Welcome to 2018, possibly our last year on earth, Christians!

I could be completely wrong about the timing of this, of course, but my belief that the Rapture will take place in 3018 is well documented. 

But the Lord told us to keep living our lives until it actually happens. “For as were the days of Noah, so will be the Coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away; so will be the Coming of the Son of Man.” (Matthew 24:37-39) Of course, I intend to do my part: I always eat and drink more than I should, and I’m now engaged to be married sometime this summer. 

The key, as the following few paragraphs explain, is to remain FAITHFUL to Christ in both word and deed, not wavering in doubt with His supposed “delay” - the Lord is never early or late; He is always just on time - or losing touch with the Holy Spirit (Mt 24:46-51 and Mt 25:1-13, respectively). And the best way to remain close to God throughout is by reading His Word every single day. 

That’s why I highly recommend “Bible-in-a-Year” for every Believer every single year, no matter how long you’ve been His Child. Every year, no matter how well you think you know the Bible, He always has something new for you - and I increase the odds by consuming Scripture differently each year. I’ve read the Bible in the KJV, the HCSB, and the ESV; this year, I read along with the Max McLean audio Bible. I haven’t started yet today, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to try reading the New Living Translation. It’s the most popular of the ‘modern vernacular’ Bibles, used by the majority of pastors who choose 21st century language to share God’s Word with their parishioners.

My goal is simply to find new depth in my reading of the Bible, and thus new information from God’s writing. If I could read Greek or Hebrew, I’d choose those in a heartbeat. But even if I was to read exactly the same copy of the Bible every year, I’d do it. Think: 1189 chapters! You won’t memorize it in one reading per year. There are sections I know extremely well. (I don’t have very many exact memorizations in my skull, partly because I DO use different versions of the Bible.) Just make sure you READ!

And you don’t have to read left to right, although so far I have every year. Most reading plans alternate between Old and New Testaments, or perhaps help you follow chronologically. Heck, go alphabetically if you want! JUST READ IT! You will be amazed at what you discover. 

What will you learn? Here’s what I think are the most important points that doing this drives home:

1) So many take verses out of context. You cannot do that this way. And you’ll learn WHY in many cases. 

2) You will notice how the same thoughts, the same themes recur repeatedly. The more He points something out, the bigger a deal it is. 

3) After a few readings, you might finally discover the truth about the Bible: every single book, chapter, verse, word, is about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. 

Good luck, my friends. Be prepared. He is Coming Soon. 

No more "thoughts and prayers", Christians: DO SOMETHING!

One of the recurring rants following the massacre in Las Vegas has been the huge inertia in our governing bodies against doing anything constructive in terms of changing the laws that determine the size of the arsenal a gun owner can amass, or the gadgets he can own to convert semi-automatics to fully automatic (and therefore already illegal) rifles that can produce the kind of slaughter inflicted on the Mandalay Bay concert last week.

"Stop sending your 'thoughts and prayers', Congress: do something constructive to help us prevent this kind of massacre!"

The response usually is some sort of analogy that killing could happen with other weapons instead - fertilizer bombs, poisons, and the like. No serious American government study is allowed by government decree (the worst offense Congress has committed on this topic, in my opinion - how dare you forbid us from learning the truth!), but independent research has seen a link between the mass murders and the mass destruction weapon sales - the usual expression of this is something like "no hunter or sportsman needs semi-automatic weapons".  At this point, the defense moves into Second Amendment territory, with the reaction that we must be allowed weapons that would defend ourselves against government assault, at which the fabric of a democratic society begins to break down.

So we stop fighting, return to the status quo, and return to our lives, silently waiting for the next mass assassination of dozens of civilians, the kind that only seems to occur on American soil.

James, half-brother of Jesus, told us the problem with settling for the "thoughts and prayers" avenue of acceptance of evil in our world → here is James 2:14-16:

14"What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? 15If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, 16and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?"

(James always was fairly direct!)

If a brother or sister is in need, and you say, "Go in peace"..."God be with you," ... "Our thoughts and prayers are with you"... when you have the means to HELP them? What kind of faith is THAT? James explains more in verses 19-21:

19You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!20Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? 21Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar?

Just because you tell us you "believe" means NOTHING! Prove it! You can no more fake being a Christian than you can fake NOT being a Christian! If you really are a man or woman of your beliefs, prove it! The Holy Spirit within you should be motivating you to do SOMETHING within your power to help in times of need! 

You see, it's NOT that it takes "works" to prove that you're a Christian. "Works" don't count towards getting into Heaven, "or else Christ died in vain", as we've said a thousand times. But if you really ARE a Christian believer, the Holy Spirit resides in you. He should be forcing you do help in whatever means you can, or at the very least making you feel guilty because you haven't!

