The Bible Bloke

  Pressing the reset button. G’day, and welcome back to the Bible Bloke Podcast where I try to keep faith simple, practical and real. I can’t believe that it has been so long since I recorded an episode for this podcast. The podcasting platform I was using has ceased to exist, which left me with the problem of reinventing, revamping, and / or renewing. When you start doing the dance with technology you are bound to face frustrations and difficulties, and there was no exception here. I was reminded of a scene in one of my favourite movies, The God’s Must be Crazy. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. In one scene, our intrepid hero and his not so trusty Land Rover are stuck in a river. He pulls the winch cable up onto the riverbank but finds nowhere to fasten it, except an overhanging branch. Now, for some reason he sets the winch running and leaves it to its own devices. When he returns, the winch has done its job, and the Land Rover is dangling from the tree. Of ...

The start of a New Year is looming, and the usual tussle of New Year's resolutions is happening off stage. Over the last few days, I have been looking into Bible reading plans. I wanted to find one that I could stick to. I get sidetracked very easily wanting to study in more depth, word studies, topical studies, manners and customs and background. This is by no means a bad thing, but it doesn't get the job done in terms of beginning to end in one year. At the end of 2024 I am in the last couple of chapters of 1 Samuel, and I have just finished the Gospel of Luke. That gives you an idea how deeply impacted I am by this malaise of digression! There were a few options. A few too many really. It seems that almost anyone of any ilk offers a Bible reading plan. Variations on a theme. There are two main types. The first is the traditional start at Genesis end up at Revelation and read Psalms and Proverbs as you go. There are others that break the Bible down into genre, grouping...

  "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Eph 6:12 I spent some time last night scrolling through my Facebook feed. I paused to read a meme here, a snippet there. I stopped and read a comment by a long time and experienced author who was expressing fear caused by the push of AI into the world of writing and publishing. The advent of self publishing and the relative ease with which one can now published a book has muddied the waters, in that there is now a deluge of poor quality work being thrown up for a reader to pick through and either toss aside or give a go. I am thankful that most of the time I can use the feature "Read a Sample," so I can see how good, or sadly more often, how awful the writing is. Enter AI into this fray. Artificial Intelligence. Computers that are programmed to be intelligent, to think, to reason, ...

One of the things we do a lot of everyday, and we probably don't acknowledge it much, is thinking. Excuse my pun, but we don't think about the act or fact of thinking. Well, not very often, and usually only in passing. Most times it happens when someone asks "What do you think about that?" or "What are your thoughts on this?" But what is a thought? And for that matter what is thinking? A thought it seems is indeed one of those little pole vaulting zaps of electro-chemical energy, hopping from synapse to synapse.     Just as your heart beats and you lungs breath your brain thinks. That's what it's made to do. 100 billion nerve cells. All working towards the functioning of your body, and the 80,000 thoughts you have each and every day. I'm not sure I'm conscious of having that many, I mean, 80,000 is a lot (and who figures this stuff out? How on earth do you put a figure on that? Or is it one of those informed guestimates you are often given w...

 This will probably run along the lines of Worldview part 2, but that’s OK, let’s get it cranked up and see where we go. Let me start off by saying there are things I don’t know. To be honest with you there are things I don’t want to know, but that’s another story. There are books I haven’t read, movies I haven’t seen and there are books and movies I don’t want to see. My mother was a big influence on my early reading habits, and very much my early viewing habits. Mum loved murder mysteries, and she loved westerns. I enjoy a good who-dun-it, but I can take or leave westerns. Mum would hand me a book, and I would generally read it. There were some I just couldn’t get into, much as I tried. I remember having a copy of a booked called Swallows and Amazon’s, and for the life of me I couldn’t get past the first page. One day I might find a copy and read it and figure out why. But here we have one of life’s puzzles. I’m sure there are people who loved that book when they read it as kids....

I want to take a bit of time tackling a concept that looms large in the background or our now, and our every day.  This idea of worldview. If you've never thought about it, that's OK. Trust me on this, everyone has a worldview. You might not be aware of it, but you have one. In order to understand how the world works, and how other people work, then it's important to grapple with this concept. I have worn glasses for as long as I can remember, until recently that is, when I had my cataracts done. As a kid I was always put down the back of the class. I never worked out why. Because I was chronically short sighted I had to squint at the blackboard, yes, in those days they still used chalk, and often I wouldn't be able to make out what was written there. I think it's a bit of an indictment on the education system of the day that kids like me were considered a bit dim because we just didn't get it. Hey guys, I didn't get it because I couldn't see it! Eventua...

