Not Far From Any of Us!

"But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing." 

                                                                                                                                                  Jas 1:25

Prov.14:15  "An unthinking person believes everything, but the prudent one thinks before acting." Simply stated this proverb is so true, and evil and the one through whom all evil comes (Satan) loves that type of person. People who don't think, who don't study to see how to make themselves a better person, people who care nothing for God, or God's word. Satan doesn't even mind you going to Christian assemblies or Bible discussions and studies, as long as you don’t do anything with what you learn.

If we assume that just because we have heard, read or studied a truth,that we have internalized or "got" it, then we are a fool. Practically everything in life teaches us the direct opposite.  I have attended seminars where you are so busy going to the next session that you have no time to implement what you've learned. The colloquial expression is "In one ear and out the other."  You forget it almost as soon as you hear it. The fact is, without implementation, our efforts become   worthless. Jesus said, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock” (Mt.7:24).

God’s blessing comes from obeying the truth, not just knowing it. He said, “Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them” (Jn.13:17). Yet, in the midst of these words from the Lord Himself, we have those who say, "I don't need all that study." or "I get all the religion I need and only come once a week."  Yet others state, "I come all the time, but haven't learned anything new in years."   Paul stated in Act 17:27  "God did this so that people would look for him and perhaps reach out and find him although in fact, he is not far from each one of us," Perhaps then we are not learning, growing or progressing because we are not looking for God, or looking for what God puts right before us. 

The best way to become a doer of the Word is to always write out step to be accomplished as a result of your reading or reflection on God’s Word. Develop the habit of writing down exactly what you intend to do, based upon what you have just learned. It should be personal (involving you), practical (something you CAN do), and provable (with a deadline to do it). Every application should involve either your relationship to God, relationship to others, or your who you are.  Being a part of a small Bible study discussion group, coming to Wednesday night studies, Sunday morning study or services. We always learn from others things that we would never learn on our own. Other people will help us to  see insights we would miss and help us to learn to apply God’s truth in a practical way.

 What has God told you to do in his Word that you haven’t started doing yet? Start today! Start recording and following through with steps as part of your Bible study.

Jim

Dating Homer

 Geneticists Estimate Publication Date Of The 'Iliad' | LiveScience (ISNS) -- Scientists who decode

the genetic history of humans

by tracking how genes mutate

have applied the same

technique to one of the Western

world's most ancient and

celebrated texts to uncover the

date it was first written.

The text is Homer's "Iliad," and

Homer -- if there was such a

person -- probably wrote it in

762 B.C., give or take 50 years,

the researchers found. The

"Iliad" tells the story of the

Trojan War -- if there was such

a war -- with Greeks battling

Trojans.

The researchers accept the

received orthodoxy that a war happened and someone named Homer wrote about it, said

Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England. His collaborators

include Eric Altschuler, a geneticist at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey,

in Newark, and Andreea S. Calude, a linguist also at Reading and the Sante Fe Institute in New

Mexico. They worked from the standard text of the epic poem.

The date they came up with fits the time most scholars think the "Iliad" was compiled, so the

paper, published in the journal Bioessays, won't have classicists in a snit. The study mostly

affirms what they have been saying, that it was written around the eighth century B.C.

That geneticists got into such a project should be no surprise, Pagel said.

"Languages behave just extraordinarily like genes," Pagel said. "It is directly analogous. We

tried to document the regularities in linguistic evolution and study Homer's vocabulary as a

way of seeing if language evolves the way we think it does. If so, then we should be able to

find a date for Homer."

It is unlikely there ever was one individual man named Homer who wrote the "Iliad." Brian

Rose, professor of classical studies and curator of the Mediterranean section at the University

of Pennsylvania Museum, said it is clear the "Iliad" is a compilation of oral tradition going

back to the 13th century B.C.

"It's an amalgam of lots of stories that seemed focused on conflicts in one particular area of

northwestern Turkey," Rose said.

The story of the "Iliad" is well known, full of characters like Helen of Troy, Achilles, Paris,

Agamemnon and a slew of gods and goddesses behaving badly. It recounts how a gigantic

fleet of Greek ships sailed across the "wine dark sea" to besiege Troy and regain a stolen wife.

Its sequel is the "Odyssey."

