I’m hoping some of you are starting to see a bigger picture. We don’t belong to this world. Once our spirits are awakened, we are eternal beings who belong to another realm. But we are still here. With that awakening comes a mission and purpose: We use this world, and our existence in it, for…
Tag: materialism
Entirely Different Reasons
There is the Person of Jesus Christ, our living Covenant with God. Coming to Him means we discover that this world is not our home; we were not made for this. It means we recognize the distinction between our divine destiny in Election and the life we must live while we are here. The word…
Experiential Faith and Money
The New Testament refers to teachings not clearly stated in the Bible. Some of it is a matter of studying the historical context. Some of it is necessarily experiential because it is fundamentally contextual. How God wants to work is not constrained by the human context, but it would be meaningless to us without some…
Bad Sunday Best
Insofar as there is such a thing as “Christian Law” it would include, at least in principle, that bling is sinful. It’s scattered liberally in the New Testament: 1 Timothy 2:9-10 and 1 Peter 3:3-4 are rather blunt about it. It is included in the broader concept of not catering to the flesh nor conforming…
JTMEE: Chapter 23
In Luke 12:13-21 we have the Parable of the Rich Fool. Bailey blows it immediately, insisting that the Hebrews did not believe in a distinction between body and soul, and that Paul believed this current fleshly body would be resurrected. This is not at all the Hebrew teaching nor Paul’s, and Heiser hammers that home…
Misreading Scripture: Vice and Virtue 02
We inject a lot of western definitions of vice into the Bible. Do you know any verses condemning procrastination or plagiarism? We like to imagine that self-sufficiency is a virtue in there, too, but none of them are. Our educational standard of “do your own work” and not copying is something you’ll rarely use in…
Path to Nowhere
Related to the issue covered in my previous post is the question of the Doctrine of Election. What happens to the non-elect? Scripture says very little. It should be obvious that, since there is an Elect, a privileged group who belong to God’s household from before their birth, then there are some who are not…
Polarization Game
Now that we’ve laid a foundation for understanding mind control, let’s discuss another example of it. Let’s say that someone is scolding you for some political position, either directly or via some kind of media presentation. While the person doing the scolding may not be aware of it, what they are doing is not really…