President Jimmy Carter @CarterCenter (New York, NY)39th President of the United States; Author, ‘A Full Life: Reflections At Ninety’ Huffington Post Interview, 7 July 2015
I know, for a fact, that Jesus did not vote for James Earl Carter for President, and could not approve the use of the sophomoric diminutive, “Jimmy.” It is rumored hereabouts that Jesus still can not understand why “Jimmy,” while Governor of Georgia, turned out thousands of inpatients from state mental health care hospitals and day care treatment centers, where they were at least clothed and fed and medically treated, to fend for themselves on city streets as the homeless and helpless victims of crime and Jimmy’s public policy; or worse, to turn to drug addition, prostitution, and violence to “make it through the night.”
“Up, LORD, and let not man have the upper hand; * let the heathen be judged in thy sight.
Put them in fear, O LORD, * that the heathen may know themselves to be but men.” Psalm 9:19-20
Jimmy Carter was an arrogant Governor, an arrogant President, and now is an arrogant Elder, who willingly substitutes his word for the Word, worse, he leads others to the left or to the right, sure in his heart he walks the narrow path. Jimmy, if it’s not in the Sacred Scriptures, it’s not the word of God, but the hubris of man. We are so easily mislead by popular culture, we are so sure that God is love, we hear so many say: “If there is a God, we are forgiven…” Conditional and relative and situational are all words of man, not found in the original texts, not taught by the original teacher.
For me, it is easy, I know that Jesus loves me, I know that He died for my sins, which shamefully I admit continue committed daily. As a Christian, I know what my sins are, for the Bible tells me so, and that Holy Book tells me that Jesus blessed the marriage of one man and one woman, for in the consummation of that union, children may be conceived, and a Family is created, and that man and that woman, blessed by the Holy Spirit, are joined eternally to God by that act of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual union, sharing the love of God with each other, bound to each other, as Ordained Sacramentally in the first public miracle of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, at the Marriage Feast of Cana.
In the Old Testament, in Genesis, Human Life begins with a man, and a woman, Adam and Eve; and in the New Testament, the first public revelation that the Son of Man is the Son of God begins with the marriage of a man and a woman. The cycle of creation is renewed and now sanctified Holy by the presence of God, the union of man and woman is given grace, blessed by the very presence of Jesus Christ.
Twice God has directly joined man and woman together, first in the Garden of Eden, in the midst of Paradise, and He left them alone to celebrate their creation. Now at Cana, He joins with the man and woman in the celebration of their marriage, in the sanctification of their union, and by His miracle of changing water into wine, God actually becomes part of the celebration, essential to the joy, the fulfillment of the feast. In John, we learn not only of the nature of Christ’s first miracle, but of the context, the presence of Jesus, the presence of His mother, Mary, and the family of her and Joseph, her sons, and certainly the daughters and daughters-in laws, all celebrating the marriage, the vows exchanged, the promise of consummation, the sheer joy of living in His image and likeness, the wedded couple brought together to conceive new life to glorify and worship our Father in Heaven.
And Jimmy, how can abortion ever glorify God? As the lady wrote, what Bible are you reading? The most profound and unbelievable miracles restored life to the dead. How can sucking the very veins and bones and bodies of weeks old children be righteous, regardless of how the child was conceived. How can flushing out of the womb of a fertilized egg be anything but murder? Show me a human that began without conception, there is none. Even Jesus was conceived in the womb, for as Gabriel told Mary:
“The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” Luk 1:35
God did not become incarnate full born, or at 25 weeks or 20 or 12 or even 2 or 1, God became incarnate with the fertilization of Mary’s egg by the seed, the sperm of God! A hard saying, but a profound truth. Jesus is the Son of Man, and the Son of God, and if you are unwilling to accept as fact, as true, the first lesson of Human Biology 101, if you are unwilling to believe that Jesus began life as a perfectly formed zygote, formed by the union of two haploid gametes, one human, one divine, there is little point in your reading what for you must be the only novel ever written, or was at one time (in my youth,) that outsold Gone with the Wind, the Bible! You might as well read Marcus Aurelius or Sun Tzu or Machiavelli or Hobbs or Nietzsche, or a biography of Margaret Sanger.
I have read them all, and believe me, were it not for the grace of God and the teachings of the Holy Bible, Mr. President, you’d be toting gold bars up the steps of my palace, or I yours. + + +