Courage

Dear Suzanne Holbrook,

Thank you so much for sharing your Facebook post and your concern about the spiritual condition of our country.  These are definitely hard times and these hard times have only begun, ouch!  Our country and our present emergency demands that we lay people, such as yourself, speak up and show up to confront the Godless priorities of the radical, socialist political base of the new Democrat Party.  This is the radical left that has put America in chains and bondage under our largely absent president Joe Biden.

No one can question that you deeply believe what you believe. This is clear because you are courageous enough to share what you believe with the rest of us and put it out there.  Maybe, you are brave enough to listen.  The end of our suffering may be a Revelation type scenario but don’t get your hopes up, that scenario is largely fodder for the TV preachers.  It is a Sunday sedative and has been around for over 2000 years.  These prophets say, God is coming to pluck we righteous folk away from our suffering and then damn, for all eternity, the rest of humanity in judgment.  Isn’t this spiritually sensitive?  Enough said.

Please allow me to disagree with you about St. Mathew 10.  In this chapter Jesus is charging his disciples to be mini messengers as he has been a messenger of God.  Jesus has been their teacher and leader and it is their time for the disciples to share with the people.  Pivotal to understanding this chapter and the charge to the disciples is to understand the target. 

My Bible is a red-letter edition, these are the words of Jesus in verse 5, “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any of the towns of the Samaritans.  Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel”.  Jesus was sending out his disciples to challenge the spiritual status quo, the corrupt religion of Israel that was comfortable leaving the Gentile and Samaritan seekers, also called sinners, beyond the grace of God. These religious folk were also the target of John the Baptist.

Allow me to share my way of understanding the Bible.  Verses 32 & 33 are a good example.   Based on these Bible words, are my assumptions necessary?  Or are my assumptions just convenient?  We all fall into the trap of dumping our favorite assumptions into scripture at the slightest opening.  I try to work hard at not dumping. 

In these verses, is Jesus claiming an equality with God based on his sonship?  The verses in question read in the TNIV, “Whomever publicly acknowledges me I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven.  But whomever publicly disowns me I will disown before my Father in heaven.”  Father is not capitalized in the Greek and what does before the Father tell us?  Is Jesus claiming equality with God as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity of God demands?  You are welcome to this assumption but is it necessary from these words?  I think not.

What if these words mean that God is spiritually the father of us all and the father of Jesus.  This is the spirituality Jesus found in the desert.  Jesus came out of the desert to tell us all about the love of the father.  His father and our father is angered with the religious status quo which withholds the love of the father from those who fail to think, look and live according to our authorized human version.

The Bible says that we are all sinners, do we take this plain biblical truth seriously?

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA         

Fraud

One of the most abused passages of the Bible is Genesis 1: 27. “So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (TNIV) The believer in God wants to exaggerate the specialness of our human condition and the nonbeliever makes fun of anyone who claims to look like God. Both understandings of this passage are fraudulent.  What does the writer of Genesis mean by “the image of God”?

To begin with (a pun and a lousy attempt at humor), these words were originally given to us in the Hebrew language and later translated into Greek and then into English.  In Hebrew the words are “tzelem Elohim”.  The root meaning of this phrase is the shadow of God.  Answering my own question, the writer means that we human beings were created with a shadowing of God.  A shadow is not reality but a shadow gives some indicators about reality.  We humans were created, according to the writer of Genesis, with the potential to be spiritual beings or said in another way, created with a predisposition to make a spiritual connection with God.

This much is a mouthful but it is all that the writer is saying.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA   

 

 

Blessed

The best part of my days are the early morning hours, on my front porch with my Dobermans, my cigar and watching the sun come up over Goat Mountain.  How or why do I deserve this, I know not!  I am indeed most blessed.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca

Compass

American peoples, what’s it going to take for you to grow a backbone?  Politics is a blood sport; our politicians play the game.  The need to kill our enemies of whatever persuasion is who we are, it is in our DNA.  Get a grip, we must understand who we are in this world.  The sad reality is that there are those of us who are ready at all times to pull the trigger for power, while most of us stand aside and watch.  Again, what’s it going to take America? 

We have graduated from killing over there for just, or seemingly just, causes to eating our own.  We sit quietly in our separate hen nest’s, putting food on the table, paying the mortgage, playing the stock market and ignoring the carnage going on around us.  Women and men have been given the permission to kill new life in the ladies’ wombs, millions of new Americans have been sacrificed on the altar of expediency since Row verse Wade.  Oh well, what’s another inconvenient life?

Fast forward to 2019, the youngest Americans, they are expendable, so too are we old folks as we are being killed by the China virus and America just watches. Get a grip, America, are you asleep or dead?  As Freud says, we all have an “id”, a moral compass that is culturally derived. As with the thinking of Nietzsche, Freud was right and Freud was wrong. The moral compass is not only culturally derived, it was also the gift of God.

