Sin and Sinners, continued...

I last asked if a sinner is a sinner because he sins or does he sin because he is a sinner and you might well ask as to what difference does it make and the answer is all the difference in the world. One way there is little sense to the matter of sin that we can make out, but with the other clarity comes.

"The day that you eat of the tree, you shall surely die," so God tells His two children in the garden. We, mostly draw the conclusion from that that the biting into the fruit is the sin when it is only the last act of a completed treason. It is like the seal on the envelope. First they had to entertain the idea, then they had to determine to do it. At this point the treason is complete. A new religion has come into being - the religion of self.

We often imagine that until the very moment that the fruit was bitten there was the possibility to go back and in a sense that was true. But before one partakes of the fruit you must commit yourself to a point from which there is no turning back. The act is like the sacrament of the new self-centered religion. The sin is to decide to ignore the God who has created and loved you for the advancement of the self. After all, they were promised promotion if only they would turn their backs on God - "you shall be as gods."

The effect of the fall is that every child that is born is born outside the garden, outside the fellowship of God's love. It is this isolation that is called the state of Sin. Everyone of us are born in this condition.

Stripped of that fellowship, we need restoration, for, being born outside the garden, come forth out of the womb into our present world, feeling our need and responding by demanding our needs be met from the time we breach the birth canal. What we will do to advance our own needs and status or deny the same to others is called our sins. So thee egg becomes the mother of the chicken where sin is concerned.

I am first a sinner, then I commit sins against God and man. it will never do to live a moral life by our personal standards because our standards are skewed by our world view - some variant on Adam's. We need to be delivered from ourselves and the righteous consequences that befall us because of our sin. We need a savior. We need someone who has born the the consequences of our sin and who can restore us to that life giving love that has always been there but has been beyond our grasp because of our rebellion and selfcenteredness. We need Jesus. The only question that remains is if we are willing to come, will He be willing to receive us. But he says, "Come to me all you who are heavy-laden and I will give you rest."

It is the plain teaching of the Bible that God is always present. That is not the problem. the problem is that we are either unaware of Him or unwilling to come. it is as if we live in adjoining rooms that you find in some hotels and motels, where there are two doors on one door frame. Each is controlled by the occupant in one of the rooms. When both occupants open their doors, an open pathway is available to each, but if one refuses to open his, the way stays barred.

Jesus said, "Behold I stand at the door and knock and if any man hear my voice, I will come into him and dine with him." So, then His side of the portal is open and we will not see Him until we open ours.

the trouble is that the door on our side is warped by our sin and we lack the strength to open it on our own. We need to ask for His help from His side. You could do that right now, and if you truly want that help, He will provide it, and if you don't want it at this point, He will continue to be available, even if you decide that you don't ever want Him in your life, until you come to a point where it would be utterly worthless to do so.

What is a Sinner?

It seems like an easy enough question: a sinner is someone who sins. That is true but it is not as simple as it first appears.

It is something of a chicken and egg sort of problem - though not quite. It's more of a cow problem. We need to answer this question: Is a cow a cow because it moos or does it moo because it is a cow?

Seems a little silly doesn't it. Of course, a cow is not a cow because it moos. Should a cow lose its voice due to disease or accident, it will not suddenly be come a giraffe. It will still be a cow.

So let's ask this question: Is a Sinner a Sinner because he sins or does he sin because he is a sinner?

Skyscraper

You might well ask why each of us needs a savior and I am not sure that I can give you a complete answer. But, perhaps, a metaphor may help. This one may seem a little contrived, but it is the best I have been able to come up with, for now.

We might compare life in this current world to going over the edge of a cliff (birth) and, ultimately, under the force of gravity, reaching the bottom. It would make some difference, as to your final condition, whether you made a soft or hard landing. If the cliff is high enough, having a maneuverable parachute, hang glider or ultralight craft could certainly make a difference in the outcome.

Now imagine an elevator shaft in a skyscraper under construction before the elevator has been put in. A worker on one of the upper floors takes a glass bottle, soda or beer, and drops it down the shaft. We have little problem guessing the result when the bottle reaches the bottom of the shaft. Unless that bottle is snagged by something like a net before it reaches the bottom, it will be irreparably shattered. We are much like that bottle.

