WHETTING YOUR THEOLOGICAL APPETITE

By Stephen Ng 23  And it happened that He was passing through the grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples began to make their way along while picking the heads  of grain .   24  The Pharisees were saying to Him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?”   25  And He said to them,  “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions became hungry;   26  how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar  the  high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for  anyone  to eat except the priests, and he also gave it to those who were with him?”   27  Jesus said to them,  “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.   28  So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” Text: Mark 2: 23-28 (NASB, Bible Gateway) Introduction The Decalogue was issued to guide the nation of Israel in their pursuit of holiness. Its fourth commandment [1] highlighted the sacredness of the Sabbath which

A look at how literary genre affects the interpretation of Book of Revelations  By Stephen Ng Introduction   In the world of literature, genre simply means the ‘kind of writing’ (Keener 1993, 825) used in the literature. Gorman defines it as “a set of texts with common, distinctive feature” (Gorman 2001, 76) . It determines how a passage is to be interpreted   (Marshall, Travis and Paul 2002, 324) . Therefore, based on the conventions that an author uses, the genre can be broadly described as letter, narrative, historical, biography or poem. It is important that the genre is correctly identified as it would define how a particular passage or text is to be interpreted. Revelation is a book of hope. In the same manner that the Old Testament prophets spoke of a coming Messiah; in Revelation, we are looking forward to be with Christ in his full glory. When interpreting Revelation, it is important to have this overall context in mind. Revelation – A Brief Discussion on its Gen

By Stephen Ng Introduction The Gospel of Matthew was written in around AD 70. Some believe it was written at a time when the Temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans, while others argued that it was completed before the invasion of Jerusalem. According to early church fathers such as Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius and Gregory Nazianzen , the gospel presented Jesus as both the promised Messiah and the great Davidic King to the Jewish community. It also sought to address their needs as they were facing the challenges posed by a Pharisaic religious establishment (Berkhof 2004, 35) . The gospel then concluded with the Great Commission to share the gospel with the rest of the Gentile world (Keener 1993, 43-45) . According to Aune, Matthew organized his contents “around a common theme”, and “often very tightly focused and appears to be designed for teaching” [1] (Aune 2010, 301) . All of Jesus’ parables had both the “mysterious element” and the interpretations. According to