Luke 4-5

[wolfpurplemoon]

Satan attempts to tempt Jesus, and then Jesus is rejected in his home town, this time with more detail, and they don't just disbelieve him because he's 'Joseph's kid' but actually get really angry and try and throw him off a cliff.

Also, this time when Jesus sees a couple of his future disciples they don't just start following him (and abandon their families) at a single word but he tells them to try one more time with their nets after an unsuccessful night and they get so many fish they nearly tear the nets.

Comments

more questions

[300gary.livejournal.com]

Hi Amy,

I'm not online every day so I've missed some of the messaging back and forth, and I can't find our original conversation from a few days ago. As I recall you said you can't just abandon logic and believe in God without proof. Does it seem logical to say that you believe in a universe that just appeared from nowhere? What was happening the moment before the big bang? We know that humans and most other animals have eyes, brains, nerves, blood, and various other complex intertwined systems, but why? How does an acorn know what nutrients to take from the ground to grow into a 200 foot tall tree? How and why did dna develop, and why is the structure of a grain of rice more complex than that of humans? Why does a baby incubate 40 weeks with no oxygen in its lungs, then require it from the moment of birth until death? What is the source of emotions?

I ask these things not to antagonize you, but to show that logic and science can only take you part of the way to truth. Belief in a higher power that existed before the concept of time and space is the only logical response when you follow science to its natural ends. And if you accept that there is a higher power, a creator and planner of galaxies, planets, and life itself, then you can begin to find answers to questions of meaning and purpose.

Keep searching and keep reading.

Gary

Re: more questions

[liedownlovely.livejournal.com]

All of these questions can be answered by science. Except for, perhaps, what came before the Big Bang. But science will find that out too, eventually.

god created logic and science, didn't he? Why are so many Christians afraid and/or threatened by it? Honest question, because even back when I spent every waking moment in a pew, I couldn't figure it out. Science has always struck me as the very language of god. Or perhaps that was math.

The messages you may be referring to are here:
http://community.livejournal.com/wolfbiblemoon/76343.html?thread=312375#t312375

[zteccc.livejournal.com]

Chapter 4
Verses 17-21 Jesus reads from Isaiah 61:1-2, however he only reads part of verse 2. He finished with "This is the year the Lord has chosen," (NIV), some translations are written "To proclaim the year of the Lord's favor," and his reading discusses proclaiming the good news to the poor, to release the captives, to help the blind to see and to free the oppressed. In each of these, the text refers to both a physical and spiritual level (e.g. healing the blind refers to helping people to see, but also to understand spiritual matters). The passage that Jesus ends on refers to a Jewish tradition of the year of jubilee, when people are supposed to forgive all debts, but the year of jubilee that the Lord has chosen would be a time when all sins are forgiven.

Jesus doesn't finish the second verse of Isaiah 61, the remainder of the verse is "and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn," (NIV). This is intentional. Jesus was there to do all of the positive things listed in the section that he read and he states that in verse 21 saying that his reading has come true today. The remainder, declaring the day of vengeance is saved for a later time (his second coming) which is why Jesus stopped where he did.

Verses 22-29 Jesus hometown doesn't accept him as coming from God. They couldn't get past the little boy they saw grow up. They all expected a Messiah, but when presented with the Messiah, they were nonplussed because he wasn't exactly what they were expecting (a conquering hero). They take him to kill him by throwing him off of a cliff. The scripture suggests that they dragged him which means that the physically overpowered him and had hands on him to keep him from running.

Verse 30 He slipped through the crowd. How does a single man escape an angry mob who had overpowered him and dragged him from the synagogue to the edge of a cliff? Only with God's help.

Verses 31-37 The demon calls Jesus "The Holy One of God" (NET). The demon knows that Jesus is the Messiah even though they had obviously just met. Would a schizophrenic, psychopathic, or otherwise mentally ill man have known this? No, we would assume that such a person would see Jesus as a man, possibly a threatening one, but not one that would know supernatural things about Jesus and not one who would correctly identify him at their first meeting. This was a demon, not just a mentally ill person.

Verses 38-39. Note that Simon (also called Peter) was married (he had a mother in law). Peter is called by many the first Pope of the Catholic church. Odd then that the church would prohibit their Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, etc. from marrying. Sometimes people do "religious" things and set up "religious" rules that aren't supportable in scripture. This is an unfortunate aspect of human nature, possibly to combat some deficiency in their own lives. The most unfortunate part of this is that sometimes these very rules cause a "stumbling block" which prevents others from accepting the faith.

[zteccc.livejournal.com]

Chapter 5
Verses 1-11 Matthew and Mark wrote incomplete accounts of the recruitment of the apostles. Luke tries to be more complete. It is likely that all accounts are incomplete because different authors are going to find different things important. If a witness tells the story about an auto accident and goes into detail describing that the driver was wearing a brown sweater, talking on his cell phone, eating pizza and listening to loud music, a reporting officer may write simply that the driver was distracted while driving. The officer may consider the color of the sweater irrelevant and summarize the remainder for space. Similarly, Luke's account goes into greater detail, and more readily explains why the fishermen might be willing to leave, however it doesn't invalidate Matthew or Mark's accounts.

Much of chapter 5 is similar to Matthew and Mark so I won't cover it again (and there was much rejoicing), but I will skip to:

Verse 39 This addition to the wine and wineskins parable is important. People prefer the old comfortable routines of their lives. Jews didn't want to accept the new covenant, people don't want culture change at their work, unbelievers don't want to consider belief, etc. Jesus is saying that we (people) return to the comfortable "old wine" (old covenant or other beliefs), declaring them "better", rather than trying the New Covenant (which is actually better). We act like little children who say "I don't like that" rather than really giving it a fair shake. He is saying that the new is better, but we must give ourselves to it and stop running back to the comfortable.

Of course today, many people believe that science is the "new wine". Science is "old wine" and has been around since well before Jesus. Scientists have always existed to explain the world. They have examined the world around them and come up with answers. The scientific method is, in fact, a very good approach to explain the physical world. It is not at all well suited to explain the non-physical world, however. There are things that science cannot answer, nor will it ever be able to answer, only theorize incompletely. For example, science cannot explain what occurred prior to the "big bang" (or whatever theory we accept of the creation of the universe). This is because science cannot explain an event that is only in the past. It is a limitation of the scientific method, and any explanation would at best be theory (any true scientist agrees with this, only those with a political motive would disagree). They can theorize forever, but they cannot ever be certain. Part of the problem with the answer lives in the fact that any explanation will result in the violation of one or more physical laws which science cannot accept. Stephen Hawking has said that the question of what happened prior to the big bang makes no sense. This is because he knows that any explanation would involve some breaking of physical laws. Currently, he's hanging his hopes on gravity to explain the origin of the universe without God, however gravity prior to the big bang is lacking a crucial component, the existence of matter prior to the bang, which would violate some physical laws.

In any case, true science does not contradict God and in fact complements God and faith. There is no problem with true science and spiritual faith, and no reason that believers cannot also accept science and its conclusions.

-- Jeff