Category Archives: Bible Study

I Believed and so I Spoke

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This medieval illumination depicts Jephthah sacrificing his daughter after she spends time alone with her friends in the mountains “bewailing her virginity,” described in Judges 11. There was a festival of Jephthah’s daughter every year at midwinter; Christians see her as a “type,” a prophetic anticipation, of Christ.

However, since we have the same spirit of faith according to what is written, “I believed, there I spoke out” (Ps. 116:9), we too believe; therefore, also speak out, for we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and place us together with you in his presence. (2 Cor. 4:13-14)

The Apostle Paul quotes the psalm: I believed, and so I spoke out. He points out that he–and the Christians faithful to his preaching–have the same faith as King David and Moses, who also faced great tribulations and adversaries from those they thought were their friends and followers.

The psalm that St. Paul quotes is commonly used in the Prayers Before Receiving Holy Communion. Because the Lord has delivered the psalmist, the psalmist asks, “How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me?” The answer is: “I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the Name of the Lord.” and “I will offer you the sacrifice of thanksgiving [eucharist] and call upon the Name of the Lord.” God has delivered us and so we thank him by offering him a thank-offering and sharing a feast with him. We participate in Christ’s resurrection every time we offer the thank-offering and lift up the cup of salvation. But our lives have to match our liturgical actions.

He who raised Jesus from the dead will raise us also if we do his will and walk in his commandments and love the things which he loved, abstaining from all unrighteousness, covetousness, love of money, evil speaking, and false witness.

St. Polycarp of Smyrna, Epistle to the Philippians

St. Paul’s faith, and the faith of David, Moses, and all the prophets is placed in the same Lord. This same Lord delivered the prophets in the Old Testament and will deliver St. Paul and the New Testament believers as well. This deliverance is not simply victory over earthly enemies; it is victory over THE enemy, which is Death.

Paul believed that through the work of Christ, he and all believers were made greater than death and that they would all be brought before the terrible seat of judgement.

St. Theodoret of Cyr, Commentary on 2nd Corinthians

This psalm promises that “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” This verse was often associated with Jephthah’s daughter, who was sacrificed by her father to keep a promise he had made to God and which is similar in many ways to Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. (Read about Jephthah and his daughter here.) In both episodes, the father is asked to give a child as an offering to save a family or clan, anticipating our Father in heaven giving his own Son to be killed as a sacrifice that saves the world.

I highly recommend reading Psalm 116:9-end each week as part of our preparation for receiving Holy Communion. The words of King David become our words as well and together we lift up the cup of salvation to celebrate the victory which the Lord shares with us.

Let Light Shine

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Depictions of St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, blinded by the divine light of Christ who spoke to him as he was going to arrest Christians for execution in Jerusalem.


On the contrary, we have renounced the deeds one hides for shame; we do not practice cunning or falsify the word of God, but through the open preaching of the truth we commend ourselves to anyone’s conscience in the sight of God…. it is the same God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has caused his light to shine in our hearts to spread the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Cor. 4:2, 5-6)

St. Paul was accused by his enemies in Corinth of “cunning” financial business; i.e., they accused him of shady and dishonest business deals with church money. They also accused him of “cunning” ways to read the Bible that were also shady and dishonest. He tells them that he has not been involved in any “cunning” behavior–not with money and not with reading the Bible. His interpretation of Scripture is open and honest and available to anyone with an honest, open conscience.

St. Paul alludes to Genesis 1 (“Let there be light”) when he paraphrases the Father’s command, “Let light shine out of darkness.” He might also be paraphrasing the prophet Isaiah: “O people walking in darkness, behold a great light: you that dwell in the land and shadow of death, a light shall shine upon you.” (Is. 9:2) St. Paul is saying that the same light that overcame the darkness in the beginning of the world and at the destruction of Death has shone in his heart-mind and shines in the hearts-minds of all honest people.

