Morning & Evening for February 21st - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Morning
My expectation is from Him.
Psalm 62:5
It is the believer's privilege to use this language. If he is looking for aught from the world, it is a poor "expectation" indeed. But if he looks to God for the supply of his wants, whether in temporal or spiritual blessings, his expectation" will not be a vain one. Constantly he may draw from the bank of faith, and get his need supplied out of the riches of God's lovingkindness. This I know, I had rather have God for my banker than all the Rothschilds. My Lord never fails to honour His promises; and when we bring them to His throne, He never sends them back unanswered. Therefore I will wait only at His door, for He ever opens it with the hand of munificent grace. At this hour I will try Him anew. But we have "expectations" beyond this life. We shall die soon; and then our "expectation is from Him." Do we not expect that when we lie upon the bed of sickness He will send angels to carry us to His bosom? We believe that when the pulse is faint, and the heart heaves heavily, some angelic messenger shall stand and look with loving eyes upon us, and whisper, "Sister spirit, come away!" As we approach the heavenly gate, we expect to hear the welcome invitation, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." We are expecting harps of gold and crowns of glory; we are hoping soon to be amongst the multitude of shining ones before the throne; we are looking forward and longing for the time when we shall be like our glorious Lord--for "We shall see Him as He is." Then if these be thine "expectations," O my soul, live for God; live with the desire and resolve to glorify Him from whom cometh all thy supplies, and of whose grace in thy election, redemption, and calling, it is that thou hast any "expectation" of coming glory.
Evening
The barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord, which He spake by Elijah.
1 Kings 17:16
See the faithfulness of divine love. You observe that this woman had daily necessities. She had herself and her son to feed in a time of famine; and now, in addition, the prophet Elijah was to be fed too. But though the need was threefold, yet the supply of meal wasted not, for she had a constant supply. Each day she made calls upon the barrel, but yet each day it remained the same. You, dear reader, have daily necessities, and because they come so frequently, you are apt to fear that the barrel of meal will one day be empty, and the cruse of oil will fail you. Rest assured that, according to the Word of God, this shall not be the case. Each day, though it bring its trouble, shall bring its help; and though you should live to outnumber the years of Methuselah, and though your needs should be as many as the sands of the seashore, yet shall God's grace and mercy last through all your necessities, and you shall never know a real lack. For three long years, in this widow's days, the heavens never saw a cloud, and the stars never wept a holy tear of dew upon the wicked earth: famine, and desolation, and death, made the land a howling wilderness, but this woman never was hungry, but always joyful in abundance. So shall it be with you. You shall see the sinner's hope perish, for he trusts his native strength; you shall see the proud Pharisee's confidence totter, for he builds his hope upon the sand; you shall see even your own schemes blasted and withered, but you yourself shall find that your place of defence shall be the munition of rocks: "Your bread shall be given you, and your water shall be sure." Better have God for your guardian, than the Bank of England for your possession. You might spend the wealth of the Indies, but the infinite riches of God you can never exhaust.
Brute' says Americans need to learn how to hibernate though this leadership winter.
Why Me? Integrity
Be that as it may, with the invention of the movable metal type printing press in 1440 by German Johannes Gutenberg, we now have for the first time in this series a written history of the continuing development of European culture in which books, pamphlets, and handbills can be widely distributed to a least the literate classes. This miraculous dissemination of information provided the technological and energetic basis for Martin Luther and other reformers to get their message out into the world.
So really what was that message?
That message essentially focused on the reality that the Roman Catholic Church had forfeited its integrity in matters concerning both the temporal and the eternal world. Today we see a similar lack of moral and ethical virtue in the general or common perceptions of people toward both formal religion and also atheistic materialism. Just as with the Reformation Roman church it is perceived that all leadership is focused on temporal wealth and power rather than on either the people themselves or their eternal destiny.
While the peasants and serfs of medieval Europe were much more concerned with daily survival, humans, being human, always require a belief that our daily struggles and aspirations will one day receive a personal reward. This concept can only come from our soul created in the image of God. Any attempt by any worldly power to corrupt that hope, desire, or pilgrimage will eventually loose the integrity it needs to continue to rule, reign, or even exist.
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Week in Review: February 14-20, 2010
“Moral compass? I don’t need no stinkin’ moral compass, I make my own way in this world and I am proud of it.”
This was evident in the Austin, Texas happening on Thursday where Joe Stack, a disgruntled former software engineer, crashed his small plane into the local IRS building, leaving behind his house he set on fire, and a reported 3000 word manifesto on the Internet.
What makes a person do such a thing?
It is easy to say that he was a crazy man and crazy men do stupid things, but that is just simplistic spin to cover a more complex causality. Joe may have been angry with the IRS, but he was still wealthy enough to have a house to set on fire, and a small plane he could fly into the building. So until he flew that plane into that building, our world really didn’t care one little bit about Joe’s problems, Joe’s house, or Joe’s plane. So Joe set out to end his miserable life, suicide by airplane, sort of similar to suicide by cop, so prevalent in many firearm disputes. By his plane’s compass, now dead Joe could find the Austin building, but Joe’s moral compass could not save his life.
