Just to help folks keep track, the static website -- also called Kiln of the Soul -- is now updated. I removed all the obsolete computer help stuff and added in the Bible Literacy course. There are also links to download the formatted word processer versions.
Wouldn't you know it? In the process I found lots of dead links, material I intended to link and forgot, etc. Please let me know if you encounter any errors.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Acts 5
A fundamental element in dealing with others is respect. This was part of what Jesus meant by loving your neighbor as yourself. Loving respect makes no presumption regarding what another does with what God has placed in their hands. We can offer advice. We can withdraw a safe distance if their choices threaten our own work. We can certainly pray for them, but we must assume only God can direct their choices in terms of Kingdom service. This Sword of the Spirit cuts both ways, though. No one claiming Christ has the authority to deceive you regarding anything at all. Respect assumes you can find your own way regarding material objects, but regarding information, as well.
The sin of Ananias and Sapphira was not in how they chose to dispose of property or proceeds, but in their attempt to deceive. They were seeking to claim a renown and respect not rightly due them. They wanted the community of Christians to believe they were doing what Barnabas had done, wanted a share of what they must have thought was his glory. They did not see how the glory went to God, and merely reflected off the life of Barnabas. The original sin of Satan was also an attempt to claim a share of God's glory for himself. This remains a primary threat to the Kingdom still, where people in the community of faith attempt to deceive others in order to gain things God has not apportioned to them. It is a very grave violation of the principle of respect, demanding by fraud something God has granted to others, a form of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit working in others.
The Holy Spirit cannot be deceived. While they owned the property, they could do as they felt God wanted. Once sold, they could use the money as they felt God wanted. Instead, they sought to buy cheaply the respect they could have freely gained by honesty. This sort of blasphemy against the Spirit threatens His work. At His discretion, God can decide you are no longer useful in this world, and take you home. There is a sin unto death. Were they simply fleshly people, their antics would be no threat. Ananias and Sapphira had already manifested the power of God's presence, but now were destroying that witness. They both died at God's own hand.
While knowledge of this did dampen some of the enthusiasm of those who might have considered too lightly joining this community of faith, the outsiders still found these people highly reputable. Not only was this a continuation of the massive healing ministry of Jesus, but it was multiplied by the several apostles, with Peter at the helm. The city attracted a host of folks traveling to be healed by the passing shadow of Peter, as they continued meeting under the Law in the Temple. But this was the Law as Jesus taught it, a complete revolution. The message condemned the current political leadership in the Sanhedrin, not so much directly, but by comparing them with what Jesus had preached. The healings and other signs supported this indirect condemnation of the Sanhedrin.
Luke is careful to remind his sponsor the High Priest and his entire cohort were Sadducees. This was a theological and political party known for secularism, a sort of cultural Judaism which compromised with pagan Rome for political and monetary gain. They were largely intellectual atheists, considering themselves the only people who really understood what was going on in the world. They dominated the Sanhedrin, but the opposing Pharisees were far more popular with the people. Yet both were at risk from this non-violent uprising. The Sadducees were particularly to blame for the decision to turn Jesus over to Roman justice.
So they had the Temple Guard arrest all twelve apostles, and put them in the peasants' jail overnight. God had other plans. He sent angels to escort them all from the prison, with a message to keep preaching in the Temple "this life" -- the way of living according to the Kingdom of Heaven, according to spiritual values and the power of the Holy Spirit. This they hastened to obey first thing in the morning. By the time the Sanhedrin got around to convening for the day, they found their prisoners had vanished. There was nothing to indicate the guards had done anything irregular, as they expressed genuine shock themselves the apostles were gone. During the consternation which followed, other guards came to report the apostles were back teaching in Solomon's Porch. This time, the officials chose to use gentle persuasion, because the crowd gathered there were entirely too supportive of the former prisoners.
The High Priest charged them with disobeying a lawful order to stop teaching in Jesus' name, along with attempting to bring the Sanhedrin into contempt with the people, essentially claiming the Court were all murderers. Peter answered the Sanhedrin might as well accuse God Himself of evil. The Sanhedrin were guilty of murder, the most shameful execution possible under Moses -- hanging on a tree or on wood. Yet God Himself raised Jesus back to life. Indeed, Jesus was now enthroned as God's Prince, and He was the sole venue for reconciliation with God. It would not matter what the Sanhedrin came up with in all their erudition and power, because the apostles were simply reporting what they saw with their own eyes. Further, the power of God Himself was present in the Spirit to support their claims.
