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church study

Biblical Requirements and Responsibilities of Deacons in the Church

Scripture tells us almost nothing about the selection, work, and office of the deacon.

In the early church, deacons were church officers—third to bishops and elders—and they had to be obeyed and respected “as Jesus Christ.”  (Tabb, B. J. (2016). Deacon.) Mounce (Pastoral Epistles) points out that at one point the deacon was over the church serving the bishop (Pastoral Epistles, 210) instead of serving the church. Today, a deacon is everything from a trustee to ordained ministers who are a step down from priests.

We need to dig deep.

Categories
hermeneutics human salvation scripture study

What Is Faith (According to The Bible)?

What is faith? I’ve seen answers that range from another religion (for example “one of many faiths”) down through some sort of fairy-tale opinion that stands opposed to science.

In the Bible, we’ll see all sorts of usage on “faith” and “belief”—sometimes even referring to when someone adheres to the doctrines that make up Christianity. One of the best usages of faith is the one that is tied to the concept of justification.

Faith is just an archaic word for trust. What I love about seeing faith, or trust, tied to justification in texts like Romans 4 (see more of the Romans study), that it explains the nature of the concept even while using, basically, case-law. No more fuzzy lessons grounded in someone’s personal trust issues, but rather taking the structure of Hebrews 11:1 where it says “faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen” and garnishing it with doctrinal meat.

Categories
religion study

Should Christians Go To A Chiropractor?

What is Chiropractic

Chiropractic is type of alternative medicine. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) defines alternative medicine as “medicine that is not generally considered part of conventional medicine”. The reason that it Chiropractic not considered part of conventional medicine is because, like other forms of alternative medicine, the claims of the practice lack observable, repeatable, and scientifically rigorous evidence.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t any evidence (there’s a bunch of anecdotal evidence); it is to say that the evidence is not scientifically established nor is it repeatable. So one of the NCCAM’s missions is to study through scientific investigation the usefulness and safety of complementary and alternative medicine.

Categories
human rey's a point study

Be Careful With Kisses

kisses

Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.

This saying, a proverb, highlights a problem that was happening 2500 years ago and is still happening today: people mis-diagnose relationships.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that the proverb is a rule about all relationships. To understand the saying, you have to understand how proverbs work.

A proverb is like key that you use on a specific door. You can’t apply them for every single situation. So that makes the Book of Proverbs like a huge keychain with a bunch of keys. You have to find the right situation to apply the saying.

This is why sometimes they sound (but are not really) contradictory.

For instance: Proverbs 26:4 says “Don’t answer a fool according to his folly” while Proverbs 26:5 says “Answer a fool according to his folly”!

Categories
scripture study

Typology in a Nut shell: What is Typology?

studytools01

If you’ve been in church within the last thirty years you’ve seen, bad or good, typology. If you’ve been in church only the last five years you probably don’t have a clue what it is.

Typology is the study of pictures or patterns that function in some sort of predictive way—though not necessarily foretelling the future. That doesn’t make a lot of sense and it’s really way too simplistic so I’ll have to explain it in three levels while first telling you why this is important.