His Vigorous Heart

A while ago , I said I would think about starting a series sharing some of the more controversial tidbits from my personal musings. Because my recent Easter reflection  still won't leave my brain, I decided to go ahead and start round 2 of this series. (Y'know...only four years later.) — We think there’s a great big barrier between us and God, but it doesn’t exist. We think our sin separates us from Him. But even in Genesis, when God knew Adam and Eve had sinned, He still chose to go walk in the garden in the cool of the day to be with them. Yet it was *Adam and Eve* who hid themselves from God, not God who hid Himself from Adam and Eve’s sin. — We were taught somewhere along the way that God can’t stand to be in the presence of sin. But Jesus—who was God—regularly broke bread with lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors and sinners. That’s one of the main reasons that the Pharisees tried to prove he *couldn’t* be the son of God. Would God really commune with these sorts of p

It’s that time of year again: the time I least like being a Christian. Because when it comes to Easter, I really think we’ve gotten the story wrong. (Which is bad, because if we get *this* story wrong, then we’re bound to get a lot of other things about our faith wrong, as well). I saw a quote the other day that went something like this: “What sort of predicament are we in that we should require the crucifixion of the son of God [to save us]?” (The quote then goes on to describe how horrible the suffering of crucifixion is, and how it was designed to make the victim subhuman, etc etc. The point being—I assume—that humans must be truly depraved and wicked if it required a sacrifice of that level to redeem us. The magnitude of a crucifixion sentence should make us somberly consider the ramifications of our depth of evil. We must be well and truly effed on an existential level if this is our only way out). But that assumes there’s a punishment mindset behind this whole story. That assume

What's the difference between the statements: “Jesus is God,” and: “God is Jesus” ?  By order of the transitive property (thanks, #math) these sentences are saying the exact same thing. Except to many Christians, that might come across as a radical statement. Because to them, they view these two statements as more akin to: “A square is a rectangle,” and: “A rectangle is a square.” (Sorry for the geometry analogy. #math again.) Obviously, the second sentence in this scenario is false. A 'rectangle' is any shape that has two parallel sets of equilateral sides set at 90 degrees to each other. One subset of rectangles exists in which all of the sides are the same length: that is called a 'square.' So while you could say that all squares are rectangles, you can’t  say that all rectangles are squares. A square is a perfect description of a rectangle, but it is also inherently missing some aspect of what the broader possibilities of rectangles represent. (Does that make se