The primary doctrine in this chapter remains consistent with the rest of the whole letter. Once again, Paul paints an image of Christian unity borrowing from bits and pieces of what his readers had experienced in human politics.

First is the very subtle paradox of his position as a prisoner of Roman justice. On the one hand, Rome recognized by treaty the limited jurisdiction of various conquered kingdoms over their own people, wherever those people were throughout the Roman Empire. Rome was not yet willing to entertain a fresh treaty recognizing Christ's jurisdiction over His people, since the same people were already claimed by other treaty partners. This conflicting claim of jurisdiction was why Paul was under house arrest in Rome; Paul had promoted a competing claim over some Judeans.

Whether or not Rome was willing to play ball was not the point. Paul had spread the gospel of a new identity that transcended human ethnic and national identities. The claims of Christ did not wait for human governments to play along; they were in force regardless because they rested on the authority of the Creator of all things. The Elohim Council couldn't argue about it, either.

So, Paul calls for his readers to act according to the laws and justice of the Covenant realm of Christ: humble, merciful to the downtrodden, patiently putting up with those who hadn't yet figured it out. This is your family, your true spiritual inheritance. We do not have the trouble most human kingdoms have with competing heirs trying to claim the throne. There is only one: Christ. He is our feudal Lord; there is no Jewish Messiah separate from the Gentile Christ.

And then we come to a passage that has stirred an awful lot of debate, about whether Paul refers to some alleged time Christ spent in Hell while His body lay in the grave. I've always taken the position that this is a bogus concept rooted in Greek mythology and read back into the New Testament, not in ancient Hebrew teaching. Paul halfway quotes from Psalm 68:18 but apparently modifies the image just a little so that it better matches the contemporary Roman parades when some general returns to the imperial capital with plunder and captives (the quintessential Roman civic ritual). These triumphal parades often heavily changed the local economy in the city because of the influx of plundered wealth.

Christ also rode home to His Father as a conquering hero, dragging behind Him the plunder He seized from the Devil's domain. But His plundered wealth was not stuff, but people. Christ gave to His own domain souls rescued from slavery. Thus, says Paul, we now have excellent leaders from all backgrounds, not just Jews, but Gentiles, too. And they have all been given for one purpose: to help us come together and love each other as one nation under Him.

The Devil cannot play head games any more. We have our own bright souls to help us understand the divine truth. The whole image of growing up to be mature rests on one thing: loving each other the way mature people do within their community. The Jews should be eager to welcome the Gentiles home from their wandering in foreign places among pagan idols and sin. The people who messed around with that stuff are all dead; the people in the church are new creatures. The chapter ends with a lot of non-doctrinal advice and encouragement to do the one and only job church has: become a single family.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

A couple months ago, I was told that an old friend, Dean,  who used to teach the girls when they were little had fallen and broken his hip.  He lives near Charlotte and was in the hospital for over a month due to complications.  As soon as I heard about his hip, I started sending him cards every week in care of his daughter who also lives in Charlotte. 
He was released a month ago into rehab.  Last Monday, he was released from rehab and was doing really well.  He went to stay with his daughter until he was able to go home. I sent another card on Wednesday with a happy face on it since he was finally able to go "home".   

He passed away Thursday, the next night. When I heard the news on Friday, I sent a sympathy card to his daughter and family.  No more get well cards.  It made me very sad. 
 

Yesterday afternoon, Marianne (my mother-in-law) called to let me know that my brother-in-law Bryce was in the ICU at the hospital in a town down towards the coast.    After several hours of back and forth conversations with her and the hospital, she is going to fly down there probably Wednesday.  I am probably going to drive down and get her at that airport and then we will figure out what to do from there.
 
He has liver failure - cirrhosis (probably stage 4), kidney failure, pneumonia, full body edema (generalized edema),  c-diff and who knows what all else.  The hospital suggested that no one sign a DNR.  His wife (they split up a couple years ago) made it to the hospital yesterday and is freaking out.  She went back home for now.

Please pray that Our Father's will be done, that Bryce need suffer no more, that we all have strength and faith to pass through this whatever it turns out to be.

Thanks!  Love you all

Stumbled across Radix Fidem through the neoreaction online community. I've since lost interest in political movements but try and stay up tp date on going ons.

Lutheran, then Baptist (IFB) background. Francis Schaeffer, Watchman Nee, AW Tozer, CS Lewis and Michael Heiser are some of the authors that have influenced me greatly in my Christian walk. I recently discovered Kenneth Bailey and suspect he will soon be added to that list. Andrew Murray may make the list as well, I've only just started exploring his material. 

Looking forward to interacting with folks who also are digging down into the heart of the matter.

This is by necessity a rather short lesson. The primary subject of this chapter is some of Paul's personal background and a prayer on the readers' behalf, but very little doctrine. The doctrinal issue here is very difficult for most people to understand, much less to embrace. Please note that I must refer to the work of Michael S. Heiser, particularly in his book, The Unseen Realm (Lexham Press, 2015).

In the midst of Paul relating his position as a prisoner and Rome, and as an Apostle of Jesus Christ, he twice refers to the mystery or secret of Jesus the Messiah. While he clearly states that the secret was that Christ's death would open the Covenant to Gentiles, most readers don't quite get the full significance of that.

Most people do understand how the Jews of Jesus' time were so hostile to the idea of the Gentiles receiving the gospel. When Paul said that to the mob at the foot of the stairs outside the Fortress of Antonia, the mob was suddenly ready to kill him with their bare hands. The Sanhedrin turned it into a major case and it took two years before Paul was finally sent to Rome in custody, from whence he writes this letter. That's only half of it. It wasn't really a secret from the Jews, but it was something the Jewish authorities desperately tried to censor. It was clearly stated in their own prophets that Gentiles would be someday redeemed.