If we were to think f each floor as a year of our lives and the bottle as our soul, we would each know what the end result would be. It doesn't matter much which floor we are dropped from, the result is pretty much assured. So we are heading for a hard landing. The only thing we don't know is what floor we have been dropped from. If we are not to be shattered, we must be caught by someone before we reach the bottom. Natural death is that bottom.

I am not sure that the Bible tells us, in so many words, why it is so. Just that it is, and to have no bottom is worse. There is no one who may die in the place of the Satan and the fallen angels we call demons because they cannot physically die. Their doom is assured because of the eternal existence they have. Jesus said, "To whom much is given, much is required."

So, natural death is not necessarily a curse to a fallen race. For with it, there is the possibility of redemption. In light of this, we can see why God places an angel at the entrance of the garden to prevent the two from returning and eating of the Tree of Life. Eternal life after the fall leaves no remedy for it. The two would have become indistinguishable from the fallen angels with regard to salvation.

The end of this is that each of us must be caught before we reach that hard floor or our fate becomes that which has been set for the devil and his angels, and since none of us know what floor we are fallen from, we, none of us know when we shall reach that bottom. Jesus said that hell was created, not for humanity but for the devil and his angels.

But, we are also told that we were created in the image of God, so it follows that we must have an eternity of one sort or another - as He most certainly has one - or the image is fatally flawed.

Gospels and the Resurrection

The New Testament has four gospels and because each of them tell parts of the story of the life of Jesus, it is easy to imagine that they were created in the same way and according to some same set of rules. It is then somewhat confusing to find that they often either disagree in details regarding the resurrection. This is not the case and the best thing we can do is look at the four men who wrote the gospels, their purpose in writing and who were their audiences.


Matthew is writing to the Jewish church. This can be determined by his interest in Old Testament passages that would have little meaning to a gentile audience, that the temple in Jerusalem is still standing when it was written and his use of "kingdom of heaven" where the other gospels use "kingdom of God," observant Jews to this day writing God "G-d" when writing in English, honoring the sacredness of the name.


Mark, it is said, collected his stories of Jesus when he was travelling with Peter. His ordering of the stories differs from Matthew in some places. It is believed by many scholars that his was the first gospel that circulated. in any case, it seems to me that it may have been put together quickly to meet a demand before the others were sent abroad. While Matthew was present with Jesus for most of His ministry, Mark was much younger and was dependent on the stories he had heard. You would expect that his gospel would be much shorter than Matthew's and it is.


Luke is the only gentile who writes one of the gospels and his style is that of contemporary standards of Greek historical reportage which is detail oriented. Not surprising since he was Greek. He writes to one Theophilus (literally, lover of God) whom some take to be a certain Greek believer and others believe is addressed to any lover of God ( there were no capital letters in the Greek of that time). I favor the latter, but, I am in the minority.


John writes his gospel considerably after the first three were in circulation. He seems to have two things in mind that give his gospel its different feel from the others. Firstly, he seems to want to fill in the blanks - add material that has been omitted from the other three, particularly with regard to Jesus' teaching. Secondly, he wants to give a testimony, the kind that is given in court. He will tell us only what he could legally give as testimony in a court of law. He puts it this way at the beginning of his letter, I John, which many believe may have been written around the same time: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have looked at and our hands have touched - this we proclaim concerning the Word of Life."(NIV) He will not lie, he will not give us hearsay, he will not speculate.


One of the problems that many people have with the resurrection story is that each of the gospels lists a different number of women that came to the tomb: Matthew - 2, Mark - 3, Luke - at least 5, John - only one. The question is whether or not these discrepancies can be reasonably explained. Let's reconstruct the story:


We are told that when Jesus was taken prisoner, the disciples all scattered, save John, who was there to the very end. When the Roman soldier pierced Jesus' right lung and heart, as far as any could see it was all over. John took Jesus' mother away with him and the other women, apparently distraught, went away, leaving the Roman soldiers to take down the body, which would have been left there for the dogs and the scavenging birds - vultures, lammergeiers, perhaps crows if they have them in the Holy Land.


