Losing one life may be regarded as a misfortune but losing four looks like carelessness, and Jesus was anything save careless. We seem to be making quick work of this Bible in a year project. With Matthew and Mark polished off we’re taking on Luke beginning today. And since we are going to have a further account of Jesus’s death and resurrection, i think maybe someone somewhere will be happy to know it only happened once, only the story is told four times in the four gospels. I thought I needed to point that out, one never knows.
Sometimes, shut up in the confines of church, Christians vastly underestimate the general biblical illiteracy in the culture. I would previously tell people to read such and such a gospel or book of the Bible, but now i find i tend to draw a blank. Often they have no clue what i am talking about; telling someone to read Matthew is akin to telling them to read Habakkuk or Jude or the book of Lamentations, it’s all Greek to them, save for the Greeks; there are four gospels, really, all tell the same story, how that? So now when i have a Bible on hand I open it up to the page and put a marker in it.
Some young people are most amusing; they have grown up in a judeo-christian, albeit secular culture, will glibly tell you they are Buddhists or more into the ‘Eastern stuff’ because the ‘Christian thing’ does not work for them; then you mention the new and old testaments and they can’t begin to think what you are talking about. Then there are cultural Christians who have some understanding of the new testament but treat the old as though it were not be touched. Someone, Jewish, once told me how their Christian spouse had decided to read the old testament and then told them utterly disgusted that their Bible was horrible.
As an aside, I did not have the heart to tell them that this was akin to the sin of Marcion. History tells us that Marcion sought to expunge all references to the Jewish God from the Christian faith and was convinced that the God of the Old Testament was not that of the New. He was so deeply vilified that on encountering him on the street once the saintly Polycarp, famous disciple of the apostle John sought to avoid him upon which Marcion asked ‘do you know who I am’, to which Polycarp replied ‘yes, I know who you are, the firstborn of Satan’.
To end this short post on a humorous note and dispel any thoughts that my first paragraph was pure fancy, this video clip culled from youtube shows Michael Jr’s testimony of how he came to Christ. Honestly, it is funny. Enjoy. (If you do not see the clip, you are probably reading this on facebook, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on View original post.)
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