Sermon and Worship Resources

Synonyms: touch, feel, sense of touch, tactile sense, tactility, contact, using one's hands, sensation, sense, suspicion, sneaking suspicion, notion, inkling, hunch, fancy, apprehension, presentiment, premonition, foreboding, love, care, affection, fondness, tenderness, warmth, warmness, emotion, sentiment, emotional state, compassion, sympathy, empathy, fellow feeling, understanding, concern, solicitude, solicitousness, tender-heartedness, brotherly love, sensibilities, sensitivities, self-esteem, ego, pride, opinion, belief, view, impression, intuition, instinct, estimation, guess, theory, hypothesis, thought, way of thinking, point of view, atmosphere, ambience, aura, air, mood, climate, character, overtone, undertone, tenor, spirit, quality, flavour, colour, aptitude, knack, flair, bent, talent, gift, skill, art, trick, faculty, ability, propensity, inclination, sensitive, warm, warm-hearted, tender, tender-hearted, caring, soft-hearted, sympathetic, compassionate, empathetic, responsive, receptive, intuitive, thoughtful

Antonyms: bad feeling, acrimony, animosity, animus, antagonism, antipathy, aversion, bitterness, detestation, disgust, dislike, disrelish, enmity, friction, grievances, grudges, hatred, hostility, loathing, malevolence, malice

Showing 3701 to 3725 of 4770 results

3701. Jerusalem Under Siege

Jeremiah 6:1-30

Understanding Series

Tremper Longman III

... :16–21,” JSOT 64 [1994], pp. 103–20) presents an odd argument in favor of seeing this oracle as not from Jeremiah. The heart of his point is that there are too many typical Jeremiah sayings. It is too like Jeremiah to be Jeremiah. Such a view contravenes itself. 6:20 / Statements like this verse (see also Ps. 40:6–8; Mic. 6:6–8) have been used to drive a wedge between the prophets and the priests. The context makes it clear that the prophets, especially one with a priestly background like Jeremiah ...

3702. Jeremiah Threatened with Death

Jeremiah 26:1-24

Understanding Series

Tremper Longman III

... also by (presumably) false prophets. Micah is identified as a Moreshite—from a town called Moreshethgath [Mic. 1:1, 14], a town identified with “Tell ej-Judeideh, a rather imposing mound, in the foothills of southwestern Judah, favored with an elevation of 1,000 feet above sea level and a view of the undulating coastal plain to the west. It is located about twenty-one miles southwest of Jerusalem,” see B. K. Waltke, “Micah,” in The Minor Prophets, edited by T. E. McComiskey (Baker, 1993), p. 594.

3703. A Letter to the Exiles

Jeremiah 29:1-23

Understanding Series

Tremper Longman III

Letters to Babylon and Back: Chapters 27 and 28 describe a prophetic conflict concerning the status of the 597 B.C. exiles to Babylon and the future of those who remain behind. Jeremiah represented the view that the former would stay in exile and the latter were under judgment. Hananiah attacked Jeremiah and optimistically stated that all would end well in just a short period of time. The present chapter continues the same note of prophetic conflict. However, rather than two prophets in contact physically ...

3704. Restoration of Israel

Jeremiah 30:1--31:40

Understanding Series

Tremper Longman III

... language of the removal of the yoke from their necks and the bonds presumably on their limbs. Their forced service to a foreign power will give way to a service to the Lord and his representative, the king in the line of David. “Liberation in the biblical view is a change of masters” (Lundbom, Jeremiah 21–36, p. 390). It is interesting to reflect on the latter part of this promise given the history that follows. In time, Judah will indeed be permitted to return to the land, but a Davidic king does not ...

3705. Freedom for Slaves

Jeremiah 34:8-22

Understanding Series

Tremper Longman III

... of the Torah (Exod. 21:1–11; Lev. 25:39–46; Deut. 15:12–18, though see S. Chavel, “ ‘Let My People Go!’Emancipation, Revelation, and Scribal Activity in Jeremiah 34.8–14,” JSOT 76 [1997], pp. 71–95, for the view that Jeremiah 34 does not follow Pentateuchal legislation). If Israelites became impoverished, they could sell themselves into slavery. However, this slavery was only temporary since the law stipulated that slave owners must free their Hebrew slaves in the Sabbatical Year. While it ...

3706. A Message About Damascus

Jeremiah 49:23-27

Understanding Series

Tremper Longman III

... a number of times so far in these foreign oracles (see 48:41; 49:22, and also 50:43). Damascus is like a woman in labor, in terror and great pain. Verse 25 presents a special problem in that it seems the first person speaker takes an empathetic view toward Damascus even calling it the town in which I delight. Perhaps the best solution here is to understand the verse to be a quote from a Syrian. There is never any indication elsewhere that Damascus is the object of God’s special concern. Indeed, it is God ...

