1Co12v1 Spiritual gifts

Squeakybro on Gifts - J :) 
1 Corinthians 12:1 KJV ¶ Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you ignorant. 
The Gift of Tongues | Post .2

Delphi Forums / Adult Christian Forum / 160512 0959 / By Squeakybro

http://j.mp/aTonguesDot2 aka http://forums.delphiforums.com/kath/messages/?msg=223983.2

GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT / MILK / 1 Cor 12:1; 1 Cor 12:4-11; 1 Pet 4:10; Matt 10:5-8; John 6:70-71; Mark 16:17-20; 1 Cor 12:27-31;

THE MILK BROUGHT YOU TO LOVE / 1 Cor 13:4-10; Rom 12:3-10 (NKJ);

xxxxxThere are nine different gifts of the Spirit that one can receive while in the milk. Everyone needs some kind of evidence that they have the Spirit while they are reading and changing their beliefs. No one desides which one of the gifts in the milk they will receive. Only the Holy Spirit desides that. But when it is time to go into the meat there is only one gift to focus on. The voice of the Holy Spirit quoting verses. Now in the milk we were hearers of the word. But in the meat we must be doers of the Word.

(GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT MEAT) / Heb 6:1-3; 1 Cor 13:8-11; Heb 5:13; John 14:26; 2 Cor 10:4-5; 2 Cor 5:5; 2 John 1:9-11; Rev 22:18-19; Rev 22:7; 1 Cor 14:39; Rev 19:10; Gal 5:24; Rom 8:1-2; Matt 7:21-23 (NKJ);

xxxxxx As it is true that all have to go through the milk before they can come to the meat. It is also true that the gifts are different. And even as the gifts are different that is not all there is to being spiritual. One still has to come to the revelations of Jesus Christ. Which comes after the three years of the milk and the eleven years of the meat. Them are the beginnings of born again though. But we also know that many can fall short before they come to the revelations of Jesus Christ. But in a revelation all nine gifts are in each one of them.

Matt 7:21-23 (NKJ); 1 Pet 4:10 (NKJ); 1 Cor 4:7 (NKJ);

Gifts Of Christ / Eph 4:10-12 (NKJ).

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Jos24v15 Alien v Predator

Predator T beats Alien H - J :)
Joshua 24:15 KJV And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.

Arguably Senator Cruz was our best choice if we wished to serve the Lord. We now seemingly have a choice between the gods of Egypt and the gods of Canaan. We should remember God's judgement. He destroyed the firstborn of Egypt, man and beast, the Pharaoh and his army. God directed Israel that all in Canaan should be destroyed, man, woman, and child, as unworthy to continue to inhabit that land.

Similarly, to Joshua's nation we are called upon this day to choose whom we should support: the greatly flawed and worldly Predator or the completely unworthy Alien. - J :)

In Alien vs. Predator, I'm for Predator, because he's OUR Predator

pjmedia.com By David P. Goldman [aka Spengler of the Asia Times] May 11, 2016 http://j.mp/0OurPredatorT aka https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2016/05/11/alien-vs-predator/?singlepage=true [Full Disclosure: Eight years ago this author gave me and others ample warning about the sort of president the present incumbent was apt to make. - J :)]

A fit of high dudgeon has gripped many of my Republican friends, ex-friends, and soon-to-be-ex-friends now that Donald Trump has all but won the Republican nomination. My advice to them: get over it. This presidential race will look like Alien vs. Predator. I'm for Predator, without a second's hesitation, because he's our Predator. For all his faults Donald Trump would be (and I'm confident will be) an incomparably better president.

I'm not pleased about the outcome of the primaries. I supported Ted Cruz and helped out in his campaign with economic research and news analysis. Yes, Trump is a vulgarian with poor impulse control. I don't like him and find his vulgarity objectionable and his insulting remarks about Mexicans (for example) deplorable. The mother of my children is Mexican, and I take this sort of thing personally. If I ever have the opportunity I will give Trump a black eye.

But there's a war on--three different wars, in fact. To remain neutral is moral cowardice; to choose the wrong side would be downright wicked.

First, there is a war on between Judeo-Christian principles and the political correctness inspired by the Frankfurt School and the French existentialists. Lunatics have seized control of our universities and have stamped out dissent with the zeal and vigilance of the Spanish Inquisition or the Taliban. The distinguished historian Paul Johnson said it best in a Forbes essay:

America has been a land of unrestricted comment on anything–until recently. Now the U.S. has been inundated with PC inquisitors, and PC poison is spreading worldwide in the Anglo zone. For these reasons it’s good news that Donald Trump is doing so well in the American political primaries. He is vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous. He is also saying what he thinks and, more important, teaching Americans how to think for themselves again.

If the foxes haven't yet seized control of the hen-house, they are running the hatchery. With the universities in the hands of the American Taliban, we can't educate a new generation of Americans. Trump is a bitter antidote, but as Johnson argues, he may be the antidote we need. One might add that he's the antidote we deserve.

