The Consequences of Sin
By Charles Eickenberg
Found in the July 1919 issue of "The Christian Workers Magazine."
"But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out." Numbers 32:23
The speaker produced a stick with a lot of nails driven into it and said that it was meant to represent a life full of sin. Each nail represented a sin, and there were so many nails that not very much of the stick was to be seen.
This illustration was suggested to the speaker by the story of the boy who was so accustomed to telling lies that his father, wishing to call his attention to the great number of lies which he was in the habit of telling, told him to drive a nail into a post every time he told a lie. The boy did this and soon found that the post was full of nails. When he saw how the post looked it made him feel very badly. He had no idea that he had been telling so many lies. He came to his father and sorrowfully confessed his condition, and said that he wished to do better. Then his father told him that every time in the future when he told the truth, instead of telling a lie, he should pull out one of the nails. This the boy did, and soon returned to his father with the good news that the nails were all out again. "But," said he, "the holes are all left." His father told him that that was part of the price he had to pay for the sins he had committed.
The nails were then pulled out of the stick which the speaker had brought, and the holes were shown to the boys and girls who were present. The following lessons were then drawn from this story by the speaker: No matter how sorry we may feel for the wrong we have done, and no matter how much we may try to do better and make it right, there are certain consequences that a bad life will leave behind it.
If a man has been a thief, and makes up his mind that he will stop stealing in the future, and does really begin to live an holiest life, yet he will never be able to forget that he was once a thief. Many of the things which he did when he was a thief will come up before him at times and make him feel ashamed of himself. Many people who were injured by his wrongdoing may be suffering even then on account of his sin, and if he is really sorry for his past life it will make him feel very badly at times.
A boy was standing in front of a school house, during recess, when another boy threw something at him. It struck him in the eye and the boy who was struck lost the sight of that eye. That boy has lost the use of one of his eyes through the carelessness of the other boy, and thus has been injured for life. The boy who threw the stone may have been very sorry for what he did but that will never restore the eye to the boy who lost it. Even if the author of the accident should be able to offer the other boy millions of dollars that would not restore the eye.
Even the great Apostle Paul reproaches himself for the life he lived before he became a Christian, when he remembered how he held the clothes of those who stoned Stephen, the first Christian martyr. He says in I Corinthians 15:9: "For I am the least of the apostles that am not worthy to be called an apostle became I persecuted the church of God." Again in Acts 26: 9 he says: "I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth which thing I also did in Jerusalem; and many of the saints did I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests, and when they were put to death gave my voice against them, and I punished them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them to blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them I persecuted them even unto strange cities."
Paul could not forget the things he did against God's people although he had repented of them and became a sincere Christian himself. Do you think that the Apostle Peter could ever forget that he had denied his Lord and Master with oaths and curses and said that he never knew Him? The memory of that act never left him as long as he lived. They say that when Peter was condemned to be crucified he asked to be crucified with his head down because he did not consider himself worthy to die as Jesus did, because he had denied Him.
We see from this that while we, may have our sins forgiven, yet what we have done, cannot be erased from our memories. It is a great deal better not to do the wrong than to do it even though we may be forgiven for it, because while we may be able to pull all the nails out of the post of our wicked lives, all the holes will be left.
Chambers' suit against God tossed out BY CHRISTOPHER BURBACHWORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
You can't sue God if you can't serve the papers on him, a Douglas County District Court judge ruled in Omaha Tuesday.Judge Marlon Polk threw out Nebraska Sen. Ernie Chambers' lawsuit against the Almighty, saying there was no evidence that the defendant had been served. What's more, Polk found "there can never be service effectuated on the named defendant."Chambers had sued God in September 2007, seeking a permanent injunction to prevent God from committing acts of violence such as earthquakes and tornadoes.Although the case may seem superfluous and even scandalous to others, Chambers has said his point is to focus on the question of whether certain lawsuits should be prohibited."Nobody should stand at the courthouse door to predetermine who has access to the courts," he said. "My point is that anyone can sue anyone else, even God."Chambers, an avowed atheist, said he decided to make that point after at least two attempts in the Nebraska Legislature to limit "frivolous lawsuits."The senator did have a day in court on the case. In August, he argued that Polk should take judicial notice of the existence of God. The senator cited the facts that U.S. currency says "In God We Trust," God is invoked during oaths in court hearings, and chaplains offer prayers before legislative bodies."If God is omnipresent," Chambers said in that August hearing, "then he is here in Douglas County and in this courtroom."Polk was not persuaded.His Tuesday ruling said Chambers' motion to take judicial notice of God "is denied as moot."Chambers, reached at home Tuesday evening, said he hadn't yet seen the court order. He declined to comment until he could review the document today.
http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2798&u_sid=10460511
Phony biblical relics spark controversy
But like so many religious relics before, the ossuary, a two-foot-long box that Jewish inhabitants of burial-site-poor Jerusalem typically used to store remains around the First Century, A.D., turned out to have a checkered past. The 2002 vetting of the box's authenticity described in the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review came under fire quickly, from experts who complained the box's origins were unknown. Oded Golan, the antiquities dealer who owned the ossuary, only said he had bought it from another dealer in the 1970's.
