The following set of passages are some remaining examples of people giving thanks in the gospels. We’ve already seen Jesus giving thanks, but now we turn to others. The first passage is the account of Anna the prophetess. She had been a widow for eighty-four years, after having been married for seven years. This extremely…

Today’s segment addresses the many verses in which Jesus and Paul give thanks before eating. We, Jesus’ disciples as Paul was, do the same when we eat. The first account below is the feeding of the 4,000 (together with a synoptic account of this feeding). The second account is the feeding of the 5,000 (with…

Today’s segment is the first mention of thanksgiving, as such, in the gospels. The passage is an account of Jesus praying to the Father. Jesus is thanking God for a very interesting thing: for hiding from the wise, and revealing to “babes.” The reason given is that “it seemed good in thy [the Father’s] sight.”…

The minor prophets provide us with two thanksgiving passages, one in Amos and one in Jonah. In Amos, God mocks those of Israel who are about to go into captivity with an ironic command for thanksgiving. As such, it is one of the few references (perhaps the only one in the Old Testament) to thanksgiving…

The two passages in today’s segment come from the book of Daniel. The first passage is Daniel’s prayer of thanks to God for showing him the meaning of the king’s dream. The first thing Daniel does, even before going to telling Arioch the good news (the wise men of Babylon were going to be killed,…

Even Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, mentions thanksgiving. He mentions it in the context of the return of the captivity of the people of Israel. The biggest point of the passage is to point out that God is predicting the future. He is telling Jeremiah to write this down as proof, as it were, that God…

The next thanksgiving verse is found among three calls to hearken to the people of God in Isaiah 51. The first call mentions the joy and thanksgiving to which the people of God will be called, calling to mind the origins of men. The second call mentions the coming judgment and contrasts it with the…

In this section we’ll look at a number of verses in the psalms that mention thanks, although that is not necessarily the theme of the whole psalm. The first group of psalms are psalms where the primary request is one of mercy, restoration, help, salvation, or deliverance. In Psalm 6, in the context of asking…

We come now to a first discussion of some of the thanks given in the book of Psalms, aka the Psalter. We have already reviewed Psalm 18 (in Part 3 of this series), Psalms 105, 96, and 106 (Part 4), Psalms 39, 62, and 77 (Part 6), Psalms 107, 118, and 136 (Part 8), Psalms…

The first passage below provides a list of the Levites who dwelt at Jerusalem in the time of Nehemiah. One will note that Mattaniah is the leader of thanksgiving in prayer and that the second prominent Levite of the sons of Asaph was Bakbukiah. Meanwhile, the other prominent Levite is Abda. Using a hop-skip genealogy,…