The Bible
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘The Bible’
Five young women cared enough about a man’s wedding-day to make the smallest of sacrifices, and received the best of rewards.
The Parable of the Ten Virgins was told as a caution to those who think that conscientious preparation for the Hereafter is unnecessary. Five young women hired as lamp-bearers for a Jewish wedding assumed they could beg, borrow or buy oil when the time came.
Adam and Eve are set in a Garden of carefree delight, but the Snake swears they are victims of a cruel deception.
Early in the 6th century BC, the leaders of Jerusalem were forced out of their land and scattered across the Near East, as a punishment for ignoring God’s laws. It was then that they wrote the story of Adam and Eve, drawing on ancient traditions to fashion a profound reflection on the ongoing story of mankind’s troubled yet hopeful relationship with his Maker.
A man born blind is healed by Jesus, but finds himself a social outcast as a result.
Jesus has been avoiding Jerusalem, but now he has taken the fateful step. Immediately he engulfs himself in controversy by coming to the aid of a woman accused of adultery, and by appearing to claim to be God. When he heals a blind man on the Sabbath the Pharisees hope he has at last done something they can prosecute him for.
God’s love proved to be bigger and stronger than all man’s wickedness.
In the 6th century BC, Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians, and her nobility were deported to Babylon. In their exile, they studied their oppressor’s heathen mythology of a great flood, and turned it quite brilliantly into an allegory of Israel’s sins, the ‘flood’ of invasion, and their own Noah-like role in keeping Judaism alive until God restored Israel to her land.