Blog

Without love, any action or relationship is meaningless. This sounds cold and harsh, but it is the reality of life. How does this relate to people who have lost their soulmates? Does that mean once a person looses their soulmate, everything else and all other relationships in their life are meaningless?

Given the popular belief that a person has only one soulmate in their life, Can such individuals find love again? And how do we relate this to the most important commandments taught us by our Lord Jesus Christ? Which are: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Followed by, Love your neighbour as yourself. Does this mean that, you can loose your soulmate, that is, that love is gone, but you should still love God, because the love of God is the most important of all and since nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, Romans 8:38-39; For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Coming back to one of the questions posed earlier, that is: “Does that mean once a person loses their soulmate, everything and all other relationships in their life are meaningless?” Not necessarily, because what the Scriptures says in 1 John 4:20 is; Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. The fact that a person does not love another person as deeply as they had loved a departed partner does not mean that they hate the other person or that other relationships that they formed after their loved ones had gone, though not based on the same kind of deep love they had earlier, it is not that of hatred.

1 Corinthians 13:1-8; If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. Romans 14:23; everything that does not come from faith is sin.

[Everything that does not come from faith is sin! if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing]. A person could have the love of God in them and still be disgusted by behavioural traits from others, while at the same time appreciative and approving of certain behavioural traits in the same individual. God loves us all, but He abhors lies, on the other hand, He is pleased with integrity. The love for our neighbour, including our life-partner could go or end, with the physical death/departure from this realm, but the love of God that is in Christ Jesus is forever, not even death can separate us from it, though, all of us at one point or the other are separated by death from the love of a partner. After love has gone, we are left with love: the love of God.

Ecclesiastes 3:11; He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Eternity can be defined as infinite or unending time, it can also be defined as a state to which time has no application; timelessness, also theologically speaking as endless life after death. The Bible text in Ecclesiastes 3:11 requires understanding from God, seeing that eternity is infinite or unending time, whereas the text informs us that God has set eternity in our hearts, therefore what or where is the relevance or application of ‘beginning’ and ‘end’.

To understand ‘beginning’ and ‘end’, we have to refer to another Scripture text that can be found in Revelations 1:8; “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” Alpha and Omega, in Christianity, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, used to designate the comprehensiveness of God, implying that God includes all that can be. In the New Testament Revelation to John, the term is used as the self-designation of God and of Christ. The reference in Revelation likely had a Jewish origin, based on such Old Testament passages as Isa. 44:6 (“I am the first and the last”), and Ps. 90:2 (“from everlasting to everlasting thou art God”). In rabbinic literature, the word emet (“truth”), composed of the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, is “the seal of God,” and in Judaic tradition it carries somewhat the same connotation as Alpha and Omega.

What is ‘the beginning’ and what is ‘the end’? Has anyone seen or witness ‘the beginning’, and has anyone seen or witness ‘the end’? Since life as we know it is still ongoing, it falls to reason that we are not or have not yet reach ‘the end’. What about the beginning? The answer to that can also be found in the Scripture from the only One who was there, let us listen to Him in Job 38:1-41;

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said: “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone— while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;  here is where your proud waves halt’? “Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it?

The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment. The wicked are denied their light, and their upraised arm is broken. “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness? Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this. “What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside? Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings? Surely you know, for you were already born! You have lived so many years!

“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle? What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?

 Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew From whose womb comes the ice?  Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? “Can you bind the chains[b] of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear[d] with its cubs? Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s[e] dominion over the earth? “Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water? Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’? Who gives the ibis wisdom or gives the rooster understanding? Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens when the dust becomes hard and the clods of earth stick together? “Do you hunt the prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of the lions when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in a thicket? Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?  

We can gather from the One who was before the Beginning that we do not know the ‘Beginning’. When He says in Isaiah 46:10; I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.’ We can also surmise that He knows the ‘end’, which we do not know, since we are not at the ‘end’ yet. Furthermore, we are told in Ecclesiastes 3:11, that ‘He has made everything beautiful in its time’, given that we are His Creation, part of the universe He created, and we are informed in Psalm 139:14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.; The text in Ecclesiastes 3:11 is verified, in that we do not know ‘the Beginning’ and ‘the End’ or we do not know the Alpha and the Omega, to be precise, we do not know God. Though, He came as Jesus Christ, so that we may know Him.

