R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 74

God’s Intent

Listen to the noise

on the hilltops!

It’s the people of Israel,

weeping and begging me

to answer their prayers.

They forgot about me

and chose the wrong path.

I will tell them, “Come back,

and I will cure you

of your unfaithfulness.”

They will answer,

“We will come back, because you

are the LORD our God.

On hilltops, we worshiped idols

and made loud noises,

but it was all for nothing—

only you can save us.

Since the days of our ancestors

when our nation was young,

that shameful god Baal has taken

our crops and livestock,

our sons and daughters.

We have rebelled against you

just like our ancestors,

and we are ashamed of our sins.”

The LORD said:

Israel, if you really want

to come back to me, get rid

of those disgusting idols.

Make promises only in my name,

and do what you promise!

Then all nations will praise me,

and I will bless them.

People of Jerusalem and Judah,

don’t be so stubborn!

Your hearts have become hard,

like unplowed ground

where thorn bushes grow.

With all your hearts,

keep the agreement

I made with you.

But if you are stubborn

and keep on sinning,

my anger will burn like a fire

that cannot be put out. (Jeremiah 3:21-4:4)

God has the cure. Repentance is more than just saying “I’m sorry.” It takes both time and effort. The people began by realizing that what they’d been doing, the way they’d been living, had simply not worked and so they cried out to God. God told them that if they really wanted to come back to him, then he had a list of things they needed to do that came down to just one thing: they needed to get rid of the idols that they acknowledged hadn’t done anything for them but relieve them of their money and time. But God pointed out that they were stubborn and hard-hearted and that what they wanted—to be freed from their sins—was not going to be easy. It would be like working on unplowed ground full of thorns. Getting a good crop out of that sort of land was hard. And he warned them, unless they got to work immediately, God would have to judge them, like a fire that couldn’t be put out. Of course, carrying the imagery a bit further, if you have unplowed ground full of weeds, a fire is one of the quickest ways to get rid of them. It was an agricultural picture that his listeners, mostly farmers, would have quickly understood. Painful as it might be for the land in question, the result would be a very good thing. God did not intend to destroy them. But he did intend to fix them.

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Leave Your Misery

Wake up, wake up, O Jerusalem!

You have drunk the cup of the LORD’s fury.

You have drunk the cup of terror,

tipping out its last drops.

Not one of your children is left alive

to take your hand and guide you.

These two calamities have fallen on you:

desolation and destruction, famine and war.

And who is left to sympathize with you?

Who is left to comfort you?

For your children have fainted and lie in the streets,

helpless as antelopes caught in a net.

The LORD has poured out his fury;

God has rebuked them.

But now listen to this, you afflicted ones

who sit in a drunken stupor,

though not from drinking wine.

This is what the Sovereign LORD,

your God and Defender, says:

“See, I have taken the terrible cup from your hands.

You will drink no more of my fury.

Instead, I will hand that cup to your tormentors,

those who said, ‘We will trample you into the dust

and walk on your backs.’ ” (Isaiah 51:17-23)

People are not always quick to leave their misery. Animals don’t always run from their cages. God has to take the cup of suffering from the hands of his people. They didn’t give it to him. They didn’t drop it. They didn’t cringe from it.

God painted the image of a drunk sitting in his own filth and misery, draining the last drops from his cup and looking for more. Israel was like an addict. They were so lost in their problem, they couldn’t see the way out. All they knew was the place where they were, the condition they were in. They couldn’t see the chance for something to change, for a way to escape, for sobriety. All they knew was their sin, their idolatry, their suffering. They had endlessly worshiped the gods and goddesses for generations, and for generations it had gotten them nowhere. Their gods remained silent in the face of their problems; they never spoke, they never intervened, they never granted a request. But the people insisted on going on with their gods because they saw no other way to go. There was, as far as they knew, no other way to live, no other way to be, no other thing to believe.

People easily get locked into a cycle of self-destruction. For those on the outside, like God, the solution was obvious. But until he yanked the cup from their drunken, shaking hands and lifted them up, they couldn’t comprehend that things could be any other way than the way they were. It was the only life they knew, the only life they thought was possible. The captivity in Babylon broke the cycle for them at last. What will it take for God to break your destructive cycle? Let God help you sooner rather than later.

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Silence

“Of whom were you worried and fearful

When you lied, and did not remember Me

Nor give Me a thought?

Was I not silent even for a long time

So you do not fear Me?

“I will declare your righteousness and your deeds,

But they will not profit you.

“When you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you.

But the wind will carry all of them up,

And a breath will take them away.

But he who takes refuge in Me will inherit the land

And will possess My holy mountain.”

And it will be said,

“Build up, build up, prepare the way,

Remove every obstacle out of the way of My people.”

For thus says the high and exalted One

Who lives forever, whose name is Holy,

“I dwell on a high and holy place,

And also with the contrite and lowly of spirit

In order to revive the spirit of the lowly

And to revive the heart of the contrite.

“For I will not contend forever,

Nor will I always be angry;

For the spirit would grow faint before Me,

And the breath of those whom I have made. (Isaiah 57:11-16)

The long stretches of silence when God does nothing to the wicked can lull everyone into a false sense of security. God’s silence does not mean that he won’t act. It also doesn’t mean that he doesn’t care. When the righteous cried out for relief and nothing happened; when Joseph remained a slave or in prison for eighteen long years; when his people rotted in Egypt for four hundred years; when Israel suffered captivity in Babylon for seventy years. When the Messiah tarried his arrival for hundreds of years—it never meant that God had stopped caring. It didn’t mean that he wasn’t busy. God does not contend with people without end, he does not leave them to twist in the wind. He understands that human beings are limited, that there is only so much that they can endure. But like a good trainer with his athletes, God knows that they can be pushed further than they imagine. Just one more push up; just one more lap. Then do it again.

But eventually it will be time to hit the showers. Eventually game time comes. Relief arrives only after hard work, after all. You don’t get a vacation because you were sitting around all day. You get it for a reason: you’ve been working hard. That reason just isn’t so much fun and we’d all like the vacation sooner than we really need it.

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Always At Work

“You have heard; look at all this.

And you, will you not declare it?

I proclaim to you new things from this time,

Even hidden things which you have not known.

“They are created now and not long ago;

And before today you have not heard them,

So that you will not say, ‘Behold, I knew them.’

“You have not heard, you have not known.

Even from long ago your ear has not been open,

Because I knew that you would deal very treacherously;

And you have been called a rebel from birth.

“For the sake of My name I delay My wrath,

And for My praise I restrain it for you,

In order not to cut you off.

“Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;

I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.


“For My own sake, for My own sake, I will act;

For how can My name be profaned?

And My glory I will not give to another. (Isaiah 48:6-11)

God hasn’t gone anywhere. God didn’t just work in the distant past. He didn’t just intervene for other people somewhere else, wherever we aren’t. God reassured his people that he was just as actively involved with them now as he had ever been.

The ancient people of Israel often looked back to the glorious stories of their ancestors and compared them unfavorably with their current, often uncomfortable circumstances. They wondered why God couldn’t act today like he used to. But such an attitude is actually a sort of “grass is greener on the other side of the fence” sort of problem: a failure of perception and perspective.

The stories in the Bible are truncated summaries that show the highlights of God, but sometimes fail to show the day to day grind. Readers don’t get to witness Joseph in jail every day, getting up, eating, working, hour after endless hour for eighteen long years before he finally got out. The real work of God in life is punctuated, unexpected, and often only visible in hindsight. In the living of life, God’s interventions, God’s miracles, God’s hand, tend to remain hidden in the shadows and soft thumps of the ordinary.

God works slowly and gradually most of the time. Even the suffering is not like what silver goes through: flaming heat that in moments separates the dross from the precious metal. Instead, it is through the “furnace of affliction” which takes days and months and years and is often times no more than ordinary days strung together like pearls on a string, with the annoyances and trials of ordinary existence. And he does it for his own purposes, and for his own glory. His treatment of his people is not dependent upon them, but upon himself.

