Walking and dreaming

It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting inside a favorite Starbucks on Madison Avenue looking west on 41st Street at the New York Public Library and Met Life building (and, yes, I always think of Oscar Woodall whenever I see it).

East 41st street is also known as Library Way and way back when I first started this website I wrote about it. I remember I was full of confidence and curiosity back then. I couldn’t get my hands on enough books about the Bible. All I did every day was read, underline, highlight, star and scribble margin notes. I would walk around the city with my Walkman constantly on, listening endlessly to cassette tapes of Alexander Scourby (reading from the entire Bible) and Richard Jordan (delivering old studies, some of them dating back to when I first started attending Shorewood in 1991).

I am having a pretty good time here back in my old city but I really know now more than ever why I was meant to move back to Chicago. This place has changed and so have I. The only real constant is my all-consuming thoughts about my book.

*****

Here’s the article I wrote from Dec. 12, 2004, only a month before Oscar (a kindred spirit who still has the ability to instantly bring tears to my eyes when I think of him) died:

Across the street from the New York Public Library off Madison Avenue is what's called “Library Way." For the length of a whole city block, on both sides of the street, are quotes from famous artists embedded in sidewalk squares on engraved bronze plaques.

I was exiting a Starbucks onto this unusual block the other day when I decided to take the “tour." Some of the quotes really make me think of the King James Bible.

For example, Rene Descartes is quoted as saying, “…the reading of books is like a conversation with the best men of the past centuries."
I think that's a lot of how it becomes when you familiarize yourself with the writings of guys like Paul, David, Solomon, John, Moses, Peter.

Suddenly you find yourself thinking about them as they really were and you're going through exactly what they were going through with them. It's like you're part of their life journey and you experience vicariously through them what was going on in their space of history.

A sidewalk quote from Francis Bacon reads, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested…"

This sums up the Bible! It's a living Book, just as it tells us it is. It's organic, not static. It literally alters your life by the reading of it and believing it's from God. God literally communes with you as the reader. The more you consume, the more it fills up your heart and mind. In fact my pastor is the one to first tell me that the Words of the Book are stored up in your soul.

In the Book of Revelations, John actually talks about literally eating a book given him from an angel. He writes that he “ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter." Jesus Christ is the one who said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God."

Emily Dickinson is quoted on the sidewalk as saying, “A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day."
Jesus Christ calls himself the "Word made flesh." The first verse in John reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The word "word" is capitalized.

Virginia Woolf's sidewalk quote speaks to why God would absolutely not be who He says He is and would be a total fraud if His Book didn't completely represent Him and be wholly accurate. Her quote reads, “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."

If you think about all the information we have about Jesus Christ--how He lived, what He said, the miracles He performed—it all comes from the Bible. And none of the four separate accounts contradict one another in any way. I think one of the reasons God gave us four different write-ups for Jesus' life is that He wanted us to see how each of the men, coming from different backgrounds, wrote in a different style and included different details of the same stories, but they all matched in what they said happened.

The Bible is the only objective standard for truth. It's the authority on truth and it's where truth is defined in all its forms.

Tom Stoppard is quoted on a plaque as saying, “Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light."
In Genesis 1 we're told God said, “Let there be light: and there was light." It says he divided the light from the darkness. Jesus Christ said, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life."
In the Book of Acts the reader is told Paul was commanded by the risen Jesus Christ to be “a light unto the Gentiles."

Muriel Rukeyser says on one of the plaques, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms." Thousands and thousands of different stories are contained within the Old and New Testament and represent the history of the universe. The stories that emerge from those written stories are endless.

On a plaque dedicated to the words of Ernest Hemingway, he says: “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

This is exactly what the Bible delivers on things that really did happen. God makes it clear He's the author of His Book. In Hebrews, Jesus Christ is referred to as “the author and finisher of our faith." The Apostle Paul assures us, “For God is not the author of confusion."

I look at the King James Bible as my most intimate possession. It's where all insight into what God's about and how He thinks is found. The more I examine its ins and outs, the more I know Him and the deeper my kinship with Him goes.

Like a scene from all those old movies

Very happy and grateful to report I’m only a day away now from getting on a non-stop United flight to LaGuardia for five days in the Big Apple! It will be my first time back in almost two years.

