Something I read today....

[mizpeh]

Part Three: Genesis 1 as Covenant Preamble.

.....Genesis 1 then fills the role of the Preamble and is intended to
reveal just exactly who this King is who is making this covenant and
who through it is bringing salvation to the world. The Preamble,
then presents the King in the role of Creator, and this is the reason
why the procedural discourse concerning the creation of all things,
most especially man fills the role of introducing God. No doubt this
chapter could be mined without end for truth about God, but here we
identify seven themes in particular, which will be vital in the
Mosaic covenant, continue to be important motifs throughout all of
Scripture, and come to full fruition in the person of Jesus Christ,
the Son of God. These seven themes are comprised of four roles and
three acts:

1. Creator
It is no small matter that the first truth the Scriptures tell us
about God is that He is our Creator: “In the beginning, God
created the heavens and the earth.” (Gen. 1:1). To the maker go
the rights of ownership: “Know that the Lord, he is God! It is
he who made us, and we are his.” (Ps. 100:3) Note Gen 14:19:
“Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Possessor of heaven and
earth,” where the word translated “Possessor,”
qoneh, means both “creator” and “owner.”
And He has full rights over His creation: “Has the potter no
right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for
honorable use and another for dishonorable use?” (Rom. 9:21)
Jesus had a right to be outraged: “He was in the world, and the
world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.”
(John 1:10).


To read the rest, go to:

http://asphaleia.wordpress.com/2009/...irrors-part-5/

[mizpeh]

I get annoyed with myself when I become involved in what's going on around me at work, or at church, or at home to the point where I forget about God being with me. I kind of lose that "practicing the presence of God" mindset of always keeping the Lord before my face and I get caught up in the activities of the day. I was reading Numbers 15 this morning and came across this passage in verses 37-41 where God instructs Moses to tell the people to make a visible border on their garments to remind them of who and whose they are. I looked through a couple of commentaries and thought this one was insightful by David Guzik:

4. (37-41) Reminders for a holy people.

a. The tassels on the corners of their garments and the blue thread in the tassels of the corners were intended to remind Israel to Whom they belonged; they were God's people. Such reminders are an effective preventive remedy for sin!

i. But why a blue thread? The ark of the covenant was covered with a blue cloth; blue curtains adorned the tabernacle; blue was in the high priest's garments. It was full of holy reminders!

b. We might imagine an Israelite being tempted into some kind of sin, and then catching sight of his own distinctive garments - reminding him of who he is, and reminding him that others can see who he is: A child of God, not a child of the sin he is contemplating!

i. In this sense, Christian theme clothing and jewelry and such can indeed serve a purpose; it can remind us of who we are, and provide a kind of "walking accountability" for our conduct.

c. However, man's instinctive pride always has a way of perverting such good and holy commands of God; in Jesus' day, He directly rebuked the abuse of this command among the religious elite, speaking of how they would enlarge the borders of their garments (Matthew 23:5), making the tasseled area as conspicuous as possible, as an ostentatious display of their "holiness."

i. The same can also be said of today's Christian theme clothing and jewelry; it can also be abused in the same self-righteous, hypocritical manner.

I was thinking that I might buy a WWJD bracelet but that seems to have been played out. I want to have something as a simple reminder to me and not something others would be aware of. What about if I buy a little ring with a blue stone? Nothing loud or gawdy. Or tying a small blue string around my finger.

Do you think the Holy Spirit would be insulted by me doing this? Isn't that what He does afterall...He puts His laws in our hearts and convicts, quickens us, and brings thoughts to our minds to keep us on track? Does anyone else struggle with trying to walk with God and be led of the Spirit?

[mizpeh]

"...But is it really possible, amid the wear and tear of daily life, to walk in the experience of these blessings? Are they really meant for all God’s children? Let us rather ask the question, Is it
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possible for God to do what He has promised? The one part of the promise we believe—the complete and perfect pardon of sin. Why should we not believe the other part—the law written in the heart, and the direct Divine fellowship and teaching? We have been so accustomed to separate what God has joined together, the objective, outward work of His Son, and the subjective, inward work of His Spirit, that we consider the glory of the New Covenant above the Old to consist chiefly in the redeeming work of Christ for us, and not equally in the sanctifying work of the Spirit in us. It is owing to this ignorance and unbelief of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, as the power through whom God fulfils the New Covenant promises, that we do not really expect them to be made true to us.
Do let us turn our hearts away from all past experience of failure, as caused by nothing but unbelief; do let us admit fully and heartily, what failure has taught us, the absolute impossibility of even a regenerate man walking in God’s law in his own strength, and then turn our hearts quietly and trustfully to our own Covenant God. Let us hear what He says He will do for us, and believe Him; let us rest on His unchangeable faithfulness
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and the surety of the Covenant, on His Almighty power and the Holy Spirit working in us; and let us give up ourselves to Him as our God. He will prove that what He has done for us in Christ is not one whit more wonderful than what He will do in us every day by the Spirit of Christ."


Two Covenants by Andrew Murray
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/covenants.iii.iv.html

[mizpeh]

This is long but worth the time to read it thoughtfully. Mere Christianity, Chapter 11: Faith by C S Lewis

Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief--accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity...The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.

When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted: but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, "perhaps she'll be different this time," and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the isntructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water-- or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go own.

Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That in not the point at which Faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other peple who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carryout a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moment at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments when a mere mood rises up against it.