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In the Beginning

The Big Bang Theory is the most likely explanation for how the universe began. It was originally resisted by astronomers due to its theological implications, among other reasons. It puzzles me that so many fundamentalist Christians seem to be opposed to the theory, given those theological implications.

Robert Jastrow in God and the Astronomers wrote:

Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the Universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter and energy into the Universe? Was the Universe created out of nothing, or was it gathered together out of pre-existing mateirals? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion. An entire world, rich in structure and history, may have existed before our Universe appeared; but if it did, science cannot tell what kind of world it was. A sound explanation may exist for the exposlive birth of our Universe; but if it does, science cannot find out what the explanation is. The scientist’s pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation.

This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: In the beginning God created heaven and earth. To which St. Augustine added, “Who can understand this mystery or explain it to others?” The development is unexpected because science has had such extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time. We have been able to connect the appearance of man on this planet to the crossing of the threshold of life, the manufacture of the chemical ingredients of life within stars that have long since expired, the formation of those stars out of the primal mists, and the expansion and cooling of the parent cloud of gases out of the cosmic fireball.

Now we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, but the barrier to further progress seems insurmountable. It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeteed by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. (God and the Astronomers, pp. 114-116)

The term “Big Bang” was a derisive one coined by Fred Hoyle who was a strong proponent of the Steady State Theory. His epithet for the theory stuck, and so did the Big Bang Theory.

Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration.

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Grounded

Therefore, this is what the Sovereign LORD says:

“My servants will eat,

but you will starve.

My servants will drink,

but you will be thirsty.

My servants will rejoice,

but you will be sad and ashamed.

My servants will sing for joy,

but you will cry in sorrow and despair.

Your name will be a curse word among my people,

for the Sovereign LORD will destroy you

and will call his true servants by another name.

All who invoke a blessing or take an oath

will do so by the God of truth.

For I will put aside my anger

and forget the evil of earlier days.

“Look! I am creating new heavens and a new earth,

and no one will even think about the old ones anymore.

Be glad; rejoice forever in my creation!

And look! I will create Jerusalem as a place of happiness.

Her people will be a source of joy.

I will rejoice over Jerusalem

and delight in my people.

And the sound of weeping and crying

will be heard in it no more. (Isaiah 65:13-19)

When your parents grounded you, was it forever? Of course not. Following the Babylonian captivity, God intended to restore his people to their land. God made a contrast between those who had repented and those who had not: the servants of God and those who had rejected God. For the people of Israel, one of the most important things they had was their name, that is, their reputation. By a “new name” God meant that they would get a new start. They could get a new reputation. Where before, his people had fallen into disrepute by forsaking Yahweh and worshipping other gods, now they would be faithful to him.

Also signifying the fresh start is the imagery of a “new heavens and a new earth,” which in context is not speaking of the eternal kingdom of God when Jesus returns, but rather of their renewed state after their captivity: think of how you feel when you’re finally well after an illness, or how the world seems when you were first in love. That is the sense God is imparting to his people: their hard service is over. They get to come home. Life will be good again.

The imagery reflected the promises God laid out in his original covenant or treaty with Israel that he gave them back during the time of Moses. Just as God had promised judgment and exile for their disobedience, so he gave them lavish promises for obedience: long life, no miscarriages, and abundant crops. Discipline is never forever, because the discipline of God always works. You’ll have a harvest of righteousness as a result of it.

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Only Ignorant Fools Don’t Vaccinate

Source: Upworthy

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Your Argument is Invalid

The LORD said to Eliphaz:

What my servant Job has said about me is true, but I am angry at you and your two friends for not telling the truth. So I want you to go over to Job and offer seven bulls and seven goats on an altar as a sacrifice to please me. After this, Job will pray, and I will agree not to punish you for your foolishness.

Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar obeyed the LORD, and he answered Job’s prayer.

