Editor's Note: Breaking News!!! My organization, H.O.M.E., will be profiled on ABC network TV tomorrow night at 7 Central in an episode of the primetime show "Secret Millionaire." They will show one of the elderly houses where I work.
*****
We’re now at the mid-point of this current winter cycle where the issue of decision-making and applying the will of God is essential to survival.
Proverbs 6:6 says, Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:
[7] Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler,
[8] Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.
[9] How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep?.
In Ephesians 5:14, Paul gives the same advice, exhorting readers to “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.
[15] See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,
[16] Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”
Jordan says, “Be like that ant. Be wise, redeeming the time. There’s a sense in which you and I have a responsibility to go out and rescue time from being lost. If these things about wintertime are true, and that life is seasonal, the time that you make the most difference is here.
“Once in a lifetime you go through the opportunity to live that once-in-a-lifetime privilege of making or breaking the heart of the future. Winter is an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to heal or to destroy the soul of a people who goes through that next cycle. It’s a critical time with critical opportunities.
“That last wintertime era is the one that gave birth to what we know as the ‘the grace movement.’ J.C. O’Hair became pastor of North Shore Church in 1924. He died in 1958 as pastor of the church. The heyday of the grace movement as we’ve come to understand it was there. The big names you hear—Stam, Baker and O’Hair—that’s their era.
“Now, I’m no J.C. O’Hair and you’re no Stam or Baker, but we don’t need to be. All we need to be is who we are. We just need to be where we are taking advantage of who we are to the fullest—to be for this season who it will need us to be.
*****
“Every springtime in this country has had a spiritual awakening. That’s the cycle in Anglo-American history in which the Reformation took place. The first reformation was a recovery of Pauline truth.
"The next great awakening was the Puritan awakening. The era of the Puritans, in the first quarter of the 1600s, produced the King James Bible. The fruit and on the vine. It’s the era of tremendous, wonderful activity in America. Jonathan Edwards and the great New England revivals changed the course of America—justification by grace through faith.
“The next great awakening in the 1800s was led by Charles Finney and had to do with the doctrines of identity. The next great awakening was the one that led into dispensational understanding. The fourth great awakening, in the 1960s, was called in history the ‘Conscience Revolution’ and it’s the first awakening in American history that wasn’t based on Bible. It was a New Age awakening. Historians call our world today Post-Christian.
“If you don’t know that, then you need to wake up and quit reading books written 50 years ago about reaching people 50 years ago, and look around you today. The best in Christendom today is so washed out and shallow, and sorry and flesh-oriented, that it couldn’t even get in the door 50 years ago.
“Unsaved men 50-75 years ago had three times the character of Christian leaders today. Christian people today accept low-living and character defects in fellow Believers, and give them ministries that when I was a kid people would have looked at them and sneered and said, ‘How in the world do you call yourself a Christian and do all that stuff? I don’t want to know what you have to say.’
“Today you’re involved in ministering to the first generations in American history that didn’t have some basic spiritual consensus or underpinnings that pointed them at least in the right direction.
“How you come out of winter into the next spring is up for grabs. It’s up for grabs during the winter.
*****
“If you want to see how nations operate, you’ll see it laid out in Genesis 8-10 and you’ll the satanic counter-attack in Gen. 11 (internationalism and getting rid of the pattern set up). Genesis 9 lays out the great ethnic divisions among the nations.
“Noah’s three boys—Ham, Shem and Japeth—are the progenitors of the three ethnic races that make up humanity. With each one of those boys and their descendants, Noah gives a prophecy about them and when he does, he gives a prophecy about the contribution each is to make.
“Those divisions are not designed to be divisions; they’re designed to be distinctions in the contribution. If you’ve done something, you know that one ingredient does one thing and another ingredient does another, and another, and then you have the whole. It’s the old sin nature that makes them divisions. When each division makes the proper contribution it’s designed to make then you have the proper functioning of the whole. In the ages to come in the millennial kingdom, that will be exactly what happens.
“That’s why when the gospel goes into any culture, no matter what culture it is, it doesn’t bring the culture of another group into it, it goes into that particular culture and purifies that culture and brings out of it all the best that culture can contribute.
“And instead of trying to go in and Westernize or Southernize or Midwestize or Californiaize, you come in and honor the dignity of who these people are and that God designed them to be that way, bringing in the gospel and the life of Christ, and the truth of God’s grace and what that brings out, and then the group is full and able to make the contribution to the whole that it’s designed to make.
“I’m telling you what the answer is to the ethnic, racial strife in the world! I’ve read accounts of missionaries, sociologists, anthropologists, etc., going into the most hinterlands of humanity, where people have had no contact at all with civilizations, and they sit down and say, ‘What are your dreams, what do you want, who do you think you are, what is it you desire?’ and you know what? The list they come away with is exactly the list you’d make! They say, ‘I want a better life for my children.’
“You say, ‘Hey, this people have never been civilized yet; touched with the blessings of the civilized world. How do they know all of our questions?!’ Folks, it’s because we all come from the same place. The same God made us and made us to operate on those four basic principles laid out in Genesis.”
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Who's running the operation?
We’re ambassadors. II Cor. 5:20. Paul’s very clear about what our function in ministry is.
Jordan says, “I love that verse Eph. 4:1. There’s a vocation associated with your calling. Our ministry is to go out and preach that message of reconciliation IN the world and TO the world.
"In order to carry out our ambassadorship we need to understand the world in which we live and how it operates. Otherwise we’re just going to be drifting along, or we’re going to be carried along by the flow, and that’s what I fear. I don’t want somebody else running my life. I don’t want to be controlled and run. I want to live on purpose. I want to live on faith.
“When you gather big nations of people together, what you’re going to get are some cycles in the way that nation works that are going to cover the ‘seasons’ of a person’s lifespan. The cycles are going to go through spring, summer, fall and winter.
“If you study history, you can identify those turnings. Historians who don’t know the Bible have done this. When you take what they’ve done and put it together with biblical understanding, it’s a fascinating overlay.
“Every great historian has studied history in a cyclical pattern. The problem they had is they just didn’t know where to go to get the pattern that was real. They didn’t know about Gen. 8, Ecclesiastes 3 (or didn’t know how to apply it).
“In American history, we are in the seventh one of these cycles. If you go back to the founding of the Anglo-American culture in Britain (that’s where our laws and systems and the whole foundation of the culture come from), we’re in the 4th cycle that’s all-American. The dates are kind of fascinating.
“There’s 1946 to 1964 (spring); 1964-1984 (summer); 1984-2005 (fall); 2005-2025 (winter). The one before this started in 1865-1886. What ended in 1945? WW II. What ended in 1865? Civil War. Every cycle has a major war. Wars in each one of these seasons is different. Wars in winter are different that wars in spring and summer. In spring, it’s a standoff. Think of the Korean War.
“Remember the War of 1812? Does anybody even know what it was about? When you remember WWII, what happens? Your heart thumps a little bit, pride comes up in you and you say, ‘Wow, we did something!’ With Vietnam, you say, ‘Totally pointless. What was the use of that?’ You weren’t the first generation that ever said that. The previous war in that same cycle was the Spanish-American War. Choked up about that one? But you do about the Civil War.
“Wars fought in the fall are strange wars that are quickly won and soon forgotten. Think of Desert Storm.”
(Editor’s note: To be continued . . .)
Jordan says, “I love that verse Eph. 4:1. There’s a vocation associated with your calling. Our ministry is to go out and preach that message of reconciliation IN the world and TO the world.
"In order to carry out our ambassadorship we need to understand the world in which we live and how it operates. Otherwise we’re just going to be drifting along, or we’re going to be carried along by the flow, and that’s what I fear. I don’t want somebody else running my life. I don’t want to be controlled and run. I want to live on purpose. I want to live on faith.
“When you gather big nations of people together, what you’re going to get are some cycles in the way that nation works that are going to cover the ‘seasons’ of a person’s lifespan. The cycles are going to go through spring, summer, fall and winter.
“If you study history, you can identify those turnings. Historians who don’t know the Bible have done this. When you take what they’ve done and put it together with biblical understanding, it’s a fascinating overlay.
“Every great historian has studied history in a cyclical pattern. The problem they had is they just didn’t know where to go to get the pattern that was real. They didn’t know about Gen. 8, Ecclesiastes 3 (or didn’t know how to apply it).
“In American history, we are in the seventh one of these cycles. If you go back to the founding of the Anglo-American culture in Britain (that’s where our laws and systems and the whole foundation of the culture come from), we’re in the 4th cycle that’s all-American. The dates are kind of fascinating.
“There’s 1946 to 1964 (spring); 1964-1984 (summer); 1984-2005 (fall); 2005-2025 (winter). The one before this started in 1865-1886. What ended in 1945? WW II. What ended in 1865? Civil War. Every cycle has a major war. Wars in each one of these seasons is different. Wars in winter are different that wars in spring and summer. In spring, it’s a standoff. Think of the Korean War.
“Remember the War of 1812? Does anybody even know what it was about? When you remember WWII, what happens? Your heart thumps a little bit, pride comes up in you and you say, ‘Wow, we did something!’ With Vietnam, you say, ‘Totally pointless. What was the use of that?’ You weren’t the first generation that ever said that. The previous war in that same cycle was the Spanish-American War. Choked up about that one? But you do about the Civil War.
“Wars fought in the fall are strange wars that are quickly won and soon forgotten. Think of Desert Storm.”
(Editor’s note: To be continued . . .)
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Standing on a bough
I Thessalonians 5 starts out with Paul assuring, “But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. [2] For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.”
Jordan explains, “The reason they didn’t need Paul to write to them is they understood him. He’s saying, ‘You already understand all this stuff. I taught it to you while I was there!’
“If you study II Thessalonians 2 it’s quite clear that one of the ways that, if you ever wanted to know what Paul did in Acts 17 when he went to Thessalonica and ‘as his manner was, went in unto them, and three sabbath days reasoned with them out of the scriptures,
[3] Opening and alleging, that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead; and that this Jesus, whom I preach unto you, is Christ.’
“In II Thessalonians 2: 3-5, Paul talks about the Antichrist, the son of perdition and the ‘sitting in the temple of God shewing himself to be God.’ He says, ‘It’s just like I taught you when I was there!’ Well, that tells you what he taught. He went through Daniel 9 and then drew time past, but now, the ages to come and laid that thing out there. He skinned that cat right away and proved that when Jesus Christ came, He came right on God’s time table and He was exactly who the Bible said He was and Israel rejected Him just like God said they were going to do.
“It’s interesting how you get truth from a remoter context. Everybody talks about the ‘first mention’ principle, and that works sometimes and sometimes doesn’t, but one principle that will always work is truth from a remoter context. You know, you use the Scripture over here to shed light on a Scripture over there and, ‘Wow, look how interesting it is to enlighten you!’ The prophetic program works on a time schedule and that’s why it works that way.
“Leviticus 23, for example, gives the redemption calendar of Israel. Every year they went through those seven feasts and what they did is lay out God’s calendar of redemption for the nation--something they recycled every year and it was designed to teach them some doctrine. It’s historically being fulfilled and they should have been able to recognize and say, ‘This is that,' and see it. Unfortunately, most of the time they were blind and didn’t.
“Just as there’s a pattern of divine edification in Paul’s epistles and the Hebrew epistles and the four gospels, there’s also a pattern to the history of the nation Israel and Moses standing on the bough of Israel’s history as a nation he lays it out and prophecies in Lev. 26 and Deut. 28-32.
“The history of Israel is identified in seasons of judgments and cycles of chastisement. In Lev. 26, you have the cycles of sevens over and over in the Bible. That’s what Daniel’s 70th week is all about. It’s the cycles of sevens and 49s and the 490s--all these different cycles prophecy goes through.
“But we don’t live in the prophetic program today, and the prophetic cycles God put in the nation Israel and put them through in their history, those have been interrupted.
“Today, God has set Israel aside and interrupted the prophetic program and introduced the dispensation of grace and the prophetic times and seasons are not available to us to be able to look out at the world and identify.
“In Luke 21, when the Lord Jesus Christ says, ‘When you see these things happen—specific identifiable events--earthquakes, for example,’ that’s specific, identifiable things where you could say, ‘This is it and this isn’t it.’
“Jesus says, ‘When you see those things look up; your redemption draws nigh. The Second Advent’s not very far.’ They lived by signs and seasons. We don’t have those today. There are no signs of the times today because these aren’t the times of the signs.”
Jordan explains, “The reason they didn’t need Paul to write to them is they understood him. He’s saying, ‘You already understand all this stuff. I taught it to you while I was there!’
“If you study II Thessalonians 2 it’s quite clear that one of the ways that, if you ever wanted to know what Paul did in Acts 17 when he went to Thessalonica and ‘as his manner was, went in unto them, and three sabbath days reasoned with them out of the scriptures,
[3] Opening and alleging, that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead; and that this Jesus, whom I preach unto you, is Christ.’
“In II Thessalonians 2: 3-5, Paul talks about the Antichrist, the son of perdition and the ‘sitting in the temple of God shewing himself to be God.’ He says, ‘It’s just like I taught you when I was there!’ Well, that tells you what he taught. He went through Daniel 9 and then drew time past, but now, the ages to come and laid that thing out there. He skinned that cat right away and proved that when Jesus Christ came, He came right on God’s time table and He was exactly who the Bible said He was and Israel rejected Him just like God said they were going to do.
“It’s interesting how you get truth from a remoter context. Everybody talks about the ‘first mention’ principle, and that works sometimes and sometimes doesn’t, but one principle that will always work is truth from a remoter context. You know, you use the Scripture over here to shed light on a Scripture over there and, ‘Wow, look how interesting it is to enlighten you!’ The prophetic program works on a time schedule and that’s why it works that way.
“Leviticus 23, for example, gives the redemption calendar of Israel. Every year they went through those seven feasts and what they did is lay out God’s calendar of redemption for the nation--something they recycled every year and it was designed to teach them some doctrine. It’s historically being fulfilled and they should have been able to recognize and say, ‘This is that,' and see it. Unfortunately, most of the time they were blind and didn’t.
“Just as there’s a pattern of divine edification in Paul’s epistles and the Hebrew epistles and the four gospels, there’s also a pattern to the history of the nation Israel and Moses standing on the bough of Israel’s history as a nation he lays it out and prophecies in Lev. 26 and Deut. 28-32.
“The history of Israel is identified in seasons of judgments and cycles of chastisement. In Lev. 26, you have the cycles of sevens over and over in the Bible. That’s what Daniel’s 70th week is all about. It’s the cycles of sevens and 49s and the 490s--all these different cycles prophecy goes through.
“But we don’t live in the prophetic program today, and the prophetic cycles God put in the nation Israel and put them through in their history, those have been interrupted.
“Today, God has set Israel aside and interrupted the prophetic program and introduced the dispensation of grace and the prophetic times and seasons are not available to us to be able to look out at the world and identify.
“In Luke 21, when the Lord Jesus Christ says, ‘When you see these things happen—specific identifiable events--earthquakes, for example,’ that’s specific, identifiable things where you could say, ‘This is it and this isn’t it.’
“Jesus says, ‘When you see those things look up; your redemption draws nigh. The Second Advent’s not very far.’ They lived by signs and seasons. We don’t have those today. There are no signs of the times today because these aren’t the times of the signs.”
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Out of border effect
Now that I know I’m going to live, I can say going down for the count with a virulent stomach bug early Sunday morning (which unbeknownst to me was circulating among other residents on my work floor during the exact same hours!) has had its share of positive byproducts.
I am currently grateful for a lot of little, little things that I was taking for granted—like swallowing water without having it come right back out of you as pee is streaming down your leg (from the absolutely violent, back-straining, rib-wrenching
heaves) and you are simultaneously fighting 5-15 minute intervals of diarrhea.
I called off sick Monday to spend the entire day in the fetal position, still nauseous and running to the bathroom with diarrhea. In between bouts of sleep I watched Channel 11 as they went from one country to the next in a long string of half-hour travel shows. Every part of the world got its nod—from the Bahamas and Cayman Islands to Monaco and Cannes--even my family’s homeland of Norway was included.
This morning I came out of hibernation with an urge for food, coffee and a fresh newspaper to read. I was in luck when I entered Metropolis Café on Granville before work and their house copy of the New York Times was sitting free on the periodicals table.
Quickly perusing the A-section, I was acutely aware of how many different nations were being reported on, even addressed by name in the headlines. In the NYT’s bold typeface for “heds” were Senegal, Brazil, Russia, Syria, Israel and its Gaza strip, Egypt, Iran, China, Mexico . . . even more that don’t immediately come to mind right now!
*****
Not only did I veg out on PBS yesterday, I popped in some VCR tapes of old Shorewood studies and came across Jordan talking about “wintertime” in a 1997 Soldiers Conference meeting. Here’s an outtake:
“Acts 17:26 says, ‘And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.’
“God’s made of one blood all nations. Listen, any of the nations God made, they all came from Adam. And they didn’t just all come from Adam; they came from Noah too. There was Adam and his three boys (those listed in Scripture) and then there was Noah and his three boys.
“God set some bounds between them and He did it that they ‘should seek the Lord.’ Why did He set the boundaries? If He made all of them from one source, why did He segment them out there like He did?
“The next verse says, ‘That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:’ That’s a strange way of saying that. He says He’s standing right there and He’s near to every one of us and yet these nations are having to hunt Him and they can’t find Him. They’re over here groping around and He uses a figure there that there’s just a blind guy groping in the dark, demonstrating something of what it means to be lost. Like a blind bat flying backward in a black cave. He can’t get it!
