Posted on 11/14/2004 8:45:23 AM PST by Alamo-Girl
Sadly, I have to leave town for a few days - so it may be late Tuesday or even Wednesday before I get a chance to do so. Sniff...
I had hoped to write a further elaboration of "existence", in particular with respect to its necessary contingency. There are implications for the logic and epistemology of science here, and of all human creative effort whatever. But I had already run on too long.... Will probably write it soon.
All, please do free to ping friends who might have an interest in this subject matter. Here goes the present effort:
* * * * * * *
Plato's Speculation on Being and Becoming
God, purposing to make the universe most nearly like the every way perfect and fairest of intelligible beings, created one visible living being, containing within itself all living beings of the same natural order.
Thus does Plato (d. 347 B.C.) succinctly describe how all that exists is ultimately a single, living being. At Timaeus 20, he goes on to say:
“There exists: first, the unchanging form, uncreated and indestructible, admitting no modification and entering no combination… second, that which bears the same name as the form and resembles it… and third, space which is eternal and indestructible, which provides a position for everything that comes to be.”
And thus we find a description of the universe in which Being and Existence (Becoming) – the one God and the multiplicity of things -- are bound together as a single living reality whose extension is mediated by Space (and thus Time).
Our aim in this essay is to define these ideas and their relationships, and trace their historical development from the ancient world to the present. Taking a page from the late, great Eric Voegelin, we will follow a history-of-ideas approach to these issues. Along the way we will find that not only philosophy and cosmology, but also theology and even modern science can illuminate these seminal conceptions of Platonic thought. We must begin at the beginning, that is, with God – who is absolute Being in Plato’s speculation, of whom the cosmos itself is but the image (eikon) or reflection.
When Plato speaks of God (or when Aristotle does for that matter, as in e.g., Nicomachean Ethics), he is not referring to the Olympian gods, to Zeus, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and the rest of the gang of “immortals.” For the Olympians are like man in that they are creatures of a creating God. Not only that, but they are a second generation of gods, the first having reigned in the Age of Chronos; which is to say that their rule or law is not everlasting, but contingent. Thus the Olympian gods are not self-subsistent, but dependent (contingent) on a principle outside of themselves. We might say that the central difference between Plato’s God and the Olympians consists in the fact that the latter are “intracosmic” gods, and the former is “extracosmic.” Therefore, the intracosmic gods are subject to contingency and so, though they may truly be said to exist in some fashion, cannot be said to possess true Being. (More on these distinctions in a minute.)
It is crystal clear that for Plato, God was the “Beyond” of the universe, or in other words, utterly transcendent, perfectly self-subsistent Being, the “uncaused cause” of all the multiplicity of existents in the universe. In yet other words we can say that the cosmos is a theophany, a manifestation or “presence” of the divine Idea -- in Christian parlance, the Logos if I might draw that association -- in the natural world.
As Wolfgang Smith notes, “Christian teaching is based upon the doctrine of the Logos, the Word of God, a term which in itself clearly suggests the idea of theophany. Moreover, what is implicit in the famous Prologue of St. John [ “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:1-5)] is openly affirmed by St. Paul when he declares that “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world have been clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:20) … The indisputable fact is that at its deepest level Christianity perceives the cosmos as a self-revelation of God.” [Cosmos and Transcendence, 1984]
Being and Existence (Becoming)
Being is a concept so difficult that it comes close to eluding our grasp. It is utterly beyond space and time; imperishable; entirely self-subsistent, needing nothing from outside itself in order to be complete; essential; immutable; and eternally perduring. Contrast this with the concept of existence, regarding which Plato asks “how can that which is never in the same state be anything?” And this is the clue to the profound difference between being and existence: The existing things of this world are mutable and transient. Smith writes,
“… they come upon the scene, we know not from whence; they grow, change, and decay; and at last they disappear, to be seen no more. The physical cosmos itself, we are told, is a case in point: it, too, has made its appearance, perhaps some twenty billion years ago, and will eventually cease to exist [i.e., finally succumbing, we are told, to thermodynamic entropy or “heat death”]. What is more, even now, at this very moment, all things are passing away. ‘Dead is the man of yesterday,’ wrote Plutarch, ‘for he dies into the man of today: and the man of today is dying into the man of tomorrow.’ Indeed, ‘to be in time’ is a sure symptom of mortality. It is indicative, not of being, but of becoming, of ceaseless flux.”