It is at this point that two men who were secret believers in Jesus show up and request the body from Pilate, who gave it to them. They then take it to a tomb that Joseph of Arimathea had carved out of the rock for himself, no doubt, at considerable expense. They then did something that was remarkable for its day - they wrapped the body in linen with seventy-five pounds of spices. This was normally women's work, because a man who touched a dead body was ceremonially unclean for the next day and could not enter temple or synagogue.


I suppose that having already handled the dead body, they imagined that they could do the rest, but it would have been unheard of. That is why the women, after they had climbed out of their deep grief, must have believed that the job had not been done and that they had neglected their obligation of love toward Jesus.


The women now needed to carry around seventy-five pounds of spices and the linens to wrap the body in. In addition, they realized that they would need to have someone move the stone away.


This was no small task. Depending on how large the entrance was, it may have weighed as much as 400-450 kilograms (900-1000 lbs). Further, before it was rolled into position, it was probably on an incline and held in place by a stone. Once the stone was removed, it rolled into place. Now, to move the stone, it would be necessary to roll it back up the incline and be wedged again with a stone. This is something the women could not have done.


Nor could they have reasonably expected that the apostles would come to their aid, in that they might well be sought for execution just as Jesus had been. It was a dilemma they hoped would be solved when they got there, that they might find the men required to help them there.


Considering the weight of the spices and the linen, it is not unreasonable to imagine that there must have been five or six women involved, unless the weight had to be carried only the shortest of distances. so, Luke's description seems to fit. Why then the differences in the accounts.


The first thing we notice is that all the accounts indicate that Mary Magdalene was there. I suspect that that was common knowledge. We also know that the women went out t0 inform the disciples what they had seen. We know that Mary Magdalene went to inform Peter and John. Matthew mentions her and "the other Mary." This was probably the mother of Mark whose name was Mary also. It is possible that she was the one who came to inform Matthew and Matthew, like John, refused to go beyond his personal encounter. The resurrection was such a critical part of the witness of the early church that the apostles were careful only to speak to what they had actually witnessed. John, of course, took that position and tells only of Mary Magdalene because she as the only one who had come to Him.


Mark is a little more difficult to explain. He mentions Mary Magdalene, Mary, his mother and Salome. Why mention Salome? there is no way to know with certainty, but my best guess is that Salome was either a relative or a close friend to his mother and, perhaps, he saw them leave together that morning.


If you have problem with the plausibility of this, it is probably because you are someone living in the 21st century and are wanting people who lived in another time to think in the same way that you do. This could hardly be possible. you have to see people as they were, not as you would have them. Their behavior may be consistent with their way of handling truth, a way that would be readily understandable to people in their own time. You are the intruder and must accommodate, not the other way around.

The Road to Emmaus

A joyous Easter to all who may read this this day. Jesus Christ is risen today. Through the ages, skeptics have fought with this and their arguments have fallen by the wayside. One of them has personal meaning - the swoon theory.

This theory is that Jesus did not really die on the cross, woke up from His coma while in the tomb and walked away. The absurdity of this theory has never been able to completely kill it. It keeps on coming back to life every several decades. Let's put it in the tomb.

When we look at the later paintings of Jesus on the cross or being laid in the tomb, we see that he has been speared in the side of his abdomen by the Roman soldier. But this was not the way it was done. The oldest pictures have it right. They show the Roman soldier pressing his spear between two ribs into the right lung.

This is excruciatingly painful. Tuberculosis forms a hardened ring on a lung, then punctures the lung in the middle. Both times when this happened to my mother, she went straight to the floor in extreme agony. She would not be walking anywhere for weeks to come.

But the spear did not stop there. the soldier would push it further in until it punctured the heart. This is what the Bible is trying to tell us when it says that water ran out first(pulmonary fluid from the lung - the descriptive words, pulmonary fluid, did not exist at this time). This was followed by blood from the heart.

