Holiness (exodus 23)

      God told Moses to make a dwelling place for Him to dwell among His people. God’s absolute Holiness is so perfect and good that anything else in this world defiles Him. “Holiness” is a very difficult concept to understand. Imagine a perfect sphere. It’s perfect, it rolls amazingly smooth. If not for gravitational forces on this earth, the bumps and hills. It could roll forever.

     That’s what God, in His infinite perfection is. He is, always was, and always will be perfection. God is “good.” He is the epitome of  the meaning of the word and He is “just,” He always does the right thing and always has the right thing on His heart and in His mind. Because He is good, right and creates things to last. He won’t ever create  temporary things. He builds things right and they continue to last. But then, sin entered the world. And I think sin needs to be defined as well. Sin is, “missing the mark.” It’s hitting anything other then God’s mark. God being the absolute essence of all existence is the mark. If you think about it sin doesn’t live long , it’s a temporary existence. It creates contaminates and creates self-destruction. It shortens the life of everything that lives. Lets take for example, lying. Lets say you have a living thriving relationship. That relationship is living, so to speak. What happens if you introduce lying into that relationship. The person that you trust is misleading you. You can no longer trust that person who has become your friend. The living entity ,that was your relationship, slows and over time ceases, it no longer lives. You know how a good relationship is infectious? It encourages more good. That’s how you know something has God’s roots, it creates and continues to create.

        Holiness is the ultimate of who God is. Genesis 3:17 says that if adam and eve ate that fruit they will die. Not that they will immediately die, just that they weren’t ready for the knowledge of good and evil. It’s kinda like a child of 2 isn’t ready to know how to weld his daddy’s gun. Maybe God was waiting for a time down the road when humanity would be wise enough to handle that dangerous knowledge of good and evil. Either way, that one choice brought death (Genesis 6:1-6).

       Luckily, we have an eternal Father who loves the heck out of us! He Himself sent His only Son (who is God, the trinity is a strange study) to die for us. He taught us how to live, how to trust, and how to love in ways I can’t do by my own power. What we need to do is make the reverse decision in life. We need to realize the truth. We do not have the strength to do it or to be holy and clean by ourselves. He is Holy, He is strong, we can be holy enough to get ourselves to heaven.

       There are things in this life that will snare us.  We get the easy part, He pleads to us to follow Him. He wants us to take His good gift and follow His ways. It’s amazing that this Holy God would love us so much to become a man and pay the debt that we don’t have the ability to pay.

-Matthew Kelly

John 17

(first read john 17)       

 John 17 (pt 1)

     Lord, let You be glorified and seen. You are the real meaningful purpose of life and that's it. To be truthful and really honest, You are the only purpose. It's not our petty joys,although those are ordained and given to us by You,they have no last significance. Only You have that. Only You're beautiful perfection.  It's true our eternal life is you...

A) You're the creator

B) You're the source

C) You're the sustainer

D) You're the purpose

You aren't only "my" purpose, You are everyone's meaning to this life.You're all of lifes purpose.  You're the purpose. It's like gravity,  you don't need to feel tge effects to know it's true. It just is.

Vs. 1-4

John 17 (pt. 2)

Wow, Jesus some pretty amazing things are said here. He’s basically equating Himself with God the Father by saying;  "glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had before the world existed." To manifest God’s name (vs. 6a), Yahweh. To manifest is to literally become in physical form. He (Jesus) talks about glory . In this particular usage of the word glory (vs. 5), He’s talking about the magnificence, and perfection of God. He (God) is truly the center of all in existence. You can deny it if you want like you can deny that the sun is hot, it’s still hot no matter if you deny it or not. He is the point. He is the One piece of light that you can see among darkness. Everything is dead and dying apart from Him. It’s all about His purpose. Why? He is light and the creator of the concept. Before Him, there was nothing. I’m not saying there was a “before Him,” I’m only saying that without His choice. Jesus has His words. The words that the One who was and is. What is more important? His words are action, like thought dictates a bodies movement. It’s easier to see His power if we correlate it with what we can see with our eyes. We have control of our bodies with our thoughts, to move your hand up, you think, move up (not the actual words), and it moves.

     Thoughts and ideas become more important. Words are information, information makes life.  (vs. 5-9)

John 17 (pt. 3)

   What really stuck out to me was vs. 19, “sanctified in the truth.” To be sanctified is to be made holy. How can you be made holy in the truth?

