He mentioned Joshua 1:2, where God told Joshua to cross the Jordan River. McGee then said it when he visited that land himself, he also crossed the Jordan.

But it was not to fulfill the Bible’s orders. Because he knew that the Bible was speaking to Joshua, not him. Thus his conclusion: the Bible is not TO us, but FOR us.

I disagree. I think it’s both.

Sure, I don’t have to cross the River Jordan. At least not physically. I don’t feel compelled to hop on a plane, travel to the Middle East, and row a boat across the water.
But I think the Lord is constantly pushing me to cross spiritual River Jordans at all times — to breach self-imposed limitations, to set new boundaries. To boldly go where my lazy butt hasn’t gone before.
Jesus commanded us to love one another as we love ourselves. Was that TO the disciples? Or was it TO us, too?

So McGee isn’t always right. But neither was Luther, Jerome, Origen, or even C.S. Lews, for that matter.

My point is that I rely heavily on others to help me understand The Word. (I can’t believe how much I miss when I half-blindly fumble through the scriptures.) But reliance on other’s understanding is always with a slight degree of skepticism running in my mental background.

The bottom line is that we need to pray for our own understanding.

“The curious task of Christian humility is to demonstrate to people how little they really know about what the imagine they can design.”

Check out what Mark Skousen had to say about how a society really survives:

Jobs’s Job
by Mark Skousen, Investment U Contributing Editor
Friday, December 30, 2011

“There is no genius without a touch of madness.”

- Seneca

I just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s masterful bestseller, Steve Jobs, who he calls “the greatest business executive of our era,” equal in stature to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. He was the classic Horatio Alger story, starting a computer business in his parents’ garage that became the world’s most valuable company – Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL).

He was responsible for major advances in six – count ‘em – industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing.

That’s not to say he was fun to be around. I’ve met over a dozen of Forbes Richest People in America, but as much as I admired Steve Jobs, I never wanted to meet him. He was notorious for his “bad boy” behavior and insulting strangers. His personal life was a mess. He frequently used LSD, seldom bathed, and was, according to his friends and associates, “an obsessive, narcissistic, frequently sociopathic nutcase” who tried to find happiness through Buddhist philosophy and strange eating habits. Not surprisingly, he died young. Sometimes it’s best not to get to know your favorite author, philosopher, or business leader.

But he has a lot to teach us when it comes to business and investing.

The Keynesian Myth

First, he proved that consumers don’t drive the economy: entrepreneurs, business innovators and visionaries do. Jobs made a point of demanding products that customers didn’t know they wanted – the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad. When asked about doing market research, he replied, “No, because consumers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

In an age when the media constantly promotes the Keynesian myth that “consumer spending is the largest single driver of the U.S. economy” (to quote The Wall Street Journal), Steve Jobs set the record straight.

“That’s not my approach,” he said. “Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!’” It’s entrepreneurship, productive investment, and creative innovation that create a higher standard of living. Consumption is the effect – not the cause – of prosperity. (This is known as Say’s law.)

Product First, Profits Follow

Second, the best companies and their leaders are driven ultimately by their desire to make great products or services, not profits. As Steve Jobs says, “The products, not the profits, are the motivation. Everything else is secondary.” He criticized his rival Bill Gates of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT): “Winning business was more important [to him] than making great products.”

If you compare the stock performance of Apple with Microsoft, it’s a split decision. From 1986 until 2000, Microsoft rose 60-fold, from $1 to $60 a share, while Apple had a 20-fold increase from $2 to $40 a share, with far more volatility.

Since 2000, the race goes to Apple. While Microsoft is about breakeven for the past 12 years, Apple has increased another 10-fold, from $40 to $403 today.

The Future of Microsoft vs. Apple…

Now that Steve Jobs has died and Bill Gates has retired and devoted most of his time to charitable causes, are either stocks worth holding?

Apple is definitely the growth company, with revenue rising 39 percent in the past year, a P/E ratio of 14.5 and a P/E growth rate of 0.62.

Revenue and earnings are likely to rise substantially, given the popularity of iPhones, iPads, iTunes, etc. (This year, my wife got an iPad and I got an iPhone for Christmas.) It pays no dividend, although there’s pressure to return some of its $26 billion in cash to shareholders.

