New Semester
Hi All,
I managed to finish all my assignments last semester (after a few late nights and all week study sessions). It was tiring. It was also rewarding completing all the work I had assigned to me on time ! Straight after I finished my studies we went to melbourne (the next day) for a conference. It was nice getting away from everything.
After two weeks break I am now back into studies (trying to keep the momentum going) at GCCTI. I am doing these subjects :
- Defending and Defining the faith
- New Testament Studies 1
- Communicating Christ
I hope to resurrect my blog in the coming months too !
Literally Speaking
When I was at study on thursday my bible teacher taught us briefly about a doctrine common among churches today called Theistic Evolution.
Theistic Evolution is the belief that God created the world but that the process which he used to create humans was evolution itself.
Rosemary warned against the perils of believing this based on what Genesis says about the post fall events.
The Bible teaches that death entered the world AFTER and as a consequence of sin, therefore if we believe Genesis 1 we need to reject the notion that over thousands or millions of years amoebas or whatever died thousands of times.
Causatively we come to the point where one being is made in the image of God and another is not and therefore not accountable to God morally.
Believing in any form of evolution eases the burden of death to a process rather than the result of sin and ultimately leads us to form a lower view of Christ’s sacrificial death.
Matt 25:31-46 Parable of Sheep & Goats
What is the context of this parable?
Jesus is responding to the disciples question about when the temple will be destroyed. What follows is a string of teachings and parables about the end times. Notice how Jesus does not answer their question but rather looks forward to a more important reality, his return and judgement of the world.
He goes on to teach:
- Signs of his return
- Peril of the times preceding his return
- Jesus will return in glory
- Believers should desire and be ready for his return
Draw us a picture
- God coming in great Glory with his Angels (he is accompanied)
- All nations are gathered before him
- He Separates them (Judgement starts) into sheep and goats
- He pronounces blessing on the sheep
- Jesus tells about a group of people in need
- Thereafter we see that the sheep and the goats respond differently to the needs of others.
- The way they responded to the needs of the others / the Lord is related to their destiny
- The ‘Goats’ go away into enteral punishment, Righteous into eternal life
Who is Jesus speaking to?
From the context we learn that Jesus is talking to the disciples (believers) however the values are universally applicable.
What is the central message?
In the passage the Lord mentions the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, prisoners and says “And the King will answer them, Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
The Lord equates mercy to this brothers to mercy to the Lord himself. This is very close to the Lord’s heart and purposes.
Jesus identifies the conscious suffering of believers and that those who are believers are set apart by their response to their suffering.
Who are the Lord’s brothers?
Matthew 12:49-50, “And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! 50 For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’”
We see that the term “Brothers” refers to believers.
Does this mean that we should only show mercy to believers? No! In Luke 6:27-36 Jesus explicitly tells us that we should love our enemies and that if we only love those who love us then we are no better than unbelievers.
What does mercy mean?
We see in the passage that the response of the believers to the needs of the Lord’s brothers is practical and relieves the suffering identified.
Is the mercy limited to meeting physical / practical needs? If we look deeper to the Lord’s command to “love your neighbor as you love yourself” we know that there are virtually no limits to the ways in which we can show love to others.
Is this a salvation topic?
This parable mirrors the principle found in the preceding parables of the Talents (Matt 25:14-29), the parable of the Marriage feast (Matt 22:1-14) , the parable of the landowner (Matt 21:33-43) as well as in James 2:17 “faith without works is dead”
All of these passages teach that if we have genuine faith in Christ as the Son of God that acts will accompany our faith.
Note how in v46 the Lord calls the sheep “the righteous”
If we persist in acts of unrighteousness or fail to show forgiveness or mercy we can’t claim to have genuine faith in Christ and are not saved as we are ultimately persisting in unbelief (this theme runs throughout the old and new testaments).
How does this passage apply to us today?
Where do we see mercy demonstrated in the church today? We see Churches sending teams to Victoria to assist with bush fire victims, we send missionaries to Asia to help those in prostitution and we give of our finances. We don’t all need to be the one who hands the bread to the hungry BUT we should endeavor to help those in need in any way we can. If you can’t go then give. If you don’t have money give your time or pray. Pray that God would grant your heart empathy. Sit next to someone you don’t know at church. Our church needs people to step out and do these things.
We know that one day the Lord will return in Glory and will judge the world. There is a time of reckoning. Whenever we show mercy to believers or unbelievers we should be quick to mention the mercy that Christ has already shown us as believers. We should take every opportunity to urge others to find ultimate mercy, enjoyment and fulfillment in Christ.
If we confess Christ is Lord then we should labour to show mercy, not to achieve salvation but out of confidence that we are saved through our belief in Christ, desiring to honour and love the one to whom it is due, Jesus Christ.
