THE WORD:

THE SWORD OF LIFE

The book of Hebrews contains a wealth of information to guide us in our Spiritual growth. I am choosing one of its most difficult passages for today's consideration, so please do not expect a scholarly presentation. One can get in over his depth so easily with this text, but that is not the message I want to show here. I recall a friend and colleague who did just that. He realized in the middle of his sermon that he was over his depth.

As you may know, I do a weekly newsletter entitled "Searching the Scriptures with Bob." That is also the overall title of one of my blog sites where this is also available. A portion of the sidebar of that each week is a daily reading guide for that week which will result in your reading the Bible through in one year's time. However, reading the Bible, unless you also make it a part of your life, guiding your activities every day, is not going to help you all that much. Satan is far more knowledgeable of the content of scripture than any of us are likely ever going to be. He is a master of quoting it out of context, twisting it, and misapplying it. Your only answer is to make it a part of your daily life so that you know the context, the meaning, and can use it against falsehood. You won't be able to do that unless you read it. You can use a different version every year.

"The word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." Hebrews 4:12.

The sword was the basic weapon of warfare of that era of history, and continued to be so for many years. It continued to be so right up to fairly recent history. It was, and is, a weapon of destruction; mostly used against a single person at a time. His emphasis is on how quick, how powerful, and how devastating it is; how thorough it is. He speaks of the joints, and the marrow. That thought takes my memory back to my childhood, when I watched my mother take a live chicken nearly every Sunday, and methodically reduce it to a stack of severed parts separating the wing and leg joints. At one time, years later, I did the same with domestic rabbits. You learn where and how to cut it up through doing it. And you expect to make mistakes while you are learning. With the chicken, pity the person who breaks the wish bone in preparing it for the cook. My mistake with the rabbit was that I prepared one for a friend and returned it to him much too soon. I should have placed it in the refrigerator for a while first. It still twitched as the muscles cooled down.

Thus it is with the word. It is capable of helping us in many ways, but we have to read it, understand it, and make use of it. Practice doesn't make perfect, but it certainly helps, thus, as I am coming to the end of the year, I have every intention of repeating the Bible reading guide of my newsletter again next year.

The word is a discerner of "the thoughts and intents of the heart." If you know the word, you will know where a false teacher is headed even before he gets there, and what his intentions are even before he reveals them, or even if he never tells you. You will recognize that he is dropping a word or changing a word here and there or perhaps changing the punctuation. A false teacher will often say Jesus Christ is a prophet or even a god, but scripture says he is God, John 1:1. Not a god, but God. Not only that, but he was "in the beginning with God." And all things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made." There, you have the answer to the origin of the whle universe. I read in my computer headlines this week of the explosion of the Comet Holmes. As the wise men of the East read the heavens and followed the star to Bethlehem to find the new born king, let us note this new and growing light of the heavens and remember that this is one of the signs that he shall return soon.