How Love Wins

The History Channel has been airing the new 5-part series of The Bible on Sunday nights as we approach Easter Sunday 2013. I've been watching it on DVR each night before I go to sleep - and have been very impressed at their surprisingly current and impressive effects/cinematography.  Some of the scenes are captured exactly as my mind's eye imagines them to be... and other scenes offer new perspective or new imaginative ideas on how things might have been 2,000 years before Christ.  For example, I love their depiction of Moses and the Red Sea.   Some of the early Sunday School books and picture Bibles show a dreamy, sunny day with the waters rolled back as if there are glass walls in an aquarium with the Israelites walking confidently through (and certainly that day could have been like that)... but the scene in the recent Bible series captivates your mind as the Israelites run for their lives through a storm of dark, deep terror with Pharoah closely behind and waves thrashing on each side... and scenes of Abraham and Isaac, Samson and the Philistines, David and the Philistines, Joshua and Jericho, Babylonians and Jerusalem, Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah the prophet... remind us of not only God's faithfulness but also mankind's sinfulness and God's redemption.  So far, the series has been true to the literal Word and history as we know it - truly an 'action flick' full of emotion and passion... just like the Israelites lived.  I can't wait to see how they portray Christ (what a tall order to take on...) and His plan for the world, the new covenant.

We have talked endlessly of current events such as arguing over gun control, our President's fruitless trip to the Promised Land and the evil going on in the middle east, the CIA finding new nuclear facilities in Iran previously unknown to us, the Muslim brotherhood continuing to manipulate poor souls and plot (and kill) innocent Christians, the new Pope in the Catholic Church, oh, and the 7th largest hail storm ever recorded (yep, in Jackson, MS last week)... how easy it would be to do the very thing James warns us not to do (1:27): "become polluted by the world."  How do we continue to live in the world and not become consumed by the world?  How do we think upon what is true, right, honorable, noble, worthy of praise (Phil 4:8) without being delusional about the world we live in?  How do we show Christ's love and the only Truth to a world seemingly devoid of any integrity, honesty, and truth?

I don't know.

But we do know and hope in Christ.  Love truly does win every time.

This is a song by Steven Curtis Chapman - written from the perspective of the thief on the cross next to Christ... our perspective as humans on this earth.



Scripture memory is one of my 'new years' resolutions' and March's passage for memory is Ephesians chapter 1.

Let us not forget:  "in love we have been adopted through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He has lavished on us." (verses 5-8)