Superman's Phone Booth

Thought:  Superman needed a phone booth to transform. No booth, no Superman.
We need Christ, the Holy Spirit...etc.
In the great, seemingly real life but totally fictional movie and comic book hero Superman, we find that our hero is a man named Clark Kent.  Clark is a totally unassuming person of mild temperament and almost backward-like character.  Underneath that timorous personality was a magical hero named Superman. But in order for our nervous, shy and backward Clark Kent to become the world-changing hero, Clark always needed a phone booth. From that phone booth, he would blow out into Gotham City with powers and world-changing strength uncontested by any. If there wasn't a phone booth there couldn't be a Superman, and if there was no Superman then there was no one to foil all the "bad guy's" plans.
It's so amazing for me to sit here and think that with all the wonders  Superman did and of all the people he rescued, not too many people spoke much of those phone booths. Yet, that was where a plain ordinary man became a Superhero.  The phone booth was the necessary environment required for the transformation. No booth no rescue! No booth no world changer!  No booth no faster than a speeding bullet. No booth, no dynamic breakout into the Gotham City skyline.  You take away the phone booth and Lois Lane never swoons in Superman's arms.
 If you're Superman, that is a tragedy! If you're a reader, that is devastating! Gosh that phone booth was as important as his mask or cape, his boots or ability to "super see" or "super hear". That booth wasn't Superman, and it certainly wasn't Clark Kent, but without that booth, you couldn't have a super change over.
  Outside the booth you have Clark Kent, inside the booth you have SUPERMAN! That's a substantial change! Which would you want if you needed to save the world?
 Today we don't have a Superman, not because we have so much kryptonite but because we don't have any phone booths. (hey, everyone's entitled to their own opinion!)  Everyone is carrying iPhone's, cell phones, mobile devices, smart phones and other wireless devices and ETD'S. Add all that up and if you are Gotham City or the world today, you're in a heap of trouble because Superman may be out there, but he doesn't have a phone booth to get into and make the changeover.
I want to tell you, there's nothing worse than having a crisis and having the resolution right there before you but you can't make the two meet.
Ok, Mr. Blog writer, so what is your point?  My point is this: We have a world of problems today.....Christians being persecuted in Syria, Iran, Egypt, North Korea, global famines of food, leadership and vision, pirates on the high sea's, Carnival Cruises limping into port with no power, moral crisis's in America and around the world, and leadership void of righteous men with a sincere message. A weak church that can't even stand up for what it's supposed to believe in - a powerful life-changing Word, but instead we cower to the ungodly ways of the world! We lack a world speaker that can direct the message of Christ to all nations like Billy Graham did in the past. Earthquakes and serious situations everywhere, to say nothing of our own personal, family situations.
   These are the problems and God has the answers to them. Unfortunately, we can't seem to get to the "phone booth" where the transformation takes place and the solution comes. Or we don't even know where to look for the phone booth in order to turn into a spiritual Super hero.  Church, our phone booth is prayer and our phone book is the Bible, but for some reason, we seem to  NOT EVEN BE LOOKING for the phone booth and the transformation that takes place in it! 
  It's time for all of us unassuming, timid, "Christian Clark Kents" to put away our newspapers, get in that booth, read our Bibles, get prayed up and come storming out of that booth with enough power to conquer the evil in this world and bring hope and help to a dying world!

