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eikonik — Paul Writes
Published: 2007-02-27 01:59:29 +0000 UTC; Views: 10124; Favourites: 182; Downloads: 376
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Romans 1:1-41 Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God-- 2 the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3 regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, 4 and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.
Romans 1:16-20
16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith." 18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
Romans 3:19-26
19 Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20 Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin. 21 But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished-- 26 he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
Romans 10:9-13
9 That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. 11 As the Scripture says, "Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame."
12 For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile--the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, 13 for, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."
Acts 26:20-23
20 "First to those in Damascus, then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and to the Gentiles also, I [Paul] preached that they should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds. 21 That is why the Jews seized me in the temple courts and tried to kill me. 22 But I have had God's help to this very day, and so I stand here and testify to small and great alike. I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen-- 23 that the Christ would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to his own people and to the Gentiles."
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Comments: 37
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he is so inspiring, always working to be closer to God
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I agree. He's like all out for God!
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right?! 
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Very cool!
May God bless you for using your talent!
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The following comes to mind:
The Persecution of Religion
by G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News March 8, 1924
(Source: G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Volume xxxiii,
The Illustrated London News 1923-1925, Ignatius Press, 1990, pp. 286-290)
Most of us feel something rather arresting, not to say alarming,
about the case of the man who was locked up in a lunatic asylum for
eight years for being religious, or for taking a reasonable interest
in the word "parallelogram," and the idea of the end of the world.
The persecution of science by religion is something of which we hear
a good deal, and a good deal more than is historically accurate.
But, in any case, it has pretty well come to an end. The persecution
of religion by science has relatively, perhaps, only begun;
but it is already at work, in we know not how many obscure
cases of pedantry and cruelty. The mystics are very likely
to be the martyrs when the psychologists become the kings.
But there is involved a paradox that is still more peculiar.
It is not merely that anything religious may be persecuted on the ground
that it is not rational. It is also that anything irrational
may be tolerated so long as it is also irreligious. It is only
lunacy to assert religion; it is no longer lunacy to deny reason.
If it were, all the professors of pragmatism would be locked up.
The very incidents in this case afford an illustration.
A man may be represented as mad and as making a mystical
riddle of the word "parallelogram." But a man is not regarded
as mad because he says that parallel lines always meet.
Our fathers would have called him a rank, raving madman;
denying the self-evident and uttering a contradiction in terms.
We only call him a mathematician of the newer school
of relativity or the fourth dimension. The man who said:
"Two and two may make five in the fixed stars" was a lunatic;
and none the less a lunatic for being a literary man. I willingly admit
that men of science have not a monopoly of this mental breakdown.
But certainly the man who could talk as if the stars were fixed,
and the numbers unfixed, was suffering from a complete mental breakdown.
It is not half so crazy to expect the end of the world to come
soon as to expect the Superman to come soon. Yet how many earnest
evolutionists in our time have written gravely as if the Superman
was to be expected next week! Things do come to an end;
and a thing designed is generally reviewed by the designer when it
has come to an end. A man planting a rhododendron bush sees it
bloom and wither and pronounces on the experiment; and there
is nothing irrational in a day of judgement, assuming a design.
But there is nothing in the world to show that a rhododendron
all by itself will sprout into a super-rhododendron all the colors
of the rainbow, merely because that would be a superior plant.
The Superman was simply and solely a phantom called out of the void
by the imagination of a lunatic; a quite literal lunatic named Nietzche.
Yet how vivid that utterly unreasonable vision became for many of our
wavering and weak-minded generation! And the strangest thing of all
is that it was some of the best brains that were thus bewitched.
They also have their word "parallelogram," like the blessed word
"Mesopotamia"; but, while few soldiers want to go back to Mesopotamia,
there are evidently sages who want to go back to Methuselah.
I need hardly say that I am not arguing that Mr. Bernard Shaw
has a tile loose; I am only pointing out that there are far more
tiles loose on the Hall of Science than on the parish church,
or even the revivalist's chapel. On the contrary, it is my desire
here to penetrate past the superficial oddities of Mr. Shaw's
dramatic experiment, and consider whether the idea itself
is in fact as sane as it is certainly serious. Mr. Shaw has
suffered as a subject of criticism from two classes of critics.
The first are those who say they do not know what he means,
and think it necessary to infer that he means nothing.
The second are those who think they do know what he means,
and think it necessary to agree with it. Few people seem to see
that it is quite possible to understand it pretty completely and
disagree with it altogether. But, as a matter of fact, it is only
by taking it seriously that anybody can disagree with it seriously.
The man who says that Shaw's play is all nonsense is really
lending valuable support to the man who says it is all sense.
By confessing his inability to make anything of it, he is precluding
himself from arguing with the man who makes everything of it.
He is like a man who should defend Christianity against Renan's "Vie
de Jesu" by saying he thanked God he could not read the lingo.
Or he is like a man who should reply to a detailed political denunciation
by saying that the fellow gabbled too fast for him to follow.
It would be impossible to pay a more complete tribute to the truth
of a philosophy than to say that nobody understands it except the few
people who have found it to be true. It would be impossible to pay
Mr. Shaw a more complete compliment than to suggest that he mystifies
the stupid and convinces the wise. Yet that is exactly the impression
that is necessarily left by merely sneering at the eccentricity
or extravagance or the extraordinary length or any other fantastic
but merely external feature of the play like "Back to Methuselah."
I have, therefore, always tried to do in criticisms what Mr. Shaw
himself does in prefaces, and discussed the doctrine which is
the backbone of the whole business. For Mr. Bernard Shaw, of all
men in the world, leaves the critics the least right to say they do
not know what he means; for he elaborately explains it beforehand.