Paul refers also to "rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms" (v. 10). After untold ages passed, these rulers and authorities were finally seeing this secret God kept from them. It's not as if they were unaware of the message from Israel's prophets about redeeming Gentiles. However, the meaning was opaque to them.

Heiser tells us that those powers in the heavenly realm were like councilors in God's heavenly courts. At the tower of Babel, the nations were divvied up between these heavenly beings. At some later point, God took them to task for misleading the nations in their care, in contrast to how He had taken care of the nation He built for Himself, Israel. The image we get is that these heavenly councilors had deceived the nations into believe they were deities, seeking to embezzle the glory that should have been given to God alone as Creator.

Because of their intransigence in this, God never told them His real plans. They knew about the coming Messiah; they didn't know He was going to send His own Son to play that roll. Whatever it was He accomplished in His time on earth, it was above the councilors' authority. Thus, His death on the Cross nullified the Old Covenant, particularly the restrictions that separate Jews and Gentiles. As Paul notes, now all Gentiles are accepted in the Covenant of the Messiah.

That means that the nations assigned to the management of those heavenly councilors were wide open to God picking out people to join His new "nation" of people. They hadn't expected this, did not see it coming. There is nothing they can do to inhibit Christ raiding their populations for the Elect of every nation.

This is what Paul refers to in this chapter. In the mere existence of the church as a symbolic "nation", the councilors learned what God had hidden from them since the Tower of Babel. Heiser shows us how this is all well established in the teachings of rabbinical schools ever since the time of the Second Temple built after the Exile. That means Paul would have learned it, and this is what he refers to here and in several other passages already noted in this study.

Because God went to so much trouble, and because Christ was faithful in accepting such an awful death, Paul's readers should be celebrating every day they live in His grace and election, that they are no longer subject to the incomprehensible power of the false gods of the nations. We are all safe in Christ. Both Jews and Gentiles are one in Him. We should be living for His glory as one covenant nation.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

The theme continues to be uniting Hebrew and Gentile Christians. The previous chapter emphasized our unity as a single nation rooted in Heaven, pointing out how the Lord designed it on three levels: cosmic, global and individual. Here, the emphasis begins again with the global, recalling the former distinction made between Israel and Gentile nations.

Before Christ, the Gentile nations were all captives of the Devil. He was demoted and confined to this world, and this became his domain under God's authority. The elohim for the most part aligned with the Devil and his agenda, so all the nations assigned to them were by default captives of the Devil. Paul says it was a form of spiritual death; no connection or awareness of Eternity. All we had was the flesh and what it could perceive, and it was wide open to the influence and temptations of the Devil. We were born children of God's wrath. Paul intentionally writes those first few verses as a single incomplete sentence, leaving us all hanging.

And then, in verse 4 begins the resolution. God was fabulously wealthy and generous in terms of mercy and love. Despite our being dead to Him, He chose us to be resurrected with His Son. That is, when Christ rose from the grave, He was the center of a new realm, and we were in raised up into that new realm. It was all by grace; there is nothing we could have done, nor could be even have known to want it. We now have an eternal identity. The whole point is that we are the proof of God's case against the Devil and the rebellious elohim council members. He will use us to prove that He was right in demanding all glory for Himself. Again, it was all by grace -- the initiative was His alone. There is not a thing we could have done; we were utterly hopeless. Giving Him glory should be our reflex.

And not just that, but with that citizenship comes a vast wealth of gifts in this life. You see, the works of obedience are His gift to us, a very high privilege that marks us eternal beings. He plucked us from our graves, gave us life, clothed us, taught us manners and sent us back into the world as His own elite ambassadors. Our rich vestments are obedience to Him. He had this all worked out before He even got around to creating us.

Before the Messiah came, Gentiles were not permitted any of that high privilege, nor even the awareness of it. Israel by law was not allowed to be friends with Gentiles. They had to remain aloof and avoid unnecessary contact in the flesh. They were granted the high privilege of ambassadorship among the Gentile nations. But Jesus opened up the Covenant citizenship. His blood covers us and makes us fit to become citizens of His domain. And He welcomed some Jews, as well! Now, we who were formerly two distinct groups on the earth are now joined in His Covenant as a new kind of human, something never seen before. We all have His Spirit inside of us, not something He had previously offered.

He is building us into a massive edifice for His living Temple. Christ is the cornerstone, the foundation is the prophets and apostles, and we will be the stones to make His home. It's a massive building project, the likes of which no man or men could ever dream, much less have they seen it before. There is no Jew or Gentile in Him, only Christians.

Two items converged a bit for me: Ed's post the other day about the financial collapse and Ben's short video on the widespread Internet outages this morning:



In mornings when I go into the office, I usually spend some time in a Starbucks to do some personal things, writing, etc., when I noticed a lot of slow going trying to load the forum here, but also my personal email and blog, all of which are hosted on Bluehost:
   

At first I thought it was an issue with Bluehost's servers, but when I could eventually log into my hosting account, there was nothing particularly wrong with my servers' health. Then I noticed the site used to manage my kid's school finances (probably not hosted by Bluehost) was showing really weird errors here and there, and bad connectivity.

As Ben says in the video, there's not a chance in the world this was a hacking attempt if so many Internet-based services were affected. The likely candidate was the solar flaring. See this facebook post from downdetector.com. There were dozens more sites and services like the one in the image that had similar troubles.

I'm thinking that the Internet will likely go poof from a moderate flare before the electrical grids worldwide are zapped, if both don't get wrecked during the same event.

We live in interesting times.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

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