Of Saducees and ...Sarah? Susan? Susette? Suzello?...

"I'm... not certain what I think of this experience, Mistress," a voice whispered beside her.  Vin paused, looking down as she realized she had begun idly scratching OreSeur's ears.

She pulled her hand back with a start.  "Sorry," she said.

OreSeur shrugged, resting his head back on his paws.

Mistborn - The Well of Ascension

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I got my Mini-Wheats today! I got there at 10, and there was still a couple of mini milk cartons left.   That made me happy, and that's all I have to say about that.

As I munched, I listened to John MacArthur's message on an interesting 'final spar' in the gospel of Luke, chapter 20.  The last time Luke records of anyone trying to trick Jesus by posing a question, the Sadducees were on the offensive.  Since they believed more strongly in Moses and the Mosaic law than in God, and denied both the existence of angels and the eventual resurrection of the dead, they came up with a startlingly bizarre scenario: a woman gets married to the eldest of seven brothers.  Her husband dies before they have children, so the next oldest marries her, as Jewish law dictated.  He, too, died before she could bear children, and so the next married her, and so on until all the men were dead.  Then, she 'mercifully' died as well.

Here's the catch: they asked Jesus who would then be her husband in Heaven, since, after all, all seven brothers had been legally married to her.  Obviously, they were trying to disprove the Scripture's promise of resurrection by reducing it to absurdity.

Jesus, however, tactfully flips their argument on its head.  He points out that, as resurrected beings, we will be 'sons of the resurrection', meaning our life is defined by that pertaining to our resurrected bodies.  As such, he says, there will be no marriage, much as the angels are.  Since there will be no more death, there will be no more need for creation of life.  He also points out to them that the man who they followed had referred to God at the burning bush as 'the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob'; all three long since dead.  He could not refer to God as being the God of a dead corpse; a corpse has no God, it has no soul, nothing to allow it to think.  God is a God of the living, and Moses referred to Him as the God of those who continued to live with Him as their God.  He basically set out undeniable evidence that the resurrection is, indeed, real as promised.  The Sadducees, after that, "no longer dared to ask him any questions", so good was His case.  Jesus had absolute knowledge of the Scriptures (He was, after all, the one who wrote them), and knew the meaning that was intended, instead of what the Pharisees and Sadducees tried to infuse into the words for their own purposes.

The main event of the afternoon was the Dawg Daze kickoff.  It was pretty much a giant social event that took place in the Husky Stadium field.  I never realized how cooshy football grass is until now.  Anyway, after running down a line of cheering first-year-program helpers, we got dragged around Kajabi-Can-Can style across the field and back.  Then we were shuffled into groups, broken up, shuffled again, and again, and again, and again...

Oh, and did I mention we met a whole bunch of people during that process that I won't EVER remember the names to after an hour? Honestly, how do you expect me to remember or make friends with people who I've only spoken to for all of ten seconds?  Aaaaanyway.  Finally, we did something really interesting.  We had broken up into groups of two, and we were told to start a rock-paper-scissors competition.  I lost my first round to... Lisa? Or was it Leia? I can't remember.  Then I followed her, cheering her on as she tackled another champion.  Having squarely beat him, he and his followers joined our entourage cheering for Liseia.  Leisa.  Bah.  And so on, and so forth.  Our group eventually got completely lost as our leaders were swallowed in the crowd.  Finally, after the champions realized they weren't getting much done when they couldn't even see each other, each got up on their group's shoulders, holding long-distance bouts with each other, leaving the crowd more confused about who to cheer for than before.

Soon, the remaining four champions were called up to the stage to hold the last four rounds.  Everyone picked sides.  I decided to cheer for Cameron Webster; I knew him from OC.  After all, I did take Physics all last year, with him as a lab partner in Spring! He finished in third, which was kind of a bummer, since the winner got an HDTV to put in their dorms.  Quite the prize! (I doubt we'd need nor want that in ours, though.)

To wrap it all up, we made the 'W' picture.  I'll see if I can get it up when it comes out on Thursday (or later, that's just the paper-date).

All-in-all, quite an interesting afternoon.  Tomorrow's when all the fun stuff starts, it seems.  If I'm feeling better, I could go to the 'Queer Bingo' session if I want to return to feeling nauseated.