A Positive Take on the Ten Commandments, Part 2 - No Idols

What kind of dimwit would worship a golden calf - and one that he had a hand in making, at that?

Quite a few dimwits, as Moses found out.

The Second Commandment, forbidding idolatry, sounds pretty 'forbidding' - God says that He'll punish the great-grandchildren of those who disobey, while He'll offer blessings through a thousand generations.

Quite a carrot, and quite a stick. Guess He thinks this one's important.

And yes, it is. The world of Moses was pretty well ruled by idols and totems, and those idols were devoutly worshiped because they were thought to really be the god,

The God of the Hebrews found this distasteful. He's not a local god, confined to a specific place and time, constrained to inhabit a shell built be those who worship him.

He's not a bird of the air or a beast of the fields of a fish of the sea.

Our God is a Big-G God, and all of Creation is his beat. That's the message He wanted to get across.  He has the power - not some wood or stone carving, or some metal casting.

And He's not a calf or a sheep or a ram or an eagle. He is us, because we are made in His image.

I think this is what He's telling us, that we can put away the infantile attachment to objects, and step boldly out in faith to worship something we can't see.

"You're grownups," says God. "Act that way."

There are those who think that we've replaced the golden calf with other things, like money and power and vacations in Bermuda. But that's not really true - I don't know anyone who prays to their billfold, or asks their Ferrari for intercession.

And if you're thinking of American Idol, let it go, because no one's paying religious homage to the singers.

We may let these things come between us and God, but it's a world away from the Israelites and their calf. We get too busy to spend time with The Man, The Israelites sought to replace...really replace him.

And God said, "NO!"

(You might question the ;worship' of saints and the Virgin Mary practiced in the Catholic and orthodox churches. It's not really the same - the correct term is 'veneration' which means 'respecting', and praying to saints or the Virgin Mary does not assume they are divine. Rather, one prays for their intercession - one is asking them to pray to God with and for the petitioner. Their statues are certainly not idols; they are to call to mind the saint or the Virgin Mary, but are in no way inhabited by them.)

The Sunshine Award - Call and Response

Well, it's happened, for the first time in my life. I've been nominated for an award!

The Sunshine Award, to be exact, and since Susannah Friis (susannahfriis.com) nominated me, she gets to ask the interview questions...

Here goes!

1. What goals have you accomplished this year? I wrote two self-help books (being primed for Kindle now) and began another novel. I've also increased my fitness level to pass the PT qualification test for BUD/S (Navy SEAL school), and am on track to operational fitness by the end of the year. I'm pretty happy with that, as I'm 52 years old, and very seriously ill. Exercise hurts, but not being fit hursts worse.
2. What do you think is your best quality? Willingness. If asked to help someone, I've learned to cultivate willingness, because help given reluctantly is worse than none at all.
3. What was the last compliment you received and what was the last one you paid to someone? Last one received was this evening. I was making brownies, and set the oven to 450, not 350. My wife was rather pleased that I caught it before they brownies lit off. Last one given was to my wife, about an hour ago, when I pointed out to her how professionally she had behaved in an uncomfortable situation she described that happened at her job.
4. What are you looking forward to during the rest of 2013? Finishing "Magic Dragon", my novel-in-progress set during the final months of the Viet Nam war, and dealing with the evacuation of orphans.
5. Do you have a favorite, kind of 'lift-me-up' quote? Sure. It's from Al Sever's book, "Xin Loi, Viet Nam". "We don't have rights - only responsibilities."
6. What inspired you to start blogging? Same reason I write. I wanted to give something to people, let them see that they can make a difference in building a better world.
7. What is creativity for you? That's a tough one. I don't see myself as creative, much less an artiste. My aspiration has always been to be something of a tradesman, as far as writing is concerned. professional and competent, with the story taking precedence over my persona.
8. What about yourself do you want to improve? I'd like to learn to be a better husband. I fear that I'm really too reserved.
9. What's the one thing you can't live without? A sense of purpose and mission in what I'm doing. I can't just 'hang out'.
10. What's your favorite way to relax? I learned long ago to take relaxation in short doses - then back to work. So I usually have a book and a diet soda with me, and will take opportunities for "five-minute-vacations". I don't need or want more time than that.

