Shocking Bible Secrets Revealed!
About once a year I manage to motivate myself to church and at my wife's ever so subtle urgings, we decided that today would be that day. This week was my birthday after all and I needed a good chance to test my new phablet bought courtesy of all the support I get here
(thank you steemers!)
On the way to church I decided to download a bible app, because honestly it's a book I haven't bothered to open in years. So I figured, "Maybe there's an app for that?"
Now you need to understand, our church doesn't really have a rich tradition of the fire and brimstone type of preaching that gets folks all fired up. But today's sermon definitely got me fired up and so I thought I would share it with you.
As you pull into our church it has one of those signs up that tells you what the day's sermon would be about. Sometimes it can be a bit kitschy, usually it's humorous. The title on the marquee today was "Shocking Bible Secrets Revealed!".
Our preacher his name is Ned (no relation to anyone here), had a sermon today on sacrifice. He opened by saying "The earliest reference to the words "burnt offering", are in Genesis 8:20 where Noah offered up sacrifices unto the lord and then invited his friends and relatives to eat."
Now I thought that was really strange. I had always thought that when they killed animals and burnt them on an altar to the lord, that it was just burnt away to ash. A wasteful process if ever there was any. Turns out I was wrong about that! So I actually learned something in the first 10 minutes of church. We may in fact have made history right there and I hear Satan has been sweater shopping today.
Then the sermon took a turn for the weird. He started reading from Leviticus.
He skipped from chapter to chapter, verse to verse. Mostly focusing on what was being offered and how it was prepared rather than any specific reasons as to why.
As this was going on, he kept smiling and nodding at the whole audience, but seemed to keep a special focus on me as I struggled to keep up. Despite my lack of skills here, I have a really good command of the English language. But biblical English slows me down a might, and while I generally consider myself a rather intelligent sort a fella, I was having a hard time keeping up.
Then at the end of the Leviticus part he slowed down a moment to explain something.
He said, that the purpose of the "law of sacrifice" was manifold, but that it could be divided into two basic concepts, the temporal and the spiritual.
The spiritual is pretty clear when you stop to think about it. Any time you take something from yourself and give it to others because you believe it's the right thing to do, you are doing good works. The more it means to you, the more it means to him. It pleases him and by doing things which please him it enriches your life spiritually.
The temporal is less clear, but when Moses lead the Hebrews out of Israel he divided them into two groups. The priestly Levite class and everyone else. The sole occupation of the priest class was to minister to the people. Helping them sort out God's will for them. This was extremely important because the bulk of people were illiterate. This class served not only as spiritual leaders but also temporal leaders. They were highly educated by the standards of the day. They weighed in on matters of the spirit, but also matters of the law. They were also the engineers and scientists and pretty much anyone else that labored with their mind instead of their body.
They held a special place in society and as a way of preventing anyone from exercising undue influence, they were also not allowed to hold outside employment.
Because they were not allowed to hold outside employment, they still needed to feed themselves and their families. So the laws of sacrifice were introduced.
Basically it was get an education yourself, or work to feed those who did.
This introduced a sort of problem. Those who spent their time in study and used their skills to benefit others were placed in a position of essentially living off the "kindness of others", despite superficially having more power.
But if you've ever run a canned food drive and seen the expired and dangerous foods people will donate because "It would be a shame to just throw it out", you'll understand.
For some reason people don't give their best. They just give whatever they feel they can do without. Also uneducated folks, especially in a primitive culture don't have a concept of proper food handling techniques.
So there's Leviticus, the book of the Levites. Primarily dealing with the law of sacrifice and this is the shocking part. Despite whatever it may have evolved into...
The thing is basically a cookbook!
It's telling folks what is good to "sacrifice" and what isn't. But preparing food this way, also extends it's shelf-life and helps prevent contamination from things like mixing utensils up, using the same knife you used to cut meat, to slice a salad and the like.
There was some more stuff in the sermon, like how when Jesus came, he was a threat to the establishment because he abolished this priest class and gave it over to the people. Each of us is now expected to learn on our own and go try to serve our fellow man the best we can with love and kindness. Literacy was becoming a real thing in those days so Jesus saying "Go seek the answers yourself!", must have come as a shock to folks that had an exclusive lock on learning for so long.
As we got up, to head home. I walked up to Ned, gave him a firm handshake and thanked him for a great sermon.
I asked him if he had noticed that Genesis 8:20 was probably the earliest recorded instance of a family barbecue.
He said "You're welcome Bill, glad you liked it and you know what? You're right, that was a family barbecue. They did a lot of that back in those days and exodus even has a whole section devoted to how to build a proper BBQ grill."
Then without missing a beat he said "Bill, just so you know, God's own Barbecue recipes are sitting right here in this book you put on your phone. Now, I'm guessing you're gonna go home and try 'em. So does that mean I should show up around 6?"
I told him, if he waited that long it'd be all gone.
Best to show up around 4.
Anyways, I got it. For the first time in living memory, I went to church and learned something completely new. On the way home a news report came through on the radio saying that the Devil had been spotted sweater shopping at Macy's.
Let's not forget the spiritual purpose of these sacrifices (which I find fascinating). Sure, Leviticus could be a text book for a food handler's class, and the Levites needed to eat.
The sacrifice of lambs especially was significant... First born males without blemish, killed a certain way, roasted over a fire.
The sacrifice was originally intended to point the minds of the people toward the real sacrifice of the Lamb of God, a firstborn Son without blemish. The ancient Israelites forgot what it meant and got a bit ocd about particulars when Jesus showed up and changed their traditions.
The ancient law was done away in Him, and they killed Him because they didn't realize they'd been waiting for Him for thousands of years!
Now days, we don't sacrifice animals, we take the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, or Communion, which we do in remembrance of Him (see Luke 22). This is intended to always point our hearts to his sacrifice. As we remember Him, we can always have His spirit to be with us. His Spirit guides us to wisdom, happiness, clarity of thought, and good choices.
According to Dante Mr. Satan is frozen in the central lowest level of hell, which is actiually a hellscape tundra wasteland, or somesuch.
But it sounds like early jews were kinda like shamanists, because that is the same way you do a sacrifice in shamanism. There is also a lot about how to prepare and preserve food, and the sacrificed animals are usually eaten by people participating in the rite. Another thing that is part of the ritual is the festive table, so the parallels are quite aparent.
Another thing is you can't get rich by being a shaman, because they take an oath to help people regardless the size of payment they are offered (but people are expected to offer as their means allow). Oh, and at least in Buryat culture learning and thinking for yourself is a virtue. :-)
Oh, also something else I was thinking about when writing this comment, but forgot. I think that the communists of early USSR took a page out of that cookbook. That is that was the reasoning behind low wages for medical and educational professionals. I bleive it was Lunacharskiy, who argued that the people would support those who care about their health and educate their children. It didn't work out as well as he hoped, though.
some how even today the 21st century its okay to cut the foreskin of a childs penis and a grown man suck the blood out. It's disgusting i agree so why is such barbaric practices allowed to continue? Because humans have been taught to question nothing. It is as it says. Plot twist. Nothing is as they said.
Um. I've seen this argument made quite a bit using almost exact words. First time I heard about that I was like WTF? I mean Russia has an orthodox church, that has some reputation for not being the most progressive people on the block, but this is the whole new level of weird. Anyhow, I don't think they do much foreskin cutting here since forever and even then most of it is part of jewish initiation. Still even in the czarist Russia times you were considered jewish if born from jewish mother, no foreskin cutting required (still some people did it), and only changing religion changed that.
As far as shamanism goes, perhaps it has something to do with living in much harsher climate conditions, but I don't think there is much "question nothing" mentality is associated with it.
Much more of such mentality has something to do with urbanization/education/economic formation, but thankfully these days it produces at least some "question everything" types also. I mean even in secular USSR there were a lot of question nothing (at least not outside the kitchen) types as in America, which includes mention of God in quite a bit of places for a secular country!
Curious tidbit: in contracts in western country there is a provision for "force majoure", i.e. acts of God. In Russia it says circumstances of irrisitable magnitude & legal acts by the governing bodies of Russian federation. While this whole idea is based on force majeure, and it is even an ideomatic phrase that comes from the same source as in other languages I still find it funny.
Don't buy into organised religion. Its an absolute cancer. Look at the history of organised religion! :( all it does is bring death and horde wealth. Keep religion personal and don't let an organised religion poison that. These people are nothing but wolves in sheeps clothing. Much love man! :P
@egjoshslim I upvoted because as usual I disagree, but it's a good conversation to have.
My opinion is to seek out truth whereever you can find it. If you open your mind to truth you will find it in the strangest places. In fact the whole point of this particular article is that I am not a religious person. I am deeply spiritual but I am not religious. Yet I went to church, opened a book and learned something.
Nothing he said was a lie. There was no attempt to manipulate me. He was explaining doctrine with plain facts.
The problem is not, nor has it ever been "religion". The problem has always been one of ideology and zealotry. Zealousness for any ideology is what will compel people to murder one another.
It doesn't matter if it's in the name of a God who made everyone and loves them all equally, or in the name of the state, or in the name of progress, or to unseat some power, or in the name of attaining some cultural ideal.
Killing people who disagree with us is just a thing that humans tend to do and over the millenia we've perfected it. No animal kills people, like people kill people.
Getting us to do that to people we don't know enough to disagree with?
That's the job of the those who preach blind devotion to ideologies and in fact it seems to be their primary job. As long as you can divide people into us vs them, you can build an army for any purpose you choose.
Saying "Organized religion is awful because religious people kill" is like saying, "Dogs are awful because dogs bite."
Yes, some dogs bite, some dogs should be put down because they are out of control. But that doesn't mean all dogs should be euthanized, or that their owners are foolish to keep them.
My religion has never organized a group to go kill people who disagree with them. In fact, it is known world wide as a major charitable organization that has sent millions of dollars of food and supplies to people suffering after every natural disaster in the last fifty years or so. The people are taught to love, not kill or manipulate. They are taught to think for themselves. Find truth for themselves.
Yes, there are really religions like that.
=o)
I believe any faith this manipulating the consciousness of people with a certain purpose.
because of faith killed too many people.
Faith never killed anyone. People did that.
Their choice to kill or die was theirs and theirs alone. The reason is irrelevant. Appealing to belief to justify harming someone else is allowing yourself to be manipulated.