Old Testament
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."Genesis 1:1-2
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Slavery Is Easy
I know, I know. But let’s talk about this. Heading back to the Old Testament book of Exodus, we’re reminded that God led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, not to the Promised Land . . . but into the Wilderness.
Christians tend to consider the Wilderness as only that place of wandering we sometimes stumble into from time to time. But the reality is that the Wilderness is where we live, and there is no leaving it until such time as we are granted admission into the Promised Land at the end of our great journey.
We look at the history of the Israelites having spent several generations as slaves in Egypt, not knowing any other kind of life. In fact, God allowed them to remain slaves long enough to erase their memory and history of any other existence. And that’s why He inspired Moses to write down their history, so that they could learn where they came from after the fact.
And just like the Israelites, we too have no idea what life before slavery looked like. Our slavery to sin is all we’ve ever known. We were born into slavery, raised by slaves, and grew to become great slaves.
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New Beginnings
In my book, The First Communion: The Making of the Last Supper I show how intrinsically connected the Last Supper, and by extension the Lord’s Supper, is with the celebration of Passover. God had selected this very specific event to tie into His plan for salvation, as the first Passover was the first iteration of this plan designed to culminate with all of what we celebrate now on Resurrection Sunday (Easter).
While we realize that we are ultimately celebrating both the Last Supper and the Resurrection each week we gather at church for worship and communion, this Holy Week provides an opportunity for us to extend over the course of seven days that which we normally share in the course of a few hours. It is in this vein I share with you this excerpt from chapter 11: Six Days of Preparation.
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The First Communion
A couple of years ago, I got in my head the idea of investigating the true meaning and purpose of Communion (The Lord’s Supper) beyond my own elementary understanding of it, and ignoring the different traditions that surround it. Sure, we all understand and appreciate this mirroring of the Last Supper on the night before Jesus’ death on the Cross, and how sharing in it as a church body reminds us of that Cross and the suffering Jesus underwent on our behalf.
We get it. But for me, this wasn’t good enough, because the way the Catholic church teaches and practices it, both in substance and form, differs from how the Lutheran church teaches and practices it, which differs significantly from how the non-denominational (often evangelical) and other Protestant churches practice it (without much instruction)—not to mention the frequency of its practice, be it daily, weekly, monthly, special occasions, or never.
While I knew it wouldn’t be particularly useful for me to investigate those disparities, I did think it valuable to discover its true origins, according to Scripture, and try my best to understand the history and tradition behind the origins of the Last Supper (and Passover) itself, while discarding the traditions of the evolving Christian church beyond the first century, being able to examine more intimately how and why the first century Church believed, taught, and practiced it.
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Grandpa Lamech
“After Noah was born, Lamech lived 595 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Lamech lived 777 years, and then he died. After Noah was 500 years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham and Japheth.”
Genesis 5:30-32 Lamech had other sons and daughters, but at the youthful age of 182, he had Noah. We cannot assume that Noah was one of the eldest sons (and probably shouldn’t), even though Noah himself didn’t have his three boys until after he was 500 years old. Noah was certainly not an only child, and likely had a plethora of siblings, not to mention an army of nieces, nephews with their children and grandchildren.
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Greater Evidence
The world has always been too small for the likes of mankind. We have always been seekers of the truth, always looking for that which we cannot see. We want to know everything, to be like God.
In the beginning, this was precisely why the first man and woman succumbed to Satan’s tempting.
“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Genesis 3:4-5 As a result of this continually wanting to know more, we are never satisfied with what we can perceive. We are constantly searching beyond our means for validation in our existence. In our hearts, all men—Christians and non-Christians alike—do believe in God, since he has placed “eternity in the hearts of men,” but spend their entire lives trying to prove God’s existence and the feeling in their hearts by trying to disprove his existence.
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Children of Abraham
“I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore.”
Genesis 22:17 Yet, Israel became and remains one of the smallest nations in the world. Surely the Children of Abraham are not limited to the Israelites. Even at the original time that God introduced the covenant of circumcision, Abraham’s entire household was circumcised, including his servants and all other males not born to him. So clearly, the covenant was not being made just for his descendants, but for all who declared the same faith that Abraham declared.
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Dragons and Dinosaurs
The Behemoth
Here’s something to consider, and I find this fabulous! Job knew what God was talking about when he said,
“Look at the behemoth, which I made along with you and which feeds on grass like an ox. What strength he has in his loins, what power in the muscles of his belly! His tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are close-knit. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like rods of iron. He ranks first among the works of God, yet his Maker can approach him with his sword.
“The hills bring him their produce, and all the wild animals play nearby. Under the lotus plants he lies, hidden among the reeds in the marsh. The lotuses conceal him in their shadow; the poplars by the stream surround him. When the river rages, he is not alarmed; he is secure, though the Jordan should surge against his mouth. Can anyone capture him by the eyes, or trap him and pierce his nose?”
Job 40:15-24 
Illustration by Franco Tempesta | National Geographic Kids This is a land animal whose description sounds an awful lot like one of the large brachiosaurs with which we seem to be so familiar today. The African Elephant currently holds the record for the largest living land animal, and God’s description of the behemoth clearly describes some other extinct animal.
And I see a couple of obvious notes that make me smile:
- Despite the atheistic viewpoint that the Bible was written by one lunatic with a plan to fool the world, it must be painfully obvious to accept that whoever that author was, deceiver or not, he knew about this dinosaur enough to write about it.
- Since there were no archaeologists or scientists around in those days (even if the Bible were fake and written only 1000 years ago) to share such things with their fellow man, then such a beast must have been walking the earth either during the author’s time or in such recent history that its existence was passed down by word-of-mouth.
- So, contrary to popular “scientific” myth, men were plainly around at the time of the dinosaurs, even though such scientists have somehow “proven” that millions of years have separated the two, and that this is not possible.
- How then could one write about something so long ago that only recently was even known?
