God revealed himself and forced Job to come to terms with his own weak and sinful state and his true standing before his awesomely holy and powerful God.

Then Job answered the LORD:

“I am unworthy—how can I reply to you?
I put my hand over my mouth.
I spoke once, but I have no answer—
twice, but I will say no more.”

Job 40:3-5

Job finally realises his true position under God and his wisdom and love and that whatever Job has lost it cannot be measured against the storehouses of the God he served. Ultimately Job repents of his failings

My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”

Job 42:5-6

But just a moment, the book says right at the start that Job was ‘upright and blameless’ and that even in the depths of his sufferings he ‘did not sin in what he said’ (Job 2:10). So what has he done that is worthy of repentance?

Simply this; that he was, like you and I are, just another sinner. Just another human being living under the curse of sin and in need of a saviour. That a holy and righteous God would even have anything to do with mankind is one of the greatest mysteries of all time. Despite our cataclysmic moral collapse as a people following our perfect representatives (Adam and Eve) rebellion in the garden this same God still wants to know you and me, more than that, he loved us so much that he sent his only son to die and take the punishment that was due to us as a race. Talk about not fair…

I’m pretty sure that all this didn’t make Job feel much better about his losses. In fact I’m sure that his experience shaped his personality for many years following the events of his life recorded for us in the Bible. But perhaps that’s the whole point. God doesn’t send us troubles to destroy us but to build us up and to encourage us to rely on him for everything, sometimes though to build up properly you need to demolish a few things first.

If you think it’s not fair then you’re absolutely right, it’s not. There’s no way that we should have stand a chance, we, our whole race, should be dead, condemned by the curse of sin and yet God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Ephesians 2:8-10

Having just read Charles Spurgeon’s sermon entitled All Of Grace I felt extremely humbled by the understanding that all of our salvation comes from God. We are saved with God’s salvation given by God’s grace and received by faith in Jesus Christ. But even that faith is a gift given by God and not made up or reliant on our own works or even our own beliefs.

Think about that for a moment; if God has given you faith in Jesus Christ unto his salvation then whether you’re a creationist or evolutionist, whether you hold to post millennial or pre millennial eschatology then no matter if you’re right or wrong you are saved!

The amount of money you put in collection each week, the amount of time you spend in your quiet time. The work you do for the church and for others, none of it will get you closer to salvation.

As Spurgeon himself puts it from Romans 11:6

If by grace, then it is no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then it is no more grace: otherwise work is no more work.

Grace demands the freely given gift. If we had to do something, anything at all to receive that grace and the gift it gives then it is no longer a gift given by grace but a wage earned and due. Would (or could) we demand that God must give us his own salvation that was bought at the cost of Jesus blood because of our own works or beliefs? No! God himself must choose, in his own unique wisdom and understanding, the recipients of his own grace, otherwise he would not be God.

Ephesians 2:10 says that we were created in Christ Jesus to do these good works, and check this out; even those works were prepared by God for us to do! We have a salvation entirely of God in which he leads us to do those good works that are equally entirely of him!

What I’ve seen in the way people actually live though (myself included) is putting the cart load of good works and beliefs before the workhorse of God’s salvation by Grace through God’s gift of Faith.

We may hold to the theology of Ephesians 2:8-10 but how does that theology manifest itself in our lives? Herein lies the challenge of Christian living; to live like kingdom people in the world. To be clear that the works and even beliefs that we do and have are subject to the saving faith that God has freely given us in his grace and not the other way around.

How do we do that? By following the best and only example laid down for us. The life and works of Jesus recorded in the gospels contain the attitude and drive that we should seek to emulate. What we find is a life driven by the goal of first giving glory to God then showing his love to everyone else, not to curry favour with God or people but because of God’s gift of salvation by grace through faith.

I love his explanation of Willow Creek’s stance on sexual ethics. This is how the church should be; open to all. My home church has the motto emblazoned on the front wall from Psalm 67:3:

Oh God, let all the peoples praise thee!

If only we could live out that ideal and be more open to encourage it, more accepting of people (like Jesus did) and allow God to do the work of changing us into his likeness (like Jesus did).

Jesus taught people and corrected people but never rejected them, he was never ‘anti’ anyone or any particular lifestyle or social group and neither should his church be.

awk '!x[$0]++' mail-list.txt

It look good and worked great, but nowhere could I find an explanation of what it’s actually doing until I came across this thread on unix.com.

Sorting is not necessary. All it does is create an (associative) array element with the entire line as the index without a value (or 0 is you will). The exclamation mark negates that value so the outcome is 1 (true). The value of 1 in awk means perform the default action which is {print $0} so the entire line gets printed. Afterwards the ++ comes into action and 1 is added to the array value, which now becomes 1. So that next time the same line is encountered the value returned by the array is 1 which is then negated to 0 by the exclamation mark, so nothing will get printed

Thanks to Scrutinizer on unix.com

It’s been a while since I posted anything work related but here’s one I discovered today.

Have you ever needed to find out when a particular row was changed? From Oracle 10g there’s a feature which records the SCN number of a row change within the table in a pseudo-column called ora_rowscn. So for example:


SQL> SELECT ora_rowscn FROM sometable WHERE id = '123';

ORA_ROWSCN
----------
45738231

Then you can convert the SCN number to a timestamp using the scn_to_timestamp function


SQL> SELECT scn_to_timestamp(45738231) AS timestamp FROM dual;

TIMESTAMP
------------------------------
05-JUL-11 10.44.42.000000000

The only caveat with this feature is the tables have to be created with the ROWDEPENDENCIES option although it seems to be on as default in 11g.

