Dale offers the prompt “in the trees” for this week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge.
Above the sunrise comes in and through the trees (Miami Beach, Florida), assuming palm trees, or whatever they are, qualify as trees. Below there is snow in, or on, the trees (Northbrook, Illinois). And below that there’s a park and mountains in the trees or perhaps it is the other way around (Garden of the Gods Park in Colorado Springs, Colorado).
After adding Jewish and Messianic Jewish parashah readings, I began studying the ancient biblical calendar assuming such a calendar even existed. This calendar would be different from the Christian calendars (Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox) with holidays like Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday and Easter (Pascha). It would also be different from the rabbinical calendar at Chabad.org with a time since Creation of only 5782 years that follows a mathematical 19-year (Metonic) cycle for leap years.
The appointed times of YeHoVaH are Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, Shavuot, Trumpets, Yom Kippur and Succoth from Leviticus 23 along with the weekly Shabbat. The biblical calendar needs to determine when to observe them so we can rehearse them as prophecies while remembering their fulfillments. There are also historical events which need to be dated, a year assigned to the Creation (or some other starting point), and an estimate when to expect the Messianic Kingdom.
I thought this would be an easy study, but I am still trying to make sense out of it. Here are three attempts to describe that biblical calendar that differ from both the modern Christian and Jewish calendars.
Below is the first of a series of videos on the Creator’s Calendar presenting Rood’s perspective created over a decade ago.
Weekly Parashah Readings
Parashah: Emor, 13 Iyar, 5782 – May 14, 2022
Torah: Leviticus 21:1 – 24:23
Haftarah: Ezekiel 44:15-31
Brit Chadashah: Luke 14:12-24; 1 Peter 2:4-10
Resources: Chabad, Hebrew4Christians, Weekly Torah Readings, Calendar
Miriam selected a white tulip for her mother. Later she wanted to treat her mother, father and younger brother to lunch at the botanic garden where many flowers were in bloom.
However, eighteen years ago her mother terminated that pregnancy and two years after that her younger brother would also be viewed as an inconvenience. None of the men in her mother’s life were good enough either.
Miriam and her brother still wait for their mother to find that narrow way even a thief on a cross could find and give her a white tulip to match her white robe.
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Rochelle Wisoff-Fields offers the photo by Na’ama Yehuda below as a prompt for this week’s Friday Fictioneers.
Who controls the whirlwind? All one can hope when the debris settles is to find something left of value.
When Benjamin saw the twister head straight for the farmhouse he yelled to his wife to get the children. While they were driving away she noticed that the tornado had changed direction as if it were chasing them. With the sound of the wind ripping trees apart Benjamin braked, turned into the entrance of a field, backed out to face the opposite direction, shifted into first, accelerated, shifted into second, accelerated, and shifted into third to accelerate out of the reach of the advancing wind.
If that twister really did want to get them it miscalculated since it left chickens, cows, sheds, tractor, cellar and the farmhouse, all of it, intact and untouched, but glowing with Benjamin’s and his family’s praise rising heavenwards sweetened with gratitude.
Denise offers the word “control” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Proverbs 10:25, “As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more: but the righteous is an everlasting foundation.” (KJV)
Dale offers the prompt “faces” for this week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge. There’s a white bird looking at me above wondering what I’m doing and a grasshopper who let me take many photos of him.
Normally I don’t take recognizable photos of people. However, I do have a photo of myself which someone else took and that is below.
Sometimes we use words that subtly undermine what we value without our realizing it. I am trying to identify these words so I can avoid using them.
For example, when we say parents are we undermining the differences between fathers and mothers by lumping them under one term? Is the word gender similarly undermining the differences between the sexes, men and women? According to Owen Strachan they do.
In this post I want to focus on (1) mutation, (2) evolution and (3) natural selection. With a biblical creationist worldview, should I be using or avoiding these words? If I choose to avoid them, what alternative words should I use to reinforce rather than undermine my values?
Mutation
Mutations in DNA is the only one of the three that has usefulness from an operational scientific perspective because it represents something that can be measured which could falsify an hypothesis. Random mutational changes in DNA allow us to look back into our past. Measured rates of mutations allow us to anticipate future mutational meltdown through genetic entropy.
Random mutations do not support evolutionary change from something simple to something more complicated. Like other mechanisms found to operate in the natural world it is a measure of decay or entropy. It can only reduce what is complicated to something simpler. Since this does not go against my values I have no need to look for an alternative.
Evolution
However, when I use the word evolution indiscriminately for any kind of observable change I reinforce the idea that alleged unobserved Darwinian evolution is possible when I would claim it is not. A safe alternative for observable changes is simply to say change.
There are no random mechanisms in the natural world that could account for the kinds of unobserved changes needed to go from non-life to life or from slime mold to mankind over any time period. We would not be here today without an act of creation if we relied only on random, natural processes.
Natural Selection
Is it safe to use natural selection to describe the changes that occur within kinds of creatures through random mutations? Charles Darwin created the term natural selection to try to project agency onto nature where no agency exists. The goal was to replace the Creator from Genesis with a mindless nature that somehow could make selections.
In the video below Lauren Pennington interviews Dr. Randy Guliuzza to first show the problem with the term natural selection and then to propose an alternate way of describing change in living creatures.
If you know of other words that we should think twice about using, let me know in the comments.