    Truth is the essence of what is. Christ is what is. When you get to bottom of what everything in life regardless of what you believe, God is, and Christ is. To know Christ and choose Him is to know to know what real life is. That’s the problem with life on earth. We think life is temporary because that’s how long our bodies last. We don’t realize that God made us to live forever in His presence. We focus on temporary things because we believed the lie that “ what you see is what you get.” True life is God’s eternal life, It’s what we were meant for, not what you see is what you get. God is trying to make us see real things. He’s God, He has the power to force us. You see, if you programmed a robot to love you, would that be real love? He gave us the ability to choose. We need to choose the real things. He came as a man for two reasons, so we could actually physically see,touch, and relate to the Father and to pay the price that we couldn’t pay for anyone that chooses Him. It all depends on choose.

      We are made holy in our choice of Him and His sacrifice for us. We are sanctified in the truth because He consecrated Himself for us.

(vs. 10-19)

John 17 (pt. 4)

    Is it possible that God’s intention was to create an amazing amount of variety  of people that could be under one roof, one single desire, and one ultimate direction? It looks like that. I look around the world and there are so many variations, so many colors, so many tastes, and just so many differences. The thing is, they’re all governed by one earth environment. It’s all contingent on one for the greater purpose. Different variations feed off of and balance each other out. God wants that for us. He loves the variety of our thoughts, feelings and reactions to different circumstances. It makes our Lord smile while watching His children. The variety of one creates a sense of adventure too. The Lord we serve isn’t boring. We twisted the idea of “one” of being like robots. We twisted the image of everyone doing the same boring thing. In that idea, we only do bland work for our own survivals sake. It’s not like that, the original “one” concept isn’t like that at all! It actually creates life, united on the idea that God is all!

    The church was meant to be a mini version of God’s newal and of the original purpose for humanity. Other people have tried to create that image apart from God. It produced communist type cult religions. That twisted way created destruction but through Gods power and direction it can be. If we look in the bible in acts 2:42-47, we see a miniature version of what God wanted. He hasn’t given up, He never gives up.

(vs. 20-26)

Gruesome…..Sacrifice needed (exodus 29)

         I was thinking about the way God ordained sacrifice for Aaron’s sons to be cleansed in this passage. God said “you shall kill the bull before the Lord,” basically so that He/we can see it clearly, Exodus 29:11. I was thinking, why does this even need to happen? Why must a Holy God who is pure be shown this? God loves analogies. Maybe sin is gruesome and gory to God? To see our “sin” placed on an alter and burned, in all of it’s goriness, is that sin being demolished away. God in His Holiness is demonstrating to us, graphically, what He sees everyday from us! This isn’t God who created gore, it was us first! We abused how He meant things to be. God is all for equality an balance of things, that offering doesn’t equal sin, it was only an animal. It’s a prophesy and the image of what needed to be done for us. The true sin offerings were meant through Jesus Christ, the representative for the human race. That “needed” to happen. We don’t have the ability to be perfect and free to not sin in our power. God had to offer Himself (His son) for all of our sin to create balance in this existence. His Judgment will not fall on those who choose Christ! It’s only right for a perfect God to create balance and judgment, for the same reason a judge in the judicial system can’t simply let a criminal go free unpunished.

Offering Life: Sin Theology

    It was for sin the Israelites not to drink “any living thing” because the blood is it’ life. How is that different from sacrificing it? To sacrifice It is to offer it’s life up. To drink it’s “life” is to take it into yourself. It’s selfish and obviously isn’t a sacrifice. Our giving is saying “You are life, take all I have. Take this life for that life only You can give.” It’s also saying that life paid the debt that I caused. Sin equals death. These sins would have eventually ended in my death but through the payment, I’m allowed to live! The animal sacrificed is only an analogy of the One true sacrifice that pays the full price. It’s as if your paying with a credit card, the debt will and can only be paid by God Himself, Jesus God’s own son, the perfect lamb. God organized reality. This is the only way that for life to work. In reality, if you notice, there seems to be a debt for anything at all. To function, something has to use energy and have waste. To live, you eat and expel fecal matter. To breath you use oxygen and carbon dioxide is expelling. All of the universe is on a downhill spiral.

       God is perfect, He uses nothing to produce power. He can keep going forever because He is perfect. Sin is death. It literally means “missing the mark.” It’s doing the wrong thing when the right thing equals a positive living motion.