the Centrist

There is but one method of Salvation and it is open to all who would but believe. It involves the age old custom of innocence, blood sacrifice, and death. It sounds so foreign to us… but is it really?

Wow, what a subject to start the week.  But I remember writing “Rebirth Pains” and  it wasn’t until I realized that all sin, from the earliest time, and the most pagan religions had two qualifications to appease their gods for their unrighteousness. .. their sins.  Those prerequisites were a blood sacrifice which would cause the death of the most innocent of that society.  Only Judaism provided that humans were off limits.  That is what caused the angst of Abraham when God asked him to sacrifice his son, “the one that he loved, Isaac”.  Abraham ‘awoke early in the morning’… Kierkegaard asks did he awake early in the morning, or was it that he could not sleep.  So from the earliest times, and in all society the ultimate was to sacrifice the most innocent of animals.  And in the pagan religions, that innocence usually included virgins and children.

As I was gardening this week I reviewed an old sermon by John Mac Arthur on this very subject.  He pointed out that every Old Testament Jew was very used to blood and death as a payment for sin, or a sin offering.  The Old Testaments tells of festivals with thousands of animals sacrifice… blood literally flowed in the streets.

In the two thousand years between Abraham and Jesus this population surely understood that this was not only an unsatisfactory method to forgive sin, but also required access to the temple and/or alters, qualified priests, the proper kinds of animals, and the proper method of sacrifice.

The volume of blood, the hordes of dead animals, and the ritualistic method certainly allowed for the Jews to pray for their Messiah, the Son of God, to rescue them and set up a Messianic Kingdom ending blood sacrifice once and for all.

That, in my opinion, was the reason for Jesus to enter society at the time he did… His people were ready, they understood, only blood and death could rescue mankind from his just sentence, separation from the Godhead.

But they did not understand that the Messiah first had to offer His people an opportunity to choose that most perfect sacrifice… a sacrifice of a perfect life, fully God and fully man… all one has to do is but to understand that much of scripture and one will spend eternity in paradise… after all, that is all that the ‘good’ thief understood.

Lighter Side… some political cartoons instead of jokes… but read on

Blogger’s Corner

Fredonia Patti sends us both:
>>     THE REPUBLICANS  NEVER GET A PASS LIKE DEMS DO?.
>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a
>>>             teleprompter installed to be able to get through a press
>>>             conference, would you have laughed and said this is more
>>>             proof of how inept he is on his own and is really
>>>             controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of
>>>             dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you
>>>             have approved?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan’s
>>>             holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a
>>>             majority stake in GM, would you have approved?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the
>>>             Special Olympics, would you have approved?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had given  Britain ‘s Prime Minister
>>>             Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly
>>>             formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a
>>>             thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you
>>>             have approved?
>>>             If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod
>>>             containing videos of his speeches, would you have
>>>             thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia,
>>>             would you have approved?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference
>>>             to the non-existent “Austrian language,” would you have
>>>             brushed it off as a minor slip?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of
>>>             advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in
>>>             their income taxes, would you have approved?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57 states
>>>             in the United States , would you have said that he is
>>>             clueless?
>>>
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush would have flown all the way to
>>>             Denmark to make a five minute speech about how the
>>>             Olympics would benefit him, would you have thought he
>>>             was a self important, conceded, egotistical prick?
>>>
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to
>>>             refer to “Cinco de Cuatro” in front of the Mexican
>>>
>>>             ambassador when it was the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo),
>>>             and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you
>>>             have winced in embarrassment?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had miss-spelled the word “advice”
>>>             would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan
>>>             Quayle and potatoe as proof of what a dunce he is?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel
>>>             to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have
>>>             concluded he’s a hypocrite?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush’s administration had okayed Air Force
>>>             One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet
>>>             fighter in downtown Manhattan  causing widespread panic,
>>>             would you have wondered whether they actually  get what
>>>             happened on 9-11?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood
>>>             victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed
>>>             or made homeless than in New Orleans , would you want it
>>>             made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of
>>>             racism and incompetence?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had created the position of
>>>             32 Czars who report directly to him, bypassing the House
>>>             and Senate on much of what is happening in America ,
>>>             would you have approved?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a
>>>             major corporation, even though he had no constitutional
>>>             authority to do so, would you have approved?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national
>>>             debt, which had taken more than two centuries to
>>>             accumulate, in one year, would you have approved?
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt
>>>             again within 10 years, would you have approved?
>>>
>>>
>>>             If George W. Bush had pronounced “Corps” as “corpse”,
>>>             would you have
>>>
>>>             thought of him as an illiterated boob?

So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive?
A young couple moves into a new neighborhood.
The next morning while they are eating breakfast,
The young woman sees her neighbor hanging the wash outside.
“That laundry is not very clean”, she said.
“She doesn’t know how to wash correctly.
Perhaps she needs better laundry soap.”

Her husband looked on, but remained silent.

Every time her neighbor would hang her wash to dry,
the young woman would make the same comments.

About one month later, the woman was surprised to see a
Nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband:

“Look, she has learned how to wash correctly.
I wonder who taught her this.”

The husband said, “I got up early this morning and
Cleaned our windows.”

And so it is with life. What we see when watching others
depends on the purity of the window through which we look.

Finally… California Clints sends us ‘a cell phone for Seniors’!