What’s In A Name

“…He saved them for His name’s sake.”
Psalm 106:8

      The Name of YHWH (Yahweh) is endowed with power. The Name and the power are synonyms. “By what power or by what name have you done this? (Acts 4:7)” As Messianic Believers, we have the covenant through the Messiah YahShua to call on the name Yahweh. There is power in the name of YHWH (Yahweh).

El is the general title for YHWH (Yahweh). It is used 250 times in the Tanach. The earliest combination of El Yah inscription (Late Bronze Age) was found on a beautiful Ewer, discovered in a rubbish heap of a temple at Lachish in 1934. The Lachish Ewer (1220 BCE) bares the title El coupled with the abbreviated name Yah embossed with the Menorah and a sacrificial ram.

      This title draws attention to the fact that one is worshipping the one true El. This is the most common title for Yahweh and comes from the ancient Hebrew word “ul” meaning, “to be strong.” In other Semitic tongues El is referred as Ellah (Ancient Hebrew – Ezra 5:11), Eloah (Hebrew – Deut. 32:17), Ilu (Akkadian), Elahh (Chaldean), and Allah (Arabic – though this was applied to the Arab moon deity also called Sin of Sinai). 

“If this were an authentic history, the textbook would explain that the god of Muhammad was man’s creation. Arabia was a pagan nation that worshiped over 300 gods. One of those was the moon god named, al-ilah. Legend has it that the moon god mated with the sun god and had two daughters, both of whom were worshiped as goddesses. When Muhammad claimed to have had his `vision’ and `revelation from Gabriel’ he chose al-ilah as the god to build his army around. Muhammad shortened the name, al-ilah, to, Allah, and declared that he alone should be worshiped. He forbade the worship of the daughters. To this day, a crescent moon can be found at the front of every mosque, acknowledging that Allah was, and is the moon god.”

     Earlier Arabs used the word El as a single name for the deity the same way it is used in the Hebrew Scriptures. The word became iyal as a plural form of majesty like many use Elohim.

Robert Miller – Understanding Yahweh

Faithfulness

 

Hosea 4:1-2 (1) Hear the word of YHWH, ye children of Israel: for YHWH hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of Elohim in the land. (2) By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.

Faithlessness, when it has infected every area of a culture, blurs the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, morality and immorality. Without truth, there is no reliable ethical basis for government, commerce, or social relationships. There are no solid standards. Without virtues upon which a majority agree, one can never be quite sure how another will conduct himself, and so everyone becomes untrustworthy.  In this context, mercy connotes steadfast love rather than a singular act of kindness toward somebody in need. It means, then, that people waver in their loyalties. They pursue whatever fad comes along. We might say today that they “blow hot and cold.” When they are “hot” they are “hot,” but they can never seem to sustain it because, when their eyes are lured by some new, exciting interest, they are off in that direction until yet something else catches their imagination. The “knowledge of Elohim” includes two elements: First is the knowledge about Elohim, of His existence, Word, and way. The second is acknowledging Him. This denotes commitment, a steady loyalty to Him personally and to His way of life as a pattern of living. The context demands the second element, since Elohim would have no reason to accuse people who were not aware of Him and His way of life. Because He is addressing those who have that basic knowledge, His complaints are directed at faithless, uncommitted people. In America, it is becoming almost impossible to find responsible and trustworthy people.   This article from John Rittenhouse, The Berean.  The Restored Names were substituted.

 

Absentee Dad’s Come In ALL Colors

Barak Obama said “Too many fathers are MIA, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Obama said to a chorus of approving murmurs from the audience. “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

We must recognize that absentee Dad’s come in all colors.  Their absence is killing America.

Dating – Prep for Failure

The American dating system does not biblically prepare young men and women for long term relationships and marriage.  It trains them to form a series of relationships, and further trains them to harden themselves to the break-up of all but the current one. This system is a preparation for divorce  Whenever the other person starts to wear a little thin, you just slip out of the relationship, thus creating the habit of divorce.

Consider how this system works. A young man notices a young girl who attracts him. He asks her out on a date, and she agrees.  If neither one likes the other, then they both have had a bad experience. 

If they initially “hit it off” and continue the relationship, the temptation to engage in sex is strong.  The carnal side of life is encouraged.

And of course, if during the dating period one of the “sweethearts” is interested in staying together but the other has a change of heart and wants out of the relationship, the possibilities for emotional snarls and  complications are almost endless.

A Modern Way of Thinking

Dating was invented within the last 200 years. Prior to that time, marriage always involved much more input from the parents, and “trial relationships” leading up to marriage (what we now call “dating”) were not conducted at all.