Second, there is a war on between civilization and barbarism. Hillary Clinton says that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. That's partly her liberal ideology, partly a kowtow to the Arab donors who gave the Clinton Foundation $40 million. Hillary, in short, sells her virtue for both fun and profit. Donald Trump cut through the Gordian Knot of political correctness by proposing a temporary ban on ALL Muslim immigration into the United States, which an absolute majority of Americans supports. After some stumbles about acting as a neutral intermediary between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, Trump has come down unambiguously on the side of Israel, supporting continued construction in the Judea and Samaria settlements (and that's the acid test). It's not just that Trump has a daughter who is a serious and observant convert to Judaism, and that he is surrounded by pro-Israeli advisers: he instinctively despises sniveling, backstabbing losers and likes tough, smart and determined winners.

Third, there is a war over the future of the American economy. Clinton promises more of the same slow suffocation of American enterprise that gave us eight years of under-performance from Obama. Trump offers a supply-side tax plan with a 15% top corporate rate. My old friend and former colleague Lawrence Kudlow thinks it would be a huge improvement, and I agree.

One, two, three. These are the existential issues facing America: our culture, our safety, and our prosperity, and Trump is on the right side of all of them. Well, mainly on the right side: his meandering on the abortion issue outrages religious conservatives like the brilliant Catholic writer Joseph Bottum, a friend and former colleague at First Things magazine. Social conservatives feel offended by his offer to let Caitlin Jenner use the ladies' room at Trump Tower. Trump isn't a social conservative. But those issues are not the purview of the presidency, but rather of the legislature and the courts. Who do you want to appoint the next Supreme Court justices--Trump or Hillary Clinton?

There is also the matter of Clinton corruption on the grand scale, in particular the use of the Clinton Foundation to solicit hundreds of millions of dollars of donations from despicable Third World kleptocrats and their cronies. Peter Schweizer's book Clinton Cash shows that Bill and Hillary are the worst scoundrels ever to crawl out of the cesspool of American politics. What enrages me is not merely their thievery but their sociopathy: They like flaunting the rules, just to show that they can get away with anything. Hillary won't get away with my vote, not unless Hitler or Goebbels were to rise from the grave and run for president against her. Goering, I'd have to think about.

Then there's the matter of foreign policy. Trump is dismissive of NATO and inordinately appreciative of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It's a matter of priorities. Writing in the New York Times May 5, made this noteworthy observation about China's response to Trump:

In China, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s criticism, he is widely viewed as a pragmatist who is less hawkish and less focused on human rights than Mrs. Clinton is.

His proposal to impose high taxes on Chinese goods receives little attention there, and his talk of China’s “raping” the United States in unfair trade deals has been met with shrugs, as if to say that charge is nothing new. Instead, the conversation focuses on Mr. Trump’s business success or his pronouncements on preventing foreign Muslims from entering the United States, an attitude that jibes with the antipathy in much of China toward the Muslim population in the western province of Xinjiang.

Radical Islam is an existential threat to Russia and China, who live in fear that the United States will once again back jihadists to destabilize them, as we did during the Cold War, when the Reagan administration armed Afghani jihadists against their Russian occupiers. One in seven Russians is Muslim. For the past dozen years the American foreign policy Punditeska has proclaimed that Russia would collapse of its own demographic weight. That was calamitously wrong, as I warned in this space. Russia is the last redoubt of the nasty old European nationalism that gave us so much conflict in the past. It is not a revived Soviet empire seeking to conquer the world, but a come-from-behind spoiler, burning with resentment at its would-be relegation to the scrapheap of former great powers. Nonetheless, jihadism is infinitely more important to Moscow than its border with the Baltic states.

Mitt Romney was wrong. Russia isn't the biggest threat to the United States. Russia doesn't want to destroy us. It wants to gain influence and power at our expense. Radical Islam is the biggest threat to the United States. Radical Islam wants to destroy us. I'm for collaborating with Russia against radical Islam where convenient and thwarting Russia in other matters where it suits us. We have a lot of conflicting interests and some common interests. The right way to deal with Russia is case-by-case. As for NATO: Germany is swimming in tax revenues, but won't spend enough on defense to keep more than one out of four of its fighter aircraft in service at any given moment. I'm for a strong NATO, but we don't have one and can't get one whether we want it or not.

Trump says he'll rebuild the U.S. military and our missile defense in particular, but avoid committing U.S. forces overseas. The neo-conservatives never will forgive him for this. It means that they are out of a job, and when they say that Trump means "the end of the Republican Party," they mean the end of the Republican Party that used to employ them. Robert Kagan and Max Boot have gone to the Clinton camp.

A Trump presidency almost certainly means that Chinese and Russian influence will grow faster and with fewer obstacles than it might have otherwise. That is not entirely a bad thing: the West is too squeamish to deal with the monstrous mess that radical Islam has created. I am not comfortable with Trump's isolationism. If he rebuilds America's military prowess (and especially our missile defenses), as he proposes to do, other errors can be fixed. If we don't restore our military power, nothing else we do will matter. Can you imagine Hillary Clinton rebuilding the American military?

