April 18, 2013 ©Homer Kizer
Commentary — From the Margins
Alpha & Omega
Part Three: Left Hand versus Right Hand
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6.
The person the media often places before the public as an expert on Christianity, the Bible, and the early Christian Church is Dr. Bart D. Ehrman of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill … reared to be a Believer, a born-again Christian, Dr. Ehrman now identifies himself as an agnostic, not because of textual difficulties in both the New and Old Testaments, but because of the presence of evil in this world. How, he wonders, could a loving God permit Hitler to come to power? Or on a lesser scale, how could a loving God permit someone or ones to detonate bombs intend to inflict harm near the finish line of the Boston Marathon? Surely if an all powerful God existed, He would intervene in the affairs of humanity to protect the lives of innocents.
Professor Ehrman’s unbelief is based in rational thought, but he doesn’t know his left hand from his right hand. He is as the people of Nineveh were, who upon hearing the preaching of Jonah, a man seemingly puked forth from the mouth of the Canaanite god Dagon whom they worshiped (among a host of other deities), repented of their evil deeds and for more than a century lived as a moral people who were the enemies of Israel and Judah, one people divided into two nations, both of which lived in open rebellion against the God of Abraham. This is not to say that the people of Nineveh worshiped the God of Abraham—they did not—but is to say that the king’s decree that the men of Nineveh turn from their evil ways and the violence they were doing with their hands was obeyed.
Yet of the people of
In her 1991 mystery Body of Evidence, Patricia D. Cornwell employed the chirality of Robitussin, a non-prescription cough medicine whose active ingredient is the drug dextromethorphan, as a clue to her victim’s death. The amount of Robitussin found in the autopsy of the victim was not enough to harm the woman; so a mystery was in the making, one solved by polarimetric analysis which revealed the presence of levomethorphan, a powerful narcotic and the enantiomer of dextromethorphan. Because the enantiomers cannot be distinguished by routine toxicological tests, the deliberate death of the victim also escaped notice, if not for a chief medical examiner who understood drug chirality.
In polarized light, the left hand or right hand structure of chemically identical compounds can be observed, with the left-hand enantiomer producing differing results in living organisms than the right-hand enantiomer … where structural chirality exists in drugs—racemic drugs—the two enantiomers [the left hand and the right hand structures] work like two different drugs. For example, in the 1980s, Perhexiline, used to treat abnormal heart rhythms and a racemate, killed people because one enantiomer was more slowly metabolized (had a much longer half-life) than the other enantiomer. Whereas the faster acting enantiomer could stabilize heart rhythms, the slower acting enantiomer could not.
Both Thalidomide and Ritalin are racemates.
The Bible can be likened
to a racemate drug; the Bible employs literary chirality to simultaneously conceal and reveal what it
means to possess spiritual life. The Bible hides from Christians not born of
spirit what it reveals to the Elect. And part of what’s revealed is that
“culture” is “law” for a society not under a formalized
law code. Culture was even law for ancient
Distinguishing a person’s left hand from the person’s right hand doesn’t, on its surface, seem significant. Of course the person’s left hand is on the person’s left side, but is it true when a person looks at him or herself in a mirror? In the reflection of a person, is not the person’s left hand on the mirror-image’s right side? So determining left from right depends on the frame of reference: if a person is seen from behind (as if looking forward from the stern of a vessel to its bow), the person’s left hand is on the person’s portside, but when facing a person, the person’s left hand is on the person’s right side.
A recent review of newly approved drugs revels an increasing percentage of single-enantiomer compounds as opposed to recemates; for too many racemates cause problems because their structures produce differing pharmacokinetic effects. As chirality has become understood, the importance of opposing enantiomers has caused each enantiomer to be perceived as a distinct compound even through the same elements in the same ratios compose each enantiomer.
A Sabbatarian Christian—a Christian who keeps the commandments, including all of the Sabbaths of God—consists of exactly the same molecules as another Sabbatarian Christian. Each looks like the other to the world, including to having character flaws. But in the polarized light that is God, the one Sabbatarian doesn’t look like the other; for one is not truly born of spirit, born of God as a son, whereas the other is. Only rarely can the difference between Sabbatarians truly be seen in this world—and we have a chance to see difference when the Elect and very few other Sabbatarians take the Passover sacraments on Tuesday, April 23, 2013, shortly after sunset. Those Sabbatarian Christians not truly born of God took the Passover sacraments in March, and did not eat the broken bread that is the body of Christ and drink from the cup that represents the blood of Christ poured out for the sins of many on the night that Jesus was betrayed … only on one night a year does unleavened bread and wine represent the body and blood of the Lamb of God, the sacrifice of righteous Abel. This night is the dark portion of the 14th day of the first month, with the first month beginning with the first observed new moon crescent following the spring equinox. On every other night of the year, bread and wine are the fruit of the ground, Cain’s sacrifice.
The left hand looks like
the right hand, but isn’t the right hand. The left hand is the
non-symmetrical mirror image of the right hand. The left hand cannot be
superimposed over the right hand. And if the left and right hands were drugs,
they would be identified as racemates. If ancient
Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you? You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the spirit. For the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. (2 Cor 3:1–6 emphasis and double emphasis added)
Law is culture and vice-versa. Whereas ancient Israel had the Law but did not keep it after the days of Joshua, circumcised-of-heart Israel is not under an outward-pointing law, but is subject to a culture of obedience to God which will cause the person in whom his or her inner self as been made alive through the indwelling of Christ to outwardly keep the Law because that is the culture of the Sabbatarian Christian (the person numbered among the Elect).
Both Rush Limbaugh and
Glenn Beck have recently declared that the
But with God, who will not be long mocked, same-gender sexual relationships are an abomination—
The difference between
the left hand and the right hand might not be recognized by a secular state,
one such as ancient
When the bombs exploded
in
Again, an Israelite
shepherd would not have lawfully married a Canaanite shepherdess. But the
Canaanite woman doesn’t represent the left hand of the
An outwardly circumcised Israelite cannot lawfully marry a Gentile, and a circumcised-of-heart Israelite is not to marry the daughter of an outwardly-circumcised Israelite unless she, too, is circumcised-of-heart; for the outwardly-circumcised Israelite represents the left hand enantiomer of Israel whereas the circumcised-of-heart Israelite (who can be outwardly male or female) represents the right hand enantiomer of Israel.
A lamb is not a human person and can never be the mirror-image of a human person; so it isn’t enough for a person to be born human to be in the image and likeness of God … the defining chiral image of humanity is for a human person to be looking up at God who looks down at the person, made in the image and likeness of God. But to be in the image and likeness of God, the human person will walk in this world as Christ Jesus walked. For the Logos who was Theos and who was with ton Theon [the God] in primacy [Gr: arche — no article] (John 1:1) entered His creation as His unique Son (John 3:16) to be born as the man Jesus (John 1:14), thereby giving to human persons the model of how God would walk in this world, and how they should walk if they are to be in the image and likeness of God.
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"Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved."