Sara Groves: Add to the Beauty (*****)
Hebrews 13:15 Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name.
True worship costs us something. And we shouldn’t try to get out of it for the lowest possible cost. It’s not like we are trying to find a deal on worship. We should run to God to offer Him the sacrifices and offerings that are due Him.
It is a sacrifice of our will and our bodies to worship the LORD. But He is so worthy to be praised. He has done so much for you. That we should give unto the LORD every waking moment and live them out as worship to Him and for His glory.
And when we gather together in the assembly of the saints, we should bring a sacrifice of praise and let our hearts overrun in glorious adoration and praise for our God who has loved us and provided for our every need.
By Charles B. Nestor II
One day there were Jews seeking to kill Jesus because he supposedly violated the Sabbath. Jesus answered them, "You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me."(John 5:39) The New Living Translation reads this way: "You search the Scriptures because you believe they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to Me!"
Everything in the word of God is about Jesus. Hermenuetics is the art and science of Biblical interpretation. A quick lesson in hermenuetics is this: Look for Jesus! John Calvin, the reformer, put it this way, "We ought to read the Scriptures with the express design of finding Christ in them."
From: Who Is Jesus? The Central Issue of Time and Space
We find this to be true in direct and subtle ways. One of those places that we see the message of Christ is in the genealogy of Noah found in Genesis 5. When we look at the meaning of each man's name in the genealogy and read it in English, we discover that God has embedded the gospel of Jesus Christ in Noah's genealogy. Here it is:
The Genealogy of Noah:
| Hebrew | English |
| Adam | Man |
| Seth | Appointed |
| Enosh | Mortal |
| Kenan | Sorrow; |
| Mahalalel | The Blessed God |
| Jared | Shall come down |
| Enoch | Teaching |
| Methuselah | His death shall bring |
| Lamech | The Despairing |
| Noah | Rest, or comfort. |
So here is how the genealogy of Noah reads in English with the meaning of the each man's name:
Man (is) appointed mortal sorrow; (but) the Blessed God shall come down teaching (that) His death shall bring (the) despairing rest.
This is a powerful example of the truth of the gospel, the incredible architecture of the Bible and the reality of Jesus Christ!
At a recent
Faith and Action briefing on Capitol Hill, David New an Attorney in Washington,
gave a provocative presentation of the legal basis of the Christian Foundation
of the United States of America.
It left my mind whirling with the implications.
While most Christian believers in America would assert an historical account of America’s Christian heritage and founding, they would not allege a legal case for it. What is this legal case? If there is a strong legal case, there must be evidence. What is this evidence?
The 1783 Treaty of Paris between the United States of America and Great Britain is exhibit A. You history buffs will remember that the Treaty of Paris is the legal document that formally ended the Revolutionary War, but it also became what is the deed of the land and territorial rights of the original thirteen colonies.
The legally binding Treaty of Paris begins with the following Preface:
In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity.
The opening
of the actual treaty communicates that the King of Britains’ and the United
States’ hearts had been disposed by this God to do His pleasing will. The treaty goes on to relinquish all
claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the thirteen
colonies and acknowledges these colonies to be free states. There was no money paid for the land. These rights were transferred because
it pleased God to dispose the hearts of the respective parties to enter this
agreement. This document, signed
and ratified by Britain and the U.S. deeded the land to the United States of
America by and in the name of the Holy Trinity.
The Holy Trinity is the Christian God, the one, true and living God. So the land of the United States was given to her by God, the Christian God. Let that one sink in for a minute.
While I was
listening to the conclusion of Mr. New’s presentation, my mind was racing with
the implications of such a proposition.
If Almighty God gave the land of the United States in a land grant, what
are the ramifications?
Since it is legally documented that the land of the U.S. has been granted by God and the evidence of this grant is now on display at the National Archives in Washington D.C. for all to see, we have to understand that with this land grant by God come all of the responsibilities that go along with ruling over land that has been given by God.
God gave
land to the people of Israel back in the book of Joshua. If you look in the final chapters of
the book of Numbers, God gives Israel precepts and procedures for properly
ruling over this land. In the
final verses of Numbers 35, a chapter that deals with the creation of cities of
refuge to deal with people who were guilty of manslaughter, God gives a statute
on dealing with the person who is guilty of pre-meditated murder.
A person guilty of pre-meditated murder was to be put to death. And this was to be done according to the law of the witness, where the witness of 2 or 3 would establish guilt. The question is why would God deal so decisively and irrevocably with a murderer? The answer is found in Numbers 35:34. God says, “Therefore do not defile the land which you inhabit, in the midst of which I dwell.” NKJV
In context, you see the principle that God is teaching Israel. The land can become defiled. It can be come polluted. In fact, at the time Israel received this binding procedure, the land was polluted and defiled from the practices of the Canaanites. The Canaanites who lived in the land were displaced by God’s decree because they had defiled the land. The question then is how can land be defiled or polluted?
The spilling of blood by pre-meditated murder defiles the land (Numbers 35:33). The crime of murder is not only an offense against the sanctity of life; it is a pollutant to the Lord’s land. Abel’s blood cried out from the ground in Genesis 4.
Genesis 4:10
Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?”
He
said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”
10
And He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out
to Me from the ground.
The Canaanites had polluted the land with their religious practice of sacrificing their infant children by burnt offering as they placed them on the scalding arms of their brazen god Molech. And so the land had to be cleansed. God cleansed it through His command to Israel to wipe out the Canaanites. This point is often missed by atheists who try to point out that the God of the Old Testament is a malevolent God and therefore shouldn’t be believed in much less followed. God’s decree to Israel was not malevolent but righteous judgment to cleanse His land.
What are the implications for the United States of America? Presently, according to the Center for Disease Control, we murder by pre-meditation over 800,000 people a year by abortion. Since Roe v. Wade was decided we have killed over 49 million people by abortion. Needless to say, blood has been spilt in such huge quantities that it is safe to say that the land has been polluted and defiled.
With all the attention we rightly give to the issue of ecology and pollution in our day, there is an act of pollution that goes far beyond the trashing of rivers, the killing of lakes, the killing of forests, and the spilling of oil in the oceans; it is the abuse of persons. The worst abuse of all is wrongful death. God will not draw near a land where blood is the polluting agent. Source Unknown
What can we do about this? There are a few things we can do. The first is that we can repent as a nation and ask God’s forgiveness. The second is that we can pray that God will change the hearts of those who stand in the way of fixing this pollution of the land. And thirdly, we can prayerfully vote for men and women who will not only acknowledge the issue with their lips but do something about it in their actions by way of legislation and the appointment of judges who understand the spiritual, legal and territorial ramifications of this issue.
The above picture is a picture of the constellation Pleiades. It is a beautiful constellation of stars. And it's mentioned in the Bible. The book of Job may be in the middle of the Old Testament, but most scholars believe that it was the first book of the Old Testament that was authored. While Genesis may describe events chronologically earlier than Job, the book of Job was written first. Scholars date the writing of the book of Job to contemporary with the Patriarchal period, so probably 1600-1900 years before Christ.
In Job 38, God has monologue with Job, where God asks Job a series of question about the founding of the universe and lays out his omnipotence and his sovereignty. In verse 31, God gives us some information about the constellations Pleiades and Orion. He asks Job if he has the power to bind the cluster of Pleiades or loose the belt of Orion.
I submit the following verse as a piece of evidence of the Divine inspiration of Scripture.
Job 38:31
"Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades, Or loose the belt of Orion."
They have long been known to be a physically related group of stars rather than any chance alignment. The Reverend John Michell calculated in 1767 that the probability of a chance alignment of so many bright stars was only 1 in 500,000, and so correctly surmised that the Pleiades as well as Orion must be physically related. (An Inquiry into the probable Parallax, and Magnitude, of the Fixed Stars, from the Quantity of Light which they afford us, and the particular Circumstances of their Situation, Philosophical Transactions, v. 57, p. 234-264)
So all the way back before the time of Moses, Job was told by God and it was recorded that the star clusters of the Pleiades and Orion are arranged in a gravitational relationship, and this information was given some 3500 years before scientists discovered it to be true.
What is truth? Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor who ordered Christ to be crucified, asked this question. In a sense, we all have. We have all asked, wondered and pondered the question. And Jesus has given us an answer. In fact, the answer to the question is Him. It’s Jesus. He is the truth. The irony of Pontius Pilate’s question was this. He asks the question, what is truth?, with truth standing right in front of him.
