Not One Without the Other

 I read a book this week set back in Bible times and a Jewish ritual was described that caught my attention and stirred  my thoughts .

 When the Jews celebrated  the Passover meal, important in the meal besides the roasted lamb,  were the herbs maror and haroset.

Let me quote from the book.

              "The maror, or bitter herbs, always made my nose and eyes run . But the bitterness made everything else taste sweeter. Papa said maror helped God's people recall how bitter life had been for their ancestors as slaves. Maybe I needed to remember that life was never meant to be heaven on earth. Why would anyone seek heaven if it were? 

The opposite of the maror,  haroset, was so sweet that after one taste , everything else seemed more bitter. Papa said haroset reminded us of the sweetness of the promised Messiah love and freedom."

 I thought about the relationship between sweet and bitter, between good and evil.

Can we truly appreciate good if we have not experienced the opposite?

We take for granted the things that are without question.. 

Have you ever appreciated  how your knees move and bend without effort , unless you, like me, have had your knees lose that ability!?

Until the 'good' things in our life are threatened or lost , we do not appreciate them. Until something comes at a cost, we do not appreciate its value.

Without sorrow, is there joy? 

Without sickness do we appreciate health? 

Without darkness, do we love the light?

Without pain, are we grateful for the lack of it?

Without turmoil, do we appreciate peace? 

Without lack , do we appreciate plenty?

Without loneliness, do we appreciate fellowship?

Without feeling lost , are we grateful for being found?

Without cold, do we appreciate warmth?

Without seeing hate , or being judged or rejected, do we value being loved?

Without being hungry, are we grateful for food?

Without seeing death, would we value life?

You could add to the above list, but I'm sure you see how the bitterness of life sweetens the rest of it!!

 

I thought of the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. I often wondered, as you may have, why God put the tree there, when He knew Adam and Eve would eat of it and bring sin and evil into the world.

 God is love, and He is good, and nothing happens that He does not know.

We tend to understand good and evil in the extreme, but what if we define evil as "everything that is not good"? 
And is that not true? Is sickness, sorrow, suffering, hunger, pain, darkness good? Is it of God? No, of course not, so we can define anything not of God as  'evil', the opposite of 'good'.

What did eating of the tree of good and evil give Adam and Eve? Did it give them divine wisdom as Satan promised?  No, we see that it didn't, which is clear if we just keep reading man's story.

 Adam and Eve in the garden experienced only the good..Everything was perfect. Were they happy? Yes, I'm sure they were, but were they able to appreciate it? Recognize how blessed they were? Know how good God was?  No, they didn't. After they ate of the tree, they did not trust in God's goodness - they tried to hide from Him. 
God in creating man wanted more than creatures living in a perfect environment taking it for granted.

He wanted a people who had learned to know Him, had chosen Him freely,  who knew He was 'good' and from full hearts worship Him. 

We wish for 'heaven on earth' , but we were not created to live on this earth. God had much more in mind when He thought to create man. We were created "in His image" which includes the ability to know what is good and choose it. 

So even though God knew that Adam and Eve would eat of the tree  He knew that if they ate of it , His plan and purpose for man would be accomplished.

 My granddaughter recently had her first child. In the hospital the nurse needed a blood sample from the baby that involved pricking her little heel, causing her to cry. My granddaughter burst into tears, and when they later needed another sample , she sobbed and left the hospital room, telling her husband to deal with it 
If we weep for the pain of our children, necessary though it be , don't you think God wept for Adam and Eve and weeps for you and me?
We see  so many passages in scripture that express God's compassion toward us.

( see Isaiah 30:18, Lamentations 3:22,23, Psalm 123:3) 

Compared to eternity, this earthly life is comparable to one grain of sand in an ocean of sand.

God created us to live forever with Him on a perfect new earth and He wants  people who are wise in understanding what is good and able to appreciate it. He wants a people that He can intimately fellowship with and enjoy. 

That can happen only if we are trained in this short earthly life. Having experienced 'evil' the joys of eternity with Him will be ever so much sweeter, and, unlike Adam  and Eve, we will not be tempted to choose 'evil'.

 God truly does all things well. Can we do other than trust Him with all our heart? And give Him all glory and praise? 

 

  Time to be Born

I am waiting ....  any day my first great granddaughter will be born!  I don't have to tell you what my mind has been focused on. 