3707. How the Lord has Covered the Daughter of Zion

Lamentations 2:1-22

Understanding Series

Tremper Longman III

... their sin deserves. They suffer more than any other person or people. She then names four particularly egregious examples of such suffering with the hope that it will grab God’s attention and induce him to relent. The first example of what personified Zion views as God’s excessive punishment involves women eating their own offspring. Such practice was known in situations of extreme deprivation such as a siege of a city. During a siege, supplies would be cut off from the city in an attempt to starve the ...

3708. I am the Man Who Has Seen Affliction

Lamentations 3:1-66

One Volume

Tremper Longman III

... target practice and now he reveals that God hit a bull’s eye (also similar to Job, see 16:13): he is skewered. The NIV translates kilyah as heart, though technically the word means “kidney.” According to NIDOTTE (vol. 2, p. 656), “the kidneys are viewed as the seat of human joy/grief,” thus “heart” is the English idiom that is equivalent. God has pierced the seat of his emotions, thereby unleashing them. As the object of God’s violent rage, the man is reduced to helplessness. As such, those ...

3709. Judgment Against Israel

Hosea 5:1-15

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... cities and to prepare for war against an approaching enemy (cf. Jer. 4:5; 6:1). The enemy comes from the south, and the advance of Judah to retake Gibeah and Ramah, which were respectively three and five miles north of Jerusalem, is probably in view. Bethel is eleven miles north of Jerusalem, and all three towns lay in the territory of Benjamin. Verse 8d reads, in the Hebrew, “after you, Benjamin,” and has the meaning, “They are coming after you, Benjamin” (contra NIV). Ephraim will be laid waste on ...

3710. Israel to Reap the Whirlwind

Hosea 8:1-14

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... 5–7 contain a further accusation and judgment. Many commentators believe that verse 7 is made up of two independent wisdom sayings, which have been attached to the unit of verses 8–10 by the repetition of “swallow.” Verse 11 then begins, in their view, a new unit of verses 10–13, and verse 14 is regarded as secondary by some. From the standpoint of rhetorical criticism, however, I believe that the first unit comprises verses 1–7a. Neither the NIV nor the RSV indicates it, but verses 6c and ...

3711. The Day of the Lord

Joel 2:1-11

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... announced the imminence of the day of the Lord. He now tells what that day will be like. Some scholars have maintained that this section does not concern God’s final judgment and is instead a description of the invasion of the locusts of chapter 1. In such a view, the locust plague would be not a past event, but a present one. Several features of this passage would, on the face of it, seem to support such a position. It describes a large and mighty army, verse 2 (cf. v. 11), and that would seem to fit in ...

3712. God's Zeal for Salvation

Joel 2:18-27

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... form of a communal lament (v. 17), followed by an oracle of assurance (vv. 19–20), but the two sections are bound together theologically by the “pity” of God. Some commentators have maintained that 2:20 refers once again to the locust horde. In their view, God drives the locusts into the Dead Sea on the east and into the Mediterranean Sea on the west, and the stench of the locusts’ rotting bodies on the seashores then fills the air. Once again, however, the enemy from the North is intended, and ...

3713. The Indictment and Punishment of Israel Spelled Out

Amos 4:1-13

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... 5 forms an oracle that is independent of 4:6–13, and that “But even I” at the beginning of verse 6 (omitted in the NIV) has been added to join the later material of verses 6–13 to the original Amos oracle of 4:4–5. Such a view completely misses the theology of this passage, which I would attribute in its entirety to the prophet. The point is that the Israelites believe that their lavish cultic ritual allows them to meet and enter into communion with God, enjoying God’s favor and fellowship. Amos ...

3714. Israel’s Ill-Placed Confidence

Amos 5:18-27

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... the most difficult pericope to interpret in the book of Amos, and it is a real question as to whether or not it belongs to the prophet. It seems to continue Amos’s condemnation of Israel’s false worship in verses 21–24, yet it shares in the Deuteronomic view that Israel offered no sacrifices in the wilderness (cf. Jer. 7:21–23), and its mention of forty years is traditional with that source (cf. Deut. 2:7; 8:2, 4, etc.). It interrupts the series of woe oracles in 5:18–20 and 6:1–7. It mentions ...

3715. Jonah Flees from the Lord

Jonah 1:1-17

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... sense, that is true. Jonah will not go to Nineveh. He would rather die than preach to that wicked people (cf. 4:3). Others have lauded Jonah for his willingness to give his life in order to save the sailors. Perhaps there is also some justification for that view. But principally, Jonah realizes that he cannot escape or defy the Lord of heaven and earth and get away with it unscathed. That Lord is not mocked (cf. Gal. 6:7) and cannot be defeated. God’s is “the kingdom and the power and the glory”; the ...

3716. Judgment Against Samaria and Jerusalem

Micah 1:1-7

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... the high places of the earth. Throughout the OT, high places often refers to the pagan worship sites of the Canaanites, but that is not the reference here. Rather, the phrase is synonymous with mountains in the following line, verse 4. According to the ancient Hebrew view of the world, mountains formed what we might call the “skeleton” of the universe. They held up the solid arc of the firmament (cf. Job 9:5–6; Ps. 18:7), and they anchored the flat earth in the waters beneath the earth (cf. Deut. 32 ...