“So He divides them up out here in certain ways to facilitate them being able to find Him. When I think about that, and my ministry is to the nations out there, and God says I’ve arranged the way the nations function in such a way that it facilitates them being reached and then seeing truth in finding truth and having truth find them.
“If you’re going to work at reaching the nations you need to understand the principles and the origins of how they function. If you’re going to do that, you’re going to have to understand what? The first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis.
“Why in the world are there eleven chapters to cover some 2,000-plus years of human history?! Why in the world would He zzzzoom--go through it like that? And most of that just covers little sections of it. The reason is the history of what happened and its details . . .
“I mean, He starts in Gen 12 to 50 and covers just a couple of hundred years. There’s something real important going on in those details. The proof is the first eleven chapters lay out four institutions of divine establishment for the nations and those four institutions are critical to understanding how the nations work.
“The first is volition. That’s your will. Theologians say you’re a free moral agent. Positive volition or negative volition toward sound bible doctrine is the thing that makes and breaks your life. Genesis 3.
“The next thing is marriage. It’s the basic building block of social living. After that is family. Robert Bork says, ‘Each year there’s a new generation of savages born who must be civilized by the cultural institutions.’ That’s the families, churches, schools. It’s the home that passes on the heritage, traditions, truth and training.
The fourth institution is human government and nationalism.
(To be continued . . . )
I am currently grateful for a lot of little, little things that I was taking for granted—like swallowing water without having it come right back out of you as pee is streaming down your leg (from the absolutely violent, back-straining, rib-wrenching
heaves) and you are simultaneously fighting 5-15 minute intervals of diarrhea.
I called off sick Monday to spend the entire day in the fetal position, still nauseous and running to the bathroom with diarrhea. In between bouts of sleep I watched Channel 11 as they went from one country to the next in a long string of half-hour travel shows. Every part of the world got its nod—from the Bahamas and Cayman Islands to Monaco and Cannes--even my family’s homeland of Norway was included.
This morning I came out of hibernation with an urge for food, coffee and a fresh newspaper to read. I was in luck when I entered Metropolis Café on Granville before work and their house copy of the New York Times was sitting free on the periodicals table.
Quickly perusing the A-section, I was acutely aware of how many different nations were being reported on, even addressed by name in the headlines. In the NYT’s bold typeface for “heds” were Senegal, Brazil, Russia, Syria, Israel and its Gaza strip, Egypt, Iran, China, Mexico . . . even more that don’t immediately come to mind right now!
*****
Not only did I veg out on PBS yesterday, I popped in some VCR tapes of old Shorewood studies and came across Jordan talking about “wintertime” in a 1997 Soldiers Conference meeting. Here’s an outtake:
“Acts 17:26 says, ‘And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.’
“God’s made of one blood all nations. Listen, any of the nations God made, they all came from Adam. And they didn’t just all come from Adam; they came from Noah too. There was Adam and his three boys (those listed in Scripture) and then there was Noah and his three boys.
“God set some bounds between them and He did it that they ‘should seek the Lord.’ Why did He set the boundaries? If He made all of them from one source, why did He segment them out there like He did?
“The next verse says, ‘That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:’ That’s a strange way of saying that. He says He’s standing right there and He’s near to every one of us and yet these nations are having to hunt Him and they can’t find Him. They’re over here groping around and He uses a figure there that there’s just a blind guy groping in the dark, demonstrating something of what it means to be lost. Like a blind bat flying backward in a black cave. He can’t get it!
“So He divides them up out here in certain ways to facilitate them being able to find Him. When I think about that, and my ministry is to the nations out there, and God says I’ve arranged the way the nations function in such a way that it facilitates them being reached and then seeing truth in finding truth and having truth find them.
“If you’re going to work at reaching the nations you need to understand the principles and the origins of how they function. If you’re going to do that, you’re going to have to understand what? The first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis.
“Why in the world are there eleven chapters to cover some 2,000-plus years of human history?! Why in the world would He zzzzoom--go through it like that? And most of that just covers little sections of it. The reason is the history of what happened and its details . . .
“I mean, He starts in Gen 12 to 50 and covers just a couple of hundred years. There’s something real important going on in those details. The proof is the first eleven chapters lay out four institutions of divine establishment for the nations and those four institutions are critical to understanding how the nations work.
“The first is volition. That’s your will. Theologians say you’re a free moral agent. Positive volition or negative volition toward sound bible doctrine is the thing that makes and breaks your life. Genesis 3.
“The next thing is marriage. It’s the basic building block of social living. After that is family. Robert Bork says, ‘Each year there’s a new generation of savages born who must be civilized by the cultural institutions.’ That’s the families, churches, schools. It’s the home that passes on the heritage, traditions, truth and training.
The fourth institution is human government and nationalism.
(To be continued . . . )
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Foundational thinking
In English there’s a difference between the words “man” and “husband,” but not in Dutch. In both cases, they say “man,” as pointed out recently to Jordan by a student of Grace School of the Bible living in Holland.
He wrote in a note, “I love the King James Bible. So many times it helps me to understand my Dutch Bible better. I don’t understand English people saying it’s difficult to read. To me, a Dutch-speaking man not educated in the English language, it is very, very clear that the (KJV) is my greatest help in understanding my Dutch Bible.”
In reading this man’s sentiments in a recent sermon, Jordan stressed, “I say to people all the time, you shouldn’t be mad at the translators of your Bible if they know more about your language than you do. II Thessalonians 2:7 talks about, ‘For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.’
“People say, ‘Let? What’s that?’ If you look the word ‘let’ up in an English dictionary, there are six different definitions. Out in the country, Down South, for example, when you rent a piece a land out to somebody, we say, ‘We’re going to let it out.’
“If you try to hit a ball over the net and it hits the net, you say, ‘Let.’ That means it’s a hindered serve and has to be redone. In Exodus 5, Moses says to Pharaoh, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord, let my people go!’ In verse 4, Pharaoh says, ‘Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, let the people from their works?’
“Within five verses the word’s used two ways. You say, ‘That’s confusion.’ No, that’s just somebody who knows more about English than you do. You know, one of the greatest ways to learn the language is just to read your Bible. If you read it and let it educate you, not just in what it says but how it’s given in the language you speak, it will elevate your vocabulary and capacity to speak and learn.”
*****
“Jesus Christ says to the leaders of Israel in Matthew 22:31, ‘Have you not read that which was spoken to you by Moses?’ and he quotes Exodus 3. That’s one of the greatest definitions of inspiration in the Bible. What’s written down there is what God spoke.
That’s what inspiration is. God picks some words, put them on paper, and the living word of the eternal God is in written form, preserved. And what Moses wrote in Exodus 3, Jesus said, ‘You birds got it to read right here,’ and by the way, they didn’t have the original manuscripts.
“They didn’t even have it in the same Hebrew dialect if they had it in Hebrew at all. The fact is most people have come to the conclusion that in the 1st Century in Israel they weren’t speaking Hebrew; they were speaking Aramaic (a language that uses the Hebrew alphabet but is a little different—like Portuguese and English).
“Did you know it’s very possible the New Testament wasn’t even written in Greek to start with? Paul writes a book to the Galatians (modern-day Turkey) and they weren’t for the most part Greek-speaking people. I’m just saying there’s all kind of stuff that gets flown into the wind out here.
“This idea that, ‘Well, they wrote it back there, but it’s been lost, and what we have over here is a dynamic equivalent of that,’ that’s just not what Jesus believed! The doctrine of preservation is a Bible doctrine.
“How can I get in Him when He’s not here? ‘I can get in the tub; I can’t get in Him!’ You say, ‘Well, it didn’t mean that.’ Well, why didn’t it say what it meant?! I’m telling you about what people tell me about where they’ve been with this stuff.
“When it says you’re baptized into Jesus Christ, that’s a supernatural activity. There’s nothing physical about that! If Jesus Christ was standing right here you couldn’t get in Him! Not physically possible; it’s a supernatural thing, though. ‘By one spirit are we all baptized into one body.’
“What it means to be ‘in Christ’ is the spirit of God takes me out of where I was, which was in Adam, and puts me into (changes my location and thus my identity) Jesus Christ and together with Him I died. I was crucified. Then I was buried with Him. He put away the ‘old man.’ Then I was raised with Him to walk in newness of life.
“Not only did I die with Him, was crucified with Him, buried with Him, raised with Him, but I ascended with Him and I sit with Him at the Father’s right hand. I share His authority with Him in the heavens. Why? Because God the Holy Spirit put me in Him. He took me out of who I was and put me into who He is. ‘For me to live is Christ.’ Everything He is is mine!
“You know why Satan doesn’t want you to see this stuff? He doesn’t want you to see THAT! I’ve been reading Ephesians 1 every day for the past six months and I’m just totally captivated by how everything focuses in Him. Verse 4 says, ‘According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love.’