To those who abandon the Republican Party in this hour of crisis, I say: Good riddance! Go now, and never come back. Your bad advice and dogmatic arrogance brought America from a lone pinnacle of greatness in 2001 to second-rate status in 2016, the fastest decline of a dominant power since Napoleon invaded Russia. Go pester the Democrats, and do as much damage to them as you did to us Republicans. [My emphasis.]

Repeating links to above article: http://j.mp/0OurPredatorT aka https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2016/05/11/alien-vs-predator/?singlepage=true

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1Jo4v19 Savior teach me

Savior, teach me day by day - J :)

1 John 4:19 KJV We love him, because he first loved us.

This verse inspired a magnificent hymn that I had never heard before today. The hymn begins:

1 Savior! teach me, day by day,

Love's sweet lesson to obey;

Sweeter lesson cannot be,

Loving Him Who first loved me.

I found this first verse while researching quotes and sermons of the Oxford martyr and great preacher of the English separation from Rome, Hugh Latimer.

Latimer was burned at the stake with Nicholas Ridley. He is quoted as having said to Ridley:

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.[8]

- ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Latimer ).

The first verse of the hymn is ascribed to Latimer:http://www.inspiringquotes.us/author/1226-hugh-latimer

Other verses were evidently added later in the hymnals of the English church and her colonial daughters. The version below is from the U.S. Episcopal 1892 hymnal. It seems to have been dropped from the otherwise excellent 1940 hymnal which I used as a soprano and later as a bass in an excellent Episcopal church choir.

1 Savior! teach me, day by day, / Love's sweet lesson to obey; / Sweeter lesson cannot be, / Loving Him Who first loved me.

2 With a childlike heart of love, / At Thy bidding may I move; / Prompt to serve and follow Thee, / Loving Him Who first loved me.

3 Teach me all Thy steps to trace, / Strong to follow in Thy grace; / Learning how to love from Thee; / Loving Him Who first loved me.

4 Love in loving finds employ, / In obedience all her joy; / Ever new that joy will be, / Loving Him Who first loved me.

5 Thus may I rejoice to show / That I feel the love I owe; / Singing, till Thy face I see, / Of His love Who first loved me.

The Hymnal: revised and enlarged as adopted by the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America in the year of our Lord 1892 - http://www.hymnary.org/text/savior_teach_me_day_by_day

A favored few still sing the hymn, watch and listen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhLZbkndGvI

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2Ki21v9 O protects T

O's endless gifts to T - J :) 
2 Kings 21:9 KJV But they hearkened not: and Manasseh seduced them to do more evil than did the nations whom the LORD destroyed before the children of Israel.

_ The wickedness of Manasseh and his successor, Amon is affirmed in scripture by the fact that they are the only two kings to be buried in a garden. Our Lord ,also buried in a garden, is said to have made his grave with the wicked.

Excerpt from the article that follows:

The point is not to whitewash Trump’s crudity and outlandishness, but to explain why it so far has not eliminated him as a candidate. […] Sadly, nearly every gross thing Trump says or does has had an antecedent in the Obama administration. […] There may be reasons to vote against Trump, but at least spare us the outrage that he is somehow uniquely demagogic, crude, or ill-informed in a manner that we have not seen over the last eight years from Trump’s greatest enabler.

Obama’s Endless Gifts to Trump

pjmedia.com By Victor Davis Hanson May 8, 2016 http://j.mp/0O0ProctectsT aka https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/obamas-gift-to-trump/?singlepage=true

It is now old wisdom that Barack Obama created Trump—as in the idea of a national pushback to Obama’s out-of-the-mainstream agendas and the unconstitutional way in which he pursued them. Forgotten is the insulation that Obama has also provided for the excesses of Trump as a candidate and, especially, if he were to be president.

Last week, in sober and judicious tones Obama all but warned Americans that they cannot seriously support Trump, who, he implied, is little more than a reality-TV conman. But such admonitions come from a president whose chief foreign policy advisor, a failed fiction writer and D.C. insider, just bragged how he deceived the media and Washington’s insider world by feeding amateurish journalists misleading talking points. Is it serious or in the spirit of reality TV for a president to invite to the White House a rapper whose court-ordered ankle monitor goes off in a presidential ceremony, or to give an exclusive interview with YouTube personality GloZell, noted for her selfies of eating breakfast cereal floating about her in a bathtub? Obama has lectured the media that they have to vent Trump, this from a candidate who never released his medical or college records, whose speech in praise of Rashid Khalidi was suppressed by the media, and whose entire memoir was only belatedly found out to be impressionistic fiction. Obama lowered the bar and Trump skipped over it.

Can Trump mislead much more than did Obama, who assured Americans that they would never lose their doctor or health plan but rather save money and have better care, and that pulling peacekeepers from Iraq would ensure a stable and self-reliant country? Obama, remember, also bragged abroad that he had all but closed Guantanamo within a year and would stop the Bush habit of piling up more debt? After Ben Rhodes and Jonathan Gruber, what exactly are the presidential standards on veracity that we must hold Trump to?

