Would God worship his own creation?! October 21, 2008
Posted by tonyrhodes in A hope and a future.Tags: Add new tag, Temptation
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For something to be a temptation it has to be based on something you really want, but in most cases it is an apparent shortcut to the object of your desire. Adam and Eve were tempted to take a shortcut to being like God, not realising they were already like him, but just needed to grow patiently in wisdom and knowledge, staying in their original intimate friendship with him. A baby has the potential to be an adult, hopefully with all the processes in place to grow into one, but it cannot yet function fully in conscious thought or in physical strength. Compare this with a being who is just like God, but does not yet know how to use his abilities. (The ‘Superman’ idea is a reflection of this. As a child he was super-powered, but had not yet learned how to use those powers to their full effect).
Adam and Eve allowed their desires to become more important to them than doing what God had said, and consequently a separation occurred which could only be bridged by Jesus.
Consider then, Jesus wants to do what he sees his Father doing; he would not do anything unless he saw the Father doing it. He wants to see the gulf between man and God gone for ever, and he knows he is on Earth for that purpose. He knows that everyone and everything will ultimately be under his feet. So, how was Jesus’ temptation tempting?
Imagine, he is praying for Father’s will to be done on the Earth. He so wants everyone to have that same relationship with God that he has. He knows that unless people look at him they will not see the Father. He knows that Father intends for mankind to be his bride. Temptation focuses on appearing to make the realisation of these desires quicker and easier. ‘Bow down and worship me and I will put all the kingdoms of the world under your feet’.
Same deception again. Eve and her husband were originally like God but she still listened to the whisper ‘You will be just like God if you eat the fruit of this tree’. Jesus was already destined to rule over everything, but the whisperer says ‘Have it now!’
How often do we pre-empt God’s will for our lives by taking a shortcut to intimacy, rather than marry in love and faithfulness. Or how often do we restlessly pursue what we think is God’s plan for us instead of resting in his strength to fulfil our destiny.
Turning stones into bread would not have been trusting Father to meet all his needs.
Jumping off the temple does not sound like what Jesus saw the Father doing. Not his style at all!
Wrong kind of worship.
Jesus wants to woo us, not control us. He wants to marry us, not enslave us.
Imagine if Jesus had bowed down to the deceiver.
Horrible!
God bowing down to his own creation?!
History would have been very different.
Billy Graham: as lucid as ever May 8, 2008
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I received this story by e-mail today.
Billy Graham is now 86 years old with Parkinson’s disease.
In January 2000, leaders in Charlotte, North Carolina,
invited their favorite son, Billy Graham, to a luncheon in
his honor.
Billy initially hesitated to accept the invitation because he
struggles with Parkinson’s disease. But the Charlotte
leaders said, “We don’t expect a major address. Just
come and let us honor you.”
So he agreed.
After wonderful things were said about him, Dr. Graham
stepped to the rostrum, looked at the crowd, and said, “I’m reminded
today of Albert Einstein, the great physicist who
this month has been honored by Time magazine as the
Man of the Century. Einstein was once traveling from
Princeton on a train when the conductor came down the
aisle, punching the tickets of every passenger. When he
came to Einstein, Einstein reached in his vest pocket. He
couldn’t find his ticket, so he reached in his trouser
pockets. It wasn’t there, so he looked in his briefcase but couldn’t
find it. Then he looked in the seat beside him.
He still couldn’t find it.
The conductor said, “Dr. Einstein, I know who you are. We all know
who you are. I’m sure you bought a ticket.
Don’t worry about it.”
Einstein nodded appreciatively. The conductor continued
down the aisle punching tickets. As he was ready to
move to the next car, he turned around and saw the great physicist
down on his hands and knees looking under his
seat for his ticket.
The conductor rushed back and said, “Dr. Einstein,
Dr. Einstein, don’t worry, I know who you are. No problem. You
don’t need a ticket.
I’m sure you bought one.”
Einstein looked at him and said, “Young man, I too, know who I am.
What I don’t know is where I’m going.’”
