Faith, Grace, and Hope

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Then Jephthah sent messengers to the king of the Ammonites and said, “What is there between you and me, that you have come to me to fight against my land?” The king of the Ammonites answered the messengers of Jephthah, “Because Israel, on coming from Egypt, took away my land from the Arnon to the Jabbok and to the Jordan; now therefore restore it peaceably.” Once again Jephthah sent messengers to the king of the Ammonites and said to him: “Thus says Jephthah: Israel did not take away the land of Moab or the land of the Ammonites, but when they came up from Egypt, Israel went through the wilderness to the Red Sea and came to Kadesh. Israel then sent messengers to the king of Edom, saying, ‘Let us pass through your land’; but the king of Edom would not listen. They also sent to the king of Moab, but he would not consent. So Israel remained at Kadesh. Then they journeyed through the wilderness, went around the land of Edom and the land of Moab, arrived on the ea

ROMANS 4:13-25 & MARK 8:31-38 Christians who look to qualify the flood by saying it might have been a flooding of the Mediterranean Sea, rather than the whole world always fascinate me. The same with those people who look to the story of Jonah and want to be sure we understand that it’s an allegorical parable and that there is no fish that can swallow a person. And, again the same with the people who continuously look for explanations for how Jesus and Peter were able to walk on water. Mysteriously frozen lake? Ice floes? Particularly thick algae cover? The Bible is full of things that we take on faith and it seems sometimes we need to find a way to explain some of the miracles because otherwise our minds might explode. Yet two of the greatest miracles of the Bible are presented in the readings for this week and in general we take them on faith. We usually accept that Abraham and Sarah had a child together when they were well past the age at which people normally concei