Tuesday, March 19, 2013

David's Connection to Christ's Cruxifixion

 My niece, Chelise Slowik, an Art History Professor sent me these insights after listening to Perry Stone. Many of the connections came from him, some from her.

  • When David slew Goliath, he took five stones with him, not because he thought he may need all five to kill the giant, but because Goliath had four more brothers! (Who were eventually killed by David's mighty men.)

  • After he killed Goliath, he cut off the head. The reason? Because Goliath was a Nephilim (found in Genesis 6) or descended from them, and traditionsaid that if the head was not removed, they could be “re-animated” by those Nephilim cursed to walk the earth as evil spirits after the flood.

  • Tradition says that David then took the head, and buried it in Jerusalem. Now, put it all together:

  • Goliath was from Gath.

  • David removed his head, and buried it in Jerusalem.

  • Christ was crucified on Golgotha – Goliath, from Gath- (Gol-gath –a) – The Place of the Skull!

  • It is said in Genesis 3:  “He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." More than likely, Christ was crucified directly above the skull – the seed of the serpent, whom He crushed.

  • Recently, archaeologists have excavated crucifixion victims, and have found that the nail was hammered in between the Achilles tendons and ankle - the heel, not through the toes, or foot bones.)

Friday, March 15, 2013

Prayer in the Dark Times

Did you ever go through one of those times when life felt as though everything
around you was crumbling? Be honest. I know you have! Jesus said, “In this life you will have troubles . . .”

Well, right now I’m going through a troubled time. Some of the things I am praying about are spiritual / emotional others job-related and financial, others concern relationships. All concern people I love. All are all too confidential to share. Isn’t that the way it always is with the really heavy stuff? You share; you betray.

So I find myself “worrying to the Lord” while tricking myself into believing I’m praying. “Lord, please heal him . . . Lord please heal him . . . Lord please heal him.”

The good news is: Today I’ve been resting in the Lord by asking once, trusting him for the answer and then rejoicing, thanking and praising him for his answer.

How does the Bible tell us to pray?

  • Keep on praying. “You who put the Lord in remembrance, give the Lord no rest . . .” (Isaiah 62:6b). That’s me. For sure.

  • The fervent prayers of the righteous are very effective (Jas. 5:16, 17). When I’m hurt or scared or worried my prayers are definitely FERVENT. So I’m doing good, right?

  • In Luke 11:5-10 Jesus tells about a man who harasses his friend in the middle of the night until he gets what he wants. The fellow gets what he asks for because he won’t go away. Won’t leave his friend alone. The point is persistence. We should be persistent in prayer if we want answers. Believe me, I’m persistent.

So why does the way I pray sometimes feel a little off?

  • In Matt. 6:7 Jesus cautions us not to “heap up empty phrases” when we pray. I’m not certain my repetitive asking qualifies as empty, but I suppose it’s possible.

  • And doesn’t having to beg God over and over run contrary to God’s character? He’s better than I am. He gives his children better gifts than I give my children (Luke 11:11-13). He will answer any prayer that is in accordance with his will. 

Doesn’t thanking him rather than desperately begging fit Isaiah 62, “give the Lord no rest?” Don’t you think my fervent gratitude fulfills James 5? Since he’s listening as I thank him I’m being persistent.

That doesn’t mean I can’t ask more than once; I’m sure I will ask many times. But I will allow my prayers to focus more on trusting God than fearing a dark future. Those kind of prayers calm me.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013



More than thirty years ago, I taught junior high during the day and threw pottery from the time I got home at about four in the afternoon until late at night. Since I have an addictive personality, I spent every moment of every summer immersed in throwing, glazing and firing my pottery. I loved every second of pottery making.

However, I wasn't walking with the Lord at the time, so I didn't realize until years later all the ways clay and the potter symbolize God and his Creation. But as I read my Bible daily and God gave me many Ah-ha! moments, a book emerged. The publisher that I signed a contract with didn't like the title Living Clay and could never come up with an alternative. Though my editor fought valiantly, the book was never published. I never submitted it to another publisher.

