⚠️Imagine - what a witness of FAITH it will be to all your friends that come to you when you invite them to your house.
Seeing the suitecase at your door - they will surely ask you where you are going.
Then you can let them know how glad you where they followed your invitation and that you are invited to a friends house - and that even though the house is in ruins you're prepared to go to honor HIS invitation ...
Thought for Today: Sunday February 19:
May YHVH Elohiym Himself lift you up and make you strong. May He intervene where you cannot. May He shine His Light on the enemy’s schemes. May He confuse the enemy’s plans and profoundly answer all your prayers. May He establish you in His Highest and Best purposes for your life. And remember, you matter very deeply to Him.
SERIES H --- THE JUDGES --- LESSON 13
JEALOUSY
SHIBBOLETH OR SIBBOLETH
From Judges 12:1-15
The men of Ephraim were very angry with Jephthah. They formed an army at Zaphon and went to fight him. ‘We are going to shut you in your house and burn it down,’ they said. ‘You went to fight the Ammonites without asking us to go with you.’ ‘I did ask you!’ said Jephthah. ‘But you wouldn’t help us Gileadites. I risked my life against them and Adonai gave me a great victory. Why do you want to fight me?’ Jephthah went out to fight the men of Ephraim because they had accused the Gileadites of being foreigners in their midst. His forces captured the fords of the Jordan behind the army of Ephraim and then attacked from the front. Whenever a fugitive from the army of Ephraim tried to cross the river, the soldiers of Gilead stationed there captured him. ‘Are you a member of the tribe of Ephraim?’ they asked. If he said ‘no’ they made him say ‘shibboleth.’ If the man said ‘sibboleth,’ they knew he was from the tribe of Ephraim and killed him there at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites died in this battle. Jephthah was judge over Israel for six years. When he died, he was buried in Gilead. Ibzan of Bethlehem followed Jephthah as judge. He had thirty sons who married girls outside his tribe and thirty daughters who also married outside his tribe. For seven years he judged Israel; then he died and was buried at Bethlehem. Elon of Zebulun was the next judge. He ruled for ten years before he died and was buried at Aijalon in Zebulun. Abdon, son of Himel, from Pirathon, followed as Israel’s third judge after Jephthah. He had forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rode about on seventy donkeys. After he had ruled for eight years, he died and was buried at Pirathon in the land of Ephraim in the hill country of the Amalekites.
COMMENTARY
CANAANITE LANGUAGE AND WRITING
After YHVH gave Jephthah and Israel a victory over the Midianites, it would seem that the people should praise Adonai. But the men of the tribe of Ephraim were jealous and angry. Victory did not lead to joy, but to civil war! Forty-two thousand men died because of a foolish quarrel. The alphabet used in the English language has its origins in Greece. But the Greeks only refined an alphabet found in Canaan. The Canaanite alphabet is the first known to history; it was created more than a thousand years before Greek traders carried it to the rest of the world. Before the alphabet, the Canaanites used a system of writing from Mesopotamia called cuneiform. It involved over six hundred symbols, one for every syllable and grammatical mark in the language. Over several hundred years the Canaanites tried many simpler ways of writing. They had great difficulty creating an easily usable system because, though they could understand each other, each group in Canaan spoke the language a little differently; each had a different dialect. The people of Ugarit invented a script that used thirty cuneiform signs to represent the individual sounds of their speech instead of syllables. The merchants of Byblos developed a set of seventy-five cuneiform symbols based on syllables for their dialect. But finally, the Canaanites borrowed part of the system used by the Egyptians, their neighbours to the south. The Egyptians wrote with complex picture-symbols called hieroglyphics. Taking the idea of hieroglyphics, the Canaanites used it in an entirely new way. They did not use the hieroglyphics as little picture-symbols for things, nor did they use them to represent syllables. Instead, the Canaanites used them to indicate individual letters or sounds. They finally settled on twenty-seven different symbols. These symbols became the letters of the very first true alphabet in history. It formed the basis of the alphabet used throughout the Western world today.
"And they went out, and preached that men should repent."
