Tuesday, August 26, 2014

GOD IS STILL SPEAKING

Jesus said, "The words that I speak are SPIRIT and they are LIFE"...think about it...He said that His words were actually "spirit"...that they were living, vibrating entities or things that carried life-creating energy within them...

Spiitual communication can only happen spirit to spirit...when Jeremiah prophesied the New Covenant, he had a vision of a people who had God's laws written on their hearts, not on paper, or on tablets of stone...

David said that the heavens, not any written documents, or any sheets of  papyrus, but the very atmosphere above us DECLARES the glory of God...

John talked about having an anointing that causes us to know all things...an anointing...not chapters and verses of a written text...

Jesus told His disciples the that Holy Spirit would lead them into ALL TRUTH...He never told them to wait for a collection of books that would be written many years later by 40 men to lead them into it...

Paul, who made it a point to differentiate between what he wrote that he believed was from God, and the part of his writings which were his own personal opinion about things, said these words to the Corinthian church: "who has also qualified us to be ministers of a new covenant, which is not written but spiritual, because the written text brings death, but the Spirit gives life."
(2 Corinthians 3:6 - ISV)..."

Think about these phrases from the passage in this translation..."which is not written but spiritual...", and "the written text brings death"...
 
Here's the same passage from a translation that looks a little closer at the nuanced meaning of the Greek language: "Who also adequately qualifies us (or: made us fit, competent and sufficient) [to be] attending servants and dispensers of an arrangement that is new in quality (or: pertaining to a new kind of covenant that has a different character and is fresh and effective) – not of [the] letter (or: not pertaining to the result of that which is written down; not having its source in the effect of a written text), but in contrast, of a Breath-effect (or: pertaining to the result of [the] Spirit; having its source in and being the effect of spirit and attitude), for the effect of letter habitually kills (or: the result of writing something into a text repeatedly puts away in death), yet the Spirit (or: the spirit; the breath-effect; the Attitude) continuously gives life (or: repeatedly makes alive; progressively forms life; habitually creates life)!"
(2 Corinthians 3:6 - JMNT) 

Think about these phrases from the above passage, as well:

"not pertaining to the result of that which is written down"...

"not having its source in the effect of a written text"...

"the result of writing something into a text repeatedly puts away in death"...

In the beginning was the WORD, not the BIBLE!

I love and appreciate the Bible for what it is, but I personally believe that the men who wrote the Scriptures would be shocked and appalled at the phenomenon of modern Bibliolatry, and how it is used today as a device of division and a weapon of death...I think they would be surprised to see it quoted as THE Word of God...

The Bible (from Koine Greek τὰ βιβλία, tà biblía, "the books") is a canonical collection of texts sacred in Judaism and Christianity...the Bible is not a book!!!...there is no single "Bible", and many Bibles with varying contents exist in the world...

The term Bible is shared between Judaism and Christianity, although the contents of each of their collections of canonical texts is not the same...different religious groups include different books within their Biblical canons, in different orders, and sometimes divide or combine books, or incorporate additional material into canonical books...

The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, contains twenty-four books divided into three parts: the five books of the Torah ("teaching" or "law"), the Nevi'im ("prophets"), and the Ketuvim ("writings")...

Christian Bibles range from the sixty-six books of the Protestant canon to the eighty-one books of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church canon...the first part of Christian Bibles is the Old Testament, which contains, at minimum, the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible divided into thirty-nine books and ordered differently from the Hebrew Bible...

The Catholic Church and Eastern Christian churches also hold certain deuterocanonical books and passages to be part of the Old Testament canon...

The second part is the New Testament, containing twenty-seven books: the four Canonical gospels, Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one Epistles or letters, and the Book of Revelation...

An early 4th-century Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible is found in the Codex Vaticanus...dating from the 8th century, the Codex Amiatinus is the earliest surviving manuscript of the complete Vulgate Bible....he oldest Tanakh manuscript in Hebrew and Aramaic dates to the 10th century CE...

The Bible was divided into chapters in the 13th century by Stephen Langton and into verses in the 16th century by French printer (for printing purposes) Robert Estienne and is now usually cited by book, chapter, and verse...

The real Word of God is eternal...we live by every word that PROCEEDS (present tense) out of the mouth of God...to say that God could only speak through 40 men during a 1,500 year period to the nation of Israel is both short-sighted and insulting to the very nature of an eternal, omnipotent, living God...

The Scriptures are inspired, but they must be read in context and rightly divided...

They are not infallible, and never claimed to be...

God is a Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in TRUTH...

Trust the Spirit for direction...trust the MIND OF CHRIST for Truth...discern what has been written and accept it for what it is, and know that men of old could be inspired and still not have all the answers, or know all the truth...understand that their obvious revelation was no doubt inspired, but was filtered through the paradigm and the prejudices of the very human men who wrote them...discern the difference between the LOGOS word and the RHEMA word, and trust your discernment...trust your instincts...trust your own love for God, and your own personal experience with Him...

Respect the Scriptures, but not as much as you do the Word which is written on your heart by the Spirit of God!

God is speaking through the Bible and other spiritual texts, but He is also speaking everywhere in the Universe...

God is speaking through nature...

God is speaking through science...

God is speaking through human relationships...

God is speaking to you, heart to heart...

Let him or her who has an ear, hear...

3 comments:

  1. Pamela Holbrook said...

    Such beautiful words.....

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jacob Israel said...

    Words are SPIRIT... Words are vocalized thought ... Spirit is Thought ... Its all about thought indeed great post

    ReplyDelete