Gospel

How would Nietzsche have evaluated the universalism of Jesus, without God on the cross?  Nietzsche devotees’, write a book.

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca

 

Problem

The problem, our problem: if this world was created by the Wisdom of God (as the Old Testament affirms), why is this our world such a poor sort of world?  (C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, p.107)

If you were building your forever house, you or I would hire the best people we could afford to design and build our dream home, would we not?  Why did a good God, who has unimaginable resources, not take similar care when putting this world into play amongst the galaxies?  Our God designed home on earth is irrevocably diseased, a place where death is king. 

C. H. Dodd tells us that this was one of the predominate questions being asked a few centuries after the resurrection of Jesus.  That atmosphere was charged with a multiplicity of wild schemes or theologies that sought out a palatable answer.  In 325 A.D., the First Church Council of Nicaea imposed an answer upon all of us, the disease is not God’s fault, Adam did it!  Adam unleased an evil influence upon this world by eating an apple from the no, no tree in the Garden of Eden.

To this very day, that is where our biblical thinking has remained.  What if, Adam was not a historical figure and the garden was not an actual physical place on earth?  What if, both Adam and the Garden are mythological languages spoken to convey a humanly devised theological truth?   What if God is at fault, so to speak?  Could it be that God intended our world to be what it is, a hell hole?

Maybe, the chaos of this world is allowed and utilized by God to convince us of the error of our arrogant selfish human ways.  As we are forced into chaos, we become acutely aware of our desperate situation and this prepares us to one day bask in the eternal safety or salvation that God has provided for all humankind.  This is an eternity appreciation world, for all the people to appreciate eternity, all the people must experience the aloneness of our chaotic world.

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Change

 Karen and I were enthusiastic Frank Sinatra fans.  Frank just stood in front of his sold-out audiences and sang to us, no freaky costumes, no fireworks or loud drummers.  This was a time in the music world when the words actually mattered. One of his catchy tunes has been buzzing in ears incessantly for a week, maybe, if I write it down the tune will cease.   

“Love and Marriage, Love and Marriage

  Go together like a horse and carriage

  This I tell you brother

  You can’t have one without the other.”

The culture of the young has radically changed in the last fifty years as has our popular music.  Try as we might to separate love and marriage in this our new culture, love soon dissipates and we all are the losers. We’ll dispense with the other verses, needless to say, the horse and carriage is a very utilitarian arrangement, it is all about sharing the load.  Feed and shelter the horse and the team will get us to our intended destination.  Love and marriage should be a utilitarian partnership of the same sort where two different human beings come together to share life’s loads and blessings, come what may.      

Faith in God and the resulting future hope is the only indispensable load sharing arrangement in this world.  Some of us have light loads and others of us know the burden of a heavy load but just around the next bend, we may face another or different burden.  There is no justice or equity in this world of blessings and curses.  At times it feels like the luck of the draw. The people of biblical times lived at ground zero of vulnerability to the consequences of both the blessings and the curses of life. 

Much has changed in the last 2000 years, the arrogant have called this change progress, yet faith in God and the resulting hope in God remains the same, our only ultimate future.

G Goslaw

Landers, Ca    

 

 

 

Update

Batman Jr. is back in the California Pepper on her favorite perch.  Big news, this morning, she has a friend of the same size just a spreading branch away.  This friend looks me in the eye as if to say, get lost!  No turkey vultures.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA.

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Words

 I’m not dead yet.  There is no greater kick in life than what appears to be a good God kick.  No drug, sex, money, power or place can compare with the dawning of understanding from without upon we disabled humans.  My thing is the Bible, not what people say about the Bible but what it wants to tell us, as garbled as that may be or seem.  I am blessed to have gotten a kick this week at age 77, 78 next month.  Ready or not, I shall try to share it.

The most perplexing passage of scripture that has bugged me and everyone else all these years is Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount. Not the good stuff but those hard seemingly impossible words like “be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew5:48).  What do we do with that?  We live on the ground floor of the Empire State Building and perfection resides at the very top with the spire. I know my life is like that, so what are we to make of this Jesus command?

Through the years, I’ve done my homework, checked out the commentaries and what the theologians say about the entire Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 6 &7.  Some say, Jesus really didn’t mean ethical performance perfect, possibly a perfection of intent.  Some deny the command status altogether, the Jesus call to perfection was a kind of intellectual game, a what if of sorts.  Some say that Jesus is changing the target of his command to be perfect, his words were spoken to embarrass the prideful, status seeking religious leaders as well as the rule making Pharisees.  Surely, perfection was even beyond their reach? The decision of most preachers and teachers, however, is to just avoid going there, stay on the good stuff, that perfection talk is embarrassing.

A few preachers and teachers rightly question the word perfect as a proper translation of the Greek word telios in ancient Greek translation of the original Hebrew Text.  The Greek dictionary tells us that telios is an ending or completion.  All the modern English translations (KJV, NIV, etc.), however, translate telios as “perfect”, which to most of us means an ethical perfection.  Knowing our portent for looking good, we can understand why the English translators chose this word.  To my knowledge, limited as it is, another English word that would better convey what Jesus was trying to tell us, has not been forthcoming or deemed bulletproof. 

