Tag Archives: Book of Genesis

Ep89 Encore: The Real Christmas Story and Its True Meaning

December 14, 2022UncategorizedAdam and Eve, Book of Exodus, Book of Genesis, Catholic Church, Christmas, Incarnation, Jeret “Speedy” Peterson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Milton, Salvation, Satan, Sin, St Paul, St. Irenaeus, St. Pope John Paul II, the Devilwrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:46 — 20.8MB)

Father Len reveals the real “reason for the season” is us.

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Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

“When I look at the world upside down, that’s when it seems right to me.” – Jeret “Speedy” Peterson
Father Len tells a story about geese to illustrate why God became a human being.
Christmas is a revelation of who we are meant to be.
To be good is to become a true human being.
Our true humanity is to live like Christ.
“Christianity is the attitude of amazement at the dignity of the human person.” – Pope John Paul II
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” – Irenaeus
“Paradise Lost” by John Milton
“Faust” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sin is the temptation to stop being a true human being.
Evil is the no to human goodness. Evil is the no to all that is good.
Satan is not one who hates God. Satan is one who believes that God can’t love him or us.
The good news of Christmas is that God became one of us to show us how to become true human beings and discover the goodness of being a true human being.
Salvation is not the story of God rescuing us from an evil universe. Salvation is the story of God coming as one like us to teach us what true goodness looks like.
Absolute love will embrace death.
Absolute love cannot be contained by the tomb.
Sin is anything that deprives us of our full humanity.
Christmas is the beginning of the journey to our true humanity to love and to be connected.

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Ep73 Encore: The Real Christmas Story and Its True Meaning

December 6, 2021UncategorizedAdam and Eve, Book of Exodus, Book of Genesis, Catholic Church, Christmas, Incarnation, Jeret “Speedy” Peterson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Milton, Salvation, Satan, Sin, St Paul, St. Irenaeus, St. Pope John Paul II, the Devilwrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:55 — 19.1MB)

Father Len reveals the real “reason for the season” is us.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

“When I look at the world upside down, that’s when it seems right to me.” – Jeret “Speedy” Peterson
Father Len tells a story about geese to illustrate why God became a human being.
Christmas is a revelation of who we are meant to be.
To be good is to become a true human being.
Our true humanity is to live like Christ.
“Christianity is the attitude of amazement at the dignity of the human person.” – Pope John Paul II
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” – Irenaeus
“Paradise Lost” by John Milton
“Faust” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sin is the temptation to stop being a true human being.
Evil is the no to human goodness. Evil is the no to all that is good.
Satan is not one who hates God. Satan is one who believes that God can’t love him or us.
The good news of Christmas is that God became one of us to show us how to become true human beings and discover the goodness of being a true human being.
Salvation is not the story of God rescuing us from an evil universe. Salvation is the story of God coming as one like us to teach us what true goodness looks like.
Absolute love will embrace death.
Absolute love cannot be contained by the tomb.
Sin is anything that deprives us of our full humanity.
Christmas is the beginning of the journey to our true humanity to love and to be connected.

Ep56 Bible Symbols Revealed and Explained-Part 2 Trees

April 2, 2021UncategorizedAbraham, Adam and Eve, Bible Symbols, Book of Genesis, Bread of Life, Catholic Architecture, Catholic Church, Christ, Christianity, CS Lewis, David, God, Human Beings, Idols, Jesus, JRR Tolkien, Noah, Old Testament, Pharaoh, Tree of Life, Trees, Zachariahwrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:42 — 30.8MB)

Father Len reveals that trees are symbols for God and human beings and trees represent the most important choices we make in life.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