Weekly Parashah Readings
Parashah: Kedoshim, 6 Iyar, 5782 – May 7, 2022
Torah: Leviticus 19:1 – 20:27
Haftarah: Amos 9:7 – 9:15
Brit Chadashah: 1 Corinthians 6:9-20; 1 Peter 1:13-16
Resources: Chabad, Hebrew4Christians, Weekly Torah Readings, Calendar
The coffee shop at the corner under the trains was open. The owner was protected and so were they. The neighborhood still looked civilized, but the troubles had begun.
One year later a quarter of the world’s population died, but it could have been more. No one knew for sure. Official truth was passed on by word of mouth and doubted as soon as it was heard. No one doubted the bodies in the streets.
An unexpected smartening raced through the population like the cleansing fire of revival as the war, the big one this time, began.
Rochelle Wisoff-Fields offers the photo below by Ted Strutz for this week’s prompt for Friday Fictioneers.
Whispers and Echoes recently published a 100-word story of mine called Spotting the Heretic. I am grateful to the editor, Sammi Cox, for selecting it. Submissions to this online journal are currently open.
People faulted Blake as someone who liked to run around, a term that usually meant he couldn’t stop starting and stopping stuff, popping in here and then suddenly there, or jabbering about this and then that longer than most listeners, they in particular, could tolerate. He wouldn’t dream of denying their charges since he viewed his defects as features except when others exhibited them.
All this running around focused his waking hours on optimizing the quantity of funds he could turn over to questionable, but good enough, causes with little time left over to deal with his own problems. As his future turned into his past and the measurable score of his good deeds exploded, he anticipated that there would be an endless supply of more of the same in spite of knowing that entropy makes a mess of most things.
Reality intervened one day like a waiter bringing a tab he didn’t know he started. Trying to find something of value with which to pay the bill he was surprised to learn that the busyness of his effective altruism provided little, if any, positive value in his present situation to keep the demonic darkness from coming in and taking him out.
Denise offers the word “term” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Whispers and Echoes recently published a 100-word story of mine called Spotting the Heretic. I am grateful to the editor, Sammi Cox, for selecting it. Submissions to this online journal are currently open.
Dale offers “public art” as the prompt for this week’s Cosmic Photo Prompt.
What you see above is part of a rather large sand turtle that lasted about a day at Myrtle Beach before the tide washed it completely away.
Below is a flower painted under a bridge that went over a brook for trains passing through an Illinois forest preserve. The forest trail following the brook went under this bridge. The graffiti kept changing over the period of time I walked that trail. I imagine by now that flower, like the sand turtle, is no longer there.
Whispers and Echoes recently published a 100-word story of mine called Spotting the Heretic. I am grateful to the editor, Sammi Cox, for selecting it. If you would like to submit very short stories or poems here are the guidelines.
15 And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the sabbath, from the day that ye brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven sabbaths shall be complete:
Leviticus 23:15-16 King James Version
16 Even unto the morrow after the seventh sabbath shall ye number fifty days; and ye shall offer a new meat offering unto the Lord.
The sheaf of the wave offering comprised a dry measure of barley called an omer. Along with the Passover this counting is a remembrance of the Exodus and the time it took the Israelites to reach Mount Sinai to receive the Torah.
The morrow after the sabbath begins on Saturday evening and extends to Sunday evening. That is the time of the wave sheaf offering. That first day of the week is counted as Day One. The next day is counted as Day Two. This counting continues until we reach the forty-ninth day which is the seventh sabbath. The fiftieth day is Shavuot an appointed time of YeHoVaH (מוֹעֲדֵ֣י יְהוָ֔ה) on the biblical calendar. Since the wave sheaf offering does not always align with Easter, Shavuot can become obscured with the focus on Pentecost (fifty days after Easter) in the solar, liturgical calendar most of us use today.
In both Shavuot and Pentecost there is a receiving from YeHoVaH. At Shavuot the Israelites received the Torah, the instruction, at Mount Sinai. At Pentecost the early Messianic believers received the Holy Spirit during the appointed time of Shavuot in Jerusalem. Before Yeshua’s fulfillment of the Passover as the perfect sacrifice and His fulfillment of Unleavened Bread as the first fruits, wave sheaf offering after His Resurrection, Shavuot was a remembrance of that past event of receiving the Torah and a rehearsal for receiving the Holy Spirit.
Now that Shavuot has also been fulfilled it remains an appointed time for remembrance of both events. Keeping these appointed times reminds us where we are in the story of redemption, a story that had been laid out before us in advance and reinforced through the yearly appointed times of the biblical calendar.
The difference between cyclic pagan calendars and this forward directed biblical calendar is the story of redemption from the Exodus to Yeshua’s Resurrection to the coming of His Messianic Kingdom. That story is not something that can be derived from human experimentation and reasoning nor from New Age nature sentimentality.
As I see it, this story comes only through biblical revelation which makes the biblical calendar unique. However, if you think there is some other competing world narrative worth considering, let me know in the comments.
3 To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God:
Acts 1:3-5 King James Version
4 And, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me.
5 For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.
Weekly Parashah Readings
Parashah: Acharei Mot, 29 Nissan, 5782 – April 30, 2022
Torah: Leviticus 16:1-18:30
Haftarah: Ezekiel 22:1-19
Brit Chadashah: Hebrews 9:11-28
Resources: Chabad, Hebrew4Christians, Weekly Torah Readings, Calendar
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 