All the multiplicity of forms in the universe are in a state of becoming and passing away. But Plato’s great insight was that all things in the state of becoming – that is, all existing things – are whatever they are because they are participations in Being. That is to say, “we perceive the trace of being in all that exists,” writes Smith, “and that is why we say, with reference to any particular thing, that it is.” Existence, in other words, is contingent on Being.
But we wonder: In what way is that possible? And if existents participate in being, what is that Being in which they participate?
In Exodus 3:14 Moses has experienced a theophany: While tending his flock on Mount Horeb, suddenly he hears the voice of God issuing from a burning bush: God is speaking to him! Reverentially, Moses inquires of God what is His name (meaning: what is His nature or character).
And God said unto Moses, I AM WHO AM: and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
God has told Moses: that He is Being (“I AM”). And the strong implication is that there is no “other” being: “I alone AM.”
This is the central meaning of the passage. Smith draws the crucial point, “God alone IS. But how are we to understand this? ‘It seems to me,’ writes St. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘that at the time the great Moses was instructed in the theophany he came to know that none of those things which are apprehended by sense perception and contemplated by the understanding really subsist, but that the transcendent essence and cause of the universe, on which everything depends, alone subsists.’ But why? Does not the world exist? Are there not myriads of stars and galaxies and particles of dust, each existing in its own right? And yet we are told that the transcendent essence alone subsists. ‘For even if the understanding looks upon any other existing things,’ the great theologian goes on to say, ‘reason observes in absolutely none of them the self-sufficiency by which they could exist without participating in true Being. On the other hand, that which is always the same, neither increasing nor diminishing, immutable to all change whether to better or to worse (for it is far removed from the inferior and has no superior), standing in need of nothing else, alone desirable, participated in by all but not lessened by their participation – this is truly real Being.’”
Smith continues: “In the words of St. Gregory, ‘that which is always the same, neither increasing nor diminishing, immutable to all change … is truly real being.’ As concerns ‘existing things,’ on the other hand, the teaching implies that these entities are always changing, always in a state of flux, so that there very existence is in a way a process of becoming, in which however nothing is actually produced. This has been said time and again, beginning with Heraclitus and the Buddhist philosophers. And there can be little doubt that it is true: even modern physics, as we can see, points to the same conclusion. Only there is another side to the coin which is not always recognized. Existent things – the very flux itself – presuppose what Gregory and the Platonists have termed ‘a participation in Being.’ The point is that relative or contingent existences cannot stand alone. They have not an independent existence, a being of their own. ‘In Him we live, and move, and have our being,’ says St. Paul….”
St. Augustine confirms the Platonic insight this way:
I beheld these others beneath Thee, and saw that they neither altogether are, nor altogether are not. An existence they have, because they are from Thee; and yet no existence, because they are not what Thou art. For only that really is, that remains unchangeably.
Space
Space is the third essential term of the Platonic cosmology: It is the matrix in which living things and all other existents participate in Being. Plato’s creation myth – the Myth of the Demiurge – elucidates the Platonic conception of Space. I find in it a very strong analogy to Sir Isaac Newton’s concept of “absolute space” (see discussion in the main article at the top of this thread).
For Plato, the God of the Beyond is so “beyond” that, when it came time to creating the Cosmos, he didn’t even do it himself. He sent an agent: the Demiurge, a mythical being endued by God to be in divine likeness of God’s own perfect love, truth, beauty, and goodness. The embodiment of divine perfections, the Demiurge wishes to create creatures just as good and beautiful as himself, according to the standard of the divine Idea -- a direct analog, it seems to me, of the Logos theory of the ancient Church.
Similarly to the Christian account, the Demiurge in a certain way creates ex nihilo -- that is, out of Nothing. At first glance, Plato is seen specifying, not a pre-existing “material” but a universal field of pure possibility called Chora, which is usually translated as “Space,” but sometimes also as “Necessity.”
Chora seems to indicate the idea of an eternal, universal field of pure stochastic potentiality that needs to become “activated” in order to bring actual beings into existence. In itself, it is No-thing, i.e., “nothing.” This “activation” the Demiurge may not effect by fiat: He does not, for instance, “command” to “Let Light Be!” The only tool at his disposal is Peitho, “persuasion.”
