Love Does not Judge, Love Forgives.

Hey folks, it’s been a while since I last posted because we were traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday.  Now that I’m back I wanted to address something that, as we spend time with others in the close quarters of the holiday gatherings we may all want to remember: be tolerant.

All too often we find ourselves in the mixed company of people who have lives or have made choices that we actively disagree with.  Perhaps they’ve made relationship choices that prove consistently destructive, perhaps they’ve turned to substance abuse, and perhaps they’ve resorted to a kind of “Peter Pan syndrome” where they refuse to advance their life beyond a certain point, they won’t (from our perspective, grow up).

Judging other people is very easy to do, because we judge based on our perspective of the situation, based on our choices, our lives, and our responses, but that’s also dangerous for our hearts.

I’ve used this example in conversations in the past, but I think it takes precedence here: working in law enforcement whether you’ve done it one day or done it a decade, you run into people who are not happy to see you.  I’ve had multiple co-workers voice the same complaint, that people they contact have a bad attitude.  I have to remind them that, before they contact police something bad has to happen to them.  I’ve never had a situation where someone pops their head into my office just to say “Everything’s fine, having a great day!”  No, we meet people on their bad days, sometimes the worst day of their life.

When we sit in judgement of other people’s choices, are we taking into account what they themselves are going through?  Think back to your last really bad day, did you show grace under fire?  Did you fail to be charming when life, the universe, and everything seemed to turn on you at once?  Were you a Job or a Jonah when things didn’t go your way?

I want us take a quick jaunt to John 8:2-12.  This is where the Pharisees drag a woman caught in adultery to Jesus.  They cite that Mosaic law, the law passed down to the Israelites by Moses, states that this woman should be stoned unto death.  This was a set up for Jesus, either he would rebuke Moses’ law (which was the word of God) or he would condone the death of this woman.  Jesus handled the situation like he normally does, by spinning it back onto the Pharisees asking them if their slates are clean.  He points out that only one without sin can truly sit in judgement of another person.

Let’s go to the woman right quick, because rarely is she talked about in the scenario and that’s a shame because in many ways she’s the stand in for us.  She’s us with our problems, she’s us with our faults and our lapses in judgement and our self-destructive behavior, and our substance abuse and our Peter Pan syndromes.  She was forcibly dragged from wherever she was and brought before the Son of God with the very real possibility of being bludgeoned to death with large rocks looming over her by a crowd that clearly did not care for her welfare, who only wanted to prove a point at her expense.

If you are starting to feel empathy towards this woman, good.  That means you are a good hearted person, that on some level you understand.

If we can extend that empathy to a woman who lived 2000+ years ago, can’t we extend it to the person sitting less than ten feet from us whom we might have known two minutes or all our lives?

Part of the problem we have when it comes to dealing with people who we view as needing to get their lives together is that we, as a society, have lost the meanings of two very important words: tolerate and accept.

To tolerate is to “allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference.”

To accept is to “believe or come to recognize (an opinion, explanation, etc.) as valid or correct.”

See there is a difference in the two concepts.  When we tolerate someone else’s life choice, we don’t have to accept them, we don’t have to view them as correct, but we still shouldn’t judge because we don’t know what’s going on with them.

So what do we do then?  We can’t accept the choices others have made, but we can’t judge them because we don’t know what’s going on with them.  Let’s flip back to “why are you judging?”

You judge because you don’t agree with it.  In the vast majority of cases we are prone to judge because we love that person, because we feel that person can be better than the situation that they are in.  Let’s face it, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking and feeling about a topic that you don’t care about, so if you are so wrapped up in what this person is doing, then it’s because you feel you have a vested interest in their life.  You have a vested interest but approaching with a judgmental attitude can cause that person to withdraw into the very lifestyle you are trying to get them out of.

What did Christ do?  Christ understood.  By law, yes the woman could have been judged and sentenced to immediate and painful death, but that’s not what he lets happen.  He gets the accusors to leave her alone first, then he waits, he loves, and he forgives.  Christ is the Son of God, there is nothing in this woman’s life that he doesn’t know.  He looks at her and sees every step that led her into her situation, and knows every wrong things she’s ever done, and he forgives her.  These are some of the same sins He’s later going to die on the cross for, but he forgives her.