Having said that Billy Graham continued, “See the suit I’m wearing?
It’s a brand new suit. My wife, my children, and my grandchildren
are telling me I’ve gotten a little slovenly in
my old age. I used to be a bit more fastidious. So I went
out and bought a new suit for this luncheon and one more occasion.
You know what that occasion is? This is the suit in which
I’ll be buried. But when you hear I’m dead, I don’t want
you to immediately remember the suit I’m wearing. I want
you to remember this:
I not only know who I am. I also know where I’m going.”
The power of forgiveness April 29, 2008
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This is what happened to my friend Ali in Turkmenistan. Tragically, last year, his wife and young son were run over by a car and killed. Since that time he met with the driver of the car, and from the story Ali tells here, he has clearly forgiven the man; and not only that, but wonderful things have happened to the man’s family
“That day the relatives of Charimov Dovran, the young man who on October 5 drove into my wife and my little son and killed them. They asked what they could do for me and my daughter and I answered that the most and best they can do is to receive Jesus into their hearts.
On Friday January 4 by the grace of God I went to the settlement Shor-Gala which is situated near little town Gyok-depe to visit the Charimovs family. I preached there 1 Cor.13 and I said that only His love made our meeting possible. And after 4 hours of fellowship 15 of them received Jesus as their God and savior. We offered them New Testaments and Bibles for children in Turkmen language. We had enough for everybody. I am grateful to God that He allowed me to carry them the Good News despite those sad circumstances. Today we pray that Holy Spirit will give a special hunger for Word to those people and that this family will be a beginning of one more new church of His.
Praise the Lord! “
We were all very shocked to hear of the tragedy that happened to this lovely young family, and I am very glad that there is no bitterness in Ali’s heart, and he has found not only the power to forgive, but the power that forgiveness brings.
Seeing things that are as yet unseen March 17, 2008
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Towards the end of “The Song of Hiawatha” Longfellow writes:
“From the brow of Hiawatha
Gone was every trace of sorrow,
As the fog from off the water,
As the mist from off the meadow.
With a smile of joy and triumph,
With a look of exultation,
As of one who in a vision
Sees what is to be but is not,
Stood and waited Hiawatha.
I was delighted to find the prophetic dimension in this poem, illustrating beautifully the realisation of forthcoming events.
As the Korean pastor Yonggi Cho has described, faith is another dimension, and when you are functioning in that dimension, things at present unseen become a very real expectation, like a pregnancy in fact.
Hiawatha was a legendary saviour of his people, and the above lines relate to his expectation of visitors from the land of the Sunrise, as he stood at the edge of Lake Superior. The one who came, the Black-Robe chief, the Paleface, would speak to the tribe of Jesus:
“How he rose from where they laid him,
Walked again with his disciples,
And ascended into heaven.”
Jesus’ wisdom and teaching transcends time and tribe.
His words:
“I am the way, the truth and the life,”
are words for the whole universe, for eternity.
The fish with the coin in its mouth May 10, 2007
Posted by tonyrhodes in Not so earthbound.1 comment so far
There is a very interesting account in the life of Jesus, relating how he paid the two drachma temple tax. He told his disciple Peter to go to the lake and throw in a fishing line. Jesus said that the first fish he pulled out would have a four drachma coin in its mouth, enough to pay his tax, and Peter’s as well.
I wonder whether this was something Jesus saw beforehand as you might see a vision, a mental picture. Jesus always said that he did only what he saw his Father doing. I think he saw this fish in his spirit as soon as the need for the money arose. I believe his Father showed it to him, so he knew it was there in the lake, ready to be fished out.
God supplied the required money in a very unexpected way, and Jesus was so united in spirit with his Father that he saw the way his Father wanted to provide for him, and he had the faith to receive the gift. Jesus wants this to be our experience too.
As I have previously written, we need to see as God sees and think as he thinks. We will certainly have events like this happening to us if we look at situations with the eye of faith. We need eyes to see beyond what we are actually looking at, to see God’s source of supply, to find the coin in the fish’s mouth in any situation.
