Monthly Archives: November 2022

November 29, 2022 · 2:46 pm

Land/Temple

Genesis 28:15-17 15 “Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you.” 16 Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ” sureley the Lord is in this place’ and I did not know it.” 17 And he was afraid and said,”How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of Heaven.”

Read this very carefully. Notice the associations, the references that both sides give. They say them differently, but they are saying the same thing. Land mentioned by God is His saying this is where I will be. House(Temple) by Jacob is the house where God lives, and interestingly cryptic for us but we have missed it in our ciphering of this passage is that this land/Temple/house/place is also “Heaven” which also implies that this was the Garden of Eden!!

Do you see it? With Jacob, later will becom Israel as a nation, God’s people, His selected example to become a light upon a Hill to the entire World, would later be for All to be, His people!!

I want to also point out that the ‘land’ reference to the ‘Temple’ also needs to be rectified in understanding. Do you see it? One, Jacob associates God’s home to a temple(because it has to have a building) This was before the actual first Temple was even thought about, it was probably seen as the thing to do because of other people had buildt temples to their Gods. God’s plan for his people was to start with the idea of the temple,sacrifices,commandments to bring them into the realm of God.

It is then that God ‘saves’ us from our transgressions by sending His Son to die on the cross, and Create the New Man for all to become!!

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November 27, 2022 · 1:33 pm

Something to think about…

A little nibble here and a nibble there.

God continues to give me insight on everything that I am studying. I have 3-4 topics that dig into deeply right now that they actually are intertwined with each other in some ways. I will start with one of the topics to get a more deeper understanding of it, when I am pointed to another nugget within one of my other interests. I still love it that it is open to everything that we read in the bible.

Let me make general observation about studying the word that I see in the ‘community’ of believers. I fear, that the lack of learning God’s word by exegesis in this ‘community'(I am disguising the real culprit (paradigm) in this statement to help you realize what it is) The paradigm that I am talking about is the ‘church’ model that we have, mainly in the US. It does not lead to the leader nor the participants of really being able to dig deep and to understand God’s word and storyline.

I find it worrisome. Let me backup a little so you will understand where I am coming from. My father was a Pastor, I was a pastor’s son, my life was filled with everything and anything related to the ‘church’ and the ‘Ministry’. My pastor(father) was with me until I was 18 yrs old until I went to college. After that I too continued with this model of a pastor and perishioner thru my early adult life until my early 50’s.

From this model I too became a example of the ‘church’ model and all it’s glory. It was then that I realized that we(I) were just getting snippets of the story. Everything was not explained or pieced together to make a complete story. It was only highlighting certain ones to put a exclaimation on it, but was it the REAL story?

I don’t fault the pastor,per se, because this is what they were taught. So why not just continue it with the congregation. But what, I do say, both parties are at fault, the pastor and the listener. Now I know that you are going to say here, that ‘you’ have bible study groups on wednesday nite or a small group on thursday evening. I say this is not exactly what happens when the ‘body’ get together to dig deep into the word. Most of us are not equipped to do such a thing, either from a ‘leader’ position let alone the student.

Why, do I say all this? It is when people that are semi-interested in discussiong things of scripture, and you have someone bring something up that is ‘different’ in nature to what everyone has heard or read, and they dismiss it as hogwash or the ultimate worse thing, it is ‘Heresy’. lol. Not even knowing what heresy is defined as.

This shows that when people bring something up that is found in scripture, we treat it as foolish but it is there as proof text. We sometimes push it aside when we don’t see it as relevent in the verses that we read, or even in the context of the whole story of God. But what I have found that it is amazing that just the tiniest nugget can make a big difference in the meaning of a story.

I would like to point out one of the stories in the bible that gets a little bit of attention, but it is not quite really understood in the relevance of the whole story. It also leaves out some details in it that it either doesn’t want to get into, or just glosses over it. It is the story of the “the tower of Babel”, I challenge you to read it again in its entireity, and slowly ingest it’s meaning and subtlety in all its flow.