All of America, believers and nonbelievers, we all must come alive from the dead to embrace our moral compass.  This is an emergency! 

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

   

People

Popularity is not the test of what is righteous or true.  Despite all the reporting on the chaos on the southern border from the conservative media, a recent Fox News poll reported that only 8% of Americans are concerned about this law breaking.  Go figure!  There was a time when the popular opinion of we earthlings was that the world was flat.  Adolf Hitler became a popular tyrant in Germany.  The popular opinion in some quarters is that our world will destroy itself by burning fossil fuels.  In all these cases or opinions, the people have been or are wrong.  How come?

The ugly truth is that the people have to be lead or herded.  The bait on the hook of leadership is, as it has always been, the promise.  The leader says to the people, do this or do that, give up a little bit of freedom, and we will give you thus and so, whatever is supposedly most needed at the moment.  To make an obviously unwise choice digestible by the people, chaos on the streets is mandatory.  The uncertainty of the circumstance will sway the people to give up their own self-interest because the people are routinely wrong and easily bullied.  Some would say that the people are generally cowards.

One question, is this not what’s happening in real time in America?

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

 

 

 

Evolution

Dr. Charles Stanley, please allow one question to follow your many words this Sunday morning, May 7.  Do you believe that everything on this earth is at all times changing?  If your answer is no, you have a problem.  If your answer is yes, you then believe in evolution.  Evolution says nothing about what one philosopher called the First Cause or popularly God.  Evolution is only a process without a beginning.  Everyone who believes that evolution has a beginning answer, such as a grand accident, is misinformed or ignorant.

The Bible says in Genesis Chapter 2:7 that God formed man from the dust of the earth, from the dirt or the mud.  This beginning is affirmed in the Books of Job, Psalms, and Isaiah.  We are of the dust of the earth and the will of God, according to the Bible.  Please keep your beliefs up with science and the words of Scripture.  Thank you.

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA

Sin?

Religion is the preoccupation with everyone else’s sin, to avoid one’s own supposed sinful culpability.

G.Goslaw

Landers, Ca

 

Hope

 Job 14:1 thru 6  (TNIV)   Job, the first existentialist philosopher, complaining to God.

“Mortals, born of women, are of few days and full of trouble.

  They spring up like flowers and wither away;

  like fleeting shadows, they do not endure.

  Do you fix your eyes on such as these?

  Will you bring them before you for judgement?

  Who can bring what is pure from the impure?  No one!

  The days of mortals are determined;

  You have decreed the number of months

  and set limits they cannot exceed.

  so look away from us and leave us alone,

  till we have put in our time like hired laborers.

If you think this is depressing, read Chapter 7!  Amidst all the negativity, Job still affirms in Chapter 13: 15, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.”  (TNIV)  

God took everything that Job loved from him, wealth, relationships and like minded believers who then became critics and Job was pissed at God bigtime.  As one reads the existential writers and thinkers of our time, one can feel the same anger, the sense of injustice that God, if there is a God, could dump us in this hellish world.  It makes no sense.  Then this God threatens us with eternal damnation for being who we are, designed by God from the dirt (Genesis 2 : 7).  Some God, right? 

I respect the Job kind of spirituality.  The TNIV translation uses the word hope instead of "trust" as in the KJV.  Trust or faith can easily be intellectualized and the entire book of Job screams at us to say, just thinking is not enough.  God wants a wholistic spirituality with us, hope is a better choice of words because hope comes from the gut, not just the head.

The best part of this verse is, "I will surely defend my ways to his (God) face". One way of describing eternity is that eternity is the only place or condition with ultimate freedom and the God given safety in which that freedom can be expressed.  Job wanted an argument with God, what a man!  What a God! 

G.Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

 

 

Missing

 Exodus 12:40-42.

Now the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years.  At the end of the 430 years, to the vary day, all of the Lord’s divisions left Egypt.  Because the Lord kept vigil that night to bring them out of Egypt, on this night all the Israelites are to keep vigil to honor the Lord for generations to come.  TNIV

Some of us do not feel the need to minimize the biblical record as given to us in Exodus.  The people were in Egypt 430 years.  However, their conditions while in captivity leaves some room for flexibility.  Whether there were 430 years of Charlton Heston slouching around in the mud mixing brick mortar for the pyramids or at times a more comfortable existence as the herds of livestock leaving Egypt would indicate.  In any event, these were desperate times for the people under Egyptian domination.  At all times and under every circumstance, freedom was not to be had and the promise of a home of their own seemed dashed.

The people should celebrate the freedom that God eventually provided when God sent his messenger to command Pharaoh to "let my people go"!  That was the freedom march of all time.  But what of the people that did not live to see the miraculous exodus?  At least four to ten generations of peoples died in Egypt. Why did God wait 430 years?  Did the people suddenly become righteous enough for God to act?   There is no biblical record of such a revival happening.  The exodus timing was all God’s doing.  Understanding this, what do the missing generations have to teach us about God?

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA