The Fall And My Youth

It is good to visit the land of your youthful past.  Your past is filled with embarrassments, heartaches, triumphs and meaning but the landscape remains the same.  Great hills, mountains and boulders remind us “The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to him.”  The yellow and scarlet covered mountains of my past gently remind me that my misspent youth belongs to Him as well, The Wonderful Redemptive One.  As He will redeem the trees in the coming spring so He turns the fall of my life into a reminder that ultimately all will be spring.

 

Patting Your Head and Rubbing Your Belly

Have you ever raised your hands in praise and slapped your knee in belly laughter at the same time?

I’ll give you the opportunity.  It takes 4 minutes but you will have accomplished it.

Go here:

http://www.studylight.org/commentaries/ttb/view.cgi?bk=57&ch=7

and click on #8

The Rarest Blood Type

While writing yesterday it dawned on me that Jesus had a blood type.  Since blood type is determined by genetics, the blood type of the mother and the father, I wondered what determine Christ’s since He was born of a virgin.  In order to adhere to the facts of nature Christ must have received some genetic material from His Father, God.  Of course God is sovereign and also outside all laws of nature including genetics but it was a course of thought that lead me to wonder.  One of the great joys of His salvation is the wonder of Him.  Christ could have been AB-, the rarest blood type, or O, the most common.  Adam and Eve shared an even rarer dilemma, neither had either parent.  I wonder their blood type, HC; Holy Created.

Unfathomable Cost of the Material's List

In Exodus God makes one of His longest speeches to man where He dictates the making of His Tabernacle.  He dictates the materials, the methods of making and the purpose of each part as He lays out where and how the people of Israel will be daily joined to Him.  The sincerity of material and ceremony is finely beautiful.  There is a deep and abiding meaning to this, as it is really a preparation for humans to be in relationship with God Almighty.  The most sincere material of all time would be the human blood that kept the Son of God alive.  It must be one of the greatest mysteries of all time how human blood could sustain the Living God and how precious each drop of that blood was.  His freely spilling out that Preciousness over my sins and me is an Act Of Devine Sincerity unfathomable in its cost of material.

Taming The Wildness With Beauty

The story of the collecting of materials to build the tabernacle found in the middle chapters of Exodus is an exquisite read.  It contradicts all that we know of nature and affirms the Goodness and Grace of God.  Nature is a dangerous place and in its most sincere form can be deadly to humans.  Its great mountain peaks, its wild seas, its volcanoes and hurricanes is nature being given free reign to run its course.  In the midst of this we find color, blue, purple and scarlet, we find rare material, gold, silver, bronze and sapphires, and animal skins that reveal a soft richness that must rival the walls of heaven.  God extracts these things from nature to build a sculptural manifestation of His Holy Loveliness and that Loveliness given freely to envelope us.  Beauty is the ultimate taming of the deadly wildness of nature.