I wonder ... while we all know there is a time for a baby to be born, do we consider the baby's feelings?  If asked, would my great-granddaughter want to stay where she is?  If you think about it , it is a pretty good place to be.  It is always just the right temperature, food is always available,  mommy's heartbeat is so reassuring, it is safe and protected.  Maybe it would be scary to think about leaving and be pushed into what is  unknown and unfamiliar. 
While children love to hear about how they were in their mommy's tummy, and we are all aware of where we came from, I have yet to hear of anyone who wished they could go back!  

That reminds me of the verse in Isaiah 65:27 that reads, "For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth and the former shall not be remembered or come to mind."  
Will we really not remember this earthly life when we leave it to be forever with Jesus?  If we don't remember it at all, would that not be like spending  years going to school to learn how to be a brain surgeon and then we finally finish our training and get a job , and then promptly forget all we learned!!   What kind of surgeon would we be?? 
If we do not remember our earthly 'training' that makes us 'fit' for heaven, then would it not be wasted?   
But....  isn't that what the quoted verse says, that we won't remember?  I have mentioned it before but I'll note it again.  'Remember' in the original Hebrew does not have the same meaning as in English. In English 'remember' is the opposite of forget, and 'not remember' IS to forget!  But in Hebrew the word 'remember' means 'to act upon' and 'not remember' means 'not to act upon'.  
As in God 'not remembering our sins' means that He will not 'act',  - will not hold forgiven sin against us ever again.  (Is. 23:45)  Or as God 'remembered Noah' in Gen. 8:1 and 'acted' by sending a wind over the earth to subside the waters. 
So I think just as we know and understand we were once in our mother's womb  but have no desire to go back, there is the same sense of  meaning  in  Is. 65:17.  We will remember our earthly life but will never 'act on it' in a way that would stir our emotions or mental longing to go back.
Just as a mother remembers giving birth, she remembers it without reliving the pain.   The 'eternal' life that awaits us will be so much better in every way that  no memories of our earthly sojourn will ever tempt us to desire to go back, no more than we would long to go back into our mother's womb.

 

Just as my g-grandbaby is totally unable to conceive of what is awaiting her -  she has no way of knowing how richly she will be surrounded by love and everything she could want or need - so also God says to us, "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for those who live Him."  I Cor. 2:9

 Eternity

Have you ever heard of a glass sponge? 

I hadn't, but recently I was curious to know what animal lives the longest!  You can google it yourself - the info about glass sponges is interesting.  I can't believe I never heard of them before.  The numbers about them being extinct and then found in 1987 use crazy numbers , but what the scientists do agree on is that they can live 15,000 years!  Do you know what that means? That means that the sponges found today were supernaturally created on the fifth day as recorded in Genesis 1. These animals don't have a brain, nor do they have eyes, but they are living, breathing animals.  

I think one  of the hardest concepts to grasp is eternity. Our finite minds can't understand an infinite concept.

But God desires that we understand as much of Him as we can so He has revealed Himself in creation - something we can see and grasp with our little minds, and apply what we see to what we cannot see.

Even 'forever'.

Below is an image of a man-made device that has what is called perpetual motion.

What is it? The marbles in the wheel fall in such a way that they cause the wheel to keep on turning , indefinitely ,forever., for an eternity!  If man can devise something that turns forever all on its own, it should not take much faith to believe God can do so much more - like create bodies that last forever. If Methusalah could live almost a thousand years, what's a few thousand plus more!!??

God also reveals His eternal attribute in space.

I remember an argument I had as a child with my girl friend. We were walking home from school and admiring the clouds in the sky. I don't remember my comment but I clearly remember her response. She informed me quite emphatically that the clouds  bumped up against the sky which was a solid ceiling. I knew enough to know that wasn't true and I argued that the clouds were hanging IN the sky and we could go to the other side. She was not about to admit she was wrong and I finally gave up. I hope she has heard  a more scientific answer since!

We know today that science has not found that solid ceiling, nor the end of space....the farther they can see with ever more powerful telescopes the more there is to see.

IF there WAS a ceiling that still could not be the end because there would have to be SOMETHING on the other side of the ceiling - even if it was empty space.

So if you believe what scientists can see, then can you not believe what you cannot see, if God says it is so? An eternally existing God of all creation has put 'eternity' in space.

Human beings have a sense of eternal life. If they chose not to believe in God, then they look for other explanations, such as reincarnation, or ghosts being departed people,  or some cosmic energy that we are all part of and will be absorbed back into.

Ecc.3:11 says that God "has set eternity in men's' hearts."

God has given us more than enough 'helps' to be able to understand Him and His ways.
He wants us to know that this earth is only temporary, eternity and perfection is yet to come when we will forever live with Him on a perfect newly created earth! 

