God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

In a recent Sunday School session, one of the attendees asked our Lutheran pastor what the Bible means when it says we are made in the image of God. This is a question that has bedeviled the church and synagogue for thousands of years. Our good pastor gave a credible and modern answer to the inquirer. It is certainly not our physical characteristics that make us in God’s image. After all, Jesus told us that “God is Spirit, and He seeks those who will worship Him in spirit and in truth.” It is our intellect, the pastor explained, our ability to know right from wrong, to dream, create, emote, and relate to God as our Father. I agree with all of that. After all, God the Father does not have genitalia. He does not need to pee after a drink of water. Only we do that. There are several ways to unpack the two creation accounts in Genesis 1-4. In Genesis one, “the Adam” is a title applied to both male and female. God speaks and things pop into existence, including man and woman, both at the sa...

This post is not really about suffering. It's about expanding our understanding of God. Aside from the fact that the book of Job is great literature, who among us can't empathize with Job's predicament? He is being tested by God. He has lost his children, his goods, and his health. He's covered in painful sores and he smells. Dogs lick his wounds. His wife is shrieking at him and his supposed friends, those misguided comforters, are accusing him of being a sinner. Job doesn't understand what is happening with his deity. God is behaving in ways that don't make sense. Something is terribly wrong, but what and why? The fact is, Job's friends and accusers were standing on solid ground. They were drawing on God's holy, inerrant, unchanging Word. Deuteronomy 27 and 28 assure the reader that bad things happen to disobedient sinners. Good things happened to the obedient. They had ineffable tradition on their side.  "Ask the former generation and find out wh...

According to the dictionary, a sophistry is a kind of reasoning that is misleading or unsound, but it sounds clever and plausible. Paul talks about such reasoning in Colossians 2:23,  "Such regulations (Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!) indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility, and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence."  Note, "appearance of wisdom" and "false humility" do not a perfect Christian make. Paul was addressing the problem of Christian leaders, one of which was James the brother of Jesus, who wanted to "Judaize" the emerging Christian church. Circumcize your male children, avoid pork, keep the Sabbath, do not marry, do not drink wine, wear this, don't wear that...The Jews had hundreds of laws beside the Law of Moses to keep. The veil in such religions between earthly ritual and objects and the unseen interdimensional ...

Bible quotes are from biblegateway.com, NKJV. In Jonathan Welton's book , The School of the Seers, he mentions a medley of passages that are theologically more important that they would seem at first glance. "The Word says that we move: from grace to grace (John 1:16) because grace and truth trump the law given through Moses; strength to strength ( Ps . 84:7); Faith to faith (Rom. 1:17) because the righteous live by faith; glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18) because it is the Spirit that forms the image of Christ in us. Last but not least, he cites Prov. 4:18 which reads "The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, shining brighter and brighter until midday" ( Holmans ). He goes on to state, "The Kingdom of God is never stagnant; it is always progressing forward and taking ground" pp. 173-174.  In simpler terms, God's plan is growth ! We don't obsess about who we were in Genesis 1-4. We reach for who we will be in Galatians 3:13 and Revelation 5:...