Paulson Post

"Power corrupts." This is a famous saying. To this we may add saying, "absolute power corrupts absolutely." David's sin with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11) is a typical illustration from the Bible on the corrupting influence of power. David happens to see Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, and he wants to make her his wife. But it is not easy even for the king in Israel to take the wife of another person. So, he devises a plan. He was the king and Uriah one of his employees, the best way to possess Uriah's wife is to get him killed. So the king sends Uriah to battle. David also tells his commander to position Uriah in the most vulnerable place where death is sure. And thus he manages to get him killed in the battle! And when the news of Uriah's death was brought to David the king, he makes a stoic comment: "It's Okay, the sword kills both sides." It is natural. David then sends for Bathsheba and she became his wife. The story goes on to say that her ...

The knowledge of Christ that strives to make him known as Paul did by his life is possible only when we are willing to move on beyond ourselves. In Philippians 3:10, when Paul talks about knowing Christ, he is not talking about a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. By this time (almost towards the end of ministry and life) Paul have had that knowledge. Nevertheless, he is talking about knowing Christ as a continuing process that culminates in attaining resurrection from the dead. I am even tempted to think that the expression "to know Christ" is a synonym for Christian life. Christian spirituality is a process of knowing Christ in increasing measure each day until we see him face to face in eternity. This knowing of Jesus requires rejecting everything that stands on the way of intimacy with Jesus. Raimondo Panikkar, a leading Christian theologian once remarked: "To arrive at God, we should not stop at us." That means if we are on a journey to know Christ, we should e...

I looked up Wikipedia for a definition of the word "Devotion" and was surprised to find that in Christianity "devotion" is identified with Bible Study. And that is very much true. When someone says that s/he had devotion in the morning what they mean usually is that they read their Bible. However, the meaning of the word is quite different from studying the scriptures. Devotion is being devoted to someone or something. It is ardent love or surrender in love. Many Hindu Bhaktas understand and practice devotion in that sense. However, in Christian spirituality we often tend to forget this aspect though it has a very prominent place in the Bible. For example, Jesus asking Peter if we love him more that all that he has is certainly a demand for ardent love and total surrender in love (John 21:15). Loving God is a dominant theme in both the Old and New Testaments. See for example the command in Deuteronomy 6:5: "Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with a...

"The days of Antipas" means not only a period of persecution but a period of perseverance as well. It signifies the days of believers who withstood the pressures from outside to surrender. In the church in the city of Pergamum, there were some people who remained faithful to Jesus in the days of severe persecution. Apostle John calls these days of persecution "the day of Antipas" (Rev. 2:13).  The Antipas mentioned here should not be confused with Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great. Herod Antipas was a wicked ruler whom Jesus called "fox". He is the one who offered the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter to his daughter. He might have tried to kill Jesus and presided over Jesus' trial. However, the Antipas mentioned in Revelation 2 was the bishop of Pergamum, a pagan city in the first century AD. The name means "against all." There is a great con trast in the names -- Herod was against all that was good, however, Antipas th...

People think that they can create a better world by annihilating all those who are against it, but Jesus may not agree! Recently, in Mumbai a man who appeared to be a thief was beaten to death. The people did not care to hand him over to the police, but they took the law in their own hands. That's what the Jewish leaders who brought the woman caught in adultery also wanted to do (John 8:1-11). Their thinking was very much in line with that of the legal and social systems of our day: the best way to get rid of sin is to annihilate the sinner. Those who commit crimes or sins continue by trivializing their act. People can always point out to bigger crimes and get away with their "small" offenses. They can always justify saying that they are not the only ones who does such things. We live in a day when people think that paying penance is the be best way to get over sin and its effect. Mahatma Gandhi once told a person who killed a Muslim boy during the riots following India...

" Confidence to pray stems out of the realization that God is in control of our situations. He can control and conquer the situations that we go through." Why do we pray to God? As all our actions must have some explanations, we must be able to explain why we pray to God. The prayer of the Psalmist is "Give us aid against the enemy, for the help of man is worthless" (Psalm 108:12). One of the reasons for this prayer is the confidence in God, which is reflected in verse 13: "With God we will gain victory, and he will trample down our enemies." The second reason is the realization that the human power is worthless. The psalmist cannot trust in human power in order to win the battle that he is engaged in. However, the most important reason is a realization of the sovereignty of God over the nations. The divine oracle cited in verses 7-9 is the basis of the prayer in verse 10. In this verse God's authority over the nations around Israel is spelt out. Israe...