Mk 6
{Edited from a conversation about writing “perfect characters”.}
I believe there are truly noble people and characters. Also I believe there are perfect people, though obviously they're rare (and not "without sin" - I'll explain).
Some take the doctrine that "all have sinned" and "there is none that doeth good and sinneth not" to be a kind of mandatory cynicism, that they must believe everyone does small evil acts or underlying evil acts and they just aren't seen or are all considered equal in God's eyes. They also often categorise an exorbitant amount of faults and flaws and things (like not getting up quick enough in the morning) as moral sins to further bolster this idea, and often fall into thinking anything that is less good than another thing is therefore bad, which is of course unreasonable.
The Bible also says "they also do no iniquity" and "he that is born of God sinneth not" and "in whom is no guile". And it tells us that unborn children have done nothing, either good or evil, yet also that we are conceived in sin. Obviously these aren’t contradictory, but rather talking about two different things.
I think it is clear that "all have sinned" and the doctrine that none are "without sin" are referring to the sinfulness of the heart; the best people understand that they are their own worst enemy when trying to do right. If they were without sin, they would have no difficulty, no struggle, no enticement of their own lust, and outward temptation would not be able to allure them at all, like Christ.
Our sinfulness is proven whenever people leave themselves without check, and of course there is the fact that you don't have to teach children to do wrong. The sinfulness of our hearts is our fault (after all, if it wasn't, then neither would any action be that arises from it), but those who do not indulge their sinful hearts (such as little children, who haven’t really done anything at all), are those who are the righteous, who "sin not", and "do no iniquity", and these are those whose sinfulness is washed away by the blood of the Lamb.
"He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy." - Pr 28
“Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” - Mt 18
Righteous people often commit small sins at times (sins “not unto death” as John puts it), and that also isn't what it is talking about when it says a righteous man sinneth not. Those who break the least commandments still will enter the kingdom of heaven, though they receive less honour.
If "there is none righteous" isn't talking about our sinful tendencies, which we must (and can) fight against and control, then we have a problem: when it expounds on this doctrine it goes on to say:
"there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: their feet are swift to shed blood: destruction and misery are in their ways: and the way of peace have they not known: there is no fear of God before their eyes." - Ro 3
If this is not describing what we tend to, then everyone is specifically an unbeliever (thus unsaved), murderer, liar, and curser (weird that that isn't a word ?); and obviously it has nothing to do with the false idea that small sins are equal to great sins in God's eyes (which idea is to accuse God of injustice, and to give license for the heathen to mock his wrath).
I would say that the most perfect person was Moses, who was the counterpart of Jesus: "a prophet like unto me", who was "faithful in all his house", so that him and Christ are pictured as a house and its builder. Moses was so perfect that speaking a single sentence unadvisedly, "Must we fetch you water out of this rock?" was punished with great wrath. Others would be Noah, Daniel, Job, Samuel, Elijah, and John the baptist. Joseph is one that I often think of first.
In fiction the first one that comes to mind would be G. A. Henty's protagonists, which are basically meant to picture what he would consider to be the best conduct in their various situations. I disagree with Henty on certain moral points (a major one would be that he sees transvestism as a joke), and his characters are rather plain, but on the whole it is good to read about his good example characters.
The first character who comes to mind that is a truly noble character, who is also interesting and endearing, would be Sam Gamgee.
(The main fault I dislike in bad film adaptation is corrupting good characters; if one sees the character as real - which is the point - then it is slander. End side note.)
Other such characters would be Puddleglum, Sybil (in Charles Williams' The Greater Trumps), Scrooge (after his reformation), the Master Monstruwacan (in William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land), and Beowulf.
2023/02/18 #sabbathposts
One of the many purposes of God's Law is to remind us of the miracles that he performed for our fathers.
You can have a 1 Corinthians 11 head covered woman or else the alternative is in the comments below ?
If God really sees all people equally, why are inequalities built into His word? Is He really unfair, or is there something wrong with us?
https://thebarkingfox.com/2023..../02/18/bottom-rail-o
If God really sees all people equally, why are inequalities built into His word? Is He really unfair, or is there something wrong with us?
https://thebarkingfox.com/2023..../02/18/bottom-rail-o
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