Can Trump act any less constitutionally than has Obama? Will he scan existing law, and order his attorney general to enforce some statutes but ignore others? Will he boast that “I won” and thus has a pen and a phone to sign treaties with foreign countries without Senate ratification? Will Trump, in Obama fashion, threaten to cut off federal funds to cities that believe in biologically identified male/female restrooms, while encouraging other cities to defy federal immigration law? Sanctuary cities in California, but not in North Carolina? Are we back to 1860 and state nullification of federal law if and when the president wishes it?

How can the media fault Trump as uniquely dense for lacking even basic familiarity with geography or foreign affairs, when they shrugged after the current president of the United States variously believed there are 57 states, there is an Austrian-speaking Austria, and the Maldives islands are the Falklands? When a president declares that Hawaii is in Asia, certainly the media cannot be surprised that Trump is not embarrassed about being clueless about the nuclear triad.

Trump is certainly vicious, but after 2009 viciousness is no longer a mortal sin in presidential politics. If it were, Obama would have been through for his thuggish language, after advising supporters to “get in their faces,” take “a gun to a knife fight” and “punish our enemies.” Trump often ridicules the helpless. But he if stoops to make fun of the Special Olympics or jokes about vaporizing people with Predator drones, what will the New York Times or NPR do? Obama ridiculed the wealthy, who did not build their own businesses, or did not know when to stop profiting, or were clueless about the point at which they had made enough money or needed their money spread around. But then again, Obama made fun of the lower middle classes as well, who clung to their religion and guns and were stereotyped as xenophobes and nativists.

Trump can be polarizing on matters of race, but here again by what standard—when the president and his team have established new lows of racial discourse? Does Trump comment on ongoing criminal cases by suggesting one of the involved might look like one of his possible white offspring? Did Trump smear illegal aliens further by suggesting that they were “typical Mexican persons”? Would he appoint an attorney general who might refer to whites as “my people” and accuse the country of being a “nation of cowards”? Would Trump stoop to wink and nod about shared white racial solidarity with a redneck comedian who shouted out to a President Trump, “Yo, Donny, you did it, my cracker, you did it”? After Obama, there are no rules about racial discourse—and no media sensitivity to racially coarse and offensive language.

Trump, as the media has shown, is certainly a crude narcissist. But will he learn to boast as a smooth egoist that he can lower the seas and cool the planet? Does he insist that he is a better political handler and speechwriter than his handlers and speechwriters? Does he claim that he will be the fourth best president in U.S. history—albeit in an outer-borough accent rather than in an Ivy League mellifluous patois? “I,”“me” “mine” and “my” are now the normal baggage of a presidential speech.

As for the supposed fanatical Trumpsters, have they gone berserk with wild praise of Trump in near divine terms? Has a Laura Ingraham or Charles Hurt, or any other columnist, historian, talk show host, or journalist said that Trump’s neat pant crease presages that he will be a great president or that Trump makes his leg tingle, or confessed that Trump is a god, or assured that Trump would be the smartest president in the history of the office? So far, I have not read any such embarrassment in the Washington Times or American Conservative. After Obama, biased deification of a presidential candidate is old hat.

Trump certainly has wacky ideas. But will he promise to ensure that the coal industry goes out of business, or electric rates will skyrocket, or will his energy czar hope that our gas prices reach European levels? Does he plan to double the national debt in eight years or dismantle the existing health care system? Will Trump praise and subsidize a failing coal company as iconic of the country’s future in the manner that Obama coronated the soon-to-be-bankrupt Solyndra? Will he brag that setting and then ignoring red lines for Syria were among his greatest foreign policy moments?

The point is not to whitewash Trump’s crudity and outlandishness, but to explain why it so far has not eliminated him as a candidate. Obama’s outright destruction of presidential protocols created candidate Trump. The media, which in Faustian fashion mortgaged its soul to empower Obama, has now lost all credibility as a legitimate critic and arbiter of the dangers of narcissism, half-educated pop knowledge, polarizing politics, and demonization of one’s critics.

Sadly, nearly every gross thing Trump says or does has had an antecedent in the Obama administration. "Hope and Change" begat "Make America Great," in a tit-for-tat way that Trump’s likely garish convention props will mimic Obama’s Styrofoam Greek columns. After Obama dismissed ISIS as jayvees by invoking Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, we should not be too outraged that Trump cited an endorsement from Mike Tyson.

There may be reasons to vote against Trump, but at least spare us the outrage that he is somehow uniquely demagogic, crude, or ill-informed in a manner that we have not seen over the last eight years from Trump’s greatest enabler.

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Isa8v20 O Lie Machine

O Policy Guru Iran Deal Lies - J :)

Isaiah 8:20 KJV To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.

"For the last seven years the American public has been living through a postmodern narrative crafted by an extremely gifted and unspeakably cynical political operative whose job is to wage digital information campaigns designed to dismantle a several-decade old security architecture while lying about the nature of the Iranian regime. No wonder Americans feel less safe—they are." - Excerpt from following article:

Obama's Foreign Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the Iran Deal

weeklystandard.com 2:48 PM, May 05, 2016 | By Lee Smith http://j.mp/0IranDealLiesO aka http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2002252

Ben Rhodes and the blob. / It’s hardly any wonder that Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has a "mind meld" with his boss, the president. According to a David Samuels New York Times Magazine article to be published Sunday and already posted to the website, Rhodes, like Barack Obama, is contemptuous of "the American foreign-policy establishment." What Obama calls the "Washington playbook" dictating the sorts of responses available to American policymakers, Rhodes calls the "Blob."

