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But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness Gal 5:22 |
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| Archived Manna: | |
Dear
Friend,
If you do not already have a habit of gathering daily manna the first thing in the morning (we can look at the example given to us in Exodus 16 and find the pattern for make it a habit. Establish your life and your schedule to allow you the necessary time to do your daily collection first thing every morning to give you the strength to make it through the day. And remember that today’s manna will not be sufficient for tomorrow; tomorrow’s manna must be collected tomorrow morning. Monday, January 8, 2024
Today's Passage : Today's Passage :The Tower of Babel Bible Verse:Genesis 11:1-9 (ESV) "Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar [Babylonia] and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.” So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth." Message:
Babel sounds like the Hebrew word for “confusion”; thus the passage says that Babel was named because it was the place where God confused the languages of the world. In 1700 B.C., Babylon was probably the largest city in the world. It again became the largest and one of the richest cities in the world over 1,000 years later, in the period when it was ruled by Nebuchadnezzar and his descendants (@ 600-450 BC). It was a city given to grand structures, including one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the great Hanging Gardens.
The story of the Tower of Babel would thus have made sense to anyone living in the Middle East. Babylon was a great crossroads of trade, a meeting place for cultures with widely disparate languages, and was repeatedly conquered and reconquered by great empires.
Secular history tells us that there was a great tower built in ancient Babylon proper, known as the Etemenanki (Sumerian “temple of the foundation of heaven and earth”). Nebuchadnezzar wrote that the original tower had been built in antiquity: “A former king built the Temple of the Seven Lights of the Earth, but he did not complete its head. Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words. Since that time earthquakes and lightning had dispersed its sun-dried clay; the bricks of the casing had split, and the earth of the interior had been scattered in heaps.” So this might well be the same tower as described by Genesis.Epiphany is an unusual feast day, because it celebrates a concept: the time when Christ became known among men as the Son of God, when people realized that the physical person of Jesus and the spirit of the Word were the same.
Three wise men (magi) with Jesus
Different churches choose to illustrate the Epiphany with different moments in Christ’s life. Most commonly, Epiphany is celebrated on January 6, representing the date when the Magi visited the Christ child. Some churches count Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist, when the Holy Spirit descended upon him in the form of a dove, as the Epiphany; many Protestant churches celebrate it as a season, extending from the end of Christmas (January 6) to Ash Wednesday.
The event described today is recounted only in the Gospel of John. Christ, who has begun to be hunted by the Pharisees of Judea for arrest, has traveled secretly from Galilee to Judea during a Jewish celebration. (The Festival of Booths, or Festival of Tabernacles, was a sort of Hebrew Thanksgiving in October, a week-long harvest feast. It was one of three annual festivals where families were supposed to travel to Jerusalem to celebrate.) When he begins to teach, he is recognized by the crowd. Some of them marvel at him and come to realize that he is the Christ, while others do not believe.
water of life
Christ uses the image of thirst in his teaching. The thirst is spiritual thirst, and Christ promises that those who thirst will not find simply a drink, but a river of living water, by believing in him.
Today as much as then, the world can seem to be a spiritual desert. Millions — probably, billions — of people seem to wander around in a daze, confused and lost, not able to quench their thirst for truth and justice, searching fruitlessly for meaning in their lives. They are dying of thirst, and yet they seem unaware that water even exists, right at hand. They reject the one compass that we have, the Bible, that would lead them out of the desert to the clear, pure water of life.
Celebration of the Epiphany is a day of great happiness. Today is the day we rejoice in our own salvation, and in the possibility that others may find the way. Let us give thanks and praise, with light and joyful hearts; today we remember the time in which we and others realized that Christ is God, and found the water of life.
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