“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It’s also a place to read, post, and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name-calling, ridicule, insults, baiting, and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
An expression has become bandied about recently that could be a prediction or, perhaps, a policy to achieve a future goal where ownership in the world would be a privilege enjoyed only by a select group of uber-rich intelligentsia.
You’ll Own Nothing and You’ll Be Happy
The human right to property would be abolished for the benefit of a few. Whatever you need or want, you’ll rent as a service . . . but will never own.
The power of ownership would be invested in the Lords of this world, and used to satisfy their every desire and inclination while the multitude of Serfs of this world (that’s you and me) supply both the manpower required to offer services, and the patronage required to actually use those services.
This thought of abolishing ownership, except for within a select group, warms the cockles of every oligarch’s heart, as well as organizations such as the World Economic Forum, but is anathema to the practical thoughts and practices of good, honest, hard-working people the world over.
From a very different point of view, however, “Own nothing and be happy” exemplifies a goal of our Christian life here on earth. We don’t follow Christ for the purpose of gaining power, wealth, fame or physical possessions on earth. Quite to the contrary, our life on earth will be beset by troubles.
Jesus said that in the world we will have tribulation (John 16:33), and Paul instructed Timothy that there “will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power” (2 Timothy 3:1-17).
But our lot and goal as Christians is a happiness in Christ that is beyond our full understanding. “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior” (Habakkuk 3:17-18).
And Paul expressed to the Philippians that “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want” (Philippians 4:12)
Paul knew the secret, and the application of that secret in our lives is essential, so that we can count ourselves among God’s selected throng who are able to proclaim . . .
It Is Well With My Soul
When peace, like a river, Attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll; Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say, It is well, it is well, with my soul.
Though Satan should buffet, Though trials should come, Let this blest assurance control, That Christ has regarded My helpless estate, And hath shed His own blood for my soul.
My sin—oh, the bliss of This glorious thought— My sin—not in part but the whole, Is nailed to the cross, And I bear it no more, Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
For me, be it Christ, Be it Christ hence to live: If Jordan above me shall roll, No pang shall be mine, For in death as in life Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.
But, Lord, ‘tis for Thee, For Thy coming we wait, The sky, not the grave, is our goal; Oh trump of the angel! Oh voice of the Lord! Blessèd hope, blessèd rest of my soul!
And Lord, haste the day When my faith shall be sight, The clouds be rolled back as a scroll; The trump shall resound, And the Lord shall descend, Even so—it is well with my soul.
It is well, with my soul, It is well, with my soul, It is well, it is well, with my soul.
Or rather, “Hey Chinese Communist Party and your entire array of servitors, ass-wipers, and fellators!”
You’re not even worth my time this week. When you decide to act like civilized people, maybe I’ll give you a lesson or two in how non-barbarians behave.
Hey BiteMe! (Or, Whoever Has Their Hand Rammed Up That Putrefying Meat Puppet’s Ass)
[Language warning]
You and yours have caused a lot of injury. Literal injury with your war on people who don’t want to take an untested vaccine. When people die in an emergency room because a hospital won’t admit them because they haven’t had their clot shot, that’s a crime.
I’m going to address here the insult on top of the injury, because I am among the insulted. I still have my health but apparently you want me to live under the 8th Street Bridge (which actually isn’t on 8th Street, but whatever, that’s what the I-25 overpass over Cimarron is called), so maybe if you have your way that won’t be true for long. Dreadful time of year to become homeless.
No, you’re just trying to make me unemployed, because I won’t take your fucking shots.
Well, that threat is NOT going to work. I. Won’t. Take. Your. Fucking. Shots.
And it looks like enough people agree, that you’re having to back down, you worthless asswipe.
You’re LOSING.
You LOSER.
You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.
I would love to see you die an agonizing, humiliating death. (This isn’t a threat, because I am not threatening to cause that death. I am just announcing my intention to party if it happens.) It would be just recompense for the way you’re killing America…and millions of Americans.
His Fraudulency
Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.
One can hope that all is not as it seems.
I’d love to feast on that crow.
(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold and silver up, most of the PGMs up but platinum itself is nailed in place at 964 bucks. (Still, inexplicably cheap compared to gold.)
And now for something completely different
I finally got a wild hair up my whatever and decided to investigate something I’ve known about for quite some time, Qubes OS.
The idea behind Qubes OS is that everything you do can run in a separate virtual machine. So if you want to go to a dodgy web site, perhaps one that sometimes puts malware on your system, you can open that website in a one-time virtual machine. It can go ahead and infect the daylights out of your system…and it won’t matter because it goes up in a cloud of smoke when you close the window. It’s sort of like sending all the woke people with the CRT mind virus off to their own island and letting them starve to death because they don’t know Jacques Schitt (brother of Adam) about doing anything you need to do to survive.
Qubes OS is in fact based on the premise that you WILL get attacked successfully; the idea is to only allow the hackers to get their mitts on one disposable “sandbox” that you can throw away.
Qubes OS is Linux based–fair warning. And I had a really hard time getting it to install, finally having to resort to installing it on a USB drive (not a thumb drive, but one of those little boxes you have to run a cable from, to a USB port). [This is not recommended, in fact they recommend using PS2 keyboards and mice instead of USB ones (including wireless). I didn’t even know anyone still sold those! But it was good enough for me to give it a test drive.] After struggling with that for three days, I’ve managed to do a lot in the last few hours.
You have direct control over which of the virtual machines can even see your internet connection, and/or your ethernet. In fact, the default setup includes something called the “vault.” It cannot communicate with ANYTHING without your direct intervention, so that’s a good place to keep, for example, your passwords.
In fact, I’m writing this post in a Qubes OS window running firefox. I’ll be working out Brave at some point. As well as a lot of other things.
Another fair warning–you will want 32 GB of RAM to start and a very powerful processor for this, and the fastest storage you can get (one of those M2 cards that plug directly into the motherboard would be about right). Running virtual machines consumes a lot of RAM and processing time. Opening a new window can take an annoyingly long amount of time when you’re used to something responsive.
In other words you might want a “Gaming” machine, but without the water-cooled graphics card that makes the lights dim when it shows monsters blowing up or whatever.
It’s supposedly possible to install Windows in one of the virtual machine “templates” and thereby be able to open up Micro$haft Turd or Micro$haft Exceed if you need to (though LibreOffice is usually a workable alternative to those); I have a number of eclectic apps that do not have Linux versions out there, so if I ever want to ditch my other old system, that’s something I will have to do.
It does come with Whonix, which by default uses Tor to communicate with the outside world.
Anyhow, this machine I am on isn’t bad…but it might be time to spring for a real powerhouse.