Microsoft is more a value play, selling for 9.4 times earnings, with a PEG ratio of 0.97 and revenue growing 7.3 percent a year. But interestingly profit margins are higher for Microsoft (33 percent versus Apple’s 27 percent). Since 2003, Microsoft has been paying out a growing dividend, now at $0.20 a share (3.1 percent).

Microsoft is definitely a safer bet for conservative investors. If you buy Apple, you are betting that Steve Jobs’ vision of superior and creative new products will continue.

One of Jobs’ adages applies here: “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” I’ve added this insight to my next edition of The Maxims of Wall Street – now available on Amazon.

After all, Christians and Hebrews share a common heritage.

But the answer came back that Paul emphasized our new traditions as Christians. We have our own rich heritage and customs. And now, over 2000 years later, these traditions are as venerable as any.

So, instead of reveling in the traditions of others, regardless of semi-relevancy, would not that same effort be better served bringing us closer to Christ?

As cool as positive thinking is, it has it’s place. It can motivate you to change what you can and need to change… but first you need “reality thinking” to recognize the negatives that need to be dealt with. I’m concerned that too many people make positive thinking their religion, only to blame themselves for “not being positive enough” when things go wrong.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=45561

There is only one solution to the world’s problems, only one prescription for producing a near-heaven on earth.



It is 3,000 years old.
 And it is known as the Ten Commandments.
 


Properly understood and applied, the Ten Commandments are really all humanity needs.

While modern men and women, in their hubris, believe that they can and must come up with new ideas in order to make a good world, the truth is there is almost nothing new to say.



If people and countries lived by the Ten Commandments, all the great moral problems would disappear.
 
Or, to put it another way, all the great evils involve the violation of one or more of the Ten Commandments.
 


Here is the case in brief for the Ten Commandments (using the Jewish enumeration, which differs slightly from the Protestant and Catholic):



1. I am the Lord your God.
 


There are moral atheists and there are immoral believers, but there is no chance for a good world based on atheism. Ultimately, a godless and religion-free society depends on people’s hearts to determine right from wrong, and that is a very weak foundation.
 
Plenty of people have died in history in the name of God. But many more have been killed, tortured, and deprived of liberty in the name of humanity and progress or some other post-Judeo-Christian value. Religion gave us an Inquisition and gives us suicide terrorists, but the death of God gave us Nazism and Communism, which, in one century alone, slaughtered more than a hundred million people. All the founders of the United States – yes, all – knew that a free society can survive only if its citizens believe themselves to be morally accountable to God.
 
2. Do not have other gods.
 
The worship of false gods leads to evil. When anything but the God of creation and morality is worshiped, moral chaos ensues.
 
No one is godless. Either people worship God, or they worship other gods — nature, intelligence, art, education, beauty, the environment, Mother Earth, power, fame, pleasure, the state, the fuhrer, the party, progress, humanity. The list is almost endless. And no matter how noble — and false gods are often noble — when they become ends in themselves, they lead to evil.
 
3. Do not take God’s name in vain.
 
People have misinterpreted this commandment. They think it prohibits saying something like, “Oh, my God, what a home run!” But the Hebrew literally means “do not carry” the name of the Lord in vain.
 
In other words, we are forbidden from doing evil in God’s name. Only when thus understood does the rest of the Commandment make sense — that God will not “cleanse,” or forgive — the person who does this.
 
Thus, the Islamist who slits an innocent’s throat while shouting “Allahu Akbar” is the perfect example of the individual who carries God’s name in vain and who cannot be forgiven. These people not only murder their victims, they murder God’s name. For that reason, they do more evil than the atheist who murders.
 
4. Keep the Sabbath day and make it holy.
 
Leaving the world one day a week and elevating it above the others is the greatest vehicle to family harmony and to harmony with friends.
 
One day a week without video games, without parents leaving to go to work or to do their own thing on the computer forces parents and children to spend time together and to actually talk. It even encourages couples to make love. It also weakens the institution of slavery. If even your servants get a day off because God commands it, that means you do not have absolute control over them.
 
5. Honor your father and mother.
 
The first thing every totalitarian and authoritarian movement does is to try to undermine parental authority. That’s why it is dangerous, even in a democracy.
 
Take our universities, for example.

Woodrow Wilson, the first progressive president, said, “The use of the university is to make young men as unlike their fathers as possible.”
 
