Daily Devotions

In the last post I showed how Adam and Eve were given the command by God that they were to worship and obey, and showing how these words are used of the Levites, God’s ministers.  Well, Adam and Eve have some other similarities with the Levites.

When Adam and Eve find out they are naked after their sin, they are embarrassed, and they try and cover up their own sin by their own power, the suit of fig leaves.  God then “finds out” they sinned, he punishes them, Adam names his wife Eve (which is huge by the way, the first display of faith in the Bible), then God clothes them with skin from an animal.  This is huge for two reasons, first it shows that something had to die to cover them.  This was the first example of a sacrifice for sin.  The second reason it is important is that the words used to describe God covering them are the same as those used to describe the clothing of priests who work in the sanctuary for God.  Once again, vocabulary shows the linking of Adam to the priests, showing how Eden is the ideal sanctuary.

Another thing that shows Eden as a sanctuary is the mention of the stones and the gold that were found in the garden in Genesis 2:12.  The “good gold” is the same words describing the most precious things in the sanctuary like the ark.  Also, the onyx stone is the same type of stone that was on the breastplate (Ex. 25).

These are a few more examples of Eden being seen as the ideal sanctuary.  Much of the two last posts come from the study of Gordon Wenham from the article Sanctuary Symbolism in the Garden of Eden Story.  Please search out his work for more study on these subjects.

The garden of Eden, the amazing place that Adam and Eve were put in after God created them.  We all wish we could still be there, but because of the sin of Adam, we were cast out of the garden and into the wilderness.  (The garden of Eden is representative of the promised land, and when Adam and Eve are not in sin, they are there dwelling with God, but after they sin, they are cast out into the wilderness, just like when the Israelites disobey  God, they are sent into the wilderness as punishment.)  God put them there, and after He created everything he gave them a command, which will be the center of discussion of this post.  Exactly what was the command that God gave them; was it how many translations render to be “tend and keep” or “work it and keep it,” or should Genesis 2:15 be translated differently?  I would suggest that it should be translated differently.  These words in the original are also found other places in the Old Testament, and we always want to at least take into account how the rest of Scripture is used and translate everything in its context.  These same verbs are used together else where, and here are some of the references:  Numbers 3:7-8, 8:26, 18:5-6.  These are all references to Levites’ duties in the sanctuary.  If Adam is put on the same level as the Levites, who were those who would minister in the sanctuary, it makes good sense that they were the first priests.

I, along with many others, would rather translate these two words “worship and obey,” because Eden is seen and portrayed as the ideal sanctuary.  There are many, many other reasons for this, some which will be discussed in future posts.

I became a Christian when I was young, about 7 years old. I grew up In a family that was always in Church, and one Sunday after church I asked my mom how to be saved, and she told me that I needed to pray and ask Jesus into my heart and that He would take my sins away, so I went into my room and did that. I believe that Jesus became my savior that day, though my own walk was weak, I did know and trust that it was only through Him that I could go to heaven.
I’m sure many of you have a similar story. Sometimes though when I hear other peoples testimony of being involved with drugs or sexual relationships, hearing how God completely hanged their lives upon their trusting in Him I get a little jealous. It also makes me question if I am really saved, because we know that salvation is really demonstrated when a persons life is changed because of what God has done.
We also know that when we are saved, we still struggle with sin. This is a fact that will remain true until the Lord returns, but that does not make sinning ok. We need to continue to strive to rid our lives of sin, and this is only accomplished through Jesus, He gives us the strength to change. This is no different than the change that occurs in the life of a person who has just been saved! If we were saved young, we don’t need to fear that there was no change right after salvation, our continual change from sin to life in Jesus demonstrates that we are really saved.

The photo to the right is from the Hubble telescope. It was taken in 1995 and released today as the Hubble web site’s photo of the day. As reported here by Wired Science, the photo captures the creation of a star. The web site goes on to state “it makes us wish even more for the eternal life of this famous sattleite.”

While this image certainly makes me wish the hubble telescope did not have to be taken out of commission, as a believer in the creator God of the Chrstian Bible, it makes me wish more for the eternal life I will one day spend in the presence of him who created such awesome beauty!

The brilliance of the colors and the gasses captured as a star forms in the remotest section of our universe immediately reminds me of Psalm 19:1. Here, David proclaims ”The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.” These “Pillars of Creation” as they have been labeled represent only a glimpse of the excellent image of the glory of our almighty God. They cause me to take pause in my day and to meditate on the superior glory of him who created such an amazing sight.

