July 16, 2024 - Good Morning! It's Tuesday, July 16.
Last Sunday we had a mid-summer night's dream of a church fellowship featuring homemade ice cream. Are you old enough to remember the days when everyone had an ice cream "freezer"? It included a metal canister with a mixer inside called a dasher. You'd fill the canister with a creamy mixture, place it inside a wooden bucket, and attach a crank to the top. On the sides you'd throw in some ice and rock salt. Then you'd place a kid on top of this contraption and instruct them to turn that crank until they couldn't turn it anymore. That's when you knew the ice cream was ready. And it was SO good! I sometimes dream of the peach ice cream that my mom would make. Not many people have ice cream freezers anymore. Somebody told me that Walmart doesn't even carry them. I believe that this is a sign of the apocalypse.
And so that leads me to our theological question of the day. Is there ice cream in the Bible? You would think not, given that it was thousands of years ago, and was set primarily in desert regions. What would Bible characters know from ice cream! But you would be wrong - well, sort of. In Proverbs 25:13, it says this - "Like a snow cooled drink at harvest time is a trustworthy messenger to the one who sent him; he refreshes the spirit of his Master." It's thought that King Solomon wrote all or most of the Proverbs. And it's thought that the king had a summer palace in Lebanon. Well, there's a mountain range in Lebanon (and in Syria and Israel) called Mount Hermon. And on the peaks of this range there is snow during most of the year. The idea here is that the king would send his servants up to the top of the mountains to gather snow and bring it back to the palace. These "snow-cooled drinks" must have certainly been refreshing.
Perhaps more refreshing than Blue Bell. But not as good as old-fashioned homemade ice cream!
Meet you back here tomorrow,
Bro. David
dmathis@fbccenter.org