And that is exactly what colleges have been doing for over a half a century. Instead of searching for truth and beauty, the universities have been alienating American youth from their fathers’ — and the Founding Fathers’ — values.
 
6. Do not murder.
 
If people lived by this commandment alone, the world would enter a heavenly state. At the same time, the commandment has been widely misunderstood. The Hebrew originally prohibits murder, not killing. By mistranslating the Hebrew as “Do not kill,” too many modern Westerners have been taught that pacifism is moral and noble. It is neither. It is an accessory to murder, since it prevents pacifists from doing the only thing that stops mass murder — killing the murderers.
 
The Nazi death camps were liberated by soldiers whose job was to kill murderers, not by pacifists or “peace activists.”
 
7. Do not commit adultery.
 
Observance or even near-observance of this commandment alone would end the formation of the underclass. No amount of state aid can do what marriage and commitment to a spouse do to end poverty and almost all social pathologies.
 
8. Do not steal.
 
This commandment prohibits the stealing of people, the stealing of property, and the stealing of anything that belongs to another. The first prohibition alone, if obeyed, would have rendered the slave trade impossible.
 
Protecting the sanctity of private property makes moral civilization possible. That is why the recent riots in London should frighten every citizen of the U.K. and the West generally. Just as the burning of books leads to the burning of people, so, too, the smashing of windows and the looting of property leads eventually to the smashing of heads.
 
The rampant violation of this commandment by the governments of Africa is the primary reason for African poverty. Corruption, not Western imperialism, is the root of Africa’s backwardness.
 
9. Do not bear false witness.
 
Lying is the root of nearly all major evils. All totalitarian states are based on lies. Had the Nazis not lied about Jews, there would not have been a Holocaust. Only people who believed that all Jews, including babies, were vermin, could, for example, lock hundreds of Jews into a synagogue and burn them alive. That similar lies are told about Jews today by Arab governments and by the Iranian state should awaken people to the Nazi-like threat that anti-Semitism still poses.
 
10. Do not covet your neighbor’s spouse, property, etc.
 
The cultivation of class warfare — i.e., the cultivation of coveting what richer citizens legitimately own — inevitably leads to violating the other commandments, most particularly the ones that prohibit stealing and murdering.
 
There is only one way to achieve a great society, and it is not by creating a massive state that doles out other citizens’ money. It is by cultivating citizens who try to live by these Ten Commandments. They are as relevant today as they were 3,000 years ago.

How about giving love, simply because there is such a dearth of it in this world. How about because, no matter your lot, you can improve someone else’s.

We are most human when we love for love’s sake. We should jump at the opportunity to create love, sharing the value we have in ourselves with others, hoping it will help them somehow, some way, on their journey.

And sure, you may get nothing back. You may get scorn. It’s a risk. I may get laughed at for writing this, and every other self-revealing thing I put in this blog.

But maybe someone will feel compelled to do what I’m trying to here — to break out of a mindset of narcissistic self-involvement to realize that there are people we can touch… and should.

And not just those close to us. Those that don’t even know us. People we may never even see again.

Because the value of a life is the highest value we have on earth, in the natural world.

But if you can’t bring yourself to try to love more people, how about a simple commitment to try to avoid hurting them? Maybe some of us need to start there.

When it gets to who begat whom, it’s all I can do to keep my lids propped open.

Same thing with Exodus. My eyes rapidly glaze over, when it gets to all the details of the temple, the altar, etc.

Maybe my scholarship is lazy on subjects that don’t transfix me with absolute interest. But I’ve found a way to at least be able to pay attention to what’s being said. And that’s to use Google Images.

For instance, in Exodus Chapter 27, I did a Google search on Exodus altar, and got these pictures:

One View of The Altar of Exodus 27

And here’s another:

Another conception of the altar of Exodus 27

So this way, I can at least envision the subject matter, instead of skimming a bundh of words without the slightest absorption of their meaning.

Next, I’ll try to do this with family trees. I’ll find visual depictions, so I don’t have to imagine an endless chain of whom begot who. When I come to it, I’ll post those, too.

Some hear the story of the Christ and hear myth. Others hear it and believe. Honestly, while it matters, for our context here it does not matter. It just is. Whether you believe it or not, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most profound event in human history. Empires were built—forged on faith in his name. Arts and sciences grew and prospered as products of faith. Philosophers and kings lived and died in ways that would have been dramatically different, but for that act on Calvary.