Dating arose out of the eighteenth century philosophical movement we now call “Romanticism” which emphasized, among other things, passion rather than logic. Writers such as Rousseau lamented that Western civilization had fallen into the “error” of exalting reason over feelings. He proposed making decisions based on emotions rather than intellect.

This philosophy had far-reaching implications, impacting the arts, literature, government, and many other areas of society. Of interest to our discussion, though, is its effects on relationships between men and women.

While love between husbands and wives has always been assumed, it was generally not perceived as a pre-requisite for entering marriage. Rather, it was understood that married partners would grow to love one another. Other factors in weighing marriage decisions were generally considered to be more significant.

In modern America, recreational dating is taken to be a positive good, like food, air, and sunshine, a necessary, inescapable activity.  It is considered to be a normal and natural part of growing up – what could be more wholesomely American than taking a girl to the prom?  But the fact is that dating was entirely unknown at the time the Scriptures were given to us.  This means that for those who take the Bible seriously should consider what the Bible has to say on the formation of families.

There are many forms of dating, perhaps as many as there are people. Everyone has a different view of what is right and wrong. But there is a glaring fault in many of our models, a double-standard. Once we are married, we recognize that certain things are sacred to our partner. Things such as co-habitation, kissing, intimate hugging, sex and bringing up children. We recognize that not only our physical body, but our emotions, even our spirit are dedicated to that one partner, for the rest of our life (according to our vows). 

The dichotomy is this: in dating, we presume to partake of many of these privileges of marriage for an admittedly short while.  We would be shocked if a married man had an emotional attachment to another woman which he redirected to another after a short while.

Yet it’s quite acceptable for singles to have a different emotional attachment every week.  On the one hand, we save sex for our partners (and some even do that sparingly), but on the other, we engage in rampant emotional promiscuity, giving pieces of our hearts away until one wonders what will be left for that special, life-long partner.

Where is Daddy?

The modern dating system leaves the father of the young girl out of the loop.   And Daddy should worry, because the modern dating system expects a certain amount of physical involvement. Fully 20% of all American teen girls have have experienced some form of dating violence –controlling, abusive, and/or aggressive behavior in a romantic relationship. 

The father, who should be protecting his daughter’s safety and purity, instead sends her off into the dark with a teenaged boy whose veins are chock full of testosterone.  True, the modern Christian version of this system supposedly allows only enough foreplay without “going all the way”, however, we have to wonder about the wisdom of allowing our youth to go into harm’s way and expect them to control strong physical urges that are often overwhelming. 

 Statistics show that only half of teen-agers remain virginal until age 17. By the age of 20, 76 percent of women, and 80 percent of men have had sex.  Only 6.9 percent of men and 21 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 59 wait until their wedding night for the experience. The statistics of premarital sex of “Christians” are the same as those of the secular world.

Additionally, society continues to redefine what sex is.  Many American teens have compromised the absolutes of abstinence to include heavy petting and alternative sexual practices while insisting they are maintaining virginity.

Fathers who actively prohibit dating force their children to miss certain things…among the missed activities are: hurt, betrayal, anxiety, self-deception, fear, suspicion, anger, heartbreak, confusion, and the horror of having been used. And those are only emotional aspects; there is also disease, pregnancy, and abortion.

Daddy, What’s A Virgin?

Virginity was an inheritance to be brought into a marriage, and the father of the bride was responsible to preserve that inheritance. If a new husband slandered his bride and claimed that she was not a virgin, the bride’s father and mother would defend her name and the name of their family. They would present the evidence of her virginity to the elders of the city (Deuteronomy 22:15).

If the charge was true, and the woman was not a virgin, then the bride was to be executed in front of her father’s house. “But if the thing is true, and evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done a disgraceful thing in Israel, to play the harlot in her father’s house. So you shall put away the evil from among you” (Deuteronomy. 22:20-21). Why the doorway to her father’s house, rather than her husband’s house? Because she had rebelled against her father’s authority, and dishonored him.

Physical virginity is only part of the equation.   Marriage and betrothal is based on vows and commitments which are as essential to the union as is the physical act.  Young persons pledge loyalty and fidelity to another in a dating situation and begin to spiritually bond even though they have only a temporary commitment. 

If they are strong enough to avoid sexual contact (which statistics show to the contrary), there is strong spiritual and emotional connection.  This connection is the source of the heartbreak and pain at break-up.

According to a study done by the Center for Data Analysis in June 2003, 25% of sexually active teens claim to be depressed all or most of the time.  Additionally, fully 14% of sexually active teen girls have attempted suicide. The study overwhelmingly shows that teens that are sexually inactive are happier than those who engage in dating and sex. The emotional devastation of dating and teen sex is vast. Virginity is a state of mind as well as a physical fact.

