In the sequence of Creation as depicted in Genesis chapter one, God handiwork becomes more and more complex as the week goes on. First light, then stars and planets, then plants, then animals, then man, and finally woman, who truly is the piece de resistance of God’s creativity.
Archive for February, 2010
Increasing Complexity
Monday, February 8th, 2010Yitro 5770 part 2 – Resistance Is Futile
Saturday, February 6th, 2010The stars, they circle and dance in the sky. Tinkling bells flow in harmony, spin and scatter and come ’round again. The stars in the sky, they circle and dance.
You are a singularity, a star alone like no other. The stars they glitter, they sing and dance and draw into you. In all their brightness and glory they cannot compare to you. You draw all things into you. Dwelling on the mountain fastness, far in deep darkness and none can approach your greatness, your fierceness and fury. In darkness you outshine them all, and nothing escapes the gravity of your majesty, your love for us, the merest specks in a vast nothingness, outshone by the dimmest of stars, but the focus yet of all your energy, your radiative purity, washing all that comes near, blotting out the dimness in which we glory, making us infinite through you, your transcendent power transmitted to us instantaneously no matter the distance, the space we occupy. These are nothing to you, beside you, Creator, Destroyer, Remaker of worlds. We submit ourselves to you, surrender to your inevitable will. We are nothing in nothing. May all we are and all we will ever be, be subsumed in your all encompassing sphere. May our horizons grow from the illusion of infinite expanse to the infinite reality of constriction within you. May our death in you be our reawakening in life and love and everlasting spirit.
Peace we find in sublimation to your infinite mass.
Exodus 20:20 And Moses said to the people, Do not fear, for God has come to test you, and so that His fear may be before your faces, so that you may not sin.
If we are meant to fear God, why did Moses tell the people not to fear?
Many times our lives pass through the same cycle that Israel experienced in Torah. We find ourselves in the wilderness again and again. Each time, God brings us there to test and refine us. Whenever a person is confronted by God, he may respond in one of two ways: He could fall back as in John 18:6 or he could fall on his face as in Genesis 17:3. In the presence of God, destruction is inevitable. Those who resist fall back and are destroyed, given over to death. Those who surrender are destroyed also, but are resurrected to new life one step closer to the perfection which God desires for us.
Life is hard enough already, and the constant tests and refinement to which God subjects his people sometimes seem unbearable. Relax. Surrender and you will find peace. You will never be perfect in this life, but you can draw ever closer to your Creator and find peace in the continuous cycle of death and rebirth which is intrinsic to true Life.
Yitro 5770 – Father Sky, Mother Earth
Friday, February 5th, 2010Exodus 20:24-26 You shall make an altar of earth to Me, and shall sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your oxen. In all places where I record My name I will come to you, and I will bless you. (25) And if you will make Me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of cut stone. For if you lift up your tool upon it, you have defiled it. (26) And you shall not go up by steps to My altar, that your nakedness be not uncovered on it.
In a very real sense, God is our father and the earth our mother. The God of heaven took a bit of earth and breathed his spirit into it, creating life. This fact in combination with the astounding miracles of reproduction, of putting seeds in the ground so that they will sprout and produce more seeds, of a man and woman joining their bodies to create a new person, could easily lead people into fertility cults. If imitation is the sincerest flattery, how better can we worship the Creator than through an act of creation? The command to make an altar of earth in order to worship the God of heaven re-emphasizes our descent from these two. However, there are two more commands attached to this one that strongly imply God does not approve of sex as an act of worship.
In the first command, God says we are not to build the altar with cut stones. We might have ideas about how to make a more beautiful altar, but God has said he will prepare the stones. We get to select them and place them, but the materials and format are strictly up to him. God wants his worship, his way, not ours. He has told us how he is to be worshiped, and, although we might have a great deal of leeway in some of the details, we are not free to improvise however we choose. Although he commanded us to reproduce, he did not command us to worship him through the reproductive act.
In the second command, God says the altar should be placed so as to avoid even accidental exposure of the priest’s nakedness. If there was any doubt as to whether nudity should or should not be a part of overt worship, that should quell it.