What I will savor the most is seeing some old friends, co-workers and neighbors. I sure do miss the city and occasionally still dream about it at night. I’m glad I’m a Chicagoan again but there’s an awful lot about NYC that tugs at my heart. Like the Art Garfunkel song goes:

New York, to that tall skyline I come, flyin' in from London to your door
New York, lookin' down on Central Park
Where they say you should not wander after dark

New York, like a scene from all those movies
But you're real enough to me, but there's a heart
A heart that lives in New York

A heart in New York, a rose on the street
I write my song to that city heartbeat

******

Jordan gave an excellent series of studies on the King James Bible over the weekend at a family conference in Florida. Super-grateful I was able to listen live via the internet. It was just what the doctor ordered! Here is the first of a new series I will write (and, never fear, I plan to get back to the “fallen angels” series upon my return to Chi-town on Monday):

The Apocrypha is within the pages of the original King James Bible but it is identified as Apocrypha. It was deliberately placed between Malachi (the end of the Old Testament) and Matthew (the beginning of the New Testament) as a free-standing study aid, not Scripture.

“The problem with the Apocrypha as a Roman Catholic text and part of their bible, and the Sinaiticus and those manuscripts, they have it as an (official) part of the Old Testament,” says Jordan. “Does the Bible in your lap have a concordance in it? Well, is that concordance a part of your Bible? It’s between the covers isn’t it?

“So, you see, in one sense my Bible has a concordance in it. But my Bible doesn’t! It’s a study aid that came along with my Bible. And that’s exactly what the Apocrypha was originally. About the mid-1600s they quit putting it in. Up to that point all Protestant and Catholic bibles had it, but the Protestant bibles put it as a separate entity, not as a part of the text.

“So people who want to tell you that the King James Bible originally had the Apocrypha in it, well it is true that it was between the covers. They did translate it. But they never put it as a part of the Bible text. They always said it was separate, recognizing that it was not Scripture, identifying it as Apocrypha under the heading and listed it separately.

“Now, that kind of information, kind of a half-thing, half-not . . . I say that to you so you understand you need to get some understanding of what’s going on so that when people throw all this stuff at you you’ve got some kind of ability to respond.

“Never think that the other side of an opinion doesn’t have good arguments. If you think the only good arguments are your arguments, then when you hear good arguments from the other side you’re going to say. ‘Whoa, hey, they got a good idea there.’ Not!

“There are good arguments on both sides of this issue. The question is how do you understand; how do you find the truth in the matter? How do you come to the place where you decide which is right and which is wrong?

“That’s why we started this study, ‘What are we looking for?!’ Because no matter how good the argument is, if you’re not looking for the right thing, your arguments aren’t on point. So, are we looking for words on the page that God wrote down and are preserved through history that contain His Word, or are we just looking for a message? A general idea of what He said? Is that the issue?

“And that’s really the two arguments of the two different camps. The fundamental basic thing that you have to grasp.”

******

Looking at the history of the Bible, Jordan calls it “the tale of two cities.” Antioch vs. Alexandria.
As Paul writes in Acts 11:26, “And when he had found him, he brought him unto Antioch. And it came to pass, that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church, and taught much people. And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.”
Jordan says, “I heard the dude up in Atlanta, Chuck Stanley, on the TV some time ago say, ‘Abraham was a great Christian!’ I thought ‘Chuck, you ought not talk like that. That’s just dumb talk and he knows better but, you know, you just kind of talk down to the lowest common denominator of your audience.
“They weren’t called Christians at Jerusalem and at Pentecost and in the Old Testament. The first time the name Christian was assigned to the disciples and to the followers of Christ was at Antioch.”
Acts 13:1 says, “Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul.”
Jordan explains, “That was the church out of which the Apostle Paul’s apostolic ministry sprung up and it’s the basis of the operation from which his ministry expands. Antioch, through the first three centuries, was a powerful Bible center, a community of Bible-teaching, Bible-believing, Bible-centered activity and Paul’s basic missionary-ministry model is exemplified from Antioch.

“Now there’s another town at that time that was interested in the Bible. Acts 18:24 says, ‘And a certain Jew named Apollos, born at Alexandria, an eloquent man, and mighty in the scriptures, came to Ephesus.’

“There was an interest in the Word of God at Alexandria. Alexandria, which is in Egypt on the Nile basin, was founded by Alexander the Great in the 3rd Century B.C. It had one of the seven wonders of the ancient world—the great lighthouse. But, more importantly, it had a great library with between 500,000 to 700,000 book volumes and was a great center of scholarship.

“It was the second largest city in the Roman Empire at the time of the writing of Acts and was the second largest city in the Western world. It was a center of great intellectual fervor and activity. It was the place that spawned the Septuagint legend that says a bunch of Jewish rabbinical scholars got together and translated the Old Testament into Greek.

“Now the authority to believe that (bunk) is a letter written by a guy who everybody says is a forgery. You read this stuff and you say, ‘Jay Leno couldn’t be this funny!’ People to this day agree to base all of their belief about the Old Testament text on a translation, the LXX Septuagint, that everybody agrees the story of how it came about is a hoax.