“Not to be IN Him; He chose you in Him. Once you’re in Him you’re part of the elect purpose of God and His Son that He established before the foundation of the world that you ‘should be holy and without blame before Him in love.’
“I Peter 1:20 says that Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world was spotless and holy. In John 17:24 He says, ‘Father you loved me before the foundation of the world.’ You know what He says about you and me?
"He says God Almighty today has put you in His Son so He could think about you the same way He thought about His Son before the world began.
“Wow! You see that?! He took you and me and blessed us according to His plan He’s had of what He’s going to accomplish in His Son, and He put you in a program where He thinks about you the same way He thought about His Son. I read that in Ephesians and I think, ‘It can’t get any better than that!’ Then I read the next verse and say, ‘Oops, wrong!’ It gets even better! Verse 5 says, ‘Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.’
“There are 12 blessings Paul lists between verses 4 and 14. When he says, ‘You’re accepted in the beloved,’ what does that make you think of? Where do you go in the Bible to find that Jesus is the Father’s beloved? In Matthew 3, Jesus is coming to begin His earthly ministry and it says, ‘And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’
“He didn’t say ‘in whom I am pleased.’ He said ‘in whom I am PLENTY pleased.’ ‘I’m ecstatic! I’m pushing it to the wall. I can’t get any more pleased than I’m pleased with Him. He’s my beloved!’ He’s the ‘apple of my eye,’ the Old Testament says.
*****
“In the Bible, when you read a passage about the end of the world and then one that says “world without end,” obviously these are contradictory terms that make you stop and think.
Isaiah 45:17 says, “But Israel shall be saved in the LORD with an everlasting salvation: ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end.”
“You can see that even in the prophetic program, not just in Paul, the Bible talks about and expects the world to not end but to go on,” says Jordan. “We use the term world in several different ways. Sometimes we refer to the planet we live on. Sometimes you talk about the ‘Wide World of Sports.’ We use that word world in the sense of an organized system of activity were involved in.
“We talk about the world tomorrow. We talk about an age—like the Iron Age. Every time the word ‘world’ appears in the Bible it’s not talking about the earth; most of the time it’s not. In Isa. 23:17, for one example, when it talks about ‘the kingdoms of the world,’ the term is talking about the organization of the affairs that are taking place on the planet.
“So when you go back over to Paul and he talks about a ‘world without end,’ he’s talking about this organized system going on that’s never going to end. But when Jesus talks about the end of the world, He says there is an organized system that IS going to end. Paul talks about this present evil world. How long do you think that’s going to last? Not forever.
“II Peter 4 says, ‘For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment;
[5] And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly.’
“There was a way things were organized before the Flood that’s different from the way things are organized after the Flood, but not only that, Rev. 11:15 says, ‘And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.’
“The way things were organized with Satan as the prince of the world, and the one in control of the world system, is all going to give way into a new world order headed up by the Lord Jesus Christ.”
*****
Jordan continues, “Nostradamus. You still reading that outdated guy?! Somebody says, ‘Well, don’t you know about the Planet X that’s out there?’ It doesn’t exist—that’s just bad, bogus science! People say, ‘Well, there’s going to be the pole shift; the solar flares.’ All of that is just debunked bad science! It’s myths, lies; it’s just stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. And you compare that with the historically, validatable, predictive prophecy of the Bible and you say, ‘I can trust what the Bible says.’
“Caesar Augustus sent out a decree that all the world had to be taxed. In order to fulfill that prophecy, Joseph had to take Mary and move her from Nazareth to Bethlehem a week before she’s going to deliver. That isn’t a normal kind of a thing that happened and he used the pagan emperor of Rome to instigate the mechanics to get them moved so that the boy was born in exactly the place God, seven hundred years before, said He would be born!
“Some people will say, ‘Well, Micah couldn’t have known that 700 years before so it had to have been written later.’ Listen to me, something that is historically validatable to have happened in predictive prophecy like that, and it comes to pass, is mathematically, statistically evidence of the validity of the statement and the source it came from.
“You’re familiar today with the science of DNA. DNA validation is simply the use of the statistical probability. When they say it’s ‘a certainty that this is your DNA, not anybody else’s, and we can take your life, convict you and put you in prison forever because we know that it’s an absurdity not to believe this is your DNA,’ they’re saying there’s a mathematical, statistical probability that the code that comes from your DNA is yours and not anybody else’s. And when something is considered to be in statistical probability of ten to the 47th power, it is an absurdity not to believe it’s true.
“When you take a predictive prophecy like where He’s going to be born 700 years before the historical certainty of that, it gives you a mathematical . . . people say you can’t prove the Bible scientifically but here you can! There’s a mathematically, statistically, scientifically demonstrative proof of the historic reliability of God’s Word.
“Do you know if you took eight prophecies like that . . . could you find eight pre-statements about Jesus Christ that were fulfilled in His life? I bet you could find 16. I’ve got a list of almost 300. If you got eight of them you’d have a statistical probability of ten to something like the 27th power, and if you had 16, it would be 10th to the 54th power, and if you’ve got 10th to the 54th power, it would be an absolute scientific absurdity not to believe it’s true!
“Isaiah 41 said, ‘You know how you know I’m God? Because I can tell you the future and make it come to pass and it comes to pass just exactly the way I said it and that’s the way I prove myself.’ The Bible is a demonstratively, validatable proof.
*****
“History’s greatest secular historians (like Edward Gibbon’s ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’) talk to you about the translation of the Old Testament into Greek called the Septuagint, and everybody will tell you that 200 years before the time of Christ the Septuagint was available. It is historically accurate to say the Bible was translated into Greek several hundred years before Christ.
“You know what that Greek translation of the Septuagint had in it? Malachi 5:2. The same thing your Bible says. Every historian that ever lived who talked about this acknowledges that that prophecy lived at least 250 years before Christ in the text there. Go look at Encyclopedia Britannica or look at Wikipedia, they’ll all tell you that.
“There is written into the fabric of Scripture some of the most fascinating patterns that demonstrate to you that the person who wrote the Scripture back in Genesis and Exodus knew what was going to happen over here in our day.
“And he wrote those passages back there to give you a prophetic picture of future events down to details that are inexplicable other than the fact that the person who wrote back there knew what was going to happen over here. We call that typology.”
He wrote in a note, “I love the King James Bible. So many times it helps me to understand my Dutch Bible better. I don’t understand English people saying it’s difficult to read. To me, a Dutch-speaking man not educated in the English language, it is very, very clear that the (KJV) is my greatest help in understanding my Dutch Bible.”
In reading this man’s sentiments in a recent sermon, Jordan stressed, “I say to people all the time, you shouldn’t be mad at the translators of your Bible if they know more about your language than you do. II Thessalonians 2:7 talks about, ‘For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.’
“People say, ‘Let? What’s that?’ If you look the word ‘let’ up in an English dictionary, there are six different definitions. Out in the country, Down South, for example, when you rent a piece a land out to somebody, we say, ‘We’re going to let it out.’
“If you try to hit a ball over the net and it hits the net, you say, ‘Let.’ That means it’s a hindered serve and has to be redone. In Exodus 5, Moses says to Pharaoh, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord, let my people go!’ In verse 4, Pharaoh says, ‘Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, let the people from their works?’
“Within five verses the word’s used two ways. You say, ‘That’s confusion.’ No, that’s just somebody who knows more about English than you do. You know, one of the greatest ways to learn the language is just to read your Bible. If you read it and let it educate you, not just in what it says but how it’s given in the language you speak, it will elevate your vocabulary and capacity to speak and learn.”
*****
“Jesus Christ says to the leaders of Israel in Matthew 22:31, ‘Have you not read that which was spoken to you by Moses?’ and he quotes Exodus 3. That’s one of the greatest definitions of inspiration in the Bible. What’s written down there is what God spoke.
That’s what inspiration is. God picks some words, put them on paper, and the living word of the eternal God is in written form, preserved. And what Moses wrote in Exodus 3, Jesus said, ‘You birds got it to read right here,’ and by the way, they didn’t have the original manuscripts.
“They didn’t even have it in the same Hebrew dialect if they had it in Hebrew at all. The fact is most people have come to the conclusion that in the 1st Century in Israel they weren’t speaking Hebrew; they were speaking Aramaic (a language that uses the Hebrew alphabet but is a little different—like Portuguese and English).
“Did you know it’s very possible the New Testament wasn’t even written in Greek to start with? Paul writes a book to the Galatians (modern-day Turkey) and they weren’t for the most part Greek-speaking people. I’m just saying there’s all kind of stuff that gets flown into the wind out here.
“This idea that, ‘Well, they wrote it back there, but it’s been lost, and what we have over here is a dynamic equivalent of that,’ that’s just not what Jesus believed! The doctrine of preservation is a Bible doctrine.