That is love, my friends.  That is forgiveness.  Our brothers and sisters in humanity have to deal with a lot.  Hearts are broken, lives are torn apart, and sometimes at the end of the day, when they are sitting there glaring at the mirror they can’t forgive themselves for all that they think they’ve done.  Forgive them.  Forgive them in your own heart, and approach them as you should, as a fellow human being, and give them compassion.  You can tolerate their decisions without accepting them, but by showing them compassion and love you offer them hope and grace.  Through this, you shine a little bit of God’s love into their world, and that little bit can go a very long way.

 

Thanks for reading and happy holidays.

Faith Tested, Science Approved

“Sometimes the only pay off to having any faith is that it's tested again and again every day."

Fall Out Boy: Immortals

                Right now we are at a phenomenal crossroads.  Never before in my entire life have I seen a response to an election like this.  While half the population is elated, the other half is morose, looking up to the skies as if the anti-Christ has begun to walk among us.

Needless to say it’s been a pretty heavy week, and its only Wednesday.  With that in mind, I want to take a few minutes today to talk about some things that validate faith.  A lot of the time people of faith, especially right now, feel like their faith is being tested by the world.  Make no mistake, it is.  The stronger you grow in faith, the harder the devil is going to work on you.  That’s an accepted fact.  But as you go about your battle and you sit there, knees in the mud, staring at your hands just wondering if there is any point to it all, keep in mind a few things.

First, let’s start in the beginning.  Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.”  This passage directly correlates to a being, existing outside of time and space, creating the reality around us that we call the universe.  Early scientists postulated that the universe was eternal, having no beginning and no end, however later it was discovered by followers of those same disciplines that the universe was, and is, expanding.  Obviously if something is expanding, then at one point it had to be smaller, and has to have a reason for expanding.  Try this experiment at home, take a balloon and, with a marker, draw a bunch of dots on it while it’s still deflated.  Then blow that bad boy up.  You will see the dots expand and get further and further away from each other.  That is what scientists have found is going on with the universe.  Something is pushing those dots, in this case galaxies, further away from each other, which means at one point, all space and matter was condensed into some finite point, commonly referred to as singularity.  Something had to have kicked off this expansion process, called the Big Bang, something that had to exist outside our reality, beyond time and space.  That something is God.

 

Next there was “God created the universe in 6 days…” Genesis 1, 2:2.  Most would say that’s balderdash, you couldn’t create all reality in six days.  Well, I’m going to try and paraphrase Dr. Gerald Schroder on this one, but I’ll put a link to his full articles below.  Go back to your balloon model of the universe and pick a point anywhere on it.  Lets say that our galaxy, simply because now you have a visual for where we are at.  If you calculated to the center of the universe and parked yourself there and shot a message at light speed, you would find that it would arrive at our planet about the time the planet started to cool from the fires of creation.  “…and the earth…” from Genesis.  Next day you shoot another message from that point, and it travels billions and billions of miles and so forth.  When you do that, say seven times, it plays out to not only the age of the universe, but also how long man has been floating around the planet writing down his history.

http://www.geraldschroeder.com/AgeUniverse.aspx

Genesis 2:7 “And then the Lord God formed man from the clay of the earth…” God fashioned us from the same matter that he formed the world.  Of the 59 elements that make up the human body, all 59 can be found in the earth’s crust.  We are of this earth.

https://esoriano.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/from-dust-to-man-a-scientific-proof/

God set us apart from the animals.  Many in the scientific community would have you believe that humans are nothing more than really fancy apes, however there is a decided difference, and if you can’t see that then you probably need to re-evaluate your personal standards.  Mankind stands apart from animals because have a bit of God in us.  He breathed life into us directly, giving us a soul, giving us something that sets us spiritually and intellectually above the animals.  Now what we choose to do with that, that’s a different matter altogether.  We’re actually going to come back to that in a bit.

God created a massive flood.  Genesis Chapter 6 pretty well covers this, but you probably know the basics: Noah, rain, ark, animals, massive flood etc.  Most scholars would push this story aside as an allegorical tale, a myth, but there’s more to this story.  You see, all across the globe people have stories about a massive flood, one that wiped out or massively altered life as they know it.  All…across…the globe.  Now again, this could be passed off as “Floods are a big deal, of course they’re myths of it…” but all these stories date back to about the same time.  They all came into records a little less than 2000 years before Christ.  Additionally there is physical evidence showing these floods happened.  Well, you say “floods”…I say “FLOOD”.

 

Jesus is real. I mean, historically speaking there is evidence that “Jesus, who is called Christ” is in the historical record.  1^st Century Romano-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who is a scholarly credible source, makes repeated references to the actions and activity of Christ in his historical record.