Credits: http://oracle-tns.com/track-the-row-change-time/

The blessing and welfare of others.
Obviously we need to intercede for other people, and we spend most of our time at the prayer meeting doing just that. But what is our motive? Does it need to be more than a desire to see others blessed? Because it makes us feel good to think that our prayers made a difference to someone? how vain and conceited would that be? Prayer becomes just a way of making us feel good, like we’re doing something.

“Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.” James 4:3(AV)

It seems that neither of these things should be our goal as they centre everything on us. What we need to do is to set out target in prayer to be…

Always and only the glory of our God
This is the only goal, and the highest purpose which we should aim for. Our own welfare and that of others must always be subservient to the glory of God. If something seems right for us, or for someone else, but not for His glory, then we should abandon the thought.
The glory of God is linked with his purpose, we can see that in John 14:13

“And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father.”

That was always the aim of Jesus here on Earth as he prayed in John 17:4

“I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.”

We should make that same goal our own, letting the glory of the Father be the link between our asking and His doing. Once we are joined on and in-tune with His purpose, then is the time that our prayers have the most effect on ourselves and those around us. There are two things we need to do to achieve our goal of giving glory to God:
1. Study His word to discover the plans that he has for us
2. Live out that same purpose.
How we live affects how we pray, when we sin we put a barrier up between God’s throne and us, but if we are made holy and justified, immediately we have a connection to that throne.
If we set our lives and our hearts on the glory of God, we become synchronised with His purposes. But there’s more to it than that, because the connection works both ways. If the glory of God is the only goal of our prayers, then this becomes reflected in our daily life.

At it’s heart, the Church is a group of people brought together by what God has done for them. The trouble is that the image that many see of the Church is those people and what they do and say for God, and we don’t always get it right.

I guess that’s something we’re still working on even after 2000 years; learning to follow God and to work where he’s working instead of trying to drag him along where we want to go. Which would be impossible of course, but we still try.

God has, does and will continue to use the Church in it’s many forms all over the world to do his will and to reveal himself through the Bible but sometimes, because we’re only human, we don’t do it right.

So as much to everyone outside the Church looking in as to God we say Forgive us, and help us be better.

In Mark 10:35-45, James and John want to turn Jesus final journey into a march to glory in which they see themselves seated on either side of him when he reigns as king.

The brothers clearly thought that Jesus talk about death and resurrection in the previous passage was like the parables, only a picture of what was to come. Perhaps meaning that things were going to be tough, but that it would all work out in the end.
But the Easter weekend wasn’t just a difficult episode for Jesus to deal with on the way to a happy ending, it is the end itself, God’s way of turning worldly power and authority on it’s head.

When Jesus quotes Isaiah’s Servant Song in verse 45 he’s making the point that the Kingdom of God turns the worlds ideas of power and glory upside down and inside out.

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ isn’t just about God forgiving our sins because of Jesus death, although that’s the central message. At a higher level it’s God’s way of putting the world to rights by challenging and subverting all of the human systems which try (and inevitably fail) to do the same thing.

Richard Dawkins says in his 1989 book The Selfish Gene

“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish”

This is man’s way and the fundamental misunderstanding behind so many misguided attempts to make the world right; that mankind can be reformed by giving them moral laws and instructions to obey.

Without God, with no moral absolute those values that Professor Dawkins wants to teach have no meaning anyway, why is generosity and altruism ‘right’ and selfishness wrong if selfishness makes me happy and content and gets me what I want? Who is Dawkins to say what is right and wrong?

He’s missed the central message of the Old Testament – that mankind cannot be reformed simply by giving them moral laws and instructions to obey. We learn that lesson over and over throughout the history of Israel.

The old covenant, under the law that God established with Israel and Mount Sinai epitomized the principle of loving our neighbour as we love ourselves, this is the entire thrust of the last six of the ten commandments (the first four exhort us to love God).

Israel was set up as the perfect and intentional test bed for the idea that you can make people good by teaching them to be good. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work now.

The test failed intentionally, to serve as an example to both them and us. Time and time again God has to deal with his people because even the best of them who are held up for our inspection don’t, and can’t get it without God’s grace.

That’s why we are presented with a new covenant, predicted by Jeremiah and cited by the writer to the Hebrews: (Hebrews 8:8-12)
A person’s heart can never be changed by mere instruction, no mater how good and noble the teaching (If God couldn’t do it, what chance do we have?). It can only be changed by a new birth in which the Spirit of God himself takes up residence in the heart and mind of a person.

Writing his own moral law, just as he did on Sinai but this time not on perishable stone tablets but on our lives and giving us the desire to love and obey him through the forgiving of our sin by the atoning death and justifying resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The reason that James and John misunderstood Jesus is the same reason people are desperate to find a Jesus without Easter. Easter calls into question all human pride and glory. It is a profoundly public and political message, and a dangerous one at that.

Edgar Andrews: Who Made God?
Tom Wright: Mark for Everyone

I have a theory of God which is made up of what I learn from the Bible plus my own understanding of my own experiences and those around me (although I hold God’s word superior to my own understanding) seen through in the light of God’s word. As I gather more experiences and seek a deeper understanding of God’s word my theory (theology) is refined and adjusted accordingly.

God does not change, only my personal understanding of him.