9Thou whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, and called thee from the chief men thereof, and said unto thee, Thou art my servant; I have chosen thee, and not cast thee away.
10Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.
11Behold, all they that were incensed against thee shall be ashamed and confounded: they shall be as nothing; and they that strive with thee shall perish.
12Thou shalt seek them, and shalt not find them, even them that contended with thee: they that war against thee shall be as nothing, and as a thing of nought.
13For I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.
14Fear not, thou worm Jacob, and ye men of Israel; I will help thee, saith the LORD, and thy redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.
15Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff.
16Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them: and thou shalt rejoice in the LORD, and shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel.
17When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the LORD will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them.
18I will open rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of the valleys: I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.
19I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the shittah tree, and the myrtle, and the oil tree; I will set in the desert the fir tree, and the pine, and the box tree together:
20That they may see, and know, and consider, and understand together, that the hand of the LORD hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it.
21Produce your cause, saith the LORD; bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob.
22Let them bring them forth, and shew us what shall happen: let them shew the former things, what they be, that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them; or declare us things for to come.
23Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods: yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and behold it together.
24Behold, ye are of nothing, and your work of nought: an abomination is he that chooseth you.
25I have raised up one from the north, and he shall come: from the rising of the sun shall he call upon my name: and he shall come upon princes as upon morter, and as the potter treadeth clay.
26Who hath declared from the beginning, that we may know? and beforetime, that we may say, He is righteous? yea, there is none that sheweth, yea, there is none that declareth, yea, there is none that heareth your words.
27The first shall say to Zion, Behold, behold them: and I will give to Jerusalem one that bringeth good tidings.
28For I beheld, and there was no man; even among them, and there was no counsellor, that, when I asked of them, could answer a word.
29Behold, they are all vanity; their works are nothing: their molten images are wind and confusion.
Beefy. Whether this is the last time remains to be seen, but the truth is that the PEOPLE have turned to lawlessness and vice, and it is reflected everywhere by decline.
Thank you for posting this article...
I found “Every straw man of Satan is to get us to look away from the REALITY of the Cross and our ETERNAL destiny.” .......so true!
The Law
The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!
If this is true, it is a serious fact, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow-citizens to it.
Life Is a Gift from God
We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.
But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. This process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.
Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
Frederic Bastiat 1801-1850
•the notion of "continuity"-- that all things are interconnected. Think "the force" from Star Wars. George Lucas got that notion from American Indian mythology. He could have easily have gotten it from the Persians or Australian aborigines or Indian Braman priests or Greek poets or eskimoes or Sub-Saharan Africans or Polynesians....
•the barriers between the three realms-- Divine, Human, and Nature, are very thin and permeable.
•the world we perceive isn't reality; it's just a distorted reflection of what's really happening in the divine realm at the same time.
•the Divine expresses itself through Nature-- that's why pantheism is prevalent, and idols are made from wood and stone and other natural materials. Those idols are not just images-- they ARE the gods who are elsewhere at the same time (mythical religions don't requrie consistency and logic as in Western thinking). What is done to idols is being done to the gods.
•the practice of magic to influence the Divine ("real") realm- we can manipulate and control the gods to some exent by ceremonies and words.
•the obsession with sexuality-- since the circle of life requires birth in crops and animals and humans, sexual ceremonies can influence those things to allow the practioners to profit personally. That's why prostitution in the ancient world was always controlled by the temples (e.g., Tamar was disguised as a temple prostitute when Judah went in to her- a common practice among pagans).
•a low view of individuals and the gods, who are just superhumans, with the same weaknesses).
•since everything is interconnected and individuals are nearly worthless, life is cheap, infanticide is rampant.The highest calling is to lose individuality and become an undistinguished part of the All.
•matter is eternal, and there is an eternal, recurring cycle of death and regeneration. The wheel in the sky keeps turning. There is no utopia in the future, and all that matters is the here and now.
The gods don't care about personal integrity and there is no one concept of immoralitor ethics (what one god likes another would dislike)-- what's moral is what one can get away with without his neighbor or the government taking action against him.
This almost universal perception of reality is not suprising when you think about it. It starts with the physical world we see and extrapolates that to the divine realm, in an effort to explain and control what's happening here. Otherwise, people would feel completely impotent and subject to the whims of the gods, and that's difficult for the human psyche to accept.
Whatever someone believes the Bible religion to be, it is clearly not a myth. Some external similarities do exist, such as a flood or a resurrection story (which you'd expect from looking at nature, and especially if YHWH worship came first as it claims). The Bible religion is unique and completely opposite of every other religion in its division between God and Nature and Man; the elavation of the individual; the nature of sin; the reasons for righteousness and personal integrity; the power and perfection and holiness of a personal God and Father; a day of judgment and an end to the physical world; and a loving, transcendant God who wants a close relationship with his people and wants to save them from the imminent destruction of the physical world due to the corruption of sin. Sadly, most people don't want to hear, don't want to investigate, don't want to know our Creator. They'd rather feed thier own pride and passions and live as pagans.