Even if a man had risen from where he was lain in the tomb, he would then have had to push the stone away to get out - 350-450 kilos ( 800 - 1,000 lbs.), at least, and then escape past the Roman guard. And you are going to require this if a man that was mercilessly beaten before crucifixion. Absurd. Only the risen Son of God can come forth out of the tomb.

I find it always helpful when I find the answer to some question that has puzzled me in the past. One question that had been on my list for many years was why two of the men who had followed Jesus were on their way to Emmaus Easter afternoon.

I suppose that the most obvious answer would be that they were going home, but I have learned in my many years in the scripture that the obvious often misses the point, in this case, by a country mile.

I have found out in recent years that the village of Emmaus was at the site of a battleground where a great Jewish victory over the Seleucid Greeks who had defiled the temple in Jerusalem. Much like many of us who like to read about former great moves of God when we are facing defeat or plain boredom in our current spiritual estate. When the blessing that God had for them was to come in Jerusalem, two of Jesus' sheep were headed away from it. The Good Shepherd had to go after them and set them back in the right direction.

Jesus' method was to bypass the Maccabees and go back further to the prophets and to tell them that all that had happened in these previous days were in the plan of His Father. But, even though what He said burned in their hearts, they were so grief stricken, it did not get to their hearts until Jesus prayed for them. Then their eyes were opened.

Jesus is ever interceding for us at this very moment the Word of God tells us. It also says that Jesus is saying, at this moment, "Behold I stand at the door and knock and if any man hear my voice, I will come in and eat with Him. Had the two men not decided to welcome Him to stay with them, He never would have sat at the table with them, nor would He have prayed before them and their eyes would not have been opened.

More than anything, we need to invite Him to stop and stay with us awhile so that our spiritual eyes may be opened. Before the cross, it was as though God and man were in adjoining rooms and both of the adjoining doors were locked. In the cross, the door on His side was opened and He was now knocking at the door which only we could open. If we would open that door to Him, He can come in and fellowship with Him. Have you ever done that? Have you done it recently? The problem is not on His side nor His heart.

Rebellion Manifested

Suppose for a moment that you had a tenant living on a property that you owned and that you had a set of conditions under which you would allow him or her to continue to live there. Then suppose that your tenant ignored you. You might well imagine that you would want to remove that tenant and get a better one.

Years ago, when we lived in New York, we new an old woman from Barbados. She did not have the kind of education that gave her many choices of occupations and when she was not involved in church work, she did house cleaning for people of greater means. But she was very prudent with her money and she finally saved enough money to buy a rental property with three or four tenants, the income from which she hoped to retire.

Her problem was the renters on the top floor, which she inherited from the previous owner. They caused so much damage, that she did not get enough money from the other renters to cover the costs. She tried to get rid of them, but they had been in the apartment for so many years that the law protected them from easy eviction. In the end, it proved impossible and she had to continue cleaning homes because of the violence of her tenant.

Well, our two tenants of the garden were like that tenant. How do we know?

Suppose that you came to my home, and in my estimation you had misbehaved, if I asked you to leave, what might you do? Either you could leave voluntarily or I would have to take some action to get you to leave, either on my own or by calling the police. But I would have little reason or justification to use force or assistance if you were willing to leave voluntarily.

But Genesis says that God drove them out - they were unwilling to leave, not surprising in view of their prospects and the safety they had known in the garden. And it was not enough just to drive them out, for God saw fit to place an angel at the entrance to keep them out.

They were now outside the garden in a scary new world, separated from the health that comes from fellowship with God.

Next: Why He drove them out.

Not Just a Bad Decision - A Bad Day as Well

One of those questions that I ask is this: why doesn't God say to our two Eden residents, "As soon as you bite into that fruit, you will die?" Why say, "The day that you eat of the fruit of that tree, you shall surely die?" The first is more to the point, if the sin is eating the fruit.

But the problem is that the eating of the fruit only seals the deal. You have to rebel before you tear the fruit from the tree. The eating of it it is like baptism in reverse. Remember the thing that Satan tells the woman: "He knows that the day that you eat of the fruit of that tree, you shall become gods, knowing good from evil." You have to decide to do something before you do it and in this case the decision is to make oneself god in God's place, is, essentially, to commit treason.