Now having said all that, probably the only person remotely interested here is Cthulhu, and he just uses a ton of Raspberry Pi machines anyway.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
Another of a series of articles on what they hope…OK maybe finally we can say “expect”…JWST to do. This one concerns the search for primimeval black holes.
Although we’re pretty confident there’s a mondo (4 million sun mass) black hole at the center of the galaxy (and one a thousand times more massive than that at the center of the M87 galaxy in the Virgo cluster), we do not know why galaxies seem to invariably have these black holes in them. Hopefully JWST will shed some light on that.
One question is whether these black holes existed before the galaxies did; that would likely mean galaxies need the black holes to form in the first place, sort of like raindrops condensing around dust particles. Well, we don’t have a time machine, but we CAN look backwards in time if we can just get a strong enough telescope that can see redshifted stuff from 13 billion light years away…which is what JWST is supposed to do for us.
Seeing 13 billion light years away is seeing 13 billion years into the past…because it takes the light that long to get to us; we only now would see what happened there 13 billion years ago. (Astronomers call this “look back time.” Yeah, no fancy Latin or Greek name; very few people learn that stuff in school any more.) On the other hand if we don’t see “bare” black holes back before there were galaxies, then they likely formed in the galaxies, after the galaxies formed; in other words rather than the black holes causing the galaxies, the galaxies caused the black holes.
Meanwhile the graphic showing the instrument commissioning still shows 19 instrument modes in progress.
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It’s also a place to read, post, and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name-calling, ridicule, insults, baiting, and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
The Bible has a lot to say about forgiveness, but it doesn’t specifically address the concept of forgiving ourselves. Usually, we talk about “forgiving ourselves” when we feel guilt over past sin or remorse over negative consequences caused by an earlier decision. We might personally feel the need to “forgive ourselves” for our mistakes in order to move forward in our lives.
Forgiving ourselves ultimately comes from understanding God’s forgiveness. The Bible is clear that every human has sinned against God (Romans 3:23), and that all our wrongdoing is against God (Psalm 51:4; Genesis 39:9). The essential thing we need is God’s forgiveness, which is available to us through the person and work of Jesus Christ. All who put our faith in Jesus are fully forgiven of our sins. We are counted as righteous before God, eternally justified (Romans 5:1–11; Ephesians 1:13–14; 2:1–10). We do, of course, still struggle with sin, but God is faithful to cleanse us when we confess to Him and restore us to right fellowship with Him (1 John 1:9; 2:1–2). Jesus’ sacrifice was enough for any and all of our sins. Forgiving ourselves, then, actually has to do with receiving God’s forgiveness.
It’s helpful to compare our forgiveness of others with our forgiveness of ourselves. Matthew 18:21–35 records the parable of the unmerciful servant. In it, a master forgives the exorbitant debt of one of his servants, only for that servant to demand a much smaller amount from a fellow servant. The master said, “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” (Matthew 18:33). As we have received forgiveness from God, we are to extend that forgiveness to others. There are no higher standards than God’s. Our sins against one another are sins against God; it is His laws that we’ve transgressed. There’s no way a person, including ourselves, could sin against us more than against God. When we understand that God’s standards are what count and that He has graciously extended forgiveness to us, we can extend that same forgiveness to others—and to ourselves.
While this might be simple to understand in concept, forgiving yourself can be difficult in practice. We regret our bad decisions, and we are remorseful over the ways they have hurt ourselves and others. The enemy continues to accuse us and remind us of our sins. Others in our lives might do the same. There are times we might even think it is repentant or praiseworthy to refuse to forgive ourselves, as if our punishment of ourselves will atone for our sins. But that is not at all the message of the gospel. In fact, the Bible is quite clear that we could never make up for our own sins. We are sinners who are dead in transgression (Romans 3:23; 6:23; Ephesians 2:1–10) and hopeless apart from Christ (John 3:16–18, 36; Romans 5:6–8). The gospel tells us that God’s wrath for our sins has been poured out on Jesus; justice has been served. Living in guilt or self-punishment is a denial of the truth of the gospel.
Oddly enough, forgiving ourselves means admitting our own sinfulness. It requires admitting that we are imperfect and unable to become perfect on our own. It means acknowledging the depths of our depravity. It means rejecting the idea that our efforts will ever atone for our wrongdoings. But it also means receiving and walking in the fullness of God’s grace. When we humble ourselves and receive God’s grace, we can let go of our own anxiety for our wrongs. We come to understand that the Creator of the universe loved us so much that He not only made us, but overcame our rebellion against Him.
When we are saved, we become children of God (John 1:12). We receive the indwelling Holy Spirit who transforms us (Philippians 2:12–13). He is with us forever (John 14:16–17; Ephesians 1:13–14). Our sins do have genuine and often heartbreaking consequences in our lives. But God is faithful to use even that for His glory and our good (Romans 8:28–30; 2 Corinthians 1:3–7). We are not left to wallow in the consequences of our sins. Instead, God helps us endure through them, and we can see His redemptive abilities (James 1:2–5).
Forgiving ourselves can be especially difficult when our sin has had a negative impact on someone else. It’s important to seek forgiveness from those we have wronged and to reconcile where possible. Again, God is the one who enables this reconciliation. Living in shame will not fix a broken relationship or remove the harm that we’ve done. But the truth of the gospel can.
Paul, in many ways, set an example of forgiving oneself. He had been a violent persecutor of the church. But rather than live in shame and regret over what he’d done, or think that God couldn’t use him, or constantly remind himself of his sin, he spread the gospel broadly. This was not from penance or trying to make up for his past. Rather, it was out of understanding God’s great salvation. Paul writes, “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his immense patience as an example for those who would believe in Him and receive eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen” (1 Timothy 1:15–17). Paul’s sin actually became an avenue by which God was glorified. Rather than refuse to forgive himself, Paul readily received God’s forgiveness and rejoiced in it.
In Romans 7—8 we see another example of this. Paul bemoans his continual struggle with his sin nature, a battle common to every believer in Christ. But he doesn’t say he’ll just try harder or that he’ll never forgive himself. Rather, he says, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Romans 7:24—8:2).
Reminders of past sin prompt us to praise God for His mercy and grace. Current negative consequences from our past sin remind us of God’s faithfulness in the midst of them. They prompt us to pray and rely on God for endurance, rescue, and transformation. Forgiving ourselves is actually receiving God’s forgiveness in its fullness. In that, there is much freedom (Galatians 5:1)!
The Chinese Should Think Before Wiping Us Out As Sometimes They Need Us To Solve Their Problems For Them
Okay you knuckledragging ChiComs trying to take us down…here’s a history lesson for you.