Take more time to read the word to dig into the true meaning and the whole storyline of God and how he works thru man and mankind to get to the “Eternal Purpose”!

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November 23, 2022 · 3:48 pm

Oh My!

Bible is amazing! I am daily ‘seeing’ things in my reading or listening to scripture. I will sometime listen to someone on a certain subject and there is another tidbit of insight to something else I may have been studying and it pieces them together to make it understood!

I in this year have seen or heard alot more of this in everything that I do, it is letting me take everything in to consideration when I am studying. I came across something today, that did exactly that for me. I am always bringing something up in a biblical or a worldly manner that tie each other together to form God’s hand in His eternal purpose for Us!

What I also have perceived that christians have failed in their responsibility to ‘know’ the scriptures. I am a believer in the Corporate identity of God’s people, but I also see the individualism or of small groups deeply studying the word. We have failed to ‘see’ things in the scripture, just as the Pharisee’s, or the scribes did not actually ‘knowing’ what the word means into what God is really about or what He was really doing in the lives of the Jews and the gentiles.

I believe that the train has left the station and is getting up to speed to make it to it’s destination! Hallelujah!! Let us strive for Wisdom in God to continue this Journey!!

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November 19, 2022 · 3:25 pm

Instruction

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good

The Revised Standard Version (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1971), Ge 1:26–31.

I find these six verses of the bible, the most non-understood verses in the bible.

This should be the verses that every christian, every group of christians, everyone in the world should know and to be the follower of it’s meaning from day one to today!

This is our “Vocation” for mankind. It is all that we need to know. It is from “OUR” God! What else do we need?

This is the “The Eternal Purpose”!

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November 18, 2022 · 3:40 pm

Tread lightly, my son…

I am a ‘abyie-normal'(reference to a statement in ‘Young Frankenstein’ kind of person. I am always swimming upstream in alot of arena’s. Religion is one of them. I will go up against the norm to challenge it to let it stand up to ‘not persecution’ but to ‘pillars of truth’.

I find it funny and at the same time, sad, that it would come to this but it always what happens when something ‘different’ or ‘new’ to someone when it is challenged to someone’s theology or institution.The ‘log’ that impedes our eyesight is that we not ‘see’ but that we haven’t ‘seen’, because we have been “soundbit’n” for over 500+ years thru the channels of the ‘church’.

Let me expound on this, a Pastor is person that is trying to speak to one small snippet of scripture of a theme,human righteousness, a story, or even a exegesis of a few verses. This paradigm is flawed. It is not using a Corporate Narrative to the Word of God. It(church) cannot ever work this way. The ‘Message’ or ‘Narrative’ cannot be told in a million soundbites over countless Sundays.

I am not sure if it possible to do this with any “Message” to the whole world at a level of this enormous level at a time. But what I do believe that as ‘hearers’ of the Word, or the ‘readers’ of the Word, that we(all) can finally ‘see’ the narrative of God’s story. I believe by starting from the beginning of the story and methodically seeing what God is moving the story along to get to his final scene, that Rest will come to Him.

It is the sincerity of the believers that will bring this mission of uniting all of us to the true Gospel to the World. Reading God’s word with the intent of ‘seeing’ Genesis 1-2 as God’s defining moment of His Kingdom. Realizing that God’s plan for all to be indwelt in the Holy Spirit as is His Son, thus given the title “Sons of God” a reality for all.

My skepticism of the current model is with alot of evidence to this reality of the ‘church'(assembly), one aspect of this would be the fact that the ‘disciples’ have no knowledge of the scriptures after 40+ yrs in the building that was supposed to do this exact thing, learn the word! There seems to be no rhyme or reason of the ‘teaching’ of the word, skipping from here to there in the bible, without any obvious relation to each other. Not realizing that the ‘sole’ issue of the bible starts at the beginning of the narrative, Genesis 1-2, has just been a blind spot from the very beginning of the reformation to now. Although, there seems to be some light shining from this corner, that is gaining some steam to see that this is where the story begins and that it is the Catalyst for the rest of the narrative til the final two chapters in the bible.