At this point, the Sadducees were ready to execute the lot of them. Even as they began seeking ways and means, a very influential rabbi from the opposition Pharisee Party stood to warn them. After sequestering the apostles, this Gamaliel listed examples of the many popular Messianic cults rising during that time. Jesus was merely one of several who claimed to be the Messiah, but the only one able to heal and raise people from the dead, not to mention Himself. He was also the only one who didn't raise an armed force to unseat the Sanhedrin. He was by far the greatest threat simply by making them look as bad as they actually were. But Gamaliel recited how all the fakes died and their cults disbanded. If Jesus was also fake, the same thing would happen. If He was the Messiah, they would be fighting God Himself, as the apostles asserted. In the minds of unbelieving Sadducees, it was enough their subjects would see it that way.
So they ordered the disciples beaten according to the Law ("forty lashes save one") and threatened it would be worse the next time if they didn't stop teaching Jesus. It had the reverse effect. The disciples rejoiced they were worthy of suffering for Jesus' name. Here we take a moment to note their confidence was in Christ, but bore total humility regarding themselves. It was the highest privilege to be oppressed by the enemies of their Lord. This is not some perverse delight in stirring up trouble, as if they now had some ancient version of "street cred." They stood condemned by the exact same people who plotted to kill Jesus, and for the same exact reasons. The Sanhedrin saw them as a genuine expression of Jesus' teaching.
The sin of Ananias and Sapphira was not in how they chose to dispose of property or proceeds, but in their attempt to deceive. They were seeking to claim a renown and respect not rightly due them. They wanted the community of Christians to believe they were doing what Barnabas had done, wanted a share of what they must have thought was his glory. They did not see how the glory went to God, and merely reflected off the life of Barnabas. The original sin of Satan was also an attempt to claim a share of God's glory for himself. This remains a primary threat to the Kingdom still, where people in the community of faith attempt to deceive others in order to gain things God has not apportioned to them. It is a very grave violation of the principle of respect, demanding by fraud something God has granted to others, a form of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit working in others.
The Holy Spirit cannot be deceived. While they owned the property, they could do as they felt God wanted. Once sold, they could use the money as they felt God wanted. Instead, they sought to buy cheaply the respect they could have freely gained by honesty. This sort of blasphemy against the Spirit threatens His work. At His discretion, God can decide you are no longer useful in this world, and take you home. There is a sin unto death. Were they simply fleshly people, their antics would be no threat. Ananias and Sapphira had already manifested the power of God's presence, but now were destroying that witness. They both died at God's own hand.
While knowledge of this did dampen some of the enthusiasm of those who might have considered too lightly joining this community of faith, the outsiders still found these people highly reputable. Not only was this a continuation of the massive healing ministry of Jesus, but it was multiplied by the several apostles, with Peter at the helm. The city attracted a host of folks traveling to be healed by the passing shadow of Peter, as they continued meeting under the Law in the Temple. But this was the Law as Jesus taught it, a complete revolution. The message condemned the current political leadership in the Sanhedrin, not so much directly, but by comparing them with what Jesus had preached. The healings and other signs supported this indirect condemnation of the Sanhedrin.
Luke is careful to remind his sponsor the High Priest and his entire cohort were Sadducees. This was a theological and political party known for secularism, a sort of cultural Judaism which compromised with pagan Rome for political and monetary gain. They were largely intellectual atheists, considering themselves the only people who really understood what was going on in the world. They dominated the Sanhedrin, but the opposing Pharisees were far more popular with the people. Yet both were at risk from this non-violent uprising. The Sadducees were particularly to blame for the decision to turn Jesus over to Roman justice.
So they had the Temple Guard arrest all twelve apostles, and put them in the peasants' jail overnight. God had other plans. He sent angels to escort them all from the prison, with a message to keep preaching in the Temple "this life" -- the way of living according to the Kingdom of Heaven, according to spiritual values and the power of the Holy Spirit. This they hastened to obey first thing in the morning. By the time the Sanhedrin got around to convening for the day, they found their prisoners had vanished. There was nothing to indicate the guards had done anything irregular, as they expressed genuine shock themselves the apostles were gone. During the consternation which followed, other guards came to report the apostles were back teaching in Solomon's Porch. This time, the officials chose to use gentle persuasion, because the crowd gathered there were entirely too supportive of the former prisoners.