For millennia, you had to suffer from this:
Yep. Steppe Nomads. They laid waste to your country, burned, raped and pillaged (but not in that order–they’re smarter than you are) for century after century.
You know who figured out how to take them on and win? The Russians.
Not you, the Russians. And it took them less than two centuries. And Oh By The Way they were among the most backward cultures in Europe at the time.
You couldn’t invent an alphabet, you couldn’t take care of barbarians on horseback, and you think you can take this board down?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! We’re laughing at you, you knuckledragging dehumanized communists…worshipers of a mass-murderer who killed sixty million people!
I mean, you still think Communism is a good idea even after having lived through it!
By my reckoning that makes you orders of magnitude more stupid than AOC, and that takes serious effort.
His Fraudulency
Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.
One can hope that all is not as it seems.
I’d love to feast on that crow.
“No Chemicals”
A detailed analysis of the contents of His Fraudulency’s skull was performed.
Absolutely no chemicals found!
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Small Government?
Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.
This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.
No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.
World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.
So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.
Political Science In Summation
It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).
James Webb Space Telescope Update
None of the 19 boxes I showed last time have been checked, yet, but NASA has published another blog entry about what they plan to do with JWST once it is ready to do science, this time focusing on our own solar system.
The article makes the point that we haven’t sent a spacecraft to Uranus and Neptune since 1986 and 1989, respectively, and that was Voyager 2 (which, by the way, is still alive and kicking, and 129.9 AUs away from the Sun, the second furthest we’ve ever sent a probe [you are a mere 1 AU from the Sun]).
We’ve even managed to put orbiters around Jupiter (two of them), and Saturn (one) and even landed on a moon of Saturn, but we’ve not been back to the two ice giants. So we need to watch them from here. Hubble has taken pictures of Uranus and Neptune, and JWST will, also.
[As an aside, I still remember New Horizons’ 2015 flyby of Pluto. In my lifetime Pluto went from being a dot (marked with an arrow) among an array of other dots (which are stars) in a photograph, to being a world we had some very detailed images of, and almost all of that progression was in one week. (Hubble had gotten very blurry images in 2002-03.) Suddenly I was able to buy a six inch globe of Pluto, something flat-out (pun intended) undoable mere months earlier.
[If we can launch New Horizons, we can launch more probes to Uranus and Neptune, though they might not be orbiters. New Horizons was launched at solar escape velocitydirectly from Earth. (Its speed immediately after launch, relative to Earth, was over 36,000 miles per hour, a record that still stands, though other spacecraft like the Helios sun probe have gone much faster well after launch.) It didn’t need a gravity assist “slingshot” like the Voyager probes needed to get to Saturn and beyond, though we did use one off Jupiter to shorten the voyage by a few years. New Horizons was a very lightweight (884 lbs) probe compared to the Voyagers (1820 lbs), and that’s what made the difference–a lighter probe can be pushed to a higher velocity by the same rocket.]
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
We’re seeing some recovery of gold, silver and platinum, but well below the levels that were starting to look normal before the Fed raised the rate.
Greatest Physicists and Greatest Scientists
Physics World (a British journal) did a poll back in 1999, presumably only quizzing actual physicists. They were asked to name the greatest physicists of all time. Here’s what they got:
Albert Einstein
Isaac Newton
James Clerk Maxwell
Niels Bohr
Werner Heisenberg
Galileo Galilei
Richard Feynman
Paul Dirac
Erwin Schrödinger
Ernest Rutherford
All of these have gotten mention here; I probably didn’t spend enough time on Heisenberg. (Or maybe I did. Can’t be sure.) I’m a little surprised to not see Michael Faraday on the list. It’s heavily tilted towards post-1894 people, which shouldn’t be too surprising; physicists’ heads are the quantum world constantly, and Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrödinger, and Feynman had a lot to do with shaping that world, and Bohr and Rutherford investigated the atomic nucleus (which also depends on quantum concepts). That just leaves Newton, Maxwell, and Galilei (almost always referred to by his first name) as representing classical (“old”) physics.
There’s also a site named famousphysicists.org and they list twenty names:
Albert Einstein (for Advancing the Theory of Relativity)
Neils Bohr (for Contributions to quantym theory, nuclear reactions and nuclear fission
Stephen Hawking (for Explaining black holes and advances on the General Theory of Relativity and quantum mechanics
Isaac Newton (for explaining the theories of gravity and mechanics)
Nikola Tesla (for creating the first alternating current system)
Galileo Galilei (for providing a mathematical analysis of the relationship between astronomy and physics)
Marie Curie (for discovering radioactive nature of thorium and the discovery of polonium and radium)
(Lord) Kelvin (for advancement of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics; developing absolute thermometric scale
Robert Hooke (for explaining Hooke’s Law of elasticity)
Richard Feyman (for work on path integral formulation on quantum mechanics, particle physics, theory of quantum electrodynamics, and superfluidity)
Michael Faraday (for discovering electromagnetic induction and for coming up with the idea for the first electrical transformer)
Ernest Rutherford (for supporting the theory on the existence of an atomic nucleus)
Marconi (for work on wireless telegraphy)
Max Planck (for formulation of quantum theory)
Allesandro Volta (for inventing the first electric battery)
J. J. Thomson (for showing the existence of the electron)
Erwin Schrodinger (for extensive advancements of quantum mechanics and the Schroedinger equation)
James Clerk Maxwell (for work on the theory of electromagnetism and the kinetic theory of gases)
Werner Heisenberg (for work on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle
James Chadwick (for discovery of the neutron).
The only ones I missed completely during the physics series were Hooke (and I’ve noted I shouldn’t have skipped that particular topic, especially when later stuff turned out to depend on it somewhat), Marconi. and Tesla. Though Tesla, I noted, did have a unit of measurement named after him.
Discover Magazine came up with their own list of scientists (not specifically physicists) here: The 10 Greatest Scientists of All Time | Discover Magazine (Warning, this is one of those sites that gives a very limited number of free reads to non-subscribers…sort of a demi-paywall.) Their selection criteria seem just a bit…odd.
Albert Einstein
Marie Curie
Isaac Newton
Charles Darwin
Nikola Tesla
Galileo Galilei
Ada Lovelace
Pythagoras
Carl Linnaeus
Rosalind Franklin.
