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Bible discovery stuns12/31/2023 You'll continue by road to Ajloun, a town still dominated by the castle that was built here some 800 years ago. The theatre, temples, baths, and hippodrome are all well preserved, and there are some wonderful Byzantine mosaic floors from the early Christian period. The city's colonnaded streets are basically intact, as is the beautiful oval forum and the gateway built to commemorate the visit of the Emperor Hadrian. Founded at the time of Alexander the Great, Jerash flourished for around a thousand years as a trade center on the road between Damascus and Petra. Today you'll head north to discover one of the great Roman cities of the Middle East, Jerash. The Roman theatre is particularly impressive, as are the sculptures in the small museum. At that time Gadara was a major cultural and literary center, as well as a summer resort for wealthy Romans attracted by the serenity of these hills and the nearby hot springs of al-Hemma. Ancient Um Qais was known as Gadara, and it is under this name that the city is appears in the Bible as the site of one of Jesus' miracles. The ruins are set on an unspoilt hilltop looking down towards the Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberius) and across to the Golan Heights. Um Qais is among the most atmospheric Greco-Roman cities of the eastern Mediterranean. This mud costs a fortune in Europe, but in Jordan you can scoop it from the seabed and cover yourself with it! The blue water, the white salt-encrusted shore, and the red desert mountains also make this an outstandingly beautiful place.įrom the Dead Sea you'll drive north to Pella, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, and from here to the scenic Roman town of Um Qais. It is an unforgettable experience! The Dead Sea is the lowest point on the surface of the earth (some 400m below sea level) and contains mineral-rich muds that have been recognized since antiquity for their curative properties. "Rejoice, O Jerusalem and come together all you that love her.Today you'll head down to the Dead Sea and have the chance to float in its warm, intensely saline water. It moves beyond the pleasure of speculation into the purest happiness of encounter. This is a wonder more daunting and challenging than the most abstruse hypotheses of the most brilliant physical scientists. The Church goes "up" to Jerusalem in an earthly sense as a metaphor for moving toward the Heavenly Jerusalem which "has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb" (Revelation 21:23). Laetare Sunday in the middle of Lent is not so much an interruption of the penitential season as it is an encouragement not to lose the focus of Lent and life itself on the joy that God offers us in Heaven, where there is no time or space, as it was before the world began. The composer Gustav Holst may have employed some fanciful theology (theosophy) in giving personalities to seven planets in his famous symphony, but the "jollity" of Jupiter is a compelling metaphor for the joy of the saints. When we delight God by doing his will, his delight infuses his sentient creatures with joy. No human hypothesis can tell us what God alone can reveal: that he made the world and all that is in it for his delight. He humbly backed off when Lemaître told him that a physical hypothesis could do no such thing. In the sixteenth century, Cardinal Baronius said, "The Bible was written to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." In a moment of unguarded enthusiasm in 1951, Pope Pius XII said that Lemaître's theory proved the existence of God. Here one must be careful in attributing to physical science an explanation of the "why" as well as the "how" of creation, and theology - equally the highest science - must not confuse itself with physics. The scale and volume of this stuns the human mind, but at least if the mind cannot grasp this, it can acknowledge it, along with the fact that there was no time or space before that "moment." It fits well with the record in Genesis of the voice of the eternal and unlimited God uttering light and all consequent creatures into existence. Just weeks ago, scientists published evidence of the almost instantaneous expansion of all matter from an infinitesimal particle. Albert Einstein was slow in coming around to Lemaître's hypothesis of an expanding universe, now popularly called the "Big Bang" - a term that was first meant in subtle mockery, but then he commended it to further research.
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