We’re family! Family doesn’t have to pay!

Now that we’re God’s family, through getting born above and adopted, we don’t have to pay for our keep, WE GET PAID (better:  REWARDED) FOR OUR WILLING OBEDIENCE. WHAT A GRACIOUSNESS! [7/12/07]

In God’s Grand Champion Tournament with Satan, His opponent had chosen his heaviest club for a shoo-in shot and NAILED it! But God, Who seemed way behind in the game, with steady gaze and measured gait, commencing “with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace” (with apologies to Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven”). picking up “deliberate speed,” with calculated deliberation, reaching for His elegant, pristine 5 IRON with “majestic INSTANCY” and GRACE SWUNG FOR A LONG SHOT.  

WHOLE IN ONE!!! GAME SHOT! [7/13/07]

WHOLESOMENESS CODE: CREATIONAL RESPECT

Could “unclean spirits” actually gain access to an Israelite by the latter’s violation of Israel’s laws from Moses concerning touching unclean things? Was this maybe one of the reasons why God gave them such detailed and wide-ranging wholesomeness laws? Moreover, was this perhaps a principal reason for the prohibitions against idolatry and all its associated practices? To go a step further, is a primary result of idolatry demonization?

The entire Levitical “holiness/wholesomeness code” was to instruct Israel in respect and honor for the integrity of God’s creatures. It promoted life and fruitfulness and prosperity and harmony on earth. Especially it was to warn them against idolatry, which would open the door to demonization, i.e., the invasion of bad, vicious, unclean, unwholesome spirits to rule the human order, thereby displacing God’s highest creature from that noble estate. In short, the wholesomeness laws constituted a hedge against decadence and its consummation in death (the greatest defilement of all, 11/10/15).  [7/13/07]

77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #42)

42.     Does the atonement have a primarily Godward or manward focus?

The Levitical sin-offerings foreshadowed the terminating atrocity of the ancient nation of Israel, namely, the slaughter of the flawless, blameless Lamb of God.  This episode rightly evoked God’s virtually immediate response from heaven, i.e., restitution for the divine Victim with life immortal and surpassing honors.  Moreover, this cosmic overpayment, in truest fulfillment of the Mosaic Law concerning compensation to victims of offenses (miraculously extending its stipulation, for the occasion, even into the sphere of capital crime!), freely benefits all who merely accept it by faith.  This is how the cleansing that’s necessary to forestall God’s indignation gets accomplished in tangible terms.  But what would that be worth in practical terms unless, upon hearing the Proclamation of God’s graciousness in Christ, people are moved by the intrinsic potency of its Storyline to change their minds (repentance) and attitudes (conciliation) toward God, make a turnabout from their sins, and then get baptized to receive his gratuitous gift of Holy Spirit to wash them all away, down the drain of cosmic forgetfulness?  That’s the humanward trajectory of the Explanation-of-the-Cross = the Resurrection-from-the-dead.  Yet how could either of these have been emergent without the genuinely menacing role of the Adversary’s forces plying their black arts against the Light?  Still, they were no match for the martial art of the Cross.  So the atonement was not narrowly focused but radiated shock waves in all directions like a cosmic nebula.