"BYE" LINES

  Iona’s intended blessing, in reverse order:

“WERE THE WHOLE REALM/OF NATURE MINE

THAT WERE AN OFFERING/MUCH TOO SMALL

LOVE SO AMAZING, SO DIVINE/DEMANDS MY SOUL, MY LIFE, MY ALL

 

SEE FROM HIS HEAD/HIS HANDS, HIS FEET

SORROW  AND LOVE/FLOW MINGLED DOWN

DID E’ERE SUCH LOVE/AND SORROW MEET

OR THORNS COMPOSE/SO RICH A CROWN?

 

FORBID IT LORD/THAT I SHOULD BOAST

SAVE IN THE DEATH/OF CHRIST MY LORD

ALL THE VAIN THINGS/THAT CHARM ME MOST

I SACRIFICE THEM/TO HIS BLOOD

 

WHEN I SURVEY/THE WONDROUS CROSS

ON  WHICH THE PRINCE/OF GLORY DIED

MY RICHEST GAIN/I COUNT BUT LOSS

AND POUR CONTEMPT/ON ALL MY PRIDE

 

(Riches I heed not/nor man’s empty praise

Be Thou my inheritance/now and always)

"BILL E. SUNDAY SPECIAL

First Samuel One

“Heard of God”   yet subject to Eli.

We live of course in a strange, unnatural, violent and profane world; one full of “leaders” like Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phineas.  In such a world, it is hard to make Godly requests, like Hannah’s, without advanced travail and many tears.  After the events of Judges, it would be easy to give up, and think that Israel, the whole nation, was doomed to failure, throttling itself in its own cradle, as Hercules was said to have strangled a large snake in his bower of infancy.  The Lord’s gift of strength, like all His good gifts, is more often misused than used in any form of holiness and obedience.

 

“So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.”

 

It is interesting to note in the commentary that before God gave Israel its first king, He prepared the nation in one striking way: He instituted the office of the prophet first; and the kings and the priests, who had been and would be corrupt most of the time, would have some pre-provided “informants for God,”  who, like Elisha who would be informed by God of what the Syrian king was saying in his bedroom; hence would be God’s voice and charge to all kings;  And Samuel would know, like Jesus would see  Nathanael by the fig tree, what Saul was not only doing, but thinking.  He could see, by God’s Spirit, into the heart of the king and act like Nathan would act towards David a few years later:  “ ‘Thou art the man.’”—with the heart of darkness.

It says in the NT that those who follow Christ and believe His Words have become temples and priests and kings.  But not all are prophets, as Paul wisely pointed out.  In fact, for 400 years before Christ, there were no significant prophets recorded.  The Temple itself had been overrun by Greeks and Romans, and what remained, except for a few men like Simeon and a few women like Anna, was largely functioning without prophets and without the Holy Spirit, since the time of Malachi. (Herod was given John the Baptist as a prophet, and  the outcome presaged Jesus’.) The last prophet, Zechariah, was murdered by the descendants of “Hophni and Phineas” on the very steps of Herod’s (Herod’s Indeed!) Temple.

Many in our day have been “nominated” for the office of prophet:  Alexander  Solzhenitsyn,  Charles Colson, David Wilkerson, and many other great pastors or even Christian philosophers and intellectuals and scientists.  Yet if one would ask them if they were prophets, they would all deny it.  Yet Paul declared that some have that gift.  Is that, um, “for today?”

Then again:  is there any substitute now, for The Holy Spirit?  Do we need a priest to mediate our relationship to Christ? (No, but a mentor and good Biblically based teaching are good, mostly) Are we cast back, like Hannah and Anna, on our knees, needing to hear from the Lord as the Lord intended by sending Christ, and then the Comforter.  And how many tears have we shed along our ways?—not so many as Hannah, I am sure!

It is all too human to want an intermediary; and God has for 4000 plus years, accommodated our profound core weaknesses, and our desires for the directorship of a human dictatorship.  But those millennia are drawing to a rapid close, and God wants us to start to “know Him as we are known,” for soon “all will know Him, from the least to the greatest,” and God is pouring “His Spirit out on all flesh.”

 If so, do we not, also by The Spirit, have to be our own prophets? To rebuke, annoy, and deny the worldishness and  the would- be dictators of our flesh within us, our “wicked kings a-many?”

