Stormy night

It's 04:37 here in the UK and we're not getting much sleep as my daughter has a fever (some kind of virus) and is burning hot. I'm alternating between getting her drinks, mopping her brow and cuddling her when things get too much for her. Such are the blessings of parenthood sometimes my dear friend -- but I'd sooner she were here than not! Right now I am watching over her, occasionally she opens her heavy eyelids to check that I haven't fallen asleep and I give her a smile. Listening to her laboured, shivering breathing is like waiting for a storm to pass.

Thanks for your post on Adultery and Divorce. Indeed spookily similar to Pastor Phil's treatise on the subject I might add. He applied the concept of Grace, along with genuine repentance and a third central idea: the saving of the unsaved and the casting off of the "yoke of inequality". The idea being that if you're a Christian, or turn to Christianity during your marriage and your partner is not a Christian and does not, then you can be forgiven for leaving them -- or something along those lines. I do recall thinking at the time that this was a highly manufactured interpretation of scripture to allow some chance of repairing the honest mistake of marrying the wrong person. But as you say, God is an unbounded Grace giver - he can forgive anything.

Note: Is God completely unbounded? Could God tell "a lie" for instance? Such a question doesn't make sense to me, God could tell a lie and be inconsistent if he wanted to, but we'd never know because he could also alter reality, or our perception of it, to ensure that we never experienced the lie or inconsistency. I'm not saying that he would bother (he could do lots of things but does not), but when you get omnipotence, anything is possible.

It's encouraging for me to hear your words about Lisa and I pray that you and she have the divinely blessed union which you clearly both enjoy now, for as long as you both (and God) desire. I think about 18 months ago I had the thought that if two parties in a marriage loved a third party (an omnipotent God) more than eachother then their union was more likely to succeed, purely from a "this is how the human mind works" perspective. Right now I can't remember my full analysis of the situation, but it had something to do with trust and responsibility (the belief on the part of the couple of "our marriage is in better hands than our own so it has to succeed").

The story of Uzzah that you mention is interesting, Uzzah was killed because he broke God's law. Now the questions that spring to my mind are:

1. Why was God angry? He knew Uzzah would do that. Now we went through this debate in earlier posts and I think we agreed to disagree. I maintain that God does not get angry as he knows everything a priori. Anger is a instinctive human emotion that arises from not being in complete control of circumstances. If God chooses to experience anger then he is in control of it, and that's not real anger.

2. Did Uzzah go to Heaven?

Current song (in my head) : "Every Breath You Take" -- The Police

PS. Any pop/rock music of any note ('cept Elvis of course) came from the UK, but I believe that The Police had a US drummer? :-)