Arcade Church

I disagree! God is not human. God spoke and everything came into place. Does Mr. Keel feel that God got his hands dirty when he created Adam? He made him from dust. Did God create dirty dust to make a perfect man? Or did God create perfectly clean dust to make man in His image. Everything else was spoken into existence. Sorry, but this quote is not of my God, nor is it Godly. It is not even scriptural an intuitive reasoning is not for us who believe in God’s word the Bible. Lets study the Bible and let others fool with this kind of stuff. The Lord will bless us if we study scripture and obey his word. Maybe it is time to replace the word Baptist in our church name and begin again as we did before, lean on scripture and the Holy Spirit for our spritual needs. Let this Intuitive Leadership fall by the wayside. PLEASE!

Jesus is God. Jesus came to earth as a human, all man and all God. He set aside all of His Divine in order to live among us on this earth as a man. Jesus worked, got dirty, walked on dirty streets and got dirty, got beaten and got bloody, got nailed to a cross and got even bloodier, and then He took my sins onto Himself to pay for my sins on that cross. I can’t think of anything I have ever done in this world that can compare to how dirty Jesus got when He came to the earth, just to die for my sins. I would assume, no matter if I agree or disagree with the title of a book that Tim Keel has written, that Tim is referring to the unimaginable glory Jesus gave up, so that He could live on this earth as a man. If that is not “getting dirty,” or taking my sin on Himself is not “getting dirty,” then I really don’t know what “getting dirty” is.

I agree with Tim Keel in the sense that God the Son got his hands dirty when he came to earth as a man. I think this is the role of the church today. I will repeat something I have said before, but it fits. For centuries in the Western world, the church was the center of community. So most people were in some way part of the church and heard the truth.Sometime in the early twentieth century that changed, and the church is not longer the center of the community for people. When the church leaders finally realized that, they decided that we needed to have great programs, shows, events, etc. to get the people to church to hear the truth. That didn’t work. So now we are going back to the JESUS model - Go out to the people, meet needs, and teach the truth. Sometimes that means getting your hands dirty, but it’s what Jesus did.

This quote provides plenty of grist for the mill! Sadly, semantics can really get in the way of our hearing truth, even when it’s as huge as this. You called it today when you shared the illustration of Love showing grace for the greatest sinner (AKA me). Jesus did not and does not observe the “Quarantine” lines of the world. He walked right into the leper colonies and embraced the rejected of the world, and calls us to do the same. “Love never fails.” So that’s the truth I hear this guy saying.
What I might take issue with is, “God joined a story.” As much as Keel might be attempting to illustrate that, had it not been so, we would not know Jesus as “Immanuel, God with us,” his choice of words leaves a stumbling block out there that could result in a lot of people “trippin’.” Just coming from my background and experience, it sounds as though Keel implies that God somehow decided to join in on something that was already up and running, apart from Him. I’m sure this is not what the author intended. Maybe better stated, “The Author entered into His-story.” Oh, wait a minute! Later, Keel does refer to it as “God’s story.” Now I’m trippin’! Why does that come so easily???