These pillars of creation create a longing in me, much like Paul expreses, for “the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and savior, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:11-15). One day we who trust in him as the creator and sustainer of the universe – as the only means of salvation from our bondage to sin – will sing eternal praises in the presence him and his Son.

“For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities– all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” – Colossians 1:16-17

If you follow Christian pop-culture, you’ve probably recently heard the story of Jennifer Knapp and her return to music. She not only is releasing a new album after a long break (about 7 years), but along side of that announcement she is revealing that she is and has been in a same sex relationship for 8 years now. She said in this article that she has chosen to reveal this part of her life so folks buying her album will not be deceived about who she really is. I do appreciate her honesty. Some Christians choose not to buy a certain product or go to a certain venue because of that product’s or venue’s view on a certain issue. (While there may be some merit to that, I don’t think its really possible to do so all the time. So many stores that we shop at every day support causes that Christians are [should be] opposed to, whether it be homosexuality, pro-choice efforts, or even child labor. It is nearly impossible in America nowadays to boycott every venue and product that does not line up with our values.)

I believe it is clear in Scripture that the ideal relationship of marriage is between a man and a woman, and that any kind of same sex action is sinful. I know people who have struggled with same sex attraction, which I believe is not sinful if they are striving not to act upon that desire. We cannot help our desires, we can only pray that God would change our heart to have the same desires of His heart. I have never been presented with a good Biblical argument for allowing same sex marriages/relationships, and believe that it can be seen both from the creation order as well as the New Testament, that a proper relationship is between a man and woman.

We as believers must remember to keep the most important thing primary, which is the gospel. How should a Christian love a person, believer or not, who is in a same sex relationship? It is a little different depending on if the person is a believer, or if they are not a believer.

If it is an unbeliever, we should show them the love of Christ. It should not surprise us that someone who does not have the Spirit of Christ indwelling them will be in sin! Thats what unbelievers do, sin! Show them love, and preach the gospel to them and pray for them to turn their lives over to the Lordship of Christ.

If the person is a believer, our approach is similar. We should first show them love. We as Christians must first love them, just as Christ loved us in our sinful state. After we have shown them love, in whatever manner they need to be loved, we then may proceed to lovingly point them to the Scriptures that show what a God-honoring relationship is. If we present them the Scriptures, and they disagree with us, it is not us they are disagreeing with, but God.

Its important to remember that no sin is worse than any other sin. Homosexual actions is bad, but so is lying, lust, stealing, over-indulging, wasting time, wasting money, etc. We in the American church have over emphasized homosexuality as a big sin, when in fact we are also in sin by not showing love to one another by being hateful to those who are attracted to the same gender.

Overall, remember that “they will know we are Christians by our love.”

I am a web developer by day. This is probably pretty boring to most of you. It means that I sit in front of the computer for at least 8 hours hacking away at the keyboard with my fat fingers to make sites like DEEPERDEVOTION.com work the way the do. The programing language that I code in is called PHP. As are all programing languages, PHP is very logical and most people could read simple code easily to understand what it is doing because it uses english words like ‘if’, ‘then’, ‘else’, etc.

This morning I ran across a t-shirt on cafepress.com that was somebody’s attempt to declare their theology with PHP. It went like this:

There are a couple things wrong with this attempt at being clever:

1. As far as the PHP goes, there are multiple errors
   1. Words that start with a dollar sign in PHP are called variables. They represent something. They have to be set somewhere before they can be used. $jesus is not defined anywhere so it can’t be compared to ‘Lord’. That’s an error.
   2. PHP functions happen between opening and closing squiggly brackets { … }. This code has an error in that the opening bracket is a closing bracket.
   3. PHP functions receive information (variables), process it, and return it to where it came from (most of the time). This function doesn’t receive or return any data.
2. Theologically (and more importantly) there are a couple errors as well
   1. Romans 10:9 (for your reference): “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved;”
   2. First, the conditional statement does not align with Scripture. The author says ‘if Jesus is Lord, you will be saved.’ If you believe Scripture, you know that Jesus is Lord regardless of whether one believes it or not. That means that the above conditional “if Jesus is equal to Lord” will always return true… which means $you would always equal to ‘being saved’.
   3. Second, The conditional statement is incomplete… even if it worked correctly. Paul’s conditions are outlined below:
      1. You must confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord (which he is even if you don’t confess).
      2. You must believe in your heart that Jesus is risen from the dead.
      3. Only if those two things are true does Paul contend that you “will be saved”.