Just as we tell the gospel, "believe on the Lord Jesus and you shall be saved," and then "be baptized," the commitment followed by the act of commitment, so the commitment to the fall came first, followed by the act of commitment. Things had already gone wrong before the first bite. And, just as the act of commitment in baptism concerns going from death to life, the act of commitment in eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil concerns the passing from life to death. So there is death in treason against God, the act only exposes the treason, not only to God but to the treasoners. Good was to remain in relationship to God, rather than betraying Him . And now they knew it full well and that the consequences to them must be severe.

A Brief Pause

Before I continue, it seems to me that you ought to know something about my approach to the scriptures, or that may be different than yours. I have lived long enough and walked in this way long enough to not suppose that what I get out of reading it is what was intended. And while it is true that much of the Bible was meant to be readily readable to the average person, it does not follow that all of it was. If, as Jesus said, the Father was going to send the Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us into all truth, it follows that that which is obvious at first reading, or subsequent readings is the end of the matter. If I can work it all out by the force of my own intellect, then why send the Spirit to lead and guide into all truth?

Imagine for the moment that I gave you an article from an old popular magazine and that it was written for the common man or woman, but it was written by some famous intellect or scientist. Let us say Albert Einstein. What would be your immediate reaction?

Even before you read the article, you would probably imagine though there would be some explanation of relativity or some other deep matter and tat you would come out of reading it knowing more than when you began, but at the same time, you would have the uneasy feeling that either there would be something in it that you might not fully understand or that he was withholding because he did not think you, the common reader, could understand it at this point.

He that made this universe is far more brilliant and wise than any man, so it would not be that surprising if the book He has given us is written so that we can get first principles readily, but which must be read with care and to find others that would require Him to come and explain to us.

Many people memorize the scripture and know large parts of it. It has become theirs, so to speak. But you can own a car and not have the slightest idea about the nuts and bolts of it. Some of us, like myself can identify the basic systems of the car and what their purposes are but are pathetic when it comes to repairs. Others can repair all or parts of a car but cannot engineer the car as a complete coherent system. Others can do that, but cannot design for efficiency or elegance. So, there are depths in an automobile to be plumbed. God's word is no different. Just because a Ford or a Honda or a Kia may be made for the common man or woman, it does not mean that it is not complex under the hood and the more you know about what is under the hood the better off you are.

But, a word of caution: you can lift up the hood and use your tools on the engine, transaxle, etc and cause a lot of damage if you don't know what the manufacturer's design and intentions are all about. Having access to the engineering team that designed the car would be a tremendous advantage. Having the Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us through the Bible is like having an engineering team at our beck and call for our cars. But, before you get a more complete understanding in automotive engineering, you may well make many mistakes in your understanding. Time is your friend in this endeavor.

The same may be said for understanding the Bible. But time will not be your ally if you have no interest in knowing what is under the hood of your car, if you never lift it up. similarly, time will not be your ally in understanding the scripture, if you have no more than a superficial interest in it (superficial means surface: in this case, it means is wanting to know only the most obvious things that the Bible says.

As you read further into this blog, you will find that I tend to ask unusual questions and find interesting and, I believe, important insights. These questions, I believe are the work of thee Holy spirit upon the mind of someone who God created to ask unusual questions.

The Bent Rim

I once went off the road to save a man's life. I was driving on the main road and after passing another vehicle that was going way below the speed limit, I signalled that I was going back into the right lane.

He was on side road and interpreted by signal to say that I was about to get off onto his road. He pulled out and my car was hurling toward the driver's door. he had only one chance to survive.

I pulled hard to the left, causing my car to go off the road, into the grassy verge that separated the two southbound lanes I had come from from the two northbound lanes on the other side. The car went hard down into the verge (which was V-shaped in cross-section) and I came up out of it onto the left lane on the northbound side, where, praise God, there was no oncoming vehicle coming for at least three quarters of a mile. Seeing his life pass before him and the risk I took to save his life (perhaps one he wouldn't have taken himself), he was suitably grateful and payed for all the obvious repairs for my car.

