jakerasmussen.com

Ok, this is really Kansas day.

Getting up early is such a treat.  You see I used to not be much of a morning person at all.  I enjoyed staying up really, really late and watching SportsCenter over and over along with MASH reruns on the Halmark channel.  Then almost a year and a half ago I got a job working for a great landscape company in the Tucson area.  This job required me to be up pretty early.

I started to enjoy it.  Being up before the sun is up and getting a cup of coffee along with reading a chapter or so in a good book is extremely enjoyable.  This morning I read some more out of a book titled, A Theology as Big as the City, Ray Bakke.

I have been enjoying this book and taking a little longer than normal to read it because here is some wonderful stuff to learn from it.  Again, I would say that the enjoyable part of the read is the tremendous amount of scripture used to communicate Bakke’s points.   This book has really opened my eyes in a lot of areas.

I know for most of you this is a pointless point, but it is something new for me.  God has been working on me for the past two years trying to shed some light into and onto His Word.  I know there are big words to explain what I am about to say here.  Although if you are reading this you are bound to know that I am a very SIMPLE creature.  All, I really need is Jesus, food, sex and ESPN.  And I would even venture to say in that order too.

My thought is this.  Just reading scripture and taking it in does very little.  I cannot say that it does nothing because I have seen first hand the life change which has taken place because of the simple messages read in the pages of the Holy Bible.  But, I think for greater life change and even the change in a community scripture needs to be dissected in a few way.  This is not a complete list… 1) the culture within which the scripture was recorded.  Both to whom it was written and by whom wrote it.  2) the meaning and uses of the word.  For example the Hebrew dictionary has something like 7,000 words in it.  Compare that to the English dictionary which has over 27,000 words.  This makes it known that for the English translations to work we much choose to use some words that “best fit”.  It makes me want to become a Greek/Hebrew scholar.

So, we are in Winfield Kansas getting ready for the wedding.  Madison is nervous about being a flower girl in the wedding tomorrow.  It is awesome to be with family.  This wedding is a time were all of Jennifer’s mom’s family gets together.  It is an outstanding time.  I really enjoy being with them.  When I was growing up my mom’s side of the family would get together a few times a year and it was always a riot.  Lots a people.  Time with cousins and catching up with all the people that you only talk to on the phone or write letters to.  So, when all of my new “extended” family gets together something inside of me remembers being a child again just having fun with the people you love and love you.

Man, Gods word is coming alive to me in the OT like nothing else.