Revision as of 12:27, 14 December 2021

Before God created anything, there was just God.

He looked for a place to put a universe. But he could not find any place outside of him. There was nothing larger than God, and so there was no space outside of him to create.

He opened a hole or pocket within himself, then spoke into the hole to create all things.

It was time to create his friends.

Imagine I want to make a friend, I have to reach into my pocket and pull him out. "Hi Adam, I'm Bob".

That's silly. But what do you think Adam would say? He doesn't know his name. He is looking at me and he thinks he must be just like me.

"Hi. I am Bob too!"

As silly as this sounds, it is exactly what Adam did with God.

"Hi Adam, I am God." "Hi God, I am God too."

God's name tells us this. His name is Elohim. 'El' means 'God'. 'Im' means water as a picture of his people. The 'H' sound means they don't understand. God is separated from his people because they don't understand.

Everything... absolutely everything after this is to teach us who God is.

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God chose some people to teach everyone else about him. The problem was that they didn't know him very well themselves.

He wrote a play that they would be actors in. He gave them some commandments, a tabernacle, and some feasts to live by. These things were the script for the play that they would live. Everyone else would see what they did and learn about God from it.

While they were following the script; and often they did not, God was using their lives to write another story. When they did wjhat he asked, and when they didn't, God used their lives to write his story. He wrote about himself, Jesus and the cross using their history.

This is hard to understand. Imagine if you played hopscotch, and every jump you took, I used to tell the story of Jesus. As the people lived their lives, God used every jump to tell his story.

In this book, we will look at the rules God gave them about things they could eat and see the story about Jesus that God hid in it.

He had already said that they could eat anything. But if they wanted to teach about God, they would live in and around the script God gave them.

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In order to hide a second story in the history of his people, God had to use symbols.

When you look at a picture of an apple, you know that it isn't an apple but just a symbol of an apple. It is something to make you think about apples.

Words are also symbols. The word 'dog' is not a dog. It is just a symbol to make you think of dogs. Words can be used to be symbols of other words.

When you are told to 'hop in the car', do you really hop all the way to the car and jump in? I don't think you do that. The word 'hop' is used as s symbol to mean 'get in'. Why would we use 'hop' instead of 'get in'?

"Get in' sounds bossy. Parents really don't like to boss you around. So to be just a little playful, they would say 'hop in'. We also use symbols in jokes and riddles.

I will tell you a secret riddle: Why did the chicken cross the road? The real answer is not "To get to the other side" but "To get to the other side". "The other side" is a symbol for going to heaven. If you saw a dead chicken in the road, you would ask the riddle.

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The dietary law is filled with riddles. We have clues for the riddles from the names that Adam gave the animals. The names of the animals describe what the animals do. We sometimes have nicknames like this.

"Smiley" might be what we call a friend who is happy all the time.

Adam named the animals by watching them, then saying something about what they do.

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The nation a teacher. De 28:37 And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all nations whither the LORD shall lead thee.

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The Dinner theater

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