Field Notes are quick sketches from the Biblical world – the people, places, rulers, etc. that show up in Scripture and shape the story around them.
Sometimes that still means looking at the armor Paul describes in Ephesians. If that’s what you’re after, you can find each piece of the armor in the sidebar links at right.

  • Field Notes: Where Were You When I Laid the Foundation of the Earth?

    For most of the book of Job, Job wanted answers. He wanted to understand why everything he had built and loved had been taken from him, and he wanted God Himself to explain it.

    By the time God answered him, Job had lost his children, his wealth and his health. He had spent chapter after chapter arguing with his friends about why this had happened and wanting an opportunity to make his case before God.

    Then, in Job 38, God finally spoke. He didn’t begin by answering Job’s questions. He began asking His own. God spoke to Job from a whirlwind and asked, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”

    Job obviously wasn’t there, and that was the point. God continued by asking Job about things that existed long before him and operated far beyond his control. “Have you ever in your life commanded the morning?” “Have you entered the springs of the sea?”

    Then the questions moved into the heavens. “Can you tie up the chains of the Pleiades?” “Do you know the ordinances of the heavens?”

    God asked about weather, stars, animals, birth, death, light, darkness, snow, hail, rain and lightning. The questions continue for four chapters. They weren’t really a test of how much Job knew. They repeatedly showed him how much he didn’t.

    Then God asked, “Will the faultfinder contend with the Almighty?”

    Job finally answered. He said he was insignificant and had nothing to say. He put his hand over his mouth.

    God wasn’t finished. He spoke again from the whirlwind and continued questioning Job, this time challenging whether Job could exercise the justice and power that belong to God. Then came Behemoth and Leviathan, two creatures Job could neither control nor overpower.

    By the time God finished, He still had not given Job the explanation Job had spent so much of the book wanting. Instead, Job said something had changed in what he understood about God. He had spoken about things he didn’t understand, things too wonderful for him to know. He said, “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees You.”

    God’s questions didn’t give Job the reason for everything that had happened to him. They changed Job’s understanding of how much he could possibly know from where he stood.

    Job wanted God to explain Himself.

    God showed Job just how much bigger the picture was than Job could see.

    Job 38–42

    God has more questions. See Let Me Ask You Something: When God Asks a Direct Question.

  • Field Notes: How Long Are You Going to Mourn for Saul?

    Samuel had been the one who anointed Saul as Israel’s first king. He had watched Saul begin his reign with promise, and he had also watched him repeatedly disobey God. Eventually, God told Samuel that He had rejected Saul from being king. Samuel was devastated. 1 Samuel 15 says Samuel was distressed over Saul and…

  • Field Notes: Why Have You Fallen on Your Face?

    Joshua had just watched Israel pull off an impossible victory at Jericho. The walls fell, the Israelites took the city, and everything appeared to be going exactly as God had promised. Their next target was Ai, a much smaller city. The spies Joshua sent ahead told him there was no reason to send the whole…

  • Field Notes: Why Do You Ask My Name?

    Before Samson was born, the Angel of the LORD appeared to his mother and told her that although she had been unable to have children, she was going to have a son. He would be a Nazirite from the womb and would begin to save Israel from the Philistines. She told her husband, Manoah, about…

  • Field Notes: The Thief on the Cross

    Was he really a thief? We call him “the thief on the cross” so often that it sounds like Scripture explicitly gives us his occupation, but it doesn’t. Luke calls the two men crucified with Jesus criminals. Matthew and Mark call them robbers, a word often translated “thieves.” Christian tradition blended the accounts, and “the…

  • Field Notes: Have I Not Sent You?

    When the Angel of the LORD found Gideon, Israel was having a rough time. The Midianites had been raiding the land for years, destroying crops and leaving the Israelites with very little to live on. Gideon was threshing wheat in a wine press, trying to hide what little food he had left from the Midianites,…

  • Field Notes: Who Are These Men With You?

    By the time Israel reached the plains of Moab, they had already defeated several kings on their way toward the Promised Land. That made Balak, the king of Moab, nervous. Instead of trying to fight Israel himself, Balak sent messengers to a man named Balaam and asked him to come to Moab and curse the…