“Now I couldn’t sell you a glass of water on a hot day with that kind of a story but people say, ‘Well, the LXX. . . ’ Was there a Greek translation of the Old Testament? You bet your bottom dollar there was. Did it occur the way they say it did? Don’t bet your bottom dollar. But the point is Alexandria was a place where this was supposed to happen because it was an intellectual center of curiosity.

*****

As Acts 18:25 goes on to reveal that Apollos “was instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in the spirit, he spake and taught diligently the things of the Lord, knowing only the baptism of John.”

Jordan says, “Apollos was eloquent, well-educated and knew how to communicate and was mighty in the Scriptures. You see, there was an interest in the Word of God at Alexandria. This man was instructed in the way of Lord, being fervent and teaching diligently, but what was Apollos’ big problem? He’s a teeny-bit out of date dispensationally. He’s only teaching the baptism of John! Well, there’s a whole lot of things that have happened since the baptism of John!

“For example, Christ has shown up. He went to the Cross, He died and was resurrected and ascended back into heaven, the Holy Spirit’s come. The next chapter you see some more of these guys—they don’t even know the Holy Spirit’s been given yet!

“Now, in my mind, it’s kind of hard to relate…how could you be that unplugged that many years after this stuff’s happened?! I don’t know; maybe the guy’s just been in the library studying or something.

“My point to you is there is real interest in Scripture in Alexandria but they’re really not interested in and have no concept of dispensational bible study. If you don’t understand the Word of God dispensationally, you don’t understand God’s Word.

“And if you don’t understand God’s Word, then your ability to function successfully in being ‘the pillar and the ground of the truth’ is going to be hampered. In fact, it’s going to be undermined.

(Editor’s note: To be continued and will write travelogue updates from NYC . . .)

Mo, you're the MAN!

The Lord said unto Moses, “Write this for a memorial in a book.”

Jordan explains, “God’s saying, ‘Mo, I want you to write a book.’ That’s why we are people of a book. If you take the book away, you take us away. Notice it’s God’s idea. Not Moses’. The church I was raised in laughed and said Moses couldn’t write: ‘Dontchaknow, back in those days they were all demented.’ You know, carry around a club on their shoulders. Living in caves. You know, meet some gal on the way, bop her on the head and drag her home and make her cook for ya.

“You ever read Acts 7 when Stephen talked about Moses and said he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians? I mean, have you ever looked at the Egyptians? The culture he lived in? He could get up in the morning and look out at the Pyramids!

“Well, mercy, people today can’t even figure out how they built them! Come to Chicago and go to the Field Museum of natural history and my favorite exhibit there is down in the basement in the Egyptian room. It’s full of mummies and they’ve got this little woman in a little sarcophagus and they’ve got some of the remnants peeled back and this is 3,000 B.C. and she looks pretty good. A little leathery, but her features are there. She’s all there.

“I’ve been involved with the exhuming of bodies in the past and you know what, with all the modern techniques of embalming, you don’t look so good after 10 years. Honest, you don’t! Give yourself 30 years in that hermetically sealed environment in the coffin and you’ll look even worse. You know why? The bacteria that produces decomposition works in that hermetically sealed environment.

“God’s Word, as it was written down, was not written down to be a family history. It wasn’t a journal or a diary. It wasn’t national archives; it was God telling Moses and others to write His Word!”

*****

Exodus 24:4-7 reads, “And Moses wrote all the words of the LORD, and rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the hill, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel.
[5] And he sent young men of the children of Israel, which offered burnt offerings, and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen unto the LORD.
[6] And Moses took half of the blood, and put it in basons; and half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar.
[7] And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient.”

Jordan says, “By the way, they put it in a book. I know what experts say: ‘Well, books weren’t invented back then.’ What are you talking about? Think about who invented books! They say, ‘Well, they had to roll a scroll,’ like dealing with toilet paper.

“Well, how would you study something rolled out like that? You couldn’t study it. How could you do what we’re doing right now and cross-reference that?  You know who invented books? People who studied because that’s why you have a book like that.”

*****

Exodus 34:27-28 reads, “And the LORD said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel.
[28] And he was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.”

Notice he writes the words on a table. This is where Moses is REPRODUCING.

Deuteronomy 31:24  says, “And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished.”

Here Moses is finishing Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus Numbers and Deuteronomy. He’s writing the words.

Jordan says, “You notice it says the writing of the words of the law in a book. A book. There’s a verse in Joshua that talks about THE book. One book! But it’s really got five parts in it. It’s one book because it’s got one author but it’s got a bunch of sections.”