So, why take the time to outline this?

Countless believers make statements like this every day of their life without knowing it. We try to insert the gospel into a context that will make it accessible to non-believers. In doing so, we water it down or we misrepresent the message of Jesus because a) we don’t understand the basis of the message correctly ourselves (the theological errors mentioned above) or b) we commit gramatical and logical mistakes in our rush to ‘market’ the gospel (the PHP errors mentioned above). Such mistakes are detrimental to the person of Jesus. Christians all too often paint a horrible picture of the gospel and this is all the exposure that unbelievers get to the gospel.

Case in point

This shirt was brought to my attention on Twitter by another PHP developer that I respect for his coding and professional work. To my knowledge he has never professed to believe Jesus is Lord and, to the counter,  made the following statements concerning this shirt:

• It’s deeply satisfying that this PHP+Jesus shirt would cause a fatal error and nothing happens even IF $jesus==”Lord”
• $you = ’saved’? What does that mean? If $jesus != “Lord”, what is $you? Christian theology at its best folks.

You know what. I agreed with him on everything other than ‘This is Christian theology at is best”. I believe this is at its worst, but nonetheless, I acknowledged to him that this is popular christian theology. This is what we wear (literally and figuratively) and this is how unbelievers respond.

I’m grateful for this individuals insight into ‘christian culture’ and I think he hit the nail on the head.

So what can you do to better your theology. Its actually pretty simple: read the scriptures and think before you speak (or write in PHP) your beliefs. In fact, it’s so easy that this individual nailed the gospel head on by providing his own code here: http://pastie.org/928094 Note: his ‘zombie_jesus’ is equal to what you would call the ‘resurrected Jesus’.

Proverbs 31.  This chapter instantly recalls countless Mother’s Day sermons we all have heard throughout the years.  This is an interesting chapter, especially starting in verse 10 is when it gets extremely interesting to me.  This verse starts out with this phrase:
אֵֽשֶׁת־חַיִל

An excellent woman…

That particular translation is from the ESV, and I don’t think its a great one.  This particular word “chayil” isn’t normally used of women; it normally means strength, might, ability, etc.  Excellent wouldn’t be a translation that I would use.  If you look in a lexicon that lists the words uses, all except two uses will be about strength, ability, fitness, only twice is it translated “integrity” or something like that.  While that translation surely isn’t wrong, does it really represent what the word means?

The only other place this phrase is used, “eshat chayil” is used just one book later (in the Hebrew Bible, also called the TaNaK, which I will explain in a different post) in the book of Ruth. In Ruth 2:11, Ruth is called an “eshat chayil” or a woman of valor, strength.  A person reading their Hebrew Bible well would notice the reoccurrence of this phrase, because the words only occur in conjunction these two times.  The author (or perhaps editor) of these two books is drawing the readers attention simultaneously to Ruth and the Proverbs 31 woman.

Could Ruth be an example of this perfect woman, that is worth more than rubies?  I think the editor of the Hebrew Bible put these two books together for this specific purpose (probably with other purposes as well, but this one seems quite obvious).

James 1:19-20
“Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires. Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.”

God requires righteousness from me. He expects for me, as a redeemed child of God to, to pursue holiness at every turn. Holiness is the expectation. Anger is an outward manifestation towards the inward disconnect between me and the word of God.

As a child of God, I have been forgiven of my sins by the death of Jesus Christ. Stated differently, Jesus’ righteousness – or holiness – has been applied to me on his behalf. I am no longer in bondage to sin, to its ungodly desires, or to its destructive nature. This includes anger.

When James warns me that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires” he is not suggesting that I could produce righteousness that leads to salvation. I know that Ephesians 2:8,9 says “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” Rather, James is hinting at what he will later explain in greater detail: true faith and true righteousness will be justified (or made apparent in my life) by my good deeds.

A simple way to think about this is to say that true righteousness, which only comes from God, will always be accompanied by righteous living.

This truth brings me to a welcomed reality check. What is happening to me spiritually when I become angry or my decisions are producing an unrighteous lifestyle? If I am continually given to anger and unholiness there is a high likelihood that I am not subjecting myself to a constant intake of the word of God. I am not reading my Bible. I am not spending time in prayer. I am not talking with other believers about my relationship with God.