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Morning & Evening for February 21st - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Morning
He hath said.
Hebrews 13:5
If we can only grasp these words by faith, we have an all-conquering weapon in our hand. What doubt will not be slain by this two-edged sword? What fear is there which shall not fall smitten with a deadly wound before this arrow from the bow of God's covenant? Will not the distresses of life and the pangs of death; will not the corruptions within, and the snares without; will not the trials from above, and the temptations from beneath, all seem but light afflictions, when we can hide ourselves beneath the bulwark of "He hath said"? Yes; whether for delight in our quietude, or for strength in our conflict, "He hath said" must be our daily resort. And this may teach us the extreme value of searching the Scriptures. There may be a promise in the Word which would exactly fit your case, but you may not know of it, and therefore you miss its comfort. You are like prisoners in a dungeon, and there may be one key in the bunch which would unlock the door, and you might be free; but if you will not look for it, you may remain a prisoner still, though liberty is so near at hand. There may be a potent medicine in the great pharmacopoeia of Scripture, and you may yet continue sick unless you will examine and search the Scriptures to discover what "He hath said." Should you not, besides reading the Bible, store your memories richly with the promises of God? You can recollect the sayings of great men; you treasure up the verses of renowned poets; ought you not to be profound in your knowledge of the words of God, so that you may be able to quote them readily when you would solve a difficulty, or overthrow a doubt? Since "He hath said" is the source of all wisdom, and the fountain of all comfort, let it dwell in you richly, as "A well of water, springing up unto everlasting life." So shall you grow healthy, strong, and happy in the divine life.
Evening
Understandest thou what thou readest?
Acts 8:30
We should be abler teachers of others, and less liable to be carried about by every wind of doctrine, if we sought to have a more intelligent understanding of the Word of God. As the Holy Ghost, the Author of the Scriptures is He who alone can enlighten us rightly to understand them, we should constantly ask His teaching, and His guidance into all truth. When the prophet Daniel would interpret Nebuchadnezzar's dream, what did he do? He set himself to earnest prayer that God would open up the vision. The apostle John, in his vision at Patmos, saw a book sealed with seven seals which none was found worthy to open, or so much as to look upon. The book was afterwards opened by the Lion of the tribe of Judah, who had prevailed to open it; but it is written first--"I wept much." The tears of John, which were his liquid prayers, were, so far as he was concerned, the sacred keys by which the folded book was opened. Therefore, if, for your own and others' profiting, you desire to be "filled with the knowledge of God's will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding," remember that prayer is your best means of study: like Daniel, you shall understand the dream, and the interpretation thereof, when you have sought unto God; and like John you shall see the seven seals of precious truth unloosed, after you have wept much. Stones are not broken, except by an earnest use of the hammer; and the stone-breaker must go down on his knees. Use the hammer of diligence, and let the knee of prayer be exercised, and there is not a stony doctrine in revelation which is useful for you to understand, which will not fly into shivers under the exercise of prayer and faith. You may force your way through anything with the leverage of prayer. Thoughts and reasonings are like the steel wedges which give a hold upon truth; but prayer is the lever, the prise which forces open the iron chest of sacred mystery, that we may get the treasure hidden within.
Why Me? Stupendous Change
So many Americans, especially those who worked hard to find their security in traditional American values, are grossly disappointed in the reality that when the candidate Obama said change, he really meant that unsettling word, “CHANGE!”
Oh, the audacity of that strange change fellow! We asked for warm feely change, and would you believe it, he really wanted to deliver change that was bordering on what most people would consider stupendous change. This angst is especially true because they elected George W. Bush twice, and he could not deliver on those warm fuzzy desires either. In fact Bush tried so hard by the end of his second term he had basically crashed all of our retirement security, in the names of freedom and unsustainable spending.
“Oh Jesus, what are we to do?”
Of course to bring the words of Jesus into the lyrics of a somewhat contemporary country song: “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden!”
That brings us to our topic of stupendous change in this week’s article – history. We left off last week at the close of the Tower of Babel myth, which occurred sometime before we have verifiable historic records. By verifiable I mean two or more historical records that point to a very similar occurrence at a somewhat consistent time frame. That history goes back about four thousand years or on the Biblical timeline of what is now considered the Middle East, the time of Abraham or Abram.
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Green Vitriol
Back in the 1970s when the fear that the world was known to be heading towards another ice age, one of the discussions against cleaning up the air, was that it may lead to global warming. What we are now told in essence, when we saved the world from dirty pollution, we condemned the world to invisible pollution. So the cheap and simple solution should be let’s get dirty again. Of course that is really just a straight-forward fix that doesn’t fit within our self-righteousness coin flipping to save the planet — get rich.
