Aren't the Best Instructions at the End?

 

If the Bible can be counted kind of like a recipe book sometimes, the food for living the Bible gives is mostly in the New Testament.

My, my, my, do I have pet peeves about a lot of the photographs and other art illustrations that feature an open Bible.

Most of us are probably so used to seeing pictures, drawings, and other art showing the Bible opened midway, that we don't stop to think that the New Testament, where God fully makes Himself known to us, is not midway the Bible but is the last few pages, and that most of the Bible is God's record of sin and slavery and war and other turmoil with only brief glimmers of Old Testament insight into the Savior to come.

Because I, for one, know the hardships of people determined to live the Old Testament instead of loving the light of Jesus, it's a pet peeve to see art that superimposes an image of Jesus across some middle pages of the Bible, for example. And has anyone ever stopped to think how confusing it can be to someone who is trying to learn the Bible, to see things like

• a scripture saying Jesus is the "way," on a banner featuring a Bible opened midway?

• photographs of the Bible opened to middle pages, even on the cover art of books written about the New Testament?

• photographs deliberately doctored, to make the New Testament appear to begin midway the Bible?!

Who is it who is so obsessed with that Old Testament time when people were lost and many never knew the light of Jesus? Who is it who wants to point us to that time, as if that Old Testament time is Jesus?

It's downright difficult to find Christian art that shows a Bible opened to the New Testament. It's almost as if someone thinks it's a sin to acknowledge the New Testament as that part of God's witness to us that is able to stand on its own.

So when Jesus lets us know He is well able to divide, I believe by faith that the principle divide is around conflicts between Old Testament iniquity and New Testament faith.

Whenever some group or faction builds doctrine or a following around a grain of Old Testament "knowledge" that God didn't intend that way, maybe that always becomes a circumstance where we see the love of Jesus as divisive, with Him trying to bring us away from that ritualistic (even satanic!) use of the Old Testament.

The Old Testament is about learning the hard way. And there are plenty of lessons there about coping. But the New Testament is about staying on mission, learning in truth, fighting for life, and overcoming. And although there is persecution in Jesus, life in Him helps us endure, makes the way in life easier to bear, and ultimately yields freedom.

"My yoke [My word] is easy, and my burden is light," He says.

He remains the same, in our hearts, yesterday, today, forever,

says a New Testament word of comfort.

O Happy Day

 

... when Jesus washed our sins away

Some of this world's feelings about faith, are outrageous. And, sometimes, the Christian response has to be in saying Satan is busy. The Bible says it's a truth he bites us at a heel, but the church yet lives.

Raise Up a Child

 

If God ever grants you an awesome responsibility, let it be raising or helping to raise a child.

A neighbor, a single woman who had survived an unthinkable problem, was given a foster child who was a baby. But she gave up on the responsibility, I think too soon.

I'll never know just what happened to cause her to give up, but so much is happening now in the lives of even our youngest children, that I can only wish I could help to give a child stability that's absent even in my own life right now.

Although I can only wish to help, be it said I'm someone who could never be contented caring for just a pet. When I think of pets, I think of a pet for my family, for a child or more than one child.

By no means do I consider a child's well-being and think, "Oh, how cute."

But I think, "Raise up a child in the way to go, and when he or she grows older, this child will know better."

Amen.