Life Is Beautiful

     In our modern culture we too often are too busy to step back and appreciate the beauty of life.  Have you ever just stopped and looked at the trees, flowers, animals, or even the ocean and just thought about how perfect all of those things are?  Have you ever thought about everything it takes for something to live and how beautifully perfect it is?  Look at the stars and take in the amazing sight that they are for they are the light in the darkness!  Look at the plants that live and grow into such beautiful things that give life to everything around them!  Look at the animals who live and do only what is necessary for survival!  There is such an awe striking quality in the complex simplicity of life!  Life gives life so that it can continue to live and grow!  Life never stops, it just moves on from one being to the next!  When one thing dies it provides life for the next, so is it truly dying?  When a living thing dies it can either decompose into the ground and become fertilizer for plants, or it can be eaten by animals and give them energy; both of these things are used to keep living things alive.  Life is the most complexly simple beauty that we have available to us!

 "Nothing.  Nothing cannot exist, because it is the opposite of existing.  To believe in nothingness is just that nothing.  Like death, death is not a state, its the absence of state.  Death to me is very unreal.  All I see is life.  In a dead body, I see simply life, the bacteria have already begun to decompose it.  Where then is death?" -- Chris Featherstone

     Biblically speaking God created all life.  Let that soak in for a moment.  God created all life!  Remember this next time you go outside soak in the life around you and recognize that God did all of it.  The next thing I want you to recognize is that God is life.  God breathed life into Adam and he became alive*.  Breath is commonly associated with spirit in ancient texts, therefore God gave Adam part of His spirit to bring him to life.  We all have God's spirit dwelling in us no matter who we are or what we believe!  God is in the plants and the animals.  God is life!  Therefore life cannot begin or end because God does not begin or end.  God is in all things and thus all things are Holy; this is why it is a sin to kill.  The Bible states that man is not to live by bread alone, but also by the words of God**.  God's words are what created all things and life itself, therefore we are to live by scripture and the world around us!  We are to love the world as God does because it His creation!

     *Genesis 2

     **Matthew 4:4

The Creation Account and The Big Bang

     If you look into what science and Christianity have to say about the origins of the world, then you may be surprised and you may realize that there must be a God. In the big bang theory everything began as a small dense fourth dimensional mass which can be seen as in the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth. God is timeless and so is the fourth dimension according to most science fiction writers; coincidence? I think not. Science doesn't know what cause this immensely dense fourth dimensional mass to expand(not explode), but they do know that the reason it did is because somehow light began to separate from the mass causing many chemical reactions. The Bible states that God said, "Let there be light". How would early Christians know that light came first without access to the amazing science that we have today unless God clued them in on it? Then the Bible says that God separated the waters of the Heavens from the waters of the Earth, thus the Heavens and the Earth separated and grew apart as the universe expanded. But wait, there is even more to these theories. Science states next that there was so much heat from the expansion of all of the molecules that the light was muffled by a dense fog-like state of the molecules and light would not return again until the sun and stars were formed. This explains why the Bible recreates the separation of light from dark and God creates the sun, stars and moon. As the stars appeared in Science everything began to cool and thus planets were formed. I don't think that it is a coincidence that everything lines up almost perfectly with the Bible. How could early Hebrews know the order that science has determined the world came to be in without divine enlightenment from God? I don't think they could have.  These are my thoughts on the topic and I know the two theories don't fit together perfectly, but they are close enough that you have to wonder how the Hebrews could have gotten so close without our modern advances.

     Genesis 1

The Christian Gospel

     No matter where you go in the United States, it seems that there is always a group of Christians talking about spreading the gospel as it is our duty as Christians.  I have no quarrel with this and I believe in spreading it too, however, I think many Christians have twisted what the gospel is supposed to be.  The gospel or good news of Christ is not that we are sinners and damned to Hell without Him, but it is that Jesus died for our salvation and He loves us no matter who we are or what we believe.  If we really think about the way most Christians present the gospels, they focus on being damned unless you follow what they interpret out of the Bible and that does NOT sound like good news to me.  I would rather suggest that the message be that we are redeemed by the blood of Christ and that we are loved by YHWH who defines Himself as love*!  If God is love, then doesn't that mean that love isn't so much a feeling or an action, but a being?  To love is not to do something, but to be something.  When we offer our hearts to the Father, we are allowing Him to consume us and fill us with His presence.  Therefore, we are to be filled with love and are to allow that love to overflow into others.  You may think of the scriptures that explain that we are to be filled with God's presence and others that explain that God emptied Himself and we are to be the same**.  I believe that this means that we are filled with God's presence (love) in order to empty Him out onto other people and then He will fill us again.
     Does that not sound more like good news than being damned unless you follow a specific code of conduct?  Why are we being told that the gospel of Christ is about damnation instead of redemption?  The answer is that people are more concerned about others lives than their own and not in the selfless way.  The Bible states that we are to deal with ourselves before we deal with others***, yet most Christians believe that what they believe is correct so they tell others that they are wrong because they believe differently.  This is not the gospel, nor is it Christ-like.  Part of dealing with your flaws before you deal with others is putting aside your convictions and assumptions about scripture because there is no guarantee that the way you interpret it is correct.  If you were truly walking in love, then would you not share the love of Christ rather than the condemnation of Hell?  Ask yourself these questions and make changes if needed.

*1 John 4:8 - "But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love." New Living Translation

**2 Corinthians 4:7 - "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us." New King James Version
  Philippians 2:5-7 - "5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; 7 rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness."

***Matthew 7:5 - "Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend's eye."