If we could ask the Wooly Mammoths they would tell us to watch those ocean effect snowfalls because they could cause you to freeze to death in the stupendous snowy change that would start an ice age. Of course they did freeze to death during the start of an ice age. So in all our human smarts we know that we really don’t want to have that enter into our frigid natural philosophy discussions.
Now when we talk about green vitriol we are not talking about crystalline ferrous sulfate, but rather a vitriolic discussion about green energy and how it is going to save us from global warming and at the same time allow us to continue our gluttonous energetic lifestyle. That just isn’t going to happen, no matter what religious mantras we invoke, incantate, or resuscitate. There are a number reasons for that.
First of all our current technologies to provide green energy are just technological refinements of the stuff we had a generation ago. The reason the world does not run on windmills, solar panels and other similar technologies, is that they are not cost effective in comparison to fossil fuels and hydropower. Back in the last potential green revolution, the effective costs for these green energy solutions were about fifty percent higher than their vitriolic competitors. So to be an energetic solution the price of crude oil needed to be in excess of about $60 a barrel. For a short time that happened, but that was not a window, but more a freakish event.
Today we really don’t know what that break even number is, but just factoring in inflation that would probably put the energetic push with oil at from $80 — $90. The problem is the current price of oil is just below those figures, and has traded in that $70 — $80 range for about a year now since the Saudis stated that the world price of oil should be at least $70. Of course there is no market making manipulation there, just a simple commodity trading program, access to a whole lot of free money from saving the world from financial collapse, and someone with an Internet connection writing oil industry press releases such as:
- Oil rises on fears snow will increase heating oil demand.
- Oil falls because record snows keep people at home and off the road.
Furthermore, we really don’t know how much oil is available in the less than $90 range. Back when peak oil competed with global cooling for environmental headlines we would have learned by now we would all be riding bicycles.
So if we really want good clean green technology what we really need to do is tax oil products so that the effective price of oil is say $100 a barrel. Then we could produce a market for all that green technology, except we really could not make enough solar panels and windmills to make a dent in our need for fossil fuel energy, and what would all that green energy do to the local environments, with windmills killing birds and solar panels covering hundreds to thousands of square miles? Then of course if we really want to be green, we must look at the total carbon footprint for those windmills and solar panels, including their design, manufacture, installation, maintenance, and distribution system.
Then, of course, it would help our save the world dreams if we replaced our current stupid electrical grid, with a smart grid. That would be a smart thing to do, because we now waste about 62% of the electrical energy generate according to the NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory). Of course if we do that we should look at the total carbon footprint of that endeavor also. Furthermore if we eliminated all the energy wastes, that would also eliminate the need for cap and trade or energy taxes.
This discussion is especially important because most of the new green energy works just as well or better without a grid tie. Could it be that Thomas Edison was right about DC (direct current) and Nikola Tesla was wrong with AC (alternating current)? Of course without grid ties the land we sacrifice of green energy could be used for something else, but then our cities would grow dark, unless we build some other type of really green centralized power plants, with a much better spin on the technology that is now viewed with vitriol. But just look at the opportunities that would allow for the collusion between the big government and the big crony global corporations.
So what we briefly see is saving the world from ourselves really is not as simple as it comes out in the talking points and well edited speeches. Perhaps if we could find a way to harness all the green, political, and wasted energy in the country, we could find ways to live together with energy independence for all. But lighting those light bulbs in our minds could not be done with compact fluorescents, for the mercury poisoning would effect our already demented intelligence.
Morning & Evening for February 14th - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Morning
And his allowance was a continual allowance given him of the king, a daily rate for every day, all the days of his life.
2 Kings 25:30
Jehoiachin was not sent away from the king's palace with a store to last him for months, but his provision was given him as a daily pension. Herein he well pictures the happy position of all the Lord's people. A daily portion is all that a man really wants. We do not need tomorrow's supplies; that day has not yet dawned, and its wants are as yet unborn. The thirst which we may suffer in the month of June does not need to be quenched in February, for we do not feel it yet; if we have enough for each day as the days arrive we shall never know want. Sufficient for the day is all that we can enjoy. We cannot eat or drink or wear more than the day's supply of food and raiment; the surplus gives us the care of storing it, and the anxiety of watching against a thief. One staff aids a traveller, but a bundle of staves is a heavy burden. Enough is not only as good as a feast, but is all that the veriest glutton can truly enjoy. This is all that we should expect; a craving for more than this is ungrateful. When our Father does not give us more, we should be content with his daily allowance. Jehoiachin's case is ours, we have a sure portion, a portion given us of the king, a gracious portion, and a perpetual portion. Here is surely ground for thankfulness.