Ephesians 2:8-10 reminds us that those works are placed in front of us by God once we've given our lives to Him!

8For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Just because you can't fix such a complicated issue yourself doesn't mean there isn't part of it that you CAN do to help. Get or stay informed on these big issues, and then let Him guide you to what you can do to share His Glory and alleviate suffering in this world. Most of the time, the Holy Spirit will prod you in the direction you should help, if you're listening to Him closely. Listen for that still, small Voice.

And don't be afraid that what you're doing "isn't enough". That's why God has so many hands on earth, why the Body of Christ extends around the globe. Consider the starfish (this story comes from one written by Loren Eiseley):

Once upon a time, there was an old man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing.He had a habit of walking on the beach every morning before he began his work. Early one morning, he was walking along the shore after a big storm had passed and found the vast beach littered with starfish as far as the eye could see, stretching in both directions. 

Off in the distance, the old man noticed a small boy approaching.  As the boy walked, he paused every so often and as he grew closer, the man could see that he was occasionally bending down to pick up an object and throw it into the sea.  The boy came closer still and the man called out, “Good morning!  May I ask what it is that you are doing?”

The young boy paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean. The tide has washed them up onto the beach and they can’t return to the sea by themselves,” the youth replied. “When the sun gets high, they will die, unless I throw them back into the water.”

The old man replied, “But there must be tens of thousands of starfish on this beach. I’m afraid you won’t really be able to make much of a difference.”

The boy bent down, picked up yet another starfish and threw it as far as he could into the ocean. Then he turned, smiled and said, “It made a difference to that one!”

Make a difference - even if it's only for one starfish at a time...

The Universe and God in Twelve Dimensions

This is the opening chapter of my upcoming book, A Step Sideways: The Universe And God In Twelve Dimensions, and the primary purpose of the book will be made obvious very quickly. I hope you enjoy the premise, and that you'll be intrigued enough to want to read the book when it's finished. Enjoy! 

Dimension 0

A point.

A single point has no length, width, or height. It has no size whatsoever, no dimension. When we exist in one solitary point, we exist in Dimension Zero.

            Waxahachie, Texas, was a quiet enough town in 2017, when those four private investors decided that their way of “making America great again” was to finish the Superconducting Super Collider underneath the town – heck, underneath a good chunk of Ellis County, if you think about it. Dang thing’s over fifteen miles in diameter, fifty-four miles around, you know? And I think in their good ol’ boy Texas hearts and wallets, they’d’ve made the dang thing even bigger if more than a quarter of it hadn’t already been dug, just sitt’n there waiting for them to finish the job.

            But even now, thirteen years later, with the population doubled thanks to the SSC, Waxahachie’s still a pretty peaceful place. It’s still somewhere that you would feel good raising a family, you know?

            Too bad I don’t have a family to raise here.

            I’ve only been back here for a year, almost two, since they opened the SSC in late ‘28. I say “back” here, because one of my three degrees came from here, from the Southwestern Assemblies of God University, class of 2018. (Go, Lions!) Even played a little football there, like I did back in Burkbuckett – heck, you can’t be six-foot-anything in Texas and not play football, you know? Nothing special: NAIA-level lineman, was never going to start anyway, not even in the Central States League. But I got to play some, and I learned about teamwork on the field while I learned about God and a ton of other topics in the classroom.

            So, to fill in the missing years in my resume there, insert a second bachelor’s in mathematics from SMU – guarantee I wasn’t going to make the team there, even though I did have a year of eligibility left! – and my doctorate in particle physics from UT-Austin, knowing what was coming down the pike back there in Waxahachie.

            Because, see, here’s the thing: I’ve been a Christian all my life. Raised in the Assembly of God, went to church every Sunday, spoke my share of tongues, took enough communion to have eaten Christ’s entire arm off. (Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned…) But even after being ordained, I knew there was something missing, something fundamentally wrong in the way I was connecting to the Lord. I was twenty-two years old, bachelors of divinity in hand, ready to go find me a nice church population to tend – and yet, I knew I wasn’t quite ready yet, you know? There was something… well, I don’t want to keep using the word “fundamental”, but that’s what it was: something foundational that was missing. A brick lacking in my cornerstone that would topple the entire structure one day through its absence.

