{"id":1806,"date":"2012-06-21T16:42:32","date_gmt":"2012-06-21T20:42:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oldsandals.net\/?p=1806"},"modified":"2012-06-25T08:23:59","modified_gmt":"2012-06-25T12:23:59","slug":"isaiah-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/?p=1806","title":{"rendered":"(Isaiah 3) No longer a paradise"},"content":{"rendered":"

The people will be oppressed,\u00a0 evry one by another and every one by his neighbor.\u00a0 The child will be insolent toward the elder, and the base toward the honorable.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Gather ’round, kids, let me ask you a question.\u00a0 Did you ever wonder why things are the way they are?\u00a0 Why\u00a0there is death in the world?\u00a0 Sickness?\u00a0 Why\u00a0a lot of kids, especially those in foreign countries, go to bed hungry every night?\u00a0 Why\u00a0you lose your temper?\u00a0 Why\u00a0you act up just so you can get your own way?\u00a0 Why\u00a0your parents fight\u00a0sometimes?<\/p>\n

It wasn’t always like this.\u00a0 To find out why, we have to go a long way back in history\u00a0—back to the beginning.\u00a0 The beginning story is recorded for us in the Bible.\u00a0 God made the first two human beings ever, and He put them in an amazing paradise.\u00a0 Think of your very favorite place in all the world; this paradise was a thousand times better.<\/p>\n

God gave them everything they could ask for.\u00a0\u00a0A beautiful place where they could live forever.\u00a0 No death.\u00a0No sickness.\u00a0No fighting.\u00a0 No selfishness at all.\u00a0Just love, joy and peace.\u00a0 Along with all of this God also gave them a choice.\u00a0 The choice was simple.\u00a0 “Just choose every day to\u00a0acknowledge that I am your God,\u00a0I am the One who has blessed you with all that you have.\u00a0 Listen to me, now.\u00a0 There is a certain tree in the center of the garden, but you need to stay away from it.\u00a0 Don’t eat from it.\u00a0 Every other tree is ok.\u00a0 Just not that one, got it?”<\/p>\n

Well, it was fine for awhile.\u00a0 The two went about their business and ignored the tree.\u00a0 One day they stopped to look at the tree and wondered how it might be to taste the fruit.\u00a0 God wouldn’t really mind, would He? They quickly put that thought out of their minds and moved on.\u00a0 But more and more as the days passed, they walked by the tree and wondered, “What does God have to do with this tree anyway?\u00a0 It looks perfectly ok to us.\u00a0 Is God holding something back from us?\u00a0 Shouldn’t this be our decision to make? We don’t need God to telling us what to do.\u00a0 In fact, we’re beginning to think we can make it just fine without Him.\u00a0 And so one day, when they thought no one was looking, they grabbed the fruit from the tree and ate it.<\/p>\n

But God was looking.\u00a0 And He was saddened too, because there were grave consequences that came with their decision.\u00a0 The paradise was somehow no longer a paradise. The love, joy and peace they had enjoyed with God—the God of the universe—it was somehow all different now. Now the rose bushes had thorns on them. Now there was strife and hatred in the world. Their firstborn son murdered his younger brother for no good reason.<\/p>\n

This is the world you and I were born into. God could have just left us alone, but He did not. He decided the only way to fix things was to become a human being himself, to rescue us from our self-centeredness, our sinfulness. And so He did, that’s who Jesus was. But fixing things proved to be much harder than anyone could have imagined. Not only did God become a man, but the man he became was despised and rejected by other men, the very men He himself had created…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The people will be oppressed,\u00a0 evry one by another and every one by his neighbor.\u00a0 The child will be insolent toward the elder, and the base toward the honorable. “Gather ’round, kids, let me ask you a question.\u00a0 Did you ever wonder why things are the way they are?\u00a0 Why\u00a0there is death in the world?\u00a0 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “(Isaiah 3) No longer a paradise”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1806"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1822,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806\/revisions\/1822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}