According to the Puritan Thomas Goodwin, “there were two grand pillars in the Old Testament: one, God’s promise of Christ; and the other, this manifesto of God’s gracious nature [in Exodus 34:6-7]...
John Bunyan describes the power of the word to convict the sinner: “Then the word works effectually to this purpose, when it findeth out the sinner and his sin, and shall...
The tree of life is mentioned exactly ten times in the Bible. The first three times are in Genesis when access to the tree was lost by the fall of man. The last three times are...
C. H. Mackintosh, in his Notes on the Pentateuch, discusses church discipline in his commentary on Numbers 5:3 - "that they defile not their camps, in the midst whereof...
When Moses was distressed because of the greatness of the task of leading the children of Israel through the wilderness, God commanded him to gather seventy elders to help him carry the burden (Numbers 11:16). Moses gathered the seventy round about the tabernacle and the spirit that was on Moses rested on the seventy (Numbers 11:24-25).
Near the Orissa state capital Bhubaneswar in India, Bimbala Das wore a silk saree while Hindu priests chanted a mantra for the wedding ceremony. The groom, a cobra that lives in a nearby ant hill, failed to attend the ceremony. A specially prepared brass serpent stood in for the real groom. Das, who is 30, had been very ill until she began taking milk to the cobra. She credited the snake with her healing and fell in love with her benefactor. The villages welcomed the wedding as a sign of good fortune and made a great feast on the wedding day. Das has moved to a hut close to the ant hill where her "husband" lives. Hinduism venerates snakes and especially King Cobra who is worn by Lord Shiva, the god of destruction. Das is not the first woman to marry an animal with the blessings of the Hindu priests. Earlier this year, a woman in the area was married to a dog. The brass serpent was used in the Bible for the healing of the disobedient Israelites (Numbers 21:4-9). However, when the Israelites later made an idol out of the brasen serpent, it became a sin to them and Hezekiah destroyed it. He called it Nehushtan, meaning, a piece of brass (2Kings 18:4).
