Holding on to Hostility

"I was consumed by the fire,
But now I'm washed in the blood..."

-Blake Kimble

I used to get angry with the simplest things; traffic, phone solicitors, rude service station attendants, telephone menus, the list was as long as the day. Which meant I spent most of my day being angry. 

Hostility is debilitating. It wears you out and the stress is infectious as well. Your family members will be victims of your fatigue. 

I started losing my anger when I discovered that forgiveness (another form of love) wasn't doing a favor for the person who wronged you. It was about healing yourself. As you forgive others all the bitterness associated with it wanes. Over time, you don't even remember what you were angry about in the first place. It's therapy at no cost. I believe that most psychotherapy and psychotheraputic drugs could be done away with if we were taught the fine art of forgiveness. 

It is easy to get caught up in the heat of a moment, and your perspective disappears. Little things like traffic, phone solicitors, rude service station attendants, telephone menus become disproportionately large. When it's really a few minutes of your day. Those little things pile up over time, being internalized, rather than being thrown away. You're soon cluttered with so much anger, spite, and emotional garbage that you can't function without feeling your anger driving you every minute of the day. Anger becomes your sole motivation and constant companion.

Anger seldom makes good choices for the future, and the frustration found at the consequences of these decisions compounds the anger. It's a negative feedback loop, and you're its primary victim.
It's been a slow process for me, and I confess, an ongoing one. I have made many regrettable choices in the past motivated by anger, and the results lead to only more fuel to feed the fire. It brought me to a point where I had become so utterly broken that I knew that only God was capable of changing my course. It was there and then that I cried out to God and plead between my sobs, "God, make me whole again", and He replied. I know many Christians experienced the depth of this utter and vast emptiness that cannot be filled by the works or words of man. This is when they took their first step in not having to carry the load alone. When they first began to hand over the reigns to the One who Reigns. Haltingly, at first, but slowly with increasing confidence, we allow God to make our choices, choices made in love.

It's not all rainbows and unicorns, there are still all the other choices you already made to deal with, but you can begin to make progress to clean those up when you're not being buried in new more egregious consequences on a daily basis. I suppose, it's learning to understand that the red check marks on your homework aren't something your teacher did to hurt you, but rather that they are opportunities to learn something you didn't know before. The question is, do we avail ourselves of those opportunities or do we clench our jaw at the teacher?

Some day, I will tell you about the reply that God gave me that day when I wept in the woods. As for now, forgive me, forgive others, and forgive yourself. Give up the reigns and stop holding on to hostility, it is only a small part of your burden that you have to carry. Leave the rest to God. 

God is One

Ssss-silence











Today, I'm going to disturb you and quite possibly cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the Fall of Creation as recounted in the Book of Genesis. I also run the risk of being declared a heretic by you and possibly everyone you associate with. If you're a regular reader of my blog, you'll find this to be one of my typical, garden-variety postings. Newcomers may be shocked and I should apologize, but I won't because that's just the way I am.

We all (should) know the Fall of Creation story...

God told Adam and Eve that they may eat of any tree in the Garden except for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Just one Commandment, the only rule, the sole edict, the solitary restriction laid upon mankind by their Creator, and they blew it.

God apparently turns His figurative back for a moment, and a crafty serpent slithered up to Eve to ask for clarification on the aforementioned dietary restriction imposed by Yahweh and asks,

"Did God say you could not eat from any tree in the Garden?"

To which Eve replied,

"No, God said that we may eat from any tree in the Garden except for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the middle of the Garden, nor shall we touch it for in that day we shall surely die."

Let's ignore the fact that Eve extended the law to include a specific location (the middle of the Garden) and added merely touching the fruit (nor shall we touch it). Let's just assume that she was allowing for a margin of error. That seems prudent when dealing with Almighty God.

However, the serpent may have seen this as a willingness to fudge the facts, an opportunity to be sure and a weakness to be exploited. Perhaps.

The snake makes his move and plants the seed of doubt in the Word of God, saying,

"Surely, you will not die, but you will become like God, knowing good from evil."

Eve takes the snake bait. Then, Adam does likewise. Mission accomplished, let the war between good and evil begin.

After Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, God returned from his peculiar absence (He's Omnipresent) and was taking a stroll in the cool of the day when He realized that Adam and Eve were nowhere to be found.

God found them cowering and hiding from their Maker with fig leaves covering their privates, because the First Couple had become aware of their nakedness.

God asks,

"How do you know you are naked? Did you eat of the tree which I forbade you to eat?" 

Adam and Eve were caught red handed and red faced with forbidden fruit pulp stuck between their teeth, juice running off their chins, and the seeds still sticking to their fig leaves. They were busted.

Adam is the first to answer God's line of inquiry, and ingloriously pins the whole affair not only on Eve, but on God, Himself.

"The woman YOU put here, gave it to me and I ate." 

Chivalry hadn't been born yet, evidently, but blaming the victim was already in full bloom.

When Eve takes the witness stand, she pushes the blame onto the Snake. It's all typical human nature stuff here, even at this primordial point in human history. Not much has changed, has it?

Author's Note: Pay attention now, this is where things get particularity weird...

Adam is questioned.
Eve is questioned.
And the snake never testifies!

God asked both Adam and Eve why they had disobeyed Him, but the Almighty never asked the serpent a single question.

