As I have been praying and asking the Lord to intervene in the various geopolitical situations going on in the U.S. and around the world, I have also sought to seek others views outside of the heavily biased MSM.  Ed has provided much in this regard and appreciate his insight and wisdom.

I have also been following a libertarian guy out of Florida, Tom Luongo, who blogs and owns the Gold, Goats, and Guns website. He published a blog post yesterday https://tomluongo.me/2022/03/02/opening-salvos-tossed-putin-next-moves-ukraine I found very interesting on the current and potential future state of affairs in the Ukraine conflict.  He provides links to some of his previous blog posts that will give you some context if this is the first time you have read his work.

Pray with me that God will guide all of us who acknowledge Christ as our Savior to be prepared for whatever he places before us.

The Lord wants me to go see Batman tonight. My youngest daughter asked me to go. I hate the movies. So it is odd. His mysterious ways...
We love You Lord and we thank You always.

I'll post the link here when it's up on Amazon.

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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.

There are a few sites I'm unable to reach because they are blocked. I've tested various ways to get them, including TOR and Opera's proxy feature, as well as more dedicated proxies around the Net. So far as I can tell, this is not a transient thing, but an intentional blockage at the backbone level.

Better get used to it.

The Feast of Tabernacles is over in mid-October; winter is coming. In five months or so comes Passover in the spring. It's been at least a year, and perhaps two, since Jesus sent out the Twelve on a preaching and healing mission. Here He chooses seventy other disciples among those who have become faithful followers. It's not likely the Twelve could have covered much territory in six pairs, so this new mission of thirty-five pairs would do a much better job of preparing a path for Jesus to follow before His final work.

This is still under the Covenant of Moses, so His instructions are very nearly the same as He gave the Twelve in Matthew 10. Jewish communities were expected to host traveling preachers. Such preachers should not have to travel with full luggage, but Jesus pushes this protocol to the limit. It's almost as if they are supposed to leave right away after being recruited during the feast.

They should have no expectations about what they would encounter, make no demands ("lambs among wolves"). Carry nothing but the message. The point about greetings is to avoid the extravagant eastern style greetings common among those who are politicking for something. They were to fully trust in the power of God to supply and bless. It's all about walking in faith and blessing the faith of others. Just accept what they offer and don't try to upgrade to nicer accommodations, since those who first exercised the faith to receive the preachers as guests should receive all the local honor. Bless that household fully. Perform the rituals that speak so loudly and watch the Father fulfill them.

Most importantly, these seventy were emissaries of the Kingdom of Heaven. They were to remind themselves and their listeners often. Make sure the miracles are clearly connected to that. If things don't go well, perform the Ritual of Foot Dust, which is tantamount to denouncing the place as pagan.

This triggered something in Jesus' mind. Right in the middle of this, He lays a curse on the cities that saw so very much of His preaching and miracles: Capernaum, Chorazin just a short distance to the north, and Bethsaida a few miles east along the shore of Galilee near where He fed the 5000. Think of how they saw the crowds healed and delivered off and on for nearly two years. But they didn't believe. We know this because archaeology shows that their synagogues tolerated pagan symbols inside their very meeting places.

Those three cities in and around Jesus' hometown at the time saw more of His presence and miracles than any other place on this earth, but they rejected His teaching, His call to restore Covenant obedience. So, Jesus reminds the mission teams that whoever receives them was receiving Jesus, and whoever embraced Jesus was embracing the Father.

We don't know how long they were at this work, but they came back celebrating the miraculous things they had experienced. Jesus rejoiced with them, mentioning how He could see the Kingdom of Darkness beaten back. They had the authority to walk peacefully through anything on the earth that Satan might use against them. It was thrilling beyond words, but Jesus reminded them that this was just a temporal situation. What really mattered was that they had an eternal home in Heaven. This life would soon be over for Him, and He was going to prepare a place for them.

Then He addressed His Father in their hearing. He gave thanks for how revelation didn't come to the pretentious and proud, but to the real children of Heaven, those who put full trust in the Father. The rest of the world would never understand, much less accept, His claim to be the Son of God. But the few who were ready to receive that revelation would receive in such abundance that no one could comprehend.

He then turned to His followers and said they probably didn't begin to understand just how richly blessed they were. They experienced directly the things prophets and kings had longed to see.

Nothing catches Our Father off guard. There is already a ton of commentary and analysis about the fracas in the Ukraine. There's no point in my adding to the noise. You already know how to find out what you want to know about it. I'll say just this: The primary field of action will be in economics, not in military maneuvers.

In ages past the Lord raised up powerful empires that didn't know Him, like Assyria and Babylon, to discipline His people. It hurt them so bad because they needed the discipline. I'm convinced it's possible to be among the few who need no such discipline, so that these things don't bring fear. We already knew bad times were coming, and we have been talking about how to prepare for it. Because sin has been unrestricted, the Lord will not spare on His wrath. This is just getting started.

May the Lord bring us to the place where peace with Him is all we care about.

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 my prayer time I have been starting, after giving thanks, to pray for my enemies before I pray about anything else. I have noticed something. It is small but it is something . After I pray there is a incredible  stillness and calm surrounding me like a light weight drape almost substance but not quite. I am not seeking for this it’s just something. I am sure in my gut to keep praying for my enemies.
I also wanted to share a couple of passages from a prayer book I got called, Prayers by the Lake:
“The way to the kingdom of blessedness is not found, is not shown, and is not intersected. It is born in the soul when Life and Truth are born in her. If Life and Truth have been born in your soul, rejoice and be glad, for the Way has been born in it as well.”

