Wednesday, October 19, 2016

                                                            The Contradiction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2AofZ3fvLI

Last post, I left you with a contradiction.  You may have noticed.

I told you no one was beyond redemption even as we were concluding the story of God wiping out Sodom whom the angels claimed was beyond redemption.  Not five righteous people  there.

Step back a bit.  We've been discussing our Fallen Flesh. We tend to see ourselves as individuals. More: as special individuals.  Our goals are specific to us.  No one else has them.  No one else wants to be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a novelist.  No one else wants to find that perfect person and live with them forever. or find all those perfect women in bed with them over and over, falling like one captured lover after another.  Except, of course, that simply isn't true.

As we go through life, we discover everyone has some variation on our dream.

They may want to work for it or have it handed to them.

They may believe it will come from work or just fall into their laps.

They may have attained it by work or by it falling onto their laps.

Almost certainly, however they got it, they will surely believe you should have to work for it.

And then we go on Facebook and realize we agree with a lot of people.  And disagree with a lot of them.  And some of them hate us without even meeting us.  Some of them call us "trolls" for merely showing up somewhere and pointing out they are foolish. And ignorant. And uninformed.  And really hate us.  While we are DOING OUR BEST NOT TO SHOUT AT THEM!!!!!  Honestly, how can they be that way?

Or on YouTube where they get really uninformed about media and politics and books and Hilary and Don and Kim and we have to clear things up and they again get this attitude like they know SO much about the world and then a bunch of them gang up and start calling us names and try to chase us out of town make threats like they'd grab us and rape us if they could...

Oh...

Kind of like a virtual Sodom?

And we discover we are all a lot more alike than we first imagined. A lot more like those guys in Sodom than we want to admit, than some of us could ever admit.

And a quote comes wafting back to me from somewhere a long time ago, something I read but forgot, the way we so often forget the Bible, the Word.


“If you look at the world, you'll be distressed. If you look within, you'll be depressed. If you look at God you'll be at rest.” 
― Corrie ten Boom


Cornelia "Corrie" ten Boom (15 April 1892 – 15 April 1983) was a Dutch watchmaker and Christian who, along with her father and other family members, helped many Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. She was imprisoned for her actions. Her most famous book, The Hiding Place, describes the ordeal.

I present a very long story here from her life. A story about forgiveness which has haunted me since I read it in another source.  I print it up whole here:

Corrie ten Boom
As appeared in 






An artist's portrait of Corrie ten Boom
It was in a church in Munich that I saw him, a balding heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands. People were filing out of the basement room where I had just spoken, moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear.
It was 1947 and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives.
It was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed-out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown.
“When we confess our sins,” I said, “God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever.”
The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. People stood up in silence, in silence collected their wraps, in silence left the room.
And that’s when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones.
It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights, the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor, the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister’s frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsie, how thin you were!
Betsie and I had been arrested for concealing Jews in our home during the Nazi occupation of Holland; this man had been a guard at Ravensbrück concentration camp where we were sent.
Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out: “A fine message, fräulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!”
And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course–how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women?
But I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. It was the first time since my release that I had been face to face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.
“You mentioned Ravensbrück in your talk,” he was saying. “I was a guard in there.” No, he did not remember me.
“But since that time,” he went on, “I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein”–again the hand came out–“will you forgive me?”
And I stood there–I whose sins had every day to be forgiven–and could not. Betsie had died in that place–could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking?
It could not have been many seconds that he stood there, hand held out, but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.
For I had to do it–I knew that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. “If you do not forgive men their trespasses,” Jesus says, “neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.”
I knew it not only as a commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Since the end of the war I had had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality.
Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.
And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion–I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.
“Jesus, help me!” I prayed silently. “I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.”
And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.
“I forgive you, brother!” I cried. “With all my heart!”
For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.
And having thus learned to forgive in this hardest of situations, I never again had difficulty in forgiving: I wish I could say it! I wish I could say that merciful and charitable thoughts just naturally flowed from me from then on. But they didn’t.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned at 80 years of age, it’s that I can’t store up good feelings and behavior–but only draw them fresh from God each day.
Maybe I’m glad it’s that way. For every time I go to Him, He teaches me something else. I recall the time, some 15 years ago, when some Christian friends whom I loved and trusted did something which hurt me.
You would have thought that, having forgiven the Nazi guard, this would have been child’s play. It wasn’t. For weeks I seethed inside. But at last I asked God again to work His miracle in me. And again it happened: first the cold-blooded decision, then the flood of joy and peace.
I had forgiven my friends; I was restored to my Father.
Then, why was I suddenly awake in the middle of the night, hashing over the whole affair again? My friends! I thought. People I loved! If it had been strangers, I wouldn’t have minded so.
I sat up and switched on the light. “Father, I though it was all forgiven! Please help me do it!”
But the next night I woke up again. They’d talked so sweetly too! Never a hint of what they were planning. “Father!” I cried in alarm. “Help me!”
His help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks.
“Up in that church tower,” he said, nodding out the window, “is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops.
“I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive someone, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.”
And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversation. But the force–which was my willingness in the matter–had gone out of them. They came less and less often and at last stopped altogether.
And so I discovered another secret of forgiveness: that we can trust God not only above our emotions, but also above our thoughts.
And still He had more to teach me, even in this single episode. Because many years later, in 1970, an American with whom I had shared the ding-dong principle came to visit me in Holland and met the people involved. “Aren’t those the friends who let you down?” he asked as they left my apartment.
“Yes,” I said a little smugly. “You can see it’s all forgiven.”
“By you, yes,” he said. “But what about them? Have they accepted your forgiveness?”
“They say there’s nothing to forgive! They deny it ever happened. But I can prove it!” I went eagerly to my desk. “I have it in black and white! I saved all their letters and I can show you where–”
“Corrie!” My friend slipped his arm through mine and gently closed the drawer. “Aren’t you the one whose sins are at the bottom of the sea? And are the sins of your friends etched in black and white?”
For an anguishing moment I could not find my voice. “Lord Jesus,” I whispered at last, “who takes all my sins away, forgive me for preserving all these years the evidence against others! Give me grace to burn all the blacks and whites as a sweet-smelling sacrifice to Your glory.”
I did not go to sleep that night until I had gone through my desk and pulled out those letters–curling now with age–and fed them all into my little coal-burning grate. As the flames leaped and glowed, so did my heart.
“Forgive us our trespasses,” Jesus taught us to pray, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In the ashes of those letters I was seeing yet another facet of His mercy. What more He would teach me about forgiveness in the days ahead I didn’t know, but tonight’s was good news enough.
When we bring our sins to Jesus, He not only forgives them, He makes them as if they had never been.


Forgiveness.  

 If anyone deserved to be unforgiven, it was the Nazi.  Instead of being in Hell, he  found eternal life.  Instead of destroying her witness, ten Boom found the depths of love that God has are unfathomable.  God forgive me when I forget either of those lesson.

 But, you ask, how can this be?  What happened in Sodom that was so bad that God destroyed the whole city?

First, we all know now where sexual sin leads.  To a life of degradation, to a life of being a slave to desires and sometimes to a life of slavery fro some women and men, often against their will.  The fact it can be abused to the extent it takes choice away from others and allows someone to think they are god, to create the illusion they rule another's life when in fact they are also slaves to their own desires, makes it one of the deepest, most binding sins.  The proliferation of pornography on the internet, the stated notion by some that "porn powers the internet", the idea that somehow it is responsible for the rush to develop more realistic video games, the notion, actually assumption that it is a given,  advanced in Westworld that humans will created androids and then use them for sexual and violent fantasy fulfillment, all makes ti a little clearer why sexual sin seems tomhave a soecial place in God's list of taboos.  

Second, we also know of the diseases that run rampant of sexual desires are not kept to the one person in marriage.  The Law would define adultery of any sort as sin.

Let's take a moment here and point out again that the urge for homsexual rape expressed by the men in the story was not the reason for Sodom's destruction.  It was coming on anyway.  Already decided. Sodom and the cities around were not keeping any idea of single marriage or of faithfulness to the spouse.  This final incident merely demonstrated to us and to Lot the depths to which the city had sunk and the fact Lot could not stay there any longer.  They would have killed him soon for protecting the strangers.