I definitely haven’t mentioned all of these, many are biologists and one is a geologist, and I haven’t talked about those fields (which are more closely tied to each other than many might imagine). Charles Darwin is famous enough, clearly (though many suffer from misconceptions as to what his theory addressed–it says nothing about the origin of life) and he definitely deserves a spot in the top ten. Ada Lovelace was in fact the first programmer, but the man who designed the machine she programmed is absent. Carl Linnaeus came up with a classification scheme for living things close to what we use today and is definitely a biologist of the first rank. Pythagoras is famous for his theorem about right triangles, and Franklin was part of the DNA sequencing team, denied her rightful share of the credit. All on this list are worthy of mention, but only a few of them should be in a Top Ten Scientists list. I suspect some PC or even wokester influence in the cases of Lovelace and Franklin. If Franklin should be on this list, so should her two teammates Watson and Crick. It could be worse, though; at least no one on this list was totally useless.
Readers of Discover Magazine sent in some other suggestions, including Isaac Asimov, Richard Feynman, Robert FitzRoy, Lucretius, Katherine McCormick, John Muir, Rolf O. Peterson, and Marie Tharp. Frankly the only one of these in the absolute top drawer is Feynman, though all of the others did worthwhile things. Asimov was a very good explainer of science (more so than me!). Marie Tharp discovered the mid-ocean terrain that was an important piece of the evidence for plate tectonics (without which, geology makes no sense). FitzRoy was the captain of the HMS Beagle (the ship on which Darwin voyaged) and made contributions to meteorology; Peterson has been running a predator/prey study on Isle Royale for decades.
T5 The Kinetic Theory of Gases or Why The Earth Leaks Hydrogen
The second list above contains the name “(Lord) Kelvin” and explains that he’s famous for his work on the kinetic theory of gases. The original article says a bit more, crediting him with enunciating the first two laws of thermodynamics. Which, for review, are:
If you put energy into (or take it out of) a system, the energy remaining in the system changes by that much. This is essentially the conservation of energy.
In a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of all entropies of the interacting items never decreases. As it turns out, this is equivalent to saying that heat never passes from a colder body to a warmer body.
Even in your refrigerator, the heat inside the refrigerator goes into the refrigerant; it’s piped away and compressed (to warm it up), the heat leaves the hot refrigerant, which is allowed to expand and cool…and sent back into the refrigerator. Energy–work–is used to alter the temperature of the refrigerant by mechanical means so it can suck heat out of the refrigerator then dump it outside the refrigerator; that work itself creates more heat.
But what’s really behind all of this? We’ve talked about heat, we’ve established that it’s a form of energy, but why does it always flow hot to cold? And what is it, really?
The kinetic theory of gases goes all the way back to Lucretius, who suggested that all objects consisted of a large number of moving particles, but Aristotelian theory was more widely accepted. In the 1700s some scientists revived the theory, but it ran into difficulty because it required perfectly elastic collisions. I’d better explain what that means, because it’s probably counter-intuitive. When you hear “elastic” you’re probably thinking of bouncing a rubber ball, which after all, is an elastic material, but to a physicist an elastic collision is one where the bodies do not deform and do not lose their kinetic energy in any way–whereas with rubber objects some of the energy goes into compressing and bending the rubber. Billiard balls are close to elastic in this sense.
William Thomson (1824-1907) was a key figure to elaborating and getting the kinetic theory of gases accepted. He was actually a very important figure in physics, and you may recall he had things to say with regard to the (then) mystery of where the Sun (and other stars) gets its energy. He was first knighted by Queen Victoria in 1866, becoming Sir William Thomson, then eventually ennobled and made Lord Kelvin in 1892, the first scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords. And he is more commonly known as Lord Kelvin today, and so the metric unit of temperature is named the kelvin, not the thomson.
In 1847 Thomson attended a conference at which James Prescott Joule argued against the then-dominant caloric theory of heat, which stated that heat was a fluid, named “caloric,” that repelled itself and thus would tend to flow to where it wasn’t (i.e., to colder objects). Joule was having little success, but Thomson became intrigued and eventually during the mid 1850s the two collaborated, mostly by mail, with Joule doing the experimental work and Thomson suggesting new experiments and working on the theory.
And they ended up arguing convincingly for the kinetic theory of gases.
This theory models a gas as a collection of very small particles, identical particles if the gas is pure, which are spaced much further apart than the diameter of the particles. And they’re all bouncing around, smacking into each other and their surroundings, sort of like in the GIF below (ignore the different colors for now).
It’s like the world’s biggest game of billiards–perfectly elastic. And it’s in three D, and there’s no friction at all. Air resistance? This is what the air is made of, how can these spheres be encountering air resistance? In other words, the space between these little particles (atoms or molecules) of gas is a vacuum.
If you watch that GIF for a while, you’ll see that some of the particles move quickly, some move slowly, and a particle’s speed can change. Part of the loop, just for instance, shows a red particle in the lower left that is nearly stationary until it gets smacked by another particle.
Just looking at that, there’s a fair amount of kinetic energy in all these particles. But it’s more than just the particles flying all over the place and smacking each other; the particles can vibrate and rotate as well, and all of this is kinetic energy in different guises.
It turns out the temperature of the gas is directly related to the average kinetic energy of the particles.
If you have, say, about six hundred sextillion particles of gas, you have a mole of the gas, in other words, if it’s hydrogen molecules, H2 (molecular weight 2), it’s two grams of hydrogen, and so on; physicists and chemists like to work in moles because if two samples of two different things are of the same number of moles, they have the same number of molecules in them.
So if temperature is directly tied to the average kinetic energy of the particles, in other words energy per particle, then you can get to total energy by multiplying by the number of particles, and every mole has the same number of particles in it. So they like to write this law out in energy per mole.
So the kinetic energy in one mole of a gas is equal to a constant, R, times the temperature in kelvins, so Ek = 3/2 RT. And if you have n moles of the gas, it becomes Ek = 3/2 nRT.
R = 8.31446261815324 J/(K mol)
But scientists then like to divide this energy per mole, by the number of particles in a mole, to get the average kinetic energy of each molecule in the gas, and when they do that the constant becomes:
k = 1.380649×10−23 J/K
And k is known as the Boltzmann constant.
So the average kinetic energy of a molecule in a sample of gas is simply this number, times the temperature of the gas, times 3/2.
Kinetic energy in general is Ek = 1/2 mv2, i.e, one half the mass of the object, times the square of its velocity.
So we have the average kinetic energy of a molecule of the gas expressed in two different ways, one the traditional formula for kinetic energy, the other in terms of temperature. So we can set these two things equal to each other, like this:
Ek = 1/2mv2 = 3/2kT
If you do a bit of algebra, you can get the average velocity of a molecule of gas, at some temperature–skipping past energy.
vaverage = sqrt( 3kT / m )
Notice…now that we’ve done it this way, it becomes clear that the lighter the molecule, the faster it must move at a given temperature (on average). A molecule of oxygen is sixteen times heavier than one of hydrogen; so at some temperature, the average hydrogen molecule must move four times as fast as the average oxygen molecule.
