There are three basic genres in the New Testament: history (Gospels & Acts), epistles and apocryphal prophecy. The Gospels are arranged in the order Jerome and other ancients thought they had been composed, Matthew first, John last. Then there is the book of Acts, written by Luke, that recounts the beginnings of the Christian church. The following books, or epistles, are arranged, oddly enough, from longest to shortest. The New Testament closes with a lengthy series of visions, a revelation, about the end of the world seen by the apostle John while he was exiled on the island of Patmos. 

So what are the guiding principles for better understanding and appreciating our reading of each one? 

Moses is another Old Testament figure who foreshadows Jesus Christ, like Joseph. In fact, the parallels are striking. While there are certainly major differences between the two—Jesus lived a sinless life; Moses killed a man; Moses establishes the moral and civil code of a nation; Jesus says his kingdom is not of this world—but in at least seven key ways, Moses’ life hints at the character and mission of the Messiah to come.
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Have you ever been so excited you could hardly sleep? That’s what happened to me the night I noticed something amazing in John’s Gospel. Toward the end of writing my post on the seven signs in John’s Gospel, I saw there was yet another chiastic structure. The more I thought about it, the more I was blown away by both John’s message and his literary genius.
 
Take a look at the signs in order:

• A: Jesus turns water into wine
• B: Jesus heals the royal official’s son “long-distance”
• C: Jesus heals a paralyzed man by the pool of Siloam
• D: Jesus feeds the five thousand
• C’: Jesus walks on water
• B’: Jesus heals the man born blind
• A’: Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead

​​Ever wondered why John’s Gospel has such different feel than the other three, which we call “synoptic” or “same view”? For one, Matthew, Mark and Luke record many more of Jesus’ miracles without necessarily drawing lessons from them. In contrast, John says what he’s recording are signs, actions that symbolize some element of Jesus’ nature or mission or power. His account of Jesus’ three teaching and ministry years is a crescendo of miraculous events that culminates in the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Let’s take a look at all seven signs and what they say about Jesus.

​Remember metaphors? My love is like a red, red rose. Oh wait, that’s a simile. A metaphor is You’re a three decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce. Just like You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch, John’s Gospel is full of sit-up-and-take-notice metaphors. In this post, I’d like to talk about the structure of the 7 metaphors and what that means for interpreting them. Here is the list in order of appearance:

​​John 6:35, 48, 51 I am the Bread of Life
John 9:5 I am the Light of the World
John 10: I am the Gate for the sheep
John 10:11, 14 I am the Good Shepherd
John 11:25 I am the Resurrection and the Life
John 14:6 I am the Way, the Truth and the Life
John 15:1 I am the True Vine

Did you ever have to write an acrostic poem in elementary school? You know, down the left side of the page you write your name and for each letter you write a word or phrase that describes you? I was never very impressed by our so-called poetic creations and I came to view acrostic poems as poetry-for-people-who-can’t-write-poetry.
 
Later, my opinion of acrostics recovered as I discovered poems where the initial letters didn’t stand out from the others and spelled a code or a series of words, such as in Geoffrey Trease’s Cue for Treason, or Lewis Carroll’s The Looking Glass. And the Bible is full of acrostics, too, though instead of spelling words, they are abecedarian, a list of the letters of the alphabet.