Spiritual Ponderings

There is a very interesting story in the Bible that conflates two different storylines overlapping them into one integrated story. Now I am starting to see that there may be something very significant about that, that very possibly if we read these two parallel stories without our Greek logic filters in place but allowed a more relaxed approach to affect our thinking, that some startling insights might begin to emerge. One account of this story is found in Luke 8:40-56. It starts out with a frantic father begging Jesus to come and heal his twelve year old daughter who is dying. Jesus agrees to go along to his house to accommodate his request. But suddenly the first narrative is suspended as a second story is inserted just at that point. The focus shifts to a grown lady much older than the girl who has suffered much and had spent all of her valuables trying to get help from physicians for her incessant hemorrhaging. And she had been forced to live with this debilitat...

No one, when tempted, should say, "I am being tempted by God"; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one . (James 1:13) I just became aware of one of the devil's greatest schemes by which he can automate his entire system of tempting us to evil. His technique is so effective that not only does he leverage his ability to keep us in a vicious cycle of falling for temptations repeatedly, but he does so by accessing the most basic part of our creation design, our very purpose of existence. By doing this he also escapes detection as being detected as the origin of our temptations and causes us to shift blame over onto God. It can be easy to be content with a simplistic interpretation of this verse. But James is not simply insisting that we should never use these words, “I am being tempted by God.” The problem is not in whether or not we use this phrase or assume that God might be tempting us to do something that is wrong. Rather ...