Those are averages. Can we say anything about the individual molecules? Well, there is a distribution known as Maxwell’s Distribution (named after the same James Clerk Maxwell who worked on electromagnetism; he also did work on this topic). With it you can determine, given an average kinetic energy (or velocity), what percentage of molecules are moving faster than some given velocity, or how many are moving slower. So perhaps the average molecule is moving at 100 meters per second, but you want to know what fraction of them are moving at more than 120 meters per second. The Maxwell Distribution will tell you. (It’s an ugly mess of a formula with derivatives in it…so I’ll spare you.)
This has a practical consequence, and explains something we take for granted.
You can imagine, perhaps, a temperature at which oxygen molecules (on average) travel slower than a planet’s escape velocity, so they tend to stick around, and hydrogen molecules, moving four times as fast, exceed the planet’s escape velocity and will escape the planet. Of course there are a couple of caveats. If the hydrogen is down close to the surface, it’s likely to bump into another molecule and perhaps lose its energy; it will certainly be deflected before it zooms off into outer space. So this applies to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, where the hydrogen has a straight shot to interplanetary space.
Also, the temperature doesn’t quite have to be high enough that the average velocity is over escape velocity. In fact, it can be quite a bit lower. This is an average velocity; some molecules move faster, some slower. What if the average is quite a bit lower than escape velocity, but one percent of the molecules are exceptionally fast and exceed escape velocity? Well, then over time that gas will slowly bleed away. Any hydrogen at high altitude will lose one percent of its number to outer space…and what’s left over, of course, will maintain the average and it will lose one percent to outer space. Repeat this a lot, and all the hydrogen in the upper atmosphere is gone, but then replenished by hydrogen from lower altitudes–but it bleeds away too. Eventually all of the hydrogen will be gone, even though it’s cool enough that at any given time, only one percent of the molecules are above escape velocity.
The earth is actually warm enough to bleed hydrogen like this. And in a fairly short amount of time, geologically speaking. This is why even though hydrogen is ridiculously common in our universe, much, much more common than oxygen, that we don’t have a world that consists of rock, water, and left-over hydrogen after all the oxygen forms rocks and water. That excess hydrogen, if it was ever here (it might not have ever stuck to the Earth in the first place during planetary formation), is long, long gone.
Helium is twice as heavy as hydrogen, and also very common…and it too bleeds away. When you open the valve on a cylinder of helium and it leaks out into the atmosphere, it rises, and eventually bleeds away into interplanetary space. Remember that the next time you get a party balloon. The helium in that balloon is gone forever once it leaks out. Helium is slowly generated by radioactive decay inside the earth, but once we pump out helium that has accumulated over billions of years and lose it, it’s gone. It’s the ultimate non-renewable resource…at least until we go mine it from gas giant planets, which is a ways away. This is why it’s so hard to get helium for balloons now–we’re saving it for MRI machines, where at least it’s continually recovered instead of leaked.
Even water (nine times as heavy as hydrogen) leaks from the earth, very slowly. GIve it enough time and the earth would become bone dry, as water evaporates, and some bleeds away. But something as heavy as oxygen and nitrogen has an average velocity low enough that, according to the Maxwell Distribution, virtually none of it gets fast enough to escape.
Jupiter, by contrast is colder and has a higher escape velocity, so it keeps its hydrogen. And helium. (Which is in large part why it is so massive.)
OK, I was hoping to get farther than this, and connect combinatorics and thermodynamics.
But alas, I have run out of time. It’s four minutes after 10 PM mountain, and I gotta publish this. I don’t even have time to edit for clarity (more than I have as I wrote it).
Hope it made some sense.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
Without a doubt, faith is at the core of the Christian life. Faith is emphasized throughout the Bible and is presented as an absolute necessity. In fact, “without faith, it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6). The entire chapter of Hebrews 11 is about faith and those who possessed it. Faith is a gift from God, as we see in Ephesians 2:8–9 and not something we come up with on our own. All Christians have received the gift of faith from God, and faith is part of the armor of God—the shield with which we protect ourselves from the “flaming arrows of the evil one” (Ephesians 6:16).
The Bible never exhorts us to have “childlike” faith, at least not in so many words. In Matthew 18:2 Jesus says that we must “become as little children” in order to enter the kingdom of God. The context of Jesus’ statement is the disciples’ question, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” (verse 1). In response, Jesus “called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me’” (verses 2–5).
So, as the disciples focus on what constitutes “greatness” in heaven, Jesus provides a new perspective: the way “up” is “down.” Meekness is required (Matthew 5:5). Jesus exhorts the disciples (and us) to seek to possess a childlike modesty in addition to their faith. Those who willingly take the lowest position are the greatest in heaven’s eyes. A young child is destitute of ambition, pride, and haughtiness and is therefore a good example for us. Young children are characteristically humble and teachable. They aren’t prone to pride or hypocrisy. Humility is a virtue rewarded by God; as James says, “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up” (James 4:10).
Although faith is not mentioned in Matthew 18:1–5, we know that it isn’t humility that ushers a person into heaven; it is faith in the Son of God. A humble, unpretentious faith could rightly be called a “childlike faith.” When Jesus wanted to bless the children, He said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:14–15). How does a young child receive a gift? With openness, honesty, and unbridled joy. That type of happy authenticity should be a hallmark of our faith as we receive God’s gift in Christ.
Jesus promoted a humble, honest faith in God, and He used the innocence of a young child as an example. Emulating the faith of young children, we should simply take God at His Word. As young children trust their earthly fathers, we should trust that our “Father in heaven [will] give good gifts to those who ask him” (Matthew 7:11).
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
You knuckle-dragging barbarians are still trying to muck with this site, so I’ll just repeat what I said last time.
Up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
Loop it if you like; I will wait.
Richly deserved.
Justice Must Be Done
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Precious metals continue to drop because the dollar is strong. It’s strong not because it’s actually worth a damn, but because foreign investors in the currencies markets put their money where they’ll earn high interest.
In other words the dollar climbs when the Fed hits the brakes and raises interest rates–an act which results in a recession. (That’s aside from whether the Fed “needed” to do it or not, which in turn is aside from whether the damned Fed should even exist in the first place.)
James Webb Space Telescope Update
NASA is now starting to talk more and more about the commissioning of the instrument; i.e., the sensors that will do something with the light that JWST collections. They’re going to track things on this graphic; the hexagons become bolded gold when that particular aspect of calibration is done.
There are 17 different modes that need to be calibrated, and they are described at length here:
And they’re still raving about how much better the optics are than they actually expected.