The High Priest charged them with disobeying a lawful order to stop teaching in Jesus' name, along with attempting to bring the Sanhedrin into contempt with the people, essentially claiming the Court were all murderers. Peter answered the Sanhedrin might as well accuse God Himself of evil. The Sanhedrin were guilty of murder, the most shameful execution possible under Moses -- hanging on a tree or on wood. Yet God Himself raised Jesus back to life. Indeed, Jesus was now enthroned as God's Prince, and He was the sole venue for reconciliation with God. It would not matter what the Sanhedrin came up with in all their erudition and power, because the apostles were simply reporting what they saw with their own eyes. Further, the power of God Himself was present in the Spirit to support their claims.
At this point, the Sadducees were ready to execute the lot of them. Even as they began seeking ways and means, a very influential rabbi from the opposition Pharisee Party stood to warn them. After sequestering the apostles, this Gamaliel listed examples of the many popular Messianic cults rising during that time. Jesus was merely one of several who claimed to be the Messiah, but the only one able to heal and raise people from the dead, not to mention Himself. He was also the only one who didn't raise an armed force to unseat the Sanhedrin. He was by far the greatest threat simply by making them look as bad as they actually were. But Gamaliel recited how all the fakes died and their cults disbanded. If Jesus was also fake, the same thing would happen. If He was the Messiah, they would be fighting God Himself, as the apostles asserted. In the minds of unbelieving Sadducees, it was enough their subjects would see it that way.
So they ordered the disciples beaten according to the Law ("forty lashes save one") and threatened it would be worse the next time if they didn't stop teaching Jesus. It had the reverse effect. The disciples rejoiced they were worthy of suffering for Jesus' name. Here we take a moment to note their confidence was in Christ, but bore total humility regarding themselves. It was the highest privilege to be oppressed by the enemies of their Lord. This is not some perverse delight in stirring up trouble, as if they now had some ancient version of "street cred." They stood condemned by the exact same people who plotted to kill Jesus, and for the same exact reasons. The Sanhedrin saw them as a genuine expression of Jesus' teaching.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Servant's Frustration
The only part about carrying that sign around town which makes me feel silly is I can't do it 24/7.
Burning within me is the deep sorrow over seeing the sins of my nation. Any time we allow a government to view people as objects, we have become what the Apostle John called "Rome" -- the great, ugly beast born in the visions of Daniel. It crushes and devours without reason, never mind without any hint of righteousness.
And whole churches defend the torture, even if they don't refer to it directly. And I honestly expect the entire staff of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety to defend the trooper who felt his personal convenience mattered more than the life of an emergency patient headed to the hospital in an ambulance. When government becomes god, and some arrogance about "our great nation" becomes an excuse for unspeakable evil, you can see John was being really nice calling such churches "whore."
So I need to carry that sign through some churches, maybe, but they would surely miss the point.
It's not possible to put all that on a sign. Nor is it possible to make them accept even that brief little message. There's a large measure of frustration on the human level for me. I suppose if I really believed it would help, I might try making a sign I could beat people with, but that's the same sin as raping children and delaying ambulances. It makes people objects to be manipulated. Each face, including the torturers and bullies in all uniforms, are the reason Jesus died on the Cross.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Tribulation Report #032: Whom Do You Believe?
You can read about the latest Bilderberg Conference and perhaps get a hint what the elites have planned for us. The difficulty is not every attendee is an insider; some are just useful idiots. Babylon is not yet ready to reveal themselves in all their glory. Thus, there is some debate how things will go down. It would appear the US Dollar is doomed. The idea the depression here will be kept short over fears some attendees will lose too much money comports well with previous actions. The talk of one-world government, one bank, one this-n-that, is not the least bit surprising, though. While the people offering this report have proved fairly reliable in the past, each such report still must stand on its own.
Do some searching and you'll see how the Dow Jones Index has been manipulated lately. You can't trust that index. And while we know unemployment is soaring, the numbers officially reported will never show those who have given up, those who have accepted work offering far lower pay, or any other useful information. What you might be able to discern, though, is easily one in ten mortgages is now behind or in foreclosure. The primary reason would obviously be loss of income.