Now it's my turn to nominate -

"Tales from the Redhead"

Beth Vogt

Becky Doughty

Gwendolyn Gage

Dave Hamlin

Give it a shot!

A Positive Take on The Ten Commandments, Part 1 - No Other Gods

You will have no other gods besides Me.

The First Commandment can be said to be the hook, designed to get our attention. No other Gods. period. What about that do we not understand?

Modes and his homeboys certainly understood. They'd just come from Egypt, after all, where just about everything could be deified. The Egyptians had jackal-headed gods, and cow-headed gods, and gods that looked like storks. It was pretty confusing to the average Egyptian, who generally picked one god to worship in the house...or hut, temple. (This kind of 'selection' is common to most polytheistic cultures.)

Even so, there were a number of Israelites who would have been just as happy hedging their bets with other gods. Maybe the God of Israel wasn't quite strong enough in some areas...let's give Him some backup!

Hedging bets. That's really they key, isn't it?

The First Commandment really says, "count on me...you don't need anyone else".

In the 21st century, we don't have to much trouble with golden calves or gods with weird heads and weirder names. But we do have problems with hedging bets.

Such as - "he who dies with the most toys wins".

In other words...this might be all we got, this life. So grab what you can, and live life to the 'fullest'.

Who knows if you'll really get pie in the sky when you die?

God's saying, BELIEVE! It's such an important concept that He made it a Commandment.

The first one.

Stuff You Can't Afford to Lose

Most of what you have, you can afford to lose. Really.

You can't afford to lose faith.

You can afford to lose family - and one day, you will, in part or in whole.

You can afford to lose reputation, because it's what other people think of you, and you can't control that.

But you can't afford to lose your honor. Often seen as the handmaiden of reputation, it's far deeper, because it goes into your soul.

Honor, at its basic level, is being the person who does the right thing, and who can be depended on to do the right thing. You keep your covenants.

Always.

Because if you break one, just one time, you've changed your life forever. Yes, God will forgive you and put your sins as far away as the East is from the West.

But convincing your own heart to follow suit is almost impossible. You can forget for a long time, you can accept forgiveness from those you've wronged, you can convince yourself that it's along time past and you're a different person...

...and then a chance remark or a hint subtle as a summer-night breeze will bring it all back, in its dreadful grandeur.

And there is no temporal atonement. The Japanese Samurai thought they were onto something with seppuku...that all honor lost could be regained through the simple expedient of ritual suicide.

Which only serves to show why there aren't many practicing samurai still around, I guess.

For the rest of us, lost honor bows our heads, and shades our hearts. It shouldn't be thus...we should be able to feel washed clean, with a new start.

But most of us don;t, and can't. Fact of life. God may be disappointed, but I suspect He understands.

So teach your kids...your word is vital, and the promises you make before man and God have to be faithfully kept.

Because there are some burdens you simply can't put down.

Why Did Jesus Weep?

The last week saw the death of my beloved mother-in-law. It's like a mountain range has sudden;y departed my horizon, and I have lost my bearings in a world suddenly gone unfamiliar...and a landscape allowing cold winds to blow unimpeded.

It does make one think of life and death. And about the shortest verse in the Bible..."Jesus wept."

Why did He weep? On the face of it, this reaction doesn't make sense. he's God, right? He knows that not only will He restore Lazarus, but that all who turn to Him will rise again.

Well, maybe He was just being sympathetic. He felt the pain of Lazarus' family, and felt is so deeply that it brought tears.

This is also an unsatisfying answer. While a robust "Buck up, kids, I'll set this nonsense right" response would have been out-of-place, the sight of their leader weeping over a single death in a land where death was cheap would not have engendered much confidence in His disciples.

Beyond this, it's a bit condescending. If He could see so much further, beyond death's tragedy, the tears would have been...no disrespect intended...ingenuous.

