See how your enemies are astir,

Psalm 83
A song. A psalm of Asaph.
1 O God, do not keep silent;
be not quiet, O God, be not still.

2 See how your enemies are astir,
how your foes rear their heads.

3 With cunning they conspire against your people;
they plot against those you cherish.

4 "Come," they say, "let us destroy them as a nation,
that the name of Israel be remembered no more."

5 With one mind they plot together;
they form an alliance against you-

6 the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites,
of Moab and the Hagrites,

7 Gebal, [a] Ammon and Amalek,
Philistia, with the people of Tyre.

8 Even Assyria has joined them
to lend strength to the descendants of Lot.
Selah

9 Do to them as you did to Midian,
as you did to Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon,

10 who perished at Endor
and became like refuse on the ground.

11 Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb,
all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna,

12 who said, "Let us take possession
of the pasturelands of God."

13 Make them like tumbleweed, O my God,
like chaff before the wind.

14 As fire consumes the forest
or a flame sets the mountains ablaze,

15 so pursue them with your tempest
and terrify them with your storm.

16 Cover their faces with shame
so that men will seek your name, O LORD.

17 May they ever be ashamed and dismayed;
may they perish in disgrace.

18 Let them know that you, whose name is the LORD—
that you alone are the Most High over all the earth.

Cape Cod - Mid Cape Assembly Feb. 2, 2008

Date:
Feb 2, 2008
Time:
From 3:00 pm until 6:00 pm
Location:
Cape Cod Community College

"Many people shall come and say,'Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; He will teach us His ways, and we shall walk in His paths." Isaiah 2:3

"Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water" Hebrews 10:22

You are warmly invited to join the body of Christ on the Cape for this regional gathering of prayer and worship. The meeting is hosted in the Mid-Cape area, but is open to all the body of Christ on the Cape.

The gathering will be primarily worship and prayer, interspersed with brief sharing/impartation of key principles for the Glory of God in our midst:

a. Intimacy with God, which is the foundation of it all :It is the realization/revelation of God's love for us that compels us to respond to Him, that "we love Him because He loved us first"

b. Holiness in the context of (a.) above :Our obedience is motivated by, and is an expression of, our love for God

c. Our role as "watchmen" in Prayer and Intercession: " I have set watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem (equivalent to Cape Cod for us), They shall never hold their peace day or night. You who make mention of the Lord, do not keep silent, and give Him no rest, till He establishes Jerusalem a praise in the earth (equivalent to till He manifests His Glory in our midst on the Cape)". Isaiah 62:67

link

Abiding

[I was not thinking about the Enlightenment or the Illuminati, or any such thing, when out of the blue, as it were, I heard Him say],

You are only as enlightened as your last illumination.

[Obviously He intended me to ponder that, so I did – and eventually responded]:

To receive illumination, one must abide in you. Then it comes as a matter of course, like physical healing.

When I walked the earth, each thing my disciples and I encountered became an opportunity for illumination, for those who had eyes to see it. Not all did.

Was the Bible filtered, to keep it simple – and profound?

You are asking if the Gnostics were right.

I did not realize I was, but as you say it, I see it. Part of me – the ego-driven part – wishes there were a hidden volume of secret wisdom, kept from us because, in the immortal words of Col. Nathan Jessep, “you can’t handle the truth!”

There’s a part of each of us that believes we can handle it, and that it has been purposely hidden from us.

Why would I do that? The other one entices the entice-able with suggestions that I or my Church have withheld truth, because it would make men like gods. Have you not heard that enticement before?

We have, Father. That was the temptation put to Eve. You had asked of her and Adam the same thing you ask of each of us: to trust and obey. Nothing has changed.

Why did I create mankind?

To become your companions for time and eternity – freely, of our own volition.

What would make a boon companion?

Someone who loves you enough to trust you, no matter what. Who will give you instant, exact obedience, regardless of what it might cost. Who has demonstrated under fire that you can trust them. And who never doubts your perfect love, even when it appears you have forsaken them.

Well answered, my son. Did it take great discernment or wisdom to arrive at that definition?