Yet, it seems here where I live, the electricity is still on, and the rates aren't increasing much. So far. Fuel prices are up to near $2.50 again. There are tankers lined up waiting to unload, but supply and demand are not what sets the price. It's under tight manipulation. Some food staples here have gone up with fuel costs. When I walk with my sign on the roads, the traffic still seems fairly heavy where one would expect it.
Still, we have a candidate for Supreme Court Justice who hates guns, is blatantly racist, and everything else to make certain narrow interest groups happy. We have new efforts to grant total control of the Internet to the Administration, at least in theory. I suspect the primary motive is to create yet-one-more new path to inspection and confiscation of computers, particularly those in private hands. There's nothing like the Internet's chaotic free information exchange to threaten hegemony. All the while many states are starting to bite back, and the federal power could easily evaporate, at least in theory.
And did you notice the IRS is reaping 1/3 less? So kiting more value-less dollars is going to insure our bottomless pit in DC will destroy the US currency even without much help from the Bilderbergers. You can't spend what you don't have.
There's only one sure thing: Jesus living in your spirit. You may have a tough time making use of His revelation in your soul, but so much as you have is more solid than all the stories out there. God's Word says America is doomed, for the obvious reason she ignores His Word. To the degree possible, our government has become Babylon. So walk with Jesus. Yes, that means you'll eventually have to take some abuse from government bureaucrats, as well as from other sources. We should hardly be concerned, as the early church in Jerusalem shows us. Our Kingdom is not of this world.
Do some searching and you'll see how the Dow Jones Index has been manipulated lately. You can't trust that index. And while we know unemployment is soaring, the numbers officially reported will never show those who have given up, those who have accepted work offering far lower pay, or any other useful information. What you might be able to discern, though, is easily one in ten mortgages is now behind or in foreclosure. The primary reason would obviously be loss of income.
Yet, it seems here where I live, the electricity is still on, and the rates aren't increasing much. So far. Fuel prices are up to near $2.50 again. There are tankers lined up waiting to unload, but supply and demand are not what sets the price. It's under tight manipulation. Some food staples here have gone up with fuel costs. When I walk with my sign on the roads, the traffic still seems fairly heavy where one would expect it.
Still, we have a candidate for Supreme Court Justice who hates guns, is blatantly racist, and everything else to make certain narrow interest groups happy. We have new efforts to grant total control of the Internet to the Administration, at least in theory. I suspect the primary motive is to create yet-one-more new path to inspection and confiscation of computers, particularly those in private hands. There's nothing like the Internet's chaotic free information exchange to threaten hegemony. All the while many states are starting to bite back, and the federal power could easily evaporate, at least in theory.
And did you notice the IRS is reaping 1/3 less? So kiting more value-less dollars is going to insure our bottomless pit in DC will destroy the US currency even without much help from the Bilderbergers. You can't spend what you don't have.
There's only one sure thing: Jesus living in your spirit. You may have a tough time making use of His revelation in your soul, but so much as you have is more solid than all the stories out there. God's Word says America is doomed, for the obvious reason she ignores His Word. To the degree possible, our government has become Babylon. So walk with Jesus. Yes, that means you'll eventually have to take some abuse from government bureaucrats, as well as from other sources. We should hardly be concerned, as the early church in Jerusalem shows us. Our Kingdom is not of this world.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Isaiah 47
God compares the future Babylonian Empire with a wife of royalty -- pampered, demanding and arrogant. God tells her the royal finery will be taken away, she will sit on the ground naked. She will be both widowed and bereft of children.
We know from history this Second Babylon (the city of the Tower was the first) lasted a mere three generations or so as the primary imperial power of the Ancient Near East. With each succeeding conquest in the Mesopotamian Valley claiming the vast literature archive of the previous, plus new additions with new patrons, this formed the core of pride. Here was the epitome of civilization, all that man had ever achieved, and presuming to be all that man could achieve.
This treasure trove of materials included all the most ancient magic texts they could find. Scripture does not deny there is power to be found in the dark corners of Hell. Yet God makes it clear it has no power over Him. With the centerpiece of Babylonian religion based on the more ancient Tower culture of astrology, there was little the stars could do to foresee or prevent God from fulfilling His promise to Israel. So weak was it, God compares it to a fire of stubble: Flaring very bright and hot for a moment, it quickly burns out leaving foul ash and no coals.
