Tag Archives: Revealed truth

Cultural Restriction

Thou Shalt Blend In

Is truth something we can discover or is truth something we agree on? All my education and all my life experience have taught me that my opinion has nothing to do with the truth. I have always known that truth is truth without regard to my feeling about it. I have always known that you and I can agree that green is purple, but our agreement does not make it so.

In today’s US culture, however, two people apparently can agree Continue reading Thou Shalt Blend In →

Faith Practice, the Exercise

A Verse for Meditation

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English: A sheet form Bach's cantata #59
English: A sheet form Bach’s cantata #59 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.    Luke 10:27

  • Jesus said that these commandments sum up all the Law. Look at the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:1-17. Can you find all ten in the summary above?
  • J. S. Bach wrote a cantata about this text. In the cantata, one singer says, “God wants your heart by itself.” Why did Bach include these words? 
  • Secular humanists assert that God does not exist, and therefore they reject the authority of God’s revealed Law in the Bible. They consider human happiness and social justice to be the goals of human ethics, which they believe to have evolved through millennia of human experience. What is a fundamental difference between Law as revealed in the Bible and ethics as the evolutionary result of human experience? (You might find more than one difference.) 
  • In Bach’s cantata, one singer cries out, “Give me … a Samaritan heart.” What does the singer mean by this prayer?
  • In the cantata, the alto sings an aria about a problem we all have. She sings, “Though I often have the will to fulfill what God says, yet I lack the ability.” When you are faced with this problem, what do you do?