In other words this is about the only damned thing that the government has done right during His Fraudulency’s administration, so hopefully he won’t notice and decide he has to f*ck it up in order to have a perfect record.
In the meantime, we have a nice before/after image of a particular patch of stars. (The name of the image file indicates it’s of the Large Magellanic Cloud, still.)
The image on the left is from the old Spitzer Space telescope (which was also designed to look at infrared; its lifetime was strictly limited by the amount of cryo-coolant it had on board but it was very valuable while it lasted). That was taken at 8000 nanometer wavelength (that equals 8.0 micrometers).
The image on the right is from JWST, using the super-cold (6 or 7 K) MIRI instrument, at 7700 nanometers.
As you can see it’s much, much sharper!
This light is of a wavelength about ten times the very deepest red we can see with our unaided eyes, and it requires MIRI (the super cold sensor running at 6-7 K) to photograph.
Instead of being blurred blobs, the brighter stars in the LMC are actual points, with diffraction spikes. Dimmer stars are actually visible instead of just looking like background noise.
If you remember when JWST took a picture of the star that was being used as a reference when aligning the mirror segments, that star had really obvious spikes on it. They were at 12, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 o’clock with two shorter spikes at 3 and 9 o’clock. You see the same thing here. The first six I listed are caused by the seams between the mirrors, the left and right pair are caused by the “arms” that hold the secondary mirror in front of the main one.
Fuck Joe Biden
Biden, you don’t even get ONE scoop of ice cream today.
(Please post this somewhere permanent, as it will continue to be true; the SOB will never deserve a scoop.)
Incidentally, I’m writing this on Friday. This morning I saw a full-sized pickup truck in the oncoming left turn lane with a forest of flags in the bed. Once he turned and drove left-to-right in front of me, I could see two American flags near the cab, and SIX “Let’s Go Brandon” flags near the tailgate. That was unusual; usually there’s a mix of FJB (only not abbreviated) and “Trump Won” and “Trump 2024” flags when someone does this.
I haven’t seen such a display in a few weeks, by the way. Even the guy at the office complex where I work with the FJB flag on his pickup seems to have removed it (or doesn’t work there any more–trucks all look alike to me from the back, and all crossovers look like cockroaches).
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It’s also a place to read, post, and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name-calling, ridicule, insults, baiting, and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
Colossians 3:2 says, “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things,” or, as the NET puts it, “Keep thinking about things above, not things on the earth.” To set one’s mind on something is to choose to think about it, influencing one’s goals and guiding one’s course of action. The first part of the chapter is worth quoting in full to give the proper context:
“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
“Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.
“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:1–17).
Colossians was written by the apostle Paul to the church in the city of Colossae. The culture of Colossae was thoroughly pagan and immoral, as it was in most of the Roman world—and as it is in much of the world today. The Christians in Colossae, however, could no longer take their cues from the world around them. They had to take direction from “above.” Although physically in the world, they were not to believe the same things that the culture around them did. They were not to behave according to the standards of the culture around them. That would be taking their cues from “below.”
Paul describes the “below” culture in a number of words and concepts: anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language, lying. The “above” culture, in contrast, is characterized by compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, peace, singing, worship, and gratitude.
How are we to cultivate the values that are from above while living below? It takes a concentrated effort. We must “set our minds” to it. We are inundated with messages that promote the “below” behavior. If we listen to the radio, overhear conversations at work, read billboards, watch the news, read the newspaper, flip through a magazine at the doctor’s office, watch TV programs or movies, etc., we will be constantly directed to embrace values that are clearly from below. Even if the messages we receive are not overtly immoral, the perspective is one that excludes God and prioritizes things as though life on earth is all that matters—our happiness and fulfillment (the “right” to be happy) are top priority. If we want to be directed “from above,” we must make an effort to counteract the messages that are omnipresent in our culture. To set our minds on things above, we must read and meditate on Scripture, attend church, listen to uplifting music, and read things that turn our hearts toward God. This is a recurring theme in Scripture:
Romans 12:2: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Matthew 6:19–20, 33: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven. . . . Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
1 Timothy 6:17: “Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.”
Following his contrast of things below and things above in Colossians 3, Paul goes on to give a list of standards for Christian behavior that make absolutely no sense in today’s culture. Everything about the individualist, self-centered priorities that have high value today run counter to the type of restraint and sacrifice that Paul enjoins in verses 18–22:
“Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged. Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.”
The only way that a person can live according to the above dictates is if he or she is taking directions from somewhere other than the secular culture. Thinking on “things above” (the truths of God’s Word) not only guides us in what we should do but gives the reasons we should do it (grace, our position in Christ, our eternal reward, etc.). As we believe the truth “from above” more than the lies “from below,” we will start to act like creatures born from above, who have been raised with Christ (Colossians 3:1) and seated with Him at the right hand of the Father (Ephesians 2:6).
This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It’s also a place to read, post, and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name-calling, ridicule, insults, baiting, and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
We’re all encouraged by verses that remind us of how much God has done for us and has promised to us when we put our faith in Jesus . . . and there are many, many verses in God’s Word that do exactly that.
I think we all have a number of favorite verses from God’s Word . . . and those verses were almost surely chosen to build us up in the Christian faith. Perhaps the following are a few of them:
John 16:33 “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
Isaiah 41:10 “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
Philippians 4:6–7 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Psalm 34:4–5, 8 I sought the LORD, and He answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to Him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!
Romans 8:28 And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.
Joshua 1:9 “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”
Matthew 6:31–34 “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or “What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Proverbs 3:5–6 Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths.
Romans 15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
2 Chronicles 7:14 “If my people who are called by My name humble themselves, and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
Philippians 2:3–4 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.
Isaiah 41:13 “For I, the LORD your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, ‘Fear not, I am the one who helps you.'”
1 Peter 5:6–7 Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time He may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on Him, because He cares for you.
Psalm 94:18–19 When I thought, “My foot slips,” Your steadfast love, O LORD, helped me up. When the cares of my heart are many, Your consolations cheer my soul.
Revelation 21:4 “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And He who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”
But then life comes along with a virtual tsunami of forces that tear us away from what we think we should be doing with all the riches that God has given us and to reap His future promises. And when those waters recede, we’re left with piles and piles of guilt because we have, once again, failed to live up to God’s standards that are part and parcel of the Christian life.
We all want blessings, happiness, and fulfillment, and we associate a happy condition with a certain amount of ease. Jesus promises blessing and fulfillment to those who follow Him (John 4:14), but many people have been surprised that the way of Christ is not as easy as they had hoped. Sometimes, following Christ can be downright difficult.