“How can I get in Him when He’s not here? ‘I can get in the tub; I can’t get in Him!’ You say, ‘Well, it didn’t mean that.’ Well, why didn’t it say what it meant?! I’m telling you about what people tell me about where they’ve been with this stuff.
“When it says you’re baptized into Jesus Christ, that’s a supernatural activity. There’s nothing physical about that! If Jesus Christ was standing right here you couldn’t get in Him! Not physically possible; it’s a supernatural thing, though. ‘By one spirit are we all baptized into one body.’
“What it means to be ‘in Christ’ is the spirit of God takes me out of where I was, which was in Adam, and puts me into (changes my location and thus my identity) Jesus Christ and together with Him I died. I was crucified. Then I was buried with Him. He put away the ‘old man.’ Then I was raised with Him to walk in newness of life.
“Not only did I die with Him, was crucified with Him, buried with Him, raised with Him, but I ascended with Him and I sit with Him at the Father’s right hand. I share His authority with Him in the heavens. Why? Because God the Holy Spirit put me in Him. He took me out of who I was and put me into who He is. ‘For me to live is Christ.’ Everything He is is mine!
“You know why Satan doesn’t want you to see this stuff? He doesn’t want you to see THAT! I’ve been reading Ephesians 1 every day for the past six months and I’m just totally captivated by how everything focuses in Him. Verse 4 says, ‘According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love.’
“Not to be IN Him; He chose you in Him. Once you’re in Him you’re part of the elect purpose of God and His Son that He established before the foundation of the world that you ‘should be holy and without blame before Him in love.’
“I Peter 1:20 says that Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world was spotless and holy. In John 17:24 He says, ‘Father you loved me before the foundation of the world.’ You know what He says about you and me?
"He says God Almighty today has put you in His Son so He could think about you the same way He thought about His Son before the world began.
“Wow! You see that?! He took you and me and blessed us according to His plan He’s had of what He’s going to accomplish in His Son, and He put you in a program where He thinks about you the same way He thought about His Son. I read that in Ephesians and I think, ‘It can’t get any better than that!’ Then I read the next verse and say, ‘Oops, wrong!’ It gets even better! Verse 5 says, ‘Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.’
“There are 12 blessings Paul lists between verses 4 and 14. When he says, ‘You’re accepted in the beloved,’ what does that make you think of? Where do you go in the Bible to find that Jesus is the Father’s beloved? In Matthew 3, Jesus is coming to begin His earthly ministry and it says, ‘And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’
“He didn’t say ‘in whom I am pleased.’ He said ‘in whom I am PLENTY pleased.’ ‘I’m ecstatic! I’m pushing it to the wall. I can’t get any more pleased than I’m pleased with Him. He’s my beloved!’ He’s the ‘apple of my eye,’ the Old Testament says.
*****
“In the Bible, when you read a passage about the end of the world and then one that says “world without end,” obviously these are contradictory terms that make you stop and think.
Isaiah 45:17 says, “But Israel shall be saved in the LORD with an everlasting salvation: ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end.”
“You can see that even in the prophetic program, not just in Paul, the Bible talks about and expects the world to not end but to go on,” says Jordan. “We use the term world in several different ways. Sometimes we refer to the planet we live on. Sometimes you talk about the ‘Wide World of Sports.’ We use that word world in the sense of an organized system of activity were involved in.
“We talk about the world tomorrow. We talk about an age—like the Iron Age. Every time the word ‘world’ appears in the Bible it’s not talking about the earth; most of the time it’s not. In Isa. 23:17, for one example, when it talks about ‘the kingdoms of the world,’ the term is talking about the organization of the affairs that are taking place on the planet.
“So when you go back over to Paul and he talks about a ‘world without end,’ he’s talking about this organized system going on that’s never going to end. But when Jesus talks about the end of the world, He says there is an organized system that IS going to end. Paul talks about this present evil world. How long do you think that’s going to last? Not forever.
“II Peter 4 says, ‘For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment;
[5] And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly.’
“There was a way things were organized before the Flood that’s different from the way things are organized after the Flood, but not only that, Rev. 11:15 says, ‘And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.’
“The way things were organized with Satan as the prince of the world, and the one in control of the world system, is all going to give way into a new world order headed up by the Lord Jesus Christ.”
*****
Jordan continues, “Nostradamus. You still reading that outdated guy?! Somebody says, ‘Well, don’t you know about the Planet X that’s out there?’ It doesn’t exist—that’s just bad, bogus science! People say, ‘Well, there’s going to be the pole shift; the solar flares.’ All of that is just debunked bad science! It’s myths, lies; it’s just stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. And you compare that with the historically, validatable, predictive prophecy of the Bible and you say, ‘I can trust what the Bible says.’
“Caesar Augustus sent out a decree that all the world had to be taxed. In order to fulfill that prophecy, Joseph had to take Mary and move her from Nazareth to Bethlehem a week before she’s going to deliver. That isn’t a normal kind of a thing that happened and he used the pagan emperor of Rome to instigate the mechanics to get them moved so that the boy was born in exactly the place God, seven hundred years before, said He would be born!
“Some people will say, ‘Well, Micah couldn’t have known that 700 years before so it had to have been written later.’ Listen to me, something that is historically validatable to have happened in predictive prophecy like that, and it comes to pass, is mathematically, statistically evidence of the validity of the statement and the source it came from.
“You’re familiar today with the science of DNA. DNA validation is simply the use of the statistical probability. When they say it’s ‘a certainty that this is your DNA, not anybody else’s, and we can take your life, convict you and put you in prison forever because we know that it’s an absurdity not to believe this is your DNA,’ they’re saying there’s a mathematical, statistical probability that the code that comes from your DNA is yours and not anybody else’s. And when something is considered to be in statistical probability of ten to the 47th power, it is an absurdity not to believe it’s true.
“When you take a predictive prophecy like where He’s going to be born 700 years before the historical certainty of that, it gives you a mathematical . . . people say you can’t prove the Bible scientifically but here you can! There’s a mathematically, statistically, scientifically demonstrative proof of the historic reliability of God’s Word.
“Do you know if you took eight prophecies like that . . . could you find eight pre-statements about Jesus Christ that were fulfilled in His life? I bet you could find 16. I’ve got a list of almost 300. If you got eight of them you’d have a statistical probability of ten to something like the 27th power, and if you had 16, it would be 10th to the 54th power, and if you’ve got 10th to the 54th power, it would be an absolute scientific absurdity not to believe it’s true!
“Isaiah 41 said, ‘You know how you know I’m God? Because I can tell you the future and make it come to pass and it comes to pass just exactly the way I said it and that’s the way I prove myself.’ The Bible is a demonstratively, validatable proof.
*****
“History’s greatest secular historians (like Edward Gibbon’s ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’) talk to you about the translation of the Old Testament into Greek called the Septuagint, and everybody will tell you that 200 years before the time of Christ the Septuagint was available. It is historically accurate to say the Bible was translated into Greek several hundred years before Christ.
“You know what that Greek translation of the Septuagint had in it? Malachi 5:2. The same thing your Bible says. Every historian that ever lived who talked about this acknowledges that that prophecy lived at least 250 years before Christ in the text there. Go look at Encyclopedia Britannica or look at Wikipedia, they’ll all tell you that.
“There is written into the fabric of Scripture some of the most fascinating patterns that demonstrate to you that the person who wrote the Scripture back in Genesis and Exodus knew what was going to happen over here in our day.
“And he wrote those passages back there to give you a prophetic picture of future events down to details that are inexplicable other than the fact that the person who wrote back there knew what was going to happen over here. We call that typology.”
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Easy as 1, 2--3 and 4
In Chapter 25 of Exodus, Moses starts telling you about the tabernacle and what it’s going to be like. He tells about the mercy seat, the ark, the veils and the shewbread, and then in verse 31, the candlestick.
Jordan explains, “With the candlestick, there’s one branch that goes up and down. Out of each side of the main stick are the branches that go out. There’s three on one side and three on the other. Each branch comes up, and at the top, there’s a little bowl where they put oil for the light.
“You’ve got seven bowls, one stick with the six branches. Notice verse 31: ‘And thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold: of beaten work shall the candlestick be made: his shaft, and his branches, his bowls, his knops, and his flowers, shall be of the same.’
“You read that and say, ‘What in the tarnation is he talking about?!’ So you got bowls, knops and flowers. What is that? On each one of these branches you’re going to have a set or ornaments. The ornament’s going to have a knop (sort of a base of things). Out of that knop is going to come some flowers and you’re going to have three of them on each one of these branches.
“By the way, you’re going to have the table with the shewbread on it. And one of the things they do is they come in and light the flame in the evening, so at night it lights up the holy place.
“Now, when you read about a candlestick giving light, what do you think we’re talking about? It’s the symbolism of light: ‘the entrance of thy Word giveth light.’ Understanding to the simple.
