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Before we begin, I need to provide a disclaimer.  Any attempt to speak of God the Father in human terms is inadequate.  He cannot be reduced to some sort of anthropomorphic representation.  It is not my intent now, or ever, to reduce God.  On the contrary, we are in our best places when we exalt Him.  On the other hand, He wrapped Himself in flesh in the person of His Son so that we could see Him more clearly.  Furthermore, He breathed of His very own Spirit into inanimate matter to create man.  He has, thus, presented Himself to us in both modes (spirit and flesh) that we might more clearly grasp His reality.  My position is that it is clear He wants us to know Him.  Herein, I will speak in fairly intimate terms regarding the ineffable.  In so doing, I can only address a portion of the topic.  The shortcomings in this treatment are my own, not His. God created.  Before anything was created, the Godhead was.  Because time was created along with the rest of the Creation, there was no time before time was created.  I say time was created because it wasn’t needed when there was only the uncreated Eternal.  Time and space were created with the rest of the Creation to give the Creation [...]

The patriarch Abraham, in early life known as Abram, is introduced to us in scripture in the eleventh chapter of Genesis.  He was the son of a man named Terah, who was a descendant of Shem, the son of Noah.  Abram’s place in the specified scripture amounts to a simple statement of his ancestry back to Noah, and is pretty straightforward.  At that point, beginning in the twelfth chapter, Abram takes center stage. Genesis 14 contains the story of the capture of Abram’s nephew Lot, along with a large number of the folks from Sodom, and Abram’s rescue of him.  After the description of the brief Babylonian campaign that resulted in the capture of Lot along with the people from Sodom, a messenger came to Abram to tell him of the events.  At that point, the word Hebrew is used for the very first time in scripture.  It was “Abram the Hebrew” who received the news and began the rescue expedition.  It was not one of the kings of the Canaanites who set out to rescue the hostages.  For example, the coalition had not captured the king of Sodom.  We would expect that king to raise the rescue expedition.  Or, it might have been another one of the Canaanite kings who was not directly affected by the raiders who [...]

By several different names, Shechem was an important city in ancient Israel.  In fact, Shechem is quite important today under the name of Nablus in the so-called West Bank.  Archaeologists disagree as to the exact location of the ancient city and whether the various cities built there are really different or were really just new manifestations of the same place.  It is for them, not us, to have these discussions.  But it was and is an important place. In the book, Birth of The Holy Nation, volume 1, we encounter Shechem as the original settling place of Abram when he first arrived in Canaan.  In volume 2, we will spend time there with Jacob and his sons.  Still later, when the Israelites had returned from Egypt, they went to a location between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerazim to renew their allegiance to the law of God.  These two mountains just happened to be near Shechem.  In the New Testament there was a woman of Samaria who encountered Jesus at a well near Sychar.  Sychar was one of the names given to the place of Shechem.  It’s interesting that the woman had come to the well of Jacob for water when she encountered Jesus.  For this encounter, He had placed himself at a well that had been dug by Jacob the [...]