Hello, dear people.
We rose yesterday at 3:30am, New York time (1:30am, Oregon time) in order to get to the airport and connect with our flight back home to Oregon. We did so amidst some fresh snow. 3000 miles in the course of one morning is still an awesome modern marvel. It was an enjoyable week.
I’m looking at a work pile that is quite daunting. Not sure how far I’ll get with it today. All I can do is what I can—and see how it goes. I think there is a place for “Que sera sera”—with a godly bent. I’m now choosing to precede it all with an old man jog—something that only happened once in the last week.
Maybe I’ll stick on a photo of Jill, Christian, Joanna and me from our New York ski excursion.
Blessings on your day. Ray.
Wow! This is part of the inflamed rhetoric of a guy named Demetrius who ran a shop that crafted silver idol images that represented the goddess Artemis. He is here addressing a group of his fellow tradespeople whom he has called together to try to communicate his outrage—attempting to create a crisis out of the effectiveness of Paul’s preaching of the Biblical Gospel. If I exercise my imagination, his speech seems to be on a par with our own liberal media that loves to inflame public sentiment against anything that they deem to be in opposition with their own biased liberal agenda. I’m inclined to believe that we can discern motives behind a lot of today’s rhetoric by simply identifying the money trails involved. Typically, a trumped up crisis is based in a threat to such a money trail. That was a primary tactic method used by Demetrius to hype up his people. And it worked! “When the people heard this, they were filled with boiling rage” (v. 28, TPT). The scene progressed into a full-blown riot. “The frenzied crowd shouted out one thing, and others shouted something else, until they were all in mass confusion, with many not even knowing why there were there!” (v. 32, TPT).
I wonder how many of those worshipers of Artemis could testify to positive changed lives as a result of their worshiping Artemis—or as a direct result of their praying and maybe presenting offerings before those little silver shrines (that cost so much). I wonder if any could testify to their new-found forgiveness and freedom from sin—perhaps marriages healed, families restored, hate replaced by love, bitterness replaced by forgiveness, and conflict replaced by peace. My hunch is that most everyone in Ephesus boarded the Artemis worship wagon mainly because they perceived that everyone else was on board. If so, their views and engagements were not based upon personal objective thought, but on the popular subjectivity of the cultural environment. I have another hunch: Not much has changed from then till now!
Once again, I am grateful for a source of authority that is bigger than opinions—not even my own. And I revel in a faith that abounds with objective testimony and evidence of its validity—not just a bunch of emotional hype and rhetoric. I hope you can resonate and say a heart-level, “Amen!”