Heavenly invasion

Another holiday passing--MLK. Today is also my sister’s birthday. Thankfully I won’t be spending this one completely alone. At 4:30, I pick up my friend Sheri and head to the Davis on Lincoln to see “The King’s Speech,” getting in “Before 5” for their reduced ticket price.

I just heard last night from Jordan that a remake of “True Grit” is also on the big screen currently. I had no idea, but then I don’t keep up with anything much anymore.

I’m really just going to see “The King’s Speech” because my former roommate Clement (who I sadly said goodbye to one week ago before he set off for his native Catskills to start his first career job as a prosecutor—there goes another friend, sigh!) made me promise him I’d see it.

I guess the movie has a strong message for those of us who work with people who are either deaf or hard of hearing, have low vision and/or are learning-impaired or facing dementia and Alzheimer’s. I also work with stroke victims who have a terrible time enunciating. Then there are my other elderly residents who only speak Spanish or Russian (and not hardly one lick of English!).

 

*****

While I now sit in a coffeehouse in Bucktown off the Kennedy Expressway (a rare treat for me as someone living on the lakefront near the Evanston border), I am going to pick up on my latest series of studies on angels. Look for the next installment tomorrow and I’ll be sure and tell you what I think of the movie . . .

 “Those wise men, and they were, were taken serious in Matthew 2; they weren’t just blown off,” says Jordan. “Herod took them seriously, so you know they had a reputation. You try to go in and see the president with some cock-and-bull story like you saw a star in the east and see how far you get! These guys had a status that was accepted because the world’s always looked away from God’s Word. Daniel was 10 times smarter when it came to wisdom and understanding because he trusted God’s Word. But there’s some wisdom involved here; it’s just corrupted.

“In Matthew 2, the wise men say, ‘We have seen his star in the east.’ That’s a reference to Numbers 24 when Balaam talks about the star of the Messiah in connection with the scepter, but you notice they didn’t say, ‘We saw a star.’ They say, ‘We saw HIS star.’ These guys were fixated on stars. But in Amos 5:24-26 you see that they were fixated on a particular star of their own and it’s named. So the idea that He would have a star--they have a star and they’re coming to add Him to the pantheon of the gods who run the stars. All of that goes back to Genesis 6.”

The chapter begins, “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
[2] That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.”

Jordan explains,  “The ‘sons of God’ are angels. These celestial creatures, aliens from Planet Earth from outer space, from the realm of the stars (angels are identified as stars in the Bible because of their association with the stars), invade Planet Earth and literally begin to conduct procreation experiments, and they begin to experiment with genetic engineering; biogenetic engineering at an advanced level.

“Verse 4 says ‘there were giants in the earth in those days.’ The experimentation that these celestial creatures engaged in with humans produced abnormal offspring. The Hebrew word that is translated ‘giants’ is the word ‘nephilim.’ You’ll see that through the Scripture—the giants.

“The verse goes on to say that ‘when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’ They became people of extraordinary enhanced intelligence because of the inbreeding; the genetic engineering.

“Now we have no idea how that could have happened until just recently with the discovery of the human genome and DNA and all that kind of stuff. People, 4,000-plus years ago there were aliens on this earth who understood that and experimented with it and practiced it!

“If you look into the history of ancient cultures, consistently there is a storyline of alien, extraterrestrial invasion. In fact, it is becoming common place today. Richard Dawkins, the leading atheist of our day (he took Carl Sagan’s place), has come out publicly suggesting life on Planet Earth perhaps came from an alien invasion and the aliens came here and produced life.

“In the late ’70s there was a big, popular book called ‘The Chariots of the Gods,’ and it postulated that the human race was the direct result of extraterrestrial activity. They made movies about it. One of the ways they argue this is they show you the murals from the caveman, they say, and you see these strange looking creatures that are half-human, half-animal; weird-looking kind of things. You say, ‘Where would they have got that idea?!’ but you begin to realize there was a lot of genetic experimentation going on back there, as in this passage from Genesis 6,  and then you begin to realize maybe there’s an explanation for some of it.

“I was looking just the other day on the internet at a mural of a Roswell New Mexico, big, bug-eyed dude supposed to be the alien, and he’s got the little-bitty feet and arms and you think, ‘He’d be worthless!’ It didn’t look like he could even feed himself if he had to. But when you’re trying to genetically engineer things you got to come up with some things like that.

“If you go down to Easter Island in South America . . . or you take the Great Pyramid . . . There are navigational markers in both of those places that, until we sent people into outer space, we didn’t understand. After going to outer space, experts went back and looked at those things and said, ‘They’re spot-on exact!’ People scratch their heads and say, ‘Where did it come from?’