This was part of the image John had in mind in Revelation. The spirit of Babylon rises quickly, but has nothing behind it. All the glittering promises of comfort and ease, of great beauty and power, evaporate quickly when the time comes for the wrath of God to fall. Nations which adopt the path of Babylon cannot fulfill any part of God's Laws for Nations. Once that way is taken, the end comes rather soon.
Every generation sees one or more nations rising to great empire status, projecting their power far beyond their own borders. The power is based on feverish commerce. They trade is not the honorable provisions for life, but appeal to sinful lusts -- hedonistic pleasures, entertainment, luxuries, and a host of over-valued trifles. It lives off the backs of other peoples in other lands, producing nothing of real value itself. Instead, it becomes a bottomless pit, consuming all things. Worst of all is the trade in human flesh, the oppression and treatment of people as mere assets.
The nation which follows the path of Babylon does not live long.
We know from history this Second Babylon (the city of the Tower was the first) lasted a mere three generations or so as the primary imperial power of the Ancient Near East. With each succeeding conquest in the Mesopotamian Valley claiming the vast literature archive of the previous, plus new additions with new patrons, this formed the core of pride. Here was the epitome of civilization, all that man had ever achieved, and presuming to be all that man could achieve.
This treasure trove of materials included all the most ancient magic texts they could find. Scripture does not deny there is power to be found in the dark corners of Hell. Yet God makes it clear it has no power over Him. With the centerpiece of Babylonian religion based on the more ancient Tower culture of astrology, there was little the stars could do to foresee or prevent God from fulfilling His promise to Israel. So weak was it, God compares it to a fire of stubble: Flaring very bright and hot for a moment, it quickly burns out leaving foul ash and no coals.
This was part of the image John had in mind in Revelation. The spirit of Babylon rises quickly, but has nothing behind it. All the glittering promises of comfort and ease, of great beauty and power, evaporate quickly when the time comes for the wrath of God to fall. Nations which adopt the path of Babylon cannot fulfill any part of God's Laws for Nations. Once that way is taken, the end comes rather soon.
Every generation sees one or more nations rising to great empire status, projecting their power far beyond their own borders. The power is based on feverish commerce. They trade is not the honorable provisions for life, but appeal to sinful lusts -- hedonistic pleasures, entertainment, luxuries, and a host of over-valued trifles. It lives off the backs of other peoples in other lands, producing nothing of real value itself. Instead, it becomes a bottomless pit, consuming all things. Worst of all is the trade in human flesh, the oppression and treatment of people as mere assets.
The nation which follows the path of Babylon does not live long.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Heed the Call
Do I feature myself as some sort of John the Baptist? Silly, strange, and goofy I may be, but I am hardly deluded regarding the probable response rate to my sign-carrying efforts. While I would dearly love to see people respond en masse, that's not why I do it. I do it because I'm utterly certain God requires it of me.
In the back of my mind, I'm aware of the accountability factor -- once warned by my message, folks around here will have no excuse when they stand before God. That's in keeping with Ezekiel's Watchman (Ezekiel 3). By no means am I in a class with any prophet of God found in Scripture, but I am held to the same standards regarding my own nation. As with Elijah and Elisha and Jeremiah, I am aware my nation is doomed. That's not the point. I am accountable for the mission.
Further, I am accountable for acting on my own teaching. Having said as loudly as I know how, and repeatedly, how our evangelistic message is repentance first and foremost, I am walking in that -- literally. The emphasis is on offering the nation salvation under Noah's Covenant, whether as a whole or individually. Living in that is the starting place, the portal to finding Christ. Theoretically, folks could stop there with Noah and things would still be a lot better; in reality it's out of reach without Christ. The silly subconscious Platonic assumption we must not concern ourselves with "salvation" on an earthly level, lest we dampen our message of spiritual re-birth, ignores a lot of teaching by Jesus and the Apostles.
