God talk

 Have we been deceived by the commerce of the Christmas tree and the use of tinsel and bling that makes us like magpies running to and thro building our castles on snow? The real meaning of Christmas is very deep, if we could only see beyond the lights of our Christmas fairy tale.   The Christmas story is no Cinderella theme.   Christmas is about God becoming a person like you and me.   The question is why would God give up his heaven and be willing to be born in a barn?   If you were God, would you do that? Anyhow let us get started and look at John the Apostles World which was full of death and destruction.    Taken from Pexels I believe that John the Apostle wrote the Gospel, letters, and the Apocalypse.   During his life, he lived through the time of: ·          some cruel Roman rulers, ·          earthquakes such as Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Heracleum (AD 62) ·          and the destruction of the Second Temple (AD 70) where Jesus preached, and the Second Temple was

  In the ancestry of Jesus, we find some really interesting women of faith: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary the mother of our Lord One will notice that in a conventional genealogy we have such and ‘such begat’ or ‘the father of’...   In Matthews genealogy there is a twist and the reason there is a twist is that sometimes God works in unconventional ways. All these women have a story to tell, and they all faced some type of persecution in their lives.    taken from wikipedia; the address is at the bottom of this blog   Tamar and Judah Tamar was married to one of Judah’s sons and he died.   According to the law (levir practice) she was to have a surrogate husband.   She got a surrogate husband, but he wasted his seed on the ground so that she wouldn’t get pregnant.   God judged him and he died.   Judah decided that Tamar was not going to get the youngest son but lied to her… that when he grew up, he would perform by making her pregnant.   It didn’t happen. Judah lied to her

  Have you ever thought about your own family background and where your roots are found?   In today’s world this is big business and with the advent of DNA testing one can find out even more. We all want to know where we are from as it helps us to build a picture of our identity and where we belong.   Sometimes when we read the news either from the papers or online it is sometimes the only good news we can find. However, DNA may also bring one bad news, perhaps one is related to a despot such as Hitler, Mussolini or even Ceausescu and Stalin. Perhaps sometimes it is better to keeps one’s ancestry at a safe distance.   Herod for example was half Edomite and he wanted to hide this from Judaism of the time so he destroyed the archives in which his ancestry could be found. In Judaism genealogies are very important as they can show in the Old Testament if one is fit to be a priest or not or to be considered Jewish.   So then today we are going to ask the question why two different genea