Friday, October 28, 2011

History in the Making

Time: 6:19 am
Place: My house, in my room
Date: Friday, October 28, 2011

Me: Oh man! I have to write a blog before noon today! I better get up right now!

Time: 7:21 am
Place: My house, in the back room, on the couch
Date: Friday, October 28, 2011

Me: (Finished my bible study) Okay, now to write this blog. But I'm so sleepy.....why does this couch have to be the comfiest in the entire house.......what is that bright.....huh? No, mustered please......(Falls over)

Time: 9:35 am
Place: My house,
Date: Friday, October 28, 2011

Some Voice: Hey, hey Selena, it's almost eleven, is your blog written yet?
Me: No, no it's not.
SV: Isn't chapter ten the second longest chapter in Hebrews?
Me: Yes, yes it is.
SV: Then what are you doing sleeping in?
Me: I'm tired!
SV: This is no way to be acting.
Me: Seriously? One, maybe two people read my blog anyways.
SV: That doesn't mean you can just blow it off.
Me: I can and I will, watch me. (Rolls over)

Time: 10:45 am
Place: My house, in front of the computer
Date: Friday, October 28, 2011

Me: (Type, type) What am I doing? I'm trying to be funny but it's really not funny that I'm a procrastinator. (Thinks) Maybe if I came up with something......(Clears throat)

Hello and welcome to my blog this week. I'm your host, and basically, there is no blog this week because forty minutes is not long enough to do a study on Hebrews chapter ten. I'm going to own the title of procrastinator, and come to you this week with a humble apology, and an invitation to come back next week, even though I don't deserve your devotion. But who's to say I can't do as I like anyways? This is my blog, and if I decide to write about peanut butter for six days straight, who's going to stop me? Besides, you have to be pirate for the code to apply which you're not. Any kind of blogging rules are more like guidelines anyway. Be safe this weekend in your activities and make sure you save a bag full of candy for me okay? Have a lovely day.

Post Time: 11:05 am B)

Friday, October 21, 2011

Hebrews Chapter Nine: Dead to Sin

OH MY GOSH I GOT A 3DS!!!! I'VE BEEN FREAKING OUT SINCE WEDNESDAY NIGHT WHEN THAT GUY AT TARGET OPENED THE GLASS DOOR AND TOOK OUT THIS BOX THAT HAD MY 3DS IN IT AND IT WAS MINE AND IT'S STILL MINE AND SO FAR I HAVEN'T WOKEN UP SO IT MUST NOT BE A DREAM! It's about time something good happens to me, I mean really. I have no games for it as of now, but you know, one thing at a time. It was totally worth the work, time, and money. I'm very impressed with it so far, I think the negativity surrounding the 3DS is blown out of proportion, but that's just me. I'll do an official review once I get some games and the excitement of finally having it has worn off, perhaps after Christmas sometime. I'm usually not lacking in money from my birthday (which happens to be on Thanksgiving this year) to Christmas, so I'll be able to purchase some games to review and talk about.

So, I'm running out of witty intros to each chapter of Hebrews. The initial blog intro that I do at the beginning is easy because it's usually something that's happened to me over the week. But, yeah, can I simply say, “Time for Hebrews nine” and be done with it? Okay, time for Hebrews nine.

1-5 I could maybe write a four page book on the significance behind the items mentioned in these verses alone, but I don't think that's the point. Perhaps it was the main focus at one time, but the book of Hebrews is not about the old covenant, but about the new covenant overtaking the old one. I see this brief list as a reminder that at one time in the past, these things were important for salvation itself. But now there's a new way of doing things.

6-10 Remember, only the priest was permitted into the inner room of the Tabernacle, and that once a year and with the shedding of blood. Limited access to the presence of God. This wasn't enough to truly cleanse God's people of their sin. There needed to be something more, something much more powerful and final to completely do away with sin.

11-12 Jesus used the power of his own perfect blood to enter eternal redemption for the whole world. It wasn't something that needed to be repeated, it wasn't a ceremony, an example, or a picture of things to come. It was the real thing.

