Deeper 12: The First Commandment

20:3 (HRV) “You shall have no other gods before Me.”

 

Most of the interpretations of this scripture revolve around creating a hierarchy of what’s most important in your life and making sure to put God at the top of the list; God, family, country, and so on.  I grew up believing that, as long as I began with “God” when reciting any list of what’s most important to me, I was obeying the first commandment. 

 

But that’s not what this verse is all about.  The words “before me” don’t refer to having the highest place on a list, but rather it refers to location as in the sentence, “Bring the children before me.”  The first commandment could be translated, “You shall place no other gods in My face,” or “You will not bring any other gods into My presence.”  The fallacy of the list idea is that it creates an illusion that if we give God a piece of our time, we can enjoy our other pleasures as we see fit.  But imagine how my wife would react if I brought home a prostitute for an hour and, after listening to my wife's protests, I told her that it was ok to spend my time with the prostitute for just an hour because I spent three hours with my wife that day which proves my wife is still more important.  How well do you think that logic would go over?  Yet that’s the logic we bring to God with the “list” mentality. 

 

Jesus said that the commandments hinge on two things, and the first of those two is that we are to love God with everything that we are.  The first four commandments are, essentially, breaking this down into more easily definable pieces.  So, really, we are just being told to love God, but in case we’re not sure how to define that (since many people define “love” very differently) we’re given a more specific set of guidelines as to what that means.  The first commandment is a matter of focus.  I want to love God, but how do I do that?  By giving Him my attention at all times.  By keeping my eyes and ears focused on Him and what He wants.  When I walk away and do what I want to do, even if I tell God He can come along if He wants, or even if I say I’m doing it for Him, I’m following the desires of something else and therefore I’m worshipping another God.  And when I do that, I’m placing that god in His face and calling it good.  In fact, in my delusion, I may even be calling it God’s will. 

 

Does this mean I can’t enjoy anything else?  Does this mean I can’t go for a ride?  I can’t watch the ball game?  I can’t enjoy that meal?  I can’t even spend time with my family?  No.  And yet, yes.  It all comes down to where our real passion and focus lay.  If I am truly loving God with all of my heart, soul, mind and strength, then He is going to return that with His perfect love.  That perfect love flowing through me is going to grow, and as He tells me to go, I am going to reach out to everyone around me and love them with the love that God is giving me.

 

But if my job, my possessions, my religion, or even my family is an idol that I hold sacred, and I'm spending time with them based not on what God wants from me, but what I've decided is best for me, then my time spent with those things is time spent worshipping those idols.  I'm effectively sticking them in God’s face and telling Him that they're more important at the moment.   This is why we’re told at different times in the bible that if you put your hand to the plow, but turn back to your father or mother, you’re not fit for the kingdom.  Or we’re told that we need to be able to give up our spouses and our children for His Name’s sake.  These sound harsh unless we realize that God loves those that we claim to love far more than we can even imagine, and that He knows that unless we love them perfectly through Him, our love is, at best, an imperfect deception of what love should truly be. 

 

If we have entered into this marriage and called him Lord, then this is his first commandment to us:  Look deeply into His smiling eyes and concentrate on His loving words without breaking your concentration.  (And to the guys out there who feel weird about that, just gender flip it.  God’s not man or woman, but that discussion's for another day.)  Don’t bring another love into this marriage and call it acceptable, because He is a jealous lover and wants us all for Himself.  He will not share us in the same way we wouldn’t share our spouses with other lovers. 

 

It’s simple, really.  All YHWH wants is all of you. 

 

Scott Snyder

Edgsicript3@yahoo.com

Sorry for the delay

I wanted to update you on our progress and apologize for the delay in getting the next issue out.  We were hoping to have it out sooner, but miscalculations on timing and unexpected delays in our personal lives, such as illness and body and household appliances, have slowed us down. 


In order to help out I'm in the process of learning the program that will allow me to add the text, dialogue balloons and such to the comics so Paul can focus on the art.  This should speed things up in the long run, but for now I'm still in the process of figuring it out so things are moving slowly. 