After Job had prayed for his three friends, the LORD made Job twice as rich as he had been before. Then Job gave a feast for his brothers and sisters and for his old friends. They expressed their sorrow for the suffering the LORD had brought on him, and they each gave Job some silver and a gold ring.

The LORD now blessed Job more than ever; he gave him fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand pair of oxen, and a thousand donkeys.

In addition to seven sons, Job had three daughters, whose names were Jemimah, Keziah, and Keren Happuch. They were the most beautiful women in that part of the world, and Job gave them shares of his property, along with their brothers.

Job lived for another one hundred forty years—long enough to see his great-grandchildren have children of their own— and when he finally died, he was very old. (Job 42:7-16)

You can’t buy love. For all his complaining to God, Job was right and his friends were wrong. After all, as God himself admitted to Satan, Job’s suffering really was without cause (Job 2:3). Job’s friends had falsely accused him of some gross and secret sin. Worse, they had accused God of having a performance based relationship with people. They insisted that the reason for being good was to get God’s blessing. Why had they argued that way? If Job had actually suffered without cause, as Job was claiming, and if good things could happen to the evil and bad to the good, then that meant bad things might happen to Job’s three friends: they couldn’t control the outcome of their lives. They accused Job of undermining piety and hindering devotion to God. (Job 15:4) Job’s friends wondered what the point of being good would be if there was no payout in it.

If we’re good because we think God will then be obligated to bless us—then we’re not being good at all and, even worse, we’re accusing God of not being good. We’re telling him that the only reason he is nice to us is because he’s getting something out of it. We’re buying him off, earning his favor. That’s why God so harshly criticizes Job’s friends.

Why do we help out around our homes or bring gifts to our loved ones? Is it only because we hope to get something out of them? If so, that’s not really love, is it? The same sort of behavior, no matter how we might try to pretty it up with spiritual verbiage, is certainly not loving God.

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Another Test of SpaceX Grasshopper Successor

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Angry God

“And when the LORD saw it, He spurned them,

Because of the provocation of His sons and His daughters.

And He said: ‘I will hide My face from them,

I will see what their end will be,

For they are a perverse generation,

Children in whom is no faith.

They have provoked Me to jealousy by what is not God;

They have moved Me to anger by their foolish idols.

But I will provoke them to jealousy by those who are not a nation;

I will move them to anger by a foolish nation.

For a fire is kindled in My anger,

And shall burn to the lowest hell;

It shall consume the earth with her increase,

And set on fire the foundations of the mountains.

‘I will heap disasters on them;

I will spend My arrows on them.

They shall be wasted with hunger,

Devoured by pestilence and bitter destruction;

I will also send against them the teeth of beasts,

With the poison of serpents of the dust.

The sword shall destroy outside;

There shall be terror within

For the young man and virgin,

The nursing child with the man of gray hairs. Deuteronomy 32:19-25)

Only the wicked enjoy inflicting pain. So God suffered even thinking about the need to bring punishment upon his people. God knew them. He knew what they would do because he knows everything, past, present and future. So God had Moses teach the people a song. But rather than a love song, it was a dirge. It described the future of his people and it was not the happy future they might have expected as they stood joyfully on the banks of the Jordan River gazing at the Promised Land, full of hope and expectation.

God knew they would be unfaithful to him, and so he composed the music to go with the punishment that was inevitably to come upon them. The later prophets, from Isaiah to Malachi, picked up God’s lyrics and merely repeated them.

God described his anger as a fire that burned “from the lowest hell.” Throughout the Bible, the image of fire would become a metaphor for God’s wrath and judgment. The “lowest hell” is a translation of the Hebrew word “sheol” which actually referred to the grave rather than the place of eternal torment for the wicked.

Despite everything, God was still willing to make them his people. He knew they’d abandon him. He knew they would worship everyone else. But he also knew he could redeem them. He knew that in the end, he could fix them. All their pain, all his pain, was still worth it because he loved them so much. God loves us more than we can fathom.

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