Insightful Musings on the Scriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67

Good chilly morning, dear ones.

My toes are kind of froze. I just returned from a jog. My Smart cell phone says it’s 25 degrees (can’t seem to find the degree symbol on this keyboard). Becki is preparing for her run to Woodburn to host a Bible Study at Country Meadows.

For extra credit and no extra charge, I’m sticking on an attachment. It’s an excerpt that Becki read to me the other morning that gives some insight into the past that I never knew concerning Hitler and the strategy he used to change his world and beyond. I judged that insight to be so relevant for our own juncture in history, that I had her type it up so I could share it with you. See what you think.

I wonder if I’m becoming a broken record on this theme of a HEART AFTER GOD. What do you think?

Blessings on your day. Love, Dad/Ray.

Many hard-to-answer questions arise surrounding God’s explicit instructions for the Passover ceremony. There’s the selection of a flawless lamb, the time and method of preparation, the painting of the lamb’s blood on the doorframes of each dwelling, and now I have to sort out the exclusivity of this provision and relate it to another required ceremony—the rite of circumcision.

My difficulty at processing this is minimized by my recall that circumcision was originally instituted as an OUTWARD sign of an INWARD covenant relationship with the LORD—A HEART AFTER GOD. Don’t we have here a strong implication that all the nice and meaningful religious ceremonies available to us really don’t amount to anything of value (nonsense) if they are void of A HEART AFTER GOD—without a circumcision of the heart? (Romans 2:28-29)

To be sure, this Passover ceremony is stuffed with meaning—later to be fulfilled in the New Covenant (Testament). Unfortunately, much of the meaning was reduced to religious form over time. But John the Baptist effectively revived the meaning when he exclaimed of Jesus, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

But don’t just look—seek, believe, embrace—with a (circumcised) HEART AFTER GOD.

Excerpt from the book, HOW EVIL WORKS by David Kupelian. (pages 14 – 15)

One of the greatest liars of the last century, Adolf Hitler, taught that the bigger the lie, the more believable it was.

During World War II, the U.S. government’s Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to today’s CIA, assessed Hitler’s methods this way:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Hitler himself, in his 1925 autobiography, Mein Kampf, explained with eerie insight the fantastic power of lying:

‘[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes. . .’

Truly the words of evil genius.