13-14 If the ashes of an animal can make us “clean” on the outside, or basically, cleansed of sin from the past only, what can the blood of Jesus do? It's a rhetorical question, by the way. The blood of animals might have been enough to clear you of the acts of sin you committed, but what about tomorrow? What about next week? The blood of Christ not only washes away past acts, but the things you are going to do. It did away with sin entirely so we can more effectively serve God.

15 I pretty much love this verse. Any verse in the bible that talks about how we've been set free from sin is my favorite honestly. Think about this for a sec: we are set free from sin. No longer does it control us. No longer does it have power over us to make us do what it wants. We have the power over sin to say no. We have the power to run from sin!

"In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus."
-Romans 60:11

16-22 Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. Without blood or death, a will can't be put into effect. It's the same way with the covenants. There has to be bloodshed in order to remove sin.

23-26 Jesus doesn't enter the Holy of Holies where God's presence dwells to intercede for us. He went straight to the Father after he shed his own perfect blood for us. He's a direct connection to the source. So instead of having to sacrifice daily for a temporary, incomplete connection to God, Jesus gave himself as a one time sacrifice to open up a full connection (or at least as full as is attainable in our earthly bodies) to God himself.

27-28 I like this picture of us waiting for God to come. He already shed his blood so he can call us his own children, now we just have to wait until his return, when we will be taken to the Father and our promise of salvation will be complete.

What do you say after that? The end, that's what you say. Man, I need to stop putting off blog writing until Thursday night........

Friday, October 14, 2011

Hebrews Chapter Eight: Summing Things Up

There was almost no blog this day on account of me completely forgetting about it until Thursday night and me feeling the beginnings of a stupid cold. I swear it's like two hundred degrees in here, I'm sweating and I haven't done anything but sit here. Nevertheless, I am determined to make sure there is reading material for my readers every Friday no matter how bad my health is. I am a dedicated blogger! YEPPERS!

We are currently in Hebrews chapter eight, for those of you new readers, and those of you like me who forgot while floating around in the space of life. I like how chapter eight starts, “The point of what we are saying is this”. We're finally getting a main point, a summery of all this information we've been taking in and picking apart the first seven chapters. This is the part I skip to in textbooks. “Don't give me all the details! Just give me the important stuff that's going to be on the test!” Ladies and gentleman, it's test time.

1-2 Remember back in chapter three, when we talked about how Moses was the builder of the earthly Tabernacle where God dwelt, and that we are the new “Tabernacle” as God's dwelling place? Jesus is the high priest connecting us “tabernacles” to God. He is the bridge between you and God, the mediator, the connector, the missing piece of the puzzle.

3-4 Jesus can't be a priest on earth because there are already people who offer up sacrifices or other material things in exchange for their sins. Maybe you are one. Have you ever felt like you weren't good enough for God? Have you ever felt that you broke too many rules or skipped too many Sunday services to be worthy of God's grace? Thinking you have to be good enough for God is the same as offering up sacrifices for your sins. Nothing YOU can do will make up for your sins. Only through Jesus we are saved, not by man's power.

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.”
-Ephesians 2:8-9

Let Jesus be your priest in heaven, the high priest who already did all that was necessary to save you. It's already done, you just need to accept it.

5-6 The Tabernacle had to be so exact, and everything had to be in the right place and happen in the right order, because it was a picture of what was to come. The old covenant was a perfect picture of the new covenant. The old covenant included things like the earthly Tabernacle, the human priest, and the daily sacrifice. The new covenant involves us, Jesus, and his one ultimate sacrifice. Do you see how everything connects here? The new covenant is far superior to the old one, as it involves us totally relying on the power of God to save us and to get us through each day. There's more intimacy between you and your Creator this way.

7-12 The quoted passage here is from the book of Jeremiah, which was written long before Jesus walked the earth. God new from the beginning that he would perfect His relationship with His people using the new covenant. No longer would people need to be told what God was saying to them, for God would be able to speak to each one directly.

