Monthly Archives: April 2005

Book Review – The Message of Numbers (Raymond Brown)

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This recent addition of Numbers to the BST series comes almost 10 years after the author’s contribution on Deuteronomy. Brown has obviously spent a lot of time studying the Pentateuch, and the fruit of this is another volume that will help Christians to draw out theological and practical lessons from what can be a daunting book to study. He argues in the introduction for the relevance of this book – though we live in a completely different time and culture, our basic needs are the same as those who we read about in Numbers.

Numbers contains a great diversity of material, but characteristically of the BST series, Brown does not go into detail discussing how the book came to be in its form, or arguing over issues of historicity (e.g. how did the number of Israelites grow so fast?). Rather he views it as a part of Christian scripture, and from a firmly evangelical viewpoint harmonises with the whole message of the Bible. There is rougly one chapter of commentary per chapter of Numbers, obviously with some important sections given more attention, and some of the more repetitive parts moved over more quickly.

The book of Numbers contains quite a few passages that attract criticism – laws that seem sexist, punishments that seem cruel, and even a command to wipe out a nation. Brown does not spend as much time dealing with these issues as he does in his Deuteronomy commentary, but over the course of the book he does provide some balanced guidelines for understanding and applying these passages.

I particularly appreciated the sections on the Aaronic blessing, the principles of giving (Numbers 7 and 18), the Levites as paradigms of modern Christians, and Moses’ strengths and failures as a leader. The story of the Bronze serpent is looked at in the light of John 3 and is used as the basis for a gospel exposition. The difficult chapter 31 is understood in the light of a long section on Balaam earlier in the book.

This book will not answer every question you have about Numbers, but will bring you a long way to appreciating its worth and contribution to Scripture. Rather than there being one key theme running through the book, this commentary on Numbers is a rich source of practical application in the personal, corporate and even political realms. Sin, holiness, worship, community, humility, unity, gospel, marriage, giving, forgiving, leadership – pretty much every aspect of Christian life is addressed in some way by this book.

Blasphemy in church

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Today was the final day of our church’s holiday Kidz Klub. One of my contributions was to play the Roman Emperor Nero in a short drama which ran each day (we had a theme of ancient Rome). As usual, the drama was not at all rehearsed, and in fact we only had a script for the first day, ad-libbing the rest. You can imagine then that this was not a theatrical masterpiece.

I quite enjoyed playing the part of Nero as it gave me a chance to throw in a few Roman history jokes (which were lost on the 5-10 year olds, and I suspect most of the helpers too), and I also took the opportunity to develop an N T Wright theme of Jesus as Lord being a direct challenge to Caesar as Lord. So I asked the children to worship me and declare that Caesar is Lord (“kurios caesar”). They were supposed to realise I was the bad guy, but (perhaps due to the sheer strength of my personal charisma?) they obligingly bowed and worshiped. Oops – that’s not supposed to happen in church.

Anyway, today the kids were primed not to worship me, which they did a good job of. I couldn’t shut them up to say my lines because they repeatedly chanted “Jesus”. But I resisted the pressure to have Nero convert to Christianity at the end of the drama – that was just too offensive to my sense of historical integrity, even given the wild amount of artistic license we had already taken.

Ern Baxter – Life on Wings

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My friend Dan Bowen has sent me a copy of his (unpublished) book on Ern Baxter, which he has given me permission to make available online. Dan is a nurse, currently working in Bristol, and shares my passion for studying the Bible and theology, as well as a love for Word and Spirit. We both attended the same church (see my story here), where Ern had a lot of input. Ern would come over to the UK once or twice a year and put on a series of meetings at the church or to speak at a Bible week. His teaching left a big impact on everyone, myself included, but Dan especially grew to appreciate Ern through listening to the tapes and videos of the years he was around (we were only in our early teens when Ern died).

Dan spent a lot of time and effort putting this together, and contacted a lot of people as he researched it. He has real skill and patience when it comes to transcribing audio. When he finished it last year, he gave copies to some of the pastors who had known Ern, including Stanley Jebb from Dunstable, and Terry Virgo who heads up New Frontiers. Perhaps it was not coincidence that Terry Virgo’s next editorial in the New Frontiers magazine drew from Ern’s teaching.

Update: A lot of the links in this post are now unfortunately broken. However, if you want access to lots of Ern Baxter MP3s (including Life on Wings), visit Broken Bread Teaching.

Anyway, download it and read it here in Microsoft Word format. I might get round to converting it to HTML format if there is enough interest.

As a free gift of my own to go with the book, here is the famous Life on Wings sermon in MP3 format. Its over 13Mb – the sermon is 1h 17min (that’s actually short for Ern! – many of his sermons are over 90 minutes). I have a good number of other Ern MP3 sermons which I can make available to people on request (its over 250Mb so I’m not putting it online).

ps Dan is also one of the founder members of Full Faith, and can be seen in a number of the photos.