----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2005 3:11
AM
Subject: [TruthTalk] The Humanity of
Jesus
Judy, what is your understanding of animal behavior?
jt: Well I have had dogs, cats, guinea pigs, turtles,
parakeets, and fish;
my brother had ferrets and pigeons, and my
father-in-law raised chickens
and hampshire hogs.
What causes the birds to sing and the whales to migrate for thousands of
miles?
What causes the pigeons to be able to use the earth's magnetic field to
find their
way over thousands of miles? What makes the beaver know how to
build a dam?
What motivates the blue bird to feed its young, and to nudge them out of
their
nest at the right time? What makes the Monarch butterfly
travel across the
oceans? What motivates the loon to fly south in
the winter and back north
again in the summer? What tells the geese
to fly in a V-formation and
switch off the lead bird from time to
time? What causes the salmon to
travel from the ocean upstream for
many miles to find their original place
of birth? What tells the
female salmon how to lay her eggs and what tells
the male how to fertilize
them? What motivates the young water snake to eat
his first
meal? How does this snake know what to eat or how to swallow it?
jt: God told Job that He is responsible for all that.
He gives the animal
kingdom their survival instincts.
Obviously I could go on and on. Ask yourself, what motivates these
animals
to do these things? Is it spirit or flesh? Surely you
must agree with me
that it is flesh.
jt: My father-in-law told our daughter when she asked
him if pigs had good
sense - that God gave them "hog sense" I liked
that :)
Man also has many desires and aptitudes like those of animals.
jt: Wait a minute. Biology may relegate mankind
to the "animal kingdom"
but this is not how it is supposed to be. God gave
man dominion over
animals - he is not supposed to be acting like
one.
We relate to it most readily when we consider hunger and sleep, and
perhaps
even reproductive behavior, but it goes much further than that. I
think the
primary difficulty that you and I might have in communicating is
perhaps in
your not grasping how much human desire comes from the flesh,
and perhaps
not recognizing that even simple carnal desires like hunger
can lead to sin.
jt: This would depend on where one is consistently
walking David ie "after
the flesh or after the Spirit" because "To be
carnally minded is death but
to be spiritually minded is life and peace (Romans
8:5,6) I understand that
Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be
tempted/tested. He
passed where the first Adam failed. After this
I see nothing in any of the
four gospels that would indicate to me that he had
daily struggles with
carnality. In fact at one point when the
disciples were hungry - he told
them "His meat was to do the will of the Father" ...
and he was able to
sleep in a boat in the middle of a violent storm ....
What an example.
judyt
