Tag Archives: John

May 10, 2022 · 12:33 pm

John- The New Kingdom

I have always thought that the Gospel of John was the ‘Crescendo’ of the story of the Bible. But to really know what it is really saying is key to knowing what the beginning of the bible is telling us. All aspects of the bible are important.

I believe that for us to understand the Gospel of John, we have to read and understand what Genesis,Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy tell us in the first hints of God’s story. It is crucial that we do this. Each one of these books tells us an very important segment of the storyline, each one a different part, not one more important than the other, but important. They are historical, but they also lay the groundwork or foundation to the Gospel of John in the realization the the story is much bigger and is from a different world. The books of the bible do this in various themes that it incites us to look deeper into God’s eyes and soul to know.

Let me point out something right here at this point, That God is so amazing at his logical and illogical things that he brings us to in our world, even tho it makes us stop and ponder and think and be in the mind of our creator. One mind, One Spirit. Even the most studious bible reader may not catch why John’s gospel is in the order that it is, it is there for a reason.

John’s gospel, is the final frontier of God’s Heaven Trek. It is what comes to fruition when all things have been put back to rights. (this is statement that one of my authors says that puts it exactly the way it needs to be said) God has created a storyline that has wonderful beginning that takes a fork in the road, then he plans for that storyline to comeback to the original road to put things back to rights!

God created a Kingdom in the beginning. It was called the Garden of Eden, it was the realm where God(King),Garden of Eden(the land), and his people (christians) are to reign together forever. It was Heaven on earth! Let’s stop again, to define something that has historically been misidentified as to what it was,Heaven.

If we realize that all of us, now and past,and future people that are born will be citizens of the earth. It is just obvious where we have our citizenship. We also have a citizenship that is subletted even more by the country, or state, or providence that we live in. Our world is one of our making by who we are and by how we see fit to rule ourselves as a society. We have a plethora of ways to do this all around the world.

But it is different when we talk about the Creator who created everything we see, everything we participate in, everything that we have, and everyone around us. God created everything for ………..MAN! Not man for the world, as everyone seems to think. Now think of the directionality of the phrases of this statement. God created everything for Man. God created the Kingdom(earth) for man! Everything! including himself, God talked to adam and eve in the Garden of Eden, He walked with them daily with their Creator! How cool was that! A God actually having a connecting with his creation.

This is a stark contrast later in the story of the roman and greek stories being far off from their ‘so called’ creations that they never saw them or talked to them, they had to make themselves the replica’s of them as a idol in their ‘temples’ to worship. Now how is god a god if you are to make a ‘image’ of them with your own hands?

God made his own image of himself. US! WOW!!!! We are HIS Image!! Guess what, He made us as an image of Him, in His own Temple! The Earth!! WOW, how neat is that! God wants to be with His creation again!

Can you see it Now? Look back at the beginning of Genesis 1-2 chapters to see the creation of the world, Now look at what John’s Gospel is saying and foreshadowing of things to come. IT IS THE SAME!!

It is the exact same picture that God made in the beginning that he is restoring back to rights!!

This is the Storyline of the scriptures that God has made and restored to Him the ‘Eternal Purpose’!!!

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December 10, 2021 · 11:23 am

New Study Plan

I have decided to have an extensive bible study of John, thru the blog, with your help in giving your comments and insight. I will try and have some small but intriguing thoughts hopefully every other day. My goal is to go very deep in our journey with John.

Stay tuned for the beginning of a very wonderful journey into John and his letter.

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December 8, 2021 · 2:55 pm

Temple

  Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” John 2.19

What does this mean to you?

Give me all your input to what you understand this to mean?

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August 2, 2021 · 11:15 am

Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days!

This proclamation by Jesus was so profound to the people around Jesus at the time in so many ways, that the ramifications of it can still be felt today!

We didn’t see then or now?

If we can just go back to the scene of the ‘words’ of Christ and take them one at a time to understand them. This is again, a testament to the reading ways of the literal readings of black and white. We have to go deeper into the words and the meanings and most importantly, context.

John 2:19–21 (NASB95)
19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
20 The Jews then said, “It took forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?”
21 But He was speaking of the temple of His body.

To stay in context with these verses we have to also look at how we got here. The Jews(ones within the Jewish hierarchy) were in discussion with Jesus in the moment of Him destroying the temple business’s that were in the temple yard. The question that was asked of Jesus “on who’s authority are you doing this?” This seems to be a straight forward question for anyone,right? But Jesus comes back with lightning bolt of an answer of “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up!” Wow. They weren’t expecting that!

So Jesus tells the ‘Jews’ to destroy this temple(Jersusalem) and I will raise it up in three days!. Jesus will put it all back together after the jews destroy it(which no doubt would take them years to do it you think about it,in the physical sense), but was He talking about the physical sense in the first part of the sentence? I believe that He was, because this is what only the Jews knew and expected of God, the reality of the things in front of them. It was a majestic site to be seen, the Temple of Jerusalem, The Temple of the one and only God.