So for right now all I can tell you is that we were originally shooting for the end of 2013, and then we moved it to early February.  Now we're kind of shooting for ASAP.  So I apologize once again for the delay.  I'm going to add another "Deeper" blog in the next couple of days, and I'll add the second prologue to my story over on Gorillahead in the next week, but I know that most of you reading this are looking forward to the comic primarily.  I can tell you this.  Paul has sent me the first several pages of issue 2 for viewing and all I'll say is that you're really going to like what's coming. 


Thanks for checking in.


Scott
edgiscript3@yahoo.com

BTS: Really quick update 1/20/14

We've added the first part of a new story over at Gorillahead.  It's not a comic, but only the first part of a novel.  I'll update it periodically while Paul's working on the art for Spiritman.

And speaking of Spiritman, Paul has thumbnailed every page and is in the process of fleshing them out.  He hopes to be done by the end of January/early February. 

That's it for now.

Scott
edgiscript3@yahoo.com

Deeper 11: Preparing for the ten commandments

Exodus 19:5-8 (HRV)  “’Now therefore, if you will hearken unto My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then you shall be my own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and you shall be unto Me a kingdom of cohenim, and a set-apart nation.  These are the words you shall speak unto the children of Yisra’el.’  And Moshe came and called for the elders of the people, and set before them all these words which YHWH commanded him.  And all the people answered together, and said: ‘All that YHWH has spoken we will do.’”

Let me set the stage for what’s happening here.  The nation of Israel has left Egypt and they’ve escaped Pharaoh’s chariots by the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea.  The people have not yet received the ten commandments yet.  At this point YHWH is saying, “I want you to be mine, but I’m offering myself to you, not forcing myself upon you.  Will you take me to be yours?”  This is the beginning of a marriage covenant and it is the essence of making Him Lord.  The people of Israel answered by agreeing to keep His commandments before they even knew what His commandments would be.  These are their vows. 

We want an intimacy with God, but too often we want it our way.  God said, “IF you will listen and IF you will keep my covenant, THEN you shall be my own treasure from among all peoples.”  We tend to act as if all God said was, “You shall be my own treasure,” and we ignore the rest of it.  We want the good stuff, but we don’t want to acknowledge that we’ve got to make some sort of effort in this partnership.  No, we’d rather pretend that God is Santa Claus just giving and giving and giving, and all we have to do is sit here like a little baby bird with our mouths open while we squawk away with our complaints about how it’s not coming quickly enough.  When are we going to recognize that this is an “if/then” statement and we need to fulfill our part of this marriage in order to enter fully into this union?

So the people of Yisra’el agreed to the ten commandments before even hearing them.  That’s a picture of what we should be doing when making YHWH our Lord.  You see, the problem is that we need to make Him our Savior AND Lord, but too often we’re only recognizing Him as our Savior.  We do need to accept His gift of salvation.  Absolutely.  That’s vital.  But it’s not over with that.  We’re supposed to make Him our Lord as well.  We’re supposed to enter into a living and vibrant union.  We’re supposed to now take an active role in getting to know Him and letting Him lead us wherever He may take us.  We’re supposed to say, “I don’t know what it is You’ve got lined up for me, but I’ve seen how good You are and I know how much You love me, so I’m going to agree to whatever it is You want from me and for me right now.” 

Other interesting things about this section:

The Ten Commandments are given in the next chapter.  How many of us miss that the ten commandments were not brought down the mountain by Moshe/Moses, but they were shouted down by God.  When Moshe went up Mount Sinai to visit with YHWH and to receive the ten commandments in stone form, the people had already received the ten commandments. 

YHWH said, “For all the earth is mine.”  The earth was not given to Satan with the fall of man.  Authority to rule was given to Satan, but the earth still belongs to God. 

