Bible Commentaries

Genesis 20 overview — blessed. And it was imperative that the wonder of God's amazing grace should not appear as being the result of merit or sinlessness on Abraham's part. As Willis noted: God wanted to make it clear that, "It was not because of Abraham's righteousness or faith that he gave him a son, but out of God's own mercy and love."John T. Willis, Genesis (Austin: Sweet Publishing Company, 1979), p. 271. The current theory that Abraham was possessed of some glorious kind of "saving faith" at this period of his life

Genesis 27 overview — God had foretold in his promises to Abraham and Isaac. The almost monotonous detail of this section is a strange mingling of righteousness and wickedness, of successes and disasters, of heroism and knavery, of strength and weakness, and of doubt and faith. The purpose of this detailed account would appear to be that of providing a window of observation, from which the clear and inevitable consequences of sin are manifested in the lives of Israel, with the necessary deduction that whatever happened

2 Chronicles 20:14-19 — by this same kind of a spiritual awakening of God's people, and by their most fervent prayers and supplications. There was one exceedingly unfortunate result of these many divine deliverances of Israel. Long after the nation as a whole had lost all faith in God and were indulging themselves in the most shameful immoralities, when they were threatened, as here, they pleaded for God's deliverance; and the frequency of those rescues led eventually to a conviction in Israel that, regardless of their

Isaiah 56:1-2 — command to "keep the sabbath" is a synecdoche, standing for all of the obligations of the law of Moses. This figure is used extensively throughout both the Old Testament and the New Testament, as in the New Testament declaration that men are justified "by faith," which means the belief, acceptance, and obedience to all the obligations of the Christian religion. It will recur in Isaiah 56:4 and Isaiah 56:6.

Matthew 12:42 — The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here. The superior faith of the Queen of the South is seen in that she came upon a paucity of evidence, responding to rumor, or hearsay. The ends of the earth, according to Barnes, referred to "the most distant parts of the habitable world then known."Albert Barnes,

Matthew 14:24 — stern of the ship during a storm; but in this instance the disciples were alone. In that case, they had him on board and could arouse him in an emergency; but in this, Jesus was out of sight, and they were learning the hard way what it means to walk by faith and not by sight.

Matthew 16:7-8 — And they reasoned among themselves, saying, We took no bread. And Jesus perceiving it said, O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have no bread? The need of Jesus' warning appeared in the fact that, even at that late hour, the apostles were far too literal in construing the words of Christ. The Saviour's warning against the Pharisees

Matthew 21:32 — believing, repenting, and being baptized. All the vaunted righteousness of the Pharisees could not save them while they were in rebellion against God's commands, nor can all the moral excellence of upright men today avail anything for them apart from faith and obedience of the Lord's commandments. By the same premise, all the sins of the publicans and harlots could not take away their hope as long as they heard and obeyed the Lord. Christ himself put it like this, "He that believeth and is baptized

Matthew 9:22 — But Jesus turning and seeing her said, Daughter, be of good cheer; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour. It is plain from this that Jesus rejected whatever of superstition there may have been in the woman's act. A suspicion that some element of superstition might have motivated her

Mark 10:9 — course, Christ was not dealing with the problem of governing earthly states, but with that of revealing tht true will of Almighty God to his human creation. Intrinsically, these words apply to anything and everything that God has joined together. Thus, faith and baptism are joined as preconditions of salvation (Mark 16:16): glorifying God is to be "in the church and in Christ Jesus" (Ephesians 3:21), thus joining Jesus and his spiritual body the church.

Mark 9:16-18 — and the Nestle Greek text concur in this). Further, there is the phenomenon of demon possession, confirmed by our Savior's conversation with the Twelve afterward. The complicated nature of the malady, as well as the evident slackening of the apostles' faith, perhaps due to the campaign of the scribes, seems to have entered into the failure of the disciples to effect a cure. See under Mark 9:29.

John 16:31 — them, Do ye now believe? Behold the hour cometh, yea, is come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. Do ye now believe? … is not a questioning of their faith, which was genuine enough; but it was a warning against overconfidence. The Old Testament prophet had written, "Smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered" (Zechariah 13:7), and Mark (Mark 14:27) identified the scattering of

John 20 overview — good news; and had he remained in the grave, there could have been no Christianity. As Paul declared, absolutely everything depended upon the physical resurrection of Christ. IF the resurrection did not occur: The preaching of the apostles is vain; The faith of all Christians is vain; The apostles are false witnesses; All men are still in their sins; The dead in Christ have perished. — 1 Corinthians 15:12-19 Regarding the somber impact of the dead Saviour, Morgan wrote: He was dead. His enemies

Acts 12:5 — remarks commentators have made about the church's praying for Peter's release and their total surprise when it occurred, two things are pertinent: (1) It is not declared that they prayed for Peter's release. It could be that they were praying that Peter's faith would not fail, as it had so conspicuously failed when he denied the Lord. (2) If they were praying for his release, this being not at all unlikely, then the surprise would have been at the dramatic suddenness and manner of it.

Acts 5:22-24 — had already grown far beyond anything they could have thought possible. It seems to have been utterly beyond their comprehension that God would remove their whole nation rather than allow them permanently to block the world-wide proclamation of the faith in Christ. Captain of the temple … See note on this official under Acts 4:1.

Romans 12:3 — For I say, through the grace that was given to me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think: but so to think as to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to each man a measure of faith. Even after Christ is enthroned in the heart, the old mental habits and value-judgments of the natural man are prone to reassert themselves, these being the most persistent and pernicious of human sins. The body is relatively easy to bring under

1 Timothy 4 overview — Corinthians 11:3). The apostasy shall occur, or be centered, in the very temple of God, in context a reference to the church, the spiritual body of Christ (2 Thessalonians 2:1-12). See under those verses above. The falling (apostasy) "away from the faith" in this passage (1 Timothy 4:1-5) carries the presumption that the apostates were once in the true faith. Another phase of the apostasy, namely, its amorality and lawlessness, is stressed in 2 Timothy 3:1-8; and the indifference of Christians

Titus 3:7 — Commentary (Marion, Indiana: Cogdill Foundation, 1954), p. 205. but two of these meanings are predominant, "Justification" in the ultimate sense of being the grounds upon which the Father declares men to be righteous is grounded in the perfect faith and obedience of Jesus Christ our Lord, in whom sinners are justified by being united with, and actually incorporated into Christ's spiritual body, thus being, in fact, "Christ," and justified "as Christ." There is a secondary

Hebrews 12:5-6 — receiveth. This quotation is from Proverbs 3:11-12, and it is here applied forcefully to all citizens of the new institution. The exhortation, in this reference, takes a new turn. He had just been speaking of the fact that they had not been required to sea1 their faith with their blood; but now he stresses that even the hardships and sufferings which they did experience, far from being anything unusual, were exactly what they should have expected; and he charges them with having forgotten that the sufferings of

Revelation 3:14 — And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God: LAODICEA Laodicea is a word which has come to stand for lukewarmness, indifference and compromise. Some theorists make a big point out of what they affirm to be the meaning of the word: