Will Vaus

Last Sunday, we finished our sixty-six Sunday overview of the sixty-six books of the Bible, conveniently titled Route 66. Before we move into Thanksgiving and Advent, I thought I might pause for one Sunday and try to summarize what the Bible is all about in one sermon. That’s a big task, I know. But many years ago, I read an analogy provided by Bible scholar, Tom Wright, that I think will greatly help us in our task for today. Wright compares the Bible to a five-act play. Using Wright’s idea as my starting point, I have expanded his idea of the five-act play into one with six acts. I think you will see why when we get to the final act…    Act I: Creation   Act I is Creation. In Genesis 1:1 we read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  The Apostles’ Creed begins with the same truth emphasized in Genesis 1… “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”  The debate continues to rage in our day between creationists, those who believe that God crea

  AUTHOR   Four times the author identifies himself as John (1:1, 4, 9; 22:8) Four persons are mentioned in the New Testament who bore this name: John the Baptist, the Apostle John, John the Elder (who may have written the letters that bear his name in the New Testament), and John Mark who was a traveling companion of Paul, a nephew of Peter, and possibly the author of the Gospel of Mark. John the Baptist did not write anything so far as we know. And the author of Revelation does not clarify whether he might be John the Elder or John Mark. That leaves us with the Apostle John as a possibility.   From the mid-second century on, this book was widely, though not universally, ascribed to the Apostle John, the son of Zebedee by the Early Church. Justin Martyr, who lived in Ephesus a mere 40 years after the writing of Revelation believed that the Apostle John was the author. Apostolic authorship was accepted by Irenaeus of Gaul in 180, and Tertullian of North Africa in 200. But some leaders

When I was young, I had a tiny bit of experience with rock climbing on more than one occasion. And the very first occasion happened in Zermatt, Switzerland, the home of the Matterhorn. I was barely a teenager, and for some reason, my parents thought it would be a good idea to send their not-very-athletic-son out with an experienced mountain climbing guide. I guess my parents thought that I should be challenged to move a bit out of my comfort zone.   Well, this big mountain of a man, with long, black beard, took me out hiking to some location outside of the village of Zermatt, and he taught me the basics of rock climbing. We were scaling little, tiny rocks, mind you, not mountains. But at the end of the day, the guide said to me, in his broken English, “You come back next year, and I take you up the Matterhorn. Those rocks are the same as these. There’s just more of them.” Thankfully, we didn’t go back to Zermatt the next summer and I never had to see that scary mountain man again. The