In the Good News Bible, this psalm is headed, 'The prayer of an innocent person'. This is a fair description: the psalmist is convinced that God knows his heart and 'found no evil desire in me' (verse 3). He says he has 'alwa...

The Hebrew title of this psalm relates it to God's preservation of David in the face of Saul and his other enemies. God is envisaged as a mighty warrior, fighting irresistibly for the psalmist and overcoming his foes.

Psalms 20 and 21 are prayers for the king, written at a time when an absolute ruler was a far more significant figure than a modern prime minister or president. There certainly laws and customs he would have been wise to abide by – as King Ahab fou...

On first reading it might seem that Ecclesiastes is expressing a deeply nihilistic worldview. This is especially noticeable in the repeated phrase 'all is vanity' or 'chasing after the wind'. In the original Hebrew this phrase mea...

Ecclesiastes 2 explores the ways people try to fill their lives, in pursuit of pleasure or possessions. The lifestyle of pursuing pleasure is called hedonism. The Preacher describes experimenting with a hedonistic lifestyle by laughing and drinking w...

Chapter 3 begins by considering that there is a certain time for everything, including the right time to sow and reap, or work and enjoy the results of work. Many people make their self-worth dependent on their work – on what they can achieve, how ...

Ecclesiastes 4 starts by talking about oppression. We know that from God's perspective oppression is bad because the Bible talks about this several times. But Ecclesiastes is examining a worldview in which God is out of the picture. From this pe...

Ecclesiastes 5 goes in a different direction from the previous chapters. It talks about taking seriously what we promise to do for God. Its main message is when you make a vow to God, 'do not delay to fulfil it' (verse 4).

The beginning of Ecclesiastes 6 should be read with Ecclesiastes 5 in mind. In verses 18–20 of chapter 5, the author speaks of someone who has wealth, food and work, with the ability to enjoy these things being the gift of God. In contrast, in chap...

Ecclesiastes is one of the books of the Bible known as ‘Wisdom' books – Proverbs is another. Just as Proverbs 4.5 implores us to ‘get wisdom’, Ecclesiastes 7 talks about the value of wisdom. Wisdom is held up to be as ‘good as receivin...

There's a repeated pattern in Exodus of the people complaining about how hard their lives are, and God stepping in to correct them or rescue them. It's as though they have to learn, after all their years of slavery, how to live as free people.

Paul could be crabby and rude, and comes across in his letters as a flawed – and therefore very human – individual. But being human means that as well as being prone to fall very low, we're also capable of rising high. In this chapter Paul ...

This chapter deals with orderliness in worship, including the issue of 'speaking in strange tongues'. This probably refers to the spiritual prayer language, unintelligible to its speakers or hearers, held to be one of the gifts of the Spirit.

This chapter is Paul's great exposition of the resurrection. He defends it to the hilt: Christ was really raised from the dead, he says, and without it Christians are all wasting their time: 'And if Christ has not been raised, then your fai...

1 Corinthians is a real letter to real people, rather than an abstract piece of theological writing. This closing chapter makes this clear – Paul has people's names and faces in mind as he writes, as he often does. That doesn't mean he pu...

The Exodus from Egypt – the word means 'going out' in Greek – was one of the foundations of Israel's identity. The people had been slaves, and God rescued them. It's an extraordinarily powerful story.

The crossing of the Red Sea is an event of tremendous drama. Older generations might remember Charlton Heston in the famous scene in The Ten Commandments (1956), in which the water literally forms walls in the sea on either side of the fleeing Israe...

The Song of Miriam is an outpouring of praise to God for his great act of salvation in bringing the people out of Egypt. After this high, however, there comes another low – three days of wandering through a waterless wilderness.

The Israelites had to cope with hunger and thirst in the desert, and they were not very patient. Now, though, there is another threat: a hostile tribe, the Amalekites, attack them. Moses stands on a hilltop with his arms outstretched in prayer; as lo...

The new nation of Israel is coming into existence, and its institutions have to be created from scratch. Everyone has questions, there's much to be decided and Moses feels he's the only one who can do it. He makes himself permanently availa...