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.

For forrealone's notifications.

The forum has been upgraded to 1.8.37 from 1.8.12. We missed a lot of versions...totally my fault. I'll try to keep it all up to date from now on.

A lot of versions come about because of security issues found, but there are some functionality updates and whatnot. Since the forum "jumped" a lot of versions, there were lots of updates. If anyone is really interested, the release notes are here. 

You will still see some of those pesky PHP warnings at the top, but they have been drastically reduced. I'll see about getting rid of them completely.

There are some security customizations that MyBB suggests, that I may implement in the future. But for now, I'm going to take a breather.

The final chapter of Galatians was encouragement but virtually no doctrine. We move on to Paul's letter to the Ephesians as a letter to be shared across Asia Minor. Thus, there are no personal notes to anyone specifically by name. By the time Paul was in Roman custody, Ephesus had already started to become the center of gravity for Christian religion, as things were heating up in Judea between the Jews and Rome, and Jewish Christians were fleeing. Writing from his confinement in Rome, the single major issue behind this letter was the ongoing division between Jewish and Gentile Christians.

Both factions suffered a powerful tendency to rely on the flesh. Jews typically never got past their "chosen" identity and cliquish behavior demonstrating discomfort with Gentiles in general. The Gentiles struggled to latch onto the necessity of moral purity in their conduct. In this first chapter, Paul begins tearing down the wall between them by emphasizing their new covenant identity as Christians. He begins using the constant refrain of being "in Christ" particularly as a reference to this citizenship.

It's important to notice that verses 3-14 are one long sentence. It comes close to a Trinitarian statement, in that there is a section about the Father, another about the Son, and third about the Holy Spirit. He offers praise that the Father chose us in eternity, the Son redeemed them (and us) in their recent history, and the Holy Spirit came to lock us into that redemption in our individual personal pasts. It's a doctrinal tour de force in just a few lines.

He starts with see several conjugations of the Greek word translated into English as "bless" coming from a root denoting someone or something worthy of adoration. We and the Father naturally find each other adorable. He chose us, each marked out before this wretched world was begun, with the intention of making us as pure as Passover lambs. He committed Himself to adopt us His own children because He loved us, joint heirs with Christ. This mass adoption is a part of His glory; any earthly ruler would count the size, ability and prosperity of his tribe as a primary manifestation of his glory. He gave us each other, our talents and adorned us with His grace as a fitting bequest to His Heir.

Regarding the Son, it was His awful price in blood that bought us, making us welcome into the Covenant. With this adoption covenant came unspeakable privileges that He willingly gives, simply because Jesus could see a vast empire would be His. The Father had kept secret His plan to offer His Son a realm of people who could be and build a vast wealth and power. All of this had to wait until the right moment when the Son could inherit all the power and authority of Heaven and Earth. As citizens of this empire ("in Christ") we become God's claimed nation (versus the nations claimed by the Elohim Council after the Tower of Babel). This is what "predestination" means -- marked for seizure from the other nations for a special purpose in which God never fails. Paul specifically points to his readers as part of the first generation of citizens in this new empire, a very high privilege as the first of many generations to glorify the Messiah.

Thus, when the readers of this letter first heard the gospel message, and were moved to believe in Christ, they were granted the seal of the Holy Spirit. Since there's no way they could experience all that comes with that in this life, it's as if that first generation are on layaway until everything is completed and all the saints God has claimed can be brought into the fold. The Blood has yet to be applied to future souls waiting to be born into this glorious empire.

Catch your breath now.

There in his Roman confinement, Paul heard from messengers how the churches in Asia Minor had progressed to the point they had learned to submit to Christ as their Lord and to recognize their fellow citizens of Heaven. It caused him to celebrate the unspeakable blessing of having been a part of that. He kept praying for more of the same; may the Lord continue working in them.