Trees are the third most common thing mentioned in the Bible.
God loves trees and gives them a ring every year on their birthdays.
Trees are places where human beings choose to worship or reject God.
There is a tree present at every major event in the Bible.
Every major character in the Bible is associated with a type of tree.
The only thing Jesus ever harmed was a tree that produced no fruit.
The Bible begins and ends with the “tree of life” and trees are present throughout the Bible.
The story of human history is choosing between two trees: the tree of life and the tree of good and selfishness.
There are two types of food. One gives us physical life. The other gives us spiritual life.
If we eat the fruit of the tree of good and selfishness we are cut off from the covenant with God and disconnected from the source of life.
The temptation to eat the fruit of the tree of good and selfishness is the promise of the power to define what is good and evil for ourselves rather than God.
We don’t have to earn the fruit from the tree of life. God gives it freely to us.
When anybody makes a commitment to God in the Bible there’s always a tree, an altar, and water present.
The tree of good and selfishness often appears in the form of an Idol in the Bible. The Idol is a false tree we create to define our own version of morality.
The Hebrews called idols “luxuriant trees” representing the pursuit of power, sex, and money for happiness. The Hebrew letters for “luxuriant tree” cleverly spell Garden of Eden backwards.
Addictions always promise happiness, but in the end leave us destroyed.
Trees in the Bible symbolize commitments and altars represent the rituals around the commitments.
The spiritual life in the Bible is pictured as a tree that must push its roots down deep to find the water of life necessary to produce good fruit in all seasons of life.
Jesus’ cross is called a tree in the Bible representing the tree of life. That’s why there is one cross next to or above the altar in every Catholic Church. It’s a reminder of the tree we should be eating from each day for eternal life.

Ep46 Interpreting and Understanding the Bible

January 20, 2021UncategorizedAdvent, Anthony de Mello, Bible Prophecies, Book of Genesis, Catholic Church, Christ, Dead Sea Scrolls, Ego, Essene Monks, False Prophets, Jesus, Jews, Kim Kardashian, King Herod, Messiah, Old Testament, Personal Bias, Pharisees, St Paul, Tim LaHaye, Zoroastrianismwrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:05 — 25.7MB)

Father Len reveals the obstacles to accurately interpreting and fully understanding the Bible and what it takes to overcome these hurdles.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

Father Len shares a fun study about how people rate their driving abilities to illustrate the effect of ego on how we see ourselves and view the world.
Human beings believe their opinions and decisions are rational, but studies reveal they are most often based on personal desires.
It takes great humility and freedom from ego for us to accurately see ourselves.
In spite of more than 400 detailed prophecies in the Bible about the coming of the Christ, very few people showed up for the birth of Jesus.
Father Len explains why shepherds and Zoroastrian priests were the only people to go to Bethlehem to honor and celebrate the birth of Christ.
For all eternity, God desired to take on human form to teach us how to be true human beings. Ironically, the great desire of human beings is to become godlike, chasing power and wealth and distance from the problems of fellow humans.
In spite of constant study of the Messiah prophecies and authoring a complicated compilation of these prophecies, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essene monks missed the coming of Christ because they were highly judgmental and filled with hate.
If you read the Bible through the lens of your own ego, prejudice and social position, you’re always going to come up with a wrong interpretation.
Hatred, selfishness, and ego blind us from finding God even if we memorize and are able to quote the Bible.
The Bible warns us of false prophets, those who interpret Scripture through their own agenda.
The “Left Behind” series of books by Tim LaHaye is an example of false prophecies.
Sincere desire to discover truth, humility, and love are essential to accurately interpreting the Bible.
It takes years to gain humility and the self-awareness to recognize how often we interpret the world from our own perspective and we’re not always right.
“Awareness” by Anthony De Mello

Ep41 The Real Christmas Story and Its True Meaning

December 8, 2020UncategorizedAdam and Eve, Book of Exodus, Book of Genesis, Catholic Church, Christmas, Incarnation, Jeret “Speedy” Peterson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Milton, Salvation, Satan, Sin, St Paul, St. Irenaeus, St. Pope John Paul II, the Devilwrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:51 — 20.0MB)

Father Len reveals the real “reason for the season” is us.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

“When I look at the world upside down, that’s when it seems right to me.” – Jeret “Speedy” Peterson
Father Len tells a story about geese to illustrate why God became a human being.
Christmas is a revelation of who we are meant to be.
To be good is to become a true human being.
Our true humanity is to live like Christ.
“Christianity is the attitude of amazement at the dignity of the human person.” – Pope John Paul II
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” – Irenaeus
“Paradise Lost” by John Milton
“Faust” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Sin is the temptation to stop being a true human being.
Evil is the no to human goodness. Evil is the no to all that is good.
Satan is not one who hates God. Satan is one who believes that God can’t love him or us.
The good news of Christmas is that God became one of us to show us how to become true human beings and discover the goodness of being a true human being.
Salvation is not the story of God rescuing us from an evil universe. Salvation is the story of God coming as one like us to teach us what true goodness looks like.
Absolute love will embrace death.
Absolute love cannot be contained by the tomb.
Sin is anything that deprives us of our full humanity.
Christmas is the beginning of the journey to our true humanity to love and to be connected.

