Month: April 2006

The New Home of Cerulean Sanctum!

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Folks, I may only do one or two more posts at the old URL for Cerulean Sanctum. The new URL for this blog is

https://ceruleansanctum.com

so please update your blogrolls and posts. The old Blogger-based Cerulean Sanctum will probably continue to exist for the rest of the year, but will be shut down eventually. I’ll be putting a redirect here in a couple weeks just to drive the point home. Any links you have to the old blog will work for a while. I haven’t figured out how to redirect them all, so I’ll probably just put in a generic redirect via 404 to the root level of ceruleansanctum.com. Commenting at the old blog will be turned off as well. All comments from the old blog were ported over, so if you had an exceptionally pithy statement, it will live on in the new blog. RSS and Atom feeds are being modified as well, so if you read via an aggregator, you will have to update those links also.

RSS – https://ceruleansanctum.com/feed/

The WordPress-based Cerulean Sanctum will be a huge work in progress. I jumped the gun a couple weeks ago by giving out the new domain name, so the cat was out of the bag and any opportunity I had to work on the new blog in secret was blown.

Sadly, despite the fact that the Blogger>>Wordpress import went well, Blogger post titles don’t play well with WordPress’s titling. Many links in the new blog are therefore broken. I’ll have to fix each one manually and that will take months. However, one of the reasons I had to redo Cerulean Sanctum was due to directory structure issues that made accessing old posts through API searches nearly impossible. So while links within posts will be stuck referring to the old blog, over time they will be corrected. For the time being, searches will work instead. Six of one, half dozen of another. In the end, better search capability is more important.

You’ll see new posts pertaining to the Christian purpose of this blog soon at the new site. I may repost some classics for a week at the new blog. We’ll see how quickly the design and link issues clean up. An extraordinary amount of work lies ahead. Thank you for being a reader. Your patience is requested. In a few weeks everything will be back to normal, I’m sure.

God is good…and I’m tired!

Blessings.

More Cowbell Award IV

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Yet More Cowbell!Sometimes it’s just silly, and sometimes it’s on a scale of utter mental vacuity that deserves its own prize. That’s why I must hand out another More Cowbell Award. Yes, “The Award That No One Wants to Win” is back with a vengeance. Perhaps it’s been holed up in a cubbyhole plotting its return in a blaze of black helicopter glory that will bring down democratic nations and establish a one world….

Hey, wait a second!

I hereby bestow the fourth More Cowbell Award on a group of folks who can’t disengage from the latest Jack Van Impe scarefest. Lately, their ilk has dominated so many discussions that even I’m growing paranoid listening to them.

Here’s a sampling of their wares:

    “Don’t ever buy anything from a Christian bookstore with a credit card. Those transactions are routed to a data vault in Antwerp and correlated. That’s how they know whom to round up for extermination.””The Roman Catholic Church has infiltrated the National Association of Evangelicals. Ted Haggard is nothing more than a papist stooge installed by Opus Dei.””Did you know that the U.S. Government has a warehouse in upstate New York filled with guillotines to use on Christians during the Great Tribulation?”

    “Zionist bankers in Switzerland are even now funding a phony vaccine that will actually be targeted for use on believers. We’ll be told its an avian flu vaccine, but its most devastating component won’t actually kick in until a year after UN workers administer the shot. Think Ebola here, except a thousand times more powerful. Ever seen an eyeball melt?”

    “Rick Warren’s PEACE initiative is an attempt by Illuminati groups to undermine the true Church and diminish its power so the antichrist can be more easily installed after the Temple is rebuilt in Jerusalem. This is all Bill Hybels’s fault.”

    “Whenever a church that uses electronic tithing methods receives your monthly tithe out of your bank account, one percent of your tithe is routed to the estate of Aleister Crowley in order to print more copies of The Necronomicon.”

    “Today, a red heifer was born in Bethlehem…”

Frank Black (guess the reference) couldn’t make this stuff up. Nor could he track it all down to a shadowy group portrayed in an eponymous TV show. Nothing about these crackpot ideas is shadowy.