I just sneezed on the computer screen and now it's all colorful.

13 So, the old covenant is completely done away with, guys. Religion and all that garbage is no longer necessary to be saved. We don't have to dress a certain way, abstain from eating certain things, or talk like we're super holy. God wants us to be just as we are, weak, helpless, imperfect, so He can show us how strong He is to save us. He needs us to be fully dependent on Him in order for Him to work through us. Otherwise we'll rely on our own abilities to get us through things, and that's not what we want at all.

I gave you the summery, now it's time to see what you have learned so far (or, time for me to see if I've been doing this right....) For this week's challenge, write a brief summery of the old covenant in comparison to the new covenant. For example:

Old: Tabernacle
New: Us

Everyone who completes the challenge will receive a cookie like last time. I'll check your answers next week. Have a smashing weekend! (Don't smash anything, just, oh never mind. I'm sick, give me a break.)

Friday, October 7, 2011

Hebrews Chapter Seven: The Most Holy Place

Alright, so I've been wanting to by the new hand-held video game system from Nintendo, the 3DS, for a few months now. I don't have a job at this time, so the only way I'm able to earn money is by doing odd jobs for family members and friends from church. I had a big one that I just finished, which was supposed to put me just twenty dollars short of the price of the 3DS, but it took me so long to finish this job that I had forgotten how much money me and the person I did the job for had agreed upon, which was twenty-five dollars less than what I thought. Now I'm about forty-five dollars short of my 3DS. I get twenty dollars tonight for another job, and as soon as I finish two other jobs, forty more, but that could be weeks. I've probably already missed the free download of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures by now, which is a game I really wanted to play. I'm crazy about Zelda, for those of you who don't already know. I'm desperate for cash right now. Only twenty more to go! Why?! WHY!?!?!?! *Sad face* If you have any jobs for me that won't take more than a week or that you can pay me in advance for, or if you'd like to just give me money I would be very grateful. You'd be helping the overall happiness of my life a lot.

Last week, I promised a more in-depth explanation of the Tabernacle and why it keeps coming up in the book of Hebrews. If you're anything like me,the Tabernacle is one of those things in the Bible that holds significance to you but you never fully understood. I still didn't quite understand what it was, besides a place where they killed animals, until last year in school when I did an intense study on it and the Israelite people. The connections between the Tabernacle and the “new covenant” and Jesus as our new “high priest” are so evident and so important in comprehending what it is that Jesus did for us on the cross.

The Tabernacle was basically a very beautiful and detailed tent. The Israelite people used it while they were on their way to the promised land, and then while they were wandering in the desert or forty years, so it had to be portable. To get a better picture of how beautiful this tent was, you can read Exodus 36:8-38.

It's a little hard to get a visual of the tent without seeing a model of it. Before I wrote this post I ran around the house panicking because I had to do a description of the Tabernacle and I hadn't seen my fold out pamphlet of it since we moved a couple of months ago. I finally found it last night at around ten o'clock, and right at this moment in time, it's nearly midnight on Thursday, so I hope I make sense. It shouldn't be a problem though, I'm very jacked up on a delicious caramel frappe right now. I'm literally twitching in my chair.

Anyways, the Tabernacle was just a big tent, like I said before, with a large outer courtyard that the people could enter into to make their sacrifices. The actual Tabernacle where God dwelt was inside this larger courtyard. In the courtyard, there was an alter where the people made their sacrifices. The offering had to be a perfect animal without any faults, and as it died the people would place their hand on its head to symbolize their sin going into the animal. This method of sacrifice only lasted the people a certain amount of time, so sacrifices were offered daily. Beyond this alter there was a large basin of water that had a mirrored bottom for the priests to wash themselves in before entering the Tabernacle. The purpose of the mirror was to remind the priest, as he made himself physically clean, that the Lord sees what's in the heart, and not just what's on the outside.

