Release Date: May 24, 2023
Questions
Referring to Genesis 49 where Jacob blesses his sons before he dies, is there a different context to the word “blessing”? Many of Jacob’s blessings for his sons don’t sound like what we would consider blessings in the modern context. (5:20)
Is there any correlation or significance when we see the “hand of God” in Scripture? We see it in the Exodus narrative with God’s hand being against Pharaoh and Egypt, then the Pharaoh’s magicians admitting one of the plagues is the “finger of God,” the Ten Commandments were written by the finger of God, and later on in Daniel we see a manifestation of a hand writing on the wall sent by God. (7:30)
How long did Job go through his season of suffering? (10:20)
Are the sons of Korah that wrote a few of the psalms from the same Korah that we find in the lineage of Esau? (10:55)
In Joshua 21:43, it says the Lord gave the Israelites all the land he swore to give their fathers and they took possession of it. However, God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 15:18-21 included land from Egypt’s river to the Euphrates river and my research is mixed as to whether the Israelites ever possessed land to the Euphrates and some researchers interpret Egypt’s river as the Red Sea instead of the Nile river, because almost everyone agrees the Israelites didn’t possess land to the Nile. Is this an instance of being lost in translation or is there something I’m missing? (11:45)
My daughter attends the local Catholic school and she comes home with many questions about the Catholic faith that are difficult to answer. Recently, she learned of different miracles in the Catholic Church such as a priest eating the bread at communion and it literally turned into flesh dripping with blood and another where a doll of Mary was crying real tears. She asked me if they were true and if I believed them. The honest answers to these questions are “I don’t know” and “I’m very skeptical” but I didn’t say that to her. I found myself struggling to find a response that would encourage her to be discerning of these miracles but also not so skeptical to never believe in the miracles that God clearly did all throughout the Bible and still does today. How should a Protestant Christian respond to these miracles? How should I have responded to her question? (13:25)
I was talking to my Mother-in-law over Easter and we are both struggling on what the right thing to do is with – pronouns. We have a gender confused nephew who identifies as a woman and his girlfriend identifies as they/them. Jesus loves everyone and we should live like Jesus. These gender issues today are really the devil playing mind games with people. There are 2 genders – man and woman. Also in the Bible only the devil is referred to as they/them. As a Christian how should we approach this gender issue? (21:35)
- Article (What’s Josh Reading?) in our weekly email back on February 24, 2023. https://www.str.org/w/why-agree-to-use-preferred-names-but-not-preferred-pronouns-
Matt kept saying that the Lord provides (present tense), but when he was talking about Jesus being our substitute, he switched to past tense. Was that correct or should they all have been in present tense? Or is either tense correct? (23:25)
Matt was kind of light-hearted about the name of the place being called Jehovah Jireh, but how did we move historically from it being the name of a place to a name of God? (24:20)