            And as I was starting my senior year at SAGU, the news came out about the four oil men who had decided to take President Trump’s slogan to heart. They’d made a killing in the resurgent oil market that year, and wanted to do something significant. (I keep using the fundamental; they kept using the word significant. Guess we’re all a bit semantically fixated sometimes.) And they’d been looking into what the situation was with the Super Collider that was mothballed back in 1994 (I wasn’t even alive back then!), found out the tunnels that existed were still in great shape, that a chem company called Magnablend had bought the site but not done anything with it yet, and decided over beer and ribs to buy the thing and “to run them CERN folks into the ground.” (Their words, not mine. I’m a team player, remember?)

            So they did. Buy it, I mean. The CERN Large Hadron Collider’s done some amazing work in the fifteen, twenty years it’s been smashing particles, and its reputation is safe from us. But it wasn’t “us” back in 2017, of course; it was “them”. As in, “Them oil men are going to make fools of themselves, reinvesting in that white elephant! Don’t they know it got shut down for a reason?”

            They did, in fact, know. Cost overruns. Mostly the cost of the magnets they needed, not so much the tunneling, which it turns out isn’t as big of the budget as you’d think (and even less in 2018, when they’d already had fourteen miles in place before day one!). And the magnets? Well, twenty-five years is a loo-oong time in technology years, and those magnets were much more easily produced, more powerful, and a tenth of the price they were in 1992. So when the original was shut down, the government had spent two billion dollars already, with an expected ten more to spend, before Mr. Clinton reluctantly signed off on its shutdown. By the time these four dudes finished the project in 2028, it had only cost them eight billion, and that’s in today’s pesos! Someth’n to be said for private management and a lack of government bureaucracy, but a big chunk of that savings was the improvement in tech since the nineties.

            And it flicked a switch in me. I’d gotten hooked on science from our chem and physics teacher back in high school, over my mother’s objections. At the time, the big thing in particle science the search for the “God Particle”, the super heavy boson that Peter Higgs and Francois Englert theorized, and CERN found before I graduated from Burkbuckett High School, up on the OK border. When I heard about the Superconducting Super Collider project starting up again in 2017, it renewed that love in my gut for the physics I’d set aside in my devotion to God.

            And it was then that I realized what the missing brick was in my foundational belief system:

            How can I believe the literal translation of my Lord’s Word, as He has given it to us through the prophets in the sixty-six books of the Bible, when the scientific world was making discovery after discovery that seemed to put that Scripture in question?

            Which was right? The Bible, or the Universe?

            Mind you, it’s not like they’re really as contradictory as some people make it sound like they are. Most people don’t realize, for example, that the Bible always assumed the earth was a sphere, unlike most of the societies alive fifteen hundred years before Christ. I was just reading Isaiah 40, which happens to be where I am in my yearly reading straight through of the Bible (and like any lifelong college student, I take such copious notes that I have to work to remember to listen to what God is telling me with his Word each day, not just read and digest it untested). In verse 22, he casually throws in this verse:

It is He who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers…

            The “circle of the earth”? The actual Hebrew word means “sphere” – so they called it a globe for hundreds of years before the Greeks and Romans watched sailors disappear below the horizon and famously realized the earth is round. (Yes, there were backwards stragglers who thought Columbus and Magellan would fall of the edge, but they were just stupid, not the norm.)

            We could go on and on… Do you know why God told man to circumcise male Hebrew babies on the eighth day of life in particular? Scientists have recently ascertained that the combination of wound coagulation (which increases over time as babies live their first month) and comfort of the surgery (while babies do feel pain, despite calls to the contrary by fools, it is less at birth than down the road) makes the eighth day the ideal date for circumcision for the health and well-being of the baby! And God knew that already and ordered it for His People from the very beginning!

            Many of the food restrictions of the Old Testament were obviously designed to keep the nomadic Israelites healthy and alive, and that’s partially why some of them were rescinded in Christ’s time – they were no longer medically necessary. The most obvious of these is the restriction on eating pork, a meat that turns deadly when it starts to go unrefrigerated. God chose simply to forbid his nomadic people the deadliest meats (there are long lists of animals that are ‘unclean’, although some of those are designed to keep up away from animals that the idolatrous pagans around them worshipped).

            There are literally dozens of these “coincidences”, and all of these things add up. I was certain that there was more method than madness to the Bible’s many rules, statutes, commandments, and so forth. But I couldn’t put my finger on it.

So I decided, two months before graduation, that I needed to find an answer to that all-important question if I was to become a true servant of God, and certainly before I could shepherd anyone else. So I applied to and got accepted at Southern Methodist University in Dallas (Go, Mustangs!), majoring in mathematics with an engineering specialization, with the sole intent on going on to graduate work in particle physics. Three years later, I was working with amazing physicists like Willy Fischler and Duane Dicus and Jacques Distler at the University of Texas at Austin (Go, Longhorns!), learning everything I prayed I would need to get on at the SSC when it opened in a few years.

