The prophecy anticipates Jesus, born King of the Jews, whose star drew magi from the East to Bethlehem (Matt. 2:1–11). Yet Balaam’s star and scepter were not the Bible’s first signs of the coming King. Those roots reach back into Genesis.

Most Christians are familiar with Jesus’s famous cry of dereliction from the cross. Many are aware that these words, cried aloud in Aramaic, are drawn directly from the first line of Psalm 22. Less realize how thoroughly Matthew’s account of the crucifixion is tied to the psalm or the ways in which his gospel is shaped by lament.

A great concern in the church today pertains to the question of whether the God of the Old Testament differs from the God of the New Testament:  whether the grace and mercy of God are manifest in Jesus, while judgment and wrath are manifest in Yahweh.

If you’re a follower of Jesus Christ living in the twenty-first century, you can’t help but feel a similar sense of seismic activity underfoot. It’s not just that a few received opinions about God or humanity have changed.

Christian life is the experiential side of how we live as Christians. You might say Christian life is the dogmatic locus where one can discuss the experience of the Trinity. It’s the placeholder, the peg for that. And I’m not diving into the doctrine of the Trinity as such, but my exploration is geared towards making sense of the Christian life as a marriage to Christ.

It is remarkable what you can see if you just look up. From my humble patch of earth here on the North Shore of Boston, I can see the stars ablaze in the northeast night sky, with the belt of Orion hanging on the horizon, recognizable even to the most amateur astronomer.

“They’re real. But I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in Area 51.” With that offhand remark on a widely watched podcast, former president Barack Obama managed to ignite a familiar American firestorm: curiosity, skepticism, and a surge of online speculation about extraterrestrial life.

It would be useful to make clear that I’m not saying that I think that what we mean by angels is extraterrestrial life on some other planet. I wanted to respond to the misconception that Christian theology is incapable of thinking about life beyond Earth because it’s always been “about us.”

The empty tomb is at the very heart of the Jesus story and the Christian faith. It is evidence that Jesus was no mere mortal and is the completion of Jesus’ death on the cross for human sin. Scripture teaches that without Jesus’ resurrection we are still in our sins. And a dead Jesus is hardly worth following in life.

Neither life nor death would have given contemporaries the impression that Jesus would impact world history. After all, Jesus was born of a poor young mother in a smelly barn and executed as a criminal. In between, he preached about the justice of God’s Kingdom in the barrios and the ghettos of Palestine. In the end, he was arrested when a paid informant singled him out.

When Friday arrives each week, it is a common phrase in our household to say, “It’s finally Friday!” Many of us experience the work week as a sequence of days leading to a conclusion. If it has been a difficult week, we are grateful that it is over. If it has been an especially tumultuous time, we are even more grateful the week has come to an end.

In my profession as a clinical psychologist, there is much emphasis on self-awareness. Anyone who seriously attempts the pursuit of increased self-knowledge will ultimately realize the tendency toward self-deception. That is, we tend to deny, distort, and rationalize those less-than-virtuous parts of ourselves.