And Chora is not exactly anxious to be persuaded: It likes being “nothingness.” [i.e., Chora likes being “lazy”; i.e., entropy is its basic nature; its heart’s desire, self-maintenance in the condition of perfect “equilibrium” that expresses non-existence.] It is always free to just “refuse to be persuaded,” thus ever to remain unformed, “Nothing” – not even matter.
And thus creation begins when the Demiurge, an “energy source,” persuades this pure stochastic potentiality into actual form, and thus existence. From the cosmic standpoint, he makes unity out of multiplicity, in harmony and geometrical proportion:
“The best bond is the one that effects the closest unity between itself and the terms it is combining; and this is best done by a continued geometrical proportion.” [Timaeus, 4]
Thus the Demiurge is also a kind of “divine geometer,” producing the forms (or mathematical ideas) that Chora can be persuaded to conform to, and thus come into existence.
But the Demiurge does more than just get things started: As bearer of the divine Idea -- sometimes I imagine he is a direct analog of the Logos doctrine of the ancient Church -- as pure love and beauty and goodness and truth, he continues always persuading Chora to be a creature as like himself as possible (i.e., reflecting his own divine qualities), throughout all eternity. Thus creation is a continuous process in space-time. Moreover, it is the source and driver of evolution as a universal process.
Through the ongoing activity of the Demiurge, men and the world are constantly being informed and renewed by the divine Idea; and thus a unified cosmic whole, a “One Cosmos,” a universal order comes into being at the “intersection of time and timelessness,” of transcendent and immanent reality, in the medium of Space (and Time).
Which evokes Newton’s conception of Absolute Space. Possibly this may be understood in the following terms. First, Absolute Space is not a property of God, but an effect of His Presence; i.e., we advert to theophany again. The question then arises, in what “where” or “when” does this theophany take place? Perhaps Newton’s answer would be: In the beginning, and continuously thereafter. Second, it has been suggested that Newton intends us to understand the sensorium Dei, not as any kind of organ of sense perception (for an omniscient, omnipresent God doesn’t need one in principle), but as the locus or medium of God’s creative and sustaining activity in the world. As Wolfhart Pannenberg writes,
“Now there are a number of good reasons – suggested by both philosophical and scientific thought – to consider time and space as inseparable. Einstein’s field concept comprises space, time, and energy. It takes the form of a geometrical description, and this seems to amount to a spatialization of time. The totality of space, time, and energy or force are all properties of a cosmic field.
“Long before our own age a theological interpretation of this subject matter had been proposed, and it was Isaac Newton who offered this proposal. It too referred everything to space or, more precisely, to the correlation of force as in the case of a force like gravitation acting at a distance. Newton’s well-known conception of space as sensory of God (sensorium Dei) did not intend to ascribe to God an organ of sense perception, the like of which God does not need, according to Newton, because of divine omnipresence. Rather, Newton took space as the medium of God’s creative presence at the finite place of his creatures in creating them.” [Toward a Theology of Nature, 1993]
Thus the infinite takes priority over every finite experience, a position decisively argued by Descartes, as Pannenberg notes, “in his thesis that the idea of God is a prior condition in the human mind for the possibility of any other idea, even that of the ego itself.”
Just posted, A-G. I'll miss you while you're gone! But no hurry, no rush in getting back to me. Have a happy, safe journey wherever you're going. Hugs!!!
We are fixing to leave any moment now, but I'm so glad I had the time to give it a quick read. I'll be meditating on being and becoming over the next few days and will no doubt have more to say when I return.
Again, thank you oh so very much!
I notice, too, that weeds don't need to be cultivated, they volunteer and proliferate without any effort on the part of the husbandman. lack of forethought and effort allows the destructive plants to thrive.
Weeds will take over and ruin a bed of desirable plants. their onslaught is relentless and must be combatted constantly.
weeds can infiltrate subterraneously before becoming visible. Just because you don't see them doesn't mean they're not there.
this has proven to be a living object lesson in the nature of sin, the responsibility of husbandry and stewardship, and the rewards of diligence. It further blows my mind that God is able to communicate in such a personal and compelling way.
I have lots more examples, but this will suffice to testify that creation does indeed testify of God.
The gods of the Greeks were not considered to be entities, they were aspects of the absolutes that they could understand, so that one represented beauty, one wisdom, etc. I often see unbelievers pose a question, like why don't you worship Zeus? Well I don't worship Zeus because he is just an extension of Greek thought, which comes from their minds. The True God exists independant of man's thought.