The light of God that shines in St. Paul and in honest people reveals the truth of the Gospel. (Remember the light that shone on St. Paul at his conversion? It struck him blind in order to heal his heart, St. Augustine said.) People “see” the brightness of the Gospel and then personally adopt it and are transformed by it; they are transformed into the image of the glorious Christ and communicate it to others who are “illuminated.” (One ancient way to refer to baptism is to call it “illumination.” Old prayers for those about to be baptized asl God to bless “those preparing for holy illumination.”)

But our actual daily experience is not bright and glorious. We are wasting away and eventually die. Yet what is strong already manifests itself in what is weak and the future erupts into the present. The eternal breaks into the perishable and enlightens what is temporary and transient.

Knowing Christ as the true light, inaccessible to falsehood, we learn this, namely, that it is necessary for us to be illuminated by the rays of the true light. But virtues are the rays of the Sun of Justice streaming forth for our illumination, through which we lay aside the works of darkness and walk becomingly as in the day and we renounce those things which shame conceals. By doing all things in the light, we become the light itself so that it shines before others which is the unique quality of light. If we recognize Christ as sanctification, in whom every action is steadfast and pure, let us prove by our actions that we ourselves stand apart, being ourselves true sharers of his name, our deeds–not just our words–coinciding with his power of sanctification.

St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection

From Glory to Glory

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Jesus reads from the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament and begins to preach (Luke 4). Illumination in the Gladzor Gospels, a manuscript from Armenia AD 1300-1307.


Indeed, until today, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart. However, when one turns to the Lord the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Lord’s Spirit is, there is freedom. But all of us, with uncovered face beholding the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as this comes from the Spirit of the Lord. (2 Cor. 3:12-18)

St. Paul tells us that a veil lies on the hearts of those who read the Old Testament without understanding that it speaks to us about Christ and points to Christ. Only by reading it in the light of Christ’s birth and life, his Death and Resurrection does the Old Testament tell us everything that God intends us to hear. Reading the Old Testament through the prism of the Gospel removes the veil from our hearts so that we can begin to grasp the full message of the words. In the Old Testament, we don’t see Christ directly but we see him reflected, “as in a mirror.”

We have to remember that a mirror in St. Paul’s day were not the silver-backed pieces of glass that clearly show us our own faces. In St. Paul’s time, a mirror was a polished piece of metal that reflected an image but the reflection was fuzzy and hazy. Sometimes it was hard for a person to really understand what they were looking at. So it is with Christ in the Old Testament: sometimes it his reflection is fuzzy and hazy. Sometimes it is hard for us to understand how we can see him in a particular Old Testament passage.

Reading the Old Testament from the perspective of the Gospel, we stand before God with naked faces–no veils!–and behold the glory of God that made Moses cover his face so that the people could look at him. Because we see the glory of God, we are being transformed into that same glory. We are always progressing from our current glorious state to an even more glorious state-of-being, suffused and saturated by the glory of God. Christian life is never-ending growth, becoming more and more like God. (When Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, they lost their “likeness” with God but not the “image of God” in which they were made. It is the choice of each of us to recapture that “likeness.”)

The phrase “from glory to glory” is especially associated with St. Gregory of Nyssa nowadays because of the famous collection of his writings published under that title. (See it on Amazon here.) St. Gregory wrote:

Change is nothing to be afraid of. We are always changing. What is bad is if we are not changing for the better …. For this truly is perfection: never to stop growing toward what is better and never placing any limit on perfection.

Lent is coming. Lent is the time when the Church asks us to spend more time reading the Bible, including the Old Testament. In the early centuries of the Church, people coming to be baptized would be taught about Genesis, Proverbs, Isaiah in the Old Testament and the Gospel According to St. Mark and the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament. (One of St. Gregory’s own, most important works is a collection of sermons on the Song of Songs in the Old Testament.) Most of the attention of the catechists (teachers) and catechumens (people wanting to be baptized) would be focused on the Old Testament. This might surprise most people today but should guide us in how much effort we put into reading which portions of the Bible.