SCHOOLBOY
HOWLER:
“MATTHEW
FLINDERS WAS THE FIRST MAN TO CIRCUMCISE AUSTRALIA!”
A young
boy was following his Dad around the
garden one day, when he suddenly asked “Dad, what is gravity?”
Trying to
make it as simple as possible, his
father replied “Gravity is the
thing whereby everything is pulled
down and attracted to the earth. It is a law of
nature. It’s
like when
you jump up and down on the trampoline, you don’t keep soaring up to
heaven,
but you always come down. It’s like if you drop a stone or an apple,
the earth
draws it down, and it falls to the earth.”
Now the
young fellow thought for a while and
then said “But look at those flowers – they all go upwards. They are
not falling
down.”
To which
the father replied “That’s correct,
but that is only because there is another law at work, and this law is
stronger
than the law of
gravity.
It’s called the law of life. This law
of life has made those flowers free
from the law of gravity – as long as
they live. That
means if I cut
off one of the flowers it will fall to the ground.”
(Comment:
The word “hath” stands for the present,
continuous and ongoing – without stopping or ceasing, that is, into the
future
for evermore without a gap. Whereas if the word was “has” that
would
mean I was once set free but now I could lose my liberty. “Has”
would mean it happened once but there is no guarantee for the future.
“Has” is
like a horse escaping from an enclosure but could be captured again. “Hath”
means it is made free for evermore, and never to be captured
again.)
As a
Christian, I hath been made free. I am not struggling for
liberty or freedom as I am standing in liberty that can never
be taken
away from me. “I hath liberty!” “I hath eternal security never to be
lost.” “I
am in Christ and as he can never die again, neither can I.” (Rom 6:7-11)
Unlike the
flower that has died and can never come back to life again, I
had to die that I might live again.
In the
physical that is true. The body dies and rots. But the real you
lives on. It’s called your soul, and it is very much welded
onto your
body. Now if your sinful soul is not separated from the sinful
flesh of
your body when the body dies, it can’t get into heaven because it’s
sinful.
Therefore God must cast you into hell. But there is a solution.
If somehow
your sinful soul can be made into a sinless soul, then when
you die, God will welcome your sinless soul into heaven, won’t he?
So here’s
what God does. He puts to death the sinful soul so that it no
longer lives. As the Bible says, the Holy Spirit of God takes our
sinful soul
and places it into Christ’s death (1Cor 12:13). Now as Christ has risen
from
the dead, so our soul can rise from the dead also because it has been
put into
Christ.
It’s like
a gardener’s twig or graff that is put into another plant,
such that, the graff comes alive again because the live juices and
nutrients of
the mother plant now become those of the twig. That’s what can happen
to your
soul so that it gets into heaven.
Another
example is a tree that has been ringbarked. It dies because the
nutrients needed for living have been cut off. As the Bible says we are
Christians because we have been spiritually circumcised – the
soul is
cut off from the sinful flesh, our soul has been ‘ringbarked’. The
Bible says
“In whom
also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without
hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the
circumcision
of Christ: Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen
with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised
him
from the dead.” (Col 2:11-12)
“Ah!
Billy! I understand now! You mean
Matthew Flinders was the first man to circumnavigate Australia.”
“Yeh Miss!
At’s wha’ I say’d didn’ I?”
**** ****
Harley Hitchcock
www.
AustralianBibleMinistries
.com
“JESUS
CHRIST - A MAN APPROVED OF GOD
(Acts 2:22)”
Miracle #4 – Peter’s
mother in law (Matt
8:14-15 Mark 1:29-31
Luke 4:38-39)