The Blob includes "editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker," etc. It also encompasses, according to Rhodes, Obama's former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and the administration's first defense secretary Robert Gates. Presumably Leon Panetta, former Pentagon chief and CIA director, who goes on the record to criticize Rhodes and the president, is also part of the Blob, alongside "other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East." In other words, the emotion driving the administration's foreign policy is contempt—contempt for allies, colleagues, and the generations of American policymakers who built the post-WWII international order, ensuring relative global stability, and peace and prosperity at home.

Samuels's profile is an amazing piece of writing about the Holden Caulfield of American foreign policy. He's a sentimental adolescent with literary talent (Rhodes published one short story before his mother's connections won him a job in the world of foreign policy), and high self regard, who thinks that everyone else is a phony. Those readers who found Jeffrey Goldberg's picture of Obama in his March Atlantic profile refreshing for the president's willingness to insult American allies publicly will be similarly cheered here by Rhodes's boast of deceiving American citizens, lawmakers, and allies over the Iran deal. Conversely, those who believe Obama risked American interests to take a cheap shot at allies from the pedestal of the Oval Office will be appalled to see Rhodes dancing in the end zone to celebrate the well-packaged misdirections and even lies—what Rhodes and others call a "narrative"—that won Obama his signature foreign policy initiative.

"Like Obama," writes Samuels: / Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer's tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press.

As Rhodes admits, it's not that hard to shape the narrative. "All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus," Rhodes said. "Now they don't. They call us to explain to them what's happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That's a sea change. They literally know nothing."

In Rhodes's "narrative" about the Iran deal, negotiations started when the ostensibly moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected president, providing an opening for the administration to reach out in friendship. In reality, as Samuels gets administration officials to admit, negotiations began when "hardliner" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still president. It was Rhodes who framed the Iran deal as a choice between peace and war, and it was Rhodes who set up a messaging unit to sell the deal that created an "echo chamber" in the press. "[Al Monitor reporter] Laura Rozen was my RSS feed," says Tanya Somanader, the 31-year-old who managed @TheIranDeal twitter feed. "She would just find everything and retweet it."

"In the spring of last year," Samuels writes: / "legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. "We created an echo chamber," [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. "They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say."

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America's future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. "In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this," he said. "We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked." He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. "We drove them crazy," he said of the deal's opponents.

It's not clear whether or not Panetta supported the deal, but he admits he was wrong about Obama's willingness to take all measures to stop Iran from getting a bomb.

As secretary of defense, he tells me, one of his most important jobs was keeping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, from launching a pre-emptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. "They were both interested in the answer to the question, 'Is the president serious?' " Panetta recalls. "And you know my view, talking with the president, was: If brought to the point where we had evidence that they're developing an atomic weapon, I think the president is serious that he is not going to allow that to happen."

Panetta stops. / "But would you make that same assessment now?" I ask him. / "Would I make that same assessment now?" he asks. "Probably not."

Rhodes tells Samuels that Don DeLillo is his favorite novelist. "That's the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics," he tells Samuels. "And that's what it's like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016."

So that's it. For the last seven years the American public has been living through a postmodern narrative crafted by an extremely gifted and unspeakably cynical political operative whose job is to wage digital information campaigns designed to dismantle a several-decade old security architecture while lying about the nature of the Iranian regime. No wonder Americans feel less safe—they are. [My emphasis.] / Web Link: http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/2002252

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Act5v29 Sasse No Trump

Acts 5:29 KJV Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.

_ Trump = National Socialism, Clinton = Revolutionary Communism, Sanders = Fabian Socialism. The choices are those similar to choices made in Europe in the last century. Ordering from the lesser to the greater evil: Sanders, Trump, Clinton. Voting implies consent to the type of governance advocated.

[Senator (R-NB) Ben Sasse To [My Friends Supporting Donald Trump]

facebook.com http://j.mp/1SasseNoTrump aka https://www.facebook.com/sassefornebraska/posts/561073597391141

AN OPEN LETTER TO TRUMP SUPPORTERS

To my friends supporting Donald Trump:

The Trump coalition is broad and complicated, but I believe many Trump fans are well-meaning. I have spoken at length with many of you, both inside and outside Nebraska. You are rightly worried about our national direction. You ache about a crony-capitalist leadership class that is not urgent about tackling our crises. You are right to be angry.

I’m as frustrated and saddened as you are about what’s happening to our country. But I cannot support Donald Trump.

Please understand: I’m not an establishment Republican, and I will never support Hillary Clinton. I’m a movement conservative who was elected over the objections of the GOP establishment. My current answer for who I would support in a hypothetical matchup between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton is: Neither of them. I sincerely hope we select one of the other GOP candidates, but if Donald Trump ends up as the GOP nominee, conservatives will need to find a third option.

Mr. Trump’s relentless focus is on dividing Americans, and on tearing down rather than building back up this glorious nation. Much like President Obama, he displays essentially no understanding of the fact that, in the American system, we have a constitutional system of checks and balances, with three separate but co-equal branches of government. And the task of public officials is to be public “servants.” The law is king, and the people are boss. But have you noticed how Mr. Trump uses the word “Reign” – like he thinks he’s running for King? It’s creepy, actually. Nebraskans are not looking for a king. We yearn instead for the recovery of a Constitutional Republic.

At this point in Nebraska discussions, many of you have immediately gotten practical: “Okay, fine, you think there are better choices than Trump. But you would certainly still vote for Trump over Clinton in a general election, right?”

Before I explain why my answer is “Neither of them,” let me correct some nonsense you might have heard on the internet of late.

WHY I RAN FOR SENATE

***No, I’m not a career politician. (I had never run for anything until being elected to the U.S. Senate fifteen months ago, and I ran precisely because I actually want to make America great again.)
***No, I’m not a lawyer who has never created a job. (I was a business guy before becoming a college president in my hometown.)
***No, I’m not part of the Establishment. (Sheesh, I had attack ads by the lobbyist class run against me while I was on a bus tour doing 16 months of townhalls across Nebraska. Why? Precisely because I was not the preferred candidate of Washington.)
***No, I’m not concerned about political job security. (The very first thing I did upon being sworn in in January 2015 was to introduce a constitutional amendment for term limits – this didn’t exactly endear me to my new colleagues.)
***No, I’m not for open borders. (The very first official trip I took in the Senate was to observe and condemn how laughably porous the Texas/Mexican border is. See 70 tweets from @bensasse in February 2015.)
***No, I’m not a “squishy,” feel-good, grow-government moderate. (I have the 4th most-conservative voting record in the Senate: https://www.conservativereview.com/members/benjamin-sasse/ http://www.heritageactionscorecard.com/membe…/member/S001197 )

In my very first speech to the Senate, I told my colleagues that “The people despise us all.” This institution needs to get to work, not on the lobbyists’ priorities, but on the people’s: https://youtu.be/zQMoB4aUn04?t=3m8s

Now, to the question at hand: Will I pledge to vote for just any “Republican” nominee over Hillary Clinton?

Let’s begin by rejecting naïve purists: Politics has no angels. Politics is not about creating heaven on earth. Politics is simply about preserving a framework for ordered liberty – so that free people can find meaning and happiness not in politics but in their families, their neighborhoods, their work.

POLITICAL PARTIES

Now, let’s talk about political parties: parties are just tools to enact the things that we believe. Political parties are not families; they are not religions; they are not nations – they are often not even on the level of sports loyalties. They are just tools. I was not born Republican. I chose this party, for as long as it is useful.

If our Party is no longer working for the things we believe in – like defending the sanctity of life, stopping ObamaCare, protecting the Second Amendment, etc. – then people of good conscience should stop supporting that party until it is reformed.

VOTING

Now, let’s talk about voting: Voting is usually just about choosing the lesser evil of the most viable candidates.

“Usually…” But not always. Certain moments are larger. They cause us to explicitly ask: Who are we as a people? What does the way we vote here say about our shared identity? What is actually the president’s job?

THE PRESIDENT’S CORE CALLING

The president’s job is not about just mindlessly shouting the word “strong” – as if Vladimir Putin, who has been strongly bombing civilian populations in Syria the last month, is somehow a model for the American presidency. No, the president’s core calling is to “Preserve, Protect, and Defend the Constitution.”

Before we ever get into any technical policy fights – about pipelines, or marginal tax rates, or term limits, or Medicare reimbursement codes – America is first and fundamentally about a shared Constitutional creed. America is exceptional, because she is at her heart a big, bold truth claim about human dignity, natural rights, and self-control – and therefore necessarily about limited rather than limitless government.

THE MEANING OF AMERICA

America is the most exceptional nation in the history of the world because our Constitution is the best political document that’s ever been written. It said something different than almost any other government had said before: Most governments before said that might makes right, that government decides what our rights are and that the people are just dependent subjects. Our Founders said that God gives us rights by nature, and that government is not the author or source of our rights. Government is just our shared project to secure those rights.

Government exists only because the world is fallen, and some people want to take your property, your liberty, and your life. Government is tasked with securing a framework for ordered liberty where “we the people” can in our communities voluntarily build something great together for our kids and grandkids. That’s America. Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of speech – the First Amendment is the heartbeat of the American Constitution, of the American idea itself.

WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT TO MR. TRUMP?

So let me ask you: Do you believe the beating heart of Mr. Trump’s candidacy has been a defense of the Constitution? Do you believe it’s been an impassioned defense of the First Amendment – or an attack on it?

Which of the following quotes give you great comfort that he’s in love with the First Amendment, that he is committed to defending the Constitution, that he believes in executive restraint, that he understands servant leadership?

Statements from Trump:
***“We’re going to open up libel laws and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.”
***“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak…”
***Putin, who has killed journalists and is pillaging Ukraine, is a great leader.
***The editor of National Review “should not be allowed on TV and the FCC should fine him.”
***On whether he will use executive orders to end-run Congress, as President Obama has illegally done: "I won't refuse it. I'm going to do a lot of things." “I mean, he’s led the way, to be honest with you.”
***“Sixty-eight percent would not leave under any circumstance. I think that means murder. It think it means anything.”
***On the internet: “I would certainly be open to closing areas” of it.
***His lawyers to people selling anti-Trump t-shirts: “Mr. Trump considers this to be a very serious matter and has authorized our legal team to take all necessary and appropriate actions to bring an immediate halt...”
***Similar threatening legal letters to competing campaigns running ads about his record.

And on it goes…

IF MR. TRUMP BECOMES THE NOMINEE...

Given what we know about him today, here’s where I’m at: If Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, my expectation is that I will look for some third candidate – a conservative option, a Constitutionalist.

I do not claim to speak for a movement, but I suspect I am far from alone. After listening to Nebraskans in recent weeks, and talking to a great many people who take oaths seriously, I think many are in the same place. I believe a sizable share of Christians – who regard threats against religious liberty as arguably the greatest crisis of our time – are unwilling to support any candidate who does not make a full-throated defense of the First Amendment a first commitment of their candidacy.

Conservatives understand that all men are created equal and made in the image of God, but also that government must be limited so that fallen men do not wield too much power. A presidential candidate who boasts about what he'll do during his "reign" and refuses to condemn the KKK cannot lead a conservative movement in America.

TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT

Thank you for listening. While I recognize that we disagree about how to make America great again, we agree that this should be our goal. We need more people engaged in the civic life of our country—not fewer. I genuinely appreciate how much many of you care about this country, and that you are demanding something different from Washington. I’m going to keep doing the same thing.

But I can’t support Donald Trump. / Humbly,/ Ben Sasse / Nebraska

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Deu23v1to9 Immigration Misc

Deut 23:1-9 Immigration, Naturalization, Forgiveness, Much Else - J :) 

From a forum post: From: Jim :) (JimSmiling) To: Bob (Bobbylee7)

Bob (Bobbylee7) said...

Deuteronomy 23:3 KJV ¶ An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the LORD for ever:

Hi Len, Jim post passage in one of his posts and it goes with this discussion too. What is this about? 10 generations?

You may have been thinking originally about vv 7-8 in Deu 23. Full passage below:

Deuteronomy 23:1-9 KJV ¶ He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD. 2 ¶ A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the LORD. 3 ¶ An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the LORD for ever: 4 Because they met you not with bread and with water in the way, when ye came forth out of Egypt; and because they hired against thee Balaam the son of Beor of Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse thee. 5 Nevertheless the LORD thy God would not hearken unto Balaam; but the LORD thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because the LORD thy God loved thee. 6 Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days for ever. 7 ¶ Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite; for he is thy brother: thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian; because thou wast a stranger in his land. 8 The children that are begotten of them shall enter into the congregation of the LORD in their third generation. 9 ¶ When the host goeth forth against thine enemies, then keep thee from every wicked thing. http://biblehub.com/purple/deuteronomy/23.htm

Some thoughts on the passage.

One. Membership in the congregation of Israel is the equivalent of citizenship in the Nation. It is also significant in worship in that its privileges include entrance into an inner court of Tabernacle and Temple.

Two. v. 1 has two purposes. a. Mutilation of male genitals from trivial, a nick, to castration was a frequent sign of commitment to idolatry. b. Potency is important. The proper cutting of genitalia, circumcision, depicts, in a sense, continual potency in a spiritual sense, in its likeness to erection.

Three. Ten generations includes 1023 people, less duplicates. The probability of bastardy in one's ancestry in ten generations is probably rather high. But God and those keeping silent are merciful toward a chosen Nation.

Four. Ruth, ancestor of David and of our Lord, was a Moabite. The injunction pertains to males. Mothers teach us how to be human. Fathers teach us how to relate to our society. Ruth and the other three women of Mat 1:3-6 trace the origin of the seed of the woman back to Eve rather than via Israel. http://biblehub.com/purple/matthew/1.htm vv 3-6

Five. After Abraham's and later the two angels' rescues of Lot, the sins of his descendants against Abraham's children of promise is particularly egregious. The Lord's turning the attempted curse into a blessing idicates that, as in the case of Joseph's brothers ( Gen 50:15-21 http://biblehub.com/purple/genesis/50.htm vv 15-21 ), we should be ready and willing to forgive everybody for everything, as Joseph was, and as we are instructed ( http://biblehub.com/mark/11-25.htm ). Forgiveness does not exclude, of course, the taking of proper precautions against recurrence.

Six. It takes three generations of immersion in a new society before full membership is appropriate. Citizenship after seven years of residence for protestants and Jews of western European origin was appropriate in colonial days. But is probably appropriate today only for those from the Anglosphere, of thoroughly British origin. Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany might also be considered for those exceptionally fluent in English. If we are to recover the virtues of America, we must maintain and enhance the origins of those virtues. Please note that I am not excluding others from residence. Only from citizenship for a biblical three or more generations of immersion.

