analyzed 76 cases of hematidrosis and concluded that the most common causes were acute fear and intense mental contemplation.
I asked Dr. Metherell what affect this bloody sweat would have had on Jesus. “What this did,” he replied, “was set up the skin to be extremely fragile so that when Jesus was flogged by the Roman soldier the next day, his skin would have been very, very sensitive.”
What could have prompted Jesus to willingly endure the misery of Gethsemane, the brutality of the flogging and the unspeakable torment of the cross?
“Well,” said Dr. Metherell, “I suppose the answer can be summed up in one word – and that would be love.”
Our special Easter devotional with Mel Lawrenz starts this Sunday! For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mel or his ministry we thought it’d be useful to introduce him via a few questions and answers. Hopefully, this will give you a taste of the pastoral insight and wisdom you can expect if you sign up for the devotional:
Bible Gateway: What do you think we can do to make this time leading up to Easter a time of real spiritual growth?
Mel Lawrenz: First of all, let me say that I am thrilled to partner with BibleGateway in offering this devotional called Knowing Him. I have benefited greatly from BibleGateway and it is exciting to see the new features you are adding.
Every year at this time we have an amazing opportunity to surge ahead in our spiritual growth just by asking God to help us know Jesus better—crucified and risen from the dead. As the Apostle Paul says in Philippians 3:10 says, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection of the dead.”
So how do we do that? Here are some practical steps:
Bible Gateway: Can you explain the mission of The Brook Network?
Mel Lawrenz:The Brook Network is an exchange of ideas and growing set of relationships aimed at helping Christian leaders improve their leadership. This includes every kind of leader or believer who influences others: church leaders, educators, business leaders, community leaders, organization leaders. We are enthused to be able to partner with BibleGateway to bring a new weekly feature to leaders called The Leader Life sometime soon. For now, people can follow along with our series called “spiritual leadership today.”
Bible Gateway: What is the most important biblical passage for people involved in spiritual leadership today?
Mel Lawrenz: I think it’s 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 where Paul says that there is something far better than “the wisdom of this age.” God has offered us a wisdom from above that gives us a spiritual understanding of all of life. This makes all the difference in the world for Christian leaders. I have been a leader most of my life, and I can say without hesitation that my best days are when I realize that I am not the real influence, God must be. God is the only leader who can transform lives, and so spiritual leadership means that we are God’s instruments in his work. Here is a beginning place for spiritual leaders: Spiritual Leadership—So What?
The weeks leading up to Easter are a great time to grow in the knowledge of Christ as Savior and Lord. We’re happy to announce a new daily email Easter devotional focusing on the Christ who died and rose for us!
Knowing Him: An Easter Devotional is an email devotional that runs from April 3 through Easter and will help you keep your eyes on Jesus along the road to Easter. Knowing Him is written by Dr. Mel Lawrenz, Christian author and minister at large for Elmbrook Church.
Philippians 3:10 says “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection of the dead.” This is what we need today–and we hope this Easter devotional will help you toward that goal.
Knowing Him: An Easter Devotional is an opportunity to grow in the grace and power of Jesus. Sign up today!
Dr. Mel Lawrenz, minister at large for Elmbrook Church and Elmbrook’s former senior pastor, is the author of eleven books, including I Want to Believe and Whole Church. You can learn more about his work and ministry at The Brook Network.
Want to access Bible Gateway on your iPhone? In just a few simple steps you can add Bible Gateway to your iPhone’s home screen. Once you’ve added it, it functions much like an app: tapping on the Bible Gateway button opens Safari directly to Bible Gateway, where you can use all of our Bible search features. To set it up, just follow the directions below:
icon located at the bottom of the screen.
That’s it! These steps should work with any iPhone running iOS 4.3. Until an official Bible Gateway iPhone app is released, this is the easiest way to use Bible Gateway on your iPhone.
Note: While these instructions are specifically for the iPhone, the mobile version of Bible Gateway can be accessed by any mobile device with internet access.
Many of you have written to ask us if there is an official Bible Gateway app for the iPhone (or other mobile device).
At the moment, there is no official Bible Gateway app to install on your iPhone. However, you certainly can use Bible Gateway on your mobile device: we’ve set up a special mobile-friendly version of BibleGateway.com that gives you full access to Bible Gateway’s features, provided that your mobile device has internet access. The mobile-friendly site is located at m.biblegateway.com.
The mobile site is the full-featured Bible Gateway site, just optimized for small screens like the iPhone’s. If you’re using an iPhone, you can add it to your iPhone home screen where it functions just like an app does; follow these simple steps for doing so.
For those of you who are hoping for an official iPhone app, know that we’re aware of the interest in such a thing and it’s very much on our radar. In the meantime, we hope the mobile version of Bible Gateway will tide you over.
Was God married? Was the Old Testament revised to hide evidence that God ruled alongside a heavenly queen?
These questions are in the news this week due to a flurry of stories about the alleged relationship between Yahweh and the Ancient Near Eastern fertility goddess Asherah. Drawing on ancient inscriptions that mention “Yahweh and his asherah,” some scholars (notably William Dever in Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel) have in recent years posited that the ancient Israelites worshipped Asherah and other deities alongside Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. Now others have taken this a step further and claimed that Yahweh’s supposed wife Asherah was later edited out of the Bible by scribes with a monotheistic agenda.
These theories sound a bit shocking at first read, and most of the articles reporting on them this week spin them as a damaging blow to the Christian understanding of God and the Bible. But on closer examination, these theories don’t seriously challenge what the Old Testament tells us about ancient Israelite religion.
That the ancient Israelites worshiped many different gods is not news to anyone who has read the Old Testament. Although God revealed himself to His people as the one and only true God (even singling out Asherah worship for condemnation), the Israelites, surrounded by other nations that worshiped many gods, constantly backslid into idolatry. This idolatry didn’t always take the form of an outright denial of God—rather than denying Yahweh, the Israelites would often start worshipping other deities (like Asherah) alongside Yahweh; or sometimes they would worship Yahweh in a way that he had expressly forbidden. Much of the Old Testament describes the forbidden worship of pagan gods like Asherah and the Baals and the failure of Israel’s leaders to outlaw such cults.
This was a recurring theme for the Biblical prophets. One of the most vivid passages in Jeremiah describes God’s amazement at Israel’s constant backsliding into idol worship, despite all that God had done for them:
This is what the LORD says:
“What fault did your ancestors find in me,
that they strayed so far from me?
They followed worthless idols
and became worthless themselves.
They did not ask, ‘Where is the LORD,
who brought us up out of Egypt
and led us through the barren wilderness,
through a land of deserts and ravines,
land of drought and utter darkness,
a land where no one travels and no one lives?’
I brought you into a fertile land
to eat its fruit and rich produce.
But you came and defiled my land
and made my inheritance detestable.
The priests did not ask,
‘Where is the LORD?’
Those who deal with the law did not know me;
the leaders rebelled against me.
The prophets prophesied by Baal,
following worthless idols.
So to the question “Did the ancient Israelites worship other gods, like Asherah, alongside Yahweh?” the answer is clear: they certainly did. But what is also clear is that the Bible repeatedly and unequivocally condemns this, describing these pagan gods as nothing more than lifeless idols.
To the more controversial question “Did God have a wife?” the answer is also clear: nowhere in the Bible is this even hinted at, and people who claim this was the case must posit a conspiracy theory in which huge chunks of the Bible were retroactively rewritten to falsify the record. There is no manuscript evidence suggesting an “earlier version” of Israelite history that endorsed polytheism. Scholars continue to debate the development of Israel’s understanding of God’s uniquely revealed monotheism, but the burden of proof lies on the critics to demonstrate that this is more plausible than simply accepting the Bible text we have as genuine.
But there is some nuance to this last question: the Bible clearly doesn’t teach that Yahweh had a wife, but did the ancient Israelites believe that He did? It’s not hard to imagine that some of them did. The Bible doesn’t sugarcoat the Israelites’ repeated embrace of idolatrous beliefs in contrast to the official doctrines they were taught; if the Israelites imagined Yahweh as a golden calf and set up Asherah poles in God’s temple during their flirtations with polytheism, it’s possible some of them cast Asherah as Yahweh’s divine consort as well. But whatever errant beliefs crept into Israelite folk religion, the clear and consistent teaching of the Bible is that God has neither divine rivals nor equals.
Earlier this year, we began a tour of the different sections of the Bible, starting with the books of Moses. Today, we’re continuing our tour with the next section of the Bible: the Wisdom Books.
The wisdom books (which number five in the Protestant canon, seven if you include Apocryphal books) represent a major shift in style from the historical books that precede them. They fall into the category of Ancient Near East wisdom literature, a genre of writing that focuses on existential questions about God, humanity, Creation, and the nature of evil and suffering. Wisdom literature could take the form of short, memorable insights (as in the book of Proverbs) or a dialogue (as in the book of Job, where Job, Job’s friends, and God engage in a conversation that teaches and enlightens the reader). Wisdom literature was produced in several different cultures in the Ancient Near East, but by far the best-known are those that found their way into the Bible canon: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs.
Here are the wisdom books of the Protestant Bible:
The wisdom books contain some of the most beautifully-written sections of the entire Bible, although they can be a challenge to read straight-through in the way one might approach the clear narratives of the Bible’s historical books. While many books of the Old Testament give us a historian’s view of God’s people and their experiences, the wisdom books provide us with a more pastoral glimpse at the state of their hearts. We see that despite the gap of time that separates us from ancient Israel, the Israelites grappled with the same faith issues that we do today: they asked tough questions about sin and suffering; they experienced joy and confidence in God’s love; they looked for God in life’s pleasures and trials alike; they sometimes entertained doubts and they looked to God for help both physical and spiritual.
Beyond that, the wisdom books show us that God values and responds to these myriad questions and prayers. We can take comfort that no experience in our lives, whether wonderful or terrible, can place us outside the love and understanding of a gracious God.
Lee Strobel’s new “Investigating Faith” newsletter kicks off tomorrow! If you missed the announcement last week, Lee has partnered with Bible Gateway to send out a twice-monthly free email newsletter exploring questions about the Christian faith.
Lee approaches serious questions about faith with a friendly and inquisitive attitude; if you aren’t familiar with Lee or his work, you can find articles and videos at his website that showcase the style he’s bringing to the new “Investigating Faith” newsletter.
You can sign up for the newsletter at any time, but we encourage you to do so today so you won’t miss the first issue. We hope it’s a helpful resource for you as you ask your own questions about Christianity!
This weekend marks the Jewish holiday of Purim. While Christians don’t celebrate the holiday, it’s based on a Biblical story that’s familiar to most churchgoers: the deliverance of the Jews from planned extermination at the hands of the Persian official Haman. The agent of that deliverance is Esther, one of the most famous heroines of the Old Testament.
Esther is the perfect example of a regular person who finds herself suddenly and unexpectedly in a position to do great good—or to refrain from acting, and let terrible evil play out. When she confronts the Persian king to plead on behalf of her people, she is risking her life. When Esther points this out to her uncle Mordecai, he responds with an inspiring challenge:
Then she instructed him to say to Mordecai, “All the king’s officials and the people of the royal provinces know that for any man or woman who approaches the king in the inner court without being summoned the king has but one law: that they be put to death unless the king extends the gold scepter to them and spares their lives. But thirty days have passed since I was called to go to the king.”
When Esther’s words were reported to Mordecai, he sent back this answer: “Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”
Given that Purim today is celebrated with feasting and charitable giving, you can probably guess that the story ends happily for Esther. But if you haven’t read the story of Esther recently (or ever), this weekend is a perfect time to do so. You’ll likely never find yourself approaching a Persian king to accuse his favored minister of planning genocide (at least, we certainly hope you aren’t). But as Esther shows us, God puts each of us in positions where we can serve Him, even though that’s often not clear until the moment we’re called upon to act.
Image: Queen Esther depicted by Edwin Long, 1878.
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