The Word was God: To understand the concept of the one true God, revealed by Himself to man, one must understand this, and is the reason why it is found in John 1, verse 1, for John is written to the Greeks and put into words that they could understand. They saw the Logos, or Wisdom, as the force active in the creation of the universe, as does the Torah. The Torah is the Word of God, and it exists outside of creation and has from the beginning. Christianity says that Jesus is the Word made flesh, the Creator and that all things, without exception, are made for Him and Him alone. This is new Torah, new wisdom.. The old Torah is water, the new Torah is wine.
Furthermore, we understand that the universe is created and sustained by the Word, and not only that, but by the Word sounding.God sustains the universe consciously and actively. He has not gone away and left us. In fact, He reveals Himself to us, and His final revelation is in the person of Christ. Christ is not an abstract aspect of God, like wisdom. He is God. He is God incarnating in the world that He himself made.
The purpose of this universe is to reveal the glory of God and to show forth His attributes, not the least of which is mercy. What underlies this creation, is the plan of salvation. Christ is the plan of salvation. There is no other reason for this universe to exist.
That it exists by laws is not disputed, yet laws are not God, just attributes of the Word sounding.
What a glorious essay, D Edmund Joaquin!
And surely you are right about this: “John is written to the Greeks and put into words that they could understand.” It seems there’s a mystery buried in here somewhere. Consider: Socrates was the teacher of Plato, who was the teacher of Aristotle, who was the teacher of Alexander – and Alexander spread Greek culture throughout Eurasia, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. Add to this the fact that the great Evangelist, Paul, had some difficulty converting the Jews, but he converted the Greeks in droves. Not only St. John, but also St. Paul speaks in terms the Greek mind could readily grasp, as when he says God is He “in Whom we live and move and have our being.” These historical connections to not appear to be accidental nor incidental to the spread of the early Christian Church. My take-away from all this is: Don’t anybody suggest to me that God does not work in this world!
According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, the Greeks strongly responded to Christianity for its moral beauty as well as its truth. A case in point would be St. Justin Martyr. He was a man of Greek culture, born in Palestinian Syria about the year 100 A.D, who converted to the faith around 130 A.D. Justin became one of Christianity’s earliest and most powerful apologists, and ended up condemned by the Roman prefect for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods, for which offense he was summarily executed by the state, along with several other of his “refusnik” co-religionists. The official record of their martyrdom is extant:
“The Prefect Rusticus says: Approach and sacrifice, all of you, to the gods. Justin says: No one in his right mind gives up piety for impiety. The Prefect Rusticus says: If you do not obey, you will be tortured without mercy. Justin replies: That is our desire, to be tortured for Our Lord Jesus, and so to be saved, for that will give us salvation and firm confidence at the more terrible universal tribunal of Our Lord and Saviour. And all the martyrs said: Do as you wish; for we are Christians, and we do not sacrifice to idols. The Prefect Rusticus read the sentence: Those who do not wish to sacrifice to the gods and to obey the emperor will be scourged and beheaded according to the laws. The holy martyrs glorifying God betook themselves to the customary place, where they were beheaded and consummated their martyrdom confessing their Saviour.”
Jules Lebreton writes (at the entry for Justin in the aforementioned Encyclopedia) “Justin tries to trace a real bond between philosophy and Christianity [the sort of thing one might expect from a Greek, one supposes!]: according to him, both one and the other have a part in the Logos, partially disseminated among men and wholly manifest in Jesus Christ.”
Yet for all their apparent similarities in many respects, there is a profound difference between the Platonic conception and the Christian one: and this pertains to the relations between God and man.
Both Plato and Justin proclaim an utterly transcendent God. Yet for Plato, God is so “beyond” as to be almost impossible of human grasp. Yet Plato felt the “divine pulls” in his nature. These Plato thought could be accounted for and articulated by an act of pure unaided intellect, that is by nous.
Contrast this position with Justin Martyr’s, who proclaimed that human wisdom was impossible without the Prophets and the action of the Holy Spirit. For Plato, man’s relations with God consisted of operations of the mind. For Justin, they were operations of the heart, of the Spirit.
Yet in all fairness to Plato, he was dead more than four centuries before the Incarnation of Christ, the full revelation of the divine Logos: He never heard the “good news” of the Christian Gospels, so never had an opportunity to act on it. What is amazing to me is that he got so much right notwithstanding. I like to think that, had Plato heard the Gospel message, he would have become yet another Greek convert to the faith.