            Four years there left me just enough time to get some practical experience at one of the National Accelerator Labs (the one out in the South Bay, near where the 49ers played. Even got to see a couple of NFL games there, including seeing my beloved Cowboys play!), plus a trip to Switzerland as a “visiting scientist” (sounds like I was some high-fallutin’ hotshot!) for three months to study what the folks at CERN were doing now, before I landed the cherished gig back here in Waxahachie, studying and working on whatever our calling would be.

I had no idea what projects I’d be working on, but I knew it would have importance. And I knew it would bring me closer to my goal – the understanding of the relationship between God and the Universe he’s created.

            So, there’s my life and career in a nutshell up until now. And all of it was aimed at answering one question, reconciling one conflict in my world’s paradigm. For example, in all my years, I’ve never had a serious girlfriend. Why? Well, before I left high school, it was mostly because I was a math geek, and afterwards, my studies always took precedence. And today, thirty-one years after birth, I’m still lost in those studies, in the question that supersedes all other questions:

            How do I reconcile what the Bible says with what modern science says?

            Amazingly, I got the chance to find out.

            And now, I get to share that knowledge with you.

Evangelizing to a Hateful World

Have you ever wondered how we're supposed to combat the "tough nuts" who fight against us when we try to share the Gospel? Those folks who've "tried" Christ and "seen it for the crock of crap it really is"? Richard Ellis has a staggeringly blunt message on this problem - and maybe it'll hit you the way it hit us. Take 25 minutes and listen; you won't be able to pull away. (Hit "It's a Crock", today's message, 7.21.17.)

The Word of God is FOOLISHNESS to the non-believer.

About a year before I was saved, one of my best friends and my eventual Christian mentor, Victor Arreaga, gave me a book to read. I'd read it once before, in college, and upon this reading my opinion hadn't changed. Foolishness.

The book was C.S. Lewis' classic, Mere Christianity.


Without bogging you down in details (as a Christian or someone on the cusp, you really need to read it yourself!), the brilliant author of the Narnia Chronicles and many other works (read Perelandra sometime, too!) goes through the process of laying out irrefutable argument after argument as to the truth of God and the validity of Christianity above all other religions.

And, of course, I refuted every single argument in my head. It's all hogwash. Fantasy from a fantasy writer.

About a year later, as I said, I was saved by Christ, on an Amtrak train traveling from Winnemucca to Reno. (Long story. I've told it before, and undoubtedly I'll tell it again, but not now.) And Victor met me the next evening to start guiding me through those hazardous first few steps towards a life of Christian joy and safety.

Another year after that, I picked up Mere Christianity again. 

And I couldn't even figure out what I had objected to, much less muster those arguments again.

"For the preaching of the cross is to them who perish foolishness, but unto us which are saved, it is the power of God."   - Paul, in the 1st letter to the Corinthians, 1:18, King James version.

There is an entirely different way of thinking when you've taken the Holy Spirit on board to pilot your ship. Even that first day I'd been saved, I probably wouldn't have understood what Lewis was talking about, but once I'd gathered the Truth of the Gospel under my feet - my "feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of Peace", Ephesians 6:15 - the whole story holds together and became, in fact, the ONLY Truth, capital T.

I had the same feeling about the Bible itself, for that matter. I'd read much of it as a young man, as well as other religious texts to try to ground myself in the ways of the world, and found them all generally reasonable but not overly enlightening. When I began reading the Bible with the Holy Spirit to guide my reading, suddenly the words lifted off the page as I read them! There were whole new meanings within phrases I hadn't given a second thought to, and as I go through my fifth time through the entire Bible (I do so every year, and I'm in my fifth full year as a Christian), I find new meanings throughout the book just for the asking (just for the praying, I should say!). 

As you try to share the Gospel with your non-Believing friends, don't forget this dichotomy!

They will NOT hear the same things YOU hear!    

When you try to tell them the story about this guy who was born in a barn, went around greater Israel preaching about how he was going to divide families, how he wanted you to eat his body and drink his blood, healed a lot of people and ticked all the religious folks of the time off ... but we're supposed to believe that he was actually God, even though he got himself killed barely three years into his ministry, and then this third piece of the same God (which is actually all one God) is going to come live inside you like some freak'n Alien movie? 

No thanks, mister. The football games come on before church gets out, anyway.

The key thing for you to remember is that it's not YOUR responsibility to "convert" ANYONE. That's the job of the Holy Spirit. When someone is ready, they'll come to the Lord. BUT, it is your job to expose them to the "foolishness" of the Gospel. When they're ready, they're ready, and you can lead them to Christ. If they're not ready, nothing you say will help - but one more exposure to the Truth never hurts. You have no way of knowing when someone is ready to accept Christ - so all you can do, and what you should do, is share the Gospel with them, and let Christ and the Spirit do the rest.