Seven. There are some who should stay in other lands and find improvement there. Our number one foreign policy goal should be to open all nations to the preaching of the Gospel.

Eight. Verse 9 reminds us of the need for moral purity in any of our various ministries.

http://forums.delphiforums.com/jesus7/messages/?msg=35954.7
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Deu23v3 Trump v Protected

Trump: Rise of Unprotected -Noonan – J :)
Deuteronomy 23:3 KJV ¶ An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the LORD for ever:
Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected
Why political professionals are struggling to make sense of the world they created.ByPeggy Noonan The Wall Street Journal Peggy.Noonan@wsj.com Feb. 25, 2016 8:02 p.m. ET 1469 COMMENTS  WSJ | 2016-02-26T01:02:00.000Z  http://j.mp/0NoonanProtectT aka  http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-the-rise-of-the-unprotected-1456448550 
We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.
I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?
In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.But actually that’s been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we’re in.
Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.
But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.
There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.
I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.
They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.
Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.
One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration. It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.
It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.
Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.
If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.
Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.
It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.
The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.
Mr. Trump came from that.
Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket—an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.
In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims—not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls—the unprotected, who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.
What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.
You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.
This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens. And a country really can’t continue this way.
In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.
Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.
Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.
I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it. [My emphasis.]
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John 12:32 Pulpit Comm. BibleHub.com

John 12:32

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.

Verses 32, 33. - And I, if I be lifted out of (or, from) the earth, will draw all (men) to myself. Now this he spake, signifying by what death he was about to die. Ὑψωθῶ has been by Meyer, as well as many of the Fathers, referred to the Lord's resurrection and ascension. The ἐκ τῆς γῆς would certainly be in favor of it, and be a possible rendering if we hold (with Westcott and others) that resurrection and uplifting from the earth involve and presuppose a previous death, or that John always speaks of Christ's death as itself a glorious thing, as itself the commencement of the supreme glory of the Son of man. On the other hand - though this idea is reiterated by the opponents of the Fourth Gospel - there is nothing in the New Testament which makes the cross of Christ in itself a symbol of the exaltation of Jesus. Moreover, the next verse compels a closer reference to "the way in which he was about to die" - a mode of departure admirably expressed by the term "uplifting." The language of Jesus to Nicodemus, in which the same word occurs in describing the lifting up of the Son of man after the fashion in which the serpent was uplifted in the wilderness, confirms this interpretation of the evangelist, which we have no claim to traverse (cf. also John 18:32; John 21:19). Christ declared that the attraction of the cross would be mightier than all the fascination of the prince of this world. The word ἐλκύσω, "I will draw," is applied elsewhere (John 6:44) to the Father's work of grace, which preveniently prepares men to come to Christ. In these words we learn that the attraction of the cross of Christ will prove to be the mightiest and most sovereign motive ever brought to bear on the human will, and, when wielded by the Holy Spirit as a revelation of the matchless love of God, will involve the most sweeping judicial sentence that can be pronounced upon the world and its prince. In John 16:11 the belief or the conviction that the prince of this world has been already condemned (κέκριται) is one of the great results of the mission of the Comforter. [Emphasis added.]

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<!-- C:\Users\James\Dropbox\Ndp\D k Reuben7 222323 1 160215a.html Version:0.9 StartHTML:00000162 EndHTML:00002002 StartFragment:00000196 EndFragment:00001966 SourceURL:http://forums.delphiforums.com/kath/messages/222323/1 <html><body> --> <!--StartFragment--><p></p> <div><strong>The Bible declares that God knew you before you were even </strong></div> <div><strong>formed in your </strong><strong>mother's womb.  God loves you and has a </strong></div> <div><strong>special purpose for your life. You</strong><strong> may feel discouraged at </strong></div> <div><strong>times because you lack certain things, but encourage </strong><strong>your</strong></div> <div><strong>self in the Lord and know that He is aware of everything </strong></div> <div><strong>that you are in need</strong><strong>. The Bible says that God knows what </strong></div> <div><strong>we need even before we ask Him. These </strong><strong>words may seem </strong></div> <div><strong>repetitive and you may have heard them many times be-</strong></div> <div><strong>fore, but </strong><strong>please take them to heart and know that God is </strong></div> <div><strong>aware of your every need.  His </strong><strong>timing may not be in tune </strong></div> <div><strong>with our timetable, but trust and know that God's timing </strong></div> <div><strong>is much better than ours can ever be. </strong><strong>(Jeremiah 1:5) </strong></div> <div><strong>(Jeremiah 29:11) (Matthew 6:7-8) (Isaiah 55:8-9)<br> <br> Be encouraged to never doubt your abilities and strengths. </strong></div> <div><strong>Stand strong in the </strong><strong>Lord and know that you are more than </strong></div> <div><strong>a conqueror through Christ.  Be encouraged </strong><strong>and look at </strong><strong>your </strong></div> <div><strong>days with a positive perspective and recognize how special </strong></div> <div><strong>and </strong><strong>loved you really are. (Romans 8:35-39)</strong></div><!--EndFragment--> <!-- </body> </html> -->