Monday Groceries with my Sidekick

Anna Violining @ the Symphony Orchestra: Lord of the Rings

The Shack: Book and Coming Movie.

Lengthy, I am sorry but The Shack, the book and coming movie are awful! 

Christian best sellers these days make for very bad theology which, we are told, doesn’t matter these days. Characteristically using emotionalism and a tragic story-line to answers life’s big questions and present a god who is no God. We must leave Christian Orthodoxy behind to indulge in a movie that will utilize the visual, music and dialogue to marry our hearts to this indefensible misrepresentation of a Holy God. God is Spirit and blatantly disregarding the second commandment alone should give us reason to pause. 

Here are some of this shack’s god’s heresies: “I am not who you think I am.” “I don’t punish sin.” “ I don’t condemn most to an eternity of torment.” This god does not create institutions… cue…The Church of Jesus Christ is an institution as is marriage between a man and a woman so go figure. Today’s judges would put this god to shame because she will let the guilty go free by invoking the “mercy triumphs over justice” line out of context. This goddess is all about, I quote, “ relationships, not rules.” Oprah’s beloved myth of many ways to God does not become true just because we want it to be. Seriously, next trip you take, try this illogical thinking at the local airport. All airplanes go to Disneyland so you can board any that you like…rules, seat numbers, maps, all irrelevant. Universal-ism, the notion that all dogs, cats, people eventually go to heaven, is a pipe dream for the autonomous, egalitarian modern man to his peril. 

And so, with the producer that gave us the religious confusion that was The Life of Pi, into the Shack we go with a side of polytheism and maybe Sarah Young’s other jesus will call us out. This is a god that has to bow to the squishy feel good zeitgeist and doesn’t even know what she is or what He said, ever. Vagueness is not an attribute of The God of the Bible, it never has been. The true God wants us to know Him and goes about revealing His character, His ways and His will in the Bible…clearly.

 I don’t know what is more frightening; that the god of the Shack does not know the Bible or that this god is indeed a she. 

To enjoy the shack, let us at least admit our utter discomfort with historic Christian Orthodoxy and our epistemological rebellion towards God’s only way of salvation--Jesus.The author of the Shack is very deliberate in using narrative to serve a false and dangerous theology. He seeks not to ignore the true God but to remake a god after our own image and likeness.

Art Study: Giotto di Bondone: Envy and Charity, 1306

1. Song: Beloved, let us love one another, James 4:2-3, Proverbs 14:30, Galatians 5:19-21, I Corinthians 13:4, Psalm 37:1, Proverbs 24:19, Joseph and his brothers, The tenth commandment Exodus 20, I Peter 2:1-3, Matt 20:1-16, Galatians 5:26, Titus 3:3.
2. PragerU: Don't compare yourself with others Prov 23:17, Daniel 6:1-8
3. Do not covet: seeking to own that which belongs to someone else.
4. Biography: We watched Michael Jackson's biography, Psalm 139:14, I Timothy 6:6,
5. Hymn: Count your blessings.
6. Read: Embrace the life you have “Occasionally, weep deeply over the life you hoped would be. Grieve the losses. Then wash your face. Trust God. And embrace the life you have.” - John Piper
7. Memory chapter: I Corinthians 13
8. Memory verse: I Timothy 6:6 But godliness with contentment is great gain.

Shakespeare Sonnet 29:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Will Durant: The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage

The journey begins...my humble desire to banish ignorance and pursue "...the contributions that genius and labor have made to the cultural heritage of mankind. -to chronicle and contemplate, in their causes, character and effects, the advances of invention, the varieties of economic organization, the experiments in government, the asprations of religion, the mutattions of morals and manners, the masterpieces of literature, the development of science, the wisdom of philosophy, and the achievements of art..." Will Durant.

Volume 1 should take me some fifty hours concentration so here goes...

Wearing of the Green - Joshua - Choir

Napkins or a hobby.

Meet Hazel

Little Britches: Mary Emma and Company

Sorting out Concerto Grosso by Vivaldi

Fur Elise

Art Class: Giotto di Bondone: Fortitude and Inconstancy, 1306

So much to talk about. Mental and emotional strength in times of difficulty, courage, Battle-hymn of the Republic, fickle, variable, moody, mutability, Galatians 6:9, Psalm 73:25-26, I Peter 1:13, Ephesians 6:10-18, James 1:17, I Samuel 15:29, Numbers 23:19, Psalms 33:11, Malachi 3:6, Shakespeare's Henry V, Damon and Pythias and on the attributes of Almighty God: Immutable.

Romeo and Juliet

Favorite Scene:

Friar Laurence. Hold thy desperate hand: 

Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art: 1990
Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote 
The unreasonable fury of a beast: 
Unseemly woman in a seeming man! 
Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both! 
Thou hast amazed me: by my holy order, 1995
I thought thy disposition better temper'd. 
Hast thou slain Tybalt? wilt thou slay thyself? 
And stay thy lady too that lives in thee, 
By doing damned hate upon thyself? 
Why rail'st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth? 2000
Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet 
In thee at once; which thou at once wouldst lose. 
Fie, fie, thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit; 
Which, like a usurer, abound'st in all, 
And usest none in that true use indeed 2005
Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit: 
Thy noble shape is but a form of wax, 
Digressing from the valour of a man; 
Thy dear love sworn but hollow perjury, 
Killing that love which thou hast vow'd to cherish; 2010
Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love, 
Misshapen in the conduct of them both, 
Like powder in a skitless soldier's flask, 
Is set afire by thine own ignorance, 
And thou dismember'd with thine own defence. 2015
What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive, 
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead; 
There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee, 
But thou slew'st Tybalt; there are thou happy too: 
The law that threaten'd death becomes thy friend 2020
And turns it to exile; there art thou happy: 
A pack of blessings lights up upon thy back; 
Happiness courts thee in her best array; 
But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench, 
Thou pout'st upon thy fortune and thy love: 2025
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.