Beloved Christian reader, in matters of grace you need a daily supply. You have no store of strength. Day by day must you seek help from above. It is a very sweet assurance that a daily portion is provided for you. In the word, through the ministry, by meditation, in prayer, and waiting upon God you shall receive renewed strength. In Jesus all needful things are laid up for you. Then enjoy your continual allowance. Never go hungry while the daily bread of grace is on the table of mercy.
Evening
She was healed immediately.
Luke 8:47
One of the most touching and teaching of the Saviour's miracles is before us to-night. The woman was very ignorant. She imagined that virtue came out of Christ by a law of necessity, without His knowledge or direct will. Moreover, she was a stranger to the generosity of Jesus' character, or she would not have gone behind to steal the cure which He was so ready to bestow. Misery should always place itself right in the face of mercy. Had she known the love of Jesus' heart, she would have said, "I have but to put myself where He can see me--His omniscience will teach Him my case, and His love at once will work my cure." We admire her faith, but we marvel at her ignorance. After she had obtained the cure, she rejoiced with trembling: glad was she that the divine virtue had wrought a marvel in her; but she feared lest Christ should retract the blessing, and put a negative upon the grant of His grace: little did she comprehend the fulness of His love! We have not so clear a view of Him as we could wish; we know not the heights and depths of His love; but we know of a surety that He is too good to withdraw from a trembling soul the gift which it has been able to obtain. But here is the marvel of it: little as was her knowledge, her faith, because it was real faith, saved her, and saved her at once. There was no tedious delay--faith's miracle was instantaneous. If we have faith as a grain of mustard seed, salvation is our present and eternal possession. If in the list of the Lord's children we are written as the feeblest of the family, yet, being heirs through faith, no power, human or devilish, can eject us from salvation. If we dare not lean our heads upon His bosom with John, yet if we can venture in the press behind Him, and touch the hem of his garment, we are made whole. Courage, timid one! thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace. "Being justified by faith, we have peace with God."
The Audacity of Wrong
I had begun to question this whole New Deal salvation when I read the “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression” by Amity Shales, earlier this year, So I wondered what I might find online, to increase my knowledge of this unknown earlier depression that Glenn had used as a model for fixing our country’s and the world’s economic mess. After some searching I came across “The U. S. Economy in the 1920s” an article by Gene Smiley of Marquette University. This is a very thorough discussion of that decade of almost twenty six thousand words and graphs that took up sixty four pages in my computer’s PDF format. A link to the article is also found under our Resources Tab.
What the Smiley article showed, and as Beck addressed, the Depression that began in 1920 was much more severe that anything we have faced in the current meltdown and bailouts. Furthermore the fix of letting the markets work to rebuild, or as Glenn said, “reboot the system” accomplished an economic miracle in which unemployment fell from over 11% to less than 2% in short order.
As with our current situation, speculation in securities coupled with tight money policies, was a correct but simplistic description of the beginning of the Great Depression. However if you link the growth of the 1920s followed by the Depression of the 1930s, this broader historical context more vividly displays the reality pointed out so well in “The Forgotten Man.” In this larger context Roosevelt’s New Deal was truly the antithesis of what the economy really needed.
If looked at in a global perspective, the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic happened essentially concurrently with the 1920s depression. While Germany’s problems were related to reparations required under terms of the War’s armistice for payment in gold, Hitler himself attributed much of that period’s instability to the success of his ability to bring National Socialism to Germany, which began in 1925 through 1933 when Nazi power was finally established.
Just as with the Great Depression, the current Obama Administration is determined to save the country and by extension the world, by a bigger and better New Deal. Ben Bernanke has been put in charge of the Federal Reserve for another four years because he saved the universe from another Great Depression, when he was Alan Greenspan’s easy money debt lieutenant as this totally unforeseen economic catastrophe developed? So now we are just beginning to see that United States program of huge governmental spending, coupled with creation of essentially worthless money, is quickly becoming the Audacity of Wrong.
What makes this so serious is that the economic recovery during the 1920s and thwarted during the 1930s Great Depression, was essentially get out of the way and let the market system work, while a broad spectrum of economic opportunities became reality. The problem we face today is that those growth industries and services are not only mature but beyond their prime.
The political leadership of the United States in both political parties are basically saying, “Don’t worry, be happy, the 1990s (1920s) will be here again.” Surely this is the Audacity of Wrong, there are currently no quantum leaps in either energetics or information to carry us forward, In fact much of that mature infrastructure is in the way of producing a new economy. Government bureaucrats, big unions, and crony capitalists all want the status quo to continue because they have their piece of the pie and they are unwilling to share that shrinking pie with what is generally called the folks, or the American people. This problem is even more pronounced now in the eurozone where you add the reality of crony nation states.