But it was proclaimed by Jesus, to tear it down! Why, would they do it? It was because it was being marred by unholiness in the ways of His people. It was dirty. It was Unholy by the people and by their institutional ways. This had to be changed. It had to be Holy.

Jesus was Holy. Jesus had authority to change it. He ‘was’ the Temple. He was greater than the temple. The Temple was in Him, of Him. Anything that was associated with Him pointed to the Temple!

The temple of Jerusalem was to die, in less than 40 years later, to prove His point. But the exclaimation that really made the point was when Jesus hung on the cross of death, and three days later rose to the world’s morning sun, to proclaim that something better than the temple of Jerusalem was now in use. Jesus Christ! Christ is something new and better than the Temple of the old covenant.

Everyone, Everyone in Christ is now the Temple of God. We are all one. Colossians 3. 11 Proclaims that ‘All in Christ are Everything’. The Temple of the ‘old ways is under the old covenant, the new one is in ‘Christ the Messiah’.

Let us ‘see’ this in the scriptures as we delved into the scriptures of just not the words, but the meaning of them. Let us not continue the traditions of old, but let us just ‘SEE’ Jesus!

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June 10, 2021 · 2:33 pm

“As the Father has sent me,…”

In John 20.21 when Jesus told his followers “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you”

What if? What if we got this statement all wrong, that we have misunderstood what Jesus was telling us?

Our recognition of what we think it means is that Jesus wants us to be sent also, as was He. But………

What if we first break down the meaning of the first half of the sentence, so we will know what the last part of the sentence means.

The Father sent Jesus to do or be what? God had a specific mission for his son to do on his creation. But what was it? From my perspective I believe that we have missed an important issue in Jesus’s coming to earth, it is that He had to become an identity to the world that they would recognize. Yes, He was a man, but he was so much more! He was God in man!! Jesus’s main goal (I believe) was to be recognized as God as the Son of God. This was going to be harder than you think to get people to believe this.

This is when context really comes into play in a story that we must realizes makes the point to what Jesus was really up against. In this age, or even for ages before the god’s have always been around, but with a slight different slant to what we would be used to. You see the ‘god’s’ were always upstairs somewhere never to show their selves to anyone, their was the imaginative imagination of what each god actually looked like(thus the ‘idol’ of such one made by man, really doesn’t make sense) and to give each one of them a description of what each god could do as a job.

Now if you were used to this scenario over the centuries with your people this would be the norm. But what if one day, a man was walking down the street and looked different,sounding different and being different than any other man walking the trail that day, there was something special about him, but you different know what. This man started to touch people who were sick, disabled, or their life was just rotten to the core, and He healed them in whatever condition the person was in. His wisdom talking to the leaders of His Priest, out surpassed them in their understanding of the Torah. Passerby’s were awe struck with his authority of men and women. The faith that they believed in Him to heal and cure their lives was astonishing.

You see God had to send His Son to earth to show the world that He was God, the Son of God. God of the creation,man, and the earth. This was his goal. It was to bring his authority back into the reality of mankind, and not him. Man’s attempt to achieve a paradise on the earth was and is a failure. God’s faithfulness, which has never left man, or in another way of putting it, God is and did keep his side of new covenant that He proposed to Man, Man had not kept his side of the covenant to God, God will bring it to a full commitment with His Son dying on the cross to kill off the man’s inability to take care of his half. Man would succumb to the liabilities of himself. Jesus becoming the ‘New Man’ of the ‘New Identity of God’ is to reign forever and ever.

Now, to answer the question at the beginning of the blog, The ‘Father has sent me’, is the defining of what God was, who He was,and what He was doing in the ‘Son of God’ on earth,as this ‘New Creation’! This is,and will be “you”,”Man”!

“,I am sending you” is the statement from Jesus that He is sending us to be the same as “Jesus” in this new creation!

We are all to be like Him in the image of God!

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April 20, 2021 · 4:03 pm

A strange thing happened on the way to…

I love reading. I love reading christian theology. I love reading the bible. and I do!

I had the opportunity to pick up some older books from my father that He had gotten from his pastoral Uncle, which would be two generations back. So these books are early 1900’s edition of christianity in all phases of literature. I have about thirty or so left to read(before the end of the year,I promised to have them read). I went thru the books trying to see which one I wanted to read next, after a store bought book which I was almost finished with to start on.

I perused the selection of books with no particular rhyme or reason on the subject on which to pick the book on, I usually stick with a theme of books for a period of time that peak’s my interest. So I pick this small withered book with yellow pages that was still in pretty good considered it was printed in 1966. It is book titled “Studies in Amos” by Kyle M. Yates,Jr. Now, this in round about way is considered a commentary on ‘Amos’, which exceedes it’s accomplishment as a book.

When I delve into a subject for studying I am never surprised that I don’t ‘see’ something new or a answer a question that I have always had, and it gets answered in the book. This book was no exception. I am a hound dog in always looking for insight and answers to questions that arise in my journey. If you haven’t read the book of Amos lately, I would strongly suggest you do, to remind yourself on what the prophet Amos was telling Israel that their indiscretions and turning from God was taking them down the road to destruction, and it was coming soon.