The fact is, blessing and hardship aren’t mutually exclusive. The disciples “left everything” to follow Christ, and the Lord promised them “a hundred times as much” blessing in return (Mark 10:28-30). Jesus warned that all who follow Him must deny themselves and bear a daily cross (Luke 9:23). Hardship, to be sure, but hardship with a purpose and leading to the joy of the Lord.
Followers of Christ also face resistance from the world. “In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Timothy 3:12). Jesus didn’t promise His disciples that everything would be coming up roses for them; just the opposite—He promised that they would have trials in this world (John 16:33). “But take heart!” He told them, “I have overcome the world.”
God’s moral laws have been written on the heart of every human – giving all people a conscience to aid them in determining wrong from right (Romans 2:14-15). When a person becomes a follower of Christ, he not only has God’s laws in his heart, but he also has the indwelling Holy Spirit to compel him toward living righteously (Romans 8:11). This in no way means the Christian will stop sinning, but it does mean the Christian will become more aware of his own personal sin and have a genuine desire to do what is pleasing to Christ (Romans 8:14-16).
In many ways, it’s after a person is saved that the struggle against sin really heats up in his life. All people are born with a nature that’s bent toward sin, which is why children don’t need to be taught how to misbehave – that comes naturally. When a person is converted, the sin nature doesn’t disappear – and so the internal conflict begins in the life of every believer.
The apostle Paul, who called himself a “bond servant to Christ,” writes of the struggle with his sin nature in Romans 7:14-25. In verse 15 he says, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15). Christians engaged in this battle have a true desire to avoid sin, but they also have a natural desire to indulge the flesh. They become frustrated when they find themselves “doing what they don’t want to do.” And to further complicate matters, Christians not only don’t want to sin, they hate sin. Yet, they still sin.
Paul goes on to write, “It is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me” (Romans 7:17). Paul is referring to the dichotomy caused by the new birth – Paul is a “new man” through Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). But he still sins because sin is still alive in the human flesh – the sin nature survives the new birth (Romans 7:18). Paul calls the internal strife a “war,” as the new man battles the old man. Paul found the battle quite distressing because he wanted to do well (Romans 7:23). “What a wretched man I am,” Paul cries out in his distress (Romans 7:24).
Every Christian who is attempting to live righteously is called to this battlefield for his entire life. We are in a spiritual battle. But in grace and mercy, God makes an entire suit of armor available to the faithful believer for the fight (Ephesians 6:13).
The Christian life is never easy, but the difficulties don’t negate the joy. We consider Jesus, who “for the joy set before him . . . endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2). God has set us free from the slavery to sin. The victory is ours (2 Corinthians 2:14). Through the Holy Spirit, believers receive encouragement, strength to persevere, and reminders of their adoption into the family of God. We know that our “present sufferings aren’t worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed” (Romans 8:18).
Always keep in mind that we’re on this earth for but a fleeting moment in time . . . and then we’re called to our true eternal home where peace, joy and God’s blessings rule forever.
I see from video of your “conversation” with MTG that someone posted yesterday, that you are still a pugnacious, lying, puddle of bearded dragon shit.
How you can look at yourself in a mirror is beyond me, unless your conscience has been replaced by a dedication to Leftist goals. It certainly isn’t dedicated to real adversarial journalism. Much less any kind of journalism.
I will give you this. You have better hair than Brian Stelter. But then, so did Telly Savalas. And Yul Brynner.
RINOs an Endangered Species? If Only!
According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.
Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.
I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.
But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.
The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.
Given the results of Tuesday’s elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.
I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.
This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Mozart
Light this time around. The Turkish March, K331.
The string quartet, consisting of two violins, a viola and a cello, is a sort of economy orchestra. In the days when all music was live, if someone wanted to host a gathering and wanted music, they had to actually pay people to perform it. Except for the most fabulously wealthy hosts, that meant you weren’t going to be hearing symphonies and concertos! The string quartet was a good compromise (and you could even arrange a symphony for it). Each of the four instruments played different parts, so the music could be plenty complex.
Joseph Haydn around 1750 invented the “string quartet” as a compositional form (as opposed to an ensemble) with four movements, and wrote over sixty of them.
Mozart wrote 23 string quartets; this one, #17 “The Hunt,” K. 458 is probably the most famous of the bunch. Quartets 14-19 were dedicated to Joseph Haydn and composed between 1782 and 1785 (i.e., just after we won the Battle of Yorktown and bracketing the time we signed the Treaty of Paris with the United Kingdom).
This video is of The Hunt, in full. Movements are at the following time cues:
Mozart, in his dedication, admitted to taking “a long and laborious endeavor” with these quartets. Usually, he was able to compose in his head, with seemingly little effort. Putting it on paper was actually “copying it out” once completed, not part of the actual creative process.
To my dear friend Haydn,
A father who had resolved to send his children out into the great world took it to be his duty to confide them to the protection and guidance of a very celebrated Man, especially when the latter by good fortune was at the same time his best Friend. Here they are then, O great Man and dearest Friend, these six children of mine. They are, it is true, the fruit of a long and laborious endeavor, yet the hope inspired in me by several Friends that it may be at least partly compensated encourages me, and I flatter myself that this offspring will serve to afford me solace one day. You, yourself, dearest friend, told me of your satisfaction with them during your last Visit to this Capital. It is this indulgence above all which urges me to commend them to you and encourages me to hope that they will not seem to you altogether unworthy of your favour. May it therefore please you to receive them kindly and to be their Father, Guide and Friend! From this moment I resign to you all my rights in them, begging you however to look indulgently upon the defects which the partiality of a Father’s eye may have concealed from me, and in spite of them to continue in your generous Friendship for him who so greatly values it, in expectation of which I am, with all of my Heart, my dearest Friend, your most Sincere Friend,
W. A. Mozart
Upon hearing the quartets performed, Haydn said this to Mozart’s father, Leopold Mozart:
Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.
Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791 and it is probably the greatest tragedy of orchestral music that he died so young. Imagine what he could have done in the next twenty years. (OK, honestly no one can imagine it, or they’d be Mozart.) Beethoven got his start shortly after Mozart’s untimely death; what influence would they have had on each other? Beethoven was famous for breaking the rules of the Classical era; would Mozart have been sympathetic? Possibly; a lot of his later works were quite “edgy” by the standards of the day.
Everything down, with the sole exception of platinum.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
The mirror is done. Instruments are at proper temperature.
People who have spent half a lifetime working on it now get to move on to their next endeavor, and hopefully will succeed at it as well.
All of the instrument packages now get a crisp image. The mirror is better than they expected!
They will now proceed to commission those packages. That’s expected to take about two months.