It hardly seems reasonable. Even Paul, the greatest evangelist in history bar none, recognized how ridiculous our task was - again, quoting from First Corinthians 1, verses 19-29 (this is from the ESV):

For it is written, 
          “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

                  and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”  (from Isaiah 29:14)

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

The Gospel is unreasonable. That's why it requires FAITH to become a Christian. You cannot believe the foolishness of the Gospel until you've experienced the wisdom of God first-hand. 

 

A thought from Kurt Vonnegut...and a sobering one from me.

Ran across this gem on Facebook yesterday...

The primary document that defines Christians as Christians is the New Testament. We share all or part of the Old Testament with many religions, primarily Judaism and Islam. And other cults or faiths which stray from the demand that nothing be added to the Bible may share the OT and the NT, but rather work with their own additions - Catholicism with its own doctrine, Latter-Day Saints with their own, and many (more cultish) variations of "Christianity".

The New Testament is the story and principles of Jesus Christ. And the Beatitudes are the first and largest piece of "policy" set forth by Him in the New Testament (after a four chapter introduction to His birth and beginning of His Ministry), starting in Matthew, chapters five through seven.

The only true rival in the New Testament to the Beatitudes in importance would be the Great Commission - the final words of the book of Matthew, repeated (as the Beatitudes are) in other gospels. And yet - and yet! - we hardly give them attention they deserve! There are no monuments akin to those of the Ten Commandments posted anywhere. There is no great missionary push to fulfill them, the way there is for the Great Commission.

We simply assume them.

Kurt Vonnegut is hardly the ideal orator for Christianity. Delete that argument if you're working that one up for the comments. But on this one point, I think he's absolutely on fleek. We harp on the "don'ts" of the Commandments without ever talking about the "dos" of the Beatitudes.

What ARE the Beatitudes?  

Starting at Matthew 5, verses 2 through 12...

2 And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:

3“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

5“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

6“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

7“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

8“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

9“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

10“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on My account.  

12“Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

  

♰

 
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Mediator for Mankind to approach the Great White Throne, blesses His People with the qualifications above, qualifications which have been debated incessantly for almost two thousand years...

"Blessed are the poor in spirit." NOT the "POOR" - being poor is not necessarily an asset or a drawback in and of itself. Being rich doesn't get you into Heaven (or keep you out) in and of itself, either. Nothing in the Beatitudes describes the physical assets of human beings in any way.  

Everything in here - mournful, meek, hungry for righteousness, pure of heart - describes your heart, if you will. Not your position in life, not your standing, not your nationality, not your gender or sexuality or race or height or anything else about you.

What is "the poor in spirit"?  I think one of the "modern" translations actually has a better version of this phrase (I know, right? Never thought I'd say that!). This is the God's Word version of verse 3a: "Blessed are those who recognize they are spiritually helpless..." THAT is what a Christian is: someone who understands that without the Holy Spirit, they are helpless to cope in this sin-filled world. That's what many folks miss about what Christians are. They're NOT perfect; in fact, it's the realization of how IM-perfect they are that makes them truly Christian!

A Christian church is not a museum for the saintly. It is a hospital for the flawed and damaged.

We also hear the expression "using Jesus as my crutch". In no way is Christ my crutch. He is my life support system. He is my defibrillator. He is the only reason I'm alive!

"Blessed are the meek." NOT the "shy". Big difference! The shy don't accomplish anything in life, or at least not the kind of things Jesus is talking of here. The shy never have reason to be persecuted, unless the culture forces them into such circumstances.

No, "the meek" is the opposite of "the proud". The ISV (or International Standard Version of the Bible) words 5:5 this way: "How blessed are those who are humble, because it is they who will inherit the earth!" It's almost a catch-22, if you think too hard about it: if you think you're going to Heaven, you're probably too proud of yourself to be going to Heaven! Not quite true, but you get the idea! Certainly, Jesus was clear about this with the two men praying in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 18: 

10“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ 13But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” 

"Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted." What's black is white and what's white is black? Only to the unsaved who cannot understand the "foolishness" of the Gospels. 

What's the opposite of humble people who will be exalted to the Kingdom of Heaven? The proud. The haughty. The people who think they're so good on their own that their own deeds are part of the contributing factors towards their acceptance into Heaven. The moment you believe that, even in the smallest part, is the moment you're more Pharisee than humble.  
 