“A madman says: “Look at my neighbor, an inveterate sinner, and see how his body blossoms with good health! Surely the sin of the soul does not harm the body,” says one who is out of his mind. Just wait, madman, just wait a little longer, until the dung of the soul emerges from the body. Then you will shut your mouth and flee from sins as though you were fleeing fetid putridity. Wait until a worm devours the inside of an apple, an you will be distressed to see its outside all faded and pale. Then you too will stand with the leper’s along the road and cry out like a man near death: “O Son of God, have mercy on me!” And then you will hear, and understand those salvation bearing words: “Your sins are forgiven; go in peace!””
Nikolai Velimirovich, 1921-1922

In the balance of chapter 7 before this passage, and in the verses following in chapter 8, Jesus asserts in several different ways that He is the Son of God. The Temple guards could not arrest Jesus. He offered the water of the Spirit. He was the light of the world. He was not of this world.

John also records in passing how the Pharisees despised the common people as accursed because they weren't Talmud scholars. They also proved they didn't know Jesus, because they insisted He was born in Galilee. They also falsely asserted the no prophet ever came from Galilee, but of course, Jonah, Nahum, Hosea, probably Elijah, and Elisha were all from Galilee. They knew the Talmudic traditions, but didn't know the Scriptures. Their lack of clear knowledge of God's Word plays a large part in this episode when Jesus confronts them in the Temple.

What was really at play was their arrogance about Galilee being a land of ignorant bumpkins, and their complete lack of effort to find out where Jesus was born. They knew the Messiah was supposed to have been born in Bethlehem, but the issue is their contempt for anyone that wasn't among their number. Everyone knew the Messiah was going to be a Pharisee, right?

The emphasis here is that they didn't know the Word God, and thus did not know the God of the Word. The only way to know the Father is through the heart of faith. If they knew God that way, then they would have recognized that everything Jesus said was consistent with divine revelation. But because they had no real knowledge of God, they could not accept anything Jesus said, much less the truth that Jesus was the Son of God.

They had slipped away so far, for such a long time, that they were no longer under the Covenant of Moses. This is what matters most in the case of the woman caught in adultery. Overnight Jesus had gone to stay with friends and supporters over on the Mount of Olives. The next day He came back and taught again in the Temple. So some Scribes and Pharisees interrupted this teaching session by bringing a woman they claimed was caught in the act of adultery. By protocol, she would have been forced to kneel before Him.

It was common for rabbis to test each other by bringing law cases. Most were imaginary, but this time the big shots brought a very real case to Jesus, asking Him to rule as a civil judge. They cited the Law of Moses prohibiting adultery and the capital punishment.

It was proper protocol for rabbis to sit down when teaching, so from this position Jesus bent over close to the ground and began scratching in the loose dust on the plaza pavement with His finger. You would have thought He didn't hear them. But they pestered Him until He straightened up and said that if any of her accusers were without sin, they could cast the first stone. Supposedly that was the signal for everyone else to join in the stoning. Then He went back to scratching in the dust on the ground.

It requires monumental arrogance to imagine that one is sinless, particularly in Jewish culture. The Scribes and Pharisees might go so far as to imagine they alone were blessed by God and that their path was the right one, but they weren't insane. All of their posturing was suddenly exposed here, and it struck their consciences. The eldest knew it best, so they left first. The younger ones in their zeal took longer, but finally realized their support was gone, and eventually walked away.

As usual, John doesn't state what should have been obvious: None of the woman's accusers had standing to take action. They had no shalom to defend here. Sinless perfection is what the Pharisees thought Jesus was talking about, but He was pointing back to the Covenant. All that was necessary under Moses was that the accusers themselves be clean of adultery, and had witnessed the crime first hand. With humble obedience comes the confidence to act, but the Pharisees knew nothing of that; their hearts were silenced. All they had was intellectual legalism.

Further, why were they protecting the man with whom she committed adultery? They broke the Law by not bringing both guilty parties. They were notoriously contemptuous of women, a primary element of their legalism. The whole party was guilty and knew it. Once they were all gone, the woman was still there by herself. Where was the required witness against her? There was no one to bring the case. She gets away with her crime because everyone who sought to condemn her were themselves condemned. In order to condemn her would require vast changes the leadership weren't willing to embrace.

Jesus stated that He was in no position to condemn her. It's not that He didn't know whether she was a sinner, in contrast to His own sinless perfection. But the national covenant had been vacated, and so there was no jurisdiction, no community purity to protect. The nation was defunct; there was no leverage for executing capital punishment. There was also the practical matter that Rome would not permit an execution on those grounds. God had allowed Rome to steal away their national sovereignty because the leadership had abandoned the Covenant of Moses. The whole nation stood condemned.

So Jesus did what He could do in that position, dismissing her with the admonition to "sin no more." Jesus had not come to bring civil judgment for crimes, but to bring moral conviction about sin itself. The only way anyone could possibly be walking in righteousness was from within their own convictions. The threat of capital punishment had not stopped this woman; only her own conscience could do that.

Jesus had come to awaken a righteous conscience.

(Edited for clarity.)