 

I don’t know. I’m just asking.  Maybe the answer is obvious. But I do know that we are responsible to The Spirit, not just to the Letter of the Law.

Much less to anything I might say here, or elsewhere.

He was, John the Baptist, “a voice of one calling in the wilderness, make straight the path for the Lord.” (Isaiah, the real prophet of Christ.)  Are we called—genuinely called—to do the same?

 

THE POLLY TICKLE HEART OF WALT KELLY, INK

Satan Swiles

GOD-- ‘SWORD

GOD—SWARD

GOD’S –WARD

GOD—WARD

ET ALL

 

LIGHT—AND THAT MORE ABUNDANTLY, MORE THAN ABUNDANTLY.

FLOOD—LIGHTS

TSUNAMI OF LIGHT? (no; flood-lite)

 

GLOBAL  FLOOD? (no, more than a “mabul.”)

 

When one looks out, or magnifies even the vicinity of lightless Pluto, what does one see?  A vast and numberless crowd of lights and more behind and between them.  The more we magnify and see, the more light we see, no matter in which direction we look. A planet or a moon may shade us—but cannot shield us more than Ayer’s rock in a weary Australia.

 It can be said that we do not “see” darkness. We have rods and cones for light-detection; but no darkness-receptors. “The Light Shines in the darkness, and no one can put it out.”

I am not looking at laser-light, or the intense and misplaced lights which, like cloudbursts in the desert, wreak destruction.  Yet the Direct Light of God, if not veiled, would have destroyed even Moses in the desert. And even more so, his rebellious cohorts, who could not even stand the Sounds of GOD or the Clouds that surrounded Him, for their protection, at Sinai. This, too, is a mystery. Faith needed!

No, I am speaking of the Light that gives Life, to the smallest leaf or euglena, down to the deepest roots of the largest tree...and the LIGHT of a different quantum level entirely, that put such energy-balls where they could bless us. We are to blame if we get too much, or gather too much like manna, or keep others out of the Light they need. Jesus is the Rock, not us. When we need shade He provides it in the best way--that we cannot see. (See above)

 

But when Jesus went into the desert, even in his most humble state, He “outshone the sun,” and “Lucifer” (the reflected light  of a lunatic spirit) all at the same time; while still merely a man of flesh and blood like all of us, whose existence is a delicate suspension of the dangers of extinction that surround us, “day and night.” (Yet what or who can un-make the soul?)

We are still continually enjoined by  the “loon-in-the-moon,”  to be enamored and moonstruck by his pitiful by-products; tempting us with the lowest form of sub-animal pride in an existence which, sans God, is an utter absurdity. And yes, I do mean  most forms of politics; the lowest forms, and the most destructive though tiny human mabul, of all endeavor; and the very thing that Jesus opposed during His Entire Ministry—then, and now.

I wish I could find the spoof of Pogo, by Mad Magazine in its earliest manifestation, in which a tadpole in a jar keeps telling Pogo, “Now don’ go ‘round messin’ with politics, Gopo.”  (“Gopo” being the spoof name for Pogo.)  The Mad strip ends with the swamp folk fleein’ a mushroom cloud. “I tole you and I tole you…don’ go….

No apologies to those whose heart and soul and spirit are taken up with the sad  and sad and frustrated nexus of political religion, and religious politics.  Man is always  unjust, unfair, and selfish:  and cannot be tempted by the cries of their fellow-men who suffer under them, and see killing fields all around  them. The Light will go elsewhere—“all these things” are sheer lunacy, ink…

 

 

HOTEL CALIFORNIA TARGET HEART BEAT

Exercise Room?  Room for exercise?  Which muscle group needs it the most?

“Bodily exercise profits a little…”

The story is told of the family doctor who was attending a dying patient; and took the opportunity to give his message one more time about diet and exercise.

“Zombie Chemotherapy”

 

When one gets to a certain point, the preachments of McMedicine no longer have relevance, and seem darkly ironic. And if what we see is what we get, we despair.

Nevertheless, we walk not by sight but by faith.

Let me invent here two more phrases that will illustrate our default position in this regard:

Micro Exercise;

And Nano Prayer.

 

“Small Businesses” indeed!

Why is our exercise regimen dictated by Big Business?  And if our exercise of faith is so pitiful, what of our spiritual diet?  Is it not thin gruel indeed, compared to what God is serving?

