Bible Studies

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The last lesson spoke of the eventual death of our body and the new life which comes to our soul. We feel the force of life but our body does not understand it will die and holds on to its habits and desires. Life itself is the eternal gift, but is is not the life of the body that we find. Our new life is like the breath of God which is clean and untainted by the evil that is of this place. It blows over all life but it is not from this world.

In the purity of the invigorated soul there is a strength that is indomitable as long as it can connect with the Spirit of Life from Whom it came. The evil and adulterous generations have always sought after signs, but to the newborn in faith the sign shall come as food like it was to the people of Moses who ate manna in the wilderness. Our food is to do the will of God (Jn. 4:34) and it will sustain us.





41. Nourishing the Soul

Enlightenment comes to him who tries to help the needy and the Lord will help him in time of trouble. The Lord will protect him and keep him alive, and he will receive all that he needs to keep him from falling to his enemies. Even through exhaustion and sickness will the Lord keep him from being overcome.

I asked the Lord to show me mercy and heal my soul, I am too weak and lack the judgement to do it myself. My enemies lie about me and try to make me look bad. They come to me only to make fun and gloat over my trouble. Those that hate me whisper together against me and devise my downfall. They say I am afflicted by evil and will never get stronger. Even my friends that I trusted and shared meals with, have turned against me.

Only You, Lord, are merciful to me and give me strength, that I might overcome my trouble. By your sign do I know that You are on my side: that my enemies do not triumph over me. You have held me up in my steadfast faith and I will remain in your sight forever.





This lesson is the emotional tie that binds these three psalms together. We sought the truth about our death and were taught the hardest lesson. Now we feel the birth of the new being that requires only the nourishment that helping others gives. We give up our old ideas of self, the vanity and the quest for power that gives no hope. We find eternal union with our Creator through service to others.

Psalm 41 was the end of the second cycle, as 21 was the end of the first and Psalm 42 takes up the search for our Creator. Before we go on, perhaps now would be a good time to think of the larger world around us and the truth the size of it contains. We are searching for the truth but we don't live only by the information we get. We live by the knowledge that the information implies, by the conclusions we draw from it, and by what we decide to look for and do next. Let’s look at some truth that has only been known for a few generations. This is correct information that helps put things into their natural perspective.

It has only been within the last 300 years that humans have understood the true size of the space beyond our Earth, and only in the last 75 about objects beyond our Milky Way galaxy. The writers of the bible could only speculate on those ideas, but we hold them as correct information. If we are to say that God created all things, then it becomes useful to have a surer grasp of how big the heavens are. This is fun to do with some friends and it has long worked with grade schoolers for an outdoor astronomy lesson. We are going to build a scale model of the Solar System, and beyond.

We start our scale model with a bright yellow ball about eight inches wide, the size of a bowling ball and put it down to represent the Sun. Now walk ten paces away and stick a pin in the ground. The pinhead represents Mercury. Walk another nine paces and put down a peppercorn that is Venus. Another seven paces is the Earth, also the size of a peppercorn. Two and a half inches away from it put a pin in the ground, the blunted point is the Moon.

Looking back to the yellow ball and holding up your hand, its apparent width will be about 1/2 the width of your little finger, the same as the sun in the sky overhead. Everything is in scale except us, we are planetary size now. Turn your back to the sun and walk another 14 yards. There a red map pin will represent Mars. Now, it’s time to hike; it is 95 yards to the walnut that is Jupiter. Four little pins around it would be the large moons that Galileo first saw from the now invisible earth a football field away. It is another 112 yards to the acorn that is Saturn and the yellow ball is barely visible two hundred and fifty yards away. The circle this acorn makes encloses forty acres and was the limit of the solar system to the ancients.

Another 249 yards will get to the peanut-sized Uranus, then another 281 paces to the same sized Neptune. Finally, it is another 242 yards to the pinhead of Pluto at its farthest, though sometimes it is closer than Neptune in its orbit. If you walked this, it has been more than half a mile. The yellow ball is 1,019 yards away and is no longer visible, even with binoculars. From Pluto the Sun would be a bright star in the perpetual night sky whose light takes five and one half hours to arrive.

Look down at the pinhead that is Pluto, then look back across the path you have walked. Can you begin to feel the immensity of nearby space? In this model the nearest star is another bowling ball that is 4,000 miles away, farther than New York to California, with nothing else in there but a few scattered grains of dust that are the asteriods and comets: and all this nearly empty space is only a tiny corner of God’s good creation.

The terrifying wonder we can feel for the size and loneliness of space around us is a symbol of reverence for our Creator… and the fear we have of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

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