The first step in economic rebooting the United States, and the world for that matter, is the realization that debt doesn’t create wealth, all it can do is shuffle or reshuffle the deck chairs on the global economic Titanic now that it has hit an iceberg. There are some life rafts that can get some to shore, and thereby use the knowledge we have gained to build some newly designed economic ships, but the major problem is the great flood of the ocean of non energetic debt money that has covered all the dry land. For those who only have life jackets, they must realize they cannot borrow their way to shore, but must tread water looking for emerging sprouts on the slowly reemerging land. The allegory of the Noah flood in the Bible comes to mind. Soon dry land will emerge from the sea, and the seeds and sprouts of new opportunties will appear.
The moral to the story is that as much as we think we control the world, and have a plan to save the world, new opportunities of growth will come from reclaimed liquidity water that will irrigate a dry land, not from human wishful thinking. The basis for that new land and the irrigation system in the United States, was and is the vision of our Founders, and the documents that they produced. In short, wealth production needs real equity liquidity to grow, not quick sprinkling economic debt stimulus. That new equity will in short order change the Audacity of Wrong into the Promise of New Real Wealth.
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Why Me? The Babel Constant
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Myth: a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, typically involving supernatural beings or events.
Following along different myth paths from either the creation of all life from God’s will or the evolution of some human out of the trees of Africa a few billion years ago, things are getting more interesting. Since time is of the essence however, we will let our readers do their own evolutionary trip but only make a comment.
Does it seem only a coincidence that these most ancient human ancestors are found in Africa, which today we still consider the most primitive place on earth, when it comes to just about anything. Actually it seems as the most logical place to look, considering that there are more monkeys in Africa than anyplace else. But that still doesn’t answer the fundamental question of the leap of faith in intelligence and that little thing such as language. That was just a minor evolutionary leap of faith from squeaks and screams to the iPad. No wonder we need a lot of time. Of course only in the twenty-first century would all this evolving technology seem like a true advancement rather than a waste of precious time.
So when we last left Adam and Eve, they were sinners in the Garden of Eden. The short synopsis of the events thereafter is that the Creator made clothing for the couple, therein creating a covenant of God’s grace, today, in its true essence, the most rare substance on earth.
Then God kicked the couple out of the Garden so that they would not become immortal. They had kids and more kids, and just like today their kids were more self-centered than their parents. Since we know little of those days we must assume that it had little to do with their music their lack of a work ethic. Those things after all take a long time to evolve, or just plain develop. Perhaps a rebel without a cause really is just an unconscious effort to become something new and unique from our parent’s influence?
These kids got so bad that the mean God decided to start over, so he had the dude named Noah to build an arc out of wood, with the help of his reluctant offspring. They got on the ship with two of each kind of animals and it started to rain. During that episode of a little over a month, the vapor canopy that made the earth an Eden, collapsed, waters also came out of the depths of the earth. That was some climate change you could believe in, except for the reality that unless you were on that little life raft, along with all other terrestrial life on earth, you became today’s motor fuel.
In the process of making all that crude oil, so as not to completely try the human experiment all over again, the bottoms of oceans rose rapidly, a lot of that mud ran back into the sea, leaving all sorts of amazing features such as grand canyons, graceful arches, natural features so amazing that it would need a whole section of North America to display the power of these miracles. So today we can even see this if we travel from sea level in the Gulf of Mexico up to say the volcano land of Yellowstone National Park, at about eight thousand feet. That is a real trip of just two thousand miles, with a few side excursions to see some of that truly miraculous scenery. Truthfully the only way you can believe that this happened over billions of years, is just to close off your mind entirely to the existence of God.
The existence of God, that is really what the Bible myth is all about; back to Noah after the flood. The whole human experiment began over again. The Bible says that his ship came to rest on Mount Ararat, which is the present country of Turkey. Some have said that the ship actually exists, buried in a glacier up on the mountain, but we would never really want to find out if it exists for real, for that would make all the evolutionary hocus pocus, be just that. So just to continue to go our own way without God, we will just continue to babel about how we are getting better and better all the time.
This brings us to human noise in the extreme, what the Bible calls the Tower of Babel experience. This occurred not all that long after the end of the Genesis Flood. All the kids the sons of Noah begat after flood settled down on the plains and decided that it was a great place to call home. Cities are like that, they have all that human culture, they are great places to life, and outside the city is really wilderness, with all types of scary things and weird creatures. If we spend too much time out in that forbidden land, who knows it might just scare the hell out of us. We really would not want that to happen, after all that is so – primitive, and we all need to stick together so that we can reinforce our the evolving goodness of elitism.
In the Biblical Tower of Babel myth we find, something we find so mystifying that we can’t at all understand what it meant. Why on God’s green earth would we want to speak different languages. God knows, even we Yanks can’t speak the Queen’s English, and English itself is so imprecise that just about anyone can make up a word and in our world, in a brief instance everyone around the world will know what we are talking about.
Since we used such a word, a short time ago, we will use the example of an iPad. As with all of recent Apple computer creations notice the “i” subservient to the technology, so as to show that owning an “iSomething” really is what makes “you – You.” This is of course marketing genius, but it is not unique in human history, because in the Tower of Babel Biblical discourse we find the “iTower” which is really in its cohesive community, “The WeTower.”