This will transform the way we regard the needs in our lives. Mary Audrey Raycroft, prayer counsellor and teacher at Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, has said that God gives to us according to our faith, not according to our needs. Why not ask God to show us what he is seeing when he looks at what we need? A whole new realm of possibilities will open up; ordinary events will be an opportunity for something much more exciting, even miraculous, to happen!
Find the coin!
DNA Code March 25, 2007
Posted by tonyrhodes in Not so earthbound.add a comment
DNA (with thanks to Accelrys)
www.accelrys.com/reference/gallery/ls_dna.html
Cameron Lawrence has raised the question of Christian scholarship in his latest post http://www.cameronlawrence.com
The desire for truth must outweigh personal attachment to established theories, that of evolution being a prime example.
Thankfully, some long perpetuated erroneous beliefs are now being questioned even by leading evolutionists.
I agree with the anthropologist and archaeologist Stephen Caesar, who has stated, in his article of 01/30/2007, entitled “Evolution and Empirical Evidence”, that Darwin’s theory relies on faith, not empirical observation. http://www.rae.org/index.html
Caesar shows the evidence for questioning major evolutionary transitions, quoting a review by Dr Kevin Padian of a book by evolutionist Dr. Henry Gee, entitled In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life, 1999. At last there is an admission that the evidence for human evolution from hominids is shaky to say the least.
My own belief is that because DNA is designed to be self-replicating, it must, of necessity, be able to reproduce itself very accurately, in order to maintain the integrity of the species it represents. The species will be adaptable, but will always be recognizable as distinct from any other species. Inherent in its construction is its ability to reproduce itself indefinitely, without risk of its genotype becoming significantly altered. DNA is a coded structure, and linguistic in nature.
John R. Baumgardner, geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, makes very interesting observations in the book In Six Days: why 50 scientists choose to believe in creation, ISBN 1 86436 443 2, ed. John F. Ashton, PhD:“From whence, then, does linguistic information originate? In our human experience we immediately connect the language we create and process with our minds. But what is the ultimate nature of the human mind? If something as real as linguistic information has existence independent of matter and energy, from causal considerations it is not unreasonable to suspect that an entity capable of originating linguistic information is also ultimately non-material in its essential nature.”
Baumgardner goes on to quote Prof. Murray Eden of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has said, “No currently existing formal language can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequence which expresses its sentences. Meaning is almost invariably destroyed. Any changes must be syntactically lawful ones. I would conjecture that what one might call “genetic grammicality” has a deterministic explanation and does not owe its stability to selection pressure acting on random variation.”
Let us be honest with ourselves about the massively complex structure that DNA is. Surely something which carries all the information required to replicate human intelligence from generation to generation must have required a far greater intelligence to create it originally.
For more about the linguistic nature of the DNA code see:
4 Months have now passed… March 19, 2007
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Welcome to the world, Timothy!
May you always know what the Lord is saying to you,
May you know and love the Father as he knows and loves you.
Moon Base December 12, 2006
Posted by tonyrhodes in Not so earthbound.3 comments
According to MSN Slate Magazine, Gregg Easterbrook believes that NASA cannot think of a good reason for establishing a lunar colony. http://www.slate.com/id/2155164 I accept much of what he says from a purely logical viewpoint, but perhaps the true reason goes deeper than logic. When people asked the question “Why should anyone want to climb Everest”, the answer that Mallory gave demonstrated an essential quality of the human spirit.
George Leigh Mallory – Why climbing?
“The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest ?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is no use’. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It’s no use.
So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.”
– George Leigh Mallory, 1922
Surely the question of the need to explore the moon has already been answered by Mallory:
“Because it’s there!”
circumhorizon arc October 29, 2006
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circumhorizon arcOriginally uploaded by teleject.
A superb example of this incredible phenomenon.
Thanks to the original photographer for recording it.
4 Months to go October 28, 2006
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To quote King David:
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made,
I know that full well.
from Psalm 139
