Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus Quotes

“One’s success in life, one’s “renown,” was measured in terms of the legacy that a person left in his or her children. But in God’s glorious kingdom, those who choose to serve him will receive an eternal legacy even more enduring than sons and daughters. He will graft them into his own family tree, and they will never be cut off. Many of you who are reading this chapter struggle with broken families or crushed dreams of future family and are feeling left out of the whole “family” plot of the Bible. I write this chapter as a woman who is nearing fifty and has never married or had children. Personally, I will be among the first to ask the Lord to fulfill his promise to give the eunuchs who served him a “name better than sons and daughters.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“We are spoiled in the West by our tradition of focusing on love as an abstract concept. What we’re doing is using Plato’s trick to formulate a mental idea of “love” that can be dissected, analyzed, and detached from reality. This detached attitude allows us to ignore the actual doing of the thing we talk about, feeling quite superior in having lofty thoughts about it instead.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“This scene in Isaiah also expects its hearers to recall echoes of rich imagery woven through the Scriptures—the temple sacrifices, the Passover lamb, and Abraham’s words to Isaac that “God will provide for himself the lamb” (Gen. 22:8).”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“What does this look like? When John the Baptist confronted the religious leaders, he didn’t lecture them about the flaws in their theology by saying, Your externalized, merit-based observance assumes a soteriology based on ethnocentric nationalism that will ultimately prove erroneous and ineffective. Rather, he bellowed: You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our father.” For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. (Luke 3:7–9 NIV)”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“To the Greeks, the only thing that could come out of foreigners’ mouths was “bar, bar, bar,” like the bleating of a sheep, giving rise to the tradition of labeling non-Greeks as “barbarians.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“I wrote a short ebook to supplement this chapter called 5 Hebrew Words That Every Christian Should Know. The book explores five fascinating Hebraic words in the Scriptures. It includes links to three translations at BibleGateway.com so that readers can see the variety of ways each word is translated. If you have time, check it out. (Available at OurRabbiJesus.com or on Amazon Kindle.) Check out my book Listening to the Language of the Bible: Hearing It through Jesus’ Ears (Tverberg and Okkema, En-Gedi, 2004), which is a devotional guide to sixty-one Hebrew words and cultural ideas. A companion Bible study is also available for digging deeper.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“Because Hebrew focuses on the action rather than the thought, it doesn’t necessarily imply that God loses the memory of sins in his infinite mind. It simply means that he has decided to forgo prosecution.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“The idea here is that the Israelites would intentionally ignore their covenant, not necessarily forget that they made it.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“the verb “remember” focuses on the action, not the mental activity. God paid attention to Rachel’s needs, listened to her prayer, and answered it. Here, “remember” means “to intervene,”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“When my five-year-old nephew first made the journey from Atlanta to Iowa for Christmas, he marveled at the white fleecy snow that blanketed the tree limbs and buried the bushes. But soon his practical kindergarten brain was cogitating on the implications. With a furrowed brow, he asked his grandpa, “Where do you put the snow when you’ve got to mow the lawn?” He couldn’t fathom an existence where people didn’t mow their grass year round and assumed that must be true for us too. As silly as this mistake is, we often do the same with our Bibles. By default we assume that our perspective is universal and project it onto the biblical world.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“If a person exerts himself and ascends to the summit, it is possible to reach it, while not being there. He stands on the summit of the mountain, but his head is somewhere else.1 It’s entirely possible for a person to expend a great deal of energy getting to a destination, yet arrive there with their head and thoughts remaining at the original point of departure. The rabbi imagined that God was telling Moses not only to ascend the mountain but to be there fully, with complete attention and concentration, leaving behind all of his extraneous thoughts.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“Stride across the intersection, walk a few dozen yards into the scrub brush, peer through the dried weeds, and you’ll see them: the ancient pavers of the Emmaus road, the stones where Jesus’ sandals walked. Yes, these are the real, actual stones. Unlike many tourist destinations in Israel, the ancient pavers are not marked in any way. There are no lights and bells, no gift shops hawking Magnum bars, Ahava hand cream, and holy tchotchkes. You simply have to know where to look. Believe it or not, you are standing where you’d park your time machine if you wanted to travel back to the scene of Jesus’ fateful conversation.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“I envied no one more than the two disciples who encountered Jesus on the Emmaus road in Luke 24, whose hearts burned as an incognito Christ led them on a backcountry hike through their Bible, when “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Wouldn’t it have been great to have heard Jesus connect all the dots to show God’s great plan all the way through the Bible? If I could get my hands on Marty McFly’s DeLorean time machine car, there’s no place in history I’d rather go.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“People want to eat slow food, not fast food. It takes more time and effort, but it’s worth it, they say. You know what? I’m into artisanal Bible study. A lot of us do Bible study microwave-style. We gulp down a prepackaged, presweetened devotion with a few slurps of coffee before heading off to work. Is it at all surprising when it’s bland and unmemorable, like a vending-machine sandwich?”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“It’s entirely possible for a person to expend a great deal of energy getting to a destination, yet arrive there with their head and thoughts remaining at the original point of departure.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“When God called Moses up to Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of law, what God said, literally, was, “Come up to me on the mountain and be here.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“According to Nahum Sarna,”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“Don’t just analyze and take notes on cultural differences. Try your best to mentally place yourself in that reality long enough to look around and see its internal logic.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“Western Christians overlook many of the connections in the Bible because of our habit of boiling down Scripture into abstract concepts for advanced study. We spend a lot of time discussing the Trinity, even though the term is never used in Scripture. Certainly we find the Father, the Son, and the Spirit throughout the Bible. But instead of following how the ruach flows from scene to scene, we prefer to build theological skyscrapers out of abstract definitions instead.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“Whenever you see the word “Christ” in the New Testament, try stubstituting “God’s chosen King” and reading the text in that light.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding

“Imagine what it would be like to live in a world where there are no police, where the weak are perpetual victims of any bully who finds them. This may sound unthinkable, but everyday violence is a massive problem in the developing world today, according to Haugen. Over two billion people live in countries that have woefully inadequate law enforcement. In impoverished areas, there is often no credible criminal deterrent, nothing to prevent the vulnerable from being victimized by bullies and thieves.”
― Lois Tverberg, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus: How a Jewish Perspective Can Transform Your Understanding