“Here’s the bread. What’s bread a picture of? ‘Man should not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.’ Light lights the Word.
“You say, ‘Who designed that sucker?! Whose idea was it to have these flowers and knops and these little bowls that look like almonds. What’s going on here?!’
“Think of what you got here. On each side he’s specific. You’ve got three sets. How many is that total? Nine. So you got nine of them on each side. And then I’ve got four running down the middle. So I’ve got three sets of three ornaments in each of the six branches.
“Well, if I’ve got three sets of the ornaments in each of the branches; three times nine is 27. So I’ve got 27 of these things going out there with the clusters of the three.
“Down the middle I’ve got the four. What’s four times three? Twelve. So I’ve got a total of 27 plus 27 which is 54, plus 12, which is 66. Do you know anything about 66?!
“Isn’t that interesting?! If you count 1-2-3-4. Well, how many was over here? There’s 27. How many is down here? 12. What’s 12 and 27? 39. So the first four, and you notice He divides them in four and three (seven in the bible is almost always divided four and three) . . .
“You take the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 there’s 4 in chapter 3. In Matthew 13 Jesus speaks seven parables of the mystery parables of the kingdom. In four of them he speaks and then he goes outside the house and speaks four and goes inside the house and speaks 3. All the way through your Bible, when God creates the heaven and the earth, He goes four days and then He creates life for the last three.
“You got 39 books in the Old Testament and three times nine is 27. That’s a good way to remember that. You’ve got the Word of God written all over this thing! How in the world did Moses know how many books were going to be in your Bible; how many books were going to be in the Old Testament and the New Testament in a Gentile Bible in 2012? Moses couldn’t have known that but the dude that wrote Exodus 25 did!
“When God wrote it, He wrote it in such a way that it’s indisputable that He knew what the end product was going to look like, not just in a Hebrew Bible but a Gentile Bible. How many loaves of bread are on the table? 12. But He specifically tells them to put them in rows of six and six.
“This one blows my mind. Lev. 24:5: ‘And thou shalt take fine flour, and bake twelve cakes thereof: two tenth deals shall be in one cake.’ So what do you have of the shewbread? You got 66. And you just sit and look at that and it don’t mean anything to you?! Well, keep reading, it gets worse! ‘[6] And thou shalt set them in two rows, six on a row, upon the pure table before the LORD.
[7] And thou shalt put pure frankincense upon each row, that it may be on the bread for a memorial, even an offering made by fire unto the LORD.’
“You know what God thinks is on that table right there? The pure bread; the pure Word of God. And that’s just in the typology of the way things are constructed and the little vignettes of what they’re doing!
“They don’t have any idea what they’re doing! But the dude that wrote that, God the Holy Spirit through Moses, He knew what the end was going to be. You go through those things and you say, ‘WOW! That old Book’s something special, isn’t it?!’ ”
Jordan explains, “With the candlestick, there’s one branch that goes up and down. Out of each side of the main stick are the branches that go out. There’s three on one side and three on the other. Each branch comes up, and at the top, there’s a little bowl where they put oil for the light.
“You’ve got seven bowls, one stick with the six branches. Notice verse 31: ‘And thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold: of beaten work shall the candlestick be made: his shaft, and his branches, his bowls, his knops, and his flowers, shall be of the same.’
“You read that and say, ‘What in the tarnation is he talking about?!’ So you got bowls, knops and flowers. What is that? On each one of these branches you’re going to have a set or ornaments. The ornament’s going to have a knop (sort of a base of things). Out of that knop is going to come some flowers and you’re going to have three of them on each one of these branches.
“By the way, you’re going to have the table with the shewbread on it. And one of the things they do is they come in and light the flame in the evening, so at night it lights up the holy place.
“Now, when you read about a candlestick giving light, what do you think we’re talking about? It’s the symbolism of light: ‘the entrance of thy Word giveth light.’ Understanding to the simple.
“Here’s the bread. What’s bread a picture of? ‘Man should not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.’ Light lights the Word.
“You say, ‘Who designed that sucker?! Whose idea was it to have these flowers and knops and these little bowls that look like almonds. What’s going on here?!’
“Think of what you got here. On each side he’s specific. You’ve got three sets. How many is that total? Nine. So you got nine of them on each side. And then I’ve got four running down the middle. So I’ve got three sets of three ornaments in each of the six branches.
“Well, if I’ve got three sets of the ornaments in each of the branches; three times nine is 27. So I’ve got 27 of these things going out there with the clusters of the three.
“Down the middle I’ve got the four. What’s four times three? Twelve. So I’ve got a total of 27 plus 27 which is 54, plus 12, which is 66. Do you know anything about 66?!
“Isn’t that interesting?! If you count 1-2-3-4. Well, how many was over here? There’s 27. How many is down here? 12. What’s 12 and 27? 39. So the first four, and you notice He divides them in four and three (seven in the bible is almost always divided four and three) . . .
“You take the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 there’s 4 in chapter 3. In Matthew 13 Jesus speaks seven parables of the mystery parables of the kingdom. In four of them he speaks and then he goes outside the house and speaks four and goes inside the house and speaks 3. All the way through your Bible, when God creates the heaven and the earth, He goes four days and then He creates life for the last three.
“You got 39 books in the Old Testament and three times nine is 27. That’s a good way to remember that. You’ve got the Word of God written all over this thing! How in the world did Moses know how many books were going to be in your Bible; how many books were going to be in the Old Testament and the New Testament in a Gentile Bible in 2012? Moses couldn’t have known that but the dude that wrote Exodus 25 did!
“When God wrote it, He wrote it in such a way that it’s indisputable that He knew what the end product was going to look like, not just in a Hebrew Bible but a Gentile Bible. How many loaves of bread are on the table? 12. But He specifically tells them to put them in rows of six and six.
“This one blows my mind. Lev. 24:5: ‘And thou shalt take fine flour, and bake twelve cakes thereof: two tenth deals shall be in one cake.’ So what do you have of the shewbread? You got 66. And you just sit and look at that and it don’t mean anything to you?! Well, keep reading, it gets worse! ‘[6] And thou shalt set them in two rows, six on a row, upon the pure table before the LORD.
[7] And thou shalt put pure frankincense upon each row, that it may be on the bread for a memorial, even an offering made by fire unto the LORD.’
“You know what God thinks is on that table right there? The pure bread; the pure Word of God. And that’s just in the typology of the way things are constructed and the little vignettes of what they’re doing!
“They don’t have any idea what they’re doing! But the dude that wrote that, God the Holy Spirit through Moses, He knew what the end was going to be. You go through those things and you say, ‘WOW! That old Book’s something special, isn’t it?!’ ”
Friday, June 8, 2012
The right stuff
I Corinthians 1 says, [30] But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption:
[31] That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.“
Jordan explains, “You know where everything you have is? Verse 30. God gave it to you in Christ. There isn’t anything you’ve got—you want wisdom where you going to get it? In Him. There isn’t anything you have that’s worth having except what God gave you in Christ. So when you boast, brag on the Lord. I used to have a message I preached on the street called, ‘Why I like to brag about Jesus.’
"I Corinthians 3 says, 18] Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.
[19] For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.
[20] And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.’
“Do what Tallmadge said one time, ‘Since I found Jesus Christ as my Savior the heroes of this world have just become common place.’
“You see the great enemy at Corinth was human wisdom. They had bright ideas about how they were going to do it for God. Chapter 4:7 he says, ‘For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’
“You ought to meditate on that passage awhile. I mean, that stuff you’re trying to strut and make out like it’s something, He says, ‘Who gave you that anyway?! Didn’t God give you that?’ ‘Well, yeah.’ ‘Well how come you acting like you did it?’ That’s a rebuke, you know that?!
“Go to gal 6:12: ‘As many as desire to make a fair shew in the flesh, they constrain you to be circumcised; only lest they should suffer persecution for the cross of Christ.’ We’re talking about the boast—it’s gone. There isn’t any boast in the gospel. Human wisdom won’t get it. It isn’t your idea. Get in that Book and find out what God’s doing and go do that.
“The work of the ministry is taking that Book and the truth out of it for today and getting it out to people! It isn’t all this other stuff out there!
“It isn’t making a living. I mean, if you got to nail nails or paint buildings or kick cats around to preach, go pay your bills so you can preach. Lord knows Paul made tents. You any better than him? I painted houses for a living for many years. You any better than I am?”
*****
I Thessalonians 2:13 says, “For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.”
Jordan says, “To me one the greatest titles of God in all of the Bible is in Daniel 2:47. King Nebby said, ‘Of a truth it is, that your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing thou couldest reveal this secret.’
“Daniel had told him that back in verse 29. Daniel had said to him, ‘As for thee, O king, thy thoughts came into thy mind upon thy bed, what should come to pass hereafter: and he that revealeth secrets maketh known to thee what shall come to pass.’
