Envy: both today and in Clement's Time

This will be more hodge podge.

I'll start with today on a topic that gives me great joy because it is so freeing, and great sadness because people just won't listen.

Okay, we all grew up in school learning about dinosaurs.  The main point is that they died out long before there were humans.

We go to church and read Genesis.  We see a world created in 6 days filled with only things God considers good until man sins.

It's not until you start surfing Answers in Genesis when you realize those two ideas greatly oppose and you never thought of it before.  Are we going to believe the school or the church?

At the expense of looking like a fool, I believe the Bible and science because they do not contradict.  I also believe that dinosaurs lived alongside humans, survived Noah's flood, and are the dragons mentioned of old.  All cultures have dragon legends until the middle ages, making a good point from the ontological argument that they were real because all cultures have a concept of it.  Clearly they died and then got rediscovered in 1840 and called dinosaurs.

With this discovery, I no longer have to compromise my faith.  I can believe dinosaurs are more recent because they have not been proven to not co-exist with humans.  In fact, if you consider the flood and all the fossil graveyard, it makes perfect sense that we all co-existed.

The atheists envy us.  They envy our freedom from a chaotic world history, our devotion to a real God who made the earth as he said in the Bible, and our satisfaction in life.  We value human life, have options for fun other than sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and appreciate people no matter how much we have to take care of them.  The world reacts by calling us immature, unscientific, and fundamental.  Oh well, I like my hope outside this world way better than the lack of hope inside it.

This brings me to the first 6 chapters of 1 Clement.

Clement sent a letter from Rome to Corinth.  The church greatly matured and were winning people to the Lord in Greece.  At the zenith of their success, some naysayers decided to insult their faith as not genuine.  They branded the church as working for material gain and brainwashing the Greeks.  Clement pointed them to heroes of the past and present who also endured shame, even death, because of envy.

Abel presented a better sacrifice to God, and Cain envied killed him.  God chose Jacob to bless, and Esau envied and wanted to kill him.  Aaron and Miriam envied Moses's leadership, but God gave them leprosy.  Same with Dathan and Abiram, except the ground swallowed them in their hatred.  Saul ruined his whole family in his jealous rage over David, the true king.

And in Clement's day, they saw the rise of Peter and Paul and their subsequent martyrdom.  Now they live in glory unharmed.  Others also reach the goal of their faith despite envy's destruction.  Their arrows are only external.  God's truth and our confidence in him can never end.