7 sprinkles

…he shall sprinkle some of it with his finger seven times before the atonement cover.

-Moses (Leviticus 16:14)

The Sunday morning after my father died I visited this statue of Holy Moses.

 

Sprinkle 1

The blood from my forehead that I sweated in the garden the night before. I was praying hard and my disciples were sleeping. I was concerned about tomorrow.

Sprinkle 2

The blood from my face where the Roman Soldiers wacked me. I just turned the other cheek. They wacked me there too, with a rod.

Sprinkle 3

The blood from my back when they flogged me hard with a Roman whip 39 times.

Sprinkle 4

When they pulled out my beard. They didn’t even put little pieces of Kleenexes to stop it from bleeding extra.

Sprinkle 5

When they shoved a crown of Thorns deeply into my scalp. Father forgive them please!

Sprinkle 6

My hands and feet bled when they hammered them to the cross so they would stick. They wanted to make sure I wouldn’t walk away.

Sprinkle 7

When they pierced my side. I didn’t feel that one, but it still counts as a sprinkle. I was in a temporary state of being dead.

2012 in review

Hi everyone! 2012 was a good year. I am now a grandfather. Thomas Cole was born on August 1, 2012 and he is very cute. I haven’t posted much on this blog, but I am thinking about blogging again – this time about artificial intelligence, a long-time interest of mine. Please feel free to contact me on Facebook or at mark.cole@gmail.com. I only blogged once in 2012, but I got 85,000 hits for things that I had posted earlier.

Have a great 2012!

Sincerely,

Mark

 

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 85,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Grading Obama’s Cabinet, first up Robert Gates

4 years ago, I wrote up a blog post about the president’s new cabinet and how to remember their names. Here is my report card on how they did.

 

Robert Gates – “R” for Republican not “B” as in Bill for “Billions”

United States Secretary of Defense – re-appointed by President Obama even though he was a Republican. Retired in April 2011 and replaced by Leon Panetta. He is now the Chancellor of College of William and Mary.

Grade: A+ on the virtue of ending the war in Iraq, and winning awards such as Best Leader by U.S. News and World Report, and one of the year’s most influential people by Time Magazine. He was appointed by bi-partison and almost unanimous vote – only Rick Santorum and Jim Bunning voted against him. Gates fired a bunch of top brass when the Walter Reed Army Medical Center neglect scandal was brought to the spotlight. Weakness: did not end the war in Afghanistan.

Robert Gates over-saw the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, saying it was a matter of “common sense and common decency” to end it.  He did not want to be secretary of state during an election year, so he retired on July 1, 2011 after recieving the nation’ highest civilian award – The Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 

Review of Erasing Hell by Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle

First I want to tell you what I think:

Jesus Christ is the best person for erasing hell. He has been erasing hell for people, one person at a time, for a long time, and He is very good at it!

This is a quick read written mainly by Preston Sprinkle and not Francis Chan. It is worth reading because it is a good Bible Study and reflection on 2 important questions

1. How could a loving God send people to hell – a place of torture – forever and ever? The short answer is God doesn’t have to do what we want him to do, which is not to send the people we love to hell, and he doesn’t have to give us a reason (see Romans 9).

2. Will people have a chance after they die to believe in Jesus and go to heaven? Francis Chan does not unequivocally answers this question in either direction, but says that it is not responsible to give this question an absolutely Yes answer:

“So where Do I land?

The Debate about hell’s duration is much more complex than I first assumed. While I lean heavily on the side that says it is everlasting, I am not ready to claim this with complete certainty. I encourage you to continue researching, but don’t get caught up on this debate that you miss the point of what Jesus was trying to communicate. I even deleted several pages that I wrote about the issue because I feared it would distract from the heat of Christ’s message.” (p. 86)

Francis, I am curious about your missing pages, and if you will send them to me I promise to give you more stars in my review! And I will not be distracted or fail to miss the point of what Jesus was trying to communicate!

The other really helpful thing I got from this book is that there are different kinds of Universalism. There is (1) non-Christian Universalism that claims that there are many ways to get to heaven besides Christ (Jesus taught there is only one way to heaven – through Him John 14:6). (2) Hopeful Christian Universalism that hopes that everyone will go to heaven by believing in Jesus Christ as the only way to get there, but perhaps because of free will some will choose eternal hell, and (3) Dogmatic Christian Universalism – that teaches that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord (phil 2:10). Everyone will end up in heaven. The Bible says it. I believe it. The book does an adequate job of knocking down dogmatic Christian Universalism (by looking at each verse) and the New Testament does not teach non-Christian Universalism, so that only leaves us with hopeful universalism. He rejects hopeful universalism as bad spiritual advice that is not backed up by the urgent message of repentance in view of the coming of God’s Kingdom. Teaching hopeful christian universalism could damn people to hell if they use that as an excuse for ignoring believing in Christ today.