The really great thing about a uniform evolutionary history of millions and billions of years is it takes away our accountability and our responsibility for anything and everything that happens today, that most good people consider bad, for we know that evil really doesn’t exist, so we will call it by some more politically correct term or terms. If we call “terrorism” something like “man caused disasters” they will go away, or at least become part of the wild universe, where we are too scared to venture, for we the highly evolved, are scared to death of the unknown.
Just as in the whole Biblical creation account, we, created in the image of God, know that God used words as his informational construct for creating, building, and eventually recreating the world. Hence if we use words properly, we can create a new world order, out of the chaos of language. This assumes ultimately that our babel can become Babel. Of course this only works in a universe where God, if he exists at all, is here to do our bidding, so that we can create a world in our image, for the good of everyone else.
Let us digress for a moment. Much is said about the teleprompter use of the President of the United States. As a highly trained lawyer, he like no other leader in perhaps the world today, understands that words have meaning. Not only do words have meaning, the punctuation of the words, in the string of words we call sentences, which develop into paragraphs, which become articles, books and speeches, have meaning also. This view of reality was also reinforced in the church he attended for twenty years. The (black) liberation theology that was preached by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is a process by which the use of words is used to elevate persons of color, to equality amongst all of God’s people.
What is lost in all human babel is that our words do not create anything at all they only reflect the reality of God’s creation, and if God did or doesn’t create that reality our words, are just words no matter the language we use, within the diversity of human language, but also within each language. We are not God and hence only God creates ex nihilo. Those ex nihilo creation words create Godly complex mathematical equations by which the world operates. Actually the math is really just a humanly created symbolic language used to describe natural laws, again that humans can only model they cannot even begin to understand except in truly spiritual or mythological means.
So back early in Genesis Chapter 11 we see the story of the Tower of Babel. In the Authorized, or King James Version it includes just 9 verses and a total of 235 words, with no paragraphs. Since this is the English language version of the Bible that the Apostle Paul used, we see that mixing up languages is no big deal to God. The major function of all this was to get people to move to other areas of the earth and develop a diversity of character more reflective of God himself, rather than mono-ethnic human desires. Through this whole language babel we learned not to trust one another, not because we humans really had changed at all, it was just that we always fear, not so much reality, but we have trouble expressing our fear in words, which is the basis for all of our world’s tribes and nations.
Now so the myth of a created universal history of thousands rather than millions and billions of years is presented in the Bible, a garden, a universal flood, and civilization growing again to a Tower of Babel forcing humans to migrate around the world, must make that babbling experiment not all that long ago and as a consequence something real in this world in which we live. Furthermore perhaps the complexity of the land itself in some miraculous, mysterious, or mythical way contributes to the creation of language and the formation of the cultures they maintain and we are working so diligently to eradicate, with so little success, but that is another mythical line.
When you look at the formation of the United States form of government, for the most part it still remains distinctly unique. Then when you realize that wealth of America came from the fertility of the land, the diversity of her immigrants, and the unity of her language, it illustrates really the grace of God that flows to those who attempt to live according not in accordance with God’s Law, but the power of God’s grace. The founding documents of the United States of America attempt to create a nation “under God.” That God is not pagan gods, Allah the god of Islam, the forces of the universe, or gods of human material fabrication.
Inalienable rights which the Founders sought to codify in words, succinctly the understanding that each human being is truly unique from one another, yet still uniquely unified in our humanity. That unity in diversity is the best description for the Christian Triune Godhead, that unity in diversity came forth in a Constitution that recognized that not all Christians, were Calvinists, some were Baptists. God only knows why but some of the Baptists were also Calvinists and some were not. Some thought it was acceptable to treat other humans as slaves, that struggle took on Civil War ramifications, but through it all the grace of God prevailed, and the United States of America became the most truly successful nation in human history, not because of anything other than the grace of God.
This current Great Recession, in this country and as it has been exported around the world is really the result of a bunch of babblers attempting to create another Tower of Babel in which we can live without God. It didn’t work back thousands of years ago, it won’t work today, but just as in that Mythical real Babel, the people at work to build this new Babylon, are unwilling to learn from the reality of this myth of history.
So to use an uncommon word from the ancient world to describe world in which we live and we Americans are the exporting leaders, through our spin of myths are the greatest sophists of history and currently seem to have no desire substantially change our way, no matter how stupid our babel becomes.
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Week in Review: January 31 - February 6, 2010
Last Monday President Obama released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2011. The proposal listed $3.83 trillion in spending, much to fight the continuing economic malaise, all of this showing the biggest deficit percentage since 1945. It is hoped this year’s deficit will come in around $1.6 trillion to be followed with something around a trillion in 2011.
