Archive for the 'Walking with God' Category

Genesis 11:8 - The Tower of Babel - Parables

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
As we saw in Genesis 11:5-8 - The Tower Babel - And the LORD Came Down… Twice, Jesus brought down Angels from Heaven, and He confused the languages of Shinar. No longer would they share the Sumerian language. Their cooperation gone, they dispersed into cities and nations. History tells us that the clans of Eber retained their Semitic language, and this would develop into Hebrew. We also know that one of Babel’s sister cities, Akkad, would develop a language that would eventually assimilate the rest of the region, even working Sumerian into an odd variant on both languages. …

Genesis 11:5 - What Tower are You Building?

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

 5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
Jubilees 10 records it as follows…
22 - And the Lord our God said unto us: Behold, they are one people, and (this) they begin to do, and now nothing …

Putting God to the Test

Friday, April 8th, 2011

Back in Summary of God’s Righteousness, I summarized some of God’s characteristics that we should find when we see Him being just:

He listens to the prayers of the righteous (those who believe and obey Him)
He saves the righteous (those who believe and obey Him) from the unrighteous (those who do not believe and obey Him)
His justice is immeasurable
He is genuinely deserving of praise and thanksgiving
He is unique
 - An immeasurable source of righteousness (accounts righteousness for believing Him)
 - The greatest source of justice
 - The only one deserving of praise (the rest of us are not righteous per se, but God willingly sees us righteous when we believe and obey Him)

While our righteousness is from believing and obeying God, God’s righteousness is …

God’s Righteousness (not Goodness) is the Reason for Our Hope

Thursday, March 31st, 2011

Skeptics argue that by creating man as a creature that can sin, and then not stopping them from doing so, God is therefore responsible for (read as “causing”) all sin, and so cannot be all good. Many Christians respond that acts of omission are not necessarily wrong, that it is acts of commission that are wrong. But the skeptic sees the active creation of a free-willed person, a person God knows will sin, as an act of commission, and this true as far as it goes. To this, Christians will typically respond with descriptions of God’s majesty, quoting scripture that tells us (truthfully!) that God’s ways are higher than ours, and that it’s only in human arrogance that we even attempt …

Let the Earth not Boast in Evolution

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

Memo to Earth: Do not boast.

Why do I say this? Because I have seen your obedience to God, and then watched you take the credit, as if God doesn’t exist.
Genesis 1:24
24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.”
And you did in fact take what life was already there, and produce the livestock and cattle we have from them. You produced them according to their kinds, yet you take credit for what you have done. But you err, for the passage goes on…
And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according …

Devotional: We do not realize what we ask

Monday, January 31st, 2011

This morning, my devotional book cited Exdous 3:1-15. It is the account of Moses and the burning bush. What really caught my attention however was God’s answer when Moses asked what to say when people ask him God’s name…
 14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

 15 God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’

   “This is my name forever,
   the name you shall call me
   from generation to generation.
Though a Christian, note that I …

Genesis 9:12-17 - And God Will Remember His Promise

Friday, November 26th, 2010

 12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 Whenever the rainbow appears in the …

God’s Sabbath was Full of Mercy

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Since writing Jesus Showed Mercy when He Made Eve on God’s Sabbath, it has dawned on my that God’s Sabbath, if it indeed was from Adam’s birth to Methuselah’s bar mitzvah, was just full of mercy.  Recall Jesus’ justification for his “working” on the sabbath in Matthew 12:7, that God desires mercy, not sacrifice.  In other words, instead of sacrificing the benefits and convenience of “working” on the Sabbath, God would rather we spend the sabbath being merciful than being martyrs of sacrifice.  For a modern, if trivial example: God would rather I move my car from the street on the sabbath so that kids can play, rather than accepting the odd reputation it gets me for refusing to move …

God’s Sabbath - With whom did God walk?

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

As I said in God’s Sabbath Lines up with His Seeming Absence, God did appear to walk with Noah’s ancestral line.  However, I want to be more specific.  Jesus Himself walked in the Garden.  I believe it was Him who talked with Adam, and potentially the Holy Spirit who brought the animals to Adam.  God the Father was in Heaven (Jesus always refers to the Father as His Father “Who is in Heaven”).

After Adam was expelled from the garden, God was physically absent from Adam’s life.

Later on, Abel was born and sacrificed to God a lamb.  God the Father smelled the sweet aroma in Heaven, and accepted the …

Genesis 8:21-9:7 - God Changes the Game

Monday, August 30th, 2010

With the flood over, it would seem that God is looking back over the circumstances that led to the flood, and is given Noah and his family a slightly different set of rules by which to live.

Before the fall, God gave man plants to eat (Gen 1:29, 2:16), and animals to subdue (Gen 1:28, 2:18).  After the fall, God cursed the ground (Gen. 3:17), making it hard to till.  Rather than farm the ground, Abel decided to raise animals for food (Gen 4:2,4); Cain tilled the ground (Gen 4:2,3).  Now, how do we know Abel’s flocks were for food? Because he knew to give God the fat most flavorful part… the fat portions. 

Cain, it would seem, was the more obedient …