John the Baptist the New Elijah

And they answered him, He was an hairy man, and girt with a girdle of leather about his loins. And he said, It is Elijah the Tishbite.

2 Kings 1.8

And the same John had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.

Matthew 3.4 (cf. Mark 1.6)

And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things. But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of Man suffer of them. Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist.

Matthew 17.11-13

Just as Jesus is the new Adam, Moses, etc. and Mary is the new Hannah, John the Baptist is the new Elijah.

Day Bidet #23

r/funny - Evolution of Art
Progress

Seven days, seven links:

  1. “[T]here is nothing to fear.”
  2. “Does money buy happiness, or does happiness come indirectly from the higher rank in society that money brings?”
  3. Soros and co. are coming have already come for the churches.
  4. Whites are the least “racist” people on Earth.
  5. “Mordecai adopted Esther not because he was allowed by Babylonian customs, but because he was motivated by the love of God to show his love to that little orphan girl.”
  6. Wild fish > farmed fish.
  7. “[L]ove does not stop at death.”

More:

Hold on to your butts! (Related: “Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October … to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study.” Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)

“If you begin with Genesis, then read through Malachi, then include most of the Apocrypha before you get to Paul, he sounds a lot different than if you begin in the Protestant Reformation and then read backwards to him.”

“[W]e need more backward people. In the subway in New York you can see the other type, the newspaper addict, who revels in social and political theories and lives the life of a drudge, foolishly flattering himself that because he is not working with his hands … he is better off than the poor white trash of the South.”

Some food for thought on hiring ministers.

“The problem with our current system … is that statements which should be suppressed are given free reign, while statements which should be freely expressable are suppressed. The trouble is that there are no non-radical ways remaining that can solve that problem.”

“[T]he small assemblies of Messiah’s people bear witness to the justice and life that has already arrived in the Sovereign Messiah’s political body, crucified, raised from the dead, exalted as Ruler of all peoples and nations.”

The Kingdom of God Is To Be in the Midst of Your Enemies

Lovis Corinth, “Das Große Martyrium”

The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing, who would ever have been spared?

Martin Luther

I Smell a (Democ)Rat

This report studies 8,954 individual updates to the vote totals in all 50 states and finds that four individual updates … are profoundly anomalous…. [I]f these updates were only more extreme than 99% of all updates nationally … Joe Biden may very well have lost the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia…. [H]is margin of victory in these three states relies on four [of the] most anomalous vote updates identified by the metric developed in this report.

“Anomalies in Vote Counts and Their Effects on Election 2020”

Happy Thanksgiving!

(And forgive the terrible pun in the title of this post.)

(Update: This thread summarizes the main findings of the article above in layman’s terms.)

Day Bidet #22

Holyrood Abbey, Edinburgh

Too many days, too many links (apologies):

  1. “Everyone serves. The only question is whom you serve.”
  2. “[I]ntense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward.… [S]weet receptors evolved in ancestral environments poor in sugars and are thus not adapted to high concentrations of sweet tastants.” (Related.)
  3. “The teaching of the New Testament is not about how to be admitted to paradise – it is about how to become the kind of human who can actually live in paradise. Paradise is not a moral achievement – it is an ontological change.”
  4. “[I]f the problem is the cancel culture, then … if people are opposed to it and actually want to fix the problem, then they have no other practical option at this point but to “act groupishly’ like a gang organized specifically with that objective in mind.” (Related.)
  5. “[F]rom the earliest records we have, the church strongly opposed abortion and took steps to care for unwanted children.”
  6. “The adoption of Bitcoin as global money is precisely the bullish case for Bitcoin.”
  7. Lydia McGrew contra Mike Licona on the differences between Matthew and Luke’s Christmas stories: “The various differences between the Christmas stories are not particularly difficult. … The behavior of Archelaus shortly after the death of Herod the Great, independently attested by Josephus, indirectly confirms Matthew’s account.”
  8. Related: Lydia McGrew contra Mike Licona on Matthew 27.51-53.
  9. Men, avoid ibuprofen. (Related.)
  10. “[P]eople in positions of religious authority can sometimes be more concerned about protecting their power than about caring for the sheep.”
  11. Children’s obligations to parents have decreased over time (with dysgenic results).
  12. “Jesus’s audience were captives to terror, and his call to ‘take up your cross’ was taking that terror head on.”
  13. Throwback. (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)
  14. “The coming in of the Gentiles does not signify the creation of a new people of God replacing the old people of God. Rather the coming in of the Gentiles symbolizes that God is restoring Israel herself to the task and commission for which she was created in the first place.”