No. Anyone earnestly seeking you is going to wind up there, whether they are on clean-up detail in the kitchen, or a centurion in charge of a thousand troops. The lessons on the Way of the Cross are not hard to grasp. The difficulty comes in applying their simple truth to our complex lives.

Is there any hidden knowledge that would make it easier?

No. Everything we need for the journey is either known already or easily knowable. Your love – is where we begin. Your grace – encourages to believe we can do it, when the other one is doing his utmost to convince us we can’t. Your precious Blood – has already bought our souls for eternity.

And – we have each other. You put us on the path with other pilgrims who will be able to help us, when we need their help. Often, they will have surmounted obstacles now confronting us. Armed with the word of their testimony and the Blood of the Lamb, we can overcome – anything.

We know that in our heads. We are still learning it in our hearts. Each time you ask a new, seemingly impossible thing of us, we are learning that you would not ask, if we could not answer.

Book of Secrets? We have it already, though its contents are hardly secret. Your Word chronicles all that you have done with us – and are doing and will do. Easy to read, mark, learn, and inwardly absorb, it is a living entity that meets each reader at whatever level he or she chooses to enter. A young child laughs at its easy-to-picture stories. An aged scholar is overwhelmed, as with metaphysical tweezers he carefully lifts off each gauze-like layer of meaning.

At the end of his life, the great theologian, Karl Barth, was asked if he could sum up all he had learned in a lifetime of probing the mysteries of the Christian faith. He thought for a long moment, then smiled. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

-David Manuel, Dec. 31,2007

7 years ago today, scientists authenticate The Sudarium of Oviedo

Scientists: Relic authenticates Shroud of Turin

Exhaustive tests show sacred cloth much older than carbon-14 date

By Mary Jo Anderson

© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com

OVIEDO, Spain -- Scientists and forensic specialists gathered in Oviedo, Spain, this week to examine an obscure relic that many have claimed authenticates the Shroud of Turin -- believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

The Sudarium of Oviedo is reportedly the other linen cloth found in the tomb of Christ, as described in the Gospel of John. The relic, whose dramatic history is intertwined with the Knights Templar, Moors, El Cid, saints and bishops, has been in Spain since A.D. 631.

Meanwhile, in Turin, Italy, the last pilgrims of the Jubilee Year are winding their way past the Shroud of Turin before the exhibit closes on October 23.

Verses 5-8 of the 20th chapter of "The Gospel According to St. John" records, "... he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths, but rolled up in a separate place." This head cloth, the sudarium, has become the focus of increasing debates over the validity of the carbon-14 tests on the Shroud of Turin. The carbon-dating tests set the age of the shroud in the 13th century, which would make the Shroud of Turin a pious icon at best, a clever fraud at worst.

However, the scientific community is divided over the shroud dates because -- with the exception of the carbon dating tests -- medical, artistic, forensic and botanical evidence favors the authenticity of the shroud of Turin as the burial cloth of Jesus.

One example of microscopic testing that supports the Shroud as authentic is the 1978 sample of dirt taken from the foot region of the burial linen. The dirt was analyzed at the Hercules Aerospace Laboratory in Salt Lake, Utah, where experts identified crystals of travertine argonite, a relatively rare form of calcite found near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. It is a stretch, say researchers, that a 13th century forger would have known to take the trouble to impregnate the linen with marble dust found near Golgotha in order to fool scientists 600 years later.

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Comparative Study of The Sudarium of Oviedo and the Shroud of Turin, June 1998

Above all

Mary did you know?

British Apostate from Islam gets Death Threats

Nissa secretly went to church for several months...soon after my conversion, Muslims told me that if they had lived in a Muslim country, they'd have been the first to cut off my head...