“Listen, the reason these guys were observing the stars thinking they could get wisdom is there WAS a time when some of that stuff WAS going on, and when God abandoned the message He put there in the stars, and man’s ability to read it was corrupted by these birds coming along and doing to the Word of God (that He put up there in the heavens) what people are trying to do to the Word He’s put on the page now, it became worthless.

“I read Wired Magazine, which is sort of the Mad Magazine of the 21^st Century. The January 2011 cover reads something like, ‘Artificial intelligence is here but it’s nothing like we expected. How genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, now a technology in human enhancement, herald the dawn of techno-dimensional spiritual warfare.’

“Every year now there are increasing numbers of scientific gatherings, many sponsored by the government, where trans-human technology is being produced. You see it every now and then; the human cloning kind of thing is just the tip of the iceberg!

“Just like there was a spiritual invasion from the heavenly realm . . .  why did those angels come down in Genesis 6 and do that experimentation? They did it because they were trying to corrupt the seed of the woman. And it said that ‘after the Flood there were giants.’ They didn’t give up with the attempt to corrupt the seed line. What happened after the Flood is God said the seed line is not just any woman; now it’s just the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

“No longer did the (fornicating angels) have to go and try to corrupt all of humanity. Now it was just Israel. And the attacks began on Israel’s seed line. And that’s why the giants were in Israel’s land. And when Israel goes into the Promised Land, the giants, or the nephilim, are already there, holding it as ‘the sons of belial’ to prevent the land from being occupied and used by the promised nation to accomplish its promised purpose. God didn’t mind that, though, because Israel needed a Redeemer first, so he had time . . .”

Anything and everyone!

The most fascinating thing about the angelic creation to Jordan, he says, is that they want to learn all things about us Grace Believers. Anything and everyone they can get an insight into!

In an old study on the subject, Jordan starts by saying, “Daniel is just fascinated by this creature he sees and he begins to try to describe him to you. He writes in Daniel 10: 5-6, ‘Then I lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a certain man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz:
[6] His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude.’

“You know, you take your wife out on a walk in the moonlit night, maybe just out for a stroll, and you look down into her eyes and you say, ‘Your eyes are like stars. They’re like diamonds.’ You’re trying to be romantic and you begin to tell her how she compares with priceless jewels, and that’s what Daniel’s doing here. He’s looking at this angel and he’s comparing him with all these wonderful, fascinating, beautiful, precious things in the earth because the angel’s a fascinating creature and they are!

“Angels are (not made out of Carbon-14) but they wear clothes and eat. Psalm 78: 25 is one of those funny little verses: ‘Man did eat angels’ food.’ Now you know what they drink? They drink Dr. Pepper. It’s the ‘elixir of the gods.’

“Asap says man ate angel’s food. Manna is the bread of the angelic host and Israel was able as the agents of God to participate in that. Angels know how to cook. Now that’s a blessing if you know how to cook good! In I Kings 19, Elijah comes out there and the angel says, ‘Get up, guy, and come over here and eat,’ and he goes over and the angel’s got a meal cooked for him!

*****

“Angels know how to drive chariots. They know how to ride horses and they know how to fight. They have activities to carry on and they can be visible or invisible. They can appear where people can see them or they can be invisible where you don’t see them. They can travel at incredible speeds. You see them in the Bible where there here and then they’re over there—zoooom! Incredibly fast-moving creatures. In fact, because of their connection with light, it is very possible and probable that their speedometer goes up to 186,000 miles per second; the speed of light.

“They can speak multiple languages. Paul said, ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels . . .’ The angelic host can speak every language that is available to be spoken. In the Bible you never see an angel come up and have to talk to someone through an interpreter. No matter what language they might be speaking the angel can communicate directly to him.

“In Revelation 14 an angel stands and speaks to the nations of the earth and communicates to them. They have all these tremendous abilities.

“What you learn is the main thing you see them charged with is the Word of God and they’re charged with the well-being of the nation Israel. They minister to the nation, they care for the nation, they fight  for the nation and they provide for the nation. We also saw how they don’t do those things for us. We don’t need what angels can provide.

“Angels are the agent of God to come and provide things and they do all these things for Israel, but what they do for Israel we don’t need them to do for us. Why? Because we have the completed written Word of God.

“While we don’t see angels today, they do see us. In fact, they do more than see us. They watch us, they observe us, and they pay close attention to us. In fact, they follow you home. They are fascinated by members of the Body of Christ.”

The friends and family plan

“You don’t need me to be happy.” This is the politically correct way to live today. Everybody accountable for themselves. Only show unconditional love to family members. Tough love for a lot. Performance system for the masses. Forget the security blanket of times past when a tribe diligently monitored its members. I am learning my own great weaknesses in these areas.

