God Doesn’t Want Us to Study Him; He Wants Us to Know Him When people first learn that I have a PhD and where I did my postgrad work, they assume I’m into theology. Imagine their disappointment to find out I don’t care about the concept or want to pursue a right theology, that I […]
We Must Exercise Care with the Labels We Use for Our Spiritual Leaders Rabbi is a title I expected to find scattered throughout the Old Testament. It seems like a very Old Testament word. It’s not. It’s a New Testament word. Rabbi only appears in the Gospels and then just three of them: Matthew, Mark, […]
Doctor Luke records a curious line when writing about the early church. He says “…some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees…” That means some Christians were also Pharisees, a Pharisee Christian. How strange. Isn’t that a contradiction? Pharisees and the Sadducees Judaism at the time was comprised of two main […]
Disunity Today Hurts the Cause of Jesus In our consideration of words that appear only in the New Testament, we come across Pharisees and Sadducees. Two related words are Zealot and Nazarene, along with Essene. Pharisees Appearing ninety-nine times in the New Testament, the Pharisees receive the most attention. They were a righteous group of […]
Both Groups Commit Theological Errors We Must Avoid In Jesus’s lifetime, there were two major sects in Judaism: Pharisees and Sadducees. Both sects appear in the Bible, with Pharisee mentioned ninety-nine times and Sadducee occurring fifteen, all in the New Testament and mostly in the Gospels. Though Jesus extended love and acceptance to all people, […]
These Characteristics of Pharisee Thinking Jesus loves everyone. He accepts those on the fringe, the people who society dismiss. Jesus embraces people who do wrong and who live immoral lives. Yet there was one group he criticized, and he did so often: the Pharisees. Don’t be a Pharisee. Aren’t we glad we’re not Pharisees? We […]
A guy who ponders deep theological thoughts recently shared two concepts with me: intentional Protestantism and accidental Protestantism. Both relate to the Reformation of the Christian church, some five hundred years ago. What about accidental Christianity or intentional Christianity? Back then, a group of people saw problems in the church and broke from it, forming […]
Whether or not we realize it, all aspects of our lives include traditions: unexamined habits and mindless rituals. But perhaps traditions most often exist in our approach to God and our worship of him. While some traditions had a positive origin, others were misguided from the start. With little thought we pass our traditions from […]
When we think of the word pharisee, we envision a narrow-minded, hypocritical, self-righteous person. To call someone a pharisee is an insult. So, when we read pharisee in the Bible, we automatically think ill of that person. However, a Pharisee was someone devoted to following a strict moral code aligned with Moses’ instructions, which he received from […]
In The Error of the Sadducees and Pharisees, it was noted that the Sadducees’s error was taking away from the Bible, dismissing or ignoring certain sections. Paul notes that the Sadducees did not believe in resurrection, angels, and spirits, even though all are addressed in the Old Testament. In order to challenge or trick Jesus, […]