Israel was in trouble, God was not happy. God’s design for them was to worship Him.

It seems that their “seeking and Living” was being construed as something else as God had planned. The people were not using the temple as their understanding of worship it was meant for. John 4: 24 says that “God is Spirit,and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” This was not being done in the kingdom of Israel. The people of God had made their ‘meeting place the idol that it was the focus of their lives. After all, this was where God’s finger was touching still, even tho his people were not worshiping him as they said. But this wasn’t what God intended for his people, It was HIM, that He wanted them to seek and find, and not to be infatuated with the ‘place’ that He could be at.

It seems that Israel did not take the warning to heart, because it wasn’t for long in it’s history that Israel’s Temple was destroyed. Amos’s warning was a precursor to the ‘church’ of today I believe that the same thing is coming to the building of worship, of the so called believers. It is the realization that the church must face that we are using the building for the substitution of Jesus Christ, for the answer. It is the essence of Christ that we are missing, the ‘life’ of Christ we are missing, the Love of Christ is missing, the Care of the World by Christ is missing,We just don’t understand why the things we are doing aren’t working? A Duh!

As was when Israel was trying to ‘Seek’, They were not seeking ‘Christ’, they were seeking the meeting place. God is Spirit, and the Truth is that He is within ‘US, and We are within Him.

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March 7, 2019 · 10:04 am

It’s a Journey

Oh, you can say that again!

Growing up in ‘church’ environment of doing or saying what everyone was claiming to be as a christian, was just normal. I guess it was the right of passage of being in the ‘church’ , you just continue on with what has been going on for generations, except with some minor modifications. But that is all. Same old things,said over and over,done over and over. But Why?

Until I finally asked myself ‘Why’ this and ‘Why’ that, what is the ‘church’ trying to do, what is christianity trying to be? How did we get here as the building of Christ believers?

It’s always good to start at the point of where you have been to ‘know’ where you are now. So the logical point of starting from is to look at how things have evolved in christianity, the good, bad, and yes there’s the ugly. Following christian beginnings is a rough and messy picture to cipher, but it does get us to the point of seeing of where we interrupted our beginnings to see if we got off on a good foot.

Christian beginnings were very thinly disguised from the start of the first century, there was no defining markers of ‘identity’ as was let’s say the Judaism sect was. Paul,Peter,James, and John were of different minds and of boundary markers of this ‘new way’. What was being emphasized was the ‘title’ that someone had given you, who you ate with, or what you believed in from your God.

This, to say the least is a picture of breaking glass of the real picture of what God was designing the perfect picture. This broad synopsis of what God’s people, God’s Temple, and who God was, never really comes into focus until around the 1000 ad when Constantine set up shop for the christians in the buildings of choice and with any interference from anyone. This model then collides with Peter’s model a few hundred years down the road that just creates the ‘ugly’ as we have talked about.

My overall synopsis of where we have gotten confused and more so, just plain, not ‘seeing’ or ‘hearing’ what God thru the scriptures is telling us. It is getting past the words of scripture and ‘seeing’ what God is doing in this narrative collection of books and letters. This mistake has got to get us to re-look at the whole narrative of the bible in what the whole picture tells us.

Studying Paul of the N.T. has shed some light on the subject that we are on, that we might start our focus on. Paul was given the ‘spotlight’ for a reason in his walk to Damascus. It was a revelation of why Messiah was put into the scriptures, It was to bring back to Him the World of his creation. His after the fact of Jesus walk on the earth that he was proclaiming to make the world right to Him. His conquering of all the things that were making the world a captive of evil were now gone that the world may now be His.

Paul’s insight of the Jewish Old Covenant of what then God was doing with ‘a people'(His) was being carried over to the New Covenant but with the bindings off of his people that would make the real difference! The two covenants are really one, with the latter being freedom from man’s identity to God’s identity, where it was in the beginning.

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February 11, 2015 · 11:18 am

John 3:16

We all know what John 3:16 says. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

This part of scripture that is told to us thru John in the new testament. This proclamation  of truth is profound, but it is it the ultimate truth? We have attached ourselves to this announcement of John that we maybe have looked at it deeper to check it’s meaning.

For this profound truth to be real it has to be looked at as the measuring stick throughout the bible. Especially in Genesis. For this astounding premise of truth, it had to have been evident in the beginning of time in God’s purpose in his actions! How was man to know or see God’s truth in their life, this has to be evident in the circumstances and realities of Adam’s lineage. What was the perception of of ‘His people’ to know this truth in his day.

Let us use this measuring stick to go back thru the old testament and see how it stands up. Now, go thru the Matthew,Mark,Luke and John. Continue to look at the theme of these scriptures to have ‘this truth’ to be verified as the ultimate truth from God.

Does something else pop up when you re-read the OT, does God seem to be saying that ‘His Purpose’ was a ‘People’ of his own, or to ultimately see, that He seeks a bride to fellowship with,in His own Presence!

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