Jesus did many miracles. He healed many people, including the demon possessed. He used a boy’s lunch to feed a crowd that included 5,000 men. He calmed a storm. And He raised Jarius’s daughter back to life.
But then some Jewish religious leaders asked Jesus to show them another miraculous sign to prove that He was the promised Messiah! They disregarded all His other miracles. They were skeptical. The request was an excuse for their unbelief. They probably wanted a spectacular “sign from heaven” (Mt. 16:1; Lk. 11:16). But they weren’t looking for proof from Jesus, they were looking for proof against Him, so they could get Him killed. It was a test, not just a request (Mt. 16:1; Mk. 8:11; Lk, 11:16). Read the rest of this page »
At first glance, these appear to conflict: but one suggests generational punishment for sin, while the other insists on individual accountability. 
For most Australians today literal darkness isn’t much of a problem. We have artificial light at our finger tips and as such can do almost any activity we wish day or night. But the metaphorical darkness of evil still plagues us. We witness political leaders using their power for their own gain at the expense of others, civilians being killed for disagreeing with authorities, money being siphoned into leaders pockets while populations are hungry and homeless. The rich protect the rich without reference to truth or justice. Self service, corruption, greed, deception, violence, this is the kind of moral darkness we can feel powerless to repel. 
Heaven seems to be a rather neglected subject today. But what do we mean by ‘heaven’? People sometimes say that deceased Christians have ‘gone to heaven’ to be with the Lord (1 Th. 4:17). That heaven is not a created place, yet the Bible’s opening verse states, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1ESV). 
There have been four shark attacks in NSW this week. A boy died after he was attacked at Shark beach in Vaucluse in Sydney harbour. A man was bitten at Manly beach. The other incidents were at Dee Why beach, and at Point Plomer near Port Macquarie. This follows fatal attacks at Sydney’s Long Reef and near Taree in late 2025. 
Most countries take at least one day a year to celebrate their nationhood and Australia do it on 26 January. On this day in 1788 Arthur Philip raised the British flag at Sydney Cove. 
When I was young there was a children’s rhyme: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names (words) will never hurt me”. We must have been more resilient and tougher then because now the Australian government wants to legislate against hate speech! This could lead to 
If you sit down at a piano, you’ll notice a pattern. From Middle C to the next C, there are exactly seven white keys. These seven notes make up a scale (Appendix A). If you play only six, the melody feels unfinished—it leaves the ear hanging, waiting for a resolution. But when you hit that seventh note, the scale reaches its ‘octave’ and feels complete. 
“Humans once stood on a pedestal: made by God in his image, earthly lords of all creation, categorically distinct from mere animals. That was the belief, anyway. Jane Goodall played a large role on eroding that self-flattering conviction, with her extraordinary study of wild chimpanzees at what is now Gombe National Park in Tanzania. By discovering unexpected behavioral similarities between chimps and humans, she continued the revolution begun by Copernicus and Galileo and advanced in a great leap by Charles Darwin: taking earth out of the center of the universe and humans down from our holy isolation. Goodall helped us see, long before genome comparisons confirmed it, that the gap between chimps and people is smaller than anyone thought. Gorillas aren’t the closest living relatives of chimpanzees. We are” (Quammen, 2025). 
RECENT COMMENTS