There is one verse he did leave out which I wish he hadn’t – baptism for the dead in 1 Cor 15:29. Paul, who is sometimes difficult to understand, throws out some rhetorical questions about whether if the dead are not raised, why are you getting baptized for them? Could the Corinthians have believed that somehow getting baptized for their dead unbaptized relatives could effect their eternal destinies? The reason I thought of that is that he says “No passage in the Bible says that there will be a second chance after death to turn to Jesus”

This book has many good things to recommend it but Crazy Love was much better. I got through this entire review without mentioning Rob Bell! (oops)

The Fate of Every Person

Rob Bell recently wrote a book called “Love Wins- a book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of every person who ever lived.”  This is serious topic. A lot of people of people believe that the people who are exactly like them and believe in Christmas and Easter are going to heaven, while those who believe in Eid or Hannakuh or same sex marriage are not going to heaven. They are going to hell.

There was a carpenter who lived 2000 years ago who was born in a very religious society that was not Christian who also addressed the topic of “Love Wins” as it deals with the fate of every man and woman.

He accepted as completely true the words of the prophets of his religion, but he rejected the religious systems that had been built up around them.  He preached that religious systems are worthless, or worse than worthless, in trying to earn God’s favor, and that what God really requires is for us to love our fellow humans – all of them  -and to love God genuinely from the heart.  He gathered 12 men around him and taught them. These men applied his teaching, for the most part. So perhaps we can find out what he believed as the fate of every man by looking at their fates.  What was their fate? One committed suicide. 9 died in other countries rather than Israel including Turkey, Greece, India, Iran, Italy, and Syria. Atleast 7 of the 12 were publicly executed by foreigners usually gruesomely. They impacted the world living lives of proclaiming a Kingdom of God, healing people, and casting out evil spirits.

Disciple	Fate
1.Simon (Peter)	Crucified upside down in Rome, buried under St. Peter’s Church
2. James (Son of Zebedee, Son of Thunder)	Put to death by the sword  in Jerusalem Act 12:2
3. John (Son of Thunder #2)	Exiled to Patmos after poison did not work where John had a revelation. Died in Ephesus. Maybe. In his 80s or 90s. MIA
4. Andrew	Crucified on a St. Andrews cross (x-shaped) in Greece
5. Philip	Crucified in Eastern Turkey
6. Bartholomew (Nathaniel)	Skinned Alive and then beheaded in India
7. Matthew (Levi)	Left everything, wrote a gospel, died in Iran
8. Thomas	Killed by spears in India
9. James (Son of Alphaeus)	Stoned in Jerusalem
10. Thaddaeus	Died in Syria, many healed at his funeral
11. Simon the Zealot	Evangelized in Iran, little is known about him
12. Judas Iscariot	Suicide

 

 

 

 

 

Christian Slaughter through rose colored glasses

Nigeria elected a Christian President, Jonathan Goodluck, on April 18 2011 and this provided enough of an excuse for Muslim rioters to start massacring hundreds of Christians and burning churches in North Nigeria.

This is what the State Department had to say about this when questioned about it in a news conference I found here:

QUESTION: Might you be soft-pedaling the violence a little bit? I’m reading some wire material today about perhaps 500 people killed and Christian churches set afire. And also people from the elections say that they’re very discouraged by this and that they prefer to not have an election if this sort of thing happens. Might you be looking through rose-colored glasses at this sort of thing?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY CARSON: Absolutely not. But let me first say we deplore the violence that occurred particularly after the conclusion of the presidential elections a week and a half ago. We saw widespread violence throughout much of northern Nigeria. Both the president and the main opposition candidates – both called on their supporters to not support violent activities and to work to restore peace as quickly as possible.

I think that there has been a history of violence associated with Nigerian elections in the past. But in this election, we have clearly seen a much more responsible security force and a security presence in and around the electoral sites. So it’s important that violence not be a part of the democratic process. We deplore it, and I think senior officials in Nigeria have also deplored it as well. We hope that these elections will be a baseline for greater improvement in both their technical procedures as well as in their security as well.

The Beginning of the Gospel of Mark

The Gospel of Matthew starts out with Abraham begetting Isaac. The Gospel of Luke begins with Zacharias having a spiritual experience burning incense in the Temple of the Lord. The Gospel of John begins at the true beginning where the WORD is.

The Gospel of Mark begins with the baptism of Jesus- not at the year zero but at the year of 30 AD. We meet Jesus and his Father God in verse 1. We then meet Isaiah the Prophet and John the Baptist in verse 2 and we meet John the Baptist baptizing and baptizing Jesus in Verse 9.

We do not meet Jesus’s Uncle, or his mom or dad and we do not encounter his birth, or a political situation.

We do meet the words of the Prophets straight away which comes from Isaiah 40 and the words that this section of prophecy is fulfilled in John the Baptist.

We learn that John the Baptist is very popular among the people living in Judea and Jerusalem. People came out of the woodwork to be baptized by him and to confess their sins.

What does this say about discipleship?

1. Humankind has a need to repent

2. Humankind has a need to confess their sins

3. Humankind has a need to have their sins remitted

4. Even Jesus got John’s baptism

5. The Prophets spoke the truth, and therefore are worthy of study

6 Supernatural things happened when Jesus was baptized that are recorded in all of the gospels. Heaven parted and the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus like a dove. God the Father spoke. “You are my Beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.”

7. The Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness.

Jesus first speaks preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.