In these blogs I will share some of the insights God gave me. Most came from actual hands-on work with clay. Other information and insights came from books. I found the chemical composition chart below from Rhodes, Clay and Glazes for the Potter: Chilton Book Company, 1957, pg 5.
"As one might expect, the usual chemical composition of clay is quite similar to the average composition of the surface of the earth as a whole. Compare, for example, an analysis of a common, red clay with the approximate percentages of oxides on the surface of the earth as a whole:"

                                                                                     Earth as                    Common red
                                                                                     a whole                          clay                          
SiO2                                                                  59.14                           57.02
Al2O3                                                  15.34                           19.15
Fe2O3                                                                 6.88                             6.70
MgO                                                      3.49                             3.08
CaO                                                       5.08                             4.26
Na2O                                                     3.84                             2.38
K2O                                                       3.13                            2.03
H2O                                                       1.15                             3.45
TiO2                                                                   1.05                              .91

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Living Clay -- Yet Too Ordinary to Brag



 © Jeannie St. John Taylor

Potters call locating and excavating clay winning the clay. That term strikes me as strange considering the commonness of clay. It’s supposed to be difficult to win something, isn’t it? Runners spend countless hours preparing to win a race; students work for years earning grades good enough to win a scholarship. But finding clay isn’t difficult.

Clay is everywhere – so easy to find that one of my pottery books suggests searching for it as a way to enrich any summer camp program for children anywhere in the world. It will be educational, the book says, while greatly increasing the fun quotient of camp. And campers will have no trouble finding it themselves. Anyone can locate clay. They just need to know where to look and what to look for.

Around the world, most topsoil is only about a foot and a half thick. Under that resides a layer of clay.


  • Deep-cut riverbeds reveal clay. You can find clay in small streams. 
  • Clay covered the bottom of the murky swimming hole in Syracuse, Ohio creek where I played as a young child. After we’d played and swam for an afternoon, the dissolving clay turned the creek a slimy, muddy red.
  • My mother and her siblings chinked the cracks of the Kentucky log cabin where they grew up with tan clay dug from their hillside front yard.
  • On one hill on the Yorkshire moors, England three different kinds and colors of clay were found on a single slope in about 400 yards.
  •  Veins of clay stripe the hillside cutaways along highways.

Clay is not rare; it is abundant and cheap. It has no value of its own. It is being produced every day by forces of nature God set in motion. Water seeps into rocks and splits them when it freezes. Plants gain a foothold in the rocks and crack them into smaller pieces.  Streams and glaciers grind rocks, readying them for disintegration by chemicals found in water. It has been estimated that more clay is formed daily than potters are able to use up in ceramics.

Furthermore, as though God wanted to prove how ordinary clay is, the chemical composition of clay is similar to the composition of the earth as a whole.  Silica (SiO2) and Alumina (Al2O3) make up
 approximately seventy-five percent of the surface of the earth. And these two oxides are the essential elements of all types of clay. It’s hardly a stretch to think of clay as a representative sample of the entire earth.

God chose to shape us from the most ordinary substance on earth. He made us from earth. Of earth. That’s not allegorical; it’s fact. We are clay. The fact that we return to dirt after we die is proof of it.

God relates our history very simply in the second chapter of Genesis. “And the LORD God formed a man’s body from the dust of the ground and breathed into it the breath of life (Gen. 2:7). The “dust of the earth” is clay. Just add a little water to make it easy to shape and you’ve got . . . well, you. And me.

Furthermore, God spoke the animals into being using the same clay from which he formed us. “And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth every kind of animal – livestock, small animals, and wildlife.’” (Gen.1:24). That makes it a little hard to feel special, doesn’t it? Yet there is something in each of us that longs to be special, to be extraordinary.

Have you ever rebelled, just a little, at the idea of being formed from common clay, from the same material as animals? Why did God make us from dirt? Diamonds are rarer. Why couldn’t he have chiseled us from diamonds with dazzling facets for reflecting him, or rubies with passionate inner warmth that would draw others, or emeralds glowing with the color of life and hope? Why’d he make us from mud?

I doubt he created Satan from mud. Surely God used some exotic substance to make him. Satan must have been too exquisite to be shaped of clay. “You were the perfection of wisdom and beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God. Your clothing was adorned with every precious stone – red carnelian, chrysolite, white moonstone, beryl, onyx, jasper, sapphire, turquoise, and emerald – all beautifully crafted for you and set in the finest gold. They were given to you on the day you were born (Ezekiel 28:12.13).

I don’t see anything common in that description of Satan, do you? Yet Satan ended up hideous, despoiled by arrogance over his own beauty. “Your heart was filled with pride because of all your beauty. You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor” (Ezekiel 28: 17). Pride ruined the devil.