“You know, you couldn’t find God out by searching, but you didn’t have to because God revealed Himself.
“Isaiah 22:14 says, ‘And it was revealed in mine ears by the LORD of hosts, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord GOD of hosts.’ At camp we were discussing some of these guys that talk about God talking to them. You know what they say, you’ve heard it—‘God spoke to me but not with an audible voice. He just spoke.’ How did He speak to you without an audible voice?
“You know how he spoke to Isaiah? It was, ‘HEY Isaiah!’ It was an audible voice and Isaiah heard Him with his ears. Now God isn’t going to talk to you like that today. I Corinthians 2:9. You got something better than Jesus Christ appearing to you at the end of the bed and talking to you. You’ve got something that doesn’t disappear; something that doesn’t just rely on your memory of what was said. You’ve got something written down on a page that doesn’t change and it’s always there and it’s always reliable.
“When people talk about translating the Bible, the great translation problem had been taken care of long before anybody had to worry about English. If you can translate deity thoughts and deity words into human words, now that’s the translation product!
“People talk about language limitation--there’s the language limitation! If you could take the thoughts of the godhead and put them in Hebrew and Greek, anything else taken from one language to another is a snap. God revealed it, made it known. He translated His thinking into our thinking.
“Isaiah 30:8 says, ‘Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever:’
“He takes the revelation and commits it to written form, putting words on the page in a book. He writes that revelation down and we call that inspiration.”
[31] That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.“
Jordan explains, “You know where everything you have is? Verse 30. God gave it to you in Christ. There isn’t anything you’ve got—you want wisdom where you going to get it? In Him. There isn’t anything you have that’s worth having except what God gave you in Christ. So when you boast, brag on the Lord. I used to have a message I preached on the street called, ‘Why I like to brag about Jesus.’
"I Corinthians 3 says, 18] Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.
[19] For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.
[20] And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.’
“Do what Tallmadge said one time, ‘Since I found Jesus Christ as my Savior the heroes of this world have just become common place.’
“You see the great enemy at Corinth was human wisdom. They had bright ideas about how they were going to do it for God. Chapter 4:7 he says, ‘For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’
“You ought to meditate on that passage awhile. I mean, that stuff you’re trying to strut and make out like it’s something, He says, ‘Who gave you that anyway?! Didn’t God give you that?’ ‘Well, yeah.’ ‘Well how come you acting like you did it?’ That’s a rebuke, you know that?!
“Go to gal 6:12: ‘As many as desire to make a fair shew in the flesh, they constrain you to be circumcised; only lest they should suffer persecution for the cross of Christ.’ We’re talking about the boast—it’s gone. There isn’t any boast in the gospel. Human wisdom won’t get it. It isn’t your idea. Get in that Book and find out what God’s doing and go do that.
“The work of the ministry is taking that Book and the truth out of it for today and getting it out to people! It isn’t all this other stuff out there!
“It isn’t making a living. I mean, if you got to nail nails or paint buildings or kick cats around to preach, go pay your bills so you can preach. Lord knows Paul made tents. You any better than him? I painted houses for a living for many years. You any better than I am?”
*****
I Thessalonians 2:13 says, “For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.”
Jordan says, “To me one the greatest titles of God in all of the Bible is in Daniel 2:47. King Nebby said, ‘Of a truth it is, that your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing thou couldest reveal this secret.’
“Daniel had told him that back in verse 29. Daniel had said to him, ‘As for thee, O king, thy thoughts came into thy mind upon thy bed, what should come to pass hereafter: and he that revealeth secrets maketh known to thee what shall come to pass.’
“You know, you couldn’t find God out by searching, but you didn’t have to because God revealed Himself.
“Isaiah 22:14 says, ‘And it was revealed in mine ears by the LORD of hosts, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord GOD of hosts.’ At camp we were discussing some of these guys that talk about God talking to them. You know what they say, you’ve heard it—‘God spoke to me but not with an audible voice. He just spoke.’ How did He speak to you without an audible voice?
“You know how he spoke to Isaiah? It was, ‘HEY Isaiah!’ It was an audible voice and Isaiah heard Him with his ears. Now God isn’t going to talk to you like that today. I Corinthians 2:9. You got something better than Jesus Christ appearing to you at the end of the bed and talking to you. You’ve got something that doesn’t disappear; something that doesn’t just rely on your memory of what was said. You’ve got something written down on a page that doesn’t change and it’s always there and it’s always reliable.
“When people talk about translating the Bible, the great translation problem had been taken care of long before anybody had to worry about English. If you can translate deity thoughts and deity words into human words, now that’s the translation product!
“People talk about language limitation--there’s the language limitation! If you could take the thoughts of the godhead and put them in Hebrew and Greek, anything else taken from one language to another is a snap. God revealed it, made it known. He translated His thinking into our thinking.
“Isaiah 30:8 says, ‘Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever:’
“He takes the revelation and commits it to written form, putting words on the page in a book. He writes that revelation down and we call that inspiration.”
Monday, June 4, 2012
Future shares
John 17: 21] That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
[22] And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
[23] I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.
The unity in verse 21 is a consequence of the glory Christ’s going to give them in verse 22 and that’s the reason the unity has to do with the kingdom. It’s a reference to what He’s going to do and accomplish in the kingdom.
Jordan says, “This kingdom’s going to go out and bear a testimony to the whole world. All the nations of the earth—and they’re going to be made perfect in one. For example, come over to Hebrews 11 when He talks about some of the better things that are going to be available to the Hebrew saints.
“Hebrews 11 he goes through this great cloud of witnesses and what faith has accomplished down through the ages since the time of Adam and Abel and he comes down to verse 39:
28] Through faith he kept the passover, and the sprinkling of blood, lest he that destroyed the firstborn should touch them.
[29] By faith they passed through the Red sea as by dry land: which the Egyptians assaying to do were drowned.
[30] By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were compassed about seven days.
[31] By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace.
[32] And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets:
[33] Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions,
[34] Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.
[35] Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection:
[36] And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment:
[37] They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented;
[38] (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.
[39] And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise:
[40] God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.
“They’re not going to get the promise; they’re not going to get the whole she-bang until the whole program is accomplished. The promise had to do with the kingdom and He said they didn’t get the conclusion of their hope yet because ‘they without us,’ the thing isn’t going to be concluded. But eventually it’s going to be concluded, and what Christ is praying for them back here is that it might all be made perfect in one.
“The unity has to do with, just as the Father is in Christ and Christ is in the Father, that relationship-- that’s the unity that they’re going to share. He’s going to be in them, they’re going to be in Him; just as He’s in the father and the Father is in Him.
“We been seeing this all through the Book of John and it just goes back to the theme that, ‘As many as received Him to them He gave power to become the sons of God.’ What He’s praying for here is the thing that John 1:12 is the whole spiritual issue in all of the Book of John.
“John 5:19 says, ‘Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.’
“You see the Father, the Son. ‘The relationship I’m having with the Father back here.’ Now they’re going to have the same relationship with us over here. Then they’re going to share that.”
[22] And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
[23] I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.
The unity in verse 21 is a consequence of the glory Christ’s going to give them in verse 22 and that’s the reason the unity has to do with the kingdom. It’s a reference to what He’s going to do and accomplish in the kingdom.
Jordan says, “This kingdom’s going to go out and bear a testimony to the whole world. All the nations of the earth—and they’re going to be made perfect in one. For example, come over to Hebrews 11 when He talks about some of the better things that are going to be available to the Hebrew saints.
“Hebrews 11 he goes through this great cloud of witnesses and what faith has accomplished down through the ages since the time of Adam and Abel and he comes down to verse 39:
28] Through faith he kept the passover, and the sprinkling of blood, lest he that destroyed the firstborn should touch them.
[29] By faith they passed through the Red sea as by dry land: which the Egyptians assaying to do were drowned.
[30] By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were compassed about seven days.
[31] By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace.
[32] And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets:
[33] Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions,
[34] Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.
[35] Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection:
[36] And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment:
[37] They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented;
[38] (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.
[39] And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise:
[40] God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.
“They’re not going to get the promise; they’re not going to get the whole she-bang until the whole program is accomplished. The promise had to do with the kingdom and He said they didn’t get the conclusion of their hope yet because ‘they without us,’ the thing isn’t going to be concluded. But eventually it’s going to be concluded, and what Christ is praying for them back here is that it might all be made perfect in one.
“The unity has to do with, just as the Father is in Christ and Christ is in the Father, that relationship-- that’s the unity that they’re going to share. He’s going to be in them, they’re going to be in Him; just as He’s in the father and the Father is in Him.
“We been seeing this all through the Book of John and it just goes back to the theme that, ‘As many as received Him to them He gave power to become the sons of God.’ What He’s praying for here is the thing that John 1:12 is the whole spiritual issue in all of the Book of John.