Anyway, the fourth More Cowbell Award goes to

Christian Conspiracy Theorists

Honestly, I’ve had to unsubscribe from a number of formerly rational blogs of formerly respectable Christian organizations. They once legitimately pursued heretical thinking in the Church, but now resemble little more than conspiracy sites run by folks who find nefarious global plots against Christians under every rock. There’s healthy discernment and then there’s just fearmongering.

Part of the problem is a lack of love. If perfect love drives out all fear, then we have to ask if folks are being loving (and loved) when the conspiracies start flying. Bad eschatology comes into play, too. Hyperkinetic dispensationalism run amok is threatening to drive hardcore orthodox amil- and premillennialists to drink. Maybe now’s a good time to be a Preterist!

Christians everywhere are up in arms about the pending DaVinci Code movie, yet we’re totally unwilling to silence our own who simply cannot shut up about harebrained conspiracies against Christians. By comparison, some of the cranium-busting hysteria trotted out as normal Christian thought today makes The DaVinci Code read like The Pokey Little Puppy.

Honestly, if someone can track down the company making all those guillotines being supplied to the U.S. Government, I want to buy their stock because they’re going to make a killing.

😉

Grace Amid Strange Fire

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And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD.
—Leviticus 10:1-2 KJV

If you’ve been reading through the McCheyne Bible Reading program for the year, you’ll be in Leviticus right now. It’s been a while since I read all the way through Leviticus, but the passage above, especially in its KJV rendering is well-known—especially among charismatics.

More than anything else, a reading through Books of the Law should give all us Christians today pause.

No sooner had God begun to lay out the proper way to perform tabernacle ceremonies when Nadab and Abihu fouled up the instructions. The penalty for their mistake was to die in a conflagration of the Lord’s doing. Strange FireEvidently enough of the two was left over for the remnants to be dragged outside the camp, but the point was frighteningly clear.

Commentaries conjecture about the nature of the strange fire that was offered. Many say that the two sons of Aaron were to take fire consecrated from the altar to light their censers. Perhaps that took fire from another source. Others claim God’s admonitions concerning incense within the tabernacle were only mentioned later in Leviticus, so the very act of using incense at all before God authorized it was their downfall. No matter the exact reason, something was amiss in the way that the two went about their new work.

Steve Camp wrote a song many years ago called “Stranger to Holiness” from an album that was one of my favorites of his. The title of that song continues to drive home to me that most of us are no better than Nadab and Abihu. And while it’s true that like them we’ve been consecrated, the difference between us and them is a chasm bridged by the cross of Jesus Christ. Those two did not have the precious gift of grace that we so easily take for granted today.

We’ve just enjoyed the beauty of Christ’s death and resurrection in this last week. Without Christ’s atoning sacrifice, I suspect that all of us would have committed an act similar to Nadab and Abihu, two men who learned a stunningly harsh lesson about what it means to be a stranger to holiness.
Yet even to those of us who have some maturity and know better, our best intentions often wind up no better than a man with holy intentions, but who was still a man, sin and all:

And they carried the ark of God on a new cart and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. And Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart, with the ark of God, and Ahio went before the ark. And David and all the house of Israel were making merry before the LORD, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. And when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God. And David was angry because the LORD had burst forth against Uzzah. And that place is called Perez-uzzah, to this day.
—2 Samuel 6:3-8 ESV

Ever pull an Uzzah? I’m certain I have, though maybe not in as extreme a way as this man did. Nonetheless, I think all of us have had that zealous need to do the right thing, but we violated God’s holiness along the way. David’s response is just as human as ours, the anger that comes in the “Why, God?” questions that always follow best intentions that run afoul of our righteous Father in Heaven.

The nature of God is holiness. The nature of Man is anything but. God’s wisdom is in knowing how frail we are underneath such a crushing debt of sin when compared against His holiness. Only Christ’s sacrifice makes it possible for us, unveiled faces and all, to behold Him.

Moses struck the rock. Samson toyed with his sworn vow. Peter fell in with the Judaizers. And you and I are no better in our practice of the Faith than Nadab and Abihu.

The sooner we understand this, the sooner we understand the manifest depths of grace.

Tags: Strange Fire, Grace, Sin, Holiness, Nadab, Abihu, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God