New blog title
I was studying this morning and discovered the term “post diluvian” meaning after the worldwide flood as described in Genesis 6-9
I am not 100% happy with “Cadere” as the blog title so have changed it to “Post Diluvian” as it sounds cool and mysterious and it is based on a theological concept.
I like it !
Wikid Esxi performance issues
I have my wikid server running as a virtual machine under ESXi. I have had a few problems with the Wikid services not starting up automatically when the system starts, however if I logged into the box via ssh and manually stopped and started the wikid services it would start up fine.
Eventually I started to wonder if the resources I had allocated the vm were sufficient and sure enough they weren’t. I rebooted the machine and observed it’s startup log and when it got to starting the wAuth and Radius protocol daemons it would say something like ‘could not connect to database’
To fix this issue I gave the system more memory; from 1GB to 1.5GB and gave it a healthier CPU max from 2000mhz to 3000mhz and most importantly (imho) changed the Disk Shares value to ‘High’.
After this my wikid server would reboot and be ready to serve without any problems. Hope this helps !
Drivers and the DOS days
I went to visit a client this morning who was having issues with an external 56k modem. Windows XP needed a driver to use the device but Acer’s website denied any existence of the poor orphaned modem.
While I was scraping the google-search-results-barrel I found a result on driverguide.com which brought back many memories of doing tech support on Windows 3.11 + Windows 95 + Windows 98 and the HASSLE it was to find drivers. I remember writing down the FCC ID so that I could track down the real maker of the card / device hoping to find the right driver.
Remember the hassle of installing TCP/IP ? yes in Windows 9x you actually had to install TCP/IP ! I was thinking of how bad this all really was until I re-discovered the driver-depravity of DOS; Does anyone remember having to use MSCDEX to use a CDROM ? I am so thankful that we have progressed to the point where modern operating systems have broad support for devices.
What about licensing ? I don’t remember any of my friends ever purchasing a license for DOS , although I must admit it seems preposterous to buy a license for such a skinny slip of an operating system. I think part of the reason that licensing was unappreciated was that DOS was such a minimal operating system – it was barely a utility, allowing you to run wordperfect or doom. You even had to tell it to use more that 640k of memory ! Ah the days of DOS !
Goldkey Hardware Encryption Token
I recently took delivery of a goldkey hardware encryption token. What sets these little devices apart is that all key management is performed “in hardware” on special goldkey tokens called Master or Grand Master tokens (depending on how many levels you of authority you want) which has the benefit of making the solution platform independent (Mac and Windows).
The token software installs easily and in minutes I was encrypting files and sharing them between my Mac and windows machine. On Windows and Mac the Goldkey software integrates neatly with the shell allowing you to right click on any file and encrypt a file. Whenever you encrypt or decrypt a file it asks you for your PIN providing two factor authentication.
Unfortunately the device is not supported under Linux and there is not much technical documentation of how the device actually works (I do know that it uses macfuse on OSX) but then again I guess Wideband (the co. that makes the device) don’t really want to share their trade secrets. The key also seems to get a tad hot when plugged in – that makes me wonder if the key is encrypting the data or if the software is encrypting the data ? I assume the key is encrypting the data otherwise having a hardware key would be of no use.
I think the key to this device taking off is it’s software. The software does a good job of creating encrypted volumes and encrypted files but can’t really do anything else. It would be great if you could use it to create a hash or a public key to use to authenticate to ssh servers or allow it to unlock mac keychains or even a particular part of a mac keychain (for example a certificate). This is obviously where a traditional smart card would provide better security but nonetheless the Goldkey is an excellent tool to protect data at rest and in transit.
This song needs praise
“Between the Bars” by Madeleine Peyroux is one of my favourite songs ever. You can listen to it here on last.fm.
In just the first 30 seconds (not in the last.fm preview) :
- Beautiful brush drums slowly panting away – it is as if the whole song stops during the pauses in-between the brush drum hits.
- The gong sound swings from left to right and the sound and tone has a beautiful booming quality.
- You can hear the strings of the bass / double bass guitar in the right channel.
- The apparent slowing down of the double bass and hence the softening and deepening of the sound of the bass.
Absolutely fantastic ! Far few songs come close to this beauty for me.
Breakfast Spaceship
I dislike breakfasts with a high sugar content – it makes me want to keep on eating all day – the principle of diminishing returns also applies. Once you have eaten something sugary and fatty it is difficult to be satisfied with anything less.
This morning I made myself a low GI but nevertheless nice tasting gourmet breakfast. It is really easy as you’ll see :
Ingredients
- Hausbrot Rye bread (preferably not factory sliced)
- Tin Asparagus
- Chunky ricotta cheese
- Olive Oil
- Lemon Juice
- Pepper
Method
- Toast the rye bread
- Spread a generous portion of ricotta onto the rye toast
- lay a few pieces of asparagus on top of the ricotta
- mix a teaspoon of olive oil with a dash of lemon juice
- grind a hint of pepper over the top
Now make yourself a coffee and enjoy !
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