destruction... can be... beautiful...

Before working on this post, I posted 'Mad World' for a few reasons, but mainly because it really touches on a lot of the same issues I'm currently dealing with.

The funny part is that I'm not the only one having these issues.

Which brings me to my first topic at hand: death.

Death is linked to a lot of old testament (OT) books there is a lot of death, a lot of killing, and mostly its in the name of God. Then, in turn, the new testament Jesus comes and tells us to turn the other cheek.

Is this the flip-flop so many people condemn Christians for having? In all honesty, I don't blame them. You can't look at OT and say that stoning for adultery is okay then Christ shows up and tells us to bugger off and count our own sins. Does Christs' words in NT null the OT teaches?

In the book of Acts, Chapter 10, Peter gets a vision from God telling him that we can now hunt and eat the food that the OT says was dirty "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean."

God means the animals that were marked as unclean in the OT but, just but, maybe God meant something more...

Did He mean we, all of us are clean, as God's creation? Not just one of God's creation but a creation made in His own image?

Genesis 1:27 "So God created man in His own image..."

His... own... image...

So, here we are, in NT, given Christ, who comes, dramatically different that the God of the OT.

Christ takes the 10 Commandments, Mosses' Law of the OT and expands them so we finally get them. In one swoop he gets to the point: Matthew 22:37 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Jesus condenses the 10 Commandments into two: Love God and Love your Neighbor. There's nothing about sacrificing your children, slavery, nothing, just love.

Rob Bell has a saying "Love Wins" which to certain people can have a very different meaning, but in its most rudimentary of its concept is Love, the cross, will always win. The cross, Christ's death, pays for our sins, even though we don't deserve it, and in this death of our Lord, he becomes our Savior, and His love for us wins over everything: death, hate, darkness, it all.

This new Tabernacle, this new law is love. Love thy neighbor, love thy enemy, carry their burdens as your own, when slapped turn the cheek and offer him the other, these things are all based around love and when we look back at the OT we see something different.

We'll start at the beginning because if we don't start there we miss something huge, like turning a movie on 15 minutes into it: you've bound to miss something.

In the beginning, God created everything, we know that, and when He created us, it was in His image. At the end of Genesis 1, God gives us His opinion of what he has done: Genesis 1:31 "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good."

People will argue about the original versions of the bible, who wrote it, in what language it was in, but in the earlier languages adverbs weren't used as often as they are used now. The word very was written because all wasn't just good, it was very good, and because God had created us we too were very good.

We then get into Eden, into paradise, and here we are given everything we needed, included one another to mass produce, to fill God's creation with more us and to live in ever lasting harmony with Him and His creation.

Just FYI, if you missed the memo: we screwed that up.

So, after the fall from perfection (in a very eerie way that reflects Satan's fall from grace - but that's neither here nor there) we were broken people and we needed a way to fit back in at God's right hand.

To me, the OT is that chaos which is the fallen people. People who left paradise behind for their own evil purposes, a reflection of what's going to happen post Rapture but before Christ's second coming. That's right: the OT is not so much our past but our future.

Wrap your head around that crap.

The OT tells of a world filled with the fallen, where Christ wasn't an option of forgiveness, survival; before love won.

Yes, there are some very Godly people in the OT, surrounded by this darkness, living in the darkness, but in that time, before God sent His only begotten Son to die for us, they did what God commanded of them, because that was their only connection to God.

Imagine the strength it took these people who were cast out of creation with no hope of anything to trust in the God who tossed them out of paradise.

but would a loving God not already have a plan in action?

This plan comes in the form of the boringest sections of the OT, showing the blood line of King David, which in turns shows the line of Christ, who was sent to us to die for us, to save us, to return us to perfection, to paradise in a new world but getting there we had to rethink what we were doing.

Christ comes into the picture and turns the Jewish leaders on their heads. He comes, using their own laws, their own teachings, which they all know by heart (as opposed to to heart?) and blows their mind!

On top of that he goes the extra step and starts healing people, physically and spiritually, and then goes to a cross and dies to continue the healing. What is healing, actually? Taking a deformation like blindness and returning it to the way God had meant it to be in the first place: whole, seeing. In healing there is a return to God, in healing, there is a death of the crustiness that was and a return to the perfection that was meant for us.

Throughout the bible, there is a common theme: choice and our struggle to make the right one.

Christ, himself, second guesses the path he is on. He begs out to God to change things, that he doesn't want to do die but because it is Gods will, he'll continue on the path. He latern cries out to God "Why have you forsaken me?" in the last moments of His life, Christ questions his father, our God, just as we do, and even there, in that death there is rebirth.

In the darkness of our thoughts, when we begin to question what is right, what is wrong, why would a loving God command his people to slaughter only to have a son who preaches Love Thy Neighbor? Does it contradicts or does it reinforce? Does it open up more questions or does it make us dive deeper into Gods word looking for answers.

The choices we make while in this darkness will mold how we come out of it. Do we throw our hands up in aggravation and turn our back on the everlasting life we have or do we continue to question, continue to dive into the truth, and maybe we'll never get clear cut answers but we're being led to a new life as our old lives die off slowly.