It is because we have been down the wrong road from the ‘Y’ intersection that we have missed the wrong message of christianity. It wasn’t about ‘trying’ to get to ‘Heaven’, but it was about having a ‘people’ holy enough to have ‘Heaven’ be on earth as the ‘New Creation’ or the New Kingdom of God.

This concept is now being realized in many of the roads outside the corner church’s, and even in some, it is realized inside the church’s. This is the beginning of what I believe to be the light that will have to be seen not only to the christians inside the building, but also outside in the road’s and highways of the world.

What has really surprised me in all this transfiguration of events is that it was not ‘seen’ sooner. When I have read the bible thru my own studies, I, one, have had problems ‘seeing’ the message that I always was given on sunday morning, there was no evidence of it to be seen. Secondly, I was seeing in plain site the real eternal purpose of God in front of me in the scriptures. Which leads me to another interesting observance of God.

Thru my studying and my involvement with other bible enthusiasts, I have had many ‘words’ used to describe things in the bible. One, being ‘hardened’, which was used in another topical discussion. But it got to me in thinking about it and the usage in the bible, especially in the Old Testament, it was used quite frequently for different times that God was having to deal with individual people or an entity of a group. I believe that God ‘hardened’ Israel to not ‘see’ their Messiah(Jesus) during a prolonged time until it was to be a ‘eye opening’ moment for the Whole World to observe in an Act of God to Showcase His Son, the Savior of the World!!

It is at this time, that the World will come to Him(thru Israel) the servant King to unite all(Israel,Gentile) to come and bow down to the God of All!!

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November 3, 2022 · 4:56 pm

One step further

You always hear people exclaim when telling scripture to prove a point to someone in discussions, but what if we take it ‘one step further’, to make it really clear, to all of us!

We all seem to know that ‘passage’ in the bible that will prove your point to someone, it’s always handy to have in a discussion. What the significance of the verse is that it alone can put the brakes on something that is being touted by someone in your discussions. It is also true that your counterpart can do the same thing to you also.

So who is right?

I, through various reading material, it has dawned on me that it is because ‘we’ (all of us) are not starting on page one together! What I mean by that, is that we are coming from different stories,examples, people, periods of time, languages, backgrounds, and theologies, and we are starting from ‘our’ base point for telling the story, or scripture.

What time has corroded over the centuries on our theology of God and the Bible has done harm on our understanding God and the Bible. I read all kinds of subject matter pertaining to religion, christianity,and the bible, and for the most part, it all starts from the time of Constantine in the 4th Century in our belief systems or our historical prowess of facts. We have used the Universal Church(Roman Catholic) and its rebellious Lutheran to get us to today. (Which I have always thought that from a religious point, we were starting from the middle of the story) All of our denominations have come from the starting point from the universal church. (Which in my opinion is based on something very misleading and misunderstood to its originality of a ‘church’)

I follow a theologian that says it quite succinctly in the problem that the modern ‘church’ is doing, and that is we are asking the wrong questions. We are asking questions to the middle of the story, when we should looking and thinking what God’s story is telling us from the beginning. God’s story is a narrative. Narrative- a spoken or written account of connected events; a story. There is meaning in a narrative story from the author, it doesn’t change or waver, it stays the same, no matter what.

There is a theme in the first two chapters of the bible. A tragedy happens, then the resumption of the theme starts back up, to the very end of the narrative. Until we get on the same page,the first two pages to be exact, we will never get to the point of why we have to have “Context”!

If we have Context from the first two pages of the Bible, it will not only stay in context thru out the bible, put the focus of the story will come to light to All of Us!!

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