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Author: eejoseph
What could it mean to be “well-spoken of”?
Luke 6:26
Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.
Standout saying in today’s reading
The real prophets get persecuted and killed. The rest get acclaimed by the community – all men, not every individual.
Where is the prophet since John the Baptist?
If you do not know the answer to that question you are likely to be in the snare of a false prophet, not necessarily someone calling himself “prophet” but an authority figure.
An incredibly dangerous attitude
The human body knows when it deserves urgent care. The doctor comes later. The spirit has needs too (none if we believe in immortal souls and perfectly fit persons, believers and nonbelievers healed by God) and it has healing and maintenance routines. Conscience, experience and faith build our spiritual health and fitness. Believing what God has promised is more than sufficient. Instead we have thought that positive thinking can replace the abject negativity of human righteousness (performing what we think God wants) we have the spiritual equivalent of a contagious and fatal disease. To sum up in simple terms, we suffer from icanitis, and tacking on “through Christ who strenthens me” does nothing to hide our proud foolishness.
The covid-19 blessing
We are showing the world how threatened we are by both surprising events and by scheduled ones. Death is coming and we have no remedy. Coronavirus threatens a lot of people and the remedy is not blood on the doorpost of anyone’s house nor are there buttons available to believers to vaccinate people or cure people.
Spiritual solutons are essentially cheap trash. Would we not expect our Jewish brothers and sisters to tell us that the solution to the pandemic is obedience to all the Commandments of God? Are Muslims saying that covid-19 gets beaten if we believe that Muhammad is Allah’s only prophet and there’s only one God named Allah?
Plague or plot
When exactly the blood of Christ became a commodity for Christians (and anyone else who dares) to pour, wipe, smear or sprinkle is not clear. It is not a Bible doctrine. Demons are responsible for the idea that Christ’s blood is for everything. It is not healthy to call bad things good but that does not restrain the fear mongers. They believe they can stop the plague from doing what God wants, but we cannot have the pandemic as one of the must-happens and complain about it and expect God to stop it before it does its work. When the plagues at the end of the age move into their last stage we do not see the masses repenting, and we cannot believe that catastrophic events are intended to help people see a loving God and worship Him. You buy that and you’ve lost your mind.
Look up! Redemption is near!
So when you hear the list of great things that will come about as a result of the coronavirus pandemic just be sure that that virus does not become the god that we are worshipping, which is the way it seems right now. How many of us are doing bad things so good can come? Is that a godly method? Get yourself a God who can hear you and talk to you and you will be in line for every day blessings, with or without pandemics, famines or earthquakes.
Never thought of
The genius behind the American adventure is thought to be religious. “One nation under God ” and “the pursuit of life, liberty…” and other rubbish sayings are not Christian or even Jewish. The love of truth in the context of politics and religion is taking a backseat to lies and propaganda just as it has for millennia.
Of course no religion has openly advocated that lying is acceptable but a nation claiming to be religious and the mightier Israel does. If only they could keep the embarrassing records of religion out of sight.
Are you inoculated against religious and political and ethnic lies?
A day like this
And it came to pass on a certain day, as he was teaching, that there were Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by, which were come out of every town of Galilee, and Judæa, and Jerusalem: and the power of the Lord was present to heal them.
Luke 5:17
We suspect that many of the events in Yeshua’s life come to us in the gospels are examples; that many of his encounters with people are likely to have been repeated all over Palestine throughout the three years.
You are not alone in your longing for a day when healing power was in the village. Such days may be few as are genuine (verifiable) cures of cancer and diabetes. The widow of Nain was not the only witness to power present. Neither was:
Mark 6:5-6
- Simeon, an old man waiting for a look at Messiah
- The distressed mother whose child needed urgent care
- The bereaved who had heard that death was subject to the reversal
- The leper who had given up hope of ever feeling love in the touch of a human hand
Power exhibits like this should be happening often, especially when two days every week we see people gathering to Christ from their neighbourhoods.
And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief. And he went round about the villages teaching.
Mark 6:5-6
How the gold dims
Books like this (small booklet) have been part of satisfying the thirst of many believers. Having a number of Bible verses in one place in some kind of order is a huge time saver. But what if the order itself has no structure? Chaos follows. The entry for covenant in this book has two parts: new and old.
Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant,
Hebrews 13:20
If the point is to compare the two then one should use the same measures: the same hearings and questions.
The new covenant is in Christ’s blood. He ratifies it. There is no connection to the Sinai or the Palestinian covenant. It has nothing to do with Israel’s exit from Egypt
Hebrews 8:8-9
8. For finding fault with them, he says, Behold, the days come, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah: 9. Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; because they continued not in my covenant, and I regarded them not, says the Lord.
There is no commandment participation
God’s role is clear – I will. Human participation does not include drilling it into “our kids” for example as the custom was for the old/first covenant.
- I will put my laws into their mind, and
- write them in their hearts:
- I will be to them a God, and
- they shall be to me a people
- they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest.
- I will be merciful to their unrighteousness,
- I will remember their sins and their iniquities no more.
The author is not comparing old and New covenant. He is actually making the points he wants to make about obedience about where the covenant placed but he says nothing about the record of keeping those Commandments.
Criteria for the new
- Where written
- Compared to the other
- Same as another
- Who ratifies
- What is its commemoration
The writer wants to say that the law is now written in human hearts but he does not deny that you can’t be teaching people about that. He compares the old to the new without saying they are different. He talks about the ratification of the old but says nothing about the ratification of the new by the blood of the Incarnate Word, not by animal blood being sprinkled on a book. There is no commemoration of the first covenant. The Jew is obliged to do what it says, not celebrate it.
Criteria for the old
- Must obey God
- What it is based on
- Who wrote it where
- With what it is ratified
- People quickly broke it
Hundreds of years later
Following the Sinai failure the precious message from God became talking points until judgment arrived and exiled the Jewish people.
How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! the stones of the sanctuary are poured out in the top of every street.
Lamentations 4:1
Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the Lord.
Lamentations 2:9
A “told you so” turning point
What do you say to the worried people?
This question posed to the American president at a White House briefing received an abominable response that made me remember thinking “potus45 has no heart at all”.
That’s a nasty question and you are a bad reporter.
We may have thought that an existential crisis can wake the dead but not even the mounting infection rates of covid-19 and the need for discipline are revealing the humanity in the executive branch of the US government. I told you so.
See the exchange on YouTube. https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=T_G4hTJX1Xw
Not even a little compassion.
The gloating bigot in the White House sees pomp and profit only, and hears only those small soundbytes that stir up people who do repeat without thinking.
Potusbigotusgloatus45 cares little about people dying of severe acute respiratory syndrome.
