Making Life Work

From Ronald L. Dart's Program Notes:

    Does God get angry? We know he does. Everyone has heard about the wrath of God. It’s fair to say many people don’t see what God has to be all that angry about. When they read the Scriptures about the wrath of God, they may shiver a little, but they really don’t understand. They either think of God as a belligerent tyrant, or they don’t believe he’s all that angry.

    Between the movies, The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt, everybody knows how the death of the firstborn in Egypt was the means God used to finally force Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. But, someone asked on one of our Internet forums why God had to kill the firstborn of Egypt just to get the Israelites out of there. After all, he’s...

By: Ronald L. Dart

By: Ronald L. Dart

 

 

"And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years" (Genesis 1:14-19).

    Nothing God gave to man has been used so consistently for the purpose He intended. Every civilization of man has used the sun, the moon, or both for the demarcation of time. They had no choice. Even a hunting society had to take notice of the passage of seasons. When would the animals migrate to the north and when would they return? How soon would the antlered animals make their move down from the high country? No people dependent upon the land could fail to notice that there was a time to plant and a time to harvest. Their problem was the prediction of that time, and that required the observation of the sun. It required a calendar, and some form of calendar has always been a mark of civilization.

By: Ronald L. Dart

 

    The holy days are, to me, an endless source of fascination. Every year I approach them with renewed anticipation. Long ago someone pointed out to me a simple, elegant pattern in the meaning of these days. The Passover, for example, portrays the sacrifice of Christ. The days of Unleavened Bread remind us to put sin out of our lives. Pentecost pictures the receiving of the Holy Spirit. Trumpets looks forward to the return of Christ and the resurrection. Atonement represents the binding of Satan and the whole world being "at one" with God. The Feast of Tabernacles look forward to the millennium, and the eighth day pictures the "Great White Throne" judgment.

By: Lenny Cacchio

    The Passover is a great celebration of freedom.  To the Jewish mind, it represents both the birth of a nation and the coming out of the physical bondage of slavery.   To the Christian mind, Christ our Passover became the Lamb without blemish who died and delivered us from the bondage of sin.  Jesus told us that whoever commits sin is a slave of sin (John 8:34), and Peter tells us that we will be brought into bondage by whatever overcomes us.

    So to both the Jew and the Christian, Passover is about freedom. When the slaves of the Old South were introduced to the Gospel, the idea of freedom from slavery fired their imaginations, and they sang the words of that wonderful old spiritual “Tell ol’ Pharaoh, let my people...

By: Lenny Cacchio

    My grandfather brought to this country his personal, wonderful tradition, which was the art of wine-making.  And he couldn’t have picked a better part of the world to ply this skill, for he settled in New York State, home to some of the best wine-making grapes in the country.

    He held nothing back when pursuing this passion, including a trip to the country to buy fresh grapes and carting them back to his basement in town.  I remember the elaborate apparatus where he squeezed the juice from the grapes, the fermentation process, and the barrels of red wine that were the result.

    One time – I must have been eight or nine years old – I was rummaging around his house and coming across a gallon jug into which he...