Many outside experts, concluded the second part of the ossuary inscription, the reference to Jesus, was a fake, including the scholar Rochelle Altman who found that it "bears the hallmarks of a fraudulent later addition," and "is questionable to say the least." Others, such as Amnon Rosenfeld of the Geological Survey of Israel, continue to defend the inscription's authenticity.
In 2003, the Israel Antiquities Authority raided Golan's apartment, famously finding the ossuary sitting atop a rooftop toilet amid a workshop setting filled with inscription tools. Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University described the furor over the ossuary as a case of " Jerusalem syndrome," modern-day people suddenly deluding themselves into believing they are Bible characters. Golan and three other men were indicted for forgery of the James ossuary in 2004 by Israeli authorities. Golan and one other man, the antiquities dealer Raymond Deutsch, remain on trial.
The case has called into question other artifacts of the same era, particularly the " Jehoash Inscription," a stone describing repairs to the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and an ivory pomegranate once thought a relic from Solomon's Temple, declared a forgery by the Israel Museum in 2004.
One journalist who has followed the ossuary case is Nina Burleigh, author of the upcoming Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed & Forgery in the Holy Land (Smithsonian Books, $27.50), which goes on sale this week. Part crime story, part travelogue through the netherworld of antiquity scholarship, the book serves up a real-life mystery that puts to shame any simplistic DaVinci Code-type thriller. We asked Burleigh to comment on the ossuary and the wider world of biblical archaeology:
Q: Faked religious objects go back a long way, don't they? Isn't it kind of an old tradition?
A: Absolutely, this goes back to the earliest roots of Christianity and probably earlier. People in the Middle Ages traveled places to see relics. It's just more high-tech now with global media coverage.
Q: Where do things stand with the forgery trial?
A: Well, the prosecution rested its case in the spring after calling about 70 experts to testify about the ossuary being a fake. A lot of scientific people have come forward and both sides are fighting tooth and nail. The defense is supposed to present its case, have its experts present their evidence by the end of October. But Israeli court cases are complicated … and it looks like the trial won't be over any time soon.
Q: Regardless of the trial's outcome, what do you think the story of the James Ossuary says about biblical archaeology as a field?
A: I've come to realize that archaeology can be seen as a very subjective science. It has a lot of objective aspects, measurements, dating and so on, but especially in biblical archaeology people bring a lot of prior assumptions to bear in their work, whether the Bible was real or not, and those can be very difficult to sort out.
Things are a whole lot more political than I ever suspected. Not just theology-minded people who are interested in artifacts like the ossuary, but Israeli nationalists who believe that evidence of ancient habitation of the Holy Land would lead to a larger Israel. The field archaeologists even joke about it, 'Oh no, I didn't find a mikvah (a ritual bath in Judaism), I found a church. I'm going to lose my funding.'
The apotheosis of the whole thing is at (Jerusalem's) Temple Mount, where the Muslim religious authority doesn't want any digging under a sacred site and others would like to find evidence of Solomon's Temple buried there. It is an incredibly tense, trip-wire place and these questions quickly become very dangerous ones.
Q: What about funding? Aren't collectors or enthusiasts funding digs and antiquities dealers having a role in scholarly debates an unhealthy situation for archaeology?
A: Archaeologists in the region have a problem, and they know it, in that antiquity collectors and people with some interest in a particular view of the Bible fund some of their work. Shelby White, a wealthy New York collector, just funded a major university archaeology department, for example. So they are torn. They see collectors as raping sites for cool stuff to decorate their apartments and on the other hand, they need the money. They have quite a conundrum.
Was I surprised by this? No, money talks everywhere. And I am a New Yorker.
Q: How does this affect the archaeology we see?
A: Biblical archaeology is really a small community. Everybody knows everybody. I think the people out in the field are just trying to honestly report what they find. When you get away from the field, things get complicated.
Q; Where do you come down on the James Ossuary?
A: I don't have a science background. My sense is that the people presenting evidence of fraud have a pretty good case.
It's important to say that Oded Golan maintains his innocence and the trial is still not over.
Q: Even if a lot of this stuff is phony, why should we care about rich guys buying forged biblical artifacts?
A: Seems like a victimless crime if a wealthy collector like Shlomo Moussaieff (who dealt with Deutsch) wants to have something possibly fake in his apartment. But when dealers and forgers toy with believers, and what they do to belief systems, is kind of a problem. That's just wrong. It's a scam: Forgers take money from gullible believers that would have gone in the collection plate to help people.
And they are distorting the truth. Especially in writing, we need in situ findings to have an accurate account of history.
Finally, the forgers are really playing with fire, things are so tense in East Jerusalem, to throw fake biblical artifacts into the mix puts gasoline on the flames there.
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