Author: Rich Gorecki

Our journey this year through the books of the Bible now brings us to the very center of Scripture: the Psalms. There are so many lessons to learn from the Psalms that I’ll need to break it into several posts. I’ll start with an overview and some interesting facts that emphasize the central theme we find right in the center of the Christian Bible: “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man” (Psalm 118:8). Next week, I’ll return to the specific lessons in Psalms in another post.  About the Psalms The MANual, my NIV (New International Version) Bible for Men, refers to the 150 chapters of Psalms as a book of “life songs” since the original title, Tehillim means “praise songs” in Hebrew. The English title we know as Psalms originated from Septuigant’s title, Psalmoi, which also means “songs of praise.”  The Psalms give

This year-long journey through The MANual, my NIV Bible for Men, has led us through lessons from the Books of Moses and the History of Israel. (I’ve included links to each of those lessons at the end of this post). We now venture into a section called the Books of Poetry, starting with the book of Job which addresses the profound question, “Why does God allow good and upright people to suffer?”  Isn’t Scripture all the Same? The Poetry section consists of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. It’s the third section of the Christian Bible after the five law books of Moses and twelve historical books of Israel which is slightly different from Scripture that Jesus would have known. Though we use the word “Bible” commonly today, the appropriate term for the Hebrew Scriptures used by the Jewish faith is Tanakh. This is derived from the Hebrew letters

Perhaps you were made for such a time as this! This is the theme of the book of Esther; our next lesson from The MANual, my NIV Bible for Men. It’s a story about how God used a queen and her cousin at His perfect time, for His greater purposes. About the Book of Esther The ten chapters of Esther were written about 470 B.C., about 10 years after Esther becomes queen. The author is unknown though some presume it was Ezra or Nehemiah, the writers of the two previous books in the Bible. Others presume the author is Morcedai, Esther’s older cousin, who plays a prominent role in the book.  Although it follows the book of Nehemiah, the events in this book actually occur prior to rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem that we learned about in MANual Lessons from Nehemiah. The setting is the Persian Empire after Xerxes the Great