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Midweek Meeting May 6 2026

Six of us gathered in Wednesday with one online. After looking at the dn of Romans 15 we all prayed. What a blessing to be there.

When you share your home with a Welsh speaker

 

(The dog is being groomed today)

Day Off Week 19 2026

I had a sort of day off Tuesday, although following a bank holiday I felt I needed to get some things done. Eleri and I went for a pleasant walk on Monday but she was in work Tuesday so I filled the day with reading and blogging and cataloguing books on Library Thing and so on. The main book I am reading at the moment is Where the music had to go by Jim Windolf about Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Very interesting. Another thing taking up my time is annotating an interesting book I found online. I got down to West Hampstead only to find that my favourite of the two bookshops there is closing down House of Books). I took opportunity to buy two Chiltern Classics for Eleri and my son to give me on my birthday this month (forgetting Eleri has spent more than enough on a pair of Birkenstocks for me).

10 Unnamed women in the Bible

Here are ten women who appear in the Bible but whose names are not given and the names given them by tradition.

1. Noah's wife (Naamah)
2. Lot's wife (Ado or Edith)
3. Job's wife (Sitis or Dinah; some traditions posit a second wife, Rahma)
4. Potiphar's wife (Zuleikha)
5. Pharaoh's daughter (Thermutis or Bithia)
6. Jephthah's daughter (Seila or Adah)
7. Manoah's wife (Tzelelponit)
8. The widow of Zarephath
9. Peter's mother-in-law
10. The widow of Nain

(There are as many as 600 of these)

10 Unnamed men in the Bible

Leonardo Campitelli Filho, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>,
via Wikimedia Commons

Here are ten men who appear in the Bible but whose names are not given and the names given them by tradition.

1. The blasphemer of Leviticus 24
2. The prophet of Judges 6 (Phinehas)
3. The man of God in 1 Kings 13 (Iddo or Jadon)
4. The Magi or wisemen (Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar)
5. The rich young ruler
6. The man born blind in John 9 (Celidonius)
7. The thief on the cross who repented (Dismas)
8. The thief on the cross who didn't repent(Titus or Gestaas)
9. The soldier who pierced Jesus's side (Longinus)
10. The Ethiopian eunuch (Simeon Bachos or Djan Darada)

10 Commentaries on The Book of Jonah

1. Hugh Martin
2. M R DeHaan Fact or Fiction
3. T Desmond Alexander
4. Peter Williams Running from God
5. Henry M Morris The Remerkabke Journey
6. O Palmer Robertson A Study in Compassion
7. Ian Barclay The I of the Storm
8. Sinclair Ferguson Man Overboard
9. Frank Sellar Anywhere but Nineveh
10. Gordon Keddie Preacher on the Run

(Also Keller and Rosemary Nixon)

Lord's Day May 3 2026

We began with communion last Lord's Day. We then had a very well attended morning service (lots of Iranians) and a very small number in the evening. I preached on from Luke 20 morning and evening consecutively - taxes to Caesar and the woman with multiple hsbands.

Lumos in West Hampstead

My kind wife took me down to a church in West Hampstead (a horrible high church with a statue of Jesus I'm afraid) where we spent an hour listening to Lumos. The Lumos style is to put hundreds of candles out (battery operated but looking like the real thing) and then preform. This time round it was a violin, a viola and a cello and mstly Einaudi compositions. So a very pleasant time that we enjoyed. I've almost never been into a church to listen to music before, although many people do I know.

Dai and the Arabian gods

I came across a passage today in a book.It had me thinking for a while.

"Secondly, the Assyrian annals identify the gods of the Arabian pantheon as Atar-Samayin, Dai, Huhai, Ruldāwu, Abīrillu and Atar-qurumā."

10 on the 10

Plenty of good books on the ten commandments have come out over the years, including these

1. Thomas Watson
2. Jochem Douma
3. Kevin DeYoung
4. Edmund Clowney How Jesus tranforms ...
5. Brian Edwards ... for today
6. Norman Shields Pattern for life
7. D James Kennedy Why the ten commandments matter
8. David Searle And then there were nine
9. Peter Masters God's rules for holiness
10. Michael Horton The law of perfect freedom

(Also, Ernest Reisinger Whatever happened to ..., Stuart Bonnington Love Rules)

Day Off Week 18 2026

We haven't had a formal day off for a while but we tried to have one last Tuesday. There were a few things that needed to be dealt with but otherwise there was time for reading, coffee and to receive a parcel of books by Benjamin Beddome, vry kindly sent by someon eno longer needing them. In the evening I drove up to The Stables, Milton Keynes, to catch Focus on their latest tour. Bed by midnight.

Ecclesiastes 11:3b

 

Childs Hill Park

Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north,

in the place where it falls, there it will lie.

Pascal at the PA

Yesterday, I was back at the Pastor's Academy perhaps for the last time. I was at the reading group leading a discussion of a new biography of Blaise Pascal by Graham Tomlin. The book is a fine piece of work and appears to give a full and fair description and assessment of the giant and genius that is Pascal. The below were written to provoke discussion, whuch they did. They plan to look at Oilgrim's Progress next, September 7.