Classicists and archeologists are fairly certain Troy existed and generally know where it is. In

the 19th century, the German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the Englishman Frank

Calvert excavated what is known as the Citadel of Troy and found evidence of a military

conflict in the 12th century B.C., including arrows and 5 feet of burned debris around a buried

fortress. Whether it was a war between Troy and a foreign element, or a civil war is unknown,

Rose said.

The compilation we know as the "Iliad" was written centuries later, the date Pagel is

proposing.

The scientists tracked the words in the "Iliad" the way they would track genes in a genome.

The researchers employed a linguistic tool called the Swadesh word list, put together in the

1940s and 1950s by American linguist Morris Swadesh. The list contains approximately 200

concepts that have words apparently in every language and every culture, Pagel said. These

are usually words for body parts, colors, necessary relationships like "father" and "mother."

They looked for Swadesh words in the "Iliad" and found 173 of them. Then, they measured

how they changed.

They took the language of the Hittites, a people that existed during the time the war may have

been fought, and modern Greek, and traced the changes in the words from Hittite to Homeric

to modern. It is precisely how they measure the genetic history of humans, going back and

seeing how and when genes alter over time.

For example, they looked at cognates, words derived from ancestral words. There is "water" in

English, "wasser" in German, "vatten" in Swedish, all cognates emanating from "wator" in

proto-German. However, the Old English "hund" later became "hound" but eventually was

replaced by "dog," not a cognate.

"I'm an evolutionary theorist," Pagel said. "I study language because it's such a remarkable

culturally transmitted replicator. It replicates with a fidelity that's just astonishing."

By documenting the regularity of the linguistic mutations, Pagel and the others have given a

timeline to the story of Helen and the men who died for her -- genetics meets the classics.

In Search of Barnabas

 In search of Barnabas A recent article (here) in the York [Pennsylvania] Daily Record features the research of Messiah College professor Dr. Michael Cosby. Cosby received a Fulbright Grant to do this research in Cyprus, a place associated with the life of Barnabas.

Barnabas is best known to most of us because of his association with the Apostle Paul on the first missionary journey. He is mentioned more than 20 times in the Book of Acts. Other than that, he is mentioned 3 times in Galatians 2, and once each in 1 Corinthians and Colossians.

We understand from Luke’s account that Barnabas, also known as Joseph, was a Levite of Cyprus (Acts 4:36). The first stop on the First Journey was at Salamis on the eastern end of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus (Acts 13:1-5). There the preachers spoke in the synagogue of the Jews, and later on the western end of the island at Paphos.

When Paul and Barnabas had a dispute prior to the Second Journey, Barnabas took his cousin Mark and went to Cyprus (Acts 15:36-41).

Nothing else is mentioned in the Bible about Barnabas and the island of Cyprus. But a great amount of tradition has grown up on the island. It is this tradition that Prof. Cosby studied, and he researched the association of the tradition to the modern Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus, and the privileges granted to the Cypriot archbishops.

Having just visited Cyprus last year I find this a fascinating article. Perhaps you will enjoy it.

According to a tradition dating back to 488 A.D., the sepulcher of Barnabas was discovered by Anthemios, the Archbishop of Constantia and placed in a church he built near the tomb. The photo below shows the now-empty church near the ruins of Roman Salamis.

The Church of Barnabas at Salamis. Photo by Ferrell Jenkins.

Salamis is now located in the the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, or as the folks in the south of Cyprus say, “the occupied territory.”

Where Is Sodom?

Genesis 13, archaeology and Biblical geography provide new answers

Biblical Archaeology Society Staff   •  02/20/2013

In the article “Where Is Sodom?”, archaeologist Steven Collins, using clues from the Biblical geography of Genesis 13 together with archaeological evidence from the site of Tall el-Hammam (pictured), argues that Biblical tradition located Sodom in a fertile area northeast of the Dead Sea.

According to the Bible, “the men of Sodom were wicked” (Genesis 13, verse 13). For its many sins, God destroyed Sodom and all the inhabitants of the “cities of the plain” in an intense conflagration, but not before allowing Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family to flee to safety.

