Opus 2026-457: The Spider

One of the things I noticed as I was watching the sunrise was that my friendly neighborhood spider seem to be enjoying the scene also.

Several days ago I noticed that there was a large spider that had built a web up in a corner near the roof and going over to one of the columns that supports the roof.  I can’t remember if I discovered him originally with my flashlight or whether he was just outlined against the brightening sky.  But he was there.  When I came out in the middle of the day, I noticed that he was gone, and I wondered if he had moved on, but the next morning he was back.  I didn’t bother him.  He’s part of creation and was doing his job.  I hope that his job included mosquitoes today.

This morning, as he was up there watching I wondered if he could see the sunrise.  Then I noticed later that he was gone.  I didn’t get my flashlight and go see if he’d moved just over to be out of my sight, but he was not in my visible corner at this point.  Did he get bored with the colors.  Did he decide there was a better place to catch bugs?  Did a bird eat him when I wasn’t watching?  For whatever reason he’s not outlined by the brightening sky at the moment.

I will keep a watch out for him.  I find the concept of how spiders nourish themselves unsettling at best.  I find myself wondering if a fly that’s getting his juices sucked out glories in the fact that he is fulfilling his purpose.  Sometimes the rabbit trails overcome my common sense.

homo unius libri

Opus 2026-456: One for All and All for One

One of the observations that is growing in me is that the Old Testament is group think and the New Testament is individual.

The promises of the land, the restoration, the seat of David on the throne all apply to the nation of Israel.  The eternal life aspect does not play into that.

Then we have the rapture.  I know that all the charts called it the church age.  I know they talk about the church being taken out.  What I need to look into is whether that is biblical terminology or dispensational propaganda.  Does it say anywhere that the church is going to be resurrected?  Off the top of my head, everything I think of has to do with the saints being brought up and resurrected.  It’s a large number of individuals who stand before God themselves as individuals that are resurrected.

Is there any place where it mentions the church that way?

So many of our disagreements are influenced by this confusion.  We have the irresistible grace people labeling the idea of the individual choosing to believe as works.  They throw out terms like “legalistic” for anyone who maintains that we are to live righteous lives.  There are people that take the promises of Israel being restored to the land, ignore that those predictions took place before Israel was restored to the land by the return from captivity, and try to draw a map of the future on that.  The promises of the land were not a part of eternal life.  That comes on a one-on-one basis based on the cross.

Enjoy the promises.  Embrace the way of living that is rewarded in this world.  Don’t think that will get you into heaven.  That comes through faith in Jesus.  

homo unius libri

Opus 2026-455: What Are Today’s Prototypes?

If you could go back in history and examine the cultural developments of civilization, you would see continual progress being made and developing things that we take for granted today.  The modern grand piano did not just appear full-blown on the concert stage.  For that matter the concert stage didn’t appear full-blown.  They all went through steps.  I have a book on guitars.  You can trace the development of the guitar back hundreds of years and possibly even thousands if you want to include things like the lyre or other ancient instruments.

What would you look at today as being in its infancy and if we came back in a couple hundred years, it would’ve developed beyond recognition?  Will pickleball evolve into an international sport?  Maybe it already has.  Will baseball still have nine innings?  With what I see in hearing aids and eye glasses, both are wide open for giant steps.  Virtual reality would be on the list.  I would guess that most of our guesses would be far from accurate.

You can’t really tell.  Remember Dick Tracy and his wrist telephone.  Science fiction is full of nonsense but it may cease to be “non” in time.

homo unius libri

Opus 2026-454: God’s Bodyguards

I got sucked into some click bait again.  It was a brief video about RC Sproul and Ligonier Ministries.  I watched about halfway through and that was all I could take.  I pretty much stopped listening to Sproul and paying attention to him 20 or 30 years ago when he declared war on the Arminians in the church.  The best line in the whole video that I saw was where he commented that people would probably be looking at this to watch his change in hairstyle.  I noticed that 40 years ago. I thought it was funny.

In the parts that I saw there were two comments that stood out to me.  The first was his concern with the character of God.  The second was the importance of the sovereignty of God.  I couldn’t disagree with either one of those, but I have a problem with the theological school that emphasizes the theology of sovereignty.  Is God sovereign?  Yes, of course.  The real question is “Does that mean what they want it to mean?”

That’s a deeper question than you think.  One of the problems that I have with people that emphasize the sovereignty of God is that they want to define what that means and tell us what God can do and can’t do.  Do you see the tension there?  If God is so sovereign,  who are you to define what that sovereignty means?  If God is sovereign, then who are you to tell Him He can’t change His mind?  If God is sovereign, who are you to tell Him that He cannot give man free will?

God does not need bodyguards.  He does not need people to stand up and give their opinion of where He can go and where He can’t go.  I’ve never had a bodyguard and I’ve never been involved with any, but one of my understandings is that when the Secret Service tells President Trump that he can’t go somewhere, he doesn’t go.  It’s an amazing amount of power.  I’m not sure we qualify to have that kind of power.

What is the point of having this absolute power in control if all of the love that is generated toward you is prescribed?  If only those who have faith are the ones that God gives faith to, then on whom is the joke?  Do people really think that God creates creatures, chooses some to love him, and then declares that it is so, and then rejoice in the fact that people love him?  Love given by changing the chip in your head is not love as defined by the Bible.