And then there is the Joy.  Man was made for joy; and we know it when we see it; so obviously the potential is there, just as much as a uterus suggests the power to gestate a child (or two; or three; etc)

It is not overly difficult to see what we are made for; all we need is one or two examples to get our attention; but is it not also true that a dying culture and a degenerating genome would put us, uh, “off-function,” as well as off-message?  And what can you say of a society that defies its own DNA; as mutated as it may be?  If we can’t even follow our physical program, how can we hope to cope with or follow anything higher or more organized than that?

 

Paraphrasing Jesus:  “If you do not believe Me about physical things, how then will you believe anything right spiritually?”

I feel particularly acutely today that I am still way too full of myself to be anything but spirit-flabby.

If Christ does not have a progressively complete controlling ownership inside, then “in me dwelleth no good thing;” something I realized 30 plus years ago; yet when Christ comes will he find me in the Faith Exercise Room of this grimy “Hotel California”? Will I not lift a finger, as Jesus said of the lawyers and teachers and rulers of His days on earth, to help anyone else to Real Health; compared to which what medicine per se has to offer may be of no more ultimate value than the Health Points earned on a video game?

Every moment of every passing day, I have a choice.  It is time to start making time to listen to God more than I talk to Him; and talk to Him thoroughly before I approach my neighbor.  Who else would know better what my neighbor actually needs?  (Hint: my neighbor, like unto me, probably has less of an idea than most as to what s/he actually needs—“felt needs” may be an entryway; but never stop there; esp. in prayer.  May the Holy Spirit guide us—that’s why He came, and why He is still here.

 

WNL

“Real scientists don’t believe in God; and certainly don’t believe that any such “Person” created us.”

(Dogma Bag of the Current Crop)

Consider this, then, from a real genetic pioneer with numerous patents and published papers, from Cornell Univ.

“Imagine entering the intergalactic starship SS Phenome. You go past doors labeled, “Warp Speed Engine Room,” and “Holodeck.”  Then you see a door marked, “Office of the Senior Architect and Chief Engineer.” You open the door and you see an office that is a complete wreck.  Papers are strewn everywhere, there is the smell of rotting food, and computer screens are broken.  Standing on a desk are 2 chimpanzees fighting over a banana. Would you be so naïve as to believe that you were actually looking at the Senior Architect and Chief Engineer of the SS Phenome?  “

“Would you actually think that this ship could have been created and maintained  through this office in its degenerated and chaotic condition?  Yet this is the ruling paradigm regarding the genome’s very nature!  --which describes the idiotic master—genius slave relationship of the genome and the phenome…”

“We should be able to discover many levels of unity of form and function within the genome. I predict that this will be seen more and more in the coming years, as we unravel the many elaborate and multi-dimensional patterns within the genome.” 

Dr. J.C. Sanford’s book was first published in 2005.  He hadn’t long to see this prediction confirmed by the most secular of scientists in the follow-up to the Human Genome Project, called ENCODE, or Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. Scientific American asked him, after the publication of 30 papers all at once, “Should we be retiring the phrase, ‘Junk DNA ‘now?”  Dr. Birney replied, “Yes I really think this phrase does need to be totally expunged from the lexicon. It was a slight throwaway phrase to describe (our ignorance) in the 70’s.  …it’s not a very useful way to describe what’s going on. “At least one and usually multiple sequences have been found in 80% of the genome, and it is extrapolated that this will be 100% before this decade is over.

On the negative side, Dr. Sanford also notes that the biological DNA clock of the entire human species is winding down.  The same forces that cause cancer in the individual—mutated rogue DNA—is accumulating in the human genome at the rate of 60 per generation—some harmful, some lethal, some seemingly neutral (see above) but any of the exceedingly rare, potentially useful mutations are not selected due to dozens of inhibitory factors, and no new information is ever added to the genome.  The vast amount of genetic drift and noise;  limits not only our species’ longevity but that of all other species, probably accounting for the majority of extinctions. We do not have to posit an asteroid to take care of the dino “problem”—the species just plain wore out.  And the more complex the system

; such as sexual reproduction—“nothing works unless everything works”—as we saw of the later and larger saurians—“the more there is to go wrong,” as my Dad used to say about the electric windows on his Thunderbird.

