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 . . . )
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