God created man in his image.  I have not seen anywhere that it says that the animals were created in His image.  I don’t see that the plants were created in this image.  I don’t see that the stars were created in His image.  You get the point.  The only place this statement is made is in the creation of human beings.  So when we say that God manages every atom in the universe, and He does, we need to recognize the fact that we are not atoms in the universe.  We are creatures made in the image of God.  Unlike stars that go through their process and eventually implode, we have free will.  We can choose to love.  We can choose to believe.  We can choose to respond.

People like to quote the verse in Malachi, which says God does not change,

(Mal 3:6 KJV)  For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.

They might want to keep reading in the same chapter where God tells Israel that if they would get on board and be obedient in their tithe, then God would do something,

(Mal 3:10 KJV)  Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

I assume that means that if they don’t, He won’t.  To me that seems that God gives Himself free will also.  He is free to change His mind.  He is free to ignore the limitations that people want to put on to Him by calling him sovereign.

Last time I looked, He was still God, with a capital “G”.

homo unius libri

Opus 2026-453: So what if the EU does it?

I was listening to a discussion having to do with nutrition and attitudes and pesticides and food dyes and so on.  One of the points that keeps being brought up in this, and in other venues is looking at the way Europe does it and how superior that is.

First of all, I’m not sure how superior it is because I haven’t done the research or know the data.  I’m not sure that you could believe the research that you see anyway with the state of science today.  Are Americans on the whole living longer than Europeans?  Do we have higher or lower rates of cancer and other diseases that we don’t know the cause of.  Are the significant differences based on double blind testing with only one variable, or are they based on somebody’s opinion.  Do they take into account all the different ethnic groups that are involved in Europe?  Of course we have our own diversity also.

Ultimately, we need to remember that one of the reasons that the United States has been so successful is because we don’t do things the way the Europeans do it.  The Founding Fathers soundly rejected the European governments and their way of running countries.  Up until recently, we have resisted the socialism that Europe has adopted so joyfully.

Also, we need to take into consideration the element of coercion.  In Europe, people have very little freedom.  Try to post a meme in England and see what happens.  Try to run as a conservative in Germany and see what happens.  How do the farmers of the Netherlands feel about their government right now?  Europe is really good on strong-arm tactics and denying people their individual freedoms.

Americans may like the way things are because they like the way things are and they don’t want the government telling them what to do.  Take into consideration recent attempts to have special taxes on drinks that have sugar in them.  We’ve been down these slippery slopes before.  We do not need government control of everything.  If we decide we want to be fat, that’s our privilege.  If they try to force us to eat healthy foods, like they do in Europe, we will find ways to get to the black market to find what we want or we’ll find substitutes.

There may be some reasons why we would want to copy some of the standards of Europe.  There might be even more reasons why we don’t want to copy the standards and methods of Europe.

The last thing we need is more government regulation.

homo unius libri

Opus 2026-452: Which Side Delivers the Fall?

I don’t know how many times I have heard this quoted in my life.

(Pro 16:18 NAS77) Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before stumbling.

I was thinking about the different ways in which pride expresses itself.  For some people, pride projects their personality, and in other cases pride restrains their personality.

A famous pastor recently made a very irresponsible and incorrect proclamation.  People got excited about it.  I had a friend quoting him to me before I was even aware of what he said.  He later tried to backtrack, but he knew most people weren’t paying attention to that.  This man has the kind of pride that says he has the right to make major proclamations.

I on the other hand, and all humility, would’ve never made that proclamation.  The reason would be that I’m proud of my humility.  I wouldn’t want to do anything that would make people think that I was arrogant or narcissistic.  So I would refrain, in pride.

It can come from both sides.  In each case, the major issue is caused by allowing our self image and our sense of self importance to block the voice of God in our lives.  Most of us can never achieve this.  The best description I have read is,

(Php 2:3-5 NAS77) Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.  Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,

Only God can develop this in us.  The important part is that we should be asking Him to do so.  Even with the touch of grace it will require practice and the discipline of changing habits.

homo unius libri

Opus 2026-451: Agendas

Everyone has one.  It’s obvious when the Fuller Brush man comes to the door.  It’s not so obvious when someone who looks at what they’re doing as a ministry of saving souls talks to you about keeping your house clean.  They may not know that they have one or what it is, but everyone has an agenda.

I assume I have an agenda for writing this post.  I’m not totally sure what it is, but I think it is a matter of justifying my skepticism over what I see going on around me.  Going with that thought, I find that I get really short with people who stare wide eyed into obvious propaganda and say, “Wow. I didn’t know that.”  The reason they didn’t know it is because it’s not true and it wasn’t there to be known.

Agendas are necessary in a sense.  When you leave your house to fly to Paris, you have an agenda.  When you park your car at the airport, you have an agenda.  You better make sure you get on the right plane because you have an agenda.  Having an agenda is not necessarily evil.  But what we need to understand is that everyone has one.

The place touches me most often is in people who share with me great insights or knowledge that they’ve gotten from a You Tube video or somewhere else on the Internet.  This is especially true if it’s something I’ve never heard before.  A recent example for me has to do with being told that in the Bible Paul wrote two other letters to the church in Corinth that we have no record of.  Now I have always known that the Bible tells us there was one missing letter.  I have seen the verse that speaks of that.  I can’t tell you where it is, but I know I’ve seen it.  What I’ve never heard is that there was a second letter.  I’ve been a Christian for over 60 years.  He would think I would’ve heard this by now.

Since it doesn’t change my theology or affect my life in any way, I’m willing to accept it on the condition of confirmation.  I have a couple of Bible verses to look up.  I will read them.  I will check them out.  I will do my own thinking.  Then I will evaluate whether this guru was speaking straight or just looking for proverbial clicks.

My current agenda is to seek some truth.

homo unius libri