Sometimes You Just Want to Get Straight Through

The Wind at Ground Zero

Can't Cry Hard Enough

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
-- Christina Rossetti

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. -Genesis 2:7

Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies: for false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty. -Psalm 27:12

10,000 FEARED DEAD
-- Headline, New York Post, September 12, 2001

AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY I lived in Brooklyn Heights in, of course, Brooklyn. The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge on May 24 of 1883 transformed the high bluff just to the south of the bridge into America's first suburb. It became possible for affluent businessmen from the tip of Manhattan which lay just over the East River to commute across the bridge easily and build their stately mansions and townhouses high above the slapdash docks below. Growth and change would wash around the Heights in the 117 years that followed, but secure on their bluff, on their high ground, the Heights would remain a repository old and new money, power, and some of the finest examples of 19th and early 20th century homes found in New York City.

When I moved to Brooklyn Heights from the suburbs of Westport, Connecticut in the late 90s, it was a revelation to me that such a neighborhood still existed. Small side streets and cul-de-sacs were shaded over by large oaks and maple that made it cool even in the summer doldrums. Street names such as Cranberry, Orange and Pineapple let you know you were off the grid of numbered streets and avenues. Families were everywhere and the streets on evenings and on weekends were full of the one thing you rarely see in Manhattan, children.

Brooklyn Heights had looked down on Wall Street and the tip of Manhattan from almost the beginning. It hosted the retreat of Washington from New York City during the Battle of Long Island, the first major engagement of the Revolutionary War. To be in the Heights was to hold the high ground and all the advantages that position affords.

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-Gerard Vanderleun

Sep. 11th Demonstration Against Creeping Islamofascism in Brussels

Update (Sep. 16, 2007) Accounts of the same event as recorded by bloggers at Gates of Vienna.

The following witness account by a Hajo J., a German Christian, was published on the Politically Incorrect blog [in German]. This is an English translation:

On 11 September 2007, at 11.30 o’ clock, I arrived at Place du Luxembourg. There were lots of policemen and armoured vehicles. I met an acquaintance with two other like-minded people at a pub. There was only meant to be a “meeting of tourists” and no coordinated action. I then went to another part of the square. Stephen Gash of SIOE was giving many interviews as he sat quietly in a pub, i.e. he was not demonstrating.

A short while later several people were taken away in a prison-van, without there having been any indication that they had “demonstrated” or done anything in particular (I was to hear the same observation again and again). It was almost 12 o’ clock. A murmuring went through the crowd, we had to do something , now was the remembrance moment for the 9/11 terror victims in the USA.

I decided there and then to take out the wooden cross I had brought and to hold it high – defying any kind of unknown. In remembrance of the victims, as a sign of protest against the threatening, creeping islamization of Europe, the lack of resistance and the increasing appeasement. And of course in spontaneous protest against the unjust banning of the demonstration by the mayor of Brussels, Mr. Thielemans. All this accompanied by a prayer and in remembrance of many Catholic saints, who resisted the same danger of Islamic rule centuries ago. Think only of Saint Marco d’Aviano, a Capuchin friar who encouraged the troops as the Muslim hordes of the Ottoman Sultan descended upon them at the battle of Vienna on 12 September 1683.

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I'll Praise You in This Storm

If your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi and nonviolence. But if your enemy has no conscience like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer.

- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds... Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough for us to find our way back?

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god). That can be the historic future.

- Karl Jung, The Collected Works Volume 18, The Symbolic Life (1939)

Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.

- Winston Churchill on Adolf Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf, in The Second World War, Vol. I (The Gathering Storm).

"The Stranger" - Rudyard Kipling
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.
The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control—
What reasons sway his mood;

Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.
The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.
This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

The Holy One of Israel

13 I am bringing my righteousness near, it is not far away; and my salvation will not be delayed. I will grant salvation to Zion, my splendor to Israel. -Isaiah 46:13

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3 Therefore tell the people: This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'Return to me,' declares the LORD Almighty, 'and I will return to you,' says the LORD Almighty. -Zech. 1:3

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24 And they will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led away captive into all nations. And Jerusalem will be trampled by Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. -Luke 21:24

When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews. - Martin Luther King

Blood-Washed Redemption

From His hands it came down
From His side it came down
From His feet it came down
And ran to the ground
Between heaven and hell
A teardrop fell In the deep crimson dew
The tree of life grew

And the blood gave life
To the branches of the tree
And the blood was the price
That set the captives free
And the numbers that came
Through the fire and the flood Clung to the tree
And were redeemed by the blood

