December 2024 – Godly Conversations

Ancient Seers

The land of Israel is again in the spotlight of war, with the swift, past victories of 1948, 1967 and 1973 seemingly further away with each passing day. The only democratic country in the Middle East, Israel, is fighting for its survival. This current war started with murder, rape and hostages, and has now dragged on for over 400 days against enemies on all sides, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, inspired and funded by Iran as the head of an “axis of evil.”

Clean and Unclean

The topic of clean and unclean animals recently arose during a pastoral meeting in Dallas, Texas, and a ministerial committee was established to review the Biblical mandate forbidding the eating of unclean meats in the light of the new covenant, and as it currently appears in the church’s doctrinal statements.

The question we perhaps can first ask, is why clean animals? Does the differentiation between clean and unclean possess any religious, theological or health values? The first record of clean animals is when Noah was instructed by God to take pairs of unclean animals aboard the ark, as in contrast to taking seven pairs of clean animals. Was this only about food or was it also about sacrifice?

Migration

Welcome to our Messageweek blog, Godly Conversations. We’ve just upgraded to a new Dell server and in doing so, had some issues migrating the backend data from the old, ailing infrastructure.

So, here we go again, with more fresh insights.

It is the only conversation worth having!

^{Above photo of our server in Perth, Western Australia}