♰

Some of the Beatitudes, on the other hand, are fairly straightforward and easy to understand and (attempt to) emulate: "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake...blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on My account". When you are attacked by the sin-laden culture of the world around you, and no doubt you are if you're a Christian, assuming you don't hide under that false veneer of sin which will prevent your heavenward egress, you are being "persecuted for righteousness' sake". You are probably being told that you're not REALLY a Christian, because you don't follow the false prophet version the speaker professes in their haste to Hades. 

"Blessed are the pure at heart, for they shall see God." If you've managed to allow the Holy Spirit to push the sinful fleshly urges off the table of your soul as a cat would push the glasses from your dinner table as she stands upon it, then you have found pureness of heart. Will you succeed completely on this side of Heaven? No, of course not. But we won't see God with these eyes anyway - Christ speaks of a time when we've ascended from this place to Heaven, when with our new bodies of immaculate flesh we can survive in Heaven and then see the perfection of God. Those who cannot repent of their sin wouldn't survive in Heaven, even if they were to somehow get there.

There's a great book by C.S. Lewis that I've long wanted to read, and I just bought it and a host of other Lewis Christian classics in an anthology. The book is short, eighty pages in the edition I now own, and it's entitled The Great Divorce, as in between Heaven and Hell. The premise (as I understand it, not yet having read it!) is essentially that there is an unbridgeable divide between the two places. The story imagines a transport going from Hell to Heaven, and people CAN travel to Heaven and stay there under one condition: They canNOT bring ANYTHING from outside Heaven in. You may not retain any keepsake from your sinful life. And that will prevent almost everyone from going to Heaven, in the opinion of Lewis through this story. (At least, that's my understanding. If I'm wrong, I'll write a retraction.)

♰

So, when you look at His list of the qualities of those who will make the roll call when Heaven's gates are opened, what do you see? Do you see proud people? Do you see accomplished people? Do you see great achievers? For that matter, do you even see people who were successful in life on earth?

No. 

The people He describes will not have any monuments named after them. (Maybe that's why there are no "Beatitudes" monuments, the way there are "Ten Commandments" monuments.) They have no place in history books, at least of their own volition. They are simple people, people who serve the Lord by prayer, who serve Him through their sacrifice, rather than their self-aggrandizement. They are people who have suffered for the same reasons He suffered: to help bring about the betterment of life for others. Undoubtedly there are famous people who will spend eternity with God, but neither their fame nor the cause of their fame will be the issuance of their pass into Heaven. The saints accepted into God's company will perhaps be as surprised as the ones who are rejected! 

I don't think I belong in that list of those with "Beatific" qualifications. Odds are, you don't either.

I'm too prideful. I foolishly think I ought to get a little recognition for my work on occasion, and that's not what the meek believe. I think about the need for righteousness, but I've never truly sacrificed for it. I'm not much of a peacemaker, and I'm certainly not very pure of heart. 

I'm afraid that when Jesus of Nazareth spoke of the narrow gates which lead to Heaven, He wasn't talking about my path. I'm afraid that my path matches too many of you out there who take the wide roads, the easy path in life, where we read our Scripture, we tithe most months unless the bills are too tight, and we say grace at meals, but we don't "take up our crosses and follow" our Lord as we should. 

As I should. 

And, odds are, as you should. Jesus Himself told us the odds are against every single one of us being on the correct path to Heaven. So, like I am trying to do, you owe it to yourself to do everything you can to focus on being on the true path to Heaven, the Beatitudes path. 

And we owe it to our loved ones and to all of those around us to help them determine if they are on the right path or not. 

That was His other big message: The Great Commission. 

I had an interesting thought today.

A "revelation", if you must.

And I got it listening to a preacher I don't think is particularly amazing, although he is on point with the Gospel and that's what matters. (Having said that, I probably shouldn't name him. He's on CSN, if that helps.)

He talked about an ad he'd seen for a fellow who specializes in helping people through their "bad UFO abduction experiences". (Re-read that if you need to, so we can continue. Got it? Okay.) This wahoo apparently will hold seminars and counseling sessions for anyone willing to come work with him or hear him tell his own tale of seeing a "little man with a big head carrying a washboard" outside his house when he was five, or of being abducted himself, as best he can recall, when he was eleven. Part of his sales pitch, apparently, is that everyone in the world wants to know what the meaning of life is, and are we alone, and what happens after we die; he, of course, feels privileged to have found the answer to all three questions before he was even a teenager, and he's glad to share that knowledge with you.

For a price, of course. And that's what got me thinking.