More:

“[B]ig failures like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China are acknowledged, but blamed on their being insufficiently ‘democratic’. Sunkara doesn’t discuss why that seems to happen so often, nor how to stop it from happening again.”

“All these previous free feasts on Zion were liturgical celebrations led by David or one of his descendants, either celebrating the Sanctuary or the Passover. These themes come to a head in the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the same mountain, in which the Son of David leads a Passover (cf. Luke 22:1-2; John 19:14) and a renewal of the Sanctuary (John 2:19-21), providing a perpetual feast at his own expense (Luke 22:19).”

“It’s almost as if companies provide pleasant sinecures for affirmative action hires who can’t really cut it in the crucial jobs.”

Words like “pastoral” and “dialogue” (examples abound) are in some cases “used in a way that implies the opposite of orthodoxy.”

Defund the universities.

“[I]f our land is stained with innocent blood and makes things harder for the needy, pursuing sexual immorality and treating lies as truth, we have no right to protest God’s judgments.”

Carlyle on the New Millennium

Thomas Carlyle - Wikipedia

All the Millenniums I ever heard of heretofore were to be preceded by a “chaining of the Devil for a thousand years,”—laying him up, tied neck and heels, and put beyond stirring, as the preliminary. You too have been taking preliminary steps, with more and more ardour, for a thirty years back; but they seem to be all in the opposite direction: a cutting asunder of straps and ties, wherever you might find them; pretty indiscriminate of choice in the matter: a general repeal of old regulations, fetters, and restrictions (restrictions on the Devil originally, I believe, for most part, but now fallen slack and ineffectual), which had become unpleasant to many of you,—with loud shouting from the multitude, as strap after strap was cut, “Glory, glory, another strap is gone!”—this, I think, has mainly been the sublime legislative industry of Parliament since it became “Reform Parliament;” victoriously successful, and thought sublime and beneficent by some. So that now hardly any limb of the Devil has a thrum, or tatter of rope or leather left upon it:—there needs almost superhuman heroism in you to “whip” a garotter; no Fenian taken with the reddest hand is to be meddled with, under penalties; hardly a murderer, never so detestable and hideous, but you find him “insane,” and board him at the public expense, a very peculiar British Prytaneum of these days! And in fact, the Devil (he, verily, if you will consider the sense of words) is likewise become an Emancipated Gentleman; lithe of limb as in Adam and Eve’s time, and scarcely a toe or finger of him tied any more. And you, my astonishing friends, you are certainly getting into a millennium, such as never was before,—hardly even in the dreams of Bedlam.

Day Bidet #21

Seven days, seven links (one day late—on a very fateful Tuesday):

  1. “There is general agreement that there is no firm evidence for infant baptism before the latter part of the second century.”
  2. “If the media scared 50% of Americans into losing 10 pounds to reduce their risk from COVID, that would likely increase life expectancy for the whole country on average more than the virus reduces it.” (Related. Related.)
  3. “In no way does my livelihood depend upon signing a statement subscribing to inerrancy. But I also think that the gospels are very, very reliable, that real witness testimony turns out to be reconcilable often when at first it appears to be irreconcilable, and that harmonization should be given a good shot before one concludes that there is an actual error. That, I believe, is not piety but merely responsible scholarship.”
  4. “She was as sensitive as she could be when addressing the question … of whether she ever considered aborting me, but she had to admit that she did consider it.”
  5. “Even professors at major universities sometimes follow their hearts instead of the facts. Even professors from Harvard.”
  6. “[T]his is the first time in fifteen years of my writing about politics that I’ve been censored—i.e., told by others that I can’t publish what I believe or think—and it’s happening less than a week before a presidential election.”
  7. “[T]he final apologetic which Jesus gave is the observable love of true Christians for true Christians.”