 If someone asked you what the best selling book in the world, in say the last 50 years, what would your answer be? I can tell you, you won't find it on the New York Times best seller list. You might think Harry Potter, but you'd be wrong. You might put The Lord of the Rings at the top of the list, but you'd be way off the mark. The Da Vinci code? Hey,  it sold well, made a lot of money for Dan Brown, but it's not even close. Time and again one book not only tops the sales charts it blows them away. The Da Vinci code has sold around 57 million copies. The Lord of the Rings slots in at 103 million. Good old Harry Potter is sitting on a very healthy 400 million, thank you very much. These guys face complete embarrassment. In the last 60 years, the book we know as The Holy Bible has sold 3,900 million copies. Wow. 3.9 billion. Let me throw some other statistics into the pot, to give it a bit of flavour. On a quick interweb search I discovered that the YouVersion Bible app ...

  Have you ever had one of those times when you just want to stand there and scream, not out of anger but out of sheer frustration? Sometimes when you have doubts that layer one on top of the other things start looking a lot like a Sara Lee pastry. What then? That old quip, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” springs quickly to mind, but that isn’t really helpful is it? How can I make lemonade out of doubts? I can sit in the sun and sip that lemonade and still feel troubled by the things around me, by the grumps I have with my circumstances. So what do you do about doubt? The opening line to the hymn looms out of the shadows: “When my love to Christ grows weak, When for deeper faith I seek, Then in thought I go to thee, Garden of Gethsemane.” To think on this, I am reminded how small I am. How much tension, anxiety, even terror Our Lord must have felt while He prayed in the Garden. O, Father, take this cup from me, but only if it is Your will. He walked ahead, firm in His re...

One of the things we get caught up on as Christian's is the word 'meek.' Somehow this word has come to mean wimpy, rather than just mild or gentle.  What was the original meaning? The word πραυς 'praus' is difficult to translate. Being meek does not mean being 'weak.' If we study Jesus as He is presented in the Gospel's we find He is anything but wishy washy. Here is a man who is firm and decisive in His actions. There is so much restrained strength in Him. And that's what meek means.  Meek is God's Strength, ALL of His strength under control in Christ.  We are limited in English as we do not have a word that encompasses this blend of both gentleness and strength.  Jesus is God's strength under control; it is now out own strength we are looking to. It is trust in God's goodness and control over any given situation, rather than self assertion or self reliance, is it Christ reliance. It is a deep knowledge that God's goodness is in acti...

 It wasn’t unusual for a Saturday, having to drop children off at sundry social engagements. This particular morning it was a session of paintball for a mate’s birthday party.  There were rain clouds in the sky, sure, but no indication that trouble of another sort was brewing. The alternator in the car had been a bit cranky, but a few whacks with a hammer by the technician from the auto club and it had been humming along for the past week and a bit.  As a precaution I had put the battery on charge the night before, and all was well. The car started first up and was purring like a happy kitten. Number one son was behind the wheel clocking up some hours on his learners. We had just dropped off number two son, done a u-turn and from the driver’s seat I hear: “Dad, the car feels weird.”  And he pulled over to the side of the road, and I swapped with him, and he was right. Engine was going, but there was no power. I turned the engine off, and went to restart and CLICK. Oh...

I grew up on a diet of western’s and murder mysteries. My mother would let me sit up and watch shows such as Callan, and Z Cars. Later it was Kojak and Columbo. Any movie with John Wayne, or Alan Ladd was a winner. We thrilled many a time waiting in that moment when the villain would spring the trap and my mother would cry “dirty work at the crossroads.” It was lost on me that it was always Danny Williams who made the arrests in Hawaii Five O. The leg work couldn’t have been done without Danny doing what Danny did, and the show wouldn’t be the same without “Book him, Danno,” rounding off each episode. Later, when I discovered the Lord of the Rings, I realised that Frodo could not have achieved what he did without the rock solid support of Sam. Sam was very much about strength of character and faithfulness. If you think of any hero or heroine there is someone standing at their side who supports them in what they do, or in some way makes their victories possible. They d...

In Romans chapter 3 verse 23 we read:  “… for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  It pops up in a section about the law which takes a bit of wading through. Essentially Paul is saying that because of Jesus’ sacrifice we are no longer justified by the law, but rather we are brought into what F.B. Meyer calls the “condition” of Holiness, which is achieved, as we see in the next verse, through “His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.”  In many a movie the intrepid hero and his companions fall into quick sand, and slowly sink up to their necks. After an ad break they somehow manage to extricate themselves, to move onto the next calamity, the next dark and sinister challenge.  But what if there was no way to get out? What if you were stuck there forever and ever? Slowly sinking. Sand trickling into your mouth despite all your efforts to prevent it from happening?  And the only way for rescue to happen is to make a faith call....