“And you shall be unto Me a kingdom of cohenim, and a set-apart nation.”  Cohenim essentially means priests.  Yisra’el was a nation of priests.  We tend to see the Levitical priesthood as a picture of an elite few that God set aside to do his special bidding while the rest of us just carry on with our own work in our own way.  We use the Levitical priesthood as “proof” that God wants one or two of us to be closer to Him than the rest of us.  But the Levitical priesthood was yet another picture that came later and was essentially a more defined picture of what God was establishing here.  God said the entire nation was a nation of priests to Him and the whole world.  We are ALL prophets, priests, and kings, not just a select few who have been ordained by the world’s system.  We are all meant to minister to Him, for Him, and through Him. 

Scott Snyder
edgiscript3@yahoo.com
 

BTS (sort of) 11/20/13

We're about a week away from Thanksgiving and I just wanted to say hi to anybody reading these (which I believe isn't many, but that's ok).  There haven't been any updates in a while.  Just wanted to let you know that Paul's hard at work drawing issue 2 and I'm (Scott) hard at work writing issue 3.  For issue 1 Paul would put out a page or two every week or so but he's decided that it'll be quicker in the long run if he does the entire issue at once so he's completing the entire 2nd issue before he releases it to the site.  So that means that there won't be any updates for a while which is why I haven't updated the blog for a while either.  It seems kind of pointless since this is secondary to the comic. 

Anyway, hopefully issue 2 will be up in about a month, I'll have issue 3 finished and ready to be drawn by then, and also I may have a chapter of my new book to add to Gorillahead. 

Have a good Thanksgiving.

Scott Snyder
edgiscript3@yahoo.com

Deeper 10: We are greater than God

Ok, I admit, part of my reason for adding that title was to pop your eyes out of your head and make you want to read on, but please bear with me.  There is a valid point to be made. 

 

How many times are we encouraged to bless God?  King David said it several times.

Psalms 103:1 (HRV) – “Bless YHWH, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His set-apart name.”

And yet, the apostle Shaul/Paul had this to say about blessing.

Hebrews 7:7 (HRV) – “And behold this no one disputes:  that the lesser is blessed by the greater.”

So if we are to bless God, and the greater blesses the latter, then this leads us to the obvious question and stunning thought.  Are we greater than God? 

Yes, we are.  We are greater than God by His design in one aspect and one aspect alone:  Freedom.

Psalms 111:10a (HRV) – “The fear of YHWH is the beginning of wisdom;”

To fear God means to acknowledge and respect who He is.  To fear is to bow.  To fear is to worship.  Fearing God is recognizing that He is King and Lord and Ruler of all even if you hate that fact.  To Fear YHWH is to come face to face with Him and say, “You’re God.  I am not.”

BUT this is only the beginning of wisdom.  It was never meant to end there.  YHWH wanted us to grow.  He wanted us to become His true love.  It’s one thing to acknowledge that He is God and to bend your knee to Him.  It’s quite another to enthusiastically embrace Him.

1 John 4:19 (HRV) – “Therefore, we love Eloah (God) because he first loved us.” 

A friend of mine said once that he loves God because He is God and therefore deserves our love.  I told him what I'm telling you now.  That's not true.  We bow because He is God.  We love because He chose to love us first.  He didn’t have to.  If we become separated from God, He continues on, we don’t.  He doesn’t need us, we need Him.  He gave us life and then He gave us His life on the cross.  Everything He has done has been for the purpose of unifying us with Him.  He never had to create us in the first place.  This is why we love, because He gave us everything.  He loved us first.  We fear Him because He is God.  We love Him because He first loved us.

In order to have true love, there needs to be the freedom to choose not to love.  Without the freedom to disobey and walk away, there is no love on our part.  If I hold out my hand and ask you to love me and you take it, that expresses love.  If I hold out a gun to your head and ask you to love me, and you concede, that fails to express true love.  Love forced is not love at all.  An atheistic friend of mine once asked me, if God exists then why doesn’t He remove all doubt and reveal Himself.  Why is faith required?  The response was simple.  Because if He did what you’re saying He should do, our freedom to choose would effectively be taken away.  You would no longer be able to truly love Him if you had no other real option. 

Having the freedom to chase Him doesn’t make all of our choices correct.  Even in our freedom, He is still the King and His supreme authority has not gone away.  We’re told we’ve been set free from the law of sin and death, and yet Jesus/Yeshua said that He did not come to destroy the law, so the law still applies.  How do we reconcile this?