It also demonstrated that the sin of lust comes from the eyes.  The angels blinded their assailants,  The desire for the angels came from seeing their beauty and God took away the organ that misled them.  Emphasizes too the fact revealed by every scientific study done in our age that men are excited by what they see, the underlying power of pornography.  The seduction of the eye leads to actions.  Look at how attractive the fruit on that tree is Eve, Adam.

But, back to disease, imagine the people were dying of AIDS or gonorrhea or syphilis.  These are all deadly, fatal diseases, the last involving the mental deterioration of the sick person.  All can exist without obvious symptoms for a time and be spread by the sick person to others by sexual contact.  The modern world has forgotten how deadly the last two are because we have developed drugs that treat them successfully, though there was a rumor during the Vietnam War that soldiers had contracted a particularly virulent form of syphilis and were being sent to a far off island to die.  




Here are the various symptoms and treatments today:


Gonorrhea, Chlamydia, and Syphilis

What are gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis?

Gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis are sexually transmitted infections (STIs). These three STIs can cause serious, long-term problems if they are not treated, especially for teenagers and young women.

What causes gonorrhea and chlamydia?

Both gonorrhea and chlamydia are caused by bacteria. The bacteria are passed from one person to another through vaginal, anal, or oral sex. Gonorrhea and chlamydia often occur together.

Where do these infections occur?

Gonorrhea and chlamydia infections can occur in the mouth, reproductive organs, urethra, and rectum. In women, the most common place is the cervix (the opening of the uterus).

At what age do these infections most commonly occur?

Although gonorrhea and chlamydia can occur at any age, young women and teenagers who are sexually active are at greater risk of both infections.

What are the symptoms of gonorrhea and chlamydia?

Women with gonorrhea or chlamydia often have no symptoms. When symptoms from either infection do occur, they may show up 2 days to 3 weeks after infection. They may be very mild and can be mistaken for a urinary tract or vaginal infection. The most common symptoms in women include the following:
  • A yellow vaginal discharge
  • Painful or frequent urination
  • Vaginal bleeding between menstrual periods
  • Rectal bleeding, discharge, or pain

How are gonorrhea and chlamydia diagnosed?

To find out if you have gonorrhea or chlamydia, your health care professional may take a sample of cells from your throat, cervix, urethra, or rectum where the infection may occur. Gonorrhea and chlamydia also can be detected with a urine test.

What complications are associated with infection with gonorrhea and chlamydia?

Both gonorrhea and chlamydia can cause pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), an infection that occurs when bacteria move from the vagina and cervix upward into the uterus, ovaries, or fallopian tubes (see FAQ007 “Pelvic Inflammatory Disease [PID]”). After a woman is infected with gonorrhea or chlamydia and if she does not receive treatment, it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks before she develops PID.

How is infection with gonorrhea and chlamydia treated?

Gonorrhea and chlamydia are treated with antibiotics. You will need to be retested 3 months after treatment to see if the infection is gone.

What causes syphilis?

Syphilis also is caused by bacteria. It differs from gonorrhea and chlamydia because it occurs in stages. It is spread more easily in some stages than in others.

How is syphilis spread?

The bacteria that cause syphilis enter the body through a cut in the skin or through contact with a syphilis sore known as achancre. Because this sore commonly occurs on the vulva, vagina, anus, or penis, syphilis most often is spread through sexual contact. It also can be spread by touching the rash, warts, or infected blood during the secondary stage of infection.

What are symptoms of syphilis?

Symptoms of syphilis differ by stage:
  • Primary stage—Syphilis first appears as a painless chancre. This sore goes away without treatment in 3–6 weeks.
  • Secondary stage—The next stage begins as the chancre is healing or several weeks after the chancre has disappeared, when a rash may appear. The rash usually appears on the soles of the feet and palms of the hands. Flat warts may be seen on the vulva. During this stage, there may be flu-like symptoms. This stage is highly contagious.
  • Latent and late stages—The rash and other symptoms go away in a few weeks or months, but the disease still is present in the body. If untreated, the disease may return in its most serious form years later.

How is syphilis diagnosed?

In the early stages, discharge from open sores is examined to see if syphilis bacteria are present. In later stages, a blood test also can be done to check for antibodies to the bacteria.

What are complications of syphilis?

