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Leading With a Courageous heart: Day 7

What do you think of this reading?

by David Joynt on June 11, 2016

Leading With a Courageous heart: Day 7

JOHN 8:6-8

What did Jesus write on the ground and why did He do so? Ken Bailey, the Middle East New Testament scholar, suggests He was doing what judges did in the ancient near east. They would render a verdict by writing it on a slate or tablet. Jesus may have written “guilty” on the ground to acknowledge the legal truth and then wiped it away in His second movement to indicate forgiveness which He was pronouncing. This drama then would prefigure our objective guilt and our forgiveness painfully bought in his risky act of sacrificial love on the cross.

What do you think of this reading?

Tags: courageous, leading

About the Author
David Joynt

Dave Joynt began his service as a pastor at Valley Presbyterian Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona in September 2014. This meant a move away from the Northeast, where he has a long history, growing up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and then serving congregations in Delaware and New Jersey for a total of 23 years.

Dave was nurtured in a great church in Bethlehem where his parents, Anne and Carey, served as elders. He graduated in classics from Lehigh University where his Father taught, and then from Oxford, where he met his wife Julia. Ordained in 1988, he completed a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1993.

He and Julia have a son, Tristan, and a daughter, Madeleine.

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