Romans 6:16-18 – “Do you not know that to whom you present your nefesh** for service, you must obey?  You are the servants of that one whom you obey, whether to sin or to the obedience of righteousness.  But thanks [be] to Eloah, because you were servants of sin, but [now] you have obeyed from the heart the form of teaching to which you are committed.  And when you were freed from sin, you were made subject to righteousness.” 

(** = Meaning of nefesh, quoted from Hebraic Roots Version, Translation issues, page LX.  “The Hebrew word NEFESH is a very ambiguous word which simply cannot be rendered well into English.  NEFESH can mean ‘soul, life or self’ and often carries connotations of combinations of those meanings at the same time.  In order to properly convey the real usage of this word to the reader I have in most cases, in the New Testament, transliterated the word NEFESH into the English text.”)

These verses speak of freedom from sin, and yet they’re constantly talking about obedience.  We’ve been given the freedom to find Him, not the freedom to create our own way and call it good.  When the bible says that we are freed from the law of sin and death, it is not a manifesto by God allowing us to ignore everything or anything He has given us, but rather it’s saying that by way of Jesus’ blood paying our penalty, the penalty of death no longer can be required of us.  In other words, we’re no longer destined to die as a result of our sin, but we may instead fall upon Jesus’ death and resurrection as having paid our burden.

Romans says that when we are freed from sin, we are made subject to righteousness.  This is why Paul, who understood the freedom he had in Christ, continued to refer to himself as a bondservant or a slave.  We no longer obey out of fear of reprisal, but we now obey out of love because it’s what He wants and it makes Him happy.  Think about it this way.  If you’re courting the love of your life and he or she hates peas and you know this, then if you’re having him or her over for dinner, you won’t prepare peas.  You will not obey that “law” because you’re afraid of being beaten.  You will obey because you love them enough to avoid hurting them even if you love peas.  When God says, “This is who I am and what I want done,” when we ignore that and respond, “That’s too bad, God, because I’m doing it my way,” who are we worshipping?  Who are we obeying?  God or ourselves?  We have the freedom to do it our way, but that doesn’t mean every single choice we make pleases Him. 

A bad choice doesn't necessarily mean we're sinning either.  It just means we're  not finding Him and therefore not growing closer to Him in the way we should be.  Playing Mario Kart all day long isn't sinful in and of itself.  But what if God has told you in some way that you should spend your time in prayer this day and you instead decide to obey your own desires and play games?  And what if you say, "I'm free from the law of sin and death so I can do whatever I want and I find God in this game"?  The answer is simple.  Yes, we do have the freedom to do whatever we want, but just because you say God wants you to find Him in that game doesn't make it right, and your disobedience is causing you and He needless suffering as a result. 

Have you ever heard of Preacher’s Kid Syndrome or Church Kid Syndrome?  This is the name given when the children of the preacher or the kids who grow up in the church are the worst behaved kids around.  Why is this happening?  Of course it’s not an absolute, but it happens often enough to give it a name.  And the fact is that church attendance is increasingly shrinking.  If a church is growing it’s usually not because of a revival, but because other churches are closing their doors.  Kids who grow up in the church are not coming back to church when they’re out on their own.  Why?

I believe that in part it’s because our churches are full of platitudes and programs, but not an honest search for a living God.  Our churches lack the true freedom to genuinely seek YHWH and then to let YHWH lead us where He wants us to go.  So we’re not finding a God of life.  We’re finding a man-made God of platitudes and rules.  Our kids, and us too if we’re honest, are hungry for life, and since they’re not finding it in our churches they’re looking elsewhere.  (And please don't feel like I'm saying every single church is a cookie-cutter version of every other church.  This is a generality and does not apply equally in every situation.)