But there was one problem that got worse and worse after he had paid me. I would be driving along and if I reached a certain speed, the car would shake violently. A few miles faster or slower and it would disappear. A mechanic quickly discovered the problem: I had a bent right rear tire rim which I had to replace, a result of my run off the road.

Normally, the center of a tire wheel corresponds to the center of the axle, but when a rim is bent, the center of the wheel becomes different wandering in and out as it rotates. depending how much it is warped, it will induce a vibration in the car at one speed or another. We call such a wheel eccentric and being just a little off center can cause you a lot of trouble.

The Bible tells us in Genesis that the tree that was at the center of the Garden of Eden was the Tree of Life and that next to it was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It will also tell us further on that Adam was living under the misconception that it was this second tree that was at the center of the garden. He was only off by a little bit, his thinking just a little eccentric and he was about to get into big trouble, as we shall see. He will tell God that he had eaten from the tree that was at the center of the garden, but, if he had eaten f that tree he would have been doing the right thing. More to come.

It's not the way you think - 1

There are few words in the Christian vocabulary that offend as easily as the word "sinner." This is partly our fault, partly misunderstanding.

The problem is that we tend to think of the word sinner as one that describes someone who is vile, violent, physically or sexually or completely immoral. It is also that we have a tendency to imagine is someone who revels in evil.

And it hardly helps that some people who call themselves imagine that they are better than others, often in an obnoxious way and there are also people who are not Christians who just assume that if anyone makes any moral judgment at all, they are assuming superiority.

It does not help, either, that the natural way to interpret the word "sinner" in English is one who sins, while it is in fact, only the consequence of being one.

An easier way to see it is by analogy. A cow isn't a cow because it moos and gives milk. It moos and gives milk because it is a cow. So, a sinner is not a sinner because he or she sins but sins because he or she is a sinner.

Simply put, a sinner is someone who is isolated from God. The effect of this is that he or she becomes his or her own god and so is at enmity with God's plan for them and the lives of those around them. This does not require a hostility toward God, only a separation from Him.

But because God has given man a will, the effect of man's isolation is a world where much evil can exist because humans are seeking their own interests, without caring for the needs of those they disagree with or who annoy them or are in their way.

Of course, being one's own god is a heady and intoxicating. It also creates an atmosphere of mistrust which is also transferred to God himself. In this intoxicated state we become incapable of coming to God without His aid.

Next: a closer look.

Opinion and Truth

I have been struggling through the past week with putting together the second part of my bio, and realizing that the reason I has for starting this blog was not to make it something about me, I decided that more could be stated at a later time. Suffice to say that I came to Christ in October of 1961, which does not seem that long ago to me, but may seem like ancient times to some of of the high and pre-high schooler readers who may come upon this blog. Since then I have been on an adventure of faith that has brought me through times that could be described as good and bad, the latter outnumbering the former, if you presume that the principle thing that faith should be about is "getting mine." But as Romans 5 states "tribulation (hard times) work patience, patience works experience, experience creates hope that overcomes our sense of shame at our inadequacies becasue through them the love of God in Christ Jesus spreads throughout our hearts.

Of course the reader may not even believe that there is a God or that my experience has any real validity, but that does not bother me in the least. No event that takes place in time is effected by opinion and if someone insists on giving their interpretation of the events that have happened in my life, that opinion in no way informs what has happened. Opinions are only valid until the truth is manifest. Opinions can be righ or wrong or partly so, but the one who has the least information has the least reason to believe that he is right. To think otherwise is to be vain and arrogant. And while popular books by atheists have increased in the last several years, the proponderance of scientific evidence is going against the naturalistic hypothesis. Backs to the wall, atheists ahve been proposing solutions to their dilemma with untestable hyypotheses such as multiverse theory. In the end they must accept something on what they have disparaginly called "blind faith."

