Opining

#546

This very morning, a University student told me that many of his classmates were born in the early 1990s. They do not even remember Clinton as President. Today's young people, particularly University students, so need a hero...people they can look up to...not these vermin...today's politicians...full of corruption, projecting themselves as leaders.

Think of Jeremiah Denton, retired Admiral, retired U.S. Senator from Alabama, who spent 8 years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict. Read his book, When Hell Was In Session and see what it was like to have served your country...to have survived the torture of Vietnam. Weep when you realize that your own country is now involved in torture that, reportedly, the CIA sent back live pictures to Washington D.C. pictures of Iraq prisoners being tortured so that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld could watch the atrocity.

“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” (Isa 9:2)

We have just observed Easter weekend, a time for revival and renewal, a time for self evaluation in the Christian world. If we missed the true meaning of Easter, prayer, praise, fasting and repentance, we have become just as our unbelieving neighbors. Today's “Christians” are afraid they will embarrass their unbelieving neighbors by living their Christian faith in front of them. Most churches are more concerned with changing God than with God changing them.

There were three men on crosses on Golgotha's Hill. The thief on the right, second person into heaven, chose to believe in our blessed Lord. The thief on the left, only interested in self, wanted to be delivered from the cross, (the thief on the street), Barabbas, had been delivered from the cross in the center because the church people, like today's church people, chose a thief in a popularity contest. To them and for all eternity, our blessed Lord said on that first Easter, “forgive them, they know not what they do”. (Luke 23:34)

Christ spoke the Aramaic language, a Semitic language still spoken by about 40,000 people in Syria. The words he spoke on the cross are the same as those found in Psalm 22:1. “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mat 27:46) Every person, throughout life, whether personally or because of a family member has a bewitching reality with those words. The Apostle Paul, writer of 14 books of the New Testament, had finally arrived in Rome, and from his prison cell, wrote his love letter to the church at Philippi. On one of his three missionary journeys, God had stopped him in Troas, and there, he got the Macedonian message to go to Macedonia. Arriving in the city of Philippi, he was beaten and thrown into the inner part of the prison. There, in stocks (wood restraints), at midnight, he sang hymns, and then an earthquake so shook the prison, that he was instantly freed, his jailer, and the jailer's family, became the founders of the first church in Philippi. It was now 11 years later and Paul was riding to the church. Over and over in the verses of this short book, Paul in prison again in Rome, used the word joy. In Philippians Chapter 4, 4th verse he said, “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice!” This is the true Easter message, “that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death (Phi 3:10).

This is the joy of today's living. Remember, no one has a nervous breakdown over today's living, it is always the life of tomorrow. “Tomorrow will take care of itself”. (Mat 6:34) Betty Smith wrote the book ,Tomorrow will be Better but in today's world, that is not necessarily true. We can only take one day at the time, never doubt in the dark what God has promised you in the light.

There is more than your present economical conditions. Muslims, from the very beginning, had two houses, the house of Islam and the house of war. Supposedly, peace was an early concept of Muhammad's' but with the progression of the house of war, all Jews and all others, Gentiles, will be put to death.

Turkey is the world's 17th largest economy, even larger than the economy of Saudi Arabia. Europeans and others think they can live with the Muslim threat because of Turkey. The earliest Muslims were dealers in human slavery. Areas of the world where the Muslims are still in control show you their profligation through Sharia law.

I was in Nigeria during the Biafra conflict resulting from the British bifurcation of Nigeria leading to the non-ending conflict between the Muslims and Christians. Thousands have died in murder and inconceivable starvation very much like that going on now in Darfur (Sudan). Most of the political troubles in Africa come from what I call, a new tribalism. There were always tribal conflicts and then with colonial exploitation by the British, French, Belgian, Dutch and Portuguese, the exploring of mineral rich Africa for oil, copper, diamonds, gold etc. the poor and the disenfranchised, as always, are the victims, then and now. I never cease to be amazed that nations, thoroughly exposed to decency of religion, are so excited and so adapt thievery. When you go to the great museums of London and other colonial powers you see the art and hear about the wealth transported from the colonies (sculpture from the Acropolis at Athens etc.). Even more opining and deleterious is the culling of bifurcated nations by Marxism which reared it's ugly head into these bewildered nations under the guise of tyrants mostly of the people's own choosing (Liberia, Niger, Somalia etc.)

It is never the mothers and children of these depressed countries who are responsible for the pride, anger, lust, greed, laziness (you note these are all carnal sins) involved. There is not record of one failed woman in the bible. The people on the streets in Jerusalem were not concerned with the thief they had freed on the street (Barabbas). Materialism and consumerism is more a threat to the soul than persecution. If you were the only person with sight, would you not be concerned with the blind? If you were the only person left on the battlefield would you not try to care for the wounded?

The thief on the right recognized not only his physical condition but his moral condition. With Santa Claus and flying reindeer, Christmas, the birth of our blessed Lord, was turned into cash register bells and brawling. Now, the celebration of our blessed Lord's resurrection, we have “Peeps”, marshmallow candies, found everywhere, creations of small animals.

Eric Berne's book Games People Play is a good opining concerning what has happened to these two Christian monuments, Christmas and Easter. Our Savior is real. He is either the truth, what he said he was, the way, the truth, the life, the light, the bread of life, the water of life, the door, or he was the greatest fraud in history. The thief on the left would have accepted our blessed Lord if the crown of thorns were a crown of gold. The nails through his hands could have been turned into gold and he could have been loosened on the streets to resume his stealing. The world would accept Christ, his way of life, if they could return to the streets unchanged. If the crust of the earth were gold, the world would still lie, cheat and steal for a handful of dirt. Stop playing games! The five most important words, in Holy scripture, Christ's mother's words at the wedding in Cana, “Whatsoever he saith unto you” (Jhn 2:5)