A catechism is an ancient form of learning using questions and answers. The Kingdom Catechism focuses on how the Law of God can help to make us proper citizens and ambassadors in that Kingdom.

The genealogies of Scripture are like the gleanings after a harvest. Theologians, teachers, and Bible students eagerly and repeatedly reap the fruit of the books, doctrines, themes, topics, and other offerings from the field of God’s Word. But the genealogies get short shrift. We speed through them, or even skip them altogether when we come to them in our reading. We leave them for someone else to glean.

But there is meat on those shocks and stalks, and in this series, Gleanealogy, we are the gleaners, determined to bring that meat to table.

Paul begins his letter to the Ephesians with an overview of the plan of salvation. He details how we were hopelessly lost, unable to save ourselves, and how God delivered us from this in a way that gives all glory to Himself and none to us.

It’s all about Him.

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Jesus has called His followers disciples – learners. We are commanded to learn Him, that is, to increase in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is eternal life.

Ecclesiastes is a series of counsels, interviews, proverbs, and “memos” to Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, soon to become King of Israel. Apparently, Solomon perceived that he was getting off on the wrong foot, and he collected these various teachings, aphorisms, and personal experiences to try to forestall Rehoboam’s drift into a life of folly and vanity.

Grace is one of those wonderful words that Christians embrace, use, and rejoice to know. But do we really know what grace is? Do we know what grace is for? How it operates? How to receive it, and what use to make of it?

Exodus is much more than the story of Israel’s miraculous deliverance from bondage. It contains some of Scripture’s clearest portraits of man’s sinful nature – Moses’s, Pharaoh’s, Israel’s, ours.

Everyone has a worldview, and Christians especially should work hard to develop their worldview, keeping Jesus at the center and as the strength and goal of everything we do. We need to see Jesus and how the Christian worldview develops around Him, beginning in our thinking where Jesus did, with the Law of God.

Like all the prophets, Isaiah brings powerful words of judgment for the people of God, indicting them for their sin, calling them to repent, and warning them that the wrath of God is about to unfold against them. At the same time, Isaiah points forward to a day of restoration, of salvation, and of the coming of the Messiah and His Kingdom, when all things will be redeemed and made new. Isaiah is the first of major prophets, so called because of the quantity of their writing. In many ways, his book is the most beautiful of all the prophetic writings.

The great tsunami of a few years back was one of the greatest ever recorded, even though it probably didn’t affect you at all.

And our salvation is great – so great that, as the Psalmist explained, “My mouth shall tell of Your righteousness and Your salvation all the day, for I do not know their limits (Ps. 71.15). So deep, so vast, so profound, so allencompassing, so all-transforming and all-renewing, so powerful, so glorious and joyous and fruitful and inspiring and world-uprighting is our great salvation, that we can never get to the bottom of its grandeur, comprehend the scope of its greatness, or exhaust the vastness of its power.