And they came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man,
the one who had had the legion, sitting there,
clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. – Mark 5:15
Rich Bledsoe’s old blog is a goldmine. Here’s an excerpt from The Dysfunctional Family of the Gadarene Madman.
“Rivers of water run down from my eyes,
because men do not keep Your law.” Psalm 119:136
I might bag out [1] the Biblical Horizons crowd for their views on baptism, but otherwise they are giants. They have a hold on Scripture and history that enables them to understand the times.
Rich Blesdsoe recently made the observation that the unbelief which constantly confronts us Western Christians is quite a different animal to the demonism found in other cultures. We don’t suffer the full-scale “possessions” seen in pagan cultures. The rebellion is just as self-destructive, as crazed and zealous, and just as much a “nothing” as the idols of the pagans, but it is a different kind of nothing. What’s going on in our culture?
[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]
Continue reading
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One more Friedman post. Rich Bledsoe commented that the Biblical Covenant structure is very apparent in Friedman’s writings. Here’s a few of Mr Friedman’s principles for understanding the nature of true and false leadership (I have left quite a few of them out, as they wouldn’t make sense without his elaboration). For the whole outline, you’ll just have to get the book.
Everything you know about leadership is wrong.
The five-fold Covenant pattern is found throughout the Bible. Those who claim that Deuteronomy’s shape was borrowed from other Ancient Near East cultures need to explain how it could then be found not only in the Ten Commandments, but in the shape of every story going back to Genesis 1. Their theorizing is the result of their deluded, naturalistic worldview, and Christian scholars suck it right up.
God loves fractals. He (Father) speaks (Spirit) the Word (Son) and everything He creates is made in the image of the Triune, three distinct, yet indivisible, named parts working as one.
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Edwin H. Friedman writes:
“Living with crisis is a major part of leaders’ lives. The crises come in two major varieties: (1) those that are not of their own making but are imposed on them from outside or within the system; and (2) those that are actually triggered by the leaders through doing precisely what they should be doing.”
(A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, p. 27)
“Recall the phrase: ‘Poor planning on your part does not constitute a crisis on my part’. The less mature are always attempting to enroll others in their disquiet, their ‘crisis du jour’. A perceived catastrophe on the part of certain members of the congregation does not constitute a calamity for a well-defined leader.”
Bible Matrix blog
