I just have to share this with you guys. This is another brilliant DVD (p.s. its not some sort of movie or concert, it's sort of something of an 'in between', that is something between teaching and preaching), clocking about 1 hour 29 mins. There are amazing stuff in there to say the least but i just dig every second of it.I liked where he explained that the cultures during OT period (specifically Abraham's culture) had this sort of conception of god. That there is simply no standard to know how much offering that one has to offer to appease the gods.
Say for example a person offers his produce to the gods and in the process he gets like more then what he offered. The person is faced with a dilemma. Does he give the same amount that he gave before? Well that would be some sort of mockery to the gods. You ought to give more in accordance to what had been given. Just to make it rather absurd, the gods keep on blessing the person and his offerings are 'mountaining' up. This might sound and look crazy but there was nothing to measure what amount was there to please the gods.
Another scenario is a drought occurs or someone gets sick or a plague hits a village. So people go to the altar and give some sort of offering. But the bad omens still persists. So people have to still give more and more and more until they have to part with something that is very valuable. That is what culture or people in those days cut themselves, offered their babies, you name it, just to appease the gods. But the thing is no one knew the standard. The mentality was people had to give.
But there was some sort of enlightening taking place. Here was Abraham. His story where God told him to go and sacrifice his son, the son in whom he loved. So taking into consideration that the culture during those days understood this as devotion to a deity, Abraham went along with it, no questions asked. But just as he is about to do that God said don't do it. And he provides a ram for the purpose of sacrifice. There, during that period Abraham got this revelation of God, that this God provides and thus shatters the concept of people bringing their sacrifices to the gods. But for Abraham this God is the one who initiates the sacrifice. Amazing.
There are a lot of other things but all in all this is amazing to say the least!
