More than 1500 years after the perfect God created his perfect world, he realized that creating humans had been a bad idea, because humans are evil. To correct his mistake, God decided to kill all the humans, and all the animals too, for some reason. But there was one righteous man in the world who God didn’t want to kill, and his name was Noah.
Continue reading The Story of Noah’s Ark—God’s people should praise him joyfully. Everyone should. That’s what righteous people do. There is no law against joy. Everyone should rejoice when they see bad things happen to bad people. That’s what righteous people do.
People should rejoice at home and in public. People should do good deeds gladly, and bring their parents and leaders joy. Don’t act like you’re mourning during religious ceremonies; you should be enjoying yourself. Even if your life is hard, you should be happy about it. Enjoying your life is the best thing you can possibly do!
God satisfies people’s desires and makes them happy. He commands people to celebrate and rejoice and to make other people happy, and he rewards them with happy lives when they do what he wants. He wants us to be glad to know that he will reward us. He rewards people for being delighted with him and for gladly doing what’s right. He even punishes people for not being joyful. God wouldn’t do those things if it wasn’t good for people to be happy, would he?
Solomon wisely wished for his son to have a happy marriage, and encouraged others to be happy too, because he knew that being cheerful is good for you. David, who always behaved just the way God wanted him to, rejoiced and celebrated a lot, and he said other people should rejoice, too. God himself is often delighted with people, particularly when they do what he wants, and he rewards them gladly. Everything God does is right, so we should follow his example.
God does not approve of people rejoicing over their enemies’ misfortune. And according to Job, that’s not the only kind of rejoicing that’s wrong; it’s also a sin to rejoice over your own fortune. Job was the most righteous person on earth, so he ought to know what he’s talking about.
You should not gratify your desires by doing what you want, because your body’s desires are perverse, and will lead to your destruction. Shun life’s pleasures, so they won’t get in the way of your spiritual growth. You must not indulge in pleasures, or you might as well be dead. God will not answer your prayers if what you’re ultimately trying to get is pleasure.
Those who love pleasure will be punished. Pleasure is not good,1 and you should have nothing to do with people who are so foolish, disobedient, flawed, and depraved as to love pleasure.
Solomon wisely advised people to refrain from laughing, because he knew that being sad is good for you. Pleasure won’t do you any good; it only brings poverty. Only a fool would go and have fun at a feast; it’s better to join the mourners instead, because you are going to die, and you should keep that in mind.
When the Babylonians rejoiced and were glad, God thought it was a shameful disgrace. God will never forgive people who insist on joyfully laughing and partying when he clearly wants them to be crying. It doesn’t matter if you’re celebrating because it’s a holy day; God will make you stop.
Jesus wants you to suffer when you don’t deserve it, just like he did. Anyone who doesn’t hate their life isn’t a real Christian. So don’t laugh, or God will make you cry. Grieve over what God is doing to those around you, or you too will be punished. Don’t even think about enjoying your life, or you will die and go to hell!
Continue reading Should people be happy?Have you ever noticed how the serpent in the garden of Eden didn’t actually tell any lies? Have you ever thought about the implications of God’s statement that Job had told the truth about him and that his friends had not? Did you spot the huge flaw in Joseph’s plan to save Egypt from the famine?
Have you noticed that despite how much the Bible tries to make him look bad, the guy with the talking donkey was a consistently obedient servant of God? Did you catch the fact that the story of Jonah is about God forcing someone to tell a lie? Or that when Daniel’s friends are disobeying the king so they won’t have to disobey God, the Bible suspiciously fails to mention what Daniel was doing at the time, and vice versa?
Probably not. Maybe you’ve never read the Bible. Maybe you’ve only read “sanitized” versions of the Bible that left out all the awkward parts. Maybe you’ve read the Bible, but you had preconceived ideas of how the stories were supposed to go and what the characters were supposed to be like, which got in the way of seeing what the Bible actually says.
Maybe you’re so familiar with certain passages that when you see them, you just recognize-and-ignore them, instead of thinking about what they’re saying. Maybe the relevant passages were just so far apart in the Bible that you forgot about one by the time you got to another, so you never realized what they imply if you put them together.
It’s easy to miss a lot of surprising things like these in the Bible, for one reason or another. In this monthly series of summarized Bible stories, I’m going to be making those things a lot harder to miss.
I will include a moral at the end of each story. Not all of them are good morals, and not all of them are ideas that Christians are likely to agree with, but they are all lessons that can be learned from the Bible’s stories. For the Parables, I will also include an interpretation at the end, so you can easily see what everything in the story represents.
Below is a list of the Bible stories I’ve published on this blog so far, as well as the rest of the stories I’ll be posting in the future. If you like these stories, you can subscribe to my blog to make sure you’ll get to read more stories as they come out each month. There are several ways you can stay updated, so find something that works for you:
Or if you don’t want to wait a month for each new story, you can read more of my Bible stories right now on Patreon.
Continue reading Bible storiesIt is written: Workers deserve their wages. Payment for work is not an optional gift; it’s an obligation. After all, the whole point of working is to be able to reap the benefits. If even people who don’t work have a right to be fed, how much more those who do? God does not approve when people make other people work for nothing. You must pay your workers without delay, or God will take away everything you have.
Continue reading Do workers deserve payment?