In conclusion the Scriptures tells us in Acts 17:24-28; “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

There is a saying which goes thus: You do not send a boy to do a man’s job. The greatest work ever done, since before Creation, is Salvation. God has and still sends His Creations to perform tasks for Him. His Creations among others include plants such as the one He caused to grow overnight to give Jonah shade, animals such as donkeys, human beings such as prophets, and Kings and ordinary citizens, and also spirits such as demons, evil spirits, and Angels.

However, when it came to the most important job or task, since before Creation, that has to be done, well He had to do it Himself. Jesus Christ is the Man. The Scripture is chock full of references to that effect, countless occasions when Jesus Christ refer to Himself as “The Son of Man”. We know that Adam was the first man and he sinned. Well the Judge had to come and subject Himself to the same circumstances and conditions that the accused had been subjected. Because truly, nobody can say that they understand what somebody else has experienced or undergone unless they themselves have been in the other’s shoes and truly undergone the same experience and circumstances.

Therefore, the Second Man, the Man had to come to redeem the sins of all born of a woman right from the seed of Adam and Eve, including that of the original perpetrators of the first transgression. We can not in all honesty understand what God, Jesus Christ has done for us, simply because, we are not the Alpha and the Omega, the Creator of Heavens and Earth, the Eternal One, the Transcending One, the one and only true God, that came down from His Throne and be born of a woman just like one of His Creations, and be subjected to the laws and vagaries of nature that He Himself has created and established to govern nature; seedtime, sowing, harvesting, spring, summer, autumn and winter, day and night, rain, snow, hale, storms, floods and other natural disasters, not to talk of temptations and the rest.

God has sent angels to carry out various tasks on earth, He has sent the Angel of death to wreak havoc, by causing the loss of human lives. He has sent angels, such as Angel Gabriel to deliver good news to Daniel, to Zechariah the father of John the Baptist and to Mary the mother of Jesus of Nazareth. But when it came to doing the Man’s job, He had to come Himself. In the book of Job, chapter 38, God told us that when it came to creating Creation, He did it all by Himself, and that the angels were looking on and praising Him. So why do we think that when it comes to a task more important that Creation, He would outsource it to a “boy”. No disrespect to His angels. We can not truly understand what it means when God is addressed as “Son of Mary”, simply because we are not Yeshua and we have never stood in His shoes. From myself I wish Yeshua, a merry and joyous Christmas. And to my brothers and sisters also MERRY CHRISTMAS.

Part I

The traditional manner of fishing involves putting a bait on a hook and dropping it in water. Eventually a fish swallows the bait with the hook ending up its throat. The fisherman is simply trying to feed himself, what about the fish? What is the perspective of the fish? Let us consider two stories about two different religious organizations:

Case study 1

This organization has members all over the world. When its founder died, several leading figures arose to fill the position of CEO, albeit for short period of time. This led to factionary and rivalry within the same organization. A fable attributed to one of the leading figures [spiritual father X] stated that in a conversation about other leading figures who died shortly after resuming the office of the CEO, spiritual father X said that an angel beat the deceased rival to death.

Case study 2

Another organization with a sizable membership, has its headquarters somewhere in Southwest Nigeria. Apparently, one of the members brought an issue to the CEO concerning the sexual harassment of the members’ daughter in a tertiary institution of learning. The CEO then in his own words, recounted how he prayed to God to kill the perpetrator. Lo, behold, his god then kills the perpetrator, whether through an automobile accident or something. Problem solved, sounds very logical and the loose ends neatly tied up.

Now, let us firstly consider what the Scriptures say in Mathew 23:9-10; Do not call anyone on earth [who guides you spiritually] your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven. Do not let yourselves be called leaders or teachers; for One is your Leader (Teacher), the Christ. And secondly in Mathew 7:11; If you then, evil (sinful by nature) as you are, know how to give good and advantageous gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven [perfect as He is] give what is good and advantageous to those who keep on asking Him. These Scripture texts begs the question: How would these so-called religious leaders feel, when one of their children asks them to beat another of their children to death? That is what is meant by “Let us ask the fish”.

This gives clarity to what God said in Mathew 5:44-45; But I say to you, love [that is, unselfishly seek the best or higher good for] your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may [show yourselves to] be the children of your Father who is in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on those who are evil and on those who are good, and makes the rain fall on the righteous [those who are morally upright] and the unrighteous [the unrepentant, those who oppose Him]. The fish has answered.