Philemon

Philemon.  The Holy Bible.  New King James Version.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Paul’s letter to Philemon appears last in most Bibles because it is his shortest epistle.  It stands out in other ways.  Most of the apostle letters are addressed to churches rather than to individuals.  His pastoral letters are directed to individuals who were aides in his ministry, but they focus on issues of church building.

Philemon is a very personal letter to a friend addressing a touchy subject.  The letter was delivered at the hands of Onesimus, a runaway slave who probably stole some money when he took flight from Philemon’s home.  Onesimus ended up seeking out Paul in Rome.  Under the apostle’s teaching he became a Christian.

So what is the right thing to do?  Paul wrote a lot about the importance of authority and of submitting to civil laws.  He also wrote about the essential equality of all Christians, including free people and slaves, and by extension the equality of all people.  Paul does both.  He respected authority by sending Onesimus home to his master.  He appealed to Philemon’s Christian ethic by sending the letter asking him to forgive the slave, now a brother in Christ, and to free him.

This little letter is rich with lessons in Christian ethics, firm teaching, gentle persuasion, and friendship.  It is hard to write about it without going on longer than the letter itself.

Paul also wrote

Colossians

First Corinthians

First Timothy

Galatians

Philippians
Romans
Second Corinthians

Second Thessalonians

Second Timothy

Titus

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You did not receive you a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear

You did not receive you a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship.  And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”

-Romans 8:15

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You did not receive you a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear

Pauline Letters

The apostle Paul wrote most of the New Testament.  His letters to the early churches mix doctrine, biography, advice, and personal messages.  Paul was Jewish and belonged to a sect of zealots called the Pharisees.  He was an up-and-comer with a prestigious education and leadership roles beyond what was typical for a man his age.  He prosecuted the early church, especially congregations of Jewish converts to Christianity.  He gave it all up, though, after having a vision in which he was confronted by Jesus Christ and he eventually became a missionary and apostle to the Gentiles, planting churches in Europe and Asia.

Several themes recur in Paul’s letters.  Some of these are: the Gospel and doctrinal purity, Christian living, and relationships.

The Gospel

Paul was a preacher of the Gospel.  He frequently reminded people to remember and stick to the Gospel he taught with directness and simplicity.  There were a lot of false teachers who taught alternatives, often to draw followers and enrich themselves.  In Paul’s teaching, everything depended on Christ and what He accomplished through His life, death and resurrection; nothing could be added or subtracted from it.

Of course, some tried to add or subtract.  Some of the teachings Paul opposed were Judaizers, Gnostics, and legalism.  Judaizers proposed that to be Christian, one must be Jewish first.  This included conversion to Judaism, including circumcision, and observance of the law of Moses.  According to the Gospel, everything needed was satisfied in Christ.  The Gnostics came from the tradition of mystery religions, taught “secrets” and proposed a Christ who was resurrected as a spirit.  Paul would have none of that either.  The Gospel was plain and all significant events of Christ’s life for our salvation were publicly known, including his physical resurrection.  Both of these groups touched to some degree on legalism.  People wanted to establish rules to live by, either to control people or to aggrandize themselves or to suggest people had a part in their own salvation.  Paul’s Gospel asserted that Christ is all, His sacrifice atoned for our sins and His power in us enables us to do good.

Christian Living

If Christianity wasn’t about following rules, how were we to live?  Could we do whatever we wanted?  Of course, it is silly to think that God would save us from our sins just so we could do whatever evil came to us.  It was equally naïve to think we could, on our own, live up to any rule that is truly pure and perfect.

Instead, a Christian life should be typified by love, humility, gratitude, and obedience to God.  We are to honor Christ our rescuer by imitating Him.  This isn’t to win his favor, but to return the love He showed us and express gratitude for the mercy we did not deserve.  Christ empowers us to live in a new way, knowing Him and doing good instead of sinning and becoming more estranged from God.

Relationships

One of the most important ways we can show our love for God and be Christ-like is in our relationships with others.  Paul wrote about all kinds of relationships: marriage, parent-child, employer-employee (in those days sometimes master-slave), and fellow in the church.  We should treat others with the love, kindness and generosity that Christ shows to us, especially in the church.

