The famed foiling of the wicked plot of Haman to blot out the Jews is, of course, one of the more dramatic narratives in the Bible. In addition to the many twists in the plot, there are also some surprises hidden behind the text itself. It is significant that the name of the book itself, Esther, means "something hidden"!

God tells us in the Bible that we are to glorify Him, not only outwardly in our bodies, but also inwardly in our spirits. (1 Corinthians 6:20) It's impossible to do this, however, if we don't really understand what our spirit is. So, last month we tried to define our spirit, how it differs from our soul and the critical importance of separating the two.

Have you ever been puzzled by the inscriptions that are attached to some of the Psalms? This has puzzled scholars for centuries, and yet the key may have been in the Biblical text all along.

While there continue to be many serious hurdles yet to be overcome, after over 60 years of research on animals such as sea urchins, frogs and mice, the cloning of commercially relevant mammals finally seems feasible.

The Book of Joshua is a book of adventure and conquest - even the days were not long enough for his battles! His name is the same as Jesus, but in Hebrew rather than Greek: Yeho-Shua, or Joshua.

Selah does connect the end of one strophe with the beginning of the next; and, in four cases it connects the end of one Psalm with the beginning of the next, thus uniting the two Psalms (Ps 3 with 4; 9 with 10; 24 with 25; and 46 with 47).

Our goal as Christians should be to become Christ-like - to be instruments of God's Love. The Bible says we are ambassadors of Jesus Christ and that God personally makes His appeal to the world through us. The only way we can ever properly represent Jesus Christ to the world is to let His character show through our attitudes and actions.

Over the past year or so, we have been exploring "night seasons" - what they are, why God allows them, and what we are to do to get through them.

Jesus had some hard things to say to the hypocrites and pretenders. He told them they were like dishes that were clean on the outside but on the inside they were full of greed and self-indulgence (Mt 23:25). In other words, they put on a good show for people.

Here is a book of the Bible which is among the least studied and the most emotionally controversial. It's a book with only 117 verses and 470 Hebrew words, yet it is among the most difficult and mysterious books in the entire Bible. It's a book about lovemaking from an author who had 700 wives and 300 concubines (women who took his heart away from the Lord).

The twentieth century has been marked by a rapid growth in knowledge, and the twenty-first will be stranger than we can possibly imagine.  The explosive advances in science and technology have already gone far beyond what even science fiction writers once thought possible.

Two thousand years ago, a governor in an obscure eastern province of the Roman Empire asked a condemned prisoner what his definition of truth was. At the time it was a sarcastic response to his prisoner's absurd claim that he was the way, the truth and the life.