Grace

Roosting rebels can’t take the heat

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Why are so many of the USA’s troubles connected to “Amendments”?  Lawyer-speak and law manipulation, a phenomenon top of field since New Testament times.  In addition to the law being written on stone to indicate its permanence and immutability we have to admit that amendments to the American Constitution or any other body of law would indicate its imperfection. It is the point made in the book of Hebrews when it affirms that a change in priesthood necessitates a change in law.  Priesthood, as the top ranking agency in Israel, is not Levitical but Melchizedekan.  It is hot in this space and all the crowing about law and order is a dead give away that the reality of grace and goodness is either not enough for insincere people or too much heat for them to absorb.

The scribe and the lawyer

Two professional types in New Testament times were the perpetual hounds of anyone who dared to act on the revelation that David’s greater son was the fulfillment of the essential hope of Abraham’s descendants and the hope of the human race. The scribes appear first helping Herod locate the birthplace of the newborn Messiah and thereafter asking gotcha questions or making shipwreck of the noblest human character trait: forgiveness.

The scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, “Who is this man who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God alone?” (Luke 5:21, NASB)

Scribes stood out for gumming up the power and authority that is latent in the Scriptures. Matthew reports that phenomenon: “for He [Christ] was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” (Matthew 7:29, NASB)

Grace: the block’s hottest girl


Law written in the heart does nothing to resolve the impurities in the heart; it only adds condemnation because it will always serve to show man guilty.  Whether you are saved or not, or think yourself a saint or a sinner saved by grace, there are certain things in the heart that we need to wrestle with. Tell yourself that you are in a different class and you will deny yourself the salvation which God provides for all human beings. Grace is simply too hot to handle much less manipulate, unlike law.  Grace (charis,χάρις) properly received elicits simple and unmixed thanks  (charis, χαρις ).

Yesterday and today’s company

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With or without historic awareness you are who you are. With or without friends and supporters we will go to our crosses and glory. Yesterday is definitely gone and friends come and go with the weather.

God does not need aces, he makes ’em in order to establish good graces.

Ships going to and fro between graceless nowheres

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Every day there is convincing evidence that the faith of Christ has been shaped to imitate the Israelite experience.

The essential grace ID card

For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.

John 1:17

It is true that God’s people have similar experiences to the Exodus, the encampment at Sinai, and the entry into Canaan, but there is neither wilderness wandering, death in the desert, nor wholesale desertion of the covenant in the experience of the great salvation. The saints are on high with Christ.

Seedsowing realities

And the one on whom seed was sown on the good soil, this is the man who hears the word and understands it; who indeed bears fruit and brings forth, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.”

Matthew 13:23

Noah’s discovery alongside his peers

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Noah is recognized as a faithful and effective preacher.  He stood out in his generation  by being convicted by a dream.  His discovery of grace is the same stuff as Abraham’s justification (for believing the promise of chiidren like the stars in the sky in number).  If anything else would have turned the tide of badness pouring out of humans it was not the law or the threat of death.

And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repents me that I have made them. (8) But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.

Genesis 6:7-8

The source of badness is the human heart. The things we want are usually responsible for the attitudes we develop and the things we do.

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Genesis 6:5

Thousands of years later human hearts are in the same condition.

For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies:

Matthew 15:19