But let's put the science off to another blog, not because it is unimportant, but it is not germaine to today's blog. Rather, I want to point out that opinions can be very limiting. Sometimes they remove from discussion the things that we see as hopelessly wrong, but on other occasions, when we are wrong or partly wrong, they prevent us from getting at what is ultimately true. And it is the things that we believe are ultimately true that rule our lives. Wisdom, more often than not, is learning to place your opinions on the altar and allowing God to burn away that which is well-intentioned but wrong or actually wrong-headed or misinformed.

Much of the debate that has occured in the church over the years has been about defending my group's or my own opinions. That is why our churches ar of so many different opinions. We all say that we are defending God's word, or reason or some other alleged good thing. Yet Jesus prayed that we all might be one even as He and the Father are one. I seriously doubt that knock-down drag-out debates are part of their unity.

Sometimes I think we are much like those blind Indian men who each grabbed a different part of an elephant and then argued about the true nature of the elephant and all were partly wrong and totally wrong about what the other was saying. Other times I think that when we debate we are each like a fly trying to defend an elephant from another fly. People may deny Him or His word. He is not moved.

The problem is that we think that defending the faith once delivered to the saints is the same as defending our opinions. Believe me, I have done a lot of that and now do my best to leave that behind. Separating our opinions from God's truth is very difficult because we believe if we are wrong at any instant we are either heretical or apostate, instead of still being in the learning process. I can tell you with surety that God is too great for us not to be living with some misconceptions, for He exceeds our our conceptions.

Some things are certain, We have a book whose revelation cannot be contradicted by anyone's personal beliefs without that person paying consequences in this life and, if his or her beliefs deny the atonement - that Jesus died to save men and women from the eternal consequences of their sin - their end will be tragic.

The real question that confronts us every day is whether we are willing to be wrong that God may be right. It is easy to give assent to this with our lips, much more difficult in practice, We will need not our strength alone, but the power of the Holy Spirit, for the self-life is a powerful stronghold in each person's life and apart from the Spirit we are asking ourselves to give up the very thing that we tend to hold onto the most desperately. On our own we become a tangle of contradictions and defeat. But "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me," so Paul tells us (Phillipians 4:13) and I have found that this is so.

Who am I? Part I

This is a happy day, today. My youngest daughter celebrates her 22 birthday and it is the day after the Giants have won the Super Bowl, the team that I have rooted for since around 1950. That brings up the whole matter of who I am. I should offer you that.

AS I have stated, I was born in New York. It was the end of World War II. The Battle of the Bulge was heading to a close, the death knell for the Nazi juggernaut. Though they would fight on for several more months, it would be pointless and cause the unnecessary deaths of thousands. My father ahd been sent to defend the Canal Zone from an attack that never came.

All my grandparents and my mother were born in Norway, as was my mother, though her father was already an American citizen, so she would be also, coming here at three months.

By the time I was six, I was living in a city housing project, not one for the poor, but one that was built for the lower middle class to make room for some of the many new families that the war and post-war had created, but private housing had not kept up with. My father was a carpenter, like my mother's father, doing the form carpentry that was necessary for building skyscrapers, roads and bridges.

As they were able, more and more of the Catholic and Protestant familes moved out and bought homes. But carpentry work was too uncertain for my father to get a mortgage from a New York bank and we were there for the long haul. Both of my parents would die while living at that apartment. So, we would live in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Further, seventy-five percent of the students in my high school were Jewish and eighty-five percent of the students that graduated the college I attended in the city.

It was much like living in another culture and my parents considered us to be like embassy employees abroad, where we were to always to show the best of what it meant to be Norwegian-Americans, Lutherans, Protestants, gentiles. They were not alone in this. People of other ethnic groups and most of the Jewish people we knew were involved in a similar enterprise. If a member of any ethnic or religious group behaved outrageously so that it was plain to all, the sense of shame was palpable. So, the needed ethnic peace was maintained.

With time, a trust relationship was built between my parents and the Jewish people who surrounded us. My mother was someone who a woman could share good news and also to vent without her words getting around. My father became someone who could be relied on for another opinion. Jewish men liked to have a variety of opinions to consider when making decisions. His strong opinions and advice were valued.