Once inside the tabernacle, there were a few other furnishings like the lamp stand, the table of showbread, and the alter of incense. Farther than this, at the very heart of the Tabernacle, was the Holy of Holies, where God's presence dwelt. The priest would only enter this place once a year to sprinkle blood on the Ark of the Covenant, which held the ten commandments inside of it and was the only piece of furniture in the Most Holy Place. The lid of the Ark is called the Mercy Seat, and this is where the glory of God dwelt. The blood sprinkled here covered the sins of the priest and the people for the rest of the year. It was only by these daily sacrifices and shedding of blood that God was able to dwell among the sinfulness of the people.

I know this is intense and maybe confusing stuff, but stay with me here. It's all going to come together as we read the seventh chapter of Hebrews.

1-10 Melchizedek was one of the priest that served in the Tabernacle. Pay attention to how he's being likened to Jesus here. His name means “king of righteousness”, and he was given a tenth of the plunder Abraham had gained from his battles. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be making a connection to tithing or not, but every priest collected a tenth of everything from the people while they were in service.

11-17 No matter how many sacrifices were made at the Tabernacle, there still had to be sacrifices for the sins of the people daily. It was an imperfect system based on the law. If this was a flawless system, why then did it have to be repeated with more bloodshed so often? When Jesus became our high priest, there had to be a change in the way things were done, just as there was a change in the priesthood. Jesus did not become a priest because of his ancestry, but because God his Father told him to so he could perfect His relationship with His people.

18-19 These are the key verses that bring it all together. The former way of doing things, the daily sacrifice of blood, the limited access to the Mercy Seat and to God's presence, all changed with this new way of doing things.

20-22 Each priest gained his title simply by being of the line of Levites, which was a tribe in Israel. But Jesus became a priest because he was promised with an oath by God. He was the guarantee of a better covenant before he was even born. Your salvation is a rock solid, promised by the God of the universe thing, guys. We shouldn't take this stuff lightly. This is powerful.

23-25 Priests die because they are human like you and me. But Jesus lives forever, and is therefore our priest forever. What he did cannot end, because he will never end. He has completely saved those who have called upon his name. When he died, the curtain that separated us from God's presence was ripped in half, and full access to the Mercy of God was granted to us. Oh man, I don't know if it's the coffee or the Spirit, but something is getting me hyped up!

26-28 The best part of it all, Jesus, our new High Priest, the one who took all our sins on himself and died once and for all to save us. Unlike the animal sacrifices that had to be offered multiple times, Jesus died one time and took EVERY SINGLE SIN away. This means all the sins you have committed, the sins you are committing, and the sins you will commit, already washed away more than 2,000 years ago on the cross. This perfect sinless man became our sin, and died in our place. He offered the blood we should have paid. He walked this earth and experienced all the things we experience. And now he's alive, bridging the gap between sinful man and a holy perfect God. The curtain was torn. The way is opened. WE ARE SAVED!

Now that that's over with, let me make some connections between Jesus and the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle was the place were God dwelt, Jesus came down from heaven to dwell among the people, and Jesus is God in the flesh. The high priest offered sacrifices for the people, Jesus offered himself as our final and perfect sacrifice. The place where God was, the Ark, held the ten commandments or the law. Jesus came to fulfill the law. (Matthew 5:17) When you sum it all up, Jesus completely replaced all that stuff. He made it so simple. He's the reason we're not still dragging animals to the alter to sacrifice for our sins.

The law shows us how imperfect we are, and how badly we fail with each passing minute to be worthy of entering the presence of God. It's like looking into a mirror and seeing all the dirt of our life. But Jesus washed us clean. His grace covers us. Like my pastor said on Sunday, “Grace doesn't give us an excuse to sin, but rather gives us the means by which we can keep it.” In other words, without grace, we would never be able to show our faces in the presence of God because we are not capable of keeping the law by ourselves. I thank the Lord for sending His son to make me perfect.

Last week, I asked for prayer requests as the challenge. I only got one, and I'm pretty sure it's been taken care of, so I'll let it go. The only challenge this week is getting through this blog, so if you made it this far congratulations, here is your virtual cookie. Now I must be going. It's almost one in the morning.