Compass-ology................"

Interstate 75, a few miles south of where it plunges from the Kentucky hills to cross the Ohio River into Cincinnati, is intersected by a beltway even as most larger cities nowadays. If you turn east on it, it, too, descends, but at a much slower pace. Once you’ve reached “bottom”, however, you’ll find access to “my neck of the woods”. Travelling north for whatever reason, though, there are several other options before one reaches that point by which they might take the back roads and still reach my address. We call them “shortcuts”, but, in truth, by the time you consider other factors such as speed limits, stoplights, and two-lane pavements that snake through the countryside, unless there’s a motive for the detour, it isn’t much worth the effort. Nonetheless, the other night I found myself returning late from Winchester with a young passenger whose own destination determined it to be prudent to take such route; and what I discovered in the darkness was: Even though you’ve lived in an area all your life and think you know it like the palm of your hand, it doesn’t take long for progress to have you scratching your head and wondering where in the world you are. Even more, life, itself, is like that. You turn a corner and suddenly find yourself in need, not only of an anchor for your soul, but also a voice to lead you home……………..

When I left for Florida a few weeks ago, a friend was trying to put definition to the Biblical claim that Jesus “gave Himself a ransom for many”. While I both identify and applaud his thirst for truth, yet I find it almost amusing that the Church, as a whole and after nearly two thousand years, has not been able to do more in that area that to provide its constituents with, as my own pastor preached this last Sunday morning, “a list of things that we believe”. As far as then giving any sort of plausible explanation of such individual doctrinal catalogue, that’s another matter! Not that I am of the opinion that ANY man, irregardless of his theological degrees, could EVER put God in a box and begin to diagram Him as one might some higher mathematical process. No matter how deep a man might descend into THAT well, when he eventually once more emerges into “reality” as we know it, he is yet left with unanswered questions. While the Gospel translates into “good news”, what it offers us, in fact, is an enigma, a “mystery” that identifies itself as “Christ IN us” and the bottom line to all our inquisitiveness. It is that accomplishment which separates us from everything else out there and creates in us a faith that is able to “overcome the world”….………..

I own a copy of Edersheim’s “The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah” and his initial statement within reads: “Among the outward means by which the religion of Israel was preserved, on eof the most important was the centralization and localization of its worship in Jerusalem.” He goes on to express that “If to some the ordinances of the Old Testament may in this respect seem narrow and exclusive, it is at least doubtful whether without such provision Monotheism itself could have continued as a creed or a worship”. To such remark, I penned on the blank page beside it: “Religion. It seems to me that’s about ALL we achieve when we boil it all down to one place, one people, one creed. Christ is a river of LIVING water and if we, as a body of believers, constrict such flow to but our own private pool, we will soon realize that which we claim to possess has grown stagnant. Was such isolation as the author here suggests necessary, or was it never more than a product of the human element as it involves itself with the things of God? I am inclined to believe the latter”. By such thought, I merely mean that anything void of Christ is “dead”. He, alone, is eternal life, that “manna which came down from heaven”. He is both the question and the answer, that which takes me one step at a time and meets me “inside the veil”………………