I had a “best friend” who died very unexpectedly almost two years ago. I frequently fall into self-pity, thinking, “Oh, what a void. He really, truly loved me and was always there for me. I could talk to him about anything and he got me. He knew my personality and he understood me.”

I really believe he was a true friend who loved me as much as he knew how, but he was unsaved. None of anything I tried to get through to him took—or at least that’s what I’ve concluded when I contemplate him being in hell. For me, he was the first person I really loved and counted on who died on me as an unsaved person. It is a real process to go through--one that you don't know 'til you're in it and really living it out.

The best thing I can say about my friend is he kept me alive as a writer. He was the only one! Nobody else even said a word! But the big thing is he really BELIEVED in my talent as a writer (as much as he wasn't necessarily a fan of what I was writing about).

If not for him, I never would have continued (starting back in 1997) and that’s the bottom line! I OWE it to him to still be a writer if not for anyone else. If not for him, I would have never even thought to apply for my magazine job in NYC, let alone survive it!

He played a crucial role in my decision to quit that job and write about the Bible. For my life he was worth all the back and forth about his salvation and whether or not the Bible was the Word of God. Thank you, Jack, and I say that to the dead lost person who (by adoption shortly after birth) was the cousin of Rahm Emanuel, currently running for mayor of Chicago. God bless all the unsaved people in my life (even to this day!) who keep me going.

Social justice, as it's called

When did men begin to multiply? What a lot of people don’t realize is Genesis 4 starts with Cain and Abel but covers a LONG period of history that extends out really to the days of Noah!

Genesis 5 gives you a genealogy from Adam to Noah, then Genesis 6 goes back and starts in the days of Cain and describes things back in the days of Cain that brought about the things going on in Genesis.

“If you want to see a description of the days of Noah (you remember Jesus said ‘as it was in the days of Noah so shall it be again’) don’t forget to read the last part of Genesis 4.

Genesis 4:19-22 reads, [19] And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah.
[20] And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle.
[21] And his brother's name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.
[22] And Zillah, she also bare Tubal-cain, an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.”

Jordan says, “Notice Jabal didn’t dwell in the tents alone; he’s the father. From him comes a crowd of people, a whole lineage of people who dwell in tents ‘and of such as have cattle.’ Well, that’s talking about husbandry. He became a rancher.

“I mean, if you think about, if you have a city and a depletion of the labor force going to the city, there needs to be more efficient production methods for the farm. Everybody can’t have a cow in the backyard because in the city you have an ordinance against that.

“So you begin to develop technologies to provide for the need. It said over there that Nimrod was a ‘mighty hunter.’ Why would he be hunting? It’s ‘Well, you don’t worry about it; I’ll go get it for you. You go live in town.’ You follow that? That’s important. They’re developing an economy.

“In verse 21 it talks of ‘all such as handle the harp and the organ.’ Now you get into arts and entertainment. In order to have that you have to have leisure time. You have to have disposable income. You have to have people who don’t need to go out and work and grow a garden to get food or raise a cow so they’ve got something to eat.

"You don’t have to pluck the duck to have supper. The man can just go to the We-Sack-It. He’s got enough of an income that he can give himself to these other things. I’m trying to say that as you read this, you realize there’s a culture developing here.

“Verse 22, that’s metallurgy. Brass is an alloy where you take copper and zinc and you meld them together. You understand something about chemistry, how to form alloys, stronger metals, more durable goods. You’re talking about industrialization.

“If I told you we need to make a fuel injection system for the car, why you’d say, ‘Let’s go down to Pep Boys or Auto Zone, but me make one?!’ You see you have to have some technology out there. These guys were not a bunch of, ‘Oooh, oooh, ooh’ with a rock and long hair and hit ’em in the head and drag them home to the cave! These guys knew some things about earth science and math.

“There are 88 keys on a piano and every key is a mathematic marvel.

I was out at my son’s Friday for supper and took all the kids down in the basement. I’m thinking, ‘How did this happen?!’ And Bryant brought me a guitar and I strummed it and man, is it out of tune! Big time bad! And so I sat there and tuned it. You know how to tune a guitar? It doesn’t just happen and you know it sounds a lot better when it’s close to being in tune then when it’s way off.

“These guys had a culture that was advanced in economics, science and in the arts, and if you go down the chapter, you’ll see even in law and ‘social justice,’ as it’s called today. Where did all that come from?!”

Subsequent record

Jordan promises, “If you’ll just give the Bible the benefit of the doubt, you’ll discover that the problem you thought was a problem really wasn’t a problem, the problem was you just didn’t have enough information to know how to figure it out.”