Pastors Academy Reading Group April 27 2026 [GB]

Blaise Pascal, the man who made the modern world by Graham Tomlin [H & S 2025]

Impressions? Did you enjoy it? What did you know of P beforehand? Can we trust Tomlin?

Intro [1-8] Does Tomlin oversell P? Did P anticipate postmodernism?

1 Great Century [9-36] How necessary is this chapter, how helpful? Is P an enigma [13]?

2/3 Majesty of Science [37-59]/Weighing the Air [60-73] Do these chapters help us with the science versus religion debate? What are the differences between P and Descartes? Would it be better today if scientists were more open to changing their minds if the evidence suggests it? [63] Do “Science & theology require different methods”? [72] If so, why? “It is the heart that perceives God not the reason”; true? [72]

4 Nothing Is Certain [74-96] Any libertins or honnete hommes today? What are the differences between P and Montaigne? How did they see death similarly/differently? Where did they differ on attitudes to self? What about man's insignificance/right responses to the human condition? 'What do I know?' or 'What do I do?' [95]

5 Children of Port-Royal [97-123] Is there an argument for sometimes abstaining from communion? What about retreats? [102] What about contrition and attrition? [112] What about pre-communion self-examination? [113] Does Chapter 5 help us on the matter of living out “the spiritual life in the middle of the world”? [121] What about providence – eg P not marrying, escaping his crazy uncle, etc? [120, 122]

6 Night of Fire [124-149] Is there a place for burying a talent? What do you make of P's “second conversion”? How does it compare with Descartes' story? Is it anti-physical at all?

7 Two Champions [150-168] Who are the two champions; what difference does P highlight under their names? Are Protestants far too confident that they, they alone, know the true meaning of the Bible? [159] Is sceptical dogmatism/dogmatic scepticism the right way to think?

8 Demented, Heretical or Jansenist? [169-196] What do we say to the five propositions? Is God a capricious despot moving pawns around? [172] Is there a blurring of Church and world today and will instruction put things right? [174] Were Jansenists Calvinists in disguise? [175; 112/3, 185] Would an entirely different approach help us perhaps? Does ridicule have a place? [176] Is there more of a need for popular writing? [178] Are there things to discuss here about use of technology/ persecution? What about the Jesuit views considered in letters 5 & 7? What do you make of the discussion of grace 186-191? Are both Jesuits and Jansenists wrong? Is it true to say heresy is often driven by an apologetic agenda, the Jesuits being a prime example? [192/3] Was P a Jansenist?

9 Hidden God [197-220] P speaks of the force of truth; a useful phrase? [197] What of his commitment to Romanism? [198] “P was always a too big and independent a mind and a character to fit ...” True or false? If true, good or bad? [199] Ridicule and eloquence might amuse but do not convert – discuss [201] Is the idea of God being hidden useful [202]? “True miracles can never be performed by anyone … to confirm an error” Is that a biblical position? [206] Are false miracles a proof there are true ones? [207] Do people believe miracles or not on the strength of evidence or what's in their hearts? [208] Is this helpful on the incarnation? [209, 220] Is P's doubt over creation's power to convert right? [212] It provides “too much to deny and too much to prove”; true? [213] “... he must see enough to know that he has lost him ...” Useful? [217]

10 Cleopatra’s Nose [221-244] Is P helpful on politics? Did the Jansenists act Jesuitically? [243]

11 Distracting Ourselves to Death [245-267] P was not content with conventional wisdom; is that a good thing? [251] What of P's struggle to balance his love of maths, etc and his love for God? [255] Is P helpful on distraction? Why is the most pleasure in the chase? [260] How do Montaigne and P differ on happiness? What about the long quotation 263?

12 Christianity Is Strange [268-293] Was P pre-suppositionalist? [275] How do we learn to love people? [276/7] Is P's order of arguing his case good? How do we escape thinking only of the past and future? [287] What about the problem of self-deception? Do we need to learn that we are monsters? [289] Is the observation top of 292 about Adam true and helpful? Is Christianity strange?

13 Make It Attractive [294-317] Is it right to say that simply piling up rational arguments for faith is a mistake? [299] What about “All those contradictions which seemed to take me furthest from the knowledge of any religion are what led me most directly to the true religion”? [302] How important is it to stress that we need a Redeemer? [303] What about his approach to Islam and the Old Testament? And the centrality of Jesus Christ? [308] Is the realisation that revelation is paradoxically hidden a helpful insight? [309] “Despite its total implausibility”? [310] The importance of the cross? What about pages 316, 317?

14 Spinning Coin at the Edge of the Universe [318-342] Atheism – not a bad argument but a bad gamble?? [332] What about the power of habit? [334] Confirmation bias?? [336] Three ways to believe? [340]

15 Hate Your Self [343-364] Does P define conversion well? [343] The competitive, deceiving, divided, trivial self and the remedy? The right balance in hating self?

16 If You Only Had a Week to Live [365-388] What do we make of P and his critics?

Lord's Day April 27 2026

It was our privilege yesterday to hear Geoff Low preach on John 17 and Job 41, 42. We had what are good turn outs for us (c 50 and 15) and good fellowship between times. Geoff and Rachel live south of the river and so our paths have hardly crossed despite moving in very similar circles.