Zacharias did not believe the words of Gabriel about the fact that he and Elizabeth were to be the parents of the forerunner of the Messiah. Instead of accepting the message from heaven, he thought what God had said just could not happen. How could two old people become parents? The answer from Gabriel gives us insight into the nature of prophecy.…

The ancient Hebrews had a word which affirmed the truthfulness of what was said. That same word was literally brought over into the Greek language with the same affirmation about truth. It may seem strange, but that same Hebrew/Greek word became an English word. That word is amen. It appears 30 times in the Old Testament and 132 times in the New…

The word “amen” is found so often in the Bible, but we can so easily overlook just how often it appears. It is of Hebrew origin and became part of the Greek vocabulary. The Hebrew word is found 30 times in the Old Testament and 132 times in the New Testament and is so often simply brought over into the English Bible…

Sometimes problems come about because there is conflict about who becomes the leader in a particular situation. You see this in the lives of children, but it continues even into our adult lives. There is a religious application of this in the deeper study of one particular Greek word and how it is used. Sometimes there are situations where it makes no…

The church in Colosse was predominately Gentile and had grown up in a pagan world. However, there were those Judaizing teachers who had come among them and sought to force Gentile Christians to become circumcised and keep many rituals of the Judaism. They had left pagan worship with all the rituals of idolatry and now faced a new challenge of those who…

We do not always know the circumstances about what was happening when the psalmist took his pen to let us see what a man after God’s own heart was dealing with. Such is not the case of Psalm 96. The historical setting of that psalm is found 1 Chronicles chapter sixteen. King David had defeated the Jebusites who occupied Jerusalem and had…

The forceful power of a small word in a single verse in the Bible can so easily be overlooked. The key to understanding the signs of the end in Matthew 24 is found in the word “all” in verse thirty-four. The time of the establishment of the kingdom is found in Daniel 7:13-14 when one notices the word “to” instead of the…

We have watched those moments when athletes are about to start their race for the Olympic gold medal. They have done this so often since they first lined up to race, perhaps when they were still in grammar school. In various ways the official has said, “On your marks, get set, go.” The starting gun sounds, and the race begins. Those starting…