Friday Faithfuls Two: Romans

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

I love Romans.  So much richness.  Such beautiful logical arguments.

I need to spend more time in Romans.

Likely because we were in a conference last weekend about the Jewish origins of the Christian faith, the verse that stood out to me the most (among several that resonated) this week is 1:16

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes:  first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.  (NIV 84)

All of the folks who spoke at the conference were Messianic Jews, and one of them commented in telling his story:

"When someone would begin to speak to me about Jesus, I would reply, 'Oh, I'm Jewish.'  And they would apologize, saying something like 'Oh, I'm so sorry.  I wouldn't have said anything if I had known.'.  So I definitely felt that Christianity and Judaism were not at all compatible.  If just one had replied something along the lines of, 'Oh, man, that's awesome!  Salvation belongs to you first!' It would have changed everything for me."

I have never understood Christian based antisemitism.  In the beginning, Christianity (the folks back then referred to it as 'The Way'...'Christian' was a derogatory term most akin to 'Jesus Freak' now) was considered a sect of Judaism.  Jesus was Jewish, as were all of his disciples.  The foundation of the Christian faith is Judaism...the radical idea that God is one, and he actually cares about and is involved in the lives of his people. A holy God, who is completely 'other than' humans, not a host of squabbling deities who were just immortal human types with supernatural powers.

People who want to cite the verse about the guilt of Jesus' death falling on the Jews missed the point entirely...it wasn't the Jewish PEOPLE who rejected him...it was their LEADERS.   To blame the Jews of that day would be to blame Andrew, Peter, Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, John the Revelator, John Mark, and all the others who followed him...who had the Jewish leaders so alarmed that they had to turn the execution of Jesus over to the Romans, lest there be a riot...for Jesus' death.  They were not to blame. Nor are their children.  We owe our faith to those very folks who told others who told others who told others; without those Jewish followers of Jesus, non of us non-Jewish folks would have the hope of the gospel.

So what sense does it make for believers to reject, harass, abuse, steal from, marginalize, disenfranchise and ultimately kill folks who are Jewish?   None at all.  

The power of God for the salvation of everyone is, first and foremost, for them.

Friday Faithfuls Two: Acts of the Apostles

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

This sorta - weekly skim through a book of the Bible has brought us to Acts...the only history book in the New Testament.  The folks who had followed Jesus were figuring out how to follow the leading of Holy Spirit, how to follow Jesus' instructions.  

I thought I knew what verse I would pick before I started reading, but right off the bat I got slapped with something else.

Isn't that always what happens, lol?   That'll preach on it's own...anytime I think I  know what God is going to say/ lead/ whatever...we go a different direction. 

After his suffering , he showed himself to these men [the apostles he had chosen; v. 2] and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive.  He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.  - Acts 1:3

Maybe it's because I was teaching a class this week about the validity of the scripture, but the immediacy of this...that Luke had likely spoken to a number of these disciples, the ones who had spent time with Jesus, as he researched the events he wrote about...suddenly hit me.  

I think I have mentioned this before; but, in archaelogical terms, the New Testament is yesterday's newspaper, full of eyewitness accounts.  No other manuscript from antiquity can even come close.

Two of the tests given to ancient texts to validate them are 1) how much time passed between the original manuscript and the oldest existing copy and 2) how many ancient copies or fragments of copies do we have in order to cross - reference the text.  Obviously, the lesser amount of time that has passed between the original writing of a manuscript and the making of the copy that still exists will make it more likely to be accurate, while the larger the number of documents we have to compare to one another the more confident we can be that it has been accurately perserved.

I'm not going to get into the specifics of this here...if you want all the numbers and such you can find them in Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict, in which he goes into all the details of these kinds of studies, but I will say that the New Testament completely blows all the other ancient documents out of the water.  Writings of Aristotle, Pliny the Younger, Caesar, Homer...have hundreds of years between the writing of them and the oldest extant copies.  We also only have a very few...less than 10 for some...ancient copies of the manuscripts. 

The oldest fragment of the New Testament is 50 years away from the original source, and we have over 5, 000 ancient documents...over 25,000 if you count all the tiny fragments...that reproduce the text.

We have a very, very high level of confidence that what we have in our Bibles today is what was written.  

And what was written was written by those who saw, who experienced or, as in the case of Luke, who were closely acquainted with those who were witnesses of the life and resurrection of Jesus and the power that his name had in the years following his ministry. The concept is repeated in Acts.... phrases like 'we have seen' and 'we were witnesses' appear several times in the text.  The original writings were floating around while the folks who lived the events were still  walking around on the planet. 

...many convincing proofs that he was alive

Yes, it is a fantastic story...bizzarre, even.  Hard to wrap one's head around. 

Maybe that's why Romans says we must believe in the heart...

Friday Faithfuls 2 - John

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

John is one of my favorite books.  It is so deep and so rich and so...intense.  I sat down and, instead of doing the normal 'skim through' for this series, I just read it through as if it were a novel.  Try it sometime...ignore the chapter/verse notations and just read.  You'll catch things that you would otherwise miss if you let the chapters and verses break up the text.  

It's hard for us to remember sometimes that those divisions are just there to make referencing the text easier; there's nothing particularly inspired about them.

But, be that as it may, after reading through the whole book I still ended up back at the beginning for this week's choice.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made....and the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us"  -- John 1: 1-3, 14a  NIV84

I was freshly struck by John's statement that everything was made through the Word...and the realization that God spoke things into being.  Using words.

It could be aruged that God did not speak mankind into being but actually fashioned  man from the dirt, but God did declare the intention to 'make man in our image'...and then created Adam from dirt that had been spoken into existence.  So words were still involved.

That gets really abstract, right from the beginning, but I love that it takes God out of the Michaelangelo- inspired concept of a muscular giant with a flowing beard.  God is the Word He spoke...that became flesh and lived among humanity.

While mankind was made in God's image...God is not an image of mankind.  It doesn't go both ways.  A reflection only shows a semblance of the original.

Status check

 Posted to Beer Lahai Roi by Lisa Laree

And I said September was a crazy month...

My Sweet Babboo had his turn with the shoulder surgery on Thursday last week; he needed a bit more repair than I did...more than the surgeon expected, actually, and he's in the immobilzer brace for 3 more weeks.  So I'm working from home in order to be around when needed, and to get him to his appointments without a crazy amout of back-and-forthing.  And I'm still working on my own rehab.  Um, yeah.  right. 

*insert sheepish face*

So, hence the kind of unplanned hiatus.  But we should be settling into some sort of routine here shortly and I'm hoping to get back on the Friday Faithful track; John is up and I want to give it good consideration.

So...just a wee check in.  We should be done travelling for the rest of the year; I have a LOT of catching up to do.  On lots of levels.  But I haven't forgotten...