Late-stage syphilis is a serious illness. Heart problems, neurologic problems, and tumors may occur, leading to brain damage, blindness, paralysis, and even death. The genital sores caused by syphilis also make it easier to become infected with and transmit human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

How is syphilis treated?

Syphilis is treated with antibiotics. If it is caught and treated early, long-term problems can be prevented. The length of treatment depends on how long a person has had the disease.

And from the Centers for Disease Control, the official govenrment stats:

How common is syphilis?

During 2015, there were 74,702 reported new cases of syphilis, compared to 44,784 estimated new diagnoses of HIV infection in 2014 and 395,216 cases of gonorrhea in 2015.1, 2 Of syphilis cases, 23,872 were of primary and secondary (P&S) syphilis, the earliest and most transmissible stages of syphilis. During the 1990s, syphilis primarily occurred among heterosexual men and women of racial and ethnic minority groups; during the 2000s, however, cases increased among men who have sex with men (MSM).3 In 2015, MSM accounted for 81.7% of all P&S syphilis cases among males in which sex of sex partner was known.
Congenital syphilis (syphilis passed from pregnant women to their babies) continues to be a concern in the United States. During 2015, 487 cases of congenital syphilis were reported, compared to an estimated 128 cases of perinatal HIV infection during 2014. 1 Congenital syphilis rates were 8.0 times and 3.5 times higher among infants born to black and Hispanic mothers (35.2 and 15.5 cases per 100,000 live births, respectively) compared to white mothers (4.4 cases per 100,000 live births).

How do people get syphilis?

Syphilis is transmitted from person to person by direct contact with a syphilitic sore, known as a chancre. Chancres occur mainly on the external genitals, vagina, anus, or in the rectum. Chancres also can occur on the lips and in the mouth. Transmission of syphilis occurs during vaginal, anal, or oral sex. Pregnant women with the disease can transmit it to their unborn child.

How quickly do symptoms appear after infection?

The average time between infection with syphilis and the start of the first symptom is 21 days, but can range from 10 to 90 days.
Most of these diseases likely existed back then.  AIDS may the new element in our modern drama but we can't really be sure since it came from an African area where sexual deviation is widely practiced.  Some early mutation could have existed then.  In a genetic pool with everyone having sex with everyone else as it was in the antediluvian world,  one mutation would have made these already awful diseases even deadlier.    They would have passed from one person to another and, as we see clearly above, from mother to unborn child.  They had already traveled from one city to another and God spared Zoar only for Lot to go there so it was likely less infected than the rest. Perhaps spared the mutation.  It seems quite possible that the highly concentrated cauldron of sexual activity would have or already had developed something a lethal as aids with nothing like modern medicine to combat it. If god acted to destroy the world only after he had the patience to give them time to make the best choice, he may have acted in the thoroughly corrupt S and G only after they had been given the example of Lot to see how they should act toward strangers.  Noah was ignored and allowed to take the ark.   Lot was ignored and would have been killed if he wasn't also rescued and allowed to leave.  I suggested in the first case that the giant mutation had gotten so bad it would have ruined the human strain and I suggest now that whatever STD's existed in S and G would have spread like wildfire and taken all humanity with it had it not been stopped there.
God's command that humanity be scattered had its reasons which we see clarified in our current studies of epidemics.  Experts suggest many of the deadliest diseases we have seen over the centuries, from leprosy to the plague were far less deadly than they may have been because travel was so limited.  For instance, we know that the native american population was wiped out as much by the diseases that were brought to the New World as by the aggression of their invaders.  Their immune systems had  no protection from the illnesses the sailors brought.  The black Plague spread through Europe because trade had so effectively because rats rode on the commerce ships, drawn by grain and supplies on board and they took their flea infestations with them.  Trade among the Middle Eastern areas during Abe's time could have brought all manner of disease to Abe and his band.  God could not allow the death of the first Hebrew.  We see the idea of people going back in time to change events in the current TV show Timeless and can recall the old question : "What if you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler before he had the chance to influence Germany?"
There were no antibiotics then.  There was no way to keep disease from ravaging our Fallen Flesh and being passed from one generation to the next.  
God imposed a "quarantine" on the cities,  They would have become the source of the world
 destruction, have physically corrupted the pure line.  e.g., Ruth the Moabite, who was an ancestor of  Jesus, came for the result of the sorry union of Lot and one of his daughters.  God took even this misguven sexual act and used it in his plan of the Line,

But, despite all the evil  and the likelihood of disease, God gave, will always give humanity every chance to accept His will and act accordingly.