See, there's no end to the number of people who ARE trying to find out the answers to one or all of those three questions, most usually the classic one about the meaning of life, to which Douglas Adams famously spoofed in his Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series that after seven and a half million years, the smartest computer in the universe, named Deep Thought, came up with the answer to.

The answer, not to spoil the mystery for you or anything, is forty-two.

The creators of the computer then asked what exactly that was the answer TO, and Deep Thought told them that they'd have to invent an even bigger computer to find out the actual question to the meaning of life. There's a story running around the computer programming world right now, by the way, that says that we need to remember that Adams was a crack computer programmer, especially in ASCII (as such people in the 80s all were), and in ASCII, 42 was the representation of an asterisk (*), which was the placeholder symbol for "whatever you want it to be" - thus, the meaning of life was really "whatever you want it to be". But I digress.

The meaning of life is so sought after because unless you're a Christian, it's not at all readily apparent. Why do we live at all? Why are we born, why do we die? (And, to quote Adams again, "Why do we spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?") 

To a believer in Christ, of course, the answer is obvious.

We are born, live, and die to glorify our Creator, the Lord God in Heaven above. Our lives are to be examples lived to exemplify His Glory, and we are to strive to live as Christlike a life as we are able to in this flawed flesh we ride around in. In doing so, we are to help set an example for the non-Believer to examine and (hopefully) motivate him or her to ask what we have that they don't which gives us such peace of mind, such joy from within despite our circumstances (WHICH IS ANOTHER REASON we do not get to live perfect lives down here on earth! If we were filled with joy living perfect lives, who would ever ask us such a question? Of COURSE we're joyful! Nothing bad ever happens to us!), and in that moment we are given the opportunity to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with that person, and if all goes right the Holy Spirit guides them towards a saving grace themselves.

Every moment of our saved lives as Christians should be lived for that purpose. And without that purpose, I've no doubt that life itself is indeed a mystery to all of those around us with any brains worth salvaging. Are we supposed to do good deeds? (Not in and of themselves, though that's a good start.) Is it, He who dies with the most toys wins? Money? Power? Fame? (No, no, no, and no.) Acquire intellect? (Nope. I tried that. It generally shows you more reasons to be depressed.) No wonder the majority of religions have to come up with some external purpose for living! If you don't have the actual answer, you've got to make something else up, AND get your money up front in case they don't come back.

Which brings me back to the topic at the top: The guy selling the UFO seminar.

Isn't it amazing that everyone who wants to share with you their idea of "the meaning of life" or "what's on the other side?" requires your money first? Even the TV evangelists, for the most part, seem to require your credit card number.

Except for true Christianity. 

There are Bibles to be had for free in any hotel room in the country. Alternatively, just about any church or mission in the world will find you one for free if you need one - heck, write to me in the comments and I'll send you one if you need it! You can wander into any Christian church in the country for free - let the bucket go around without your "clink"; they won't throw you out - and then any good preacher worth his salt will tell you about the Good News, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and offer to help you make a saving commitment to the Lordship of Jesus Christ right then and there. You don't need six easy payments of $19.95 to qualify. You don't need PayPal. You don't even need two copper coins to rub together as the poor woman in Mark 12 or Luke 21 contributed at the synagogue.

You just need to come with an open mind, an open heart, and an understanding that you are an imperfect person in need of salvation. You (and I, and every other human being who ever lived save one) are a sinner. We violate God's laws every single day, most of the time without malice or forethought. But no matter how hard we try on our own, we will not be able to prevent doing so - and even one sin bars us from God's holiness in Heaven. Our sins must be paid for. THAT is one of the things which we are searching for in this life, unknowingly, until we come to Christ. Because Christ is the one Man Who lived that sinless life, and so He is the One Man Who had the ability to pay the price for our sin, having no price required of Him. 

But in order to accept that immeasurable favor He did for us, we must do ONE THING: Accept His Lordship as God, which shouldn't be difficult, because by raising from the dead on the third day He proved that He IS God. All we have to do is acknowledge actual TRUTH (not "fake news" - news witnessed by hundreds of first century Israelites) and submit to His Lordship. We are not only granted eternal life in Heaven after this pile of flesh has worn out (rather than eternal existence in Hell - already an amazing deal), but we also get the Holy Spirit, the third member of God Himself, along for the ride wherever we go from that moment on. 

All of this is free. No pastor could charge for it, even if he wanted to.

So, if anyone thinks that you should give them money for anything they claim as eternal knowledge or some such thing? 

THERE'S your "fake news". That's a sure sign they're false prophets, destined to be condemned to Hell when their time comes.   

Cyrano And The Lord

 “A large nose is in fact the sign of an affable man, good, courteous, witty, liberal, courageous, such as I am.”