We truly have been given  everlasting  life so we will live forever with an eternal God!

John 11:25,26 "I am the resurrection and the life.He who believes in Me, though he die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me will never die. do you believe this???"
Do we?  Do we believe that? What a hope it is! 

 The Memory of Scent

 It is spring.  and one of the things we all enjoy are the wonderful scents of spring -  flowers, freshly mown grass, fresh rain. 
Have you stopped lately to consider how important smell is to us?  Both pleasant and unpleasant , it is our delight, or our disgust -- it draws us to what is desirable and repels us from what is not!  

While we do not 'smell' God's presence with our physical sense, if we could , would it not be the most incredible scent of all scents?   

I pray that each of you will sense the fragrance and delight of God's very real presence around you... because we know that is His promise.  he is as near to us as our breath!  

I always love when science 'catches up' with the Bible. After multiples tries and many discarded, amended, adjusted attempts at understanding  the world we live in and defining how things work, science does sometimes confirm the truth.

In Gen. 9:2 God says this .. "and the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth, on every bird of the air , on all that move on the earth.... "   

I used to wonder how this could be since God originally created animals to be Adam's 'friends', yet something changed when God told Noah after the flood that, from then on, animals would fear man So how is it that today animals still  fear man, unless with patient retraining they are 'tamed'?
What happened that permanently changed the animals' instinctive trust of man to an instinctive fear of man?

Seems science has found the answer.

Using foot shocks lab mice were trained to fear a fragrance resembling orange blossoms.  To the surprise of the scientists somehow there was a transfer of information regarding the 'danger' of this fragrance into the sperm of the trained mice.
This ensured that the 'fear'  response to that particular scent  was passed on to their young.   The other surprising result was that the successive generations had an even greater fear response to the 'smell' and needed a smaller amount of fragrance to trigger the response.

Interesting to note, isn't it, that  next time a wild animal flees from you in fear you can know that it is still displaying something learned by its ancestors that lived in Noah's time. It  is literally the 'smell' of man that triggers the fear of man in animals, just as the mice in the quoted experiment were trained by a 'smell'.

God's word is true, and it is always true, no matter how long it takes science to figure something out!!

I was wondering ....
God says in Duet. 5:9 that the iniquity of the fathers is passed down to the children, to the third and fourth generations.  BUT those who love God and keep His commandments experience God's mercy.
We have indication in our language usage  that people are aware of this 'passing down' - from parent to child - of characteristics , behavior patterns, addictions etc.
Familiar phrases are .. "Like father, like son..."  or "he's a chip off the old block" , or "that's a family trait".

From the initial brainstorming work of two scientists, Moshe Szyf, a moecular biologist and geneticist at McGill University in Montreal, and Michael Meaney, a McGill neurobiologist,  there spawned a whole new field, behavioral epigenetics.   This study has shown that our DNA is permanently changed by what we experience in our childhoods - negative or positive -  be it abuse or deprivation or loving affirmation.  

While God meant it for our good -- that our DNA would carry in it the pattern of the good example our parents modeled before us, so that it would be easier for us to 'do and live right' -- it also works against us if less than a good example is lived out by our childhood caregivers. Then our DNA is changed to follow a negative pattern, and we follow our parents'  tendency toward depression, or violence or anxiety. 
   
But isn't it reassuring, and comforting to know that all negative patterns that affected us in our growing up years  can be overturned by God's grace? 
 If we look to Him as our Savior, we are given a new start, we are a new creation, and are given a new example to follow.   Jesus  showed us the way,  He expressed God's love toward us, and when we come to Him in our brokenness,  He heals our hearts minds and spirits.
He gives us a new identity and  writes HIS DNA on our hearts.  

"I will give you a new name..."

 Isa_62:2 

 "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you;

 I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh." 

Eze_36:26 

And there is more -- our 'scent' changes.  Look at I Cor. 2:14, It says that the knowledge of God has a scent -- as we recognize and embrace the truth of His Word, a fragrance is diffused through us!   And this scent is responded to.
To God it is the very fragrance of Christ, but to the world it is the smell of death.  Have you ever wondered how we 'instantly' sometimes know whether someone we just met is a believer or not?  Unconsciously, we recognize the 'scent' of Jesus whose fragrance they are wearing.
This world lost in a dark winter needs a 'spring' where the fragrance of Christ is everywhere !  
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This article , that I read some time ago, is what triggered my devotional thoughts here ... https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/fear-can-be-inherited-through-sperm-1.2448914