Dated

Could suffering be the God appointed, redemptive thing?

William Dembski, Christian Theology, p. 48. Quoted by William Hasker, The Triumph of God over Evil, 2008, p. 108.

“I frankly doubt that a static, dull, monotonously perfect world is what God had in mind in creating our world. The world that God originally had in mind is the world we in fact inhabit, a messy world filled with tragedy, comedy, romance, and adventure. There never was any other world.”

There is no other choice nor has there ever been another choice. There was no Garden of Eden. Suffering is normal. Therefore our world is good “as is”, suffering is the plan. Religion will tell you otherwise, they say that, somehow, suffering is always your fault. Religion is always dated.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

  

Heaven

What is heaven you ask? Heaven is the land of no regrets and no surprises. Heaven is the bucket list of every experience of every human that has ever seen the face of this our earth. Heaven is that much multiplied a trillion times. Put that on the internet, “oh ye of little faith”! Amen!

So why wait?  God delays the inevitable reality of heaven for us because you and I, every one of us, has an ever so small contribution (testimony) to make in our short time in this our world. Every contribution is a possible door to heavenly things to be experienced by others in this world. There is a method to God's madness. The goal is to change us, all of us, in this world and not to bring heaven to earth. Ours earth shall remain an "as is" world that fits the purposes of God. Tarry on my brother.  

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca. 

Rabbit Hole

Things were looking bleak. Almost all of my days seemed wasted and wondering, in and out, bobbing and weaving through life without a clear focus. The future was of little concern, tomorrow would take care of tomorrow. Well, not exactly, maybe that summary is a bit skewed or a gross oversimplification. True confession, maybe I was just scared. No maybe’s about it, I was scared but didn’t want anybody to know it, least of all me. Maybe, that is how most of us live our lives.

Then one day in 2012, at age 67, I bought a house. Focus had arrived. No longer was the world and my place in it an overwhelming concern. No longer was the weight of the world seemingly on my shoulders. There was only one concern, all by myself, it was me and my house against the world, nothing else mattered. Why then or why now? Why a house? Who knows? My wife Karen used to say in times like these, no one knows the answer but “the stars and their courses”. There is a reason for everything but some things will ever be a mystery.

Therein lies our frustration. Life is so unpredictable and confusing, so much so that the life that you and I have been given is simply gory. We are told by some voices that the where or when of our being deposited into this world matters little but our experience tells us that most times it matters a whole lot. The contradiction is grotesque. In some worlds there are no good choices.

Sooner or later we have to engage the facts of life, life is about dying. Choosing about how we should live is about choosing how we shall die. That big picture is the search for meaning that has always been and ever will be a life and death issue. We shall discover meaning in this life when we stare down the rabbit hole of death, regardless of our history, and then look upward. All the other stuff about living is mere window dressing.  

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca. 

 

Hallelujah

God allows gross evil in our world because God wants us to experience freedom. Perfect freedom not perfect goodness, is who God is. Knowing or experiencing freedom means that we have to experience, first, the lack of freedom, better called evil. Thus we have to experience wars, the Holocaust or the killing of Charlie Kirk. Evil is an unavoidable consequence resulting from a world that is lacking a freedom priority. Is the search for freedom an adequate justification for evil? 

One would think not. However, all earthly evil, when properly understood and experienced, gives us, at best, only a shallow dive into true freedom. In this world the race is on requiring a shallow racing dive that just skims the surface of freedom. We have only a few undetermined years to run our race. 

The deep dive into freedom and what we understand to be God, that Perfect Freedom, one day we shall all experience as the deep dive. 

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

 

Hope

Hope is a bus ticket. Hope is God given permission to travel on. Hope is a window seat. Hope is protesting the pain. Hope is the trip home.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Losers

Believers of every flavor have at least one thing in common, "this world is not our home". We, all of us, the good, the bad and the ugly, including the sexually challenged, are born to be citizens of another better world.  

There are those Christian ideologues (useful idiots) who want to turn the assassination of Charlie Kirk into an evangelical revival meeting. All God believers do not look to such an atmosphere to be close to God. The crazed Godless are the displaced persons of this world, they are dangerous and the unprovoked enemy of all God believers, not just Christians. Christianity has historically and falsely claimed or assumed that the message of Jesus was the exclusive purview of their exclusive religion. Some of us believe that there is enough evil around in this world to engage all of us, regardless of one’s preferred religion or lack of religion.

