Tag: miracles

Happy Hanukkah!

December 22nd

O King of the Gentiles, yes, and their desire; O Corner-stone, that makes two of  one: come to save man, whom You have made of the dust of the earth!

O Rex Gentium antiphon

We thank You also for the miraculous deeds and for the redemption and for the mighty deeds and the saving acts wrought by You, as well as for the wars which You waged for our ancestors in ancient days at this season.  …You in your abundant mercy rose up for them in the time of their trouble, pled their cause, executed judgment, avenged their wrong, and delivered the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of few, the impure into the hands of the pure, the wicked into the hands of the righteous, and insolent ones into the hands of those occupied with Your Torah. Both for Yourself did you make a great and holy name in Thy world, and for Your people did You achieve a great deliverance and redemption. Whereupon your children entered the sanctuary of Your house, cleansed Your temple, purified Your sanctuary, kindled lights in Your holy courts, and appointed these eight days of Hanukkah in order to give thanks and praises unto Your holy name.

Al HaNassim prayer

Because: irony. Since Hannukah starts at sunset tonight: Happy  Hanukkah, or “G’mar tov” since I’m typing this and there’s no possible way for me to mispronounce it.

Here is Tom Inglis et al. (on We Are One) singing A King is Born on Youtube and Spotify respectively. This is one of the few Integrity/Hosanna songs I genuinely like.

…and here is an image of Herbig-Haro 110 from last year’s Hubble Advent Calendar in The Atlantic. (Herbig Haro objects are basically like exhaust jets from a star.)

Here’s this year’s calendar, if anyone’s interested.

Baruch Haba

June 15th

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! See, your house is abandoned to you. I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’! 

Luke 13:34-25 (CSB)

“…the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”

Luke 19:37-38 (NRSV)

Take the old-fashioned way of erecting a scaffolding and building the structure inside.

The scaffolding may be so skilfully erected and admirably proportioned and be there for so long that we come to consider this the scheme in the mind of the architect. Then one day we see the loosening of ropes and planks and ladders, and the turmoil destroys for ever the skill and beautiful proportion of the scaffolding; all that is happening is but to clear the real building that it may stand nobly before all as a thing of beauty. There is something similar to the Bible revelation of the way God deals with the world’s Ages.

There have been prophets and students who handle the Bible like a child’s box of bricks; they explain to us the design and structure and purpose; but as time goes on things do not work out in their way at all. They have mistaken the scaffolding for the structure, while all the time God is working out His purpose with a great and undeterred patience.

from Oswald Chambers’ The Discipline of Patience 

Paul Wilbur’s Baruch Haba (Blessed is He Who Comes) on Youtube and Spotify respectively.

Makarios

June 14th

…[Jesus] replied “Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Blessed is the one who does not fall away on account of Me.”

Luke 7:22-23 (BSB)

Yes, blessed is he who is not offended in Him, blessed is he who believes that Jesus Christ lived here on earth and was the one He said He was, the lowly man and yet God, the Only Begotten of the Father blessed is the man who knows no other to go to, but knows in every case that he may go to Him.

And whatever a man’s fate may be in the world, however the storms of life may threaten him — blessed is he who is not offended but believes fully and firmly that Peter sank for the one and only cause that he did not believe fully and firmly. And whatever a man’s fault may be, even if the human race, not just himself, despaired of his forgiveness — yet blessed is he who is not offended but believes that He said to the paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven’, and that this was just as easy for Him to say as to say to the paralyzed man, ‘Take up your bed and walk’ — blessed is he who is not offended but believes in the forgiveness of sinners, although they are not helped like the paralyzed man to believe by the certainty of healing.

Blessed is he who is not offended in Him but believes.

from Søren Kierkegaard’s Training in Christianity (Pt. 2, Prelude)

Re: the title: G3107

Wholehearted following

June 13th

…but the entire congregation threatened to stone Joshua and Caleb. Then the glory of the LORD appeared to all the Israelites at the Tent of Meeting. And the LORD said to Moses, “How long will this people treat Me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in Me, despite all the signs I have performed among them?

Numbers 14:10-11 (BSB)

Are you going to live a perfect life ? I hope you are, for I believe in such a life; — not perhaps in the sense in which you understand “perfection” — entire freedom from wrong-doing and all inclination to it, for while we live in the flesh the flesh will lust against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh; but the perfection spoken of in the Old Testament as practised by some of God’s saints, who are said to have “served the Lord with a perfect heart.” What is this perfection? A state in which your hearts will be set on perfect integrity without any reserve, and your will wholly subservient to God’s will. Are you willing for such a perfection, with your whole heart turned away from the world and given to God alone? A man can do it in one moment when he comes to see that God can change his will for him.

Joshua “wholly followed the Lord his God.” He failed, indeed, before the enemy at Ai, because he trusted too much to human agency, and not sufficiently to God; and he failed in the same manner when he made a covenant with the Gibeonites; but still, his spirit and power differed very widely from that of the people whose unbelief drove them before their enemies and kept them in the wilderness. Let us be willing wholly to serve the Lord our God, and “make no provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof.” Let us believe in the love and power of God to keep us day by day, and put “no confidence in the flesh.”

from Andrew Murray’s The Deeper Christian Life (Out of and into)

I think ‘wholly followed the Lord his God’ refers primarily to Caleb, but Joshua gets lumped in there with him too once or twice, so it’s close enough.

‘Leaven of the Sadducees’

June 12th 

But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.

Matthew 22:29 (ESV)

The question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

If immediate experience cannot prove or disprove the miraculous, still less can history do so. Many people think one can decide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining the evidence ‘according to the ordinary rules of historical enquiry’. But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are. For if they are impossible, then no amount of historical evidence will convince us. The philosophical question must therefore come first.

Here is an example of the sort of thing that happens if we omit the preliminary philosophical task, and rush on to the historical. In a popular commentary on the Bible you will find a discussion of the date at which the Fourth Gospel was written. The author says it must have been written after the execution of St. Peter, because, in the Fourth Gospel, Christ is represented as predicting the execution of St. Peter. ‘A book’, thinks the author, ‘cannot be written before events which it refers to’. Of course it cannot—unless real predictions ever occur. If they do, then this argument for the date is in ruins. And the author has not discussed at all whether real predictions are possible. He takes it for granted (perhaps unconsciously) that they are not. Perhaps he is right: but if he is, he has not discovered this principle by historical inquiry. He has brought his disbelief in predictions to his historical work, so to speak, ready made. Unless he had done so his historical conclusion about the date of the Fourth Gospel could not have been reached at all. His work is therefore quite useless to a person who wants to know whether predictions occur. The author gets to work only after he has already answered that question in the negative, and on grounds which he never communicates to us.

from C.S. Lewis’ Miracles (The Scope of This Book)

Why yes, I am feeling enormously self-indulgent this week, so you get more from the Inklings et al.  I think I might even be able to force a Tolkien quote in at some point.

The title is a reference to Matthew 16 (though we’ve already covered the story involved), since it’s rare that the Sadducees, with their anti-supernatural bent, get any sort of attention in the gospels at all.