The manifestos of murderous dudes are evidence.
We cannot bring the mass murders to White House?
Remember:
America will redeem itself when it prosecutes people who say things like that.
Many of us are worshipping the capacity to choose and we stick to the routine of jumping through the same hoops week after week. The assumed helpers of this chosen lifestyle are the massive legal institutions we depend on to punish wrong and often the innocent. The exercise becomes a futile venture when we insist on trying to cultivate our choices and values in perfect isolation from others.
With thousands of years and hundreds of rules under our belt we still can’t say we have achieved purity, safety, or maturity. Nobody can. All the modern nations coming to grips with their divided houses and running out of fingers to plug the holes in their leaky constitutions many Christians have bought the delusion that law will stop crime.
If the gloating bigot in the White House is saying it, it is likely to have a gaping hole in the bottom. Humans do not change by willpower, and it is impossible for any human to become a citizen of God’s kingdom by willing it.
But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. John 1:12-13
There is no successful vote to end crime
Again it is helpful to work the message of Numbers 21:6
Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.
People died and YHWH moved, not to bring the dead back, but to demonstrate his preservation of His travelling people. Again we see how precisely the narratives of the sacred texts inform us of the practical dimensions of the glorious gospel.
Moses’ elevated bronze serpent is one of those graphics that tells only so much about the Saviour’s mission. Could there be one facet of ancient revelation that tells it all, that is not blood (life) and grace (God’s attitude)? The person who has not believed in Christ is condemned for not believing. Having no participation in God’s life and having only human desires and aspirations is death.
In response to the serpent-bite outbreak YAHWEH ordered something intended to drill down into the experience. The last thing they wanted to see was a serpent, of any kind. The dying Israelite who looked lived, surviving the venomous bite.
Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. Numbers 21:6
Who would have thought that God’s answer to our ongoing sin problem was to have us look at a dying sinner, His son who had taken onto himself all of our sins? Salvation story is not told in any single Old Testament narrative, and the elevated bronze serpent is one that tells one slice. So to claim that “tabernacle” or sayings like “whole duty of man” are the bedrock of the gospel is pure fiction.
Life for people dead in trespasses comes only from Christ and his sacrifice. Elevated serpent is obviously another matter.
Still think that John 3:16 is about life for a dead race?
We are familiar with presentations that are completely Christ-free except for the fact that the content might bring us to the Christ Event.
The theory that God has encoded the way of life for the world in the Tabernacle is a fascinating half truth. Up to the preaching of John the Baptist followers of divine revelation had only glimpses of the great hope of the race. The OT makes a person wise to salvation without delivering its benefits, unless we can show that something other than faith is responsible for saving ancient individuals. Two witnesses, David and Abraham convince us otherwise.
The OT is either contemporary instruction or prediction, and we know that God kept the mystery of divinity – mystery of godliness – concealed until the Lord Jesus Christ himself began to publish it. It is sheer fantasy and fable to intimate that the gospel was preached to the Israelites in antiquity.
How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him; Hebrews 2:3
Matthew 13:13-17
This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says: You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.
Ancient leaders whose lives came under divine scrutiny or had divine approval are many, even though only a few are celebrated by means of a book named after or written by them. David seems to outshine them all with curious distinction. From young shepherd to bandit king-in-waiting, to songster and builder of a palatial residence for Israel’s God, David rocks. All he ever wanted was to build a place where God would be pleased to live as sung in a pilgrim Psalm.
Remember, O Lord, in David’s favor, all the hardships he endured, how he swore to the Lord and vowed to the Mighty One of Jacob, I will not enter my house or get into my bed, I will not give sleep to my eyes or slumber to my eyelids, until I find a place for the Lord, a dwelling place for the Mighty One of Jacob.
132:1-5
When Solomon, David’s son, departed from the standards delivered by Moses, God decided to rip up the kingdom, dividing it into two. The northern kingdom would bear the name of Israel (the father of the twelve patriarchs) and the southern kingdom would bear the name of Judah (the patriarch who had pled for Joseph’s life and whose family line was destined to be the house of Messianic revelation). The nation might have felt that a restart like the flood or worse, an overthrow like the Sodom and Gomorrha judgment was in the works, but God’s promises required a living people and due regard for David.
Nevertheless, for David’s sake the Lord his God gave him a lamp in Jerusalem, setting up his son after him, and establishing Jerusalem, (1 Kings 15:4) because David did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and did not turn aside from anything that he commanded him all the days of his life, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite (1 Kings 15:5).
David, with his blood-soaked hands and Yahweh’s sure mercies, was greater than Solomon and neither of these monarchs is the expected anointed one.
Building a house for Yahweh is an irrelevant and outdated instruction as we have come to understand the requirements for divine residence.
Mark 14:58
We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.
No building anywhere compares with the human body as residence for God.
The people had a common leader and experiences, yet they
Let us stop imagining that we are experiencing super-human trials, because when we are Christ’s we have the confidence that with every trial comes an exit. The exit route is up “Endurance Road” not “Miracle Blvd”.
But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. 2 Corinthians 4:7
The human interest in goodness and excellence has often brought us to the wealthy and the influential. More often than not we look in the wrong places and our quests end with some of the most abominable things and people. Typically we pursue and latch onto the proud and self-reliant, the heroes of the world’s junkyards and dynasties.
God has deposited, to our surprise, his lasting, incorruptible, and theft-free fortune in the lowly of circumstance and heart. In these mortal bodies of ours there is excellence: the Holy Spirit and the character of God our Father and Saviour.
We have treasure!
Life is Fun, But Not a Joke 