The stories of Sodom and its destruction, whether historical or not, were clearly understood to have occurred near the Dead Sea, among the so-called “cities of the plain” mentioned in Genesis 13, verse 12. But where exactly was this plain, and was a particular site associated with Sodom? In the article “Where Is Sodom?” in the March/April 2013 issue of BAR, archaeologist Steven Collins combines clues from Biblical geography with archaeological evidence from the site of Tall el-Hammam in Jordan to suggest that the author of Genesis 13 located Sodom in a fertile area northeast of the Dead Sea.

So where is Sodom, according to the Biblical geography of Genesis 13? Sodom and its sister cities are located in the large oval-shaped, fertile plain just north of the Dead Sea called simply ha-kikkar, or “the Disk” (Genesis 13, verse 13). In Biblical geography, this well-watered disk-shaped plain, said to have been located east of the highland towns of Bethel and Ai, was an area “like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt” where Lot moved his family after his quarrel with Abraham (Genesis 13, verse 10). It is also the place where the Biblical writers set their dramatic tale of Sodom’s wickedness and destruction (Genesis 19).
 

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In the new BAS DVD Discovering Genesis and the Origins of the Biblical World, the late Dr. David Neiman expertly guides you through the book’s first 11 chapters, examining how the Biblical writers grappled with the fundamental questions and mysteries of the shared human experience.

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Seeking to answer the question “Where is Sodom?” and using the Biblical geography of Genesis 13 as a guide, Collins decided to excavate Tall el-Hammam, an extensive and heavily fortified site located in modern Jordan at the eastern edge of the kikkar. First inhabited during the Chalcolithic period (4600–3600 B.C.E.), the site attained its maximum size during the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000–1600 B.C.E.) and became one of the largest cities in Canaan. But unlike other Canaanite cities that continued to flourish in the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 B.C.E.), Tall el-Hammam was destroyed by fire at the end of the Middle Bronze Age and remained uninhabited for centuries.

Across Tall el-Hammam, archaeologists found widespread evidence of an intense conflagration that left the Middle Bronze Age city in ruins. They found scorched foundations and floors buried under nearly 3 feet of dark grey ash, as well as dozens of pottery sherds covered with a frothy, “melted” surface; the glassy appearance indicates that they were briefly exposed to temperatures well in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the approximate heat of volcanic magma. Such evidence suggests the city and its environs were catastrophically destroyed in a sudden and extreme conflagration.

Was it this event—which destroyed Hammam and the other cities of the kikkar—that was remembered by the Biblical writers in their telling of the story of Sodom?

We're NOT Hermits!

If so that if I am delayed, you may know how one should behave in the household of God, which is the Community of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth. (1 Tim.3:15 )

God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen.2:18). Yes, this is referring to the creation of woman as the help meet for man, but have you ever thought about why God made that statement, that it is not good for man to be alone, or by himself?  This is a statement that does not apply to just marriage. 

We are created to be part of a community. We are born into a family, a group that forms relationships, bonds, and fellowship. We are urged from youth to adapt skills of intercommunication, how to play fair with others, how to be considerate of those we're around, and more. Interpersonal skills are cultivated in us, and even the world at large requires it of us. 

The Bible knows nothing of solitary saints or spiritual hermits. Even when the mighty Elijah fled to a cave to hide from people, God calls him out of the cave (1 Ki.19:13-15), He didn't want Elijah to be by himself. God's will required him to be out among people, not secluded in a cave alone. 

While our relationship to Christ is a personal one, God never intended it to be private and secluded. God does not wanting us living our lives as Christians in secluded personal caves shut off from everyone else.  It is important to understand, that in Acts 2:47 God ADDS us to His family. That means that just like when we are born in life we are born into a family, so too, when we are born spiritually (Jn.3:5; Rom.6:1-4), we are added to God's spiritual family.  The Bible says, “In Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others” (Rom.12:5). Following Christ includes belonging, not just believing. We term it "membership," but noted author C.S. Lewis stated once,  that the word "membership" is of Christian origin, but the world has emptied it of its original meaning. Stores offer discounts to “members,” and advertisers use "member names" to create mailing lists. In Christian corners, membership is often reduced to adding your name to a roll like you are attending school. 