I am also aware this sort of activity drives me out to (if not over) the edge of credibility with a great many people. It most certainly has cut down on my computer time. This is not just a time emphasis, but I'm far less interested in things I once avidly read. My email traffic is now very low, and comments here are rather few. That's all to the good, insofar as it signals a real world ("meat space") obedience to the call of the Spirit. Not only is the Internet not my home, but this fallen world itself is not my home. As much as anyone, I recognize how the Net breaks the strangle hold evil governments and others have had on free information. Still, it's just a tool. Getting a low response via the Net to my ministry is not in the least dissuading, however disappointing it may seem. I'm not posting on this blog to bring attention to myself, nor so much to my activities.
I'd much rather see evidence people are giving thought to what God calls them to do.
In the back of my mind, I'm aware of the accountability factor -- once warned by my message, folks around here will have no excuse when they stand before God. That's in keeping with Ezekiel's Watchman (Ezekiel 3). By no means am I in a class with any prophet of God found in Scripture, but I am held to the same standards regarding my own nation. As with Elijah and Elisha and Jeremiah, I am aware my nation is doomed. That's not the point. I am accountable for the mission.
Further, I am accountable for acting on my own teaching. Having said as loudly as I know how, and repeatedly, how our evangelistic message is repentance first and foremost, I am walking in that -- literally. The emphasis is on offering the nation salvation under Noah's Covenant, whether as a whole or individually. Living in that is the starting place, the portal to finding Christ. Theoretically, folks could stop there with Noah and things would still be a lot better; in reality it's out of reach without Christ. The silly subconscious Platonic assumption we must not concern ourselves with "salvation" on an earthly level, lest we dampen our message of spiritual re-birth, ignores a lot of teaching by Jesus and the Apostles.
I am also aware this sort of activity drives me out to (if not over) the edge of credibility with a great many people. It most certainly has cut down on my computer time. This is not just a time emphasis, but I'm far less interested in things I once avidly read. My email traffic is now very low, and comments here are rather few. That's all to the good, insofar as it signals a real world ("meat space") obedience to the call of the Spirit. Not only is the Internet not my home, but this fallen world itself is not my home. As much as anyone, I recognize how the Net breaks the strangle hold evil governments and others have had on free information. Still, it's just a tool. Getting a low response via the Net to my ministry is not in the least dissuading, however disappointing it may seem. I'm not posting on this blog to bring attention to myself, nor so much to my activities.
I'd much rather see evidence people are giving thought to what God calls them to do.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Kiln News, Memorial Day 2009
The entire booklet, From Darkness to Light, A Course in Biblical Literacy is now complete. I have prepared a copy in OpenOffice format (136 KB) and in MS Office format (584 KB), coming in at 55 pages. If you want either, I can email them on request. The HTML version will be online in a few days, I hope, but I'm toying with the idea of re-working the website itself. I can zip up the HTML archive for you very easily, and email that, as well.
I'm hoping tomorrow I'll have my first sign ready for the call to repentance. The plan is to use my hiking talent for carrying a sign along the major thoroughfares in the county where I live. I'm working from a set of 4-inch letter stencils, and the message will be pretty simple. On one side: "Repent, America!" On the other side: "God's wrath is upon us." I'll carry copies of the pamphlet in case anyone wants an explanation. Naturally, I'm always willing to stop and talk, but I honestly don't expect too much of that. I'll be keeping track of this particular ministry on my other blog.
The logic behind this is rather simple. It's not possible to replicate the entire cultural and technological setting in which the First Century church operated. These days we do not have the common central community plaza or market square where folks are encouraged to share their news, or new message. Knocking door-to-door was never a part of the biblical method. In today's world, we are limited to broadcast (hopelessly corrupt), distributed printed media (ditto), the Internet (too much noise), or something which requires imagination.
It's hardly new to have folks waving signs, particularly in protests and other forms of agitation for public attention. In most towns I'm sure there are the folks who hold up their gospel signs, but I'm not too impressed with what I've seen. Most of the men doing this appear the same as the panhandling derelicts along Interstate ramps or other congested traffic spots. Often the signs are entirely too wordy, and often they contain messages I find theologically offensive. Too many are simply confrontational and a few are downright rude and unfriendly.
The one thing left to me making any sense at all is walking quietly along the public roads, stopping only when someone asks to discuss my task, or anything else for that matter. The sign will speak for itself, as will the lettering on my t-shirts. Short and sweet is a crucial element in such signs. It has to transmit the message in a couple of seconds. I'm meeting people where they are, with short attention spans, hurrying along in their cars or shopping, etc. God is the one who gets their attention; it's His alone to make the message seen and felt. I am simply the messenger.
