It’s interesting the broad-level knowledge that people have — or don’t have — about the teachings of Jesus. I asked each member of the class to rank the top three emphases of Jesus’ teachings — and no two people described the same things.
It’s hard to narrow down a week of reading like we just shared. We covered the birth of Jesus, his temptation, the calling of the apostles, his first miracles, the sermon on the mount, and his first encounters with serious opposition.
Two handouts this week:
This week’s study introduces the New Testament, the apocrypha (deuterocanonical writings) and the inter-testamental period.
When Jesus arrives — it’s a big deal!
This week’s files are zipped to include several links for further study as well as the powerpoint introduction to the new testament and a handout offering some possibilities for understanding the genealogies in Matthew and Luke.
Enjoy!
This is our final week of Old Testament studies. I hope you’ve found this to be as encouraging and enlightening as I have! We crack open the door to information about the intertestamental period this week, and look at the last words of the prophets.
(Aside: Does anyone else get really annoyed that Microsoft Word’s built-in spelling dictionary doesn’t have the books of the Bible? Would that be so hard???)
This week’s material covered Esther and Malachi. Esther is (in)famous for it’s avoidance of the Divine name and references to luck (lots). It’s no surprise that aporcyphal writings include a little extra material to “sanitize” the book!
Malachi is one of the great questioners of all time–and his retelling of God’s questions for man and man’s questions for God serves as an excellent spiritual check-up list for any of us.
Here’s this week’s PowerPoint.
Admittedly, this is not my favorite portion of scripture. To compensate for my lack of knowledge in the nuances of different interpretations of Daniel’s (crazy) visions, this week’s lesson PowerPoint is a compilation of links to sites — some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t, that offer explanations and clarifications of these prophecies. I hope that you’ll continue to study–and if you come up with a coherent interpretation of these passages–will you share them with me in the comments?
This week’s discussion revolved around the many questions from the book of Job. For one, why in the world is it not pronounced like it looks like it should be? :-)
We considered the problem of pain and suffering. God points out Job to Satan. Were it not for His actions, we could assume that Job’s life would have missed the suffering he experienced, and so on.
We looked at files from other congregations. Here are their materials:
More to come next week…
This week we wrote cards — I hope you will too. Here’s our brief PowerPoint.
Check out the page under Ministry Tools for internet content filtering ideas….I’ve added a new one using the free OpenDNS service…