★★★★

A group of us are discussing this book in an apologetics forum, but the truth is, I’m not sure I classify the book as apologetic, simply because of its too-friendly tone. Kazmaier seems more focused on defending the reasonableness of theism than proving the existence of a particular God. His goal seems to be to help atheists agreeably disagree with theists. That may simply be Kazmaier’s nonaggressive style rising to the surface, but it seems appropriate to me. This book does what is possible, presenting the logic for believing in a creator of sorts, and then in the final pages bringing up personal experience to seal the deal. It is Al’s “concrete experiences with the Lord Jesus Christ” that convince him that Christianity is the proper choice among theistic options.

//Bet you can’t name the one minor prophet who is mentioned in the book of Kings. Aww, I gave it away with today’s verse: it’s the one prophet whose book virtually every critical Bible scholar believes is pseudonymous (the story of Jonah is attributed to an obscure historical name merely for emphasis and context).

There are twelve books of minor prophets in the Bible, and they break down like this:

Hosea, Joel, Amos, Jonah, Obadiah, and Micah belong to the eighth century BCE, a period of Assyrian power and the fall of the Kingdom of Israel (the northern kingdom).

Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah belong to the years of Assyrian decline at the end of the seventh century BCE.

The last three books, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, belong to the Persian period—the fifth and sixth centuries BCE—when the Jews returned to their homeland and rebuilt the Temple.

The curious thing is that not one of these prophets is mentioned in the book of Kings, which covers the time period of the first nine, unless one counts the pseudonymous Jonah.* Who are these guys, really?

* Some argue that the mysterious “man of God” in 1 Kings 13 is Amos

//Today’s lesson from Jesus follows on the tail of story about a Gentile who comes to Jesus to be healed. Jesus is impressed by the man’s faith, and utters these words.

Matthew has a thing about “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” and we commonly think of the phrase as describing torment in hell, while others go to the “kingdom” up in “heaven.” But that is not at all what Jesus was saying.

The “kingdom of heaven” … or, more precisely, the “kingdom of God” … was never thought in Jesus’ day to be a place up in the sky. It describes the arrival of a new age on earth, when God will rule justly. Jesus is saying, in this verse, that when the kingdom arrives, Gentiles will be a part of it while those Jews who were anxiously waiting for its arrival would be excluded. “Gnashing of teeth,” here and elsewhere in the Bible, refers not to torment but to extreme anger. The Jews, excluded from the kingdom they sought because of their hard-heartedness, would be regretful (weeping) and angry (gnashing their teeth).

Oddly, none of the Gospel references to “weeping and gnashing of teeth” make sense in the context of heaven and hell! How did we ever connect this phrase to a distant afterlife? You may read them for yourself:

Matthew 8:12

Matthew 22:13

Matthew 24:51

Matthew 25:30

Luke 13:28

★★★★★

A fascinating book. Technology is enveloping us in a new religious revolution, and Steve Jobs’ Apple Corporation, with its cult following, is leading the way. We gaze adoringly at media screens for hours a day, gingerly touching their magical user interface designed to help us overcome the linear thinking we were raised with. Jobs, by trusting in his esoteric brand of Eastern religion, has turned iEverythings into a sublime and transcendental experience, connecting humanity worldwide.

This is not a book about religion; at least not in the traditional sense. If you ride the current of the book, though, you realize that Jobs has led us into a new religion for the information age. A comment he made once after traveling from Delhi to the Himalayas, shaving his head and participating in various Hindu rituals in search of enlightenment, gets right to the point: “I started to realize that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karoli Baba put together.” It became clear to him that his mission in life was to help develop tools for the mind that would deprogram the Western mentality of linear rationality and formal logic.

For Jobs, technology was more than a tool, it was a way to elevate consciousness. He insisted on manufacturing computers without cooling fans to allow the user to achieve a Zen-like concentration, undistracted by the machine’s noise. His ad campaigns all focus on thinking differently.

Digital technology renders us omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent (the three omni’s attributed to God in the Bible). But is technology ultimately a false god? Are we reaching for the stars or are we shriveling inside? That question is left for you to decide.

//Is it possible that this verse in Isaiah contributed to the legend of Jesus’ birth in a manger? Remember the story in the Gospel of Luke:

I was nursed in swaddling clothes, and that with cares. For there is no king that had any other beginning of birth — Wisdom of Solomon 7:4-5

Jesus, the misunderstood king. Put the manger and the swaddling clothes together and we have a beautiful Christmas story!

//Today in Christian circles, a great debate rages about whether God plans to banish the majority of his creation to the fires of hell. Along these lines, here is a fascinating verse that I never paid any attention to, until Crystal St. Marie Lewis, in her little booklet about hell, happened to mention it.

The verse is about the tribe of Judah, which, says God, has done evil, setting up idols, and had even begun sacrificing sons and daughters in the fires of Ben Hinnom.

Do you know where Ben Hinnom is? It’s the valley of Gehenna, south of Jerusalem. It was a perpetually burning garbage dump in the first century, and had become a symbolic figure of speech by Jesus’ time. Today, some versions of the Bible translate the word Gehenna into hell, thinking the symbolism describes God casting sinners into fiery torment.

However, God says something very interesting to Jeremiah. Read today’s verse again. God says it never crossed his mind to cast anyone into the fires of Gehenna! Indeed, he condemns those who do such a thing. What are we to make of this?

Read carefully the following parable:

“The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.'”

Most readers, today, imagine that the rich man went down to hell while Lazarus, the beggar, went up to heaven. But nowhere does the text say that, and indeed, such beliefs would contradict the Biblical understanding of life after death.

There were no “heaven” and “hell” destinations in early Hebrew thinking … just one place, called Sheol, where everyone went … down, down from the grave, to a shadowy existence below the earth. By the time the New Testament was written, Sheol had morphed into Hades, but still, that’s where everybody went when they died.

Today’s parable is not at all about whether you will go to heaven or hell when you die. It is about two people in the underworld, before any resurrection occurred, where one was in fiery torment, yet could look across a chasm and see the other in comfort. Whether or not the tellers of this parable believed literally in a place called Hades is questionable, but the image clearly describes the Greek mythology of differing levels of comfort in the same underworld, close enough to each other that they can see and talk to one another.