The New Bereans

For the last three or four months I have had a singular obsession as I study the Word…the resurrection of Jesus Christ.   My (spiritual) curiosity had been peaked because over the years I have noticed that among a great deal of the Easter sermons I have attended, I have noticed very little discussion about the meaning of the empty tomb.   All too often I have heard sermons preached out of the end of one of the gospels, and we are reminded often about how the women beat the disciples to the tomb, that it was early in the morning…no-one was waiting there.  All the details are often commented on, but I have often been left feeling as empty as the tomb Christ vacated when the sermon is over.

The purpose of this blog series is not to debate the technical validity of celebrating the resurrection on Easter.  If eating meat sacrificed to Idols bothers you, then don’t celebrate it on Ishtar, my emphasis is rather on the fact that on the day we do commemorate the resurrection, so often the point of it is missed.  Our Christian life is un-arguably to be one of resurrection power and the tendency to celebrate this concept only once a year is a very distilling tradition.  I find it to be a bitter irony that many Americanized religious folk only go to church twice a year and one of those days is Ishtar.

All the while I was studying this I was completely oblivious to the fact that Easter was once again coming about on the calendar, so I thought it would be fitting to share some of the insights I feel the Lord has shown me in His word that may help to take you deeper in your walk with Christ.   This is going to take numerous entries because the nature of the study does not lend itself to a blog post very well as it has been a long, prayer-filled meditation on this powerful truth from the word.  Please be patient as I will build up the thesis to a crescendo over an estimated 10 – 12 blog posts.  This may take me a month or more to complete.

It is my hope that my blogging silence over the last few months will be noted as I have given very little time to the usual little nuggets I proffer.   My silence has been due primarily to this obsession.

For the purpose of maintaining only the things I think are important to us as believers during the following blogs, I will take the remainder of this post to state that if you have been bit by the Zeitgeist Tom-Foolery and think that somehow the resurrection of Christ is not a unique concept to Christianity, I would ask that you consider watching this documentary.  While the concept of a god being resurrected may not have been entirely unique in a technical sense…I would propose that the meaning of the empty tomb, to Christians, is hands down, the singularity around which the entire galaxy of Christian sanctification doctrine gravitates.  And I would propose that all the “meaning” around the technical god-resurrections of mythos-gone-by does not hold an inkling of meaning by means of comparison.  For example, if you think that Osiris being reconstructed by Isis for the purpose of demi-god near necrophilia has much meaning to compare to the Krakatoa of purpose behind Yeshua Hamashiach rising

and conquering the power of death, then certainly the meaning of Christs death-resurrection-and ascension has not been articulated well enough (not as the fault of scripture, but ours to portray it.)

The tendency to view it alone as an historical event has probably invited and begged mythological criticism.   I suspect that all this mythos has been a result of such a lack of the display of Christ’s resurrection in us.  We ought to take note of the winds of criticism…even the murmurings of dark hearts can be an exhortation for us to seek deeper meaning, and to discover our own failures.   If you do not know what Zeitgeist is all about…don’t waste your time.  I am only saying this for the benefit of those who have had their flesh exposed to the poison Zeitgeist’s fangs excrete.   Please stay tuned or read the next post; I think it will be of great value to many.

-Your brother in Christ (if you are born of the Spirit)…Jeremiah Dusenberry.

I pray that God would send another revival to our generation similar to this, yet new in His end-time purposes.

In reading through Genesis 46 today I again ran across one of those great scriptural themes, division.  And it struck me because I’ve never thought of it as a major scriptural theme like faith or love, but it most definitely is.  Joseph instructs his father and brothers to tell Pharaoh they are just shepherds, because “every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians.”₁ This is quite important because their very livelihood caused a deep and immediate rift with their Egyptian hosts.  They were completely separated from the world around them.  This kept them from eating with or marrying, the Egyptians; it kept them from being absorbed into Egypt.

The world as in the Tower of Babel is always emphasizing unity but God wants no part of it.  He is always dividing, separating and creating disharmony, case in point . . . the Jews.  Out of the entire world God chooses one man, and from him, he builds a new nation, through which he will reveal himself to the world.  He didn’t work through an existing nation he separated one man from his nation; He is a God of separation.

Jesus put it this way . . .

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.  And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.  Matthew 10:34-36

If we are his disciples, we should expect division to follow in our wake.  If no one hates or maligns us we should be quite worried, for Christ promises us that these are the natural fruit of following him.  We are not to go out of our way to pick fights and be Jerks for Jesus, but need to realize that if we are living for Him, opposition and division will always follow.

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.  John 15:18

1. Genesis 46:34