3717. The Lord's Plan

Micah 4:6-13

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... deal with a specific time in Israel’s history, either Micah’s time (ca. 701 BC) or 587 BC. Rather this is an eschatological oracle that is concerned with God’s final battle for supremacy over the world. The eschatological and apocalyptic traditions of the Bible include the view that there will be one last great assault of evil, symbolized by the pagan nations, against God’s lordship (Isa. 29:7–8; Ezek. 38–39; Joel 3:16–17; Zech. 14:1–5, 12–15; cf. Isa. 17:12–14; Zech. 12:1–9; Ps. 76:4 ...

3718. A Promised Ruler from Bethlehem

Micah 5:1-4

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

... :9–12). Continuing the figure of the woman in travail (4:10; see the commentary there), the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judah will go forth, as from the womb, into captivity. Some scholars have speculated that the reference in verse 3b to a woman in labor has in view a specific woman, as in Isaiah 7:14, whose birth of a child will mark the end of Judah’s exile. But the meaning is the same as that found in 4:10, where the captured inhabitants of Jerusalem burst forth from the city, like a child bursting ...

3719. Prayer and Praise

Micah 7:14-20

Understanding Series

Elizabeth Achtemeier

Israel’s New View of the Nations (7:14-17): There is some question about how this passage is to be interpreted. Hillers, Mays, and Wolff all take the verses to make up a communal prayer of lament to Yahweh, like the communal laments found in Psalms 44, 74, 79, 80, and 83. As ...

3720. Warnings and Exhortations for Jerusalem and Judah

Zephaniah 1:1-3, Zephaniah 1:4-13, Zephaniah 1:14--2:3

Understanding Series

John Goldingay

... Baal priests and Yahweh priests in the temple, but the latter connived with this situation; so Yahweh will cut off “the priestlings along with the priests” (NJPS). Zephaniah refers (second) to worship of the starry host, to an involvement with some theological views and religious practices that is better known to us from Assyria and from Babylon in a slightly later period. These practices naturally took place on the housetops where the planets and stars can be seen. They work under the assumption that ...

3721. A Man With a Measuring Line

Zechariah 2:1-13

Understanding Series

Pamela J. Scalise

... . The form of this promise addresses the later audiences of the book of Zechariah. In the second year of Darius many exiles had already returned from Babylon, but many more would eventually come from all over the world. The short-term view was part of the life experience of the prophet’s audience, while the worldwide invitation and promises look far beyond to the eschatological fulfillment of God’s kingdom. Theologically, both perspectives have Zion, the Lord’s chosen dwelling place, as their ...

3722. The Woman in a Basket

Zechariah 5:5-11

Understanding Series

Pamela J. Scalise

... daughter.” All of the wicked people in the book are males or groups of mixed gender, and Zechariah does not portray the people or the city of Jerusalem as an adulterous wife (cf. Hos. 1–3; Ezek. 16; 23). These factors minimize the negative view of women in particular that may derive from the personification. 5:9 The information about the migratory route of white storks was found online at: http://storks.poland.pl/about_stork/article,White_ Stork_migration_routes,id,234996.htm (accessed March 5, 2009).

3723. The Lord Promises to Bless Jerusalem

Zechariah 8:1-23

Understanding Series

Pamela J. Scalise

... had had the wilderness tabernacle constructed, promising that “I will dwell among them” (Exod. 25:8), and Solomon built a temple for the same purpose (1 Kgs. 8:12–13). This verse does not mention the temple. Its presence may be assumed, or this oracle may view the whole city as God’s throne, as in Jeremiah 3:17. Jerusalem-to-come has many names in the ot—for example, “the faithful city” (Isa. 1:21), and “THE LORD IS THERE” (Ezek. 48:35). City of Truth (ʾemet) is unique to Zechariah. This ...

3724. The Lord Comes and Reigns

Zechariah 14:1-21

Understanding Series

Pamela J. Scalise

... be the slave of Shem” (Gen. 9:25–26). Perhaps this promise means that there will be no more slaves and masters in eschatological Jerusalem. Deuteronomy and related OT literature forbade Israel to establish relationships with the Canaanites who lived in the land. They were viewed as the chief source of temptation to worship other gods (Deut. 7). Perhaps this promise points to the obvious truth that idolatry will have no place in the temple in the Day of the Lord. There will no longer be any person in the ...

3725. Blemished Sacrifices and Admonition for the Priests

Malachi 1:6-14, Malachi 2:1-9

Understanding Series

Pamela J. Scalise

... cultic duties as a burden (mattelaʾah), a term the OT uses elsewhere only to speak of the hardship Israel had suffered at the hands of Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian oppressors (Exod. 18:8; Num. 20:14; Neh. 9:32; Lam. 3:5). They viewed holy privilege as tribulation. 1:14 The opportunity to ensure blessing for the people has, by the priests’ error, resulted in curse. By permitting laypeople to cheat on their vows by offering blemished animals when they had acceptable ones available, the priests failed ...

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