[Today’s run: rest day]<\/p>\n
An interesting juxtaposition of ideas this weekend.<\/p>\n
Last night we watched the DVD Quantum of Solace, a James Bond (007) picture.\u00a0 As usual, Bond kills lots of bad guys, sometimes with guns, but sometimes with other things.\u00a0 And sometimes with his bare hands.\u00a0 He is a one man army.<\/p>\n
This morning in church we were in Judges chapter 14.\u00a0 It is part of the story of Samson.\u00a0 The chapter was very well exposited, as usual.\u00a0\u00a0 The preacher pointed out how Samson is introduced to his gift of strength through the attack of the lion.\u00a0 And the preacher also turned us over to Hebrews 11 to show us that Samson appears in the role of the faithful, even though it looks to us like he wasn’t doing so well.<\/p>\n
Another thing was in my mind.\u00a0 This morning’s newspaper had an article by two pilots who gave a presentation about a flight training accident that happened to them some time ago.\u00a0 They were explaining how they reacted on instinct, as a result of rigorous training, to avoid being killed in the accident.\u00a0 One\u00a0 didn’t even remember later exactly how he escaped, but he credited his training.<\/p>\n
So I had this picture in my mind of Samson and of James Bond\u00a0 (Daniel Craig) and these pilots who somehow found the “eject” button but don’t remember how.<\/p>\n
Samson was attacked by a lion and he was overcome by the Spirit\u00a0 (his “spiritual gift”?) and killed the lion with no weapon.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 007 maybe could have done it with a nail file, but Samson didn’t have a nail file.\u00a0 And Samson had no training.\u00a0 Later he killed 30 men, then 1000 men with no training and with either primitive weapons or nothing at all.\u00a0 The guy was a Holy Spirit Ninja, Israel’s better-than-007. Somehow when the time arrived, when superior strength, speed, skill were necessary they appeared.<\/p>\n
It’s kind of hard to imagine a super-soldier being a gift from God.\u00a0\u00a0 That had me wondering about other gifts.\u00a0 It is so easy to imagine them being “spiritual”, not in the sense of coming from the Spirit but of being ethereal, cerebral, or mental.\u00a0 (But aren’t cerebral and mental also in the physical world?\u00a0 If a man is a savant and can multiply large numbers in his head, don’t we count that as somehow being a real process\u00a0 inside the man’s head?)<\/p>\n
Our preacher pointed out that Samson’s position was one of being set-apart due to his vow.\u00a0 He was not to touch dead bodies, not\u00a0 to drink, and not get his hair cut.\u00a0 It was not too far into the story when Samson has already touched a dead body and already been drinking.\u00a0 So he leaned on God’s grace quite a bit.\u00a0 But he knew that if he did that one last thing he would no longer be set-apart, no longer be special.<\/p>\n
Back to faith.\u00a0 So Samson’s faith was that he could put himself in the way of 1000 angry Philistine men, without fear or trepidation, without training, without superior firepower.\u00a0 He had complete confidence that the sudden inrush of physical ability would come and he would prevail.<\/p>\n
No matter what you say about Samson, the guy had a lot of faith.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Today’s run: rest day] An interesting juxtaposition of ideas this weekend. Last night we watched the DVD Quantum of Solace, a James Bond (007) picture.\u00a0 As usual, Bond kills lots of bad guys, sometimes with guns, but sometimes with other things.\u00a0 And sometimes with his bare hands.\u00a0 He is a one man army. This morning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2541"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2543,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2541\/revisions\/2543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}