As long as it is only a Christian fight, Christianity will always be on the defensive and probably the loser. And then we all lose.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Stand Up America

How should we, among the crowd of Charlie Kirk supporters, respond in the wake of his assassination? Our hearts and minds are full of anger and loathing for that crazy cowardly punk that did the deed. The dirt bag is subhuman. The radical left Democrat politicians are blaming the victim, Charlie, for his own death because he said some things that enraged the shooter. Charlie, you just wouldn’t shut up!

There is a righteous call from the governor of Utah for national unity. These are nice words in a perfect world but they are meaningless because they are divorced from our earthly reality. There has never been unity in America for we are a democracy, the majority rules. It will not happen in our world, now or any time in the future. Forget it, earthly unity is not the future God plan for our world. God must like a good scrap. God must be bigger than our scraps.

We were all put here in our world to live as if we were already home. That is the God plan, to share mercy with the unmerciful, to share forgiveness with the undeserving, to suffer the slings and arrows of the haughty, to run where the weak dare not go, to care for something or someone besides our own well-being. It is hard and against our nature but that is the God plan.

Most of us play the noncommittal waiting game, hiding in the bushes, avoiding having to declare one way or the other, nursing our fears and wants, not Charlie. Charlie stood up to say, our lives do not belong to us, life is a gift from God (Christ). The religious context in which we choose to express our faith is not the important decision. The important decision is to live fearlessly knowing we are destined for the better world, the better unified world. A world with an atmosphere of pure freedom for love is freedom.

Shall we also stand up? Yes or No, check the box?

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Community

If you had a twenty year old socially challenged son with a room full of guns and ammo and no interest in hunting animals, what would you think and do? Some of us don’t get it, these young monster assassins have waved the red flags for years, so how can the parents, family, relatives, friends and neighbors remained silent?

How can the passengers on a public transit train in North Carolina remain cowardly uninvolved when a killing happens in their midst and the victim is left alone bleeding and struggling for her life? One would think we are a nation of robots or demented scarred cats.

Maybe we have always been this way or maybe we, as a society, have lost our sense of interrelatedness or community. Maybe we should have cell phone burnings and start being human again.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

 

Offense

Some have taken offense to the term “useful idiot” in this blog. A useful idiot is not dumb. A useful idiot is one who has set beliefs and conclusions that are considered absolute. There is no need for discussion, in fact, discussion will likely push the useful idiot off the deep end. A useful idiot is desperate to see their truth to be your truth. A useful idiot is easily motivated or manipulated by applause.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

Foul

So they say that the assassination attempt in Butler Pennsylvania was not a conspiracy of the many but one solo nut job. Really! The useful idiots are everywhere, in the pew and behind the pulpit. On orders from above, the security plan by the Secret Service on that day is deliberately sabotaged and a shooting perch is identified prior to the event. On the day of the event, all security at the perch is ordered elsewhere.

Months prior to the event, a useful idiot is identified, prepped and motivated to gain hero status among democrats by killing the president. The useful idiot is told of the perch and was assisted in planning the shoot by a solo shadowy perpetrator.

The Secret Service sniper team on the other warehouse roof had standing orders never to fire until a threat first fires. We all are allowed one murder. Prior to the assassin’s barrage of bullets, the sniper team had to have had the threat in sight for as soon as the threat fired, they took him out. You are a hero no more.

Why is this not an extreme likelihood? All the moving parts of a conspiracy are there, however, such a scenario would be very difficult to trace. We can be sure that the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah has a similar scenario. Or, the democrats just got tired of playing games and hired a professional assassin.

No wonder democrats are united and fearful of the radical communist left in their party, most are not useful idiots, they know that any perceived dissent will be extinguished. As a result of democratic cowardice, all democrats, the politicians and the regular voters, are as guilty of murder as the shooter. Democrats have earned a foul reputation that will be long remembered.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

Emergency

It is time. The American people need our president to address the nation from the oval office. The Commies are coming from within and without. It is time to stop all imports from China. It is going to get messy no matter what actions we take or don’t take. This emergency requires America to pull out all the stops. 

We the people are behind our president, tell us, how are we to remain a free people? The cost is irrelevant, we all will be heroic Americans in our generation just as many heroic American generations have done for the last two hundred and fifty years.  God and Country forever.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA.

 

Warning

Sean Hannity you are not that dumb. Me thinks you just want your guests to answer one question but every one of them avoids answering. Please explain that, can’t you find a guest who is willing to state the obvious? Why do Democrats insist on a crime ridden America? Why do they subject every large Democrat run city to rampant crime chaos regardless of the consequences?

