2013 picture of Ray Sparre

Insightful Musings on theScriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67


October 10, 2014

Good good morning, dear ones.

In just 30 minutes from now, I am supposed to be back at the console of my sawmill…still set up a few miles away. I made a big pile of sawdust with it yesterday. It will be a mountain by the end of the day. But this Port Orford Cedar is about as pleasantly aromatic as any wood out there. A visitor came by and said, “I wish my wife could find a perfume like that!”

May your day smell nice.

Love, Dad/Ray.

10 October
Hebrews 12:1-13
Focus: "’Make level paths for your feet’, so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.” Hebrews 12:13.

An overview of this reading leads me to understand that, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not, WE ARE IN A RACE. It’s not some optional recreational event, but an ongoing struggle against sin, self, and Satan—all the way to the finish line of eternal life. Far too many never finish the course as prescribed. “Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. ‘Make level paths for your feet,’ so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.” Do you see the implied importance of personal daily devotions in this exhortation? I hope so.

There is a lot of preaching that could be done from this little passage. But for now I wish to raise a pair of short simple questions:

  1. Who are the LAME?
  2. Who are the HEALED?
May I suggest that the LAME represent all of us BC—before Christ. The HEALED are all of us AC—after Christ. Sin is a universal condition that leaves us all quite LAME in doing the will of God that leads to Life. If the condition is not diagnosed, treated, and HEALED, it can only lead to DISABLEMENT—and worse. Praise God for the healing power of Christ.

I am convinced that it is primarily this kind of healing that is prophesied by Isaiah: “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are HEALED. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:4-6).

“Keep out of your life all that will keep Christ out of your mind.”

PS: Incidentally, I judge that many misrepresent and miss-apply the passage in Isaiah 53 in ways that put people on a tangent and cause them to become overly preoccupied with physical health and healing. Some will insist on making divine healing so integral to the Gospel as to teach that one by faith receives physical healing from infirmity in the same way one by faith receives spiritual healing from sin. The glaring volume of practical flaws within this spin on Biblical interpretation is enough to convince me that something is very contradictory with this form of dogma. Haven’t you noticed that the same people who promote this view are themselves wearing glasses, balding, paunching, wrinkling, weakening, ailing, and eventually dying? Isn’t dying very unhealthy? How often do we hear of confirmed cases of healing from old age?