Jordan Day 2- Friday

Day two rose with blue skies gleaming and the sun shining; it looked like a promising day for the students of JUC. Off we headed to the Amman citadel and museum where we were greeted with the first of the many, many columns we would be seeing this day.

The packed and crowded capital city of Amman

Courtney and me posing with a sweet statue face in the museum. See the resemblance?

Fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls!

This is the remnants of the "Balaam text". It actually talks about Balaam (see Number 22) and how he was a seer of the gods. It's cool when secular findings match up with the Bible...just more evidence in the truth of God's word.

We continued on to Jerrash-the city of a thousand columns. It was spectacular. It was different then all the other sights we saw because every time you walked up a new hill there was another amazing mess of columns and ruins to see. It seemed as if the columns would never end. Just a tiny picture of maybe, maybe a tenth of all the ruins.

We were in this theater with AMAZING acoustics. The bagpiper and drummer played several songs for us. Marcus even got a little bit of drumming time in...

Here's a better view of the theater

Me, Ash, and Kaytlin being silly at the very top of the theater

And then to Ashleigh and Kaytlins dismay, I insisted on our typical weird pose with the columns! What would a beautiful mass of columns be without us showing them a little love???

The Jabbok river was our next stop, and though not an amazing sight to see, it was a great place to talk about some insights from the Bible. The Jabbok river was possibly where Jacob wrestled with the angel. Dr. Wright shared about Jacob and how he is a great representation of us. We strive so hard to separate ourselves from the sinful men and women of the Bible. We read about them and laugh at the fact that God still uses them through all their screw ups, while all the while being so proud that we are better then them. We are so blind to think that. The truth is, we are Jacob- a clever deceiver, doing all that we can to better ourselves while God, in his grace and majesty chooses us to be his despite our selfish actions. The story of the Bible is our story. The stories of the men and women actually paint a shockingly realistic picture of our lives. It is only in our pride and foolishness that we see ourselves as somehow above these people. We are them. We are the ones God send his son to redeem. This class time was a good reminder.

We finished off the day at a "mystery" sight. We weren't allowed to read the sign and we had to explore the ruins and try to piece together what we were looking at, who built it, what time period it was from, etc. It ended up being Tyre, a pleasure palace from early AD

Dan high atop Tyre as the sun sets.