From the tree streamed a light
That started the fight 'Round the tree grew a vine
On whose fruit I could dine
My old friend Lucifer came
Fought to keep me in chains
But I saw through the tricks
Of six-sixty-six

And the blood gave life
To the branches of the tree
And the blood was the price
That set the captives free
And the numbers that came
Through the fire and the flood Clung to the tree
And were redeemed by the blood

From His hands it came down
From His side it came down
From His feet it came down
And ran to the ground
And a small inner voice Said "You do have a choice."
The vine engrafted me
And I clung to the tree

First hand report of Kassam missile attack in Sderot

(Update: Sep. 4, 2007)
Yesterday Palestinian terrorists fired 9 Kassam rockets into Sderot, including one that landed outside a day care centre for young kids. 12 school children were treated for shock. The Jerusalem Post reported that Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility saying that it was a "present for the new school year."

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Just hours after a Kassam missile landed just yards from his location, Shlomo Wollins was interviewed on the Tovia Singer Show (www.israelnationalradio.com) and described this near-death experience. And, in this 45-minute interview, Wollins provides a moving and comprehensive assessment of the situation in Sderot as well as the political/military landscape in the state of Israel.

2 I will gather all nations
and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. [a]
There I will enter into judgment against them
concerning my inheritance, my people Israel,
for they scattered my people among the nations
and divided up my land.

3 They cast lots for my people
and traded boys for prostitutes;
they sold girls for wine
that they might drink.

4 "Now what have you against me, O Tyre and Sidon and all you regions of Philistia? Are you repaying me for something I have done? If you are paying me back, I will swiftly and speedily return on your own heads what you have done. -Joel 3: 2-4

Jerusalem of Gold

I will sing a new song unto thee O God, upon an instrument of 10 strings. -Psalm 144:9

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17 So Saul said to his attendants, "Find someone who plays well and bring him to me." 18 One of the servants answered, "I have seen a son of Jesse of Bethlehem who knows how to play the harp. He is a brave man and a warrior. He speaks well and is a fine-looking man. And the LORD is with him." 19 Then Saul sent messengers to Jesse and said, "Send me your son David, who is with the sheep." 20 So Jesse took a donkey loaded with bread, a skin of wine and a young goat and sent them with his son David to Saul.21 David came to Saul and entered his service. Saul liked him very much, and David became one of his armor-bearers. 22 Then Saul sent word to Jesse, saying, "Allow David to remain in my service, for I am pleased with him."23 Whenever the spirit from God came upon Saul, David would take his harp and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him. -Samuel 16:17-23

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But I have chosen Jerusalem, that my name might be there; and have chosen David to be over my people Israel. -2 Chronicles 6:6


As clear as wine, the wind is flying
Among the dreamy pines
As evening light is slowly dying
And a lonely bell still chimes,
So many songs, so many stories
The stony hills recall ...
Around her heart my city carries
A lonely ancient wall.

Yerushalaim all of gold
Yerushalaim, bronze and light
Within my heart I shall treasure
Your song and sight.

Alas, the dry wells and fountains,
Forgotten market-day
The sound of horn from Temple's mountain
No longer calls to pray,
The rocky caves at night are haunted
By sounds of long ago
When we were going to the Jordan
By way of Jericho.

Yerushalaim all of gold
Yerushalaim, bronze and light
Within my heart I shall treasure
Your song and sight.

But when I come to count your praises
And sing Hallel to you
With pretty rhymes I dare not crown you
As other poets do,
Upon my lips is always burning
Your name, so dear, so old:
If I forget Yerushalaim
Of bronze and light and gold ...

Yerushalaim all of gold
Yerushalaim, bronze and light
Within my heart I shall treasure
Your song and sight.

Back to the wells and to the fountains
Within the ancient walls
The sound of horn from Temple's mountain
Again so loudly calls,
From rocky caves, this very morning
A thousand suns will glow
And we shall go down to the Jordan
By way of Jericho.

Yerushalaim all of gold
Yerushalaim, bronze and light
Within my heart I shall treasure
Your song and sight.