It is pleasing to me to imagine that Plato is a Christian now.
Thank from my heart, D Edmund Joaquin, for your beautiful, elegant, and most gracious post.
What an extraordinarily beautiful epiphany, the invisible hand! The "book of nature" truly reveals the glory of our Lord to those with the eyes to see it, and the grace to understand it. Thank you, oh so very much!
It seems there’s a mystery buried in here somewhere.
The mystery of the ages, revealed in Christ, was that the salvation of mankind was to come from the Seed of Abraham. The Seed is Christ, who is elect, and all those who are in Christ. They too are the elect, and they too are the seed. And what is the seed, except, the word.
In the culture of the Greeks, a system of the highest intellectual achievement, the word found good ground. "Good ground" is dry ground. Its importance begins right at the start of Genesis, when God says that he needed a man to till the ground.
The answer is found also in Genesis 9:27. The Lord shall enlarge Japtheth and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem. The Greeks of the New Testament inherited the promise, and they came to dwell in the tents of Shem It doesn't get any better than that. Wonderful stuff the scriptures.
Plato and Aristotle reached the zenith of thought, but it is important to realize that they did not do this on their own. They were wise men, not prophets, as that requires a knowledge of the Word, but still they had the mark of seers.
Plato's assumption is that God - or at least God's realm - is " the unchanging form, uncreated and indestructible, admitting no modification and entering no combination."
You go on to note that "Being is... utterly beyond space and time; imperishable; entirely self-subsistent, needing nothing from outside itself in order to be complete; essential; immutable; and eternally perduring."
I couldn't possibly know what I am saying, but I would never let that stand in the way of formulating an opinion. We posit an unchanging God but we can't help but notice that as God manifests himself in the material realm the effect is one of constant flux, permanent change, continuous and dramatic motion. God is a creator God and the creative essence, of which we are both fruit and deputized agents, seems to be an indisoluble part of the whole.
We understand change in terms of a 4D world of space and time, and so we say that God, who precedes space and time, who created space and time, must be somehow spaceless and timeless, and therefor unchanging and complete.
We assume that, and yet when God shows himself by means of the material world the result is a riot of life forms bursting into existence, of change and motion. If 4D change is meaningless outside the 4D world, we might also say that changelessness is a 4D concept that doesn't exist even in a 4D world and could not describe God.
I find this line of thought somewhat seductive, but what limits it is the fact that this riot of change and motion is nonetheless ruled and ordered by principles that are unchanging, that repeat themselves again and again. The rules are unchanging but they provide the matrix that allows this "riot of change and motion" to exist and makes it meaningful, and beautiful.
But do these unchanging rules by which our 4D world is ordered have any meaning outside that 4D world? I would rather say that they are a reflection of God's nature as it impinges on a material world, a clue to his nature as important as is the permanent state of change, and motion, and creation that we see.
The idea that God is complete is a kind of sleight of hand by which we can confuse ourselves, if we are not careful. If he is complete, might go the argument, he has no need of a created universe. And yet there it is. The mistake is in imagining that the word "complete" or "incomplete" might refer to God at all. God, after all, is what he is. The creative essence does not reveal him to be incomplete, somehow, looking for completion, but rather it is who he is. And, being as we are made in his image, it is also who we are.
The only thing I can think to add to your comments about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Alexander is to point out that Alexander was prophesied in Daniel, that he normalized the Greek language into a common Greek thus making the mental “ground” among the Gentiles more fertile for the spread of the Gospel, and that he was evidently informed of the Daniel prophesy when he went through Jerusalem.
Most scholars agree that the following story, told by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in his Jewish antiquities 11.317-345, is not true. One argument is that Alexander is shown a book that was not yet written. Another argument is that the story is a bit too good to be true: the Samarians, the eternal rivals of the Jews, blacken the Jews and get permission to build a temple of their own, Alexander visits Jerusalem, understands that he owes everything to the God of the Jews, allows them the privilege to live according to their ancestral customs and behaves rather unkind towards the Samarians. If a Jew in the second century BCE were to invent a story, he would write something along these lines.
