Genesis 2:2-3 The French revolution turned everything upside down, including the arrangement of time. They used decimalisation in a thoroughgoing way, dividing each day into ten hours and each week into ten days. But it didn’t catch on. After onl...
Genesis 1:27 I can happily sit people watching for ages. It fascinates me that we are all so incredibly different from one another. In size, shape, colour, height, age and ability, we are all absolutely unique. However, we have one thing in commo...
Genesis 1:3-4 It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of light. Without light there is no life. It’s as simple as that. So it is not surprising to discover that, on the first day of creation, God created light. With the introduction of ligh...
Genesis 1:1-2 It is important not to rush past these verses. They may be so familiar to us that it would be easy to skip over them. But don’t! These words are foundational for the whole Bible and, indeed, for each of our lives. They are telling u...
Luke 2:29-32 Eight days after Jesus’ birth, his parents took him to the temple for his circumcision. There is no suggestion that the people of Jerusalem understood the significance of this moment. All that the people saw was a poor young couple p...
Luke 2:19 This sentence is what I would call a piece of considerable understatement! Mary, who was probably a teenager and who almost certainly knew very little about the world, had just given birth to the Messiah. She had certainly been given pl...
Luke 2:16-18 Just imagine if this was happening now. Bethlehem would be swamped with news reporters and film crews, and all the shepherds would have microphones thrust in front of them. The world would be hanging on their every word and the detai...
Luke 2:13-14 The shepherds received the news of Jesus’ birth from a single angel who was then joined by a vast crowd of angels to sing an amazing chorus of praise. The language used recalls Job 38:7, which states when God created the world “the m...
Luke 2:10-11 The angel’s message is fascinating because its content is both incredibly Jewish and yet embraces the whole world. The angel made it clear that the baby was the Messiah, the one who came to fulfil the Old Testament scriptures. But, a...
Luke 2:8-9 The shepherds would have been well used to facing dangers in the desert. They were constantly threatened by wolves and other wild animals, but angels were a different matter! This was completely outside their experience, and they would...
Luke 2:6-7 When Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, they found that it was heaving with people who had arrived for the census, which the Romans had demanded. In the Jewish law, censuses were forbidden and so the holding of a census was a furthe...
Luke 2:4-5 If you travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem these days it is a relatively easy journey. The roads are good, and you should get there by car in about two and half hours. Mary and Joseph’s experience would have been completely different. On...
Matthew 1:22-23 Loneliness is one of the greatest problems of our society and it is on the increase. This matters because loneliness is incredibly dangerous. It increases the risk of death by 26 per cent; is more damaging to health than obesity;...
Matthew 1:19 At the centre of the account of Jesus’ birth is a man about whom we know very little. Joseph was the legal father of Jesus and Matthew’s Gospel begins with Jesus’ family line through Joseph. But after the birth of Jesus, we meet Jose...
Luke 1:78-79 Tender mercy is an exquisite expression and takes us to the heart of the nature of God. Much of the Old Testament is an agonising description of God’s people’s rebellion against him. There were some good times, but they were few in n...
