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Reading from Tuesday, October 5

Hey kids. What's happening?

Reading for October 5
Jeremiah 4:19-6:15
There's a lot of "God Angry! God Smash!" stuff in this reading, but one lonely verse stuck out to me, and it goes back to the idea that intrigued me from the beginning of my journey - fearing God.

22 Should you not fear me?" declares the LORD.
       "Should you not tremble in my presence?
       I made the sand a boundary for the sea,
       an everlasting barrier it cannot cross.
       The waves may roll, but they cannot prevail;
       they may roar, but they cannot cross it.
So this is another reason we should fear God. He created everything. He gives only one example here - the example of the shoreline. Something so innocuous to us that we take for granted was imagined and blueprinted by the LORD. Take a minute and think about that. You have an ocean and you have to put something at the end of it. Sand and beaches don't exist yet - you are starting from square one. Would you come up with something as awesome as sand and the shoreline?  My wife would disagree because her least favorite thing about the beach is the sand, but you get the idea. God has unbelievable power.

Colossians 1:18-2:7

2My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ
I wonder. My old youth pastor has commented on this idea before - that the authors of the Old Testament got much of it wrong. They heard a message from God and interpreted it incorrectly and wrote it down and out of that we got the Bible. I didn't like this theory because it cheapened the impact of Christ's sacrifice. However, I think the verse above lends credence to that theory. The mystery of God which Paul refers to here would seem to be simply this: God claims to be loving and kind and just, and yet here we are getting slaughtered by him.

As I and many other have said before: Jesus is the clearest representation of God we will likely ever get. So if the mystery of God is explained through Christ, then that invalidates much of the Old Testament because it means that the awful vengeful "eye for an eye" things that were attributed to God should have been attributed to the fact that people are just jerks and they liked to kill people.

Psalm 77:1-20

I think a lot of people feel this way sometimes. I feel this way now:

 7 "Will the Lord reject forever?
       Will he never show his favor again?
 8 Has his unfailing love vanished forever?
       Has his promise failed for all time?
 9 Has God forgotten to be merciful?
       Has he in anger withheld his compassion?"
Not so much because I'm suffering, I just don't see God in my life at all. I feel the effects of his words. I try to live out what I'm reading, but the actual idea that God is sitting up there is getting fainter and fainter in my mind. Is it possible to be an Agnostic Christian? 

Proverbs 24:23-25

 23 These also are sayings of the wise:
       To show partiality in judging is not good:
 24 Whoever says to the guilty, "You are innocent"—
       peoples will curse him and nations denounce him.
 25 But it will go well with those who convict the guilty,
       and rich blessing will come upon them.

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