The Pauline Letters appear in most Bibles generally from longest to shortest: Romans, First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, First Thessalonians, Second Thessalonians, First Timothy, Second Timothy, Titus, and Philemon.  First and Second Timothy, Titus and sometimes Philemon are called the Pastoral Letters because Timothy and Titus were young pastors.

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Genesis

Genesis. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

It’s hard to even begin to discuss Genesis in just a page or two. It covers a great patch of history from the creation of the world to the death of Joseph, who brought Israel and his descendants to Egypt, where he was a high official, to save them from a famine. A lot happens in between.


A lot happens in Genesis, but three major thematic events occur: the creation, the fall of man and the God’s initiation of a plan to redeem people. The creation is described in a chapter. Man’s wonderful life with God before the fall takes up another chapter. These are important issues, but since they occurred before the problem of sin became the central problem of human life, they are presented as establishing scenes.

The fall takes up a chapter, too. Eve is deceived and believes ill of God. Adam stands by passively letting it happening and following her into sin. They broke there relationship with God and since then humanity has been a slave to sin and a victim of sin’s consequences, ultimately death.

God immediately steps in to begin to repair the relationship with man. Yes, in His justice He judges man, as in the flood of Noah’s time and other times in Genesis and since. However, Genesis also establishes God as the hero of the story who rescues people from sin and reconciles them to himself. He provides a sacrifice for Adam and Eve and covers them. This pattern repeats throughout Genesis and the Bible until it finds its ultimate expression in Jesus Christ.

In its major themes, Genesis is the establishing chapter in our enslavement to sin and God’s heroic action to free us, love us and make us part of His family. In its details, Genesis is full of interesting stories. We are introduced to several of the major people of Biblical times: Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob (Israel) and Joseph. One can get the impression that the Bible is all about these people.

The things God did in their lives reverberate through the Bible. God revealed his plan of salvation step-by-step, each time making a connection to the past as He opened up something about the future. In this way, Genesis isn’t tossed aside with the coming of Christ, but becomes part of the background and evidence for our faith in the One who completed the divine work of salvation that began as soon as we needed saving.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Gospel of Luke
The Gospel of Mark
The Gospel of Matthew
Proverbs

The Secret of the Ages by Robert Collier

Collier, Robert. The Secret of the Ages. 2nd ed. 1948. New York: Tarcher, 2007.

The secret of the ages, according to Collier, is that Mind is all and all is Mind. It is through our thoughts, for good or bad, impressed upon the stuff of the universe that brings what we have into our lives.

Collier teaches there is a Universal Mind. The universe itself and everything in it, including us, are part of and expressions of this Universal Mind. This mind conceives only good and perfection, so all we need for successful living is available to us.



We relate to the Universal mind through our minds. We have the conscious mind of our thoughts. We have the superconscious mind, part of the Universal Mind. We have the subconscious mind.

The subconscious mind is the workhorse of the system. It operates our body and accomplishes our desires effortlessly through its own intuitive genius and by drawing on the infinite knowledge and wisdom of the superconscious mind.

Though the subconscious mind is the master of achievement, it is the slave of the conscious mind. Whatever result we hold in the conscious mind the subconscious achieves through its ability to solve problems, control our bodies and impress our desires on the universe.

Therefore, the secret of the ages is the control of our conscious thoughts and faith in the subconscious and superconscious minds to accomplish our good and perfect desires.

Collier quotes and alludes to the Bible frequently, but very narrowly. I think it is fair to say that his philosophy and view of God are not Biblical. He equates God with the Universal Mind. It is an impersonal force, a mirror that reflects back to us in the material world the images we hold in our minds. I think one can reason from the Bible and experience the plentiful providence of a benevolent God. However, the God of the Bible has a personality and His own purposes and plans.

Though the book is over 80 years old (its first edition was published in 1925 under the original title of The Book of Life), it lessons are indistinguishable from the teachings of many modern self-help gurus. You’ll find the same viewpoint in the 2006 film and book The Secret (produced by Rhonda Byrne and popularized by Oprah Winfrey).

