I think many of us got off on the wrong foot with the Bible. It has, in most cases, been thrown into our laps like an assignment that takes us away from our “productive and meaningful” lives. Yet we fail to see that the Bible is the very secret that gives clarity, meaning, and strategy…
Interpreting numbers can trip up an interpreter more often than you may think, and in more ways than you may imagine. So, let’s look a bit closer at those numbers. Small numbers are no-brainers. If you sit through Lessons 2 to 5 of any language class, that should cover them. Problem occurs when you get…
1/2 Chronicles歷代志上/下 {li4-dai4-zhi4-shang4/xia4} Speaking of the kings, we all know where to look for their stories: 1 Kings and 2 Kings! Once we finish those captivating histories, we are immediately invited to persevere through 9 chapters of family trees in 1 Chronicles, only to read on and feel, “Wait, didn’t I just read these in Kings?” Yes,…
Ask any Chinese believer “Who is the God of Israel?”, and the answer would easily be “耶和華” {ye1-he2-hua2}. No surprises there, as His name can be plainly read from the pages of the Old Testament. But if we ask an English speaker the same question, we might get “Jehovah” or “Yahweh”, yet we can’t find either in…
Scanning the millennia of narratives contained in the Bible, we witness the rise and fall of empires from the Egyptian to the Roman; we read about the dozens of tribes from friends to foes; we see thousands of names ranging from our famous Lord Jesus Christ to outright mind-boggling ones like Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. To know all these names in multiple…
IMHO, the hardest word to translate in the Bible is 感動 {gan3-dong4}. It makes perfect sense in Chinese but has no perfect equivalent in English, or even Hebrew or Greek. It means something in one context and something else in another. Sometimes it’s not even there in the text. Incidentally, it’s one of the favorite words…
Ah… Chinese New Year. It always brings me back to the chilled dry air permeated with a gunpowder smell, walking down the streets of red, where everyone seemed to be your friend that day. Nothing excites a little boy more than lighting up firecrackers thicker than his arm, or waiting for minutes for those million-pop firecrackers…
We know the birth of Christ divides the Western calendar into two eras, BC and AD, 公元前/後. I had always assumed that such a defining moment would fall precisely in 1 BC or 1 AD. Interestingly, no. The time of Jesus’ birth, according to current archaeological study, fell somewhere between 4-6 BC. By the time…
The combined account of Matthew and Luke describe not only the pivotal birth of Christ but also the arduous journey that His family had to endure. Within one verse, Joseph and Mary traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem. That same journey, if we are to endeavor now, takes more than 30 hours one-way (no stopping), covering 145km according to Google…
No, really, what IS Christmas? I used to think Christmas means Christ más, which loosely translates to plus Christ in Spanish. I know, it’s absurd, but it made just enough “sense” that I didn’t bother asking, until now. It turns out, the mas in Christmas is short for mass, another name for worship service in Catholicism. So Christmas originally meant the special worship…