As reading his Bible, my father noticed another interesting name of God, in Exodus 17:15-16:

And Moses built an altar and called the name of it, The LORD is my banner, saying, "A hand upon the throne of the LORD! The LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation."

Another name of God - "My banner".

Here's a nice passage which shows how Jesus considered his work far more important than any other things in life, and how we can be considered his friends and relatives.

And [Jesus'] mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you." And he answered them, "Who are my mother and my brothers?" And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.
Mark 3:31-35

And what exactly does God want us to do? This is answered in another passage, earlier in the Bible.

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Micah 6:8

We must do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God - then we can be Jesus' friend, and be called his brother, sister and mother.

When our family were reading Saturday's second Bible reading (Jeremiah 16 - see our full Bible reading planner), there was an interesting point at the started; in the second verse, God told Jeremiah, "You shall not take a wife, nor shall you have sons or daughters in this place." This got us thinking about various prophets in the Bible, and whether they had wives, what happened to them, and that sort of thing. So now I've done a bit more investigation, and here are some of the things I found.

• Abraham: Genesis 20 (note especially verse 7). Abraham was in Abimelech the Philistine king's land, and to save his life, he said that his wife Sarah was actually his sister, because otherwise he thought that Abimelech might have him killed so that he could have her. (She was beautiful, even if she was quite old - about 90 years old!) God showed himself to Abimelech in a dream, and told him that Abraham was a prophet, and that Sarah was actually his wife. When told this, Abimelech let her go, and gave presents to Abraham.
• Ezekiel: Ezekiel 24:15-27. Ezekiel was married, but was told by God that his wife was going to die, as a sign for the people. He was not to mourn for her, but to continue on with his work. In verse 18, "I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died." It seems to me to be a pretty striking way of going about giving an example, but thta was what God needed to do to get across to that stubborn people.

I think that I'll add more here as I find more to put here.

I'm going to be starting to do a blog on this site, really about pretty much anything Bible-related that takes my fancy. Because of my Bible-reading habits, posts will often be related to our daily Bible readings; if you wish to read the Bible with a nice Bible reading planner, on a day-by-day basis, you can use the Bible Reading Planner block in the left sidebar, or, if you want the whole year's worth of readings listed, that is also available inside our resources section, on the Bible Reading Planner page. One idea which I think I'll start on is a consideration of various names given to God. I hope to find some quite interesting ones!

I'll start with the one that was actually the one that made me decide to do this; Isaiah 63:16. Here's an extract of it, the important bit, taken from the ESV:

You, O LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.

“Our Redeemer from of old” – that's one I hadn't noticed before.

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