Some of the Problems with Dating…

• Dating promotes lust and sexual activity, opening the door for fornication.
  
• Dating develops a self-centered, feeling-oriented concept of love.
  
• Dating creates intimate soul ties between two people who will not spend their lives together.
  
• Dating teaches people to break off difficult relationships, conditioning them more for divorce than marriage.
  
• Dating develops an appetite for variety and change, creating dissatisfaction within marriage.
  
• Dating lacks the protections and guidance afforded by parental involvement of courtship.
  
• Dating prepares children to escape “life’s realities”
  
• Dating devalues sex and marriage.
  
• Dating leads to intimacy but not necessarily to commitment.
  
• Dating tends to skip the “friendship” stage of a relationship.
  
• Dating often mistakes a physical relationship for love.
  
• Dating often isolates a couple from other vital relationships.
  
• Dating, in many cases, distracts young adults from their primary responsibility of preparing for the future.
  
• Dating exposes teens to violence and coercion.
  
• Dating creates an artificial environment for evaluating another person’s character

http://www.americanvalues.org/Hooking_Up.pdf

Better Than Cocaine

Intense Sweetness

Surpasses Cocaine Reward

Magalie Lenoir^#, Fuschia Serre^#, Lauriane Cantin, Serge H. Ahmed^*

University Bordeaux 2, Université Bordeaux 1, CNRS, UMR 5227, Bordeaux, France

Abstract

Background

Refined sugars (e.g., sucrose, fructose) were absent in the diet of most people until very recently in human history. Today overconsumption of diets rich in sugars contributes together with other factors to drive the current obesity epidemic. Overconsumption of sugar-dense foods or beverages is initially motivated by the pleasure of sweet taste and is often compared to drug addiction. Though there are many biological commonalities between sweetened diets and drugs of abuse, the addictive potential of the former relative to the latter is currently unknown.

Methodology/Principal findings

Here we report that when rats were allowed to choose mutually-exclusively between water sweetened with saccharin–an intense calorie-free sweetener–and intravenous cocaine–a highly addictive and harmful substance–the large majority of animals (94%) preferred the sweet taste of saccharin. The preference for saccharin was not attributable to its unnatural ability to induce sweetness without calories because the same preference was also observed with sucrose, a natural sugar. Finally, the preference for saccharin was not surmountable by increasing doses of cocaine and was observed despite either cocaine intoxication, sensitization or intake escalation–the latter being a hallmark of drug addiction.

Conclusions

Our findings clearly demonstrate that intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward, even in drug-sensitized and -addicted individuals. We speculate that the addictive potential of intense sweetness results from an inborn hypersensitivity to sweet tastants. In most mammals, including rats and humans, sweet receptors evolved in ancestral environments poor in sugars and are thus not adapted to high concentrations of sweet tastants. The supranormal stimulation of these receptors by sugar-rich diets, such as those now widely available in modern societies, would generate a supranormal reward signal in the brain, with the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus to lead to addiction.

Citation: Lenoir M, Serre F, Cantin L, Ahmed SH (2007) Intense Sweetness Surpasses Cocaine Reward. PLoS ONE 2(8): e698. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000698

Academic Editor: Bernhard Baune, James Cook University, Australia

Received: April 24, 2007; Accepted: July 4, 2007; Published: August 1, 2007

Copyright: © 2007 Lenoir et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This work was supported by grants from the Université Victor-Segalen Bordeaux 2, the French Research Council (CNRS), the Conseil Régional Aquitaine, the National Research Agency (ANR) and the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM).

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: sahmed@u-bordeaux2.fr

# These authors contributed equally to this work.

DAD, Stay Home!

 

According to US Census Bureau -  Fatherless homes account for:

 63% of youth suicides,

90% of homeless/runaway children,

85% of children with behavior problems,

71% of high school dropouts,

85% of youths in prison, 

50+% of teen mothers.

You are Dead Already – M.L. King, Jr.

“You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be.
And one day, some great opportunity stands before you
and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle,
some great issue, some great cause.
And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.
You refuse to do it because you want to live longer.
You’re afraid that you will lose your job,
or you’re afraid that you will be criticized
or that you will lose your popularity,
or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you,
or shoot at you or bomb your house;
so you refuse to take the stand.

“Well you may go on and live until you are 90,
but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You refused to stand up for justice.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
From the sermon “But, If Not”
delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church November 5, 1967.
He was assassinated five months later on April 4, 1968.

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Welcome to The Congregation of YHWH US.  Spreading truth in Babylon.