One of the most common stumbling blocks I have heard people cite, when they explain why they have difficulty understanding (or accepting) the God of the Bible, is the concept that God knows the future. The difficulty they find lies in claiming that if God knows the future, then that future is fixed, and therefore none of us has free will.

We have been going through the book of 1 Samuel at Church. And last week we covered chapters 4 through 7. My task was to comment on a subject that stood out to me in those chapters, in 5 to 10 minutes. This is my take…

We are now winding down the study through the Gospel according to Mark. Last time we covered the story of the crucifixion. It is a story so well known that on re-reading it we can easily miss something, involuntarily skipping something, because we assume we know every detail. But that is true of the whole Gospel, isn’t it? Mark’s version is short, compact, and every word, every scene, counts.

Mark’s narrative of the Passion is swift and direct, almost matter of fact. Everything that needed to be set in motion has been set in motion and there is no turning back… because if this is God’s Plan nothing can stop it. Still, every participant, every observer, has a choice to make.

One of the things that I used to say to the men in Jail at our Church service was that whenever they read a story in the Bible, they should try to imagine themselves as the characters of that story. Because these people were regular people, just like us. Today it is time to imagine we are Peter.

Fully God and fully Man, that is the standing of orthodox Christianity on the nature of Jesus of Nazareth. Nowhere in Scripture is that more clearly displayed than in the narrative of the arrest, trial, and execution of the Messiah