Answer: chaos is right out of the Marxist playbook. Democrats are no longer American. The plan that they advance has worked around the world. First trash the legal system, have your partners in crime create total chaos, defend the criminal and thereby destroy the country. The helpless country, in this case America, can then be built back the communist way. Someone needs to speak up and state the obvious.

What do you say, Sean Hannity?

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

 

 

Ponder On

Luke 2: 19.  

KJV:  But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

TNIV: But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

One might ask, what things? The surrounding stories would suggest the appearance of the angel Gabriel, shepherds, a company of singing heavenly hosts and a message locating the birth of the long expected birth of the Messiah-Savior. This is not Christmas time so let’s get real. Some or all of these stories may be true or they may not, that is not the point of their telling. The possibly exaggerated stories were told only to convince the listener, nothing else. They were not deceitful stories, they were stories told to add an exclamation point.

Was Mary pondering the stories or something else? If you or I were an unmarried pregnant teenager, what would we be pondering? If you or I were an unmarried pregnant teenager who had heard from somewhere that God was up to something in and through your child, what would we be pondering? If you or I were a newly wedded pregnant bride, with a doubting virgin husband, what would we be pondering? If you or I were a homeless couple taking shelter with the animals, what would we be pondering?

Maybe Mary was pondering over the question, "Is God really in the midst of my circumstances?" How can it be?  

Yes, Mary, your child will be speaking my things to your world, some will listen but most will not. By trusting in the midst of your questions and doubts, you have done your part.     

For us, take heart, we too are not alone in our questions. The only answer that matters is yes, I shall trust today and fight the fight of faith again tomorrow. 

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

 

Tradition?

So, the television puppeteers are threatened. Could it be that this blog is making sense out of the Bible? They say, no Christian commentator has ever proposed such a conclusion based on Scripture. Therefore it is not Christian. Fair enough, some of us just say, “thank you for the compliment”.

In some quarters, love for the Bible is about the search for truth for living. The truth search is holy while all religions, including Christianity, block the search for the people. If there is disagreement be honest and make an argument. Religion hides behind tradition.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

Freedom

“What we have here is a failure to communicate”.  Cool Hand Luke

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

sparrow

There are a few words in the Bible that we might consider to be Jesus words. You know, those Jesus words that some scholars tout to be historically authentic. The words that could have been spoken before all the interpreters of religion stacked the deck with additions. Jesus had a thing for sparrows, to him, the sparrow is the national bird of God’s world.  

Why did Jesus use the sparrow to teach us about God? Sparrows are everywhere, they are short lived, they are of little earthly value and they have no power. Every day, every hour could be their last, they are at risk of everything. They are totally fragile but as Jesus said, God cares for them! Despite all the evidence to the contrary, God cares for them. 

Jesus may also ask us, is it therefore lunacy to believe that God could also care for all of us, for you? Well, it is lunacy and it is not lunacy. Shall we ask the sparrow? .

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca. 

Freedom, Freedom

If there be a God, that God is to be experienced as freedom. Dictators are all about this world, even the dictators who use only the name God. They are ignorant of what it really means to live our days in the fresh air of freedom.

How do we know that God loves freedom? God loves freedom because all of us were dumped into this risky, dangerous world where the monsters are allowed to live among us. God wants us to learn of the other world by living in ours. Our world is a teaching tool, are you learning?

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

Scandal

The scandal of particularity is a God scandal that looks human. It is a scandal for any human to say to this world of multiplied billions of humans that somehow, God has noticed me. Some would say such a claim is craziness and that may very well be. However, is such a claim only Tom foolery? Does or can God scandalously influence the particular individual?

Some say that God does so influence the individual, one on one, and that religion most times is at war with these same individuals. Religion and God are not always comingling because religion is about control and God is about freedom. Those who have been impacted by God do not talk about it, they just go on about their God directed business. They are not broadcasters, they are doers. They are not virtue signalers, they give virtue away.    

The ultimate scandalous question needs to be asked. Could God likeness be advanced among men through the life of an individual as seemingly undeserving as that of a bastard individual? You know, those of us who did not ask to be born at a particular time and place but born they were, born to live their lives in the midst of a very real social stigma and the resulting turmoil. Such a notion would even be a bigger scandal. Some of us believe that God did just that when he scandalously chose to influence Jesus.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.

 

December

What are you 31/ATLAS? Are you an interstellar object on a parabolic orbit through multiplied solar systems to return again in thousands or millions of years? Better yet, are you an interstellar life probe from a distant solar system looking for others of us? We are about to find out in three months. Will our world be a stopping point or will the interstellar object merely wave to us from its orbit, 168 million miles from earth? Hold on to your hats.

G. Goslaw

Landers, Ca.