As discussed by the spin-doctors and pundits, this is either the salvation or the end of the economic world, as we know it. What all these people are hoping for – is through the budget, or changes to the budget, we can return to the prosperity that the nation and the world we hoped would continue forever, namely the 1990s.
What no one seems to understand is that the ‘90s were funded basically by the housing bubble, monetarily securitizing that debt, and selling it to the rest of the world. To believe that we can do it all again, with some other zero risk – get rich scheme, borders on stupidity, if not insanity. I suppose the good news, as bad as the United States economic woes; the dollar has rebounded, thanks to things being worse elsewhere.
What the world really needs is money in the old fashioned sense, like a medium of exchange for goods and services, not a Ponzi Scheme of central bankers, politicians, and various leveraged market makers. That real money will not be loaded on the world’s economic ship until sometime in the unknown future. In the meantime the world will continue to be awash in an ocean of non-energetic debt money, with no real place to go, because the players, either don’t seem to care, or they haven’t got a clue.
On the left coast, Southern California slowly continues to wash into the Pacific Ocean. On the right coast massive snowfalls have broken trees, power lines, and frozen transit, creating economic ice. One town in Maryland is said to have received over 40 inches. The area is expected to receive another winter blast toward the middle of the week. Here in the northwest, the record snows of the last two winters have been replaced with almost an extended spring, with just freezing nights and pleasant days.
El Nino is the climate culprit in all of this. Warm ocean waters in the Pacific have shifted storm tracks to the south, so we see more rain in the arid southwest and as it moves east this moisture laden air becomes essentially an ocean effect snow, similar to the lake effect snowfalls around the Great Lakes, but this time over a lot larger area.
In all the climate change debate about global warming, nothing in the models fits this happening, but many creation scientists, believe that just more massive events as these, were the underlying reality that brought on the ice age after a period of warmth following the Biblical Genesis Flood.
Morning & Evening for February 7th - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Morning
Praying always.
Ephesians 6:18
What multitudes of prayers we have put up from the first moment when we learned to pray. Our first prayer was a prayer for ourselves; we asked that God would have mercy upon us, and blot out our sin. He heard us. But when He had blotted out our sins like a cloud, then we had more prayers for ourselves. We have had to pray for sanctifying grace, for constraining and restraining grace; we have been led to crave for a fresh assurance of faith, for the comfortable application of the promise, for deliverance in the hour of temptation, for help in the time of duty, and for succour in the day of trial. We have been compelled to go to God for our souls, as constant beggars asking for everything. Bear witness, children of God, you have never been able to get anything for your souls elsewhere. All the bread your soul has eaten has come down from heaven, and all the water of which it has drank has flowed from the living rock--Christ Jesus the Lord. Your soul has never grown rich in itself; it has always been a pensioner upon the daily bounty of God; and hence your prayers have ascended to heaven for a range of spiritual mercies all but infinite. Your wants were innumerable, and therefore the supplies have been infinitely great, and your prayers have been as varied as the mercies have been countless. Then have you not cause to say, "I love the Lord, because He hath heard the voice of my supplication"? For as your prayers have been many, so also have been God's answers to them. He has heard you in the day of trouble, has strengthened you, and helped you, even when you dishonoured Him by trembling and doubting at the mercy-seat. Remember this, and let it fill your heart with gratitude to God, who has thus graciously heard your poor weak prayers. "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits."
Evening
Pray one for another.
James 5:16
As an encouragement cheerfully to offer intercessory prayer, remember that such prayer is the sweetest God ever hears, for the prayer of Christ is of this character. In all the incense which our Great High Priest now puts into the golden censer, there is not a single grain for Himself. His intercession must be the most acceptable of all supplications--and the more like our prayer is to Christ's, the sweeter it will be; thus while petitions for ourselves will be accepted, our pleadings for others, having in them more of the fruits of the Spirit, more love, more faith, more brotherly kindness, will be, through the precious merits of Jesus, the sweetest oblation that we can offer to God, the very fat of our sacrifice. Remember, again, that intercessory prayer is exceedingly prevalent. What wonders it has wrought! The Word of God teems with its marvellous deeds. Believer, thou hast a mighty engine in thy hand, use it well, use it constantly, use it with faith, and thou shalt surely be a benefactor to thy brethren. When thou hast the King's ear, speak to Him for the suffering members of His body. When thou art favoured to draw very near to His throne, and the King saith to thee, "Ask, and I will give thee what thou wilt," let thy petitions be, not for thyself alone, but for the many who need His aid. If thou hast grace at all, and art not an intercessor, that grace must be small as a grain of mustard seed. Thou hast just enough grace to float thy soul clear from the quicksand, but thou hast no deep floods of grace, or else thou wouldst carry in thy joyous bark a weighty cargo of the wants of others, and thou wouldst bring back from thy Lord, for them, rich blessings which but for thee they might not have obtained:--
Oh, let my hands forget their skill,
My tongue be silent, cold, and still,
This bounding heart forget to beat,
If I forget the mercy-seat!