May they continue embracing the convictions of their hearts as their guide to understanding the full privilege and duty as members of Christ's empire, in particular, the divine gifts of the Holy Spirit working in their bodies. That's the same power that raised Christ from the dead, and which placed Him on His throne. Every power and authority in Heaven and Earth is now subject to His whims. That includes domains in the Spirit Realm that no human can imagine.

He is our Lord; we are His body. We are His hands and feet throughout the whole earth.

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.

In the previous chapter, Paul pointed out that we should not seek to place ourselves under the guardianship of the Law. Christ died on the Cross to claim His inheritance, and that's you and I. He ended the Law and set us all free, including Jews who embrace Him as the Messiah. The purpose of the Law was to drive Israel to the Messiah, and in the process to draw us Gentiles to Him. But it's a one way transaction; Christ does not drive people back to the Law. In Christ, we are set free from that regime to find the Father's favor in His Son. The Law was never meant for Gentiles, but the Messiah was.

Christ set us free for a reason: so we could walk freely in His favor. This is a personal relationship with Him, not a highly ritualized subservience. The rituals are not part of His reign, and that includes circumcision. It's not for Gentiles. If Gentiles enter into that dead realm, it owns them wholly and they are no longer part of Christ's realm. They have walked back into the realm of flesh and death. We need not wonder fearfully whether God will accept us. The Holy Spirit assures us that we are accepted by Him. The condition of our fleshly body is not considered; it's a matter of faith in Christ. His love replaces fear.

When Paul last saw them, the Christians in Galatia were running free and easy. Who loaded them down with burdens to make them drag around so slowly? That load of nonsense did not come from Christ. All it takes is just a tiny little bit of deception to stop you in your tracks. The "burden" of Christ is like wings that speed you up. Let the fools who are preaching that burdensome nonsense face their own judgment; don't help them carry their garbage bags around.

Paul didn't preach a Jewish identity to them. If he had, the Jewish authorities would not have persecuted him. He wouldn't be preaching the Cross; there would be no reason for Jews to choke on the Cross as the final sacrifice God accepts to end the entire body of ritual law. Instead of cutting around ("circumcision"), let the Judaizers cut themselves off (emasculation). Paul suggests mockingly that, if a little cutting helps, how about a whole lot?

Granted, the wrong kind of freedom will also become a burden that kills. It's the paradox of faith that it sets us free to voluntarily bind ourselves to loving each other as Christ did. Besides, rabbis had been teaching for at least a couple of centuries that loving your neighbor as yourself is the summary of the whole Law of Moses. Get that right and everything else will take care of itself. But if you follow the example of the Judaizers, you'll end up like predators, taking advantage of each other. This would destroy the churches.

The Spirit and the fleshly nature are natural enemies; there can be no peaceful coexistence. One will rule or the other, and the Law is for the flesh, not for the Spirit. Obeying the Spirit transcends the law code. Paul lists the kinds of stuff that comes with the flesh. It's power is nonexistent and desperately needs the Law, because it does not know how to do good. It can only destroy, not build up.

By contrast, the power of the Spirit produces a host of glorious behaviors that take you outside the reach of the Law. Belonging to Christ nails the flesh to the Cross. Law cannot do that, because flesh refuses to surrender. You can walk in the Law and stay in the flesh, or you can embrace the new life in the Spirit and live by His character.

Yet again: The typical character of Judaizers was to be snarky, always jockeying for position while seeking to undercut each other. That's what they made of the Law. Christians don't need that stuff.

Ed and I have been receiving weird PHP warnings at the top of some pages on the forum. You will know them if you see them. Nothing to worry about right now, since they just are just cumbersome notifications. Everything seems to be working fine. If you encounter them, simply scroll down and the page content should be below the warnings.

I have noticed on the Who's Online page (it's linked on the forum home page at the bottom of radixfidem.org), that there are a lot of hits from unregistered visitors, from a range of IPs originating in Hong Kong. On the server side, I banned that range of IPs, so they can't see the site unless they register. I'm seeing guest hits right now but they are scattered geographically and they don't seem suspicious.

I'll check on things later or tomorrow, but keep this site in your prayers, if you can.