"Alzheimer's.............................

In more ways than one humanity seems marked by, not just how quickly it forgets, but also how easily it can be conditioned to believe what was never so. In the Navy, they taught me Serbo-Croatian and Russian with an admonishment to “use it or lose it”. So it seems also with this faith that we refer to as Christianity. We look to our Bible to find form and foundation for what we profess to be truth; and yet the apostle Paul’s epistles were written to churches he, himself, had planted, but which, in short time, had already evolved into something other than the Gospel he had sowed into them. Indeed, we exist today as a body of believers, supposedly one in Him, yet very much divided by the Book. Can it be that the latter portion of that statement may well be attributed to our never fully grasping the truth of what those three words, "one in Him",actually are in the reality of the gift as given? In no way do I count myself “called of God” unto some prophetic ministry of reshaping the ecclesiastical institution’s over-all doctrinal dogma. I speak only out of my own journey, my own thirst to know Him, my own questions concerning what has been preached unto me. For over four decades, for example, sermon after sermon has declared my “sins” to have been “nailed to the Cross”, in such a way as to suggest that, having been cleansed at the foot of that altar, His righteousness became my righteousness and any further transgressions a matter of rebellion on my part. Yet there are few verses addressing Jesus as having accomplished that in such manner. 1st Peter 2:24 speaks of Him bearing our sins in His own body; 2nd Corinthians 5:21 says that He became sin for us; and Colossians 2:14 acknowledges the Law as being, symbolically, attached to the tree; but the third merely signifies a transition unto grace and the other two actually refer to the Savior having paid the price for Adam’s rejection of the Holy Ghost. When those words, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani” (God, oh God, why hast Thou forsaken me) came forth on Calvary’s hill, Christ, for a brief time, became all men, void of that connection possessed with His Father, that we might be restored unto Eden’s initial state of existence with the Spirit abiding within us. How far we have drifted from that theology. How drastically we have mutated exactly what that means in so far as knowing Him on a daily basis………