2013 picture of Ray Sparre

Insightful Musings on the Scriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67


April 25, 2015

Hello in the late afternoon, dear people.

My day sure didn’t go as planned. I checked out some trees that some friends wanted me to look at. I did, and ended up going back and dropping a dead pine, and removing some big broken branches from a maple. Easy. The same people came by our place after as I wanted them to see Thano’s splitter perform. They stayed for lunch. You know how it goes—just a casual unstructured Saturday. Earlier, Becki and I knocked out our little walk/jog routine. Now I’m going to go out and attack some of the tall grass.

Have a great rest of the day.

Love, Dad/Ray.

25 April
Mark 14:27-52
Focus: "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” Mark 14:34.

These are the anguished words of Jesus to His three inner-circle disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane. We could never face the same set of circumstances as the one Jesus faces here. We can only imagine what He must have been feeling in His humanity in anticipation of His divinely pre-ordained time of torment, death, while being weighted down with the sins of the entire human race. Nevertheless, you can be sure that, at some point in your future, you too will face very difficult circumstances that will make you too feel “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” I believe this is an inescapable feature of our humanity.

When I was a young schoolboy, I remember our teachers leading the class in occasional “fire drills” where we would practice how we would conduct ourselves in the event that a fire were to break out in the school. There was a point of wisdom to that, even though it was most likely that a fire would never happen. But just in case, we were ready.

How many people practice “crisis drills” where they establish for themselves specific plans and procedures to prepare for meeting times of crisis?—those deep, dark, difficult times of feeling “overwhelmed with sorrow.” That strikes me as wisdom too. For it is not a matter of IF such a crisis would come, but WHEN. Such DIFFICULT TIMES WILL COME. Period. Eliphaz recognized, “Man is born to trouble as surely as the sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7).

In preparing to meet those hard times, Jesus, by His example, sets forth the best standard you could ever find.

  1. He sought the strength, support, and guidance of the Father in prayer.
  2. He enlisted prayer support from others.

While His prayer partners kind of folded on Him in this instance, it remains a good course of action.

“If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley ~

PS: The issues that are boiling around us are rarely in alignment with objective intelligent reason. The gay and lesbian lifestyle and agenda do not make sense. The legalized killing of people (baby humans) in the name of women’s rights while making heavy laws to preserve the life of animals and plants presents a bizarre moral contradiction. And Marxist socialism does not make a lick of sense primarily because it has never worked!—yet that is exactly where our nation is fast heading.

In this reading Jesus presents a statement of valid reasoning at the point of His betrayal and arrest by the mob. He begins with a sound rhetorical question—“Am I leading a rebellion…that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me?” He backs up the question with undeniable fact—“Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts, and you did not arrest me.” Then He adds a simple statement that convinces me that there is something going on here beyond human thinking and public opinion—dark spiritual forces—“But the Scriptures must be fulfilled.”

Within the permissive will of the Sovereign Lord, the same spiritual forces are in the mix of today’s issues, conflicts, and world events. The Scriptures are being fulfilled—right on schedule.