If you’re one of those “kids,” whether you're nine or ninety, my prayer for you today is that you have the courage to follow your heart’s desire to truly seek His life, His face and His love.  There are many in churches today who can help and want to help.  I’m not decrying everyone who attends church.  But I hope you recognize that even the best out there are just as imperfect as you are.  A lot of bad advice has been given to me over the years from very good intentioned people just as it has been given to you.  I hope you understand that He wants to be found.  The journey was made difficult to prove your heart’s desire.  You've got to find His truth in the midst of all of the lies.  If you seek Him, and I mean if you TRULY seek him, he WILL be found. 

 

Go for it.

Scott Snyder

Edgiscript3@yahoo.com

BTS: 11/22/13 I-Con come and gone

Hey, gang.  What's up?

Normally I try to rotate my behind the scenes stuff with my "Deeper" stuff, but we just finished I-Con last Saturday and I wanted to give my report. 

First of all, I got some cool pics of Batman, Spider-Man, Stormtroopers, a Minecraft guy and more.  Ok, I admit I'm biased towards Spider-Man, but I've got to say that I thought the most creative idea for a costume was Cyclops re-imagined as a steam-punk character. 

Second, my son absolutely freaked out when I showed him the plush-doll Dalek that I got for him.  He (gasp) hugged me.  He even hugged me in front of people.  He's put it right beside the TV in our living room. 

And third, I want to say thank you to the ninjas in training that continued providing us with candy for the entire day.  It was more than just the sugar rush, guys.  It was the fact that it was just too cool watching you BAMF out and then BAMF back in with candy.  (If you have to ask what "BAMF" means, then you're not a licensed nerd.) 

:)

It was a blast seeing all of the people.  The, as I like to call it, Massive Mystical Tome was once again a huge hit.  I lost count as to how many people lit up when they saw that they could open it.  One person became absorbed in it and quietly read the whole thing.  Everyone who checked it out was impressed.  It was very encouraging to see the reactions we were getting from people. 

Once again we gave away a ton of free stuff.  It really helps draw people in when you're not asking them for money.  You know that feeling that you get when you're at the state fair or some other similar location with dozens or even hundreds of neat booths and attractions, and you want to see them all, but at the same time you know that each one of them wants you to spend all of your money there?  It was so cool seeing the transformation on people who passed by our booth:  Passing by not wanting to make eye contact, to semi-interested because of a free comic, to stunned that we were giving away everything, to jaw-dropping amazed at the MMT (Massive Mystical Tome). 

Thanks to everyone that stopped by and thanks to everyone that keeps tabs on us online.  My fondest hope is that through us the Holy Spirit is inspiring and encouraging somebody out there.  More than one would be nice, but I won't get greedy.  :)

Briefly, here's our tentative plan for the future.  Finish issue 2 (story and pencils as it looks now) by the end of the year and finish through issue 4 by summer 2014.  Then go back and finish all 4 issues with ink and color.  Once that is complete we'll see about putting that on various sites to download a digital version of it in graphic novel form.  Several people have asked about getting print copies.  Unfortunately, that won't happen right away.  We'd love to, but the financials simply aren't there at the moment. 

If you're checking us often for updates, I wanted to let you know that there will be a lengthy delay until issue 2 is ready.  I said in my last blog that Paul is taking a much needed break for a week or so.  Then, when he starts in on issue 2, he said he believes he could speed things up by working straight through on penciling the drawings and then go back and add all of the dialogue.  So there won't be a page up every couple of days.  If it works the whole thing will be up in one shot after a few months.  Or maybe large chunks of it will be out sooner.  We'll see what happens.  Either way, please be patient with us.  We want to get it to you as fast as we can.  Issue 2 gets into the spiritual warfare side of things and Martin wonders what God needs him for with Spiritman here.  Chelsea and Cameron want some answers as to what's going on too. 

And I'm going to start adding pieces of a story to Gorillahead.  I apologize that it will be in novel form and will not be added as a comic.  Paul can only draw so much at a time.  I don't want to kill him.  The story's title is called "Valid".  Sorry, but that's all the tease you get right now.  I'll drop other teases in later BTS posts.

For now, have fun.

Tanoshinde.  (I've been told that means "have fun" in Japanese.  I hope that I haven't been lied to and that it's actually something very offensive.)

Scott Snyder
edgiscript3@yahoo.com