The violence of the Good News is both nail head hitting and way overstated.

Pardon the lengthy title, it was only meant to start and finish this post succinctly. Now for the ambling about: When the Hebrews described the creation of the world it was with words of tumult and roiling imagery, hardly a peaceful or idyllic scene. When light enters the world it is sudden and abrupt, separating, surrounding and rejecting while encompassing and warming and enlightening. This is the world we live in. A place teeming with life in such a way that it more than calls, it cries for salvation.

If God is Holy and His holiness is beneficent then by His nature we must be changed from our flesh-tendency in order to abide with Him, otherwise goodness would be corrupted by proximity and mingling with unfettered shortcoming and meanness.

God required that an animal be skinned to provide the peace of mind Adam so desparately wanted-foreshadowing the day that Pilate would tack a hide to his wall and thus atonement would be made, access to God granted, and peace established as the bedrock for all mankind.

But we look about and see murder and mayhem, war and torture, greed and lust. Not somuch a peaceful picture as yet. We observe even the select few who have found Christ and often they slip and must ask forgiveneness, and fall and must call out to God for help. The people of today, the ones coming into the fray we call life, they have a new perspective that some of our own group may have thought about taking on. That perspective is one that couold perhaps simply be stated as a desire to be honest, to not be a hypocrite, to do and follow with passion and vigor but not so much from duty or discipline, rightness or value, as from the knowledge of purity of character and fidelity to intent. This may become understood to be sophomoric in the end, but what virtue, when it is raised to the level of demagoguery is not foolishness.

The point is that each generation is given its choices and its chances and its reign. Honesty and integrity to oneself and thereby to God, while a cart before the horse sort of configuration, will at least develop people who can be trusted to do what they say they will do. At least until they begin to realize they have followed the letter of the law and missed the Spirit. Of course through all of this there will be the very select few who will understand the futility of being true to oneself while ignoring the need for depending upon guides based in traditional(longtime pre-existant) strictures which are sometimes unwieldy but often the very thing which protects civilizaton from civilization. So into the 'next' next generation will be infused the opportunity to correct the heading of this next generation so that perhaps through time and trial and error we as a religious sub culture have the opportunity to appeal to yet another generation of souls who might not otherwise come to the table with that new song mentioned in the psalms. I think that is what revolution means, that things just keep on roiling until the Master returns and says, "It is finished". The peace we yearn for is ours as spirit and hope, but we must continually refresh ourselves in the living water we find about us, and that means we must make judgements and choices and stop and start over again and again, knowing that we are forgiven, even though we hung no stars, nor breathed no life into a leviathan, and probably will be mean or short or stupid a time or two before we are gone home. I just hope I will have said some of the words of peace and enlightenment which tend toward salvation to the ones appointed for me to do so, before I go.

Robert