Leapers All

 

I once heard an educated Bible theologian say that to understand the Bible, we must either believe that Jesus was God or that he was only a crazy deluded man.  This was probably the excuse he used for not dealing with the contradictions in the Bible.  Does the reader have to take one or the other of these extreme mindsets?  Is there no middle ground?

Sure, there is a lot to talk about between the two polar extremes, the question is, will we?  For sure, the Church trained and financially supported Biblical theologian could not even hint for a second that Jesus was slightly less than God.  The heretic label would have devastating consequences within the hierarchy of the Church, both to one’s career and income.  He or she would achieve, in an instant, leaper status to be shunned.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA.

     

   

Eternity

Why have you and your Facebook friends taken such offense at my words, Suzanne?  I thought that we were at least acquaintances.  Heaven as a reward is one of those biblical words that has been corrupted by the Christian religion.  When Jesus used the word heaven he did not mean to agree with your heaven and hell scenario.  Yes, he also used the word hell but, in most instances, he was playing mind games with the hell raisers.  There were hell raisers then as there are hell raisers now.

This is why I prefer to us the word eternity which foretells of a positive or good or redemptive future for all of humanity.  Case in point, let us return to our prior discussion of Matthew 10, 32 & 33.  According to the text, those who “acknowledge” Jesus and those who are disowned by Jesus are all before the Father in eternity.  No where is it said that those who are disowned are to be sent to hell, that is an assumption that you are making. 

Who can say for sure?  Maybe, eternity is like a building with many floors and we will have the opportunity to move on upward to full understanding.  Having something to work on in eternity should be a positive, right?  If you think life can get boring at times here on earth, just wait. 

For now, let us be open to a myriad of possibilities.

Respectfully,

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

 

Pain

If I were a preacher, which I am not, what message would I share on Father’s Day 2023?  I would begin by sharing about my earthly father, that seems reasonable.  There’s the rub.  We all lived in the same house, sat together at the same dinner table but we three boys, were never a part of or a reflection of the adult world of my parents.  That world was the church.  We were just the kids.  If asked, my parents would say, we love our children but that love, if it existed, was not expressed or shared.  Nothing about life and family was ever shared.  I grew up believing that was normal, not understanding what I was missing.  Normal, it is not.

Which is worse, never knowing your birth parents or living in the same house and never knowing your birth parents?  Go figure!  Because this question is so intimately involved with my story, I would choose the latter but there is pain enough in life to go all around.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA    

 

Father

It will be Father’s Day on Sunday, June 18. On this day we celebrate our fathers but are we not celebrating our understanding of the ideal father?  As wonderful as our fathers may or may not have been, no earthly father matches our ideal, that need or desire for the ideal father, is a part of which binds all of humanity together on this day.  Are we not thankful, therefore, that there really is an ideal father?  That father is our eternal Father God.

When the disciples asked Jesus how they should pray to the eternal Father God, Jesus began his illustrative prayer with the address, “Our Father, which art in heaven” (Matthew 6:9-13).  Some would prefer an address such as “My Father, which art in heaven”.  Did Jesus understand himself as a special emissary, co-equal with the ideal Father God or was he praying as one of the believing spiritual children of God?  An argument could be made either way, but in his lifetime, as recorded in the three synoptic Gospels, Jesus never claimed to be God. The later, theologized Gospel of John, however, disagrees.  

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA

 

Sorry

 Sorry blog, I’ve been distracted.  There is nothing more satisfying than being inspired to write something that pleases me, no matter what it does for anyone else.  I am selfish that way.  Then again, there are times when the whatever over the next hill, a dream or a wish fulfilment, captures my attention and I forget or intentionally avoid practicing my calling.  I am the loser. 

Dreams are not evil; they just need to be kept in balance.

Forgive me.

G. Goslaw

Landers, CA  

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