“A kiss, when all is said, what is it? A rosy dot placed on the “I” in “loving”. ‘Tis a secret told to the mouth instead of the ear.              

     - Edmond Rostand, “Cyrano”

Ever read the story of Cyrano de Bergerac?

            The French poet Edmond Rostand wrote a (fictional) play in 1897 about Cyrano, in which the large-nosed, slightly grotesque, yet brilliant and eloquent and charming Cyrano falls in love with the beautiful Roxane. However, his fears of rejection (for obvious reasons!) lead him to enlist the help of a proxy, in the person of Christian de Neuvillette. Christian is much better looking, but also much less intelligent than the man he’s representing.

            In the critical scene, Cyrano and Christian are outside Roxane’s window (think Romeo and Juliet!), with Cyrano in the foliage hiding and Christian seemingly alone under her balcony. When Roxane comes to see who her suitor is, Cyrano feeds his proxy the words he needs to woo her – romantic and eloquent verses that succeed in winning her heart.

          Unfortunately…that means that Roxane falls in love with Christian, and not Cyrano. The remainder of the story, of course, is how slowly, slowly, Roxane starts to learn who Cyrano really is as a person, and slowly she grows to fall in a deeper love with him (as opposed to the surface affections she had for Christian).

         Consider the parallels between that story and the story of Our Lord God Almighty and His beloved Son, Jesus Christ.

          Put God the Father in the role of Cyrano, Jesus Christ (the Son) in the role of Christian (how ironic!), and we the people of the believing body of the church in the role of Roxane.

            God the Father may not be “large nosed” or “slightly grotesque” (He certainly qualifies as brilliant and eloquent!), but He has trouble connecting tangibly with us, His beloved, because He only appears to us as columns of fire, or sentient clouds, or a burning bush, or (more often) simply as disembodied actions and communications from On High. You can see how, sometimes, that might be difficult for us to form a loving relationship with! And while the Lord our God has no fear, He certainly had enough rejection from His beloved in the Old Testament to make up for any lack of fear in the equation.

            So, He enlists the help of a proxy – Jesus Christ. Christ is much better looking than His Father, in the sense that He exists in a much more tangible, accessible form for humans to connect with. All accounts tell us that despite the prophesies of Isaiah, Our Lord Jesus Christ was also fairly handsome, as logic would dictate the Perfect Man might very well be. And while Jesus was of course intelligent on so many levels, He did give up His divinity and the access to divine knowledge while in human form, so certainly in comparison to His Father, we can justify the analogy of His being “less intelligent” than God.

            So, Jesus comes to earth, is born fully man and fully God, is baptized by John and blessed by His Father, and He starts His three-plus year “wooing” of His Father’s beloved on His behalf – namely, us. The words He courts us with are His Father’s words (“It is written”), the miraculous power He demonstrates to the flock comes from Above, and He even tells us point blank that all the power He displays comes from God Above, not from Him. So…Jesus is essentially wooing us with His Father’s words, deeds, and powers. 

            But we didn’t fall in love with God…we became Christians, not “God-ians”.

           Just like Roxane, we fell in love with the proxy, the One who was slain on the cross outside the city of Jerusalem. God sent His Only Son to earth for many reasons, one of the most important (to us, certainly!) was as a proxy for our sins. The violent and bloody death of the Perfect, Sinless Man served as the eternal replacement for all the blood sacrifices we were required to make to atone for our many sins. But He also came to replace the old covenants with a New Covenant, a Covenant which came from God but was delivered by Jesus Christ. In the process of our interactions from the balcony with Christ, we chose to worship HIM more than we worship GOD.

       So the question becomes: Is that bad? Should we see Jesus as only the messenger for God, the “Christian” to His “Cyrano”?

          Of course not. That’s where the analogy breaks down.

          But it’s important to understand the relationship between the two: Jesus Christ is wholly God, an integral and honored part of the Trinity – but He is not more important than God the Father, any more than He is more (or less) important than God the Holy Spirit, any more than the Father is more important than the Son. They are all God, and while they often function in different spheres, they are inseparable. “Ranking” the Trinity is a fool’s game; at best, it’s like asking a parent who their favorite child is (although in this case it’s closer to asking a child the reverse question).

          We worship God. We worship Christ. We worship the Holy Spirit.

          We call ourselves “Christians” because the Hebrew nation could have rightly been called “God-ians”. (For some reason, we never think of ourselves as “Holy Spirit-ians”, although for me, that’s the aspect of the Trinity I most often associate with!). But we respect, love, and worship the entire Triune God as our Lord and Master, and that’s why the analogy breaks down.

           (But, just like Cyrano, our story still has a really happy ending!)