 Paul, references being a “member” of God's family means being a vital organ of a living body. As part of the family of God, we are interconnected with ever other part of the Body of Christ.  God's family is a body, not a building!  It is a living organism, not an organization or business (Rom.12:4-5; 1 Cor.6:15; 12:12-27).  We "function" within it "..from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Eph.4:16)" Because the body of Christ is a living entity!

 Jim

We'll See Who Wins :-)

"CHURCH!" This is a unique word, and a unique concept, and unfortunately one that has been abused and misrepresented from what the scripture intended to be understood. The word "church" as used in our English, is a term that actually does not occur in scripture. The word in the scripture in NT Greek is "ekklesia" which means assembly or gathering.  In Mt.16:18, Jesus says that He is going to build HIS assembly - HIS gathering. It is referred to as His body (Eph.5:25) and Jesus is referred to as its head. Except for a few important exceptions referring to all believers throughout history, almost every time the concept is used in the Bible it refers to a local, visible congregation or body of believers in Christ. It is so significant that Jesus died on the cross for it: “Christ loved the church and gave his life for it” (Eph.5:25). And a Christian not part of a local congregation,  is like an organ without a body, a sheep without a flock, or a child without a family. It is an unnatural and unscriptural state. Paul states, Eph 2:19  "So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.."

 It is unfortunate, that man has created a culture of independent individualism that in turn has created many spiritual orphans. Many have become like rabbits, hopping around from one church to another without any identity, accountability, or commitment. Many believe and even teach that it is possible to be a “good Christian” without joining (or even attending) a local congregation. God however, would strongly disagree.  The New Testament scripture and teaching assumes membership of believers in a local congregation. The only Christians not members of a local fellowship were those who had been removed from the fellowship because of gross public sin (1 Cor 5:1-13; Gal.6:1-5). Being part of a local group identifies you as a genuine believer. When we come together in love as a family of believers from different backgrounds, race, and social status, it is a witness to the world (Gal.3:28;  John 17:21).  I can’t claim to follow Christ if I’m not committed to any specific group of disciples. Jesus stated, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (Jn.13:25)." 

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Many say they've stopped attending church because of an experience in their past. There are hypocrites, teachings that are incorrect, politics and much more that exist. "I don't need the church, all I need is Jesus," they say. And, in some ways we might even feel that this statement is justified.  Yet, this is not what Jesus taught, nor is it what the scripture describes.  Paul had issues with many, yet it did not sway him from seeking to "to join the disciples(Acts 9:26)."  Neither should it hinder us. This is the means that Jesus has chosen for His body to grow, and you are included in that equation. For you to exclude yourself, is to exclude yourself from God's will. If you don't believe me in this article, then I challenge you to take the scriptures mentioned above plus more and argue with God about it.  We'll see who wins then :-)

Jim

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Give LOVE a CHANCE!

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you have been saved-- Eph 2:4,5

Many times, as we grow older as Christians, we have the tendency to feel "stuck in neutral.” We feel that we have grown all that we can and often wonder what the problem is.  Many of us think that it is because we just don't love God enough. Perhaps, it is because we just don't  understand, or we have forgotten how much he loves us. The reason we are alive is because God wants to love you. This is prophesy! Paul states, "As indeed he says in Hosea, "Those who were not my people I will call 'my people,' and her who was not beloved I will call 'beloved.'" Rom 9:25  

Yes, it is important to serve God, obey, and trust God, but our first purpose is to love God.“We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Love is always the first response to love. His love is demonstrated in His Son (Jn.3:16). How do you demonstrate your love?  Yes....WORKS and FAITH are ways to demonstrate love, but is LOVE your first response (Jas.2:18)?  When you say, “I don't love God,” it's because you don't understand just how much he really loves you.

God is love. Love is the essence of his nature. The only reason there is love in the universe is because of God. Ants and snails do not love, but you were made in God’s image, so you CAN love. Do you respond to God's love with thanksgiving (Rev.7:12)? 

Often in our zeal to DO God's will, we often forget that we are to enjoy a relationship with God. We are to serve God with joy, happiness, love!  It is the fruit of a thankful spirit (Gal.5:22), that has come to understand the love that God has given us.  When I serve God from the position of love, then all other "fruits" of the spirit become automatic responses instead of chores. 

Think about your current relationship with God. Has it become more about rules, regulations, and rituals than about love?  Maybe it is time to give love a chance. 

Jim