Locked into that job for eight hours a day, five days a week 40 hours a week with two weeks' vacation each year. For most of us, it is then that we really begin to question, “Is this all there is?
I think missions influencers resort to militaristic tropes because, when it comes to the sharing of our faith, whether local or cross-cultural, we have a motivational problem. To get more believers ‘committed’ to evangelism, ministry, and missions, influencers too easily twist Scripture to promote a militant activism, casting the ‘great unwashed’, ‘pagan’, or ‘heathen’ as ignorant slaves of our enemy (sin, the powers of darkness, and the Devil) needing to be rescued (by force, if necessary, e.g. the burning building analogy).
Positioning freedom as a condition for the potential of spiritual elevation to become effective opens the complementary aspect of the concept of the "Kingdom of God" that I propose, compared to interpretations that speak of the "Kingdom of God" only as an inner moral reservoir with which we would have been equipped at our divine origin
The expression "I am the Lord your God" is repeated dozens of times in different contexts in the Old Testament, consistently understood as a declaration through which God asserts authority over humans, an authority infused into the nature of the Commandments
The effort spanning generations, from deep antiquity to the present day, to elucidate the Holy Scriptures, contemplate upon them, and attribute meanings finds its primordial literary impetus in the unity (or agreement) between humanity and divinity, established by verse 26 of the first chapter of Genesis