Alone among the most fantastic fabulists, he not only adorns the fable
with moral, but he actually puts the moral before the fable.
The preface to this particular play deals first with a more
particular point; about which Mr. Shaw seems to me completely to
prove his case. It is that the Darwinian version of evolution is,
in the most emphatic sense of the phrase, not like life.
It is impossible to believe that life has been so completely
separated from will as it is implied in the notion of natural
selection producing all the varieties of nature. It is far
too much of a fortuitous concourse of animals like a fortuitous
concourse of atoms. In that sense, every chapter of the "Origin
of Species" may be precisely described as a chapter of accidents.
Natural selection is the most unnatural thing we can conceive.
It is an eternal coincidence. But it is not only that the natural
selection is not natural at all; it is the whole point of it that it
is not selection at all. Nobody selects; and nothing cannot select.
It seems to me in the largest and most luminous sense a matter
of commonsense to say that, if there was not a clear design
from above, then there was some sort of design from below;
and it is quite possible, of course, that there was both.
All this preliminary part of the preface and the argument is
sound and on solid ground; because it is dealing with a definite
theory and giving reasons for differing from the theory.
In other words, it is trying to do in the case of Darwin what I am
trying to do in the case of Shaw.
Mr. Shaw's notion is not meant to be nonsensical, but it is nonsensical;
not as a term of abuse, but in the exact sense in which I have
said that most sensible people would have called the modern talk
about pragmatism and parallelism nonsensical. Any rational person,
and especially any rational person, would have called it irrational.
Any sceptic, from Lucretius or Lucian to Hume and Huxley,
would have thought it far more rational to say that the world
was coming to an end in a hundred years than to say that the life
of a man was not coming to an end for three hundred years.
The mere scale or scope of the modern prophecies would have seemed
utterly unbalanced and bewildering to all the philosophies of
civilized history. I think they would be right; but not merely
because of anything externally extravagant about the scale or scope.
What is unnatural about this philosophy is that it will not accept
the only norm it can ever get; that which Aristotle called the measure
of all things. A good and happy humanity is, humanly speaking,
the idea by which we test political and social ideas; it is a test;
it is in that sense the ideal. This futurist religion will not accept
it as normal, and goes forth hunting for a new normal that it can
never find. It can never find it because it can never fix it.
It is obvious, of course, that a permanent ideal is absolutely
necessary to anything like progress or reform. You cannot reform
what is eternally formless; and you cannot march towards what is
always moving about. What is the good of the progressive making
certain that the children of the future shall have better boots,
when the prophet is already saying that they will have no feet?
It may seem a crazy comparison to say that children will have no feet.
But it is not half so crazy as saying that people will have no children.
And it actually is one part of this futurist scheme that the new
generation will be born mature, without passing through childhood.
That is an excellent working model of the whole issue.
To us a world without children would not be a better world,
but a very much worse world. It would not be an impossible Utopia,
but simply an intolerable nightmare. And this is simply because we
have kept in view, what the evolutionary lunatics have lost sight of,
that there can be nothing more ideal that the ideal; and the only thing
that affects humanity as an ideal at all is that which is fully human
in being divine. For some of us it is fixed by a divine humanity,
and even by a divine child.
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Love it!
Only problem I have with it: he'd have some wounds, wouldn't he? I'd think, atleast, some marks on the wrist/ankles, from the chains.
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"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." - Hebrews 13:3
That's the theme scripture for IDOP: [link]
Awesome art! ^.^ Looks like a crack in the wall is allowing a little sunlight in... or perhaps an angel is holding a candle for him.
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I really like it, but I'm curious, did they have books back then?
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Good question... I'm not sure if they were bound like ours or not, but the scripture mentions books and them being opened like this:
Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. (John 21:25)
And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. (Revelation 20:12)
Whereas scrolls are rolled and unrolled:
The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: (Luke 4:17)
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, (Luke 4:20)
Paul wanted his scrolls/books with him while in prison. He wrote about it in 2 Timothy 4:13. But one translation reads:
When you come bring the cloak which I left at Troas with Carpus, and the books, especially the parchments. (2 Timothy 4:13, NAS)
While another translation says:
When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments. (2 Timothy 4:13, NIV)
So right now... I don't know.
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He probably used loose-leaf. College ruled.
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You know what... I have no idea either. I was simply wondering.
I must admit though, that your wealth of scripture knowledge amazes me. I wouldn't have been able to come up with ANY resources for where books and scrolls were mentioned in the bible.
It makes me wonder what the greek words for books and scrolls are, and why they were translated as such.
So yeah. Thanks for all the wonderful input. You are truly a Christian to be admired for his knowledge of our Lord.
Blessings!
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Wow I love this! 
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awww I wanna hug him! lol yeah...okay now on to critique. the ceiling would have been wood, and the bricks are big. Other than that, FANTASTIC! *favs*
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You may be right... I just did this cell based on some info on the web about Paul's (possible) jail in Rome. I liked the stone and that he may have been lowered into it through a hole in the ceiling:
[link] 
[link]
But I've never been to one personally... and you can't always trust the web....
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lowered him thru the ceiling? I'll have to look into that one! lol idk...i might be wrong.
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Let me know what you find out.... I'd be very interested if you come across anything.
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oh, I *definately* will. Be on the lookout for random messages on your page.
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Wow, this is awesome! I love the lighting...
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wow.......i never thought of is so lonely and secluded....that crazy paul. He's The Man~!
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