So, why? Why did He cry?

I think He cried for two reasons. The first is that to truly represent and save us, He had to experience life sequentially, just like we do. He couldn't emotionally jump ahead a few pages and see the outcome. Lazarus' death was a fact. His resurrection was not yet a fact. He was therefore constrained to the Now, and not the Tomorrow.

Did He know that Lazarus would die, and that He would bring him back again? Evidence is that He did - delaying for four days made sure that, under Hebrew tradition, the soul had departed the body (which it was said to inhabit for three days after death). It also made sure that decomposition would be well advanced, which is why there was some reluctance to roll away the stone.

So with that a priori knowledge, why did Jesus weep?

I think that it is because raising Lazarus was a work of faith, and to identify with us, He had to live the feeling that, in the face of a monumental tragedy like the death of a friend, faith can be a slender reed indeed.

Faith is not knowing. Faith is belief in something unseen, and in this case as yet unconsummated.

We have some evidence that Jesus faced a very human struggle with faith, in the garden of Gethsemane and on the Cross.

And that is why I love Him. Because He gives me a shoulder to lean on...and had I been there, two thousand years ago, I could have returned the favor. He's my God.

Jesus Goes Skydiving

Heard something interesting on Bill Purvis' televised sermon last Sunday (October 20, 2013) - "some people don't look up until they hit bottom".

That is so true. I've known many people whose lives seemed to go into free-fall, and they kept trying, desperately, to work the problem. Trouble was, they became fixated on the rapidly growing, and very hard landscape beneath their feet.

If you commit the highly unnatural and illogical act of jumping out of a perfectly good airplane while wearing a parachute, one of the first things you'll learn is that you need to keep your eyes on the horizon as you approach the ground.

Best to learn this when you're told. learning by experience means you've just driven your femurs through your pelvis.

The problem is the same one that deer get when you see them in your headlights. Paralysis, and the total lack of ability to take effective action. You're scrabbling for the steel D-ring at the end of the ripcord, but your fingers can't make the connection.

You do have time to wonder how high you'll bounce.

When everything in your life is going wrong, and you stare at the oncoming disaster, you're going to funnel yourself right into it. Kind of like the old saying that when a man thinks he's going to die tomorrow, he'll usually find some way to make it happen.

But if you raise your eyes to the horizon - you will find that Jesus is falling at your side.

And look - he's reaching for the ripcord you can't reach!

Warriors

Where did anyone get the idea that being a warrior was fun?

Every fight I've been in, I wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

There's that song, "Voice of Truth", with the lines:

"...surrounded by the sound of a thousand warriors
shaking in their armor,
and wishing they'd have had the strength to stand..."

Much to Barbara's displeasure, I rewrote one line...

"...surrounded by the sound of a thousand warriors
shaking in their armor,
and wishing they'd have had the sense to stay home..."

It's certainly more representative of most combat infantrymen.

And yet...why do so many return for another tour, forsaking home and family? They get into theater, and bind and moan about everything, and long to return home.

And then look forward to the next deployment.

Is this crazy? Are we madmen, who can't find anything better to do than dice with death like over-the-edge hot-rodders on Mulholland Boulevard?

Or are we cold killers, whose senses are so deadened that we can only feel through nihilism?

And do we love our families so lightly that we can leave them to a final government paycheck...or, for a contractor, sometimes nothing at all?

Are we patriots, looking, like modern-day Nathan Hales, for a place to give that one life for our country?

None of the above, I think...or at least, the above form only small pieces framing a larger whole.

Going into a fight, we're coming home.

Home is a place where life is reduced to elemental factors. Dry is better than wet, warm is better than cold. Defilade - when the enemy can't put direct fire on you - is better than being enfiladed (being shot at).

The guys around you are the most important thing in the world, and you can't let them down.

And that is the key. Your wife may divorce you, your kids may run away, your parents may disown you.

But somewhere out there is a guy who will go back-to-back with you, and is perfectly willing to die with you, surrounded by empty shell cases.

Kind of like Jesus.