Breakthrough series 9: No double jeopardy

Breakthrough series 6: Truly dead, truly alive

Its a new Day

Who are you?

I did do that

Meatloaf, so-called pejoratively by his childhood peers, sang, “I will do anything for love, but I won’t do that”.

His female accompaniment sarcastically sang two poignant lines, but excuse me quoting them verbatim: "You'll see that it's time to move on", and "You'll be screwing around".

That was 22 years ago, but now almost anything goes, be it in the name of love or otherwise.

Rise again and live

Like most believers, I have longed to see the authority of the church restored. I always felt that signs and wonders should flow from the cross.

Last night I was hit by a comparison I had never seen before. Elijah and Jesus were synonymous with incredible signs, which shook a nation. Then they both went up a hill, not to the top, but halfway up: the former to Carmel, the latter to Moriah.

Time only time, if we only had time, only time

Have you ever mixed up your dates so badly that you arrived a day late for a meeting? I did today and yes I know it could only happen to me.

It is supposed to be the 19th today and maybe it still is, somewhere on the planet, or maybe it still was when I headed off, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, for an important meeting - only to arrive at the security window and find that today ... is the 20th. Look I did what I could to correct them, but it was tough to persuade several hundred workers to reset their calendars, so I had to capitulate and realign my own system.

You would think, in this day and age, that we could all standardise, but alas it is just not to be. Yet, when it suits them, people still want us to adopt their standards. I had the same problem when I was in the army - my mom always noticed that I could keep the pace, whilst the rest of my battalion remained out of step. It reminds me of a time when she phoned my dad to tell him that some idiot was driving the wrong way down a highway, to which he aptly replied, "All the idiots on this highway are doing it".

There will be no more, tears in heaven

In 1991 Connor, Eric's Clapton's 5 year old son, accidently crawled through a 53rd floor apartment window and fell to his death on the streets below. Clapton arrived shortly after his son fell and for a long time his performances were deeply haunted and distracted by the tragedy.

Out of the crisis came the haunting ballad, "Tears in Heaven", which I am trying to master. It presents challenges for voice and for guitar, but it is such a rewardingly beautiful song. Sadly Clapton rarely sings the song anymore, because he has moved on and feels too detached to do the song justice.

He rightfully argues that there will be no more tears in heaven. Sadness sure can tear us apart down on the streets below and it can lead to untold sorrow. But there are still no tears in heaven.

The candle burnt out long ago, but the legend never did

On this day in 1962, Marilyn Monroe took a fatal dose of sleeping tablets to escape her complex life. Although she raised the ire of the secret service for her indiscrete sharing of JFK's inner thoughts and worked her way through a few husbands, she could find no satisfaction. How sad for a girl who had so much going for her ... beautiful, talented and desirable. Well it was not to be. After 36 hectic and often exciting years, she burnt out and left the world stage: but as Elton John noted, her legend lives on.

She reminds me of the woman at the well, one of the most insightful human exchanges ever recorded about Jesus. It was not a parable, but a real-life exchange that could take another two thousand years to fully interpret. What a remarkeable person He was, so wise and yet so profoundly economical in His style. He could convey a wealth of meaning in a sentence.

What advantage then has the Jew, Part 1

Paul's answer to that, in Romans 2, was, "much in every way, for they are the oracles of God". Paul even went so far as to say, "I would rather be condemned for my brethren, Israel's sake".

As for the apostles, well suffice to say that they agonized over their Jewish roots. Peter had a vision that led him to the gentiles, but he could not go that far without offending his loyalty to the Jews. That resulted in a major rift between Peter and Paul, which led to a conference presided over by James, the brother of Jesus. After much debate, James pronounced that there could be no doubting G-d's desire to reach out to the Gentiles, but in doing so, he instructed that the same Gentiles should be obliged to live lives that were sensitive to Jewish culture, in terms of clean living and noble conduct.

Celebrate Life

Coldplay's iconic hit, Viva la Vida, means "celebration of life", yet is about death. However, it is not a dark celebration of death, but the triumph of life over death.

The album cover, features Delacroix's "liberty leading the people (into victory)", symbolising the triumph of new life over the old enemy, "I used to roll the dice, feel the fear in my enemies' eyes, listen as the crowd would sing, now the old king is dead, long live the king".

Death boasts, "One minute I held the key, next the walls were closed on me, and I discovered my castles stand upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand". The poet alludes to great biblical imagery about building on sand and the folly of Lot's wife who looked back to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Then the triumphal albeit tragic refrain, which echoes that fateful day of Calvary, when the King of Life met the ruler of death in the darkened canyons of hell, "I hear Jerusalem's bells a ringing, Roman cavalry choirs are singing, be my sword, my mirror, my shield, my missionaries in a foreign field."

The words continue with haunting lyrics about the cold winds of death and shatttered lives, but what happened on Calvary's windswept sides will live on forever, beyond the stars, beyond the fullness of time, beyond the end of the ages, long after the worlds as we know are gone and the universe is folded up like a garment. Even then the bells of heaven will ring as a perpetual reminder of that one, climactic moment that forever changed the destiny of men, angels and heaven above.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net
Image courtesy: www.mpam-tetelestai.org/mission.html