“John 5:19 says, ‘Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.’
“You see the Father, the Son. ‘The relationship I’m having with the Father back here.’ Now they’re going to have the same relationship with us over here. Then they’re going to share that.”
Saturday, June 2, 2012
'Progress not perfection'
When 80-year-old Eugene was transferred to a nursing home earlier this year he left behind a lot of his books and so forth that pertained to philosophy, self-help and career advice. One cassette tape series from 1999 was entitled, “If You Can Talk, You Can Write.” This was the one thing I decided to take.
Driving through the Ohio countryside this past weekend, I decided to pop one into my Sony Walkman to keep me company. Boy, was I in for a surprise! I wasn’t expecting anything from the “seminar” leader Joel Saltzman (a known NYC author and lecturer, I gathered) and it turned out to be a lifesaver!
The biggest thing I got from the 4-hour long crash course on writing is that it’s a “game”! It’s not meant to be treated as something “serious” like other professions! You’re supposed to have fun with it and “play” around with it.
One of the big take-home mantras was, “Progress not perfection.” This is almost a foreign concept to someone like me who remembers my journalism training at Ohio State that was always oriented around “beating” the competition and having the perfect lead and well-rounded story that never was unbalanced and was fact-filled as well as investigative, etc., etc., etc.
I’ve long felt my professors at OSU, some of whom were Pulitzer Prize winners, gave me the greatest gift through their tutelage, especially knowing they were old and on the edge of retirement and I was just lucky enough to catch the tail-end of their accumulated brilliance, but more and more I see they left out much of the free-spirited, free-wheeling side of writing.
My whole goal in life lately, especially since the very untimely deaths of one of my very best friends and my only sister, has just been to try and feel free. I don’t want to be hindered anymore by my sensitive brain that never feels I’m good enough and that I just can’t compete. I realize some of this baggage is due to my father, and then my professors, putting so much pressure on me to be the best.
*****
Here is an outtake of a conversation I taped between me and my mother (without her permission) when I was home over the Memorial Day holiday:
Mom: It started with him investing in soybeans. He just had no sense. He thought he could swing and sway with the stock market. Yeah, he swung all of his money away. Then he started drinking. Then he didn’t come home. Then he got picked up for drunken driving.
Lisa: How old were we when all of this was going on? Was I even born yet?
Mom: No. He was still drinking, I think, when you were born. No, he quit drinking and he was taking pills by then. But when Rita was born . . . My mother said, ‘Well, that’s why Rita was upset,’ and you were upset because all of this tension from all this stuff related to him getting a DUI.
Lisa: You mean when she was a baby?
Mom: Yeah, she used to have colic.
Lisa: Oh, yeah, that’s why daddy would get mad at her, right?
Mom: No, he didn’t care. He wasn’t around! He stayed the heck away!
Lisa: So he was what you would call an ‘absentee father’?
Mom: Yeah, most of the time. In fact, even when you guys were young he wouldn’t come home. He’d run the roads. Then he’d come home in the morning, go to bed. When I went to the office (as his receptionist) he wouldn’t come in. People were there. I remember calling the babysitter and saying, ‘Oh, wake him up,’ and she’d say, ‘No, I don’t want to, he’ll get mad.’ I said, ‘Well, he has to come into the office.’ I remember some guy came up the steps and he had a heart attack. Oh, God, that was horrible.
Lisa: Was that the truck driver?
Mom: Yeah. I don’t know why the heck, you know, he couldn’t just be a normal person.
Lisa: So with that truck driver . . . ?
Mom: They took him to the hospital but he died.
Lisa: No, but he was waiting for daddy’s office to open?
Mom: Yeah! When he wouldn’t come I called the paramedics and they came and got him and took him to the hospital but he died. I felt so bad for his kids because his wife was already dead.
Lisa: Well . . .
Mom: The guy had had a problem on the road and some hospital had treated him and said it was something else and let him go so it wasn’t just your dad. Just a big mess all the way around.
Lisa: Well how did you feel daddy was culpable?
Mom: Well, he didn’t come in! The guy sat there in the heat and everything. I kept telling him to come in. He knew it was office hours.
Lisa: Did he know there was somebody who was really ill and on death’s door?!
Mom: Well, no. But, you know, if you say you’re going to be in the office at 9 o’clock you ought to be there for God’s sake! Or just hang it up. Just like in Loudonville he used to run home between patients. He’d practically run them over . . . They’d be coming in the door and he’d practically knock them down getting out and getting in that car and running home for five minutes. That was the dumbest thing in the world.
Lisa: I wonder if that’s why he picked Loudonville?
Mom: No, he was a good doctor in the beginning and then he got onto these diet pills and that’s all he was at
the end. He didn’t treat anybody for anything.”
Driving through the Ohio countryside this past weekend, I decided to pop one into my Sony Walkman to keep me company. Boy, was I in for a surprise! I wasn’t expecting anything from the “seminar” leader Joel Saltzman (a known NYC author and lecturer, I gathered) and it turned out to be a lifesaver!
The biggest thing I got from the 4-hour long crash course on writing is that it’s a “game”! It’s not meant to be treated as something “serious” like other professions! You’re supposed to have fun with it and “play” around with it.
One of the big take-home mantras was, “Progress not perfection.” This is almost a foreign concept to someone like me who remembers my journalism training at Ohio State that was always oriented around “beating” the competition and having the perfect lead and well-rounded story that never was unbalanced and was fact-filled as well as investigative, etc., etc., etc.
I’ve long felt my professors at OSU, some of whom were Pulitzer Prize winners, gave me the greatest gift through their tutelage, especially knowing they were old and on the edge of retirement and I was just lucky enough to catch the tail-end of their accumulated brilliance, but more and more I see they left out much of the free-spirited, free-wheeling side of writing.
My whole goal in life lately, especially since the very untimely deaths of one of my very best friends and my only sister, has just been to try and feel free. I don’t want to be hindered anymore by my sensitive brain that never feels I’m good enough and that I just can’t compete. I realize some of this baggage is due to my father, and then my professors, putting so much pressure on me to be the best.
*****
Here is an outtake of a conversation I taped between me and my mother (without her permission) when I was home over the Memorial Day holiday:
Mom: It started with him investing in soybeans. He just had no sense. He thought he could swing and sway with the stock market. Yeah, he swung all of his money away. Then he started drinking. Then he didn’t come home. Then he got picked up for drunken driving.
Lisa: How old were we when all of this was going on? Was I even born yet?
Mom: No. He was still drinking, I think, when you were born. No, he quit drinking and he was taking pills by then. But when Rita was born . . . My mother said, ‘Well, that’s why Rita was upset,’ and you were upset because all of this tension from all this stuff related to him getting a DUI.
Lisa: You mean when she was a baby?
Mom: Yeah, she used to have colic.
Lisa: Oh, yeah, that’s why daddy would get mad at her, right?
Mom: No, he didn’t care. He wasn’t around! He stayed the heck away!
Lisa: So he was what you would call an ‘absentee father’?
Mom: Yeah, most of the time. In fact, even when you guys were young he wouldn’t come home. He’d run the roads. Then he’d come home in the morning, go to bed. When I went to the office (as his receptionist) he wouldn’t come in. People were there. I remember calling the babysitter and saying, ‘Oh, wake him up,’ and she’d say, ‘No, I don’t want to, he’ll get mad.’ I said, ‘Well, he has to come into the office.’ I remember some guy came up the steps and he had a heart attack. Oh, God, that was horrible.
Lisa: Was that the truck driver?
Mom: Yeah. I don’t know why the heck, you know, he couldn’t just be a normal person.
Lisa: So with that truck driver . . . ?
Mom: They took him to the hospital but he died.
Lisa: No, but he was waiting for daddy’s office to open?
Mom: Yeah! When he wouldn’t come I called the paramedics and they came and got him and took him to the hospital but he died. I felt so bad for his kids because his wife was already dead.
Lisa: Well . . .
Mom: The guy had had a problem on the road and some hospital had treated him and said it was something else and let him go so it wasn’t just your dad. Just a big mess all the way around.
Lisa: Well how did you feel daddy was culpable?
Mom: Well, he didn’t come in! The guy sat there in the heat and everything. I kept telling him to come in. He knew it was office hours.
Lisa: Did he know there was somebody who was really ill and on death’s door?!
Mom: Well, no. But, you know, if you say you’re going to be in the office at 9 o’clock you ought to be there for God’s sake! Or just hang it up. Just like in Loudonville he used to run home between patients. He’d practically run them over . . . They’d be coming in the door and he’d practically knock them down getting out and getting in that car and running home for five minutes. That was the dumbest thing in the world.
Lisa: I wonder if that’s why he picked Loudonville?
Mom: No, he was a good doctor in the beginning and then he got onto these diet pills and that’s all he was at
the end. He didn’t treat anybody for anything.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)