He will set up a banner for the nations, And will assemble the outcasts of Israel, And gather together the dispersed of Judah From the four corners of the Land. Also the envy of Ephraim shall depart, And the adversaries of Judah shall be cut off; Ephraim shall not envy Judah, And Judah shall not harass Ephraim. But they shall fly down upon the shoulder of the Philistines toward the west; Together they shall plunder the people of the East; They shall lay their hand on Edom and Moab; And the people of Ammon shall obey them. The LORD will utterly destroy the tongue of the Sea of Egypt; With His mighty wind He will shake His fist over the River, And strike it in the seven streams, And make men cross over dry-shod. There will be a highway for the remnant of His people Who will be left from Assyria, As it was for Israel In the day that he came up from the land of Egypt. (Isaiah 11:12-16)
Everyone knows what “walking on water” means. You can do the impossible. Often it has a negative spin, as when it is applied to politicians with a Messiah-complex.
But what does it actually mean in the Bible? And why did Jesus do it?
Now it came to pass on the third day, Pharaoh’s birthday, that he made a feast for all his servants; and he lifted up the head of the chief butler and of the chief baker among his servants. Then he restored the chief butler to his butlership again, and he placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand. But he hanged the chief baker, as Joseph had interpreted to them. Yet the chief butler did not remember Joseph, but forgot him. (Genesis 40:20-23)
Joseph’s life has three “matrix” cycles: as a prophet betrayed by his brothers [1], a priest tempted to “harlotry”, and finally as a conquering king.
[I find this one very hard to post. It gets a bit too close to the bone for me. But there is something here for all of us.]
“Be sure we are willing to accept anything
into our lives as from the Lord,
except those things which can really alter us.”
From The Inward Journey, by Gene Edwards. [1]
Chris,
I’ll give you a riddle and if you can answer the question for me fully let me know. I have been ministering the Lord for three decades now. It has been a ministry within the walls of church life and a ministry which I hope—and believe—has been centred in the Lord Jesus Christ. But here is my mystery: There are some Christians who have come among us who are greatly flawed: they come, listen to the messages, take notes and never miss a meeting; they arrive at every 6 a.m. prayer meeting, read all the good books, do everything exactly as recommended for those who are young in Christ; they pray, sing, testify, wait patiently before the Lord, do everything that Scripture itself admonishes them to do. Yet, they do not change. Why is this? I do not know. But I have noticed something. On a few occasions, I have seen such deeply flawed brothers and sisters, after many years of going on unchanged, and sometimes getting away with near murder, I might add, confronted at last.
Michael Stead (The Intertextuality of Zechariah 1-8 (Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies)) points to a number of intertexual connections between Ezekiel 1-11 and the vision of Zechariah 5:5-11. He concludes that the vision of Zechariah is an inversion of the Ezekiel’s vision of Yahweh’s departing glory: “Ezekiel 1-11 describes the departure of Yahweh from Jerusalem because of the idolatry (Ezek 8), iniquity (Ezek 4) and wickedness (Ezek 5) of his people, and his departure is attended by winged creatures riding on the wind. But, now that Yahweh is returning to dwell in Jerusalem, idolatry/iniquity/wickedness is being forced to depart, in a parody of Yahweh’s earlier departure.”
“…practical, daily piety (“religious sense”) flows from liturgical piety. The sense of how man approaches God in formal public worship before His throne determines the sense of how man serves God in daily life. It follows from this that changes in practical piety are largely a reflection of changes in liturgical piety. At the same time, as we shall see, misunderstandings of practical piety feed back into liturgical piety. A practical piety that focuses on negation of the world rather than on its transformation will work to destroy the spirit of thanksgiving in the liturgy, and will also give rise to wrong understandings of what is happening during the Lord’s Supper.”
James B. Jordan, Christian Piety: Deformed and Reformed.
“Human beings are animals whose preference for group membership is simultaneously the source of their greatest salvation and their ultimate destruction” —Xenocrates
Who has the majority of evidence to support their paradigm? Is it the Young Earth Creationists or the (mostly atheistic) Evolutionists? (Please note that as far as I am concerned, anyone else is just sitting on a very sharp fence trying to hide the pain with clever words.)
The Old Earthers, whatever their stripe (from Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to certain young Sydney Anglicans I admire and the misguided mob at BioLogos), despite their bluff, rely on hearsay and circular reasoning. Creationist cosmologist Russell Humphreys writes:
In the introduction to the sixth volume of G. K. Chesterton’s Collected Works, while working toward some explanation of The Man Who Was Thursday, Denis Conlon quotes Chesterton’s Introduction to the Book of Job (1907):
Ralph Smith helpfully applies the five point Covenant model to the history of Israel between the captivity and Christ:
1) Transcendence: God’s sovereign control over the nations was revealed in this period of the old covenant more than any other. Daniel foresaw the whole history of the world from the time of Babylon to the time of establishment of the kingdom of the Messiah (Dan. 2:27ff.; 7:1ff.). Clearly the kingdoms of this world were in His hand and He was guiding history where He willed. For the Jews as a nation, this greater revelation of God’s Kingship was important for they would be apparently in the hands of unbelieving rulers through much of this period, but the fact that God had predicted the history of the entire era from the beginning put all of this in a different light. The Jews learned anew that “The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: He turneth it whithersoever He will” (Prv. 21:1).
Mike Bull is a graphic designer who lives and works in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Australia. His passion is understanding and teaching the Bible, and he writes occasionally for Theopolis Institute in Birmingham AL, USA.