What then do I do if I find this to be true in my life? First, I must ask myself several tough questions:

• Do I really believe that Jesus is the Son of God?
• Do I really believe that I was born into this world a sinful person, damned to spend eternity separate from God?
• Do I really believe that Jesus, though He was righteous, took on the full wrath of God for me and paid for my unrighteousness?
• Do I believe that I have been redeemed by the blood of Jesus and am set free from the bondage of sin?

If I answer yes to the above questions and still find myself angry and practicing a life of unholiness, there is only one option. James makes it very clear in verse 21: “Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.” I must commit to stop making unholy decisions and I must depend on the Holy Spirit to lead me through that commitment. This is called the process of sanctification and it will not happen unless I consistently “receive with meekness the implanted word.” If I am not willing to work out my sanctification with fear and trembling, I fooling myself when I claim to be a child of God.

Anger and unrighteous living is a sure sign of my disconnect from the word of God.

By Carolina Kavanaugh

A little mindless entertainment

It was a typical evening for me. My husband and I had just finished cleaning up after dinner, and we sat down to see what was on TV in order to end the day with a little mindless entertainment. We ended up watching a show about 2 families who switch wives and consequently “moms.”

Although I had seen this show before, this one particular episode really made an impact on me because of one of the wives’ strong devotion to animal rights. Not only did she not eat any animal or animal byproduct, but she also didn’t wear any clothes that came from an animal. On top of that, she preached veganism openly and talked about how she hoped to plant seeds in people’s minds so that they too might consider veganism.

The mindless entertainment turns thought provoking

It wasn’t her devotion however that impacted me. Countless times I have witnessed many people who were devoted to all kinds of causes or ideals. What stunned me the most however, was the way that the show attempted to expose and utterly scrutinize any possible hypocrisy that they could find in her. For example, they would show a clip of her saying something passionate for her cause and then show a clip of her spanking the family dog for messing on the floor.

I have to admit that at first it was funny, but I realized that the bigger issue wasn’t that they were exposing a certain hypocrite, but that those who choose to take a stand for anything in this culture will always be judged and scrutinized. Whether you take a stand for animal rights, the environment, or the right to carry a gun, you will be criticized and judged, because that is what the world does. This world applauds people who tolerate anything and everything and choose the path of least resistance.

Nothing is really mindless

As Christians, we have to realize that it is not just because we are taking a stand for Jesus that we will be judged by our culture, but because we take a stand for anything at all.

As Christians, we have to realize that it is not just because we are taking a stand for Jesus that we will be judged by our culture, but because we take a stand for anything at all. Look around you and you will see people making decisions about things and right along side them you will see others criticizing and picking them apart.

So be encouraged in your stand for Jesus! Expect the scrutiny and be thankful that what you are taking a stand for has the one and only God behind it approving of you all along the way. When you realize that, it really doesn’t matter what anyone thinks or says. As for the vegan woman, I wish her the best, and I hope she finds Jesus because her kind of passion mixed in with a reckless abandon for God could be quite a sight!

originally published 07/31/2005

by Danahli

Romans 12:1,2

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–His good, pleasing and perfect will.

What does fully surrendering your life to God really mean? Like it says in Romans 12:1,2, “offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is considered your spiritual act of worship to the Lord.”

First, you must give up your body to the Lord and then give up your rights. This may seem difficult to deal with, since we, born into human nature, think we have certain rights over ourselves. But when you really think about it, God was the One Who created us for His purpose. He loves us enough to provide each of us with freewill, therefore, not being forced to love Him, but choosing out of the depths of our hearts to love Him with our own realization that we need Him in order to fulfill our life’s purpose.

In the second verse it states: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” By doing this we will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–His good, pleasing and perfect will.

The social pressure that comes from living in this world can sometimes push people into doing things they would otherwise not even think about. With the renewing of our mind we will be able to resist such worldly stress.

Another way of conforming to this world would be to have materialistic and humanistic values. We must rid ourselves of these secular views by transforming our thoughts to become more like Gods way of thinking.

Some good ways of renewing your mind is to read and meditate on Gods Word. Applying biblical principles to everyday circumstances is always a helpful way to get through the day. Memorizing Scripture along with prayer and worship are always a good method of refreshing your thoughts.

Have you fully surrendered yourself to God?