“Listening to God through His Word must be a daily habit and ordering our life according to the revealed will of God must be an instinct.” I cannot drive without maps. During my short stay in the US a few months back, I always asked people for their ZIP code and downloaded a map with driving directions from Yahoo.com. I found this more dependable than calling up friends and getting the directions to their house over the phone. Being new to the country, I needed reliable guidance and I always depended on Yahoo maps! I am a stranger in this world too. I am moving forward in life. Every day new people, new circumstances, new challenges encounter me. I never been there before in most of these situations and I hardly know what to do. I desperately need guidance in life; some authority to tell me what to do, what to say and how to react. The psalmist who penned Psalm 119 was also in a similar situation. However, he is more poetic than me. He says of himself: "I am a stranger on earth...

"We have two options when we see our dear ones in sin. One is to do nothing about it and give it as much publicity as possible as Ham did. The other is to go and correct so that they may not continue in sin." It is normal to bungle, especially for the first time. In the first meeting to be chaired, the first speech to be done, it is normal to make mistakes. The very first day of driving, I scratched against a small truck and I learned that truck drivers in my city (Pune) do not pay much attention to the electric signals of other vehicles. However, as the Danish proverb says ("No dog bumps into the same stone again!") mistakes are not to be repeated. The Bible says Noah was the first to plant a vineyard (Genesis 9:20)!* Thus he must be the first person to make wine and drink it too. He probably did not have anyone to tell him that too much wine intoxicates and you lose control on your thinking and body. There was no one on earth to tell him that so much of wine can m...

Jesus is  not the king of the materially minded people; he had come to rule our hearts "Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself" (John 6:15). It was an opportunity that anyone who would like to have: to become king! However, Jesus runs away from that excellent opportunity. However, in John 18 when questioned by Pilate, Jesus ascertained that "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth" (John 18:37). At the same time he also had made clear that his kingdom "... is not of this world" (John 18:36). There are crucial differences between the way kingship was understood by the people of Jesus' day (including Pilate) and Jesus. That is why Jesus had to clarify that his kingship is not an earthly kingship. The people around Jesus, who had just eaten the food that Jesus multiplied from five loaves an...

The Crowd Puller The Crowd that Jesus Really Pulls! The Gospel of John presents Jesus as a loner in the opening chapters of the book. The statement in John 1:11 is rather startling: "He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him." And then we see Jesus walking (alone?) in John 1:29 when John the Baptist introduces him saying, "Look, the Lamb of God!" Then the following day Jesus gets two disciples of John the Baptist to follow him (John 1:35-42). In the second chapter, we see a small crowd around Jesus but they had come for the wedding in Cana and not because of Jesus. Then until chapter 6, he mostly ministers to solitary individuals: Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, etc. However, by the time we reach the sixth chapter he has become so popular that there were 5000 adult males in the crowd when he multiplied the fish and loaves by Lake Galilee. Rest of the sixth chapter is about the type of people who came to Jesus in large numbers. In these da...

Miracles are the display of God's power not the strength of our faith For a miracle to happen you have to have faith, that is what I was taught. I was also taught that miracles happen only when certain people pray, the anointed ones. I have thus developed a notion, as many of my readers have that miracles is a product of right amount of faith with anointing. If there is something wrong in that mixture then miracle may not happen. Now, I know those who told us this haven't really read their Bible carefully. In the Bible, miracles have happened in the context of unbelief and sometimes by people who lacked faith. They themselves did not believe that a miracle is going to happen. When God did miracles through Moses in the presence of Pharaoh, it did not depend on the faith of Moses nor the Pharaoh. In fact the miracles were performed that Pharaoh may believe. When the Syrian official Naaman was healed of leprosy what was the role of his faith in his healing? He did not believe t...

Introduction What God can do for us always exceeds what the world can offer us. We need to realise this important fact and respond to God in faith. This is the important lesson that we can draw from the first 15 verses of the fifth chapter of John's Gospel. The story found only in the Gospel of John, is set in Jerusalem in one of the porticoes of the Pool of Bethesda. In the ancient times it was a tank where rainwater was collected and stored. It was here that Prophet Isaiah in the eighth century BC met king Ahaz according to Chapter 7, of the Book of Isaiah. Isaiah 7:3 "the upper pool", near the Washerman's Field. In Jesus' time it is called Bethesda, the Jews might have pronounced in Aramaic as BET-HESDA meaning, House of Mercy. It got is name for the reputation of the miracle of healing that was going on there. It was built as a Roman Bath during the days of Jesus. In Roman times pools had porticos, and changing rooms, and steps leading to the pool. It could ha...