About Griffin Ministries
Never read the Bible the same way again.
Griffin Ministries is focused on providing Bible education resources and experiences that bring together the supernatural and the best in faithful scholarship.
Bring the Supernatural and Scholarship together and read the Bible fresh!
Griffin Ministries is focused on providing Bible education resources and spiritual insights through methods that bring together an openness to the supernatural along with the best in faithful biblical scholarship. This is so important because ancient people, including the Israelites, believed they lived out their lives surrounded by influential invisible realities, multiple spiritual realms inhabited by personalities and structures; what the Bible calls the Heavens. That belief in invisible reality is what we commonly call the supernatural and it is central to how and why God inspired the ancient writers to compose the Bible.
But the Heavens is not just an ancient, “that was then, this is now” phenomenon, the Heavens are still quite real, we humans are still surrounded by invisible persons and structures with whom and with which we are constantly interacting. God has always wanted his people to be able to discern his ways and his truth especially in the face of other powerful and attractive truth claims.
Griffin Ministries is dedicated to helping you, the modern reader learn about the Heavens from God’s own inspired source, the Bible, and to equip you with the insights and experience to learn from the Bible how to navigate your life now in God’s presence and wisdom.
Why scholarship? People always want to know how things work, what is real, and how to live a good life. That’s why the Bible is filled with believers asking God what he is doing and why. As much as they took Heaven for real, ancient believers were also convinced of the reality of life in the other realm God created, the earth. The Bible itself is, in part, a work of scholarship; a careful study of God on the earth, what God did, why he did it, and who he is because of it. The God of the Bible calls for thoughtful reflection on who he is and then calls for obedience in life with him.
Believers in Jesus are called to careful critical study of the Bible because Jesus himself did so. Paul also goes to great lengths to report what he knows to be the facts that others can check for themselves (see 1Cor. 15!)
Reading the Bible “critically” does not mean tearing it apart. It means being careful about figuring out what it meant to its original audiences by applying the best of recent biblical research relating to the world of the ancient Israelites, the world of the early followers of Jesus and their respective neighbors so we can see what they saw and hear what they heard.
At Griffin Ministries we embrace careful scholarship. We don’t fear it. Good scholarship sharpens our understanding, reveals new insights, keeps us honest, and it allows us to see the foundational truths of the Bible with fresh insights. Griffin Ministires accomplishes this by bringing together the supernatural and scholarship. The best in spiritual practices, the best in scholarship.
Our mission is to change the way you read the Bible and to enrich your life in God.
Meet Your Instructor
Read the Bible with fresh insights and enthusiasm!
Bill Griffin brings a unique combination of personal, pastoral, and educational experience to interpreting and teaching the Bible. His lively insights into the meaning behind biblical texts elevate his students’ understanding of the ancient mysteries that have connected generations of believers.
Bill grew up Lutheran, but don’t hold that against him. He was a teenager in the Jesus Movement ‘70’s when he surrendered his stubborn heart to Christ. He puts it this way, “I went from knowing about God to knowing Him personally. Jesus started something in me that continues to guide my life.”
It was about a year later when Bill came heart-to-heart with the Holy Spirit, “In that hour and a half of intense encounter with God I had an experience where I saw and felt the words of Jeremiah 1:4-8 come off the page of my Bible and embed themselves in me. That was the beginning of a life-long fascination with the Holy Scriptures.”
The following year, a fellow UC Davis student showed Bill a personal copy of the Hebrew Bible and another friend was learning New Testament Greek, Bill says he fell in love with the ancient texts, “I just had to learn to read Hebrew and Greek.”
Seminary was the next stop on his journey. Bill encountered the various disciplines of biblical criticism in which he and his fellow seminarians were immersed. He says, “For my professors there was no spiritual world in and around the Bible. But for me the Bible spoke of invisible dimensions of reality that were quite real and full of meaning.” His professors explained the mysteries found in the Bible as “legends and fantasies”. But Bill saw another side of reality: what the Bible calls “the Heavens.
What began as a longing became a life-long calling, to integrate experience of the Heavens with biblical scholarship on the Earth. This calling to see heaven and act on earth has become the hallmark of Bill’s twenty-five years of pastoral ministry and central to his eighteen years teaching as professor of Bible and Ministry at Simpson University (Redding California).
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