The Goslaw translation of Jesus’s command in Matthew 5:48 is the following, “Be ye eternal as your heavenly Father is eternal”.  Get it?  Everything begins and ends in the eternal, you and I are completed in the eternal, the eternal should rule our days until that day when we join the chorus in the sky.  This was to me the message that Jesus was announcing to everyone gathered together on the Galilean hillside. The eternal priorities, those of extreme generosity, extreme forgiveness and extreme optimism, should rule our days.

Sorry, we still have to check some boxes. Each of us has to ask ourselves, how do our lives measure up to the eternal standard?  Are our lives about chasing the immediate seemingly necessary things or are we living with one foot in eternity.  You and I are uncomfortable again.  What would that look like, you ask?  Check out the picture that Jesus paints as he speaks in the Sermon on the Mount.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA 

      

 

 

 

Curses

 Batman Jr. has been a constant resident of the big California Pepper tree for about a year.  Every morning I take a peek up there to check for her presence.  I have decided that he is a she and to me she is a friend.  This morning two turkey vultures were sharing the same tree but my presence scared them into noisy flight. 

It is my prayer that Batman Jr. is OK!  Curses on the vultures.  So goes the natural world of animals and Great horned owls. Stay tuned.

G. Goslaw 

Evil

 Our world was designed by God to be an eternity appreciation environment for all of humanity.  Some of us are quick studies, most of us are not.  

The Christian religion says heaven is for those who fit our expectations but hell is for the rest of you.  

There is no other greater evil in this world.

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca

 

Council of Nicaea

The following is the faith statement from the First Church Council of Nicaea, 325 years after Jesus rose from the grave.  The believing world was looking for a definition of the Jesus event.  Who was this man Jesus, man or God?  This was a disagreement between spiritual leaders yet the men and women on the street had opinions so strong that the mobs resorted to violence and murder of every description.   

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.  We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.”

The conclusion of the Council was that Jesus was born of God not man.  One might ask, does God have a penis?  No disrespect is intended but the words themselves lead us to ask this question.  Our world 1800 years ago believed in divine mythological characters running around doing all kinds of crazy stuff, making God a family affair would have been easily accepted.  It was not.

What did the biblical writers mean by sonship, did they mean that Jesus was a co-equal with God or an emissary with a message from God?  Was the resurrection of Jesus a testimony to his Godly character or a testimony to the Godly approval of his message?  The difference may seem minute but this Council decided the theological foundation of the Christian faith.  Was the decision of the Council righteous?  Does the typical Christian care one way or the other?  Go ahead, goggle the Council of Nicaea or read a book or two, there out there.  Judge for yourself.

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca  

 

 

Jig

Thank you House Republican Magnificent Twenty!  The jig was almost up, the Washington money swamp almost buried the America we love and the country we have held in respect despite its faults.  People and countries are not perfect, we all need room to grow.  The Obama American political transformation, is not growth, it is a mutual self-destruction motif that amounts to national suicide. We might as well have retreated to the jungles of Guyana.

The twenty of you stood strong in spite of the trashing.  You won an important battle with the swamp of corrupt Democrats and Republicans, the mainstream media, Fox News and Sean Hannity.  Please, stay strong for we the people.

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA  

 

Relief

A heart felt certainty about our eternal, forever future, is not necessarily a religion.

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca

 

Obscene

Boys and girls, get real, we all will die one day.  At any moment, any of us, young, old, rich or poor, could fall over backwards from a major event like the NFL football player immortalized on Monday night.  The national pathos is obscene.  What ever happened to the national ethic, “the show must go on?” Rather than shutting down the game, the players should have maned up and played the game in honor of their fallen comrade.

When any of us engages in risky behavior, such as being human, there are resulting consequences.  We don’t know the cause of this event and we need not know but why all the fuss?  Why is the national reaction so profound?  One hundred thousand Americans overdose and die every year on drugs coming across our open border to the south, not a peep from anyone, no tears and no accountability. 

What kind of people are we?

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA

Twenty three

Welcome to 2023.  This is a new year that has brought a new beginning to us all, a beginning that is full of new expectations, whether we deserve this newness or not.  My life in retirement is simple, my house, my dogs, my trees and my blog.  For the last fourteen years I have shared some of my hard-fought understandings of the Bible and American politics on my blog, ggoslaw.blogspot.com. 

Blogging has been a learning experience.  I am not an accomplished political writer nor a creditable biblical theologian, no degrees and no allies to quote.  I am a reprobate, a profound sinner who is just trying to separate fact from fiction.  My most important discovery while learning some of the history of both politics and religion is that both are awash is seemingly never-ending confusion dumped on us by those who make groundless assumptions.  Most, if not all, historical attempts to bring clarity just seem to further muddy the water.  The assumptions are the real target.

Both the Bible and in American politics, if you don’t know your history, you are doomed to repeat the egregious errors of the past.  Generally, we the people are ignorant of both our factual American history and the history of the Christian Church.  America is supposed to the land of the free.  Are we free?  Maybe we are, maybe not.  The Church is supposed to be biblically based.  Maybe it is, maybe not.  We the people just tend to swallow whatever is fed to us.  Because we don't know our history, we do not have the facts to make a just judgement and confusion reigns.

This is not a slam on the intellectual prowess of the people.  There was a time in my life when the swallowing was the only viable option, after all, there are jobs to perform, finances to manage and families to raise, who has the time?  Who has the time to ask questions?  I am extremely grateful that now God has given me the time to ask questions because questions are a delight.

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA