We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

imprecatory-696x366

Friday Lights: The Bee

Ever heard of The Babylon Bee? It’s a satirical site, sort of like The Onion for Christians. Several of our readers pointed out this site to us, and we loved this entry on an adult coloring book of the imprecatory psalms. It forces you to think through the ways we uncritically accept the violence of some Old Testament passages and even use them to justify our own violent tendencies. Plus it’s super funny. Win-win. Run on over to the Bee and read the whole article there, but here’s a snippet:

“Coloring has been shown to both engage the mind and relieve stress and anxiety, and coloring illustrated Bible verses can help believers recall and meditate on Scriptural truths,” the press release read, in part. “In this new book covering the imprecatory Psalms, Christians can also color violently bloody scenes of death and destruction while praying that God’s judgment would fall upon their enemies.”

Image via The Babylon Bee

Related Reading

The Key to Understanding Revelation

The most important key to interpreting John’s violent imagery is found in the heavenly throne room scene in chapters 4-5. (For the first entry in this series on the violence in Revelation, click here.) This throne room represents heaven’s perspective on events that are occurring on earth, which is contrasted throughout Revelation with the false…

The Way We Disagree Matters

Rachel Held Evans posted her reflections on the ways we interact over differences in Biblical interpretation. It’s an important topic as we live out the kingdom among one another in our polarizing environment. How do you maintain a Christ-like posture when you are attacked or when others question your devotion to Christ when you express…

Gospel “Contradictions” and Orality Studies

* This essay has been adopted from G. Boyd and Paul Eddy, Lord or Legend? (Baker, 2007). One of the standard tests historians put to ancient documents to assess their veracity is self-consistency. Generally speaking, fabricated accounts tend to include more inconsistencies than truthful accounts. Hence, the absence of inner contradictions contributes to a positive…

Jesus is the Center of the Story

The previous post addressed how the revelation of Christ is the surprising twist that reframes how we must read all that precedes it. Today we’ll look briefly at five supports to this claim. Jesus said, “I have a testimony greater than that of John” (John 5:36). Jesus elsewhere claims that “among those born of women…

Was Jesus Violent in the Temple?

Many adopt the attitude depicted in the picture above, saying that Jesus used violence when he cleansed the temple. But Jesus’ stance on nonviolence is clear not only from how he responded to threatening enemies at the end of his life; it’s also strongly emphasized his teachings. We need to understand what Jesus was up…

Podcast: If Violence is Wrong, Why Passively Allow Others to Use It?

Greg discusses dealing with the violence of loved ones. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0166_.mp3