Coming back to the 'Power' in the Blood

In Genesis 2:7 we read how God created man. It is important that we understand that with all the medical marvels we see today and the labratory developments we have come up with, no matter what -  man can never create man.
Man is God's greatest creative achievement on earth, and was made in His likeness. The Bible teaches that man is fearfully and wonderfuly made (Paslm 139:14), far more wonderfully made than the angels (which belong to a previous creation of God.) Angels have no blood in them, for they have no flesh.  Because they have no cells, they have no reproductive potential since the absence of cells cannot compound and make another cell which makes life. Angels are spirits and have only spiritual life.  That's just the way God made them.
But man, now But blood does "carry" life! The life is in the blood the scripture says. It is obvious when we see what happens at death.  Immediately after death, the person is still warm, and will remain so for a brief time. Yet that person is dead because the mysterious life has departed from the blood.  The life of man is carried in his blood stream.  Life itself is spiritual, God breathed, but it must have a physical carrier. This carrier is the blood which flows within the body of every individual.
When God made man, He formed a body from the dust of the ground - from the sustances and chemicals of this planet. Then in spectacular fashion He breathed into this body the breath of life.  In other words, He breathed into this chemical composition some of His own spiritual life, and that life was held in the chemical substance we call blood.  So you can see from the last statements, that the dust to flesh is not life and the blood and flesh combination is not life and blood itself is not life.
Most of us know our own blood type. There are only a few blood types for all human beings. But Jesus 'blood type' was entirely different.  The blood that flowed in His veins was sinless blood b/c it was not contaminated by Adam's sin which brought sin and sickness into human blood. Adamic (human) blood is corrupt and was carried by Mary, who declared that Jesus her son was "God my Saviour' (Luke 1:47). Mary was the chosen carrier of the body of her Son, but all the blood came from God. Jesus' blood did not come from His mother Mary.  No child born to man has its mother's blood.  The blood always comes from the father.  That is why when there is a question of who the father is, you check the man's blood. Since Jesus was the only begotten of the Father (John 1:14) His body was formed and fashioned wonderfully in the womb of Mary His mother, and if you were to check Jesus blood you would find out that there was no father's blood. The blood of Jesus was from God. It came from the Father by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, this Blood which flowed in the veins of the Lord Jesus Christ was perfect, heavenly, sinless, infallible blood. Nothing human, and especially nothing from Joseph since the scriptures tell us he never knew Mary(Matthew 1:25). 
The fact of the matter is that God says in the Bible that He prepared a body for Jesus.  It was that body that was created in Mary's womb. "Wherefore when He cometh into the world, He saith, sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me" (Hebrews 10:5). Jesus knew before His birth at Bethlehem that His Father would build and prepare a body for Him, which He later described as the temple of God.  That body had to be made so that it was sinless.  It could not be contaminated with human, earthly blood. He simply came down from heaven and entered into the  body created in the womb of Mary His earthly mother, and builder of His flesh.  This body had the blood type created by God His father. There was no human blood from His earthly father intermixing at all.
To conclude, Jesus had no sin in His body, but He allowed Himself to die for the sins of a sinful humanity.  But, in order to be the sacrifice for sin, Jesus had to have no sin.  If He had sin, then He could not remove sin from man. That is why it is written in the scriptures, 'how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God'? (KJV)
Jesus gave the perfect life that was filled with His perfect, sinless, blood to redeem poor mankind -um, us - who carried death in their bodies. It was pure blood for imperfect, contaminated blood, a life for life, since life is in the blood.
This is why Jesus is described in the Bible as the last Adam. God sent Him to earth in the likeness of sinful Adam, but with pure uncontaminated blood in His veins. God sent him so that He might shed that pure blood of His at Calvary for the life of humanity. Peter called it "precious blood" ( 1 Peter1:19). Can anyone Amen that??

The Mystery Part 3 of 3

Well, finally, we get to the point of just what this "mystery" is.
It is that between that ascension (Jesus being taken up into heaven) and His coming again, between those two stupendous works of God, not seen by the angels, not thought about by the prophets, there's a great gap. Those two works are not side by side.
To the apostle Paul, the events seemed to stand together or at least close to each other. To the believers at Thessalonica those events; Christ's life on earth and then His coming back made them all prepare to leave earth right then and there!
The seers could clearly see those two events but they could never have imagined that there was a great distance of time, thousands of years and events of which was hid only in the counsel of the Almighty between those two works. They couldn't see the apostle Paul, or Peter and his great experience with Cornelious, they couldn't see the book of Acts or Revelation and all those events. 
 It was this the angels could not look into and neither could the prophets or any one else -  - not until the fullness of God's will deems that it is time. They knew the coming, they knew the consummating of the ages, the glory, but nothing else was clear to them.
We as a church, as God's creation, already reached the one great work; the Jesus, Mary and Joseph stuff, the parable stuff, the walk on water stuff, the cross and Calvary, the resurrection and ascension part, but still, even hidden to us, is the second great work.  We know of it and can look through a glass dimly but even we can't see this other work clearly. We can read, but not totally understand the time or all the happenings in the plan of God.  We can see events in this time but not totally understand the times.
 One example is the rapture of the church; we can read the Scriptures but we don't know the time, or anything other than during this event the church is removed from off the earth. We can see the tribulation, the vials, the bowls and all the judgments, we can read of the great White Throne judgment, the 144,000, the voices under the altar crying for vengeance, but even to us living in this time we know nothing more. We can read about the Jews and how they will be reconciled to God, we know there is the anti-Christ, the false prophets, two witnesses, but even to those of us who are close to these events we cannot see any better than the prophets who were far removed from these events.
We know the destiny of the church is that period between those two great works, and we can read the scriptures that tell us the destiny of the church is to be caught out of the world. Raptured away, within the blinking of an eye.  This is amazing and it is only one of a whole list of great events that will take place in between Christ's coming and His eventual return.
The scripture says in 1 Thess 4:15-17, "For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until that glorious consummation shall not precede them that fall asleep in Jesus. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord....somebody say "Amen"!
The church, God's bride, Christ's reward for His death on Calvary, you and I and our time period, we are the mystery the angels wanted to look into and see. No wonder it is a pretty exciting time.
And you know what?? That time could be this instant!! Above all, in this busy, chaotic world, be ready and waiting.