Why Me? Paradise Lost: Part 2
Our human world builds its society based upon myths. Of course we have now redefined many of them in terms of the myth of science, for the most part to justify our philosophy or religion, many times both. Some of our myths are as old as human language; some are quite modern. To become a myth means that there is something believable about the story. The power of that appeal to truth, greatly contributes to the longevity of the myth.
Old myths in someway touch the deeper soul of humanity; their appeal is many times based upon an unspoken or unknown truth, perhaps even an absolute truth that transcends humanity and life itself. New myths do not stand that test of time as well, and if they lose their basic tenants through corruption and exaggeration, they cease to be myths, or even wise fairy tales.
The creation account in the Bible’s book of Genesis fits our definition of myth. The written record is attributed to Moses, but the oral tradition basically goes back to the creation of it all, and specifically through the development of a human society on earth from a couple we call Adam and Eve, created by God, in his image.
A modern myth is the demise of the earth and everything upon it via the mechanism of global warming caused by man induced greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, but not limited just to that form of hot air. Recent emails that report that the basic assumptions of the myth were manufactured to support a religious bias, have hurt the myth’s plausibility by many who were and are skeptical not only of the underlying truth of the myth, but also the integrity of the proponents.
Just this week, further skepticism has developed because the UN Global Warming comprehensive report was based on some of the science, not in peer reviewed literature, but a popular magazine and a master’s thesis. Furthermore the author of the UN report also authored a novel about the sexual exploits of a well known global warming expert’s exploits as he traveled the world promoting an agenda of?
This week we look at the old myth found in Genesis Chapter 2 and 3, on how sin entered into the human species. The basis of this myth is that all life, as well as all creation was created not by a god, but the God, who gave us a written testimony of his existence and his plan for an age in which we now live. We find that testimony in a Book we call the Bible. Read More...
Current national leadership is out of touch
What is never discussed is the fact that before the recession began over 70% of the American economy was based upon consumer spending. It is assumed by both sides of the budget debate that if we just follow their perspectives, which can be summarized as tax cuts or tax increases, all will again be peachy keen in no time.
The meltdowns and the bailouts were enacted, because a consumer economy based upon cheap debt, fueled by a housing bubble, has run out of gas. To assume, by either plan, and a whole lot of positive thinking we will find our way out of the deep woods has no basis in real reality.
Both parties recent political histories of either tax and spend or tax breaks and spend are based on a dumbed down views of not only human enterprise but also human culture. The basis in both of these paradigms is that we are smart enough to manage everything, generally under the faith in the premise that we specifically are promoting alone, and really not much else.
What both concepts do is combine leadership principles of power and authority essentially in the Federal government. First of all, authority means you have the lawful and common right to lead. Power means you have the actual ability to make it happen. The U. S. Constitution really rests very limited authority in the Federal government and even less power. Most of both are left to the states and to the people themselves.
Finally natural ecosystems grow to maturity and then reach a climax state, where energetic utilization becomes greater essentially through true diversification. This means that naturally we will find ways to replace the material consumerism if the politicians and their special interest get out of the way and let the system work. If they do not the whole culture will collapse and we will have to begin again at some lower level of both information and energetics. That is not spin just the wisdom of Deep Woods Moola.
Week in Review: January 24-30, 2010
The biggest change in our world came on Wednesday the 27th with Apple’s announcement of their new iPad. Sure this doesn’t have the earthshaking ramifications of President Obama’s State of the Union Address later that evening – well maybe it does, for the President’s remarks seemed to be more of the same coming out a Washington, but we will get back to that later.
I bought a Mac Plus in 1985, it had 1mb of ram, internal and external 800k floppy drives, an Apple dot matrix printer, and cost about $3300 out the door. Following that Apple developmental line, lest we forget the iPad is really the evolutionary descendent of the Newton which debuted in 1993 and died a silent death in 1998. In that intervening decade we have seen the emergence of our current vast array of PDA’s that have greatly changed the way the world does its business and its pleasure. It seems today that the world has become touch-screen; the new iPad now means we might be able to do something revolutionary with touch-screen technology.
I stopped into the local Apple reseller in Spokane on Saturday and they knew just about what you could gather from reading the press, and they said it would probably be a couple of weeks before they would know if they would be able to handle both the Wi-Fi and the 3G versions.
The significance of the technology will probably have a dramatic effect on both your web interface and how you do your reading of what is generally called print media. The ability to embed video in what used to be solely printed words will open a new frontier in the way we get and manage our information. The most apparent is being an acceleration of the dismantling of traditional books, magazines, and newspapers. Just as important is how publishers and authors are going to get paid for their endeavors. The real need for a laptop or desk computer will be that some of us still need a real keyboard to get information at speed into our pages, pretty much everything else we do, can be done on an iPad with a price point varying between $500 – $900.
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