Churches around the world who participate in the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual January Bible Study will be studying the book of Exodus in 2009. Thanks to our tax dollars at work, those leading the studies are apt to have an added challenge. Why? Because the taxpayer-funded Public Broadcasting System recently debuted a two-hour Nova special called The Bible’s Buried Secrets that, among other things, floated the ideas that: · The patriarchs of Israel may have never existed· The so-called Israelites were really Canaanites· The exodus as depicted in the Bible never happened· Moses wasn’t a historical character· The so-called “Books of Moses” were actually compiled many centuries after the supposed events they recount· Exodus was written by multiple authors, none of them Moses (who didn’t exist)· And all of the above is settled fact upon which all intelligent scholars agree[i] William Dever, one of the featured archaeologists on the program, said that the PBS Nova special was “designed for intelligent people . . . who want to read the Bible in a modern way.” [ii] One would hope that every pastor leading a Bible Study in his church would want to be intelligent about the matter and take into account any pertinent modern knowledge.
Must such a pastor reject the main narrative in the book of Exodus, negating the heart of Old Testament history and...
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bible critics, exodus, nova, pbs, tv
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Moses had died. Joshua and the nation of Israel found themselves on the brink of a new era, at the edge of a place they had never been before. Isn't that where we are today? On the threshold of a new year . . . a year we have never seen before.
I can remember when A.D. 2009 sounded like the setting for a science fiction movie. In 2009, so I thought, we would get around with jet packs while robots did all our work. But here we are, in pretty much the same circumstances we were in when we were dreaming about flying saucers and one-hour work weeks.
How shall we enter this new year? None of us has been this way before. We don't know what kind of giants, what kind of battles, await us in the coming year.
But surely the Lord's instructions to Joshua are applicable to us today.
Heeding God's Word in Joshua 1, let's . . .
ENTER 2009 CLAIMING THE PROMISES OF GOD
1:1 After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua the son of Nun, Moses' assistant, 2 “Moses my servant is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the people of Israel. 3 Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, just as I promised to Moses. 4 From the wilderness and...
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2009, bible reading, joshua 1, new year, one-year bible, presence of god, promises of god
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