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The Heavenly Melting Pot
The great melting pot is not America, but the coming New Creation where Heaven and Earth merge with one another. America may celebrate its cultural diversity, but it does so with the unspoken expectation that if you’re going to live here, you must blend in. Don’t do anything unfamiliar to the white majority or we…
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Meditate, Not Memorize
In starting his career, God told Joshua that he needed to meditate on the Book of the Law day and night and do everything written in it without straying to the left or right. This will be an important task for this new political leader of Israel if he is to create a just and…
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Of Mountains and Fiery Bushes
Since Heaven is “up there” and Earth is “down here,” the Bible writers viewed mountains as places where Heaven and Earth intersected. Because of this, it made logical sense to ancient people that you might encounter a heavenly being on a mountain and have a “mountaintop experience.” Such things happen all throughout the Bible: Eden…
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Stairways to Heaven
In Biblical mythology, some of the angels of heaven crossed the boundaries between heaven and earth and procreated with human women. These women gave birth to children who would grow into the giants found throughout the Old Testament in the clans of the Nephilim, the Anakim, the Emim, the Rephaim, and the Zamzummim. Their quasi-divine…
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Patiently Following God Amidst the Trees
Following God is a slow and steady work, for he is a person with a will who offers his words, signs, and impressions as he sees fit. As we get used to the way he sounds, we build habits and traditions in an attempt to keep hearing him. Abraham, for example, was used to encountering…
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The New Music I Enjoyed in 2023
I’m at that age where new music doesn’t impress me like it used to, but still check every Friday to see what’s come out and give it a listen. That being said, here’s a few albums that stood out to me this year. pure – Abbie Gamboa Abbie Gamboa’s album, pure, is easily one of…
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The Best Books I Read in 2023
Out of the 46 books I read this year, here are some of the best and why (in no particular order). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma As I’ve done exorcism throughout the years, I’ve come across some of the kinds of trauma difficulties that Bessel van…
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Hymn Culture
I don’t have a problem with hymns. However, I do have a problem with the “hymn culture” of some Protestants. Our hymns were written well after the time of Jesus—many of the most popular ones being created in the last 500 years. Yet hymn culture treats these songs as sacred, as though God only inspired…
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Lessons in Ministering to the Homeless
After struggling to grow our church for several years, we shifted into a dinner church model. Our numbers increased immediately, hitting triple digits in about two years. The word of our dinners spread rapidly among the impoverished and homeless in our community, giving us an inroad to the very people we had been trying to…
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Jesus, the Church, and Gender Abuse
Why did God come to earth as a man and not a woman? Either gender could have been theologically possible since the Old Testament presents Jesus in the masculine form of the Angel of the Lord (Gen. 32:24–30; cf. Hos. 12:3-4)1 and the feminine form of Woman Wisdom (Prov. 8:22-31; cf. Luke 11:49-50; Matt. 23:34-35).2…