 

Finally…you have a soul and it transcends what you are going through.  According to Dr. Robert Lanza, voted 3^rd most influential scientist alive by the New York Times, quantum theory proves consciousness moves to another universe after death.  What we interpret as the universe is our senses informing our brains of what reality is.  Naturally we are locked into thinking this is all there is because this is all the input we receive.  In interpreting the data Lanza states that the body receives consciousness from an outer source, a source that defies the conventions of space/time, and that when the body dies, the consciousness moves on to a different concept of reality.  His theory is a bit involved, but it points out that the universe was fine tuned for life, something that cannot happen randomly, and therefore must have an intelligence driving that material creation.

http://truththeory.com/2015/12/05/quantum-theory-proves-that-consciousness-moves-to-another-universe-after-death/

This is a highly respected scientist reaffirming that you have a soul that transcends your body, and the universe was purposefully created by intelligence beyond our understanding.

Take from this what you will, sometimes having an outside source reaffirm your faith helps, sometimes it just feels like a life jacket while you float in the middle of the ocean, you’re not drowning, but you don’t feel like you’re in a better place.  God has a plan and a purpose for everything, and we sometimes just have to ride out the storm under a better understanding comes along.

Thanks for reading.

Looking for Lost Books...

This week I want to address something that has weighed on my mind for a long time.  When Martin Luther kick started the Reformation, what became the Protestant church (which included those that followed Luther, called Lutherans) removed 9 books from biblical cannon, because they claimed they weren’t cannon.  Well, 7 or 9, depending on who you’re asking.

So the books that came under question were Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Baruch, the Wisdom of Solomon, Maccabees 1 and 2, the Prayer of Manasseh, and some chapters of Esther and Daniel.

Incidentally the confused numbering is “Do you count Maccabees 1 AND 2 or just Maccabees all together, and can you really count editing Esther and Daniel as a “book”?”

My answer is, 1 and 2 are separate books for a reason, and yes, Esther and Daniel count.

The question that bothers me and what brings about today’s discussion is “Why?”

I’m not particularly a fan of historical censorship of any kind, I personally believe we need to have access to it all no matter how good, bad, or ugly it is.  However, as it turns out, these books weren’t censored because of content, but rather timing and a lack of historical data.  When Jesus came to Earth, the tome of scriptures included the books I just listed.  They were cannon at that time.  Then 70 AD came along and the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple due to the large number of Christians popping up.  The Jews then decided to get their house in order and part of that was to determine what was scripture and what wasn’t.  They…THEY were the first ones to edit out the big 9 (or seven if you want) because they questioned whether these specific books were ever written in Hebrew.  When the Catholic Church put together their Bible based on a lot of criteria, they included the books again.

Then Luther came along and since he felt there was no historical data to support these books in the first place, he put them basically as “extra reading, but not required”.

Then this happened:

The Dead Sea scrolls were found and over the last fifty or so years have been translated, validating the existence of several Old Testament books in their original Hebrew…including parts of Tobit and other Sirach.  Over the last few decades, these books have been surfacing in historical data supporting that they were valid the whole time.

So are they pertinent?  Are Protestants and Lutherans really missing anything?

Well yes, and I could go on and on about that, but I’d rather you find out yourself by checking out these lost books.

Now what about the books that were almost lost?

Martin Luther had a very low opinion of the Paul’s letter to Hebrews, the books of James, Jude, and Revelation, all of which he wanted removed but eventually relented to placing in the back of the Bible, placing more focus on what he considered the core text.

So why does this matter to me?  Well, I was born and raised Lutheran, and I know there are those of you reading this who will say “You weren’t born Lutheran, you may have been raised, but you weren’t born Lutheran.”  Which I respond with: The point is I am a cradle Lutheran so I never questioned the Bible as it was presented to me.  There is a big thing in the Protestant church and its practically a battle cry for Lutherans “Sola Scriptura” or “scripture alone”.  That means that you base your faith solely on the Bible and what it says and not based on anyone’s interpretation of that scripture.  I was okay with that for the longest time.  “Bible says it, I believe it, that’s it.”  You’ll hear that in any Bible study, but now I have this problem: How can you talk about what scripture says if you can’t question what scripture says?

Further, how can you believe in “sola scriptura” if you have “inabsolutus scriptura”, incomplete scripture?  That’s the equivalent of saying “I believe you are a person, except for your hand.  Your hand is a chair, or at worst doesn’t exist at all.”

Just something to think about.

 

Thanks for reading.