But what does this have to do with the contradiction?  How can anyone be saved and yet some be beyond redemption?
Did God put Lot there to begin with?  He allowed it.  Did Lot lead a righteous life?  Peter says he did.
2Pe 2:4 For if God did not have pity for the angels who did evil, but sent them down into hell, to be kept in chains of eternal night till they were judged;
 5 And did not have mercy on the world which then was, but only kept safe Noah, a preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when he let loose the waters over the world of the evil-doers;
 6 And sent destruction on Sodom and Gomorrah, burning them up with fire as an example to those whose way of life might in the future be unpleasing to him;
 7 And kept safe Lot, the upright man, who was deeply troubled by the unclean life of the evil-doers
 8 (Because the soul of that upright man living among them was pained from day to day by seeing and hearing their crimes):
 9 The Lord is able to keep the upright safe in the time of testing, and to keep evil-doers under punishment till the day of judging;
 10 But specially those who go after the unclean desires of the flesh, and make sport of authority. Ready to take chances, uncontrolled, they have no fear of saying evil of those in high places:
 11 Though the angels, who are greater in strength and power, do not make use of violent language against them before the Lord.
 12 But these men, like beasts without reason, whose natural use is to be taken and put to death, crying out against things of which they have no knowledge, will undergo that same destruction which they are designing for others;
 13 For the evil which overtakes them is the reward of their evil-doing: such men take their pleasure in the delights of the flesh even in the daytime; they are like the marks of a disease, like poisoned wounds among you, feasting together with you in joy;
 14 Having eyes full of evil desire, never having enough of sin; turning feeble souls out of the true way; they are children of cursing, whose hearts are well used to bitter envy;
 15 Turning out of the true way, they have gone wandering in error, after the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who was pleased to take payment for wrongdoing;
 16 But his wrongdoing was pointed out to him: an ass, talking with a man's voice, put a stop to the error of the prophet.
 17 These are fountains without water, and mists before a driving storm; for whom the eternal night is kept in store.
 18 For with high-sounding false words, making use of the attraction of unclean desires of the flesh, they get into their power those newly made free from those who are living in error;
 19 Saying that they will be free, while they themselves are the servants of destruction; because whatever gets the better of a man makes a servant of him.
 20 For if, after they have got free from the unclean things of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again taken in the net and overcome, their last condition is worse than their first.
 21 For it would have been better for them to have had no knowledge of the way of righteousness, than to go back again from the holy law which was given to them, after having knowledge of it.
 22 They are an example of that true saying, The dog has gone back to the food it had put out, and the pig which had been washed to its rolling in the dirty earth.
 (BBE)

These verses gave me the structure for much of this first section and the inspiration, verses found while studying God's words concerning men seeking leadership before the church and the nations, about people who mock authorities, attack them relentlessly to increase their own power and chase after the flesh, and mislead believers who are actually more interested in the desires of the flesh, like health and wealth or their own glory in the pulpit, than in obedience to God. And Pete was never one to mince words o we can be certain this was the unvarnished truth.  And an accurate comparison. 

The thing of it is: in every case, the truth is presented, Noah, Lot to his in-laws, and only then does God act. Every chance to repent was given.  Is given.  
No one is beyond redemption.
Unfortunately, it seems many will not take the offer to escape and won't believe because the desires of the Fallen Flesh pull them in to an eternal dying.  
No one before the flood would listen.  Not even those who knew lot in Sodom would listen. The seductive liar always has humanities ear, even when the truth is revealed, we humans often refuse to listen.  Our sins deafen us.  Our eyes deceive us.  Our foolish hearts go on.
In the thrall of  Fallen flesh, humanity doesn't take the offer. WE are the reason salvation is imperfect.  God knows who will and won't accept Him. But he still offers.  I wonder if some part of Him hopes He's wrong, that His perfection will fail and some lost whore, some diseased pervert will actually come forward and go with Lot, will help Noah in building the ark. But that may just be me adding to God.  
When we find Biblical contradictions, it is only the flesh misleading us yet again.  


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