Then there is the other “secular” discovery of DNA in T-rex fossil bones.  This has been studied extensively because of the implications for Darwinian theory.  But there is no question now as to the origin of the DNA and other cellular and molecular components that have been preserved. Besides all that, the research team on New Zealand’s extinct Moas has shown that the half-life of DNA is 521 years!

 

“At this rate, DNA molecules in bone break down after only 10,000 years into tiny chemical segments too short for modern technology to sequence.  And this result assumes preservation factor that optimize biochemical longevity.” 

Hmmmm…150 million years give or take a million?  Keeping in mind that this is all secular research without even a hint of “intelligent design,” much less the clear implications of Scripture.  

Isn’t it strange, Hobbes; that man will concoct the most far-fetched theories to avoid an occasional bleak truth? I suppose that scientists of Darwin’s time, ignorant of the most fundamental elements of molecular biology, could be excused if Dr. D led them around by the nose for a century or so.  It reminds me of that wonderful acronym, “WNL”  which doctors use so liberally in their documentation.  What it is supposed to mean is, “Within Normal Limits.”  A colleague of mine in residency told me it really means:

 

  “WE NEVER LOOKED.”

 

 

 

 

wn

Harvard's Yard Sale

A number of Harvard students have been suspended or expelled due to cheating on a final exam.

So, tell me again why I should , say, "In Academia We Trust"?  As in Hitchcock's "Rope" , Professor X attends the party with the dead man's chest being the center of attention, but cannot understand why his Leopold/Loeb students took him literally!

Or to quote Mr. Natcherl again, "Um Tut Sut; Sure, Why Not..."

"Midst the Crash of Loud Lyres" --Aristophanes, pun intended.

BITTER VS BETTER

WHO LOVES YA, BABY?

WHO DO YOU LOVE? (Or did he mean, HooDoo Love!?) (“Dr.” John, circa 1968)

“WHO DO YOU SAY THAT I AM?”

“The Alien Corn.”

John Patrick made the comment that during WWII, most Britons knew what this Bible verse, from the book of Ruth, meant.  Today you could not find one Brit in 1000 who would have any idea of either the origin or meaning of this quote.  And Biblical illiteracy in the USA is far deeper, worse, and wider than that. 

None the less, the book of Ruth is important to know, thoroughly. For it was written in the latter days of the period of the Judges, a very chaotic time during which, “every man did what was right in his own eyes.”  (or at least they did until their enemies took advantage of their unbelief and oppressed and conquered them; then they would, with saddest regularity, call out to God to deliver them. Or at least deliver some food—alien corn if you will…)

The entire picture of Ruth is one that repeats itself over and over in times of chaos, such as we are currently experiencing—WWII would be another of those times, of course, making Ruth a perfect reference point, a sane alien who loves her mother-in-law unconditionally, benefits or no benefits. It is also a vivid picture of “Marah”, the bitter Naomi, who has lost everything—she thinks—and like modern conservatives, is so focused on her loss of privileges that she can’t see the blessings a few inches from her face, being wet with the intermingling tears shared by her and Ruth.

As I have long averred, God is a Person Who is interested in, and loves, persons not only in the Bible but here and now; and that our “greatest gain I count but loss.”  (When I Survey the Wondrous Cross—read those words and try not to shed a tear…) The Greatest Provision for Ultimate and Most Intimate Fellowship Forever is, like Boaz, the “kinsman redeemer,” just around the corner; and fully available to “whosoever will.”

But like both Ruth and Naomi, we have to let go of the alien corn on which we fed in the “far country” of the Prodigal Son.  There is a monkey trap used by some tribes which consists of putting grain into a small hole in a tree, a hole just large enough to allow a monkey hand to enter; but not to exit if the monkey has a fistful of kernels.  In many cases the monkey is so greedy that it will not let go, and his/her captors arrive in the morning to “harvest” the monkey; without even losing so much as a grain of rice. And it starts all over again with the next monkey.

(Will this be welcome news to those who still think we are glorified chimps; I mean, chumps?)

Rapid entropic decay takes away entire civilizations that depend on an accumulation of conquests, wealth, and privilege.  There seems to be no movement in our country that would tend to move us, as a whole, from our handfuls of rotting grain, to “my greatest gain.”  If there is, it will have to take place on the level of individuals letting go, willingly (Ruth)or unwillingly (Naomi), of that bondage to animal comforts of creatures who insist they were never created, but “got this all on my own.”