On closer inspection, however, we may notice some odd details. In the first place, the Samaritans are allowed to keep their temple: not exactly something a Jew would invent, and in fact a plausible punishment for the Jewish refusal to send soldiers. In the second place, in fact, Alexander gives the Jews no privileges at all: everything he grants the Jews, had already been granted to them by the Persian kings. This was Alexander's usual policy. In the third place, the idea that Alexander had had a vision in which the God of the Jews played an important role is just too incredible to be invented: everyone knew that Alexander claimed to be the son of the Egyptian god Ammon. Nobody would invent a special link to the Jewish God. The easiest explanation is that Alexander did indeed sacrifice to the God of the Jews.
Another aspect that deserves to be mentioned is Alexander's demand for auxiliaries and the presents the Jews formerly had sent to the Persian government. This matches the demand made by Alexander to Darius that he would address him as the master of the Persian possessions (more...).
The following translation was made by William Whiston
And when Jaddus understood that Alexander was not far from the city, he went out in procession, with the priests and the multitude of the citizens. The procession was venerable, and the manner of it different from that of other nations. It reached to a place called Sapha, which name, translated into Greek, signifies a prospect, for you have thence a prospect both of Jerusalem and of the temple. And when the Phoenicians and the Samarians that followed him thought they should have liberty to plunder the city, and torment the high-priest to death, which the king's displeasure fairly promised them, the very reverse of it happened; for Alexander, when he saw the multitude at a distance, in white garments, while the priests stood clothed with fine linen, and the high-priest in purple and scarlet clothing, with his mitre on his head, having the golden plate whereon the name of God was engraved, he approached by himself, and adored that name, and first saluted the high-priest.
The Jews also did all together, with one voice, salute Alexander, and encompass him about; whereupon the kings of Syria and the rest were surprised at what Alexander had done, and supposed him disordered in his mind. However, Parmenion alone went up to him, and asked him how it came to pass that, when all others adored him, he should adore the high-priest of the Jews? To whom he replied, 'I did not adore him, but that God who has honored him with his highpriesthood; for I saw this very person in a dream, in this very habit, when I was at Dion in Macedonia, who, when I was considering with myself how I might obtain the dominion of Asia, exhorted me to make no delay, but boldly to pass over the sea thither, for that he would conduct my army, and would give me the dominion over the Persians; whence it is that, having seen no other in that habit, and now seeing this person in it, and remembering that vision, and the exhortation which I had in my dream, I believe that I bring this army under the Divine conduct, and shall therewith conquer Darius, and destroy the power of the Persians, and that all things will succeed according to what is in my own mind.'
And when he had said this to Parmenion, and had given the high-priest his right hand, the priests ran along by him, and he came into the city. And when he went up into the temple, he offered sacrifice to God, according to the high-priest's direction, and magnificently treated both the high-priest and the priests. And when the Book of Daniel was showed him wherein Daniel declared that one of the Greeks should destroy the empire of the Persians, he supposed that himself was the person intended. [3] And as he was then glad, he dismissed the multitude for the present.
But the next day he called them to him, and bid them ask what favors they pleased of him; whereupon the high-priest desired that they might enjoy the laws of their forefathers, and might pay no tribute on the seventh year.[4] He granted all they desired. And when they asked him that he would permit the Jews in Babylon and Media to enjoy their own laws also, he willingly promised to do hereafter what they desired. And when he said to the multitude, that if any of them would enlist themselves in his army, on this condition, that they should continue under the laws of their forefathers, and live according to them, he was willing to take them with him, many were ready to accompany him in his wars. …
But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man. For it became him, for whom [are] all things, and by whom [are] all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified [are] all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren, Saying, I will declare thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto thee. And again, I will put my trust in him. And again, Behold I and the children which God hath given me.
Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For verily he took not on [him the nature of] angels; but he took on [him] the seed of Abraham. – Hebrews 2:5-16
Why?
What is the ultimate purpose?
What is the ultimate purpose?
By sharing our moments of standing in awe, we are praising Him and telling others to look and see. If the Lord is willing, some of us may may follow-through by writing a book, essay or set of devotions.
Yes, when I read that section in Josephus some years ago I was fascinated. There is no doubt that God spoke to the priest and Alexander on the same night.
Thank you both for your kind words. Scripture is like a field full of jewels, rubies and diamonds and pearls and more. No matter how many times you traverse the field, more and more just keep turning up
To praise God! (Psalms 19:1, Romans 1:20)
Thanks for your response A-G, and thanks be to God.
I'll now stay in the background and read the rest of the posts.
We would greatly appreciate any comments or moments of standing in awe you'd care to share.
Lapidary, DEJ! So true.... It really is the most amazing thing!
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