I'm hoping tomorrow I'll have my first sign ready for the call to repentance. The plan is to use my hiking talent for carrying a sign along the major thoroughfares in the county where I live. I'm working from a set of 4-inch letter stencils, and the message will be pretty simple. On one side: "Repent, America!" On the other side: "God's wrath is upon us." I'll carry copies of the pamphlet in case anyone wants an explanation. Naturally, I'm always willing to stop and talk, but I honestly don't expect too much of that. I'll be keeping track of this particular ministry on my other blog.
The logic behind this is rather simple. It's not possible to replicate the entire cultural and technological setting in which the First Century church operated. These days we do not have the common central community plaza or market square where folks are encouraged to share their news, or new message. Knocking door-to-door was never a part of the biblical method. In today's world, we are limited to broadcast (hopelessly corrupt), distributed printed media (ditto), the Internet (too much noise), or something which requires imagination.
It's hardly new to have folks waving signs, particularly in protests and other forms of agitation for public attention. In most towns I'm sure there are the folks who hold up their gospel signs, but I'm not too impressed with what I've seen. Most of the men doing this appear the same as the panhandling derelicts along Interstate ramps or other congested traffic spots. Often the signs are entirely too wordy, and often they contain messages I find theologically offensive. Too many are simply confrontational and a few are downright rude and unfriendly.
The one thing left to me making any sense at all is walking quietly along the public roads, stopping only when someone asks to discuss my task, or anything else for that matter. The sign will speak for itself, as will the lettering on my t-shirts. Short and sweet is a crucial element in such signs. It has to transmit the message in a couple of seconds. I'm meeting people where they are, with short attention spans, hurrying along in their cars or shopping, etc. God is the one who gets their attention; it's His alone to make the message seen and felt. I am simply the messenger.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Acts 4
Worship in the Temple had not been that lively for quite some time. The man born lame had caused quite a scene. When the man stood with Peter and John in Solomon's Porch, a crowd gathered and Peter preached a sermon. However, the crowd was noisy and seemed to grow by the moment. This was not a good thing in the eyes of the Temple guards. Crowds might get out of control and do bad things which would upset the precarious balance between Rome and the Jews' few remaining freedoms.
They first listened to the message Peter preached, and found he was expounding on the rebellious rabbi recently executed, Jesus of Nazareth, claiming He had risen from the dead. For the Sadducees, the political party which included the ruling High Priest and the priestly families, this challenged their assertion there was no afterlife and certainly no resurrection from the dead. For the Scribes and Pharisees, it was a promotion of Jesus as Messiah, which they could never allow. Since by now it was nearly dark, they arrested the trio and held them in custody overnight.
We don't know the occasion, but the entire extended household of the ruling priestly families were in Jerusalem, so virtually every possible member of the Sanhedrin, plus a large number of other political heavyweights, gathered the next morning for a hearing. They demanded Peter and John, standing with the formerly lame beggar, confess on whose authority this disturbance took place. Peter had no trouble answering directly. He wondered aloud why they were bothered with a man's healing, but it was in the name of Jesus the Messiah, from Nazareth. Peter pointedly notes the Sanhedrin were guilty of having Jesus executed, but God raised Him from the dead. Had the Sanhedrin produced the dead body of Jesus, or even firm testimony from a sergeant of the Temple Guard where the body lay, it would have been pretty simple business. Instead, they face Peter, who says Jesus is the one they found flawed, but which God chose as the foundation of His work.
In Palestine, most structures were built on sloping stony ground. The most common way to prevent slippage of stone structures was to cut into the hillside, place a massive block which tilted back into the soil, then place the rest of the stones up the slope against this immovable block. Were any cracks visible, it could not be used, since it bore the weight of the entire structure. Jesus was God's Chosen, the one and only name by which any man could approach God for reconciliation. He was the one and final offering for sin.
Both Peter and John spoke with a Galilean accent, the speech of country bumpkins in their day. Educated men would cultivate the refined speech pattern of the priests. Further, genuine rabbis would always speak in a certain predictable fashion, giving verbal footnotes every sentence or two, which made it hard for peasants to follow. These guys simply asserted the truth, as if it were self-evident. They were just laymen, yet