Sabbath School From Home

Analogies are so compelling that we need to be careful to keep them the right way around.

Humans are story-telling creatures and so good analogies and narratives captivate us. The opening "prologue" of John's gospel introduces many of the central themes that reappear throughout the book. Perhaps it is possible to get things mixed up if we end up focussing more on the analogy than on Christ himself.

Standing for the Truth is vital, but what if our "truth" needs tweaking?

History is full of people who passionately defended what they felt was true, but which seems more questionable to us in retrospect. This problem is not new - exactly the same thing occurred in Biblical times. Throughout the Gospels people struggle to accept the Truth in Jesus because of their passion for defending truth they inherited or developed. John 9 tells a fascinating story all about knowledge, which highlights the way that conversations about truth are often motivated by working out who is in and who is out. We take comfort in Jesus being "the way the truth and the life", and it seems that standing on the truth still allows room for growth and even uncertainty.

Why is it so hard to accept an incarnational nature of scripture?

Christians take that name because of their belief in Jesus as God incarnate - the whole point is that He had to become human in order for us to better understand who God is (and what we mean to Him). It seems reasonable to encounter the Bible in the same way: inspiration but through genuinely human authors.

"Love or selfishness" forms an interesting axis.

It might seem strange not to contrast love with hate, but the book of 1 John spends a lot of time on the relationship between love and a focus on what is best for others. It is quite a stimulating perspective on love and its role in the revelation of God. We realise that love can have many "opposites", each of which represents a somewhat "great controversy" that we each must navigate in the particulars of life.

This new season will explore "the Great Controversy", and so we start with some of the biggest questions about good and evil.

It is easy to get tied up in knots with this sort of thing, ending up squeezed into a rhetorical corner that sounds like God is responsible for bad things in the world. In a way that's the whole point of this theme and exploration - searching for a way to express a deep conviction that God is good and just even while we acknowledge pain and suffering. We definitely have more questions than answers, which is perhaps appropriate for this introductory episode of the season.