Today, in the United States, we struggle as perhaps the last religious people in western society. The concept of the puritan work ethic has defined us as a nation and, through it, the doctrine of vocation premised on what some see as a near divine right or blessing within this country, has allowed us to prosper. But, as you read this, more and more Americans get their wealth from government. Not since the Great Depression have more Americans taken from the treasury than given to the treasury. The puritan work ethic and the Christian ethos of America are slowly replaced by dependency on government and the secular god of tolerance wherein everything is embraced save everlasting Truth.

When you go out today on Good Friday, remember that two thousand years ago, one act changed forever the course of human history. But for it, this country we have would not have happened in the way it did or with the character it has. And the cool part is, while some may choose to call it fiction, so many more have believed and acted accordingly, the timeline of human history itself has been impacted in so many positive ways. The death and resurrection of Christ remains the greatest act of sovereign grace ever displayed in the universe and also the biggest story that ever will be.

— Erick Erickson

It is here where God creates the material universe. I say material, because it is the totality of that which exists that we can empirically observe, and have evidence that it exists.

And that it was made out of nothing.

The spiritual universe, where the ever-living, most-high God lives, is a little less tangible… a little less concrete. And certainly less observable.

So in this chapter, we have God creating matter. He starts with creating heaven and earth. Without having a Greek or Latin translation tool at this point in my study, I cannot determine what word is being used for “earth.” I believe that in the Masoretic version, which I do not hold in the same esteem for accuracy, the word is “‘erets,” which means land.

Indeed, in verse 10, it is said God called the dry land Earth.

In the Latin translation, we have a lowercase version, earth, in verse one. In verse 10, where the differentiation is made to dry land, it is also capitalized… i.e., Earth.

It would be an interesting word study.

However, I view the principal job of Christians, at this point, is not to quibble about various words. Instead, we need a defense of their religion. To bring it into the marketplace of ideas, to spread the message of the Word.

I can devote an entire book to the study of a single word, and have a tiny breakthrough, and an accomplishment of scholarship.

Or, I can use the same effort to persusade someone unfamiliar with our faith, and bring them to knowledge of what God can do for them.

I think that is indeed the path that I, and other Christians, must put our energies toward. Once acquainted with our faith, we can then proceed to hammer out the details.

Now, I do not pretend to understand all of what that entails. There are aspects of Judaism more esoteric and arcane than the Catholic church…

However, he brought up something that has crossed my mind before as an idle curiosity…

Why don’t Christians observe the Hebrew high holidays?

At first, I wondered why we don’t make sacrifices anymore. The answer to that was obvious… Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice, making all others unnecessary.

But what of the other traditions? So I asked my writing mentor, himself a Rabbi.

His reply was something to the effect of because many Christians don’t believe in the Torah.

He’s right about many Christians not obeying the Law of Moses. Too many Christians do away with the Law entirely, because of what Paul taught. Yes, Paul said that the Law was only our schoolteacher, to bring us to the point of Grace. And that being under Grace means we are no longer under the Law.

Again, true. But that does NOT mean, go ahead and commit whatever sin you want… Christ will forgive you. As C.S. Lewis said, if you believe that being a Christian means taking no notice of what he taught, you’re not much of a Christian.

Also, remember Jesus said he came to fulfill the Law. To complete the Law. Not to replace it. If you truly love Christ, you will obey God’s law.

In the Acts of the Apostles, and in Paul’s letters, you will find bitter disputes about the Law of circumcision. Supposedly, this aspect of the Law was put aside.

Why? What aspects of the law are we supposed to keep, and which do we discard?

So let’s return to the subject of not celebrating the Hebrew high holidays. Why should Christians not celebrate Rosh Hashanah, Shabbat Shuvah, and Yom Kippur? They are eminently compatible the Christian practices of self-reflection and atonement.

I can understand not celebrating Passover, the recognition of freedom from slavery from the Egyptians. It generally starts on the same date our savior was nailed to the cross, extending past the resurrection. Even so, this should not be put aside due to a scheduling conflict. There must be room on the calendar somewhere to accommodate both.

So what’s the issue with not celebrating various aspects of our spiritual heritage? I’ll have more on this later as I research this one out.