I don’t want to end up like him and I’m assuming you don’t either. Certainly, God doesn’t want us to fall victim to our own bloated pride. God wants us to understand precisely who we are so we will remain humble and not fall into Satan’s trap. “Be honest in your estimate of yourselves, measuring your value by how much faith God has given you” (Rom. 12:3b).

God tells us plainly that he is the potter and we are common clay. We are nothing without him. “How stupid can you be? He is the Potter, and he is certainly greater than you. You are only the jars he makes! Should the thing that was created say to the one who made it, ‘He didn’t make us’? Does a jar ever say, ‘The potter who made me is stupid?'” (Is.29:16).

I’m convinced God has many reasons for each thing he does. I wonder . . .  is it possible he formed us from common clay to continually remind us we have no basis for pride? If we vessels of clay truly understand where we came from, pride should never be a danger for us.

Yet we do have a reason to feel pride. We should boast because God the Potter wins us. He scooped clay from the ground, shaped it and breathed his own Life into humankind. We alone can display his image. That makes us special. Extraordinarily special.

Even so, the second time he won us was the best. Nothing else so difficult and painful has ever been accomplished. He won us when Jesus died on the cross. As a result, we each have a noble purpose, to pray and glorify him forever. We can give him pleasure.

“God forbid that I should boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14). 

Monday, March 11, 2013

The Day God Breathed Life into Common Dirt



© Jeannie St. John Taylor

Was God thinking about you before the beginning? Did he see your face when nothing existed except an enormous earth-sized mass of water undulating in inky blackness? Did he know he planned to form you from clay even when there was no such thing as clay?

I think so. I think visions of your face moved through his mind while his Holy-Spirit-energy simmered over the watery abyss. Knowledge of the earth-home he planned to create, combined with knowledge of the amazing future he intended for you, filled him with pleasure.

Then he spoke.

Light exploded through the water. Every color of the rainbow shimmered around the pulsating prism and skimmed through the vapors floating above the water. Once more God spoke, splitting the light and darkness down the middle.

“Oh, wow!” God said. “Beautiful!”

Angels shouted with joy, even though they still didn’t know about you. They new nothing of lifeless clay and they certainly could not have imagined Living Clay.

The next day, when God spoke again, thick mists enveloping the earth lifted clear of the watery surface and swept upward with a mighty roar.

“Incredible!” God said.

He spoke a third time and the waters churned as rocks and clay came into being. Mountains broke the surface and surged heavenward. Water cascaded down sheer cliffs like an oversized waterfall crashing into oceans. Skyscraper-high waves whipped into foam. On the just-formed land, fir and oak pushed out of the dirt, stretching skyward. New apple trees hung heavy with red fruit. Underneath them, purple flowers swayed in the breeze, drenching the air with fragrance.

Gradually, the waves calmed. Orange and pink light skipping along swaying foam danced over the surface and reflected on the faces of the angels who watched in awe.  But the angels had no way of knowing the best was yet to come. How could they guess that the most common substance of the creation would become its magnum opus -- God’s masterpiece?

A smile played across God’s heart. “I love this,” he said.

On the fifth day, God spoke squirming, wiggling creatures into the oceans. Octopus snuggled into caves, whales slapped the blue surface with enormous tail fins, porpoises arched over the water, pink anemones swayed in shallow current, and schools of fish changed course in unison, light glinting off their scales. God spoke eagles onto high ledges, migrating geese into formation in the sky, and blue dragonflies over quiet ponds.

He watched his creatures at play and said, “Yes!”

On day six, God spoke and ordinary dirt morphed into lumbering elephants and roaring lions. Mud wriggled into squirrels that scampered up trees to chatter at blue jays.

Angels giggled with delight.

But before the day ended, God did something totally unexpected. Something so shocking all the angels held their breath. Instead of once more speaking his creation in to being, God did something very different. He stepped down onto the planet, knelt beside a stream, scooped up a glob of clay and began shaping it with his own hands. With love-light gleaming in his eyes, God the Potter prodded, squeezed, and smoothed. With his own holy fingers he incorporated perfection into every detail of this final creation. Then he bent over and breathed into the completed figure.

The creature stood and turned to his Daddy God. The angels looked deep into the man’s eyes and gasped. “He understands that God is his Father! God made the man in his own image and breathed his own Life into him! The animals are magnificent, but they aren’t alive! They don’t understand who God is. The man does. God created Living Clay from common dirt!”