Jesus in John 14:6 said, "I am the truth". Well, what exactly was Jesus saying when he made this statement? What exactly did He mean? The key is in the word for truth in John 14:6. The word here for truth is the Greek word aletheia. It means: a) what is true in any matter under consideration 1) truly, in truth, according to truth 2) of a truth, in reality, in fact, certainly. It carries the idea of what is ultimately real, in reality. You can look for truth in philosophy, in science, in these places, but truth is ultimately found in the person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the reality, the truth that you and I need to embrace. He is ultimate reality, and we need to be standing on that solid ground of truth. In reality, Jesus is what is ultimately really solid. We look at things in this physical world as being the things that are solid. These are the things that we can believe in and rely on. When the fact of the matter is that Jesus is the only solid substance and solid reality.
Let me demonstrate this for you.
If I was standing on a rock and I asked you, is this rock solid? If you said yes and I said no, I would be 10 to the 15 times more accurate. If you look at an atom and the distance relationship between the protons and the electrons, you take the size of the proton and the size of the electrons and account for space you come up with a factor of 1 part in 10 to the 15 which is a very large number. The amount of empty space in an atom. To demonstrate, let me show you some pictures that I took. If the proton of our atom was the tennis ball in the picture above, the electrons would be spinning around it beyond the edges of the football field, beyond the goal posts.
And so this rock that I'm standing on, most
of this rock is empty. It feels
solid because of the electrical simulation between atoms that sense each others
nearness. But it’s mostly empty by
a factor of 1 part in 10 to the 15. If I say there is nothing here, I’m 10 to the 15 closer to
reality.
Jesus taught there two kinds of people, the wise and the foolish. The foolish man builds his life on that which seems to be real and solid to him. The wise man builds his life on the rock of Christ Jesus who is in and of himself ultimate reality and truth.
We
live in two
physical spheres of existence both of which we cannot escape and both of which
are fallen. First, we live in this
physical universe, this world. And God created the universe and the world,
and it has boundaries. People who
wanted the universe to be here just naturally, hypothesized that the universe
must be infinite. And what we have
discovered is that the universe is not inifinite. The universe is
expanding by what scientist call the stretch factor which is 10 to the 12. And this is based on what’s called
quark confinement where matter freezes out energy. The point is that there is a boundary to the universe on a
macro level.
Well what about the micro level?
The theory was that if you took a piece of string and cut it in half and you took that half and cut it in half, you would think that we could keep doing that for ever. The theory of infinity is that no matter what you have left, you could always cut it in half. It turns out, that’s not true. When you get to 10 to the negative 35 centimeters it loses locality. It’s suddenly everywhere at once. It is what physicists call non-locality. And so you have limits at the atomic level. The whole universe is made up of indivisible units or digits. These units are called quanta. This is the basis of quantum physics. These quanta or Planck units are named after German physicist Max Planck and are sometimes referred to by physicists humorously as God’s units. The point is this: the universe has limits on a macro level and a micro level.
And then on top of that we have the limits of our physical bodies. And so you have these boundaries, these spaces of existence and God has subjected both of them to the bondage of decay. Romans 8:18-30 outlines this for us. The creation and our bodies groan for the redemption from the Lord, and so the apostle Paul tells us that the Spirit helps us in our weakness.
Today we may be living our Spiritual life in Christ in a material universe and body made of flesh that have been subjected to the bondage of decay, but we have access to a Helper that is beyond our universe and yet as Jesus said, "He dwells with you and will be in you." (vs. 17 of John 14)
I do believe in the resurrection of the dead, and so my blog at charlesnestor.com is rising from the ash heap to live once again. It has been so long, but I'm feeling good and ready to contribute to the blogosphere in hopefully a thought provoking, positive way. I'm not going to be as reserved as maybe I was before. I'm going to let things fly. And so here we go.
I took my boys and my niece and nephew out to the Tampa Bay Bucs Training Camp at Disney yesterday. We had a great time. R.T. from the church was with us. We were able to see a lot of the players. The kids got a few autographs and this picture with Ike Hilliard.
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