The Ancient of Days curses all parties involved; man gets thorns and thissel whilst trying to produce a meal by the sweat of his brow, woman get painful childbirth and is told to heed the word of her failed farmer of a husband, and the serpent goes crawling on his belly.

All bad stuff, really, and that's just for starters; disease, death, poverty, ponzi schemes, tooth decay, halitosis, war, female circumcision, mortgage backed securities, fiat money, demonic possession, the Yugo, and everything else we know to be evil came with that first curse.

Still, God never bothered to ask the serpent his side of the story. You would think that the Maker of Heaven and Earth would want to inquire,

"Hey, snake, I put a lot of work into all this, why did you screw it up with your mischief?"

Wouldn't you have asked? I certainly would have. I would have grilled that snake on the stand like a hostile witness, and then grilled that snake on a skewer with a little butter and lemon pepper, but that's me.

Maybe it's just my sense of fair play, but it leaves the whole motive of the serpent in an awkward silence. It reads to me like the Warren Commission Report, you're shouting at the biblical text,

"Ask the question! Come on! You've got the viper on the ropes, God! Ask the question!"

But God doesn't toss so much as a raised eyebrow at the apparent ring leader of the Fall of Creation plot. Instead, the Supreme Deity proceeds straight to sentencing (and I am foreseeably vexed!)

Then, it occurs to me that God created everything, including the silent serpent. He made the Garden, Adam, Eve, and the forbidden fruit, no less.

God, in His Omniscience, was also inescapably aware that this whole fruit eating force majeure was all in the immediate future of His Creation, as well.

What a blatant and obvious oversight for the Supreme Being, eh? Come on, Ancient of Days, what are you... new?

So, why was this "design flaw" allowed to happen? It's a product liabliability case, as clear as eternity is long. God could have performed a recall as He did during the life of Noah, but here when everything is at stake God knowingly and willingly does nothing. Is He malevolent? Spiteful? Negligent?

Hold on! Before you start chanting,

"Humans have freewill."

Let's see this for where the evidence leads us.... God's engineering "flaw" is allowed to happen, allowed to stand, and allowed to do harm, all of it... to everything and everyone ... forever, or a really long time.

That is what a cursory reading of the text would imply.

Or perhaps there is another possibility:

It's not a flaw. It's a feature.

The Fall was a necessary part of a Perfect God's Will. I'm not saying God is evil, I'm saying that there is really only one team.

We are speaking about an ALL powerful (that's without exception), ALL knowing (that's also without exception, EVER present (once again without exception) God, and there is no other. So, what gives?

We are left with only two possibilities:
1. The serpent outwitted God.
2. The serpent was an agent provocateur of God.

If you can suggest another option, drop it in the comments below, but try first to think about the implications and ramifications of their being only One team.

I find it very comforting, so should you.

God bless. 

I Am Here

The System

Blame the system...

WCIDTWPJ?

God's Job

A Question of Choice

As one reads through the Scripture you may notice that God never forces anyone to believe in Him, His Word, His Works, His prophets, or even His only begotten Son, Jesus. 

He always seems to leave room for doubt. Isn't that odd? Isn't that just like the nature of God? He leave us to choose, that is our gift of freewill in play.

I believe it has everything to do with the Nature of God. He is a God of love, and if you have been paying attention  you know that love requires choice. You must have the ability to make a decision to love, hate, or be indifferent all on your own. Otherwise, we would have obligation, duty, responsibility, or something else that isn't love. A sense of obligation, duty, or responsibility may grow from love but not the inverse. 

In a nation which has a volunteer armed forces, one joins the military because they love their country, and this leads to a feeling of duty to defend it. We don't have an intrinsic desire to join the service, which leads to the love of country. So, we love our country enough to die for it, that's giving up everything for the object of love. 

Our God is a pretty smart God, and He understands human nature far better than we understand His Nature. Love is something that you do for another without any expectation of return, reciprocity, or consideration. What He desires most from us is our love, not sacrifice, not money, not our unblemished attendance at church, but our love. 

This sounds pretty simple, at first, but there's more than just the lip service of love that He's asking for. If you love your mother or father, you want to do the things that make them happy. What good is my claiming to love my mom if I am stealing her cigarettes four times a day. My actions do not exhibit love, do they? 

The Lord says: "These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.

-Isaiah 29:13

He's looking for the genuine article, not the sales pitch. Even if you are the worst of sinners, He will accept your contrite heart over someone who feels that they are owed Salvation because they followed "the rules",  or operated on grudging obligation. 

If you have love in your heart towards God, how could you not have love for all His Creation? Do you see how the single act of loving God expands exponentially into love for all? 

It's a logic puzzle in a way, 

God is everything 
God is love 
Love is everything 
GOD=LOVE=EVERYTHING 

Everything that He desires from us and for us is Love. What a wonderful, beautiful God! 

Your good works are the product of Salvation, not progress in salvation. You can never earn your way to God, His Grace or eternal Life by your own merit. You don't have the capacity. You don't even know how to be good in the way God is good. We are too selfish and self-centered by vice of the human nature that clouds our judgments and perspectives. What appears right and just is a shadow of God's Right and Just. We can't really do much about it, it's our nature. But God can by applying His corrective lenses tinted with the Blood of Jesus Christ.

Praise God for his correction! 

Praise Him for His Mercy! 

Praise Him for His Love!