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get off', you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

The first step is to recognize the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings and church-going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who have lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

[mizpeh]

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE & THE OLDEST SECULAR ACCOUNTS SUPPORTING THE EXISTANCE OF JESUS OF NAZARETH

No serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus. Otto Betz

1. Cornelius Tacitus: (AD55-120) Roman historian. Most acclaimed works are the Annals and the Histories. The Annals cover the period from Augustus Caesar’s death in AD14 to the death of the Emperor Nero in AD68, while the Histories begin after Nero’s death and proceed to the reign of Domitian in AD96. In the Annals, Tacitus alludes to the death of Christ and to the existence of Christians at Rome. See Annals XV,44: But not all the relief that could come from man, not all the bounties that the prince could bestow nor all the atonements which could be presented to the gods, availed to relieve Nero from the infamy of being believed to have ordered the conflagration, the fire of Rome. Hence to suppress the rumor, he falsely charged with the guilt, and punished with most exquisite tortures, the persons commonly called Christians, who were hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius: but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time, broke out again, not only through Judea, where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also.” (The misspelling of Christ as “Christus” was a common error made by pagan writers). It is interesting that Pilate is not mentioned in any other pagan document that has survived. It is an irony of history that the only surviving reference to him in a pagan document mentions him because he passed sentence of death on Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ (Messiah).

For more quotes and proof of the historicity of Christ: http://www.agapebiblestudy.com/Salva...on_History.pdf

[mizpeh]

7. Josephus ben Mattathias: 37-100AD, Jewish priest, general and historian. He wrote two great works of Jewish history: The Jewish War, written in the early 70’s and Jewish Antiquities, which was finished about AD94. In his work, Jewish Antiquities, there is a passage that has created heated debate among scholars for many decades: “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ, and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians so named from him are not extinct at this day.” Antiquities, XVIII, 33

[mizpeh]

....It was thus with the Old Covenant. God had said to Israel, Obey My voice, and I will be your God (Jer. vii. 23, xi. 4). These simple words contained the whole Covenant. And when Israel disobeyed, the Covenant was broken. The question of Israel being able or not able to obey was not taken into consideration: disobedience forfeited the privileges of the Covenant.
If a New Covenant were to be made, and if that was to be better than the Old, this was the one thing to be provided for. No New Covenant could be of any profit unless provision were made for securing obedience. Obedience there must be. God as Creator could never take His creatures into His favour and fellowship, except they obeyed Him. The thing would have been an impossibility. If the New Covenant is to be better than the Old, if it is to be an everlasting Covenant, never to be broken, it must make some sufficient provision for securing the obedience of the Covenant people.
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And this is indeed the glory of the New Covenant, the glory that excelleth, that this provision has been made. In a way that no human thought could have devised, by a stipulation that never entered into any human covenant, by an undertaking in which God’s infinite condescension and power and faithfulness are to be most wonderfully exhibited, by a supernatural mystery of Divine wisdom and grace, the New Covenant provides a guarantee, not only for God’s faithfulness, but for man’s too! And this in no other way than by God Himself undertaking to secure man’s part as well as His own. Do try and get hold of this.....

This is an excerpt from Andrew Murray's The Two Covenants. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/murray/covenants.iii.vi.html

This chapter has some excellent thoughts in it. It kind of leans toward OSAS in its wording. But I think if we have a desire to walk with God, He will do everything but force us to walk with Him. For us to lose our salvation which Christ gave His all for us to have, takes unbelief, apathy, and a lack of the fear of God on our behalf. A lack of the fear of God which would unrestrain us from sinning against Him willingly.

Who's report will you believe?

[mizpeh]

I've been studying, discussing, and praying about Christology for quite awhile now. ( I want to KNOW Jesus so I can follow His example of being pleasing to God) I read a couple of paragraphs today written by NT Wright which absolutely in such condensed form speak volumes. I've taken both paragraphs completely out of context but I think they stand fairly well on their own.

What are we therefore saying about the earthly Jesus? In Jesus himself, I suggest we see the biblical portrait of YHWH come to life: the loving God, rolling up his sleeves (Isa 52:10) to do in person the job that no one else could do, the creator God giving new life the God who works through his created world and supremely through his human creatures, the faithful God dwelling in the midst of his people, the stern and tender God relentlessly opposed to all that destroys or distorts the good creation, and especially human beings, but recklessly loving all those in need and distress. “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he shall carry the lambs in his arms; and gently lead those that are with young” (Isa 40:11). It is the OT portrait of YHWH, but it fits Jesus like a glove.

Thinking and speaking of God and Jesus in the same breadth is not, as has often been suggested, a category mistake. Of course, if you start with the Deist god and the reductionists’ Jesus, they will never fit, but then they were designed not to. Likewise, if you start with the New Age gods-from-below, or for that matter the gods of ancient paganism, and ask what would happen if such a god were to become human, you would end up with a figure very different from the one in the gospels. But if you start with the God of the Exodus, of Isaiah, of creation and covenant, of the Psalms, and ask what that God might be like, were he to become human, you will find that he might look very much like Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps never more so than when he dies on a Roman cross. Start with the Deist God, and your historical Jesus study will only achieve incarnational christology by sliding towards docetism. Start with the real historical earthly Jesus, and your God will come running down the road to meet you, deeply attractive, deeply preachable, deeply challenging in his transforming embrace. That, for me, is the theological significance of the earthly Jesus.

Both paragraphs are located near the end of the article.

http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_JIG.htm

[*AQuietPlace*]

I enjoy this thread, Mizpeh.

[mizpeh]

Originally Posted by *AQuietPlace*

I enjoy this thread, Mizpeh.

Thanks.

I feel like I'm in my own little world over here.