As he became older, and my brother and I were out of the home, he found himself giving fatherly counsel to a number of those Jewish people who had lost their fathers to an early death. I'm sure that it was not something he sought out, and I was unaware of it until after his death. When my father died, My mother could not cry because of a disease that prevented it, but several Jewish women came and wept for him, according to their custom for one another, and not only according to custom but from a sense of personal loss. Similarly, a number of Jewish men came to me in the months after his death, representing different groups of men he knew in ours and neighborhoods that surrounded us, telling me of how profoundly the men in their circles missed him - dozens and dozens of them, all tolled. I don't think he thought of himself as an ambassador, but, in the end, I think that was what he was.

In all this, we learned how complex a people the Jewish people are. Almost any stereotype you can devise excludes more than it includes. We also learned that people that have been persecuted for thousands of years can wear their pain very close beneath their skin. And that is understandable. Anti-semitism is not.

In recent years, we have beem menbers of churches and known many Jewish people who have come to a kowledge of Jesus as Messiah and Lord. They bring with them several different ways of seeing the New Testament, undrstanding things that could easily be missed by those who have no connect to the culture that Jesus was born into.

Next: about my spiritual journey from religion to faith.

Hello

I believe in the power of thought, but thought requires time and patience. In my sixty plus years, I have found that a measured high intelligence is often the best excuse for not using ones mind. We sloppily adopt the opinions of others whose prejudices are similar to our own and congratulate ourselves. Even when we give an ear to what others are saying, it may merely be a courtesy, because emotionally we are unable to detach from those ideas that we have not given satisfactory thought to, because we don't want the level of involvement that requires much precious time. Even those who are in the ninety-ninth percentile for intelligence can be lazy thinkers when the subject does not suit them or when the position before them challenges their long held views.

I also believe that we are not only thinkers but be-ers and be-ers must be emotional and spiritual as well as thinking. You will find that I am what is called an evangelical Christian and a charismatic. But, having said that, you must be careful, in that those names are what Lewis Carroll called "portmanteau words" - words that carry a wide variety of meanings both denotatively and connotatively.

You should also consider that unlike Coca-Cola and Ebay, no one has a marca registrada on the name Christian and it can be used by anyone, even people who repudiate the plain teachings of Jesus Christ. No one can get a cease and desist order from the court to stop imposters from using it. If you have been mistreated by someone in the name of Jesus Christ, there is little that anyone can do about it, but you cannot extrapolate from that that their's is true Christianity, anymore than you could conclude that there is no true physics, chemistry, biology or earth science based on the test papers that I have graded.

You will also find that I make a necessary distinction between religion and faith which are often confounded. A simple way to look at it is a religion depends on the adherent, a faith on the the One who one has faith in. As a general rule, it is much like one of those slides you see in so many photo processing and computer art programs: slide to the left and the picture gets redder, slide to the right and the picture gets greener. Much the same, generally, the greater the faith, the less the accoutrements of religion and vice versa. I know. I have been both.

In this blog, I may speak to matters that are strictly Christ centered or to matters of science and mathematics especially if they interface with the place of God in the life of humans or the nature of the universe.

I hope to be able to engage you with meaningful conversation and since I have never known a case where profanity has not detracted or subtracted from serious thought, so I ask you to omit it ( beside, I was raised in New York City and you would need to be inordinately creative to say something I haven't heard many times over - in English, in Spanish, in Yiddish, etc.) A good argument is in no way made more persuasive by invective.

I also ask, that if you disagee with me, you will have the courtesy to return to hear my response. It is intellectually dishonest and irresponsible to make no opportunity for a reply to your argument or emotional response.

Finally, you may well be more intelligent than I. I must trundle along with all the well known deficiencies of an IQ of 160 (be patient with me) and I tend to be somewhat mercurial in my selection of topics being one of those unusual people who are called ambi-brained, in that I favor neither hemisphere of the brain, as most do.

Before we go on, it seems to me, it will do well to tell you something about who I am, but I'll save that for the next blog. - Your friend, in Him.