One of the things a student of the Bible realizes is that when you take the risk of giving the Book the benefit of the doubt it will prove itself, so the best thing to do regarding the Bible is to doubt your doubts and trust what the Book says.

“There are things that aren’t written down initially that show up later,” says Jordan in a study he gave recently on the Bible’s “rule of subsequent narrative.”

In II Timothy 3:8, for one easy example, Paul writes, “Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith.”

You say, ‘Who in the world are Jannes and Jambres?’ If you look their names up in a concordance you won’t find them anywhere else in the Bible.

“But do you remember two guys back in the Book of Exodus who withstood Moses?” asks Jordan.

“Moses took his rod, threw it down, and two of the Egyptian magicians came up and threw their rods down, and they didn’t simply duplicate what Moses did, they outdid him two to one in the resisting of God’s Word to Moses. It’s in II Timothy you learn their names and the implication was people would have known who they were. So that’s the idea that the identity is there but it’s not put in Scripture until Timothy.”

*****

Psalm 105: 17-18 says, “He sent a man before them, even Joseph, who was sold for a servant:
[18] Whose feet they hurt with fetters: he was laid in iron.”

Jordan says, “See that stuff in verse 18 about what happened to Joseph and his brothers? They took him and put him in a pit and all that stuff. There’s nothing in Genesis about ‘whose feet they hurt with fetters’ or about him being put in iron.”

*****

Matthew 2:23 says, “And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.”

Jordan says, “Now that again is one of these verses people go bonkers over because there’s no verse in the prophets you can read that says he shall be called a Nazarene. Scofield’s got a note that says ‘it’s probably a reference to Isaiah 11:1’ but his argument is just fallacious—it doesn’t work. It doesn’t match the word here at all. That’s why he says ‘probably.’

“What is it? Well, it didn’t say ‘it was written in the prophets,’ it said this is something the prophets were saying. They know about it. It only gets written down here. Matthew 27:9 is another one. The verse says. ‘Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet’ saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value.’ But that verse was written in Zachariah 11. So why does it say it was spoken by Jeremiah? Because it was.

“It doesn’t say it was written by Jeremiah. How do you know it was spoken by Jeremiah? Because Matthew tells you subsequent to the fact that that’s what happened--subsequent to Jeremiah saying that Zachariah, who prophesies AFTER the Babylonian captivity (Jeremiah is BEFORE), writes it down. You don’t know Jerry said it until Zachariah 11. That’s the subsequent record of the information.”

*****

Acts 20:35 says, “I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Jordan explains, “That’s a quote. If you’ve got a red-letter Bible it’s written in red, but those words are not found in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. So how did Paul know Jesus said that? Luke, who was a companion of Paul, could have told him because he was an eyewitness and a historian about the life of Christ. Paul didn’t write this; Luke wrote it. This is Luke quoting what Paul says.

“If you read Luke’s narrative in the Book of Acts, it’s taken from Acts 9 at the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Then in Acts 22 Paul gives his testimony and then again in Acts 26. So in the Book of Acts you have three records of Paul’s conversion--one that Luke writes, two that Paul gives (one in front of the synagogue to the Jews and one in front of Agrippa, the Gentile ruler) and all three of them contain additional information that is complementary to one another.

“They don’t contradict each other but each one has the basic story with different components that go along with it. And the reason for that is the audience is being addressed. If you gave your testimony in two different settings, and then somebody wrote it down, there would be the same story but with maybe a different emphasis on different issues.”

*****

James 5:17 says, “Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months.”

Jordan says, “If you go back in Kings, you’ll notice you have the drought 3 ½ years, then it rains. You don’t read about it not raining and it raining because Elijah (Elias) prayed. It isn’t until James 5 that you learn it rained at Elijah’s prayer.

“There are some things God put in James about the incidents back in Kings because the illustration in James 5:16 is, ‘The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.’ The point in James is the issue of prayer and he uses Elijah as an illustration of it.

“While Elijah prayed that it not rain back there, what Elijah was doing was praying God’s warning to the nation Israel (found in Deuteronomy 11 and Leviticus 26). What Elijah was literally doing was announcing to the nation Israel, ‘The next course of judgment has begun.’ And he reaches back in Deuteronomy and Leviticus and pulls out some core things that are going to take place in that next course of judgment and says, ‘This is it!’ What you learn in James is that he’s praying and God answers. You learn something about prayer.

“What you want to learn about the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man isn’t that you can stop it from raining or make it rain, it’s that what effectual fervent prayer is when you take God’s Word and have an understanding of where you are in the program of God as revealed in His Word and you talk to God about what His Word says is going on.

