Study Updates (publ. 2025-06-23)

My apologies to any interested subscribers to this gemfeed: I haven't had enough spare time, for many months, to work on a post for this gemlog. With my other gemlog, I can write up quick posts using a few minutes of my lunchbreak. But writing posts for this gemlog requires quality time in the evening or the morning hours, with access to my Hebrew study books.

But I think it would be worth mentioning what I have been studying privately since my last post. For several months, I was continuing with readings and meditation in the book of Isaiah, and I had made it up to Isaiah 56. A month or two ago, I was given a book called "Messianic Christology" by Dr. Arnold G. Fruchtenbaum, a messianic Jew and a founder of Ariel ministries. Since then I have been slowly working through that. It is one of the most excellent study books I have ever read. The book lists and explains every prophetic passage in the Hebrew scriptures that deals directly with the first coming of Messiah, i.e., those prophecies that were fulfilled in the New Testament. At the beginning of the chapter for each passage, the Hebrew text is placed alongside an English translation (usually the NASB) so that I do not even have to pull out my Hebrew Bible.

The ISBN for this book is 0-914863-07-X, and I would strongly recommend buying it or borrowing it through a library system. Also, information about the interesting life of Dr. Fruchtenbaum, including his early childhood in Europe near the end of WWII, can be found at the Ariel Ministries Web site.

Messianic Jewish Ministry Bible Teachings

More recently, I was able to checkout another book titled "Analog Church: Why We Need Real People, Places, and Things in the Digital Age" by Jay Y. Kim, ISBN 978-0-8308-4158-5. I've only finished about ¼ of the book, but it has been very interesting so far. The first part includes in extended discussion of how technological changes throughout the centuries have impacted Christian worship, and how modern technologies, taken to an extreme, can end up reversing the benefit that they were originally created to provide. For example, smart phones dramatically improved the human capacity for person-to-person communication, by allowing instant communication across vast distances in a multitude of ways. But they also created a world in which people can be sitting across from each other at a coffee shop, glued to their phones, and almost completely unaware of each other's existence. Also there has been some discussion on transcendence vs. relevance, in which churches, trying to appeal to the modern seeker, end up losing the thing that the modern seeker really wants and needs, but can't find in his own life.

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