The picture above shows the results of aiming the JWST at a part of the Large Magellanic Cloud. This is a small galaxy that is a satellite of our own Milky Way, and is readily visible at night in the southern hemisphere (as is the Small Magellanic Cloud), provided, of course, you’re not in a big city. It’s a good target because, as seen from here there are a lot of stars crammed together in one part of the sky and they’re all at pretty much the same distance from us.
(This is how we discovered that Cepheid variables had an intrinsic brightness proportional to their period of variability–an astronomer looked at a bunch of them in the LMC and SMC and noticed their apparent brightness was proportional to their period of variability; since all were at the same distance, the apparent brightness was directly related to the intrinsic brightness with no possible confusion due to differing distances.)
When Supernova 1987-A blew up in (wait for it) 1987, it was in the LMC.
I’ve never seen the LMC and SMC, though I did look for them when I was a good deal further south than I am now. Alas, the lighting situation was terrible.
Anyhow, the process of commissioning the instruments is expected to take a couple of months, and involves setting operating parameters and the like (the blog doesn’t have a lot of detail, so I didn’t boil it down for you; they did).
To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!!
If anyone ends up in the cell right next to him, tell him I said “hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It’s also a place to read, post, and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name-calling, ridicule, insults, baiting, and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Corinthians 1:3–4).
The idea of “comfort” implies at least two parties: one who gives the comfort and one who receives it. It also implies a need—one that Scripture speaks of exclusively for humans. Animals have no capacity to receive spiritual comfort. The holy angels have no need for comfort. Satan and his demons are eternally beyond it (Matthew 25:41; Revelation 12:9, 12; 20:10). Only humans—higher than the animals, lower than the angels, and composed of body, soul, and spirit—were created with the capacity to receive and give comfort, and we live in a world where we need it.
Bound in time, yet with a sense of our own eternity like angels (Ecclesiastes 3:11), we humans suffer distress in a unique “three-dimensional” way—past, present and future. We remember previous distresses and are filled with grief or regrets (Genesis 37:35; Matthew 26:75). We face each day’s troubles and worry (Matthew 6:25–32). We reflect on these things and dread what may come next (verse 34). And beyond these worldly matters is that most distressing sensation of all, the guilt for having deeply, inexcusably offended our good and righteous Creator and Judge (James 2:10–11; Revelation 6:16).
Believers in Christ have a comfort from God that includes a true freedom from guilt. For Christians, our righteous Judge is also our loving Savior (John 3:16–17)—a sharp contrast with the terrifying assortment of distant, cruel, or unappeasable deities of the ancient world into which Paul brought the good news of free, complete and irrevocable forgiveness, reconciliation, and adoption (Romans 3:23–25; 2 Corinthians 5:11–21; 1 John 3:1–2).
In 2 Corinthians 1:3, God is called the “Father of compassion” and the “God of all comfort.” In His mercy and love, God is eager to provide comfort to His children in any and all circumstances. Whatever the trial we face, our Heavenly Father knows the situation and offers comfort as needed. The fact that He is the God of all comfort teaches that all comfort ultimately comes from Him. He is our source of peace and happiness and blessing.
The comfort we Christians receive flows through us to others “so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Corinthians 1:4). Like grace, comfort is an active, powerful gift to be not merely received but actively shared with others, supernaturally multiplied to advance God’s kingdom (Matthew 25:14–30). And so the Bible commends those who are simply with people in trouble, such as those who are sick or in prison, whether or not we can change their circumstances (Matthew 25:36–40). In bringing comfort to those in trouble, we glorify God by giving a glimpse of how He comforts those who are in distress.
All three Persons of the Trinity participate in comforting us just by being with us. That is enough. The Father is always with us, as He was with Moses (Exodus 3:12) and the nation of Israel (Deuteronomy 31:6–8). So, too, are the Son (Matthew 28:20; John 14:18) and the Spirit (John 14:16–17). Hence, Paul confidently ends his letter to the Corinthians with the beautiful blessing: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14).
The Holy Spirit is how Jesus keeps His promise to always be with us as the God of all comfort. One meaning of the Greek root word is “close beside.” All three Persons of the Trinity live with and in believers (John 14:17, 22)—very close indeed! As a result, no past, present, or future distress can separate us from God and His love for us in Christ (Romans 8:35). We are not only comforted in our troubles, but we are “more than conquerors” in them (verses 30–39). When we turn our worries into prayers, “the God of peace will be with [us]” (Philippians 4:6–9).
In the end, when we finally leave the temporary troubles of this life and enter the permanent joy of the next, our Heavenly Father will forever comfort each one of us, wiping away every tear (Isaiah 25:8; Revelation 21:4), welcoming us into a world where comfort is no longer needed because there is “no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21:4). We will enjoy the God of all comfort forever.
The Bible brings comfort during difficult times
The Bible is the Word of God written to His people and, as such, it contains everything we need to be “complete” (2 Timothy 3:15-17). Part of the “everything” we need is comfort. The Bible has a lot to say about comfort and has many passages that comfort us in life’s tough times. Yes, the Bible comforts us!
Life is fraught with many difficulties. We all experience setbacks in one way or another. Sometimes they are sudden; sometimes they are gradual. Maybe we have suffered the death of a loved one or been forsaken by a loved one. Maybe our health is poor or our finances are uncertain. Whatever the difficulties, they affect all of us at some point in our lives, and the Bible states that this is inevitable (Job 5:7; Genesis 3:17; Proverbs 22:8). The Bible is the Word of God (Isaiah 55:11), written by God’s servants under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21) and provided as both a guide and an aide to our daily living.
How does the Bible comfort us? Perhaps the most important aspect of God’s Word is the promises that are contained within, promises that the Lord makes to those who are prepared to trust Him. It is these promises that bring comfort, promises that feed off the weakest spark of saving faith to provide the reward of comfort, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. There are many promises in the Bible that have to be combined with faith to be realized, for without faith it is impossible to please God, the provider of comfort in times of trouble (Hebrews 11:6; 2 Corinthians 1:5; Psalm 46:1).
Clearly, the promises of God cannot be appropriated in the same way by the unbelieving, with whom God is angry continually (Psalm 7:11). Nevertheless, it is because of God’s grace, through the work of regeneration that happens at conversion, that these promises are realized and become the very fuel that spurs His people on to greater faith and greater obedience. These things go hand in hand; we trust God’s promises, and He has promised to reward us accordingly with joy, peace, and comfort, intangible things that the world can never supply. One of the greatest ways the Bible comforts is Isaiah 26:3 (“You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you.”). Embrace it in faith, asking for the Lord’s help, and there will be no disappointment.
