As it happens...

It just so happened (I’ve been looking with my Bible study group at the coincidences in the book of Esther) that the subject I’d hoped to do this semester was unavailable, so I enrolled in another. And in case I was in any doubt about who was really in control, in the first week of term in my English class one of the students asked about the various rulers mentioned at the beginning of Luke 3, the topic I had been reading about in NT201 the previous day. Sometimes it’s hard for me as someone who has grown up reading the Bible to see it in the way that the students, many of whom have never seen it before, do. But as we read Luke’s gospel with them, understanding the background, culture, and history that it is written in to (and that in many cases is more similar to theirs) is already enormously helpful. It seems God knows what he is doing after all.