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Acres of Diamonds by Russel H. Conwell
Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker
The Success Principles by Jack Canfield with Janet Switzer
Write It Down, Make It Happen by Henriette Anne Klaus

Writing: Steal Characters

A lot of writing revolves around characters. For some writers, characters are central, and they’re drives, decisions, history, and idiosyncrasies move the story. A popular series character can be the jackpot for a writer, especially a genre writer.

Great characters are all around. How do you find them? Do as your predecessors in inventing great characters. Steal them.

I’m not suggesting that you actually steal characters. Nor am I suggesting that the writers I’ll be discussing stole their characters. It’s a matter of looking around in literature and life for real and fictional people then reworking them, consciously and unconsciously, into your own character.

Let me draw an illustration. Let’s take a popular character and see how other popular characters are in some way a reworking of it. These connections are my invention. I have not idea what the creators of these characters were thinking. I doubt most of them were thinking along these lines.

Let’s start with the Lone Ranger. Created by George W. Trendle (written by Fran Striker) in 1933 for the radio, the Lone Ranger saw success in several media, especially television. Before looking at the masked strangers successors, look at his predecessors. There were white-hatted cowboy heroes before the ranger. His contribution was the secret identity and the avoidance of lethal force. These heroes were white knights transformed for the gunpowder age. You might see those chevaliers as vaguely Christianized versions of mythological questers like Odysseus and Hercules.



Now imagine that the Lone Ranger is an antihero, his bullets are deadly lead and he uses a lot of them. You might picture something like Jonah Hex. John Albano and Tony DeZuniga created Hex in 1971. He is a scarred frontiersman who roams the West, not necessarily protecting the innocent, but collecting bounties or dealing deadly justice.

Maybe you like that the Lone Ranger avoids deadly force. Let’s keep that, but make him a pulp-era vigilante. That is what Trendle and Striker did in when they created the Green Hornet for the radio in 1936. They even made the Hornet a distant relative, though not a descendant, and imitator of the Ranger. The Hornet is darker, though. Instead of riding a white horse, he drives the Black Beauty. He sometimes pretends to be a criminal, but it is mainly to allow him to infiltrate gangs and break them apart from the inside. In spite of this, he avoids killing just as his predecessor did (I guess Seth Rogan didn’t notice that).

What if the Lone Ranger was a costumed superhero? He might be Batman, created by Bob Kane in 1939. Bruce Wayne’s identity isn’t hidden from the audience, but his costumed crusade against crime could have been modeled on the horseman. Batman writer Bill Finger gave Batman a code of ethics that would have made the Ranger proud. Not only did Batman eschew deadly force, he rarely used a gun at all. In appearance, at least, Batman resembles Zorro more than the Lone Ranger. (Batman comics tie him to Zorro, too. Several authors have depicted it as the move the Waynes had just seen when Bruce’s parents were killed by a criminal). Zorro himself might be taken as a Latin American spin on the Ranger, except he was created 14 years earlier by Johnston McCulley.

Not all of these ostensible progeny are as good as Batman. Put the Ranger in a talking car and you might end up with something like Knight Rider. Put Jonah Hex on a motorcycle in a futuristic megacity and you might get Judge Dredd. (The Judge Dredd comics weren’t bad, just not my cup of tea. The Sylvester Stallone movie was bad.)

The Lone Ranger is an archetypal hero, which is how we can so easily draw connections between him and characters that came before and after. It doesn’t denigrate Trendle and Striker to say they drew on archetypes, or even specific characters or people, in creating his own character. It’s a compliment that they created a character that was so popular, enduring, and inspiring to other writers.

Think of your own twist on the Lone Ranger archetype. You might have other characters you love that you could call on. Take your favorite romance heroine and put her in a completely different setting (Charlaine Harris put Sookie Stackhouse in a Louisiana full of vampires). You could put a detective in the far future (Isaac Asimov did in Caves of Steel). Bring a dragon into the atomic age (yeah, Godzilla). You could make a dragon a slave to the boilermakers in a steampunk fantasy—hey, maybe I’ll do that.