Hi everyone,
Well, today I started Daniel and I prayed first that God would breath - new. It is so easy to read familiar scripture and see nothing new. Well today I read a small verse 1:4. In the last part, Nebuchadnezzar ordered Ashoenaz (one of his chiefs) to teach some of the most qualified of the captured sons of ISREAL the language and literature of the Chaldeans. I stopped, what was this language? As I probed, I landed on the fact that the chief god of the Chaldeans was Marduk, and certain animals represented him, especially a dragon with forked tongue. So what if these young Israelites had little knowledge of scripture; meaning it was simply here-say and not their own? I suspect it might have been pretty easy for forked tongue teaching to seep into their lives. Then the definition of a forked tongue: to say one thing and mean another; to be duplicit.
So I thought about TODAY. A culture screaming their literature and their teachings and pragmatic churches succumbing to the duplicity, especially in the arena of LGBTQ. You see the duplicity in my mind is this: taking Love and expanding to embracing, saying we must Love as scripture states but in reality meaning we must embrace/accept. I surmise that these teachings Daniel and his friends were subject to required massive discernment to recognize the false. And the only way they could was knowing clearly the TRUTH. Truth that they had themselves taken into their being and digested. The Devil never presents clear deceit. It is always a forked mixture, and an undiscerning ear or heart will be easily swayed by his words. Words have meaning. Words are powerful and God's Word is deliberate, precise, consistent and never "forked!" But, for myself, I must read it; it must be mine. I must own it’s truth with a fervor or I too could be easily deceived by a culture or even a pragmatic pastor. I realized for me that my stand is dependent on this.
The Word is the lamp for me to shine truth and expose the deceitful where "forked" is the mantra. Quite a thought-provoking thing today: teaching and language are pervasive. What teaching and language am I consuming TODAY?
Much love,
Cari
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