God gave Jonah the prophet a task: “Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry out against it, because their wickedness has come up before Me.”[1] Jonah was a prophet during the early part of the 8th century, B.C. Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, was located Read more…
The Samaritans occupied parts of what had previously been the northern kingdom of Israel. The Jews in Jesus’ day refused to have anything to do with them. (See John 4:9.) The feud probably originated as far as 722 B.C. when the Assyrians (from what is now northern Iraq) conquered the Read more…
Jesus’ story about the “good Samaritan,” in Luke 10:30-37, is so well known that the expression is part of our lexicon, referring to anyone who goes out of their way to do a good deed for someone—especially for a stranger. But I fear that much of the story’s impact has Read more…
I want to tell you two stories about forgiveness. 1. Rachelle Friedman, a bride-to-be, attended her bachelorette party a few days before the wedding. Around midnight she and some of her friends went swimming. A friend playfully pushed her into the pool, but the water was too shallow—she struck her Read more…
Most of the New Testament was originally written in Greek, the language of business, commerce, and government in the eastern Roman Empire. Greek has four words that can be translated as our English word, “love”: eros, storge, phileô, and agape. Eros refers to sexual love—the mutual attraction between the sexes. Read more…