Bible

 

Hosea 14

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1 O Israel, come back to the Lord your God; for your evil-doing has been the cause of your fall.

2 Take with you words, and come back to the Lord; say to him, Let there be forgiveness for all wrongdoing, so that we may take what is good, and give in payment the fruit of our lips.

3 Assyria will not be our salvation; we will not go on horses; we will not again say to the work of our hands, You are our gods; for in you there is mercy for the child who has no father.

4 I will put right their errors; freely will my love be given to them, for my wrath is turned away from him.

5 I will be as the dew to Israel; he will put out flowers like a lily, and send out his roots like Lebanon.

6 His branches will be stretched out, he will be beautiful as the olive-tree and sweet-smelling as Lebanon.

7 They will come back and have rest in his shade; their life will be made new like the grain, and they will put out flowers like the vine; his name will be like the wine of Lebanon.

8 As for Ephraim, what has he to do with false gods any longer? I have given an answer and I will keep watch over him; I am like a branching fir-tree, from me comes your fruit.

9 He who is wise will see these things; he who has good sense will have knowledge of them. For the ways of the Lord are straight, and the upright will go in them, but sinners will be falling in them.

   

Komentář

 

Time

  

Time is an aspect of the physical world, but it is not an aspect of the spiritual world. The same is true of space: There is no space in heaven. This is hard for us to grasp or even visualize, because we live in physical bodies with physical senses that are filled with physical elements existing in time and space. Our minds are schooled and patterned in terms of time and space, and have no reference point to imagine a reality without them. Consider how you think for a second. In your mind you can immediately be in your past or in some speculative future; in your mind you can circle the globe seeing other lands and faraway friends, or even zoom instantly to the most distant stars. Such imaginings are insubstantial, of course, but if we could make them real we would be getting close to what spiritual reality is like. Indeed, the mind is like a spiritual organ, which may be why physicians and philosophers have had such a hard time juxtaposing its functions to those of the brain. What this means in the Bible is that descriptions of time -- hours, days, weeks, months, years and even simply the word "time" itself -- represent spiritual states, and the passing of time represents the change of spiritual states. Again, we can see this a little bit within our minds. If we imagine talking to one friend then talking to another, it feels like going from one place to another, even though we're not moving. The same is true if we picture a moment from childhood and then imagine something in the future; it feels like a movement through time even though it's instantaneous. Changing our state of mind feels like a physical change in space and time. The Bible simply reverses that, with marking points in space and time representing particular states of mind.