15 Genesis 18.
16 Exodus 3–4.
17 Take a look at I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology by Abraham Joshua Heschel, edited by Samuel Dresner (New York: Crossroad Classic, 1983).
18 Robert Farrar Capon deals with this in his book The Fingerprints of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). Go out and buy all of his books and read them immediately.
19 If you really want to know, this is from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999).
20 1 John 4:8, my emphasis.
21 This is quoted from Entertainment Weekly (6 February 2004).
22 I heard Dwight Pryor say this several years ago. Dwight is about as close as you can get to a Christian rabbi, and he has deeply influenced me. Check out his teachings at www.jcstudies.com.
23 David Rylaarsdam provided me with this insight.
24 Read everything John Piper has ever written, beginning with The Dangerous Duty of Delight (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2001).
25 Psalm 37:4.
26 Matthew 7:13–14.
27 Philippians 4:7.
MOVEMENT TWO: YOKE
1 Joshua 6.
2 2 Corinthians 11:23.
3 1 Corinthians 7:12.
4 1 Corinthians 7:4.
5 Leviticus 19:18.
6 Exodus 20:8.
7 Matthew 11:30.
8 Matthew 5:17.
9 My version of Jesus’s words in Matthew 5.
10 Matthew 3:11.
11 Matthew 3:17.
12 Matthew 3.
13 Luke 20:2–3, my paraphrase.
14 Matthew 5:21–22, 27–28, 31–32, 33–34, 38–39, 43–44.
15 See Anchor Bible Dictionary 1.743–45 (New York: Doubleday, 1992) and Walter Bauer et al. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 222.
Also, according to Josephus, “The power of binding and loosing was always claimed by the Pharisees. Under Queen Alexandra, the Pharisees became the administrators of all public affairs so as to be empowered to banish and readmit whom they pleased, as well as to loose and to bind” (Wars of the Jews, 1.5.2 in The Complete Works of Josephus, trans. by William Whiston [Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1960]).
To read more about binding and loosing, go to the Jerusalem Perspective website: www.jerusalemperspective.com.
16 Matthew 16:19; see also 18:18.
17 Acts 15:28–29.
18 Matthew 18:20.
19 I heard Anne Lamott say this at an event we were both speaking at.
20 Romans 16:16; 1 Corinthians 16:20; 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26.
21 1 Corinthians 11:3–16.
22 1 Corinthians 16:22.
23 Matthew 19:21.
24 1 Timothy 2:8.
25 Ephesians 6:5.
26 Acts 15:28.
27 Genesis 3.
28 “There are seventy faces/facets to the Torah” (Numbers Rabbah 13:15).
29 John 11:39.
30 Once again, Marcus Borg does a great job of explaining this idea in The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).
31 The best thing I have ever read about the Bible is a transcript of a lecture given by the British scholar N. T. Wright called “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” published in Vox Evangelica 21 (April 1991): 7–32.
32 The tractate in the Mishnah, “Avot,” is very helpful in understanding what the debates were and what was forbidden and what was permitted in Jesus’s day.