Ep38 Why is There Nothing about Dinosaurs in the Bible?

November 17, 2020UncategorizedAlbert Einstein, Blaise Pascal, Book of Genesis, Book of Proverbs, Catholic Church, Christians, Dinosaurs, Father Georges Lemaitre, Galileo, Mormons, Peking Man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Aquinas, Young Earth Creationistswrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:13 — 17.6MB)

Father Len explains the relationship between science, history and the Bible and why dinosaurs aren’t present in the Bible.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

Father Len reveals that some Christians and members of a group known as “young earth creationists” believe that dinosaurs aren’t present in the Bible because they didn’t exist. They fear science is driving God out of the human experience and therefore they deny rigorous scientific evidence of such things as the age of the earth and the existence of dinosaurs.
Demanding that belief in God requires rejecting scientific facts is committing intellectual suicide and damaging to religion and the image of God.
When science challenges us, we should be grateful, discerning, and welcoming of scientific truths.
There is an ancient belief in Catholicism that God gave us two books of Revelation. The Bible and the book of nature.
Thomas Aquinas believed that if nature and scientific facts prove your interpretation of something in Scripture is wrong then clearly your interpretation of the Bible is wrong.
The Catholic view is that religion supports science and science supports religion.
“Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.” – Albert Einstein
Galileo believed that scientific exploration is a noble endeavor of faith saying, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
The first book of the Bible is not Genesis. It is the back story for the first book of the Bible which is Exodus. The purpose of Genesis is to explain that God created everything to be good.
The Bible is not a science or history book. Its purpose is to explain what it means to be a human being. There is no mention of dinosaurs in the Bible because they are not relevant to becoming a free and loving human being.

Ep17 Race, Culture, and Jesus

July 3, 2020UncategorizedBook of Exodus, Book of Genesis, Chosen People, Christ, Gentiles, God, Jesus, Jews, Marian Apparitions, Moses, Racism, The Bible, Tower of Babel Storywrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:22 — 15.9MB)

Father Len reveals why Jesus came into the world as a Jew and why God created multiple races and cultures.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

God chose an enslaved, weak, and hated people to show God’s strength and bring love into the world.
Father Len reveals his joke about every Jewish feast.
The Bible constantly wrestles with racism.
There is just one race in the Bible. That’s humanity. There are many different nations, but they’re all part of one family.
Humanity is united by the language of love not rules, regulations, politics and technology.
Father Len tells his favorite racism story where God’s punishment for a Middle Eastern woman’s racism is to make her skin white as snow.
The Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus, has made dozens of appearances around the world over time. Always appearing as a person of the nation in which she appears. This to signify that Christ is present in all of us no matter what the color of our skin or our country of origin.
If Jesus came into the world today he might well have black skin and be of African descent.

Ep13 Understanding Human Evil

June 9, 2020UncategorizedAleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Book of Genesis, Catholic Church, God, Huckleberry Finn, Human Evil, Mark Twain, moral evil, natural evil, Religion, St. Irenaeus, Yetzer Ha-tov, Yetzer Harawrestlingwithgodshow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:40 — 23.5MB)

Father Len reveals two primary impulses God gives us and how we can use them for good or evil. This episode was recorded before the murder of George Floyd, but it couldn’t be more relevant.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

Human evil is the most difficult kind of evil to grapple with because it’s what we do to ourselves.
Human evil is never part of God’s plan.
God created human beings with two primary impulses. One is rooted in self-interest or self-protection. The other an inner sense that alerts us when we’re violating God’s law and urges us to live lives of generous care for other people.
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn