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| The Promised Land is the Lord Himself. |
A tent in the desert with my God
Is better than riches or gold.
A tent in the desert with my God
Is better than pleasures untold.
And if to gain a greener land
A place of comfort to lay
I must leave my Lord behind
In the desert with God I'll stay.
- Inspired by Exodus 33
Today my son was supposed to sing in front of the whole church with his fellow children's choir buddies. He was scared and did not want to go. He began to cry.
Many options raced through my mind. Do I threaten him with discipline if he doesn't? Do I tell him to suck it up and be a man? Do I give in and let him sit it out?
What would the Father do?
My mind went back to Exodus 3 and the Burning Bush. God appeared to Moses and told him to go to the most powerful man in the world and tell him to let God's people go. Moses was afraid and did not want to go. What did God say?"That's OK Moses, I'll pick someone else."
No.
"Moses, if you don't go, I'll punish you."
No.
He said, "You have to go, but I will go with you."So I told my son, "You must go up there, but I will go with you. I won't leave you alone and I will be there the whole time."
My son said, "OK daddy. Thank you." and he stopped crying.
So I went with him and knelt down beside him and held his hand. And he stood brave and resolute. All because daddy was there with him.
I have learned two things from this.
1. We can face anything because God is with us. Just as my presence calmed my son's fears, so remembering that God is with me will calm mine.
2. I need to stop acting like a human parent and start acting like a supernatural one. I need to act more like God the Father to my children. He is the perfect father.
My charge to today is to remember that God the Father goes with you wherever you go. By His spirit we cry, "Abba, Father!" He loves us like little children. We must go and do the hard things, He will not shelter us from them, but He will go with us every step of the way. Likewise, we fathers should be so towards our own children, especially our sons. Do not treat them harshly, but do not shelter them from the hard stuff. Instead, go with them and be with them side by side. You may not think much of yourself (I sure don't) but to your kid you are the strong and mighty father who can defeat any foe and protect them from any harm. In time they must learn we are not as strong as they suppose but there is One who Is. Until then, you must be that man for them. Beside you, they will believe they can do anything. With Him, they really will be."Fear not, I will go with you."
Send them into the darkness, but go with them.
As some of my readers may know, there are public websites out there which allow subscribers to ask questions on various subject to which other subscribers can then post answers to. I joined on a lark, but found there are a lot of people seeking answers to deep spiritual questions out there. I’ve decided that some of these bear repeating to my readers, so this series will show you a question that a real person has asked on the Internet and my response. Enjoy.
Question: Is Isaiah 7:14 a failed prophesy of Jesus as the messiah? Now I'm no scholar, but I can clearly see that the prophesy foretells the birth of someone named Emmanuel...not Jesus.
My Answer:
When it says that he shall be called Emmanuel which means God With Us, it means that people will call Him that, which they did (and do). In Isaiah 9:6 it lists a whole host of other names by which He shall be called later, Prince of Peace, Everlasting Father, Wonderful Counselor, etc.
Just as a man today might be called by many names, titles and nicknames, so was the Christ. After all, He is God Incarnate, so one name isn't going to define Him.
Even in the OT, Yahweh goes by many descriptive names (Yahweh-Raphe, Yahweh-Tsidekenu, etc.)
Messiah just means "Chosen One." A kind of champion or special servant. Cyrus the Great was a messiah, in the fact he was God's chosen one to send His people back to their homeland, and an example of The Messiah to come, that is Jesus Christ.
You see this all over the OT. God taking mortal men and using them as a type or foreshadowing of Christ, to set an example for His people. "This guy is going to save you by sending you back to the promised land, remember this, because I'm sending another One like this who will send you back to me forever." That's obviously a paraphrase, but you do see similar language ALL over the prophets. There's an immediate fulfillment of God's plan (deliverance from a drought, a plague, captivity, etc.) and a future promise of complete fulfillment (the Christ and His atonement for us).
Hebrews 10:1, Colossians 2:17 and Hebrews 8:5 show us that much of what is recorded in the OT were there only as types and shadows of the reality to come, that is Christ.
The temple and its sacrifices, for example, could never make man right with God. Why then these sacrifices? To show man a type or foreshadowing of what was to come in Christ, so that when it came man would recognize it and believe.
In John 5:39 Jesus himself explains that the point of the OT Scriptures was to point mankind to Himself. To prepare us for His coming. In Galatians 3 starting in verse 19, Paul goes into detail explaining that the entire point of the Law (i.e. the OT) was to point us to Christ. The Law was not an end to itself, as many of the Jews believed.
Whew! Sorry for the long response. In short, Emmanuel is not a failed prophecy, Jesus was (and is) called this because He was "God With Us." It's just one of many "titles" or "nicknames" that the true Messiah would be honored with. Also, Cyrus was referred to as God's messiah because he was a man chosen by God to deliver His people from bondage, but there are messiahs and there is The Messiah, that is the Christ, who God chose from before the foundations of the world itself to free us from the bondage of sin and death. All the "messiahs" of old were but types and shadows to foreshadow the coming of the True Messiah. (And coincidentally, this is also why Jesus of Nazareth has many more names and titles besides Messiah, to distinguish him from other "messiahs.")
I hope that helps! Keep searching the Scriptures!
As some of my readers may know, there are public websites out there which allow subscribers to ask questions on various subject to which other subscribers can then post answers to. I joined on a lark, but found there are a lot of people seeking answers to deep spiritual questions out there. I’ve decided that some of these bear repeating to my readers, so this series will show you a question that a real person has asked on the Internet and my response. Enjoy.
Question: How authentic is the Bible?
My Answer: As an historical document? Very.
First, you've got to realize the Bible is a collection of 66 separate documents, or slightly less if you consider the books that are two-parters.
Most of the documents are written by different people from vastly different walks of life. It's authors include kings, shepherds, poets, fishermen, and others. They are all separated by vast spans of time as well. Some are hundreds and even thousands of years apart.
So, from a historical point of view, it's not really fair to judge "the Bible" as a single document or work, because it's not.
Nevertheless, each of those 66 books has the same or more authenticity than any manuscript of its age. We have thousands and thousands of manuscripts backing it up with only minor variations that are usually nothing more than spelling or grammatical errors.
There is a host of archaeological evidence that also supports the Biblical narrative as well as other contemporary historians and their works, such as Josephus.
If it is held to the same standard as similar documents of its age, each of the books of the Bible holds firm as authentic, or at least as authentic as anything else we consider authentic from that period.
The only reason people dismiss it isn't because of a lack of evidence or authenticity, but because the Bible goes on to make some pretty audacious claims about humanity and God and sin and redemption.
Unlike, for example, Homer's Odyssey or Plato's Republic, the Bible makes claims that demand a response from the reader. Either you believe it and therefore must follow it or you disbelieve it and therefore must somehow discredit it to justify your unbelief.
Since humans don't want to believe in a God who owns them and holds them accountable for their misdeeds, many humans choose to disbelieve the Bible and therefore will do anything at all to discredit it, even if that means abandoning any sense of integrity and holding the Bible to unrealistic standards that no historian would impose upon any other document.
As some of my readers may know, there are public websites out there which allow subscribers to ask questions on various subject to which other subscribers can then post answers to. I joined on a lark, but found there are a lot of people seeking answers to deep spiritual questions out there. I've decided that some of these bear repeating to my readers, so this series will show you a question that a real person has asked on the Internet and my response. Enjoy.
Question: "Even with so many experts and knowledge, why are there so many controversies in the translation of biblical texts (including apocryphal)?"
My Answer: It really depends on what you mean by "experts" and "controversies."
Among honest scholars of both Hebrew and Greek, there are few real controversies out there, and most of them have nothing to do with translation, but with "was this in the original MS or not?" There are not many texts in dispute, but any decent Bible will have each of them marked and notated somehow (usually in parenthetical or marked with asterisks).
As far as translation, the so-called "controversies" arise mainly from the fact that we are dealing with languages both ancient and dead. Koine Greek is an especially complex (and beautiful) language, ever so much more than English. A Greek word in and of itself has a myriad of layers and meanings that can only be deduced from context clues and cultural cues. Usually, we've got enough of both to know what the author was trying to say, but sometimes the cultural context is all but non-existent and sometimes the context isn't totally clear. Nevertheless, even in these cases, there is almost always enough information to get a really good approximation. Then there are a few examples where there simply is no English equivalent for a Greek word. Hebrew, by contrast, is a much simpler language and is more easily understood than Koine Greek, but complications arise simply because the style of Hebrew and the MS its contained in are so old. We are talking stuff that was recorded more than 2,000 years ago here. The cultural context for most of it is pure guesswork for some cases. In the end though, it's mostly just academic stuff for the intellectuals to have a friendly debate over coffee. One thing that must be emphasized to people who struggle with the fact that a few select passages are in dispute or that this or that word is unclear is that no Church doctrine is dependent on any disputed text. That means you can take or leave any disputed text or unclear wording we still haven't pinned down yet and it won't change the message of the Bible. Someone who believes that the story of the woman caught in adultery is canon is no more or less a Christian than the one who believes its apocryphal. All the important, key texts that define doctrine are not in dispute at all. As for "experts," you might want to be careful about them. Not all who write books about this subject or do TV interviews are actually trained in Hebrew or Greek or know anything academically about the subject. For the most part, the only people seriously studying the Bible, its cultures, and its languages are the people who believe in it (with some exceptions). Most of the people claiming that there is a controversy in Scripture big enough to crack the Church in half are just blowhards who heard what they wanted to hear from an academic they didn't understand and then spun it out of the stratosphere.