More:

“If Trump were a tyrannical dictator, nobody would be able to get away with calling him one. … Hell, if it were okay to be white it would be okay to say it’s okay to be white, but it’s not okay to be white so it’s not okay to say it’s okay to be white.”

“Isaiah 5:1-7, understood in light of broader Scriptural themes, is a love story.”

The new normal. (Related. Related.)

“What’s Wrong with the Zeitgeist Movie?”

Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Demon World. Demon World.

“My life isn’t a game of self-actualization that can be won or lost, it is a gift to be received as primordially blessed and graced.”

The Faith Itself Is Torn in Pieces

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is space-trilogy.jpg

The Faith itself is torn in pieces since your day and speaks with a divided voice. Even if it were made whole, the Christians are but a tenth part of the people. … The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their mother and from the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus.

CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

Day Bidet #20

Seven days, seven links:

  1. “These kids are God’s creation that have souls and lives and hearts that need to be filled.”
  2. Fake News Wikipedia. Fake Wikipedia. Fake Wikipedia.
  3. “What the Samaritan did in in Jesus’s story of Lk 10.34-35 is inspired by the the witness of the Scriptures he was raised on in 2 Chronicles 28.15ff.”
  4. Anti-war Progressives (including many Progressive Christians) seem not to have noticed that Donald Trump is arguably the most anti-war president in a century. (Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)
  5. “There are numerous parallels between David and his divine descendant.”
  6. “This is what remembrance is about – the good and the bad.”
  7. “Romans 9-11 isn’t a mysterious detour at all, but a key and central part of Paul’s pastoral goal to address the Jew/Gentile conflict in the church.”

More:

“If our society needs the truth about important things, such as how to make people click on ads, good honest statistics will be allowed to happen sometimes. But if we want to figure out whether a drug has a positive cost benefit for one’s health—forget about it.” (Related.)

“Jesus is thus shown to be faithful to the stipulations of the Torah in spite of an infraction of the command not to touch.”

Chinese propaganda. (Related. Related.)

“What did ‘adoption’ mean to the Romans?”

Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World.

“The only way for us to really show the world that Christians are really nice people and don’t want to put kids in cages and stuff is to vote in ancient Canaanite god Moloch.”

Day Bidet #19

Seven days, seven links:

  1. “Job #1 for church leaders is getting their people to unplug. Because if your people are plugged in they will never, ever listen to you. Social media is drowning you out.” (Language warning.)
  2. “Fidelity considered the notion of keeping 5% of value in a multi-asset portfolio in Bitcoin as a means to reap greater returns over time regardless of market conditions.”
  3. “[T]he Gospel writers were convinced that Jesus was a source of holiness that was even more powerful than death itself.”
  4. “Their skulls and their bones were collected from the furrows of mass graves and assembled into imitations of men. They were sorted, carted for hundreds of miles on Southward-bound wagons, and, finally, sown in their native soil.”
  5. “I have been married to three different wives, but the same woman.”
  6. The Blue Establishment is redefining words in real time. And blocking links to anti-Biden news articles. And locking the press secretary’s Twitter account. “It is no longer exaggeration to say that the collusion between social media and media to manipulate our reality for the benefit of their political agendas has reached Stalinist proportions.” “Establishment disinformation … is killing Western democracy.”
  7. “[O]ur sense of community – a notion that spans TIME as well as space in Scripture – is seriously awry.” 

More:

The obesity epidemic seems to have begun over a century ago.

“Matthew 4:23-25 and 9:35 form an inclusio, a frame around the Sermon on the Mount (ch. 5-7) and the authority/miracle stories (ch. 8-9).”

Clown World. Clown World. Demon World. Demon World. (Related. Language warning.)

“[T]here are serious theological, ethical, and scriptural reasons for affirming that there is not merely spiritual discontinuity between man and animals but also significant material discontinuity.”

The happier you are, the less likely you are to live with your significant other while unmarried.

“Was the Divinity of Jesus a Late Invention of the Council of Nicea?”