Mount Hamilton Baptist Church

Some of our biggest problems with the Bible are not caused by the Bible itself, but by assumptions we bring to it. We expect an ancient library to function like a Google search, a systematic theology textbook, a science manual, or an instruction booklet written directly to twenty-first-century Canadians. When we engage with Scripture, we must be aware of the different lenses at play and ask good questions like: What is really going on here? Why does this matter in the story? Why was this written down the way it was? What am I missing from the original context? What interpretation is happening in the translation? What should we be aware of when we engage with Scripture?

If we’re ever going to follow the writing in the Bible, we need to learn to trust it as an ancient writing. We’ll be looking how manuscripts, translation, textual criticism, and ancient documents actually work. Every English Bible is already an interpretation, and the many different translations are often because of different approaches or trying to accomplish different purposes. In reading scripture we’re not called to turn our brains off, but the Bible being this way, having us work to understand it, is intentional. The existence of textual variants and translation disagreements is not the devastating problem people sometimes imagine it to be. We can have confidence in the text we possess which draws us to engage with the writings.After thousands of years of copying and translating, can we really trust that the Bible in our hands faithfully communicates what its authors wrote? Why are there so many different translations and which one is “the best”?"

What exactly is the Bible, and how did this collection of ancient writings become the book in our hands?Before we can talk about whether the Bible is reliable, inspired, authoritative, or relevant, we should probably know what it actually is. The Bible did not fall out of heaven leather-bound, divided into chapters and verses, with Jesus' words already printed in red. It is an ancient library of writings produced across generations, cultures, languages, genres, authors, and circumstances, which the people of God received and preserved as Scripture. Buckle in for all the facts about the Bible you can take!

As we step into a new season together, we desire to be a church strong at the foundations. It’s not simply that people would know more, but that we would be rooted in Christ, united in love, and strengthened in living out of our calling.Many of our upcoming series will be on some of the foundational blocks of faith. We hope this will be great for people exploring faith, but also that others will deepen their walk with Jesus; It’s not that these things are basic, but they are the soil from which mature faith grows.

The nations rage. Humanity rebels. Yet God remains on His throne. This Sunday we'll discover how Psalms 1 and 2 point beyond human rebellion to God's chosen King and the refuge found in His Son. From Eden's tree to Christ's victory, the story has been there all along.