“Literally you pray God’s word and, when you do that, you get the answer to prayer. His prayer was effectual because it was initiated by God’s Word to him and he was praying from an intelligent understanding of where he stood in the plan, purpose and Word of God. Elijah just didn’t suck the idea out of his thumb.

“It wasn’t a mindless kind of zeal he prayed with. The zeal was in understanding God’s Word and he was fervent about the truth of the Scripture and he zealously prayed and believed and trusted God’s Word.

“If you remember the story back in Kings, Elijah was fighting against King Ahab and his wife Jezebel. Ahab was a spoiled brat who wanted Naboth’s vineyard and Naboth wouldn’t sell it to him because God said, ‘Don’t you let the stuff out of your family,’ and old Ahab went home, laid on his bed and turned his face to the wall and pouted.

“Jezebel comes in and says, ‘What’s the matter, sugar?’ and he tells her, ‘That mean old guy won’t sell me his vineyard!’ So she went and had the dude killed and came back and said, ‘Okay, you can have the vineyard now.’ She was ruthless and he was a kind of a milquetoast and that’s the couple that introduced Baal worship as the state religion in Israel! Jezebel was the daughter of Ethbaal.

“After Elijah met the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel and had a great victory there it was Jezebel who sent him the message, ‘I’m coming to get you, sucker, and you’re dead meat!’ And that’s where you have the incident about Elijah in the cave and he hears the wind and the storm and the still small voice—that’s when he was running for his life from Jezebel.

“So this prayer and withholding the rain and having the rain coming back after the victory with the prophets of Baal, was no small thing for Elijah. He was a righteous man who knew how to effectively and fervently trust God’s Word and that’s what made the prayer, but you wouldn’t know anything about all that, the prayer part of it, if you didn’t have this subsequent narrative in James.”

*****

Critics of the Bible will look at a verse like John 7:38, “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water,” and say, ‘See that’s really not a verse of scripture Jesus’ quoting because there’s not a verse to quote that says ‘out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.’ But Jesus is just making a summary statement of the consensus of what the Messiah’s going to produce for the nation Israel through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

John 7:39 (“But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified”) clears up the fact that what Christ’s talking about is the new covenant ministry of the Holy Spirit in their midst.

“You just need to understand that, No. 1, that is what the Scripture teaches, and when we say the Scripture says something oftentimes what you’re doing is talking about the consensus; you’re making a summary statement about the consensus of the teaching of Scripture,” explains Jordan. “You also can be having the issue of the subsequent narrative, adding information that wasn’t there before that only complements what’s going on.”

Isaiah 48: 21, for example, says, “And they thirsted not when he led them through the deserts: he caused the waters to flow out of the rock for them: he clave the rock also, and the waters gushed out.”

Isaiah 58:11 says, “And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.”

---

Jordan explains, “Isaiah 58 is a picture in apostasy and in repentance and then Israel getting the blessings of her kingdom. And when the blessings come, verse 11, ‘the Lord shall guide thee continually.’ You’re going to have a drink of cold water in the midst of a desert. There’s that thirst metaphor.  God’s going to give them a drink that satisfies the thirst that was compelling them ‘and make fat thy bones…’

“Out of your belly, that part of you that has that ability never to be satisfied, is going to flow rivers of living water. It’s Jeremiah who identifies the fountain of living water as the Messiah; as the blessings the Messiah brings. He’s going to put His Spirit in them and it’s going to flow out of them.

“Flow, not just fill them up. There’s that verse in Mark where Jesus Christ talks to that Gentile woman and says ‘the children must first be filled.’ But they're not just simply going to be filled and have their thirst slacked; they’re going to be filled to overflowing, so that after He’s blessed them that blessing’s going to flow out THROUGH them to others. What he says in John 7 is just a summary statement of the consensus of what the Messiah’s going to produce for the nation Israel through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

*****

One other verse is James 4:5: “Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy?”

Jordan says, “Bible critics use these kinds of verses to try to destroy confidence in God’s Word. There’s no verse of scripture in the Bible that says the ‘spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy,’ but there are a dozen scriptures that teach that! There’s no verse that he’s quoting that’s written but that isn’t what the verse says. The verse doesn’t say that ‘the scripture written says,’ it says ‘the scripture sayeth.’ Just like Jerry spoke and Zach wrote it down.

“What that verse is is a condensation, or a summary of the teaching of scripture. That’s why it doesn’t say it is written and quoted. What is written teaches in no uncertain terms that the spirit that dwells in us lusts to envy.”

(Editor’s note: The Book of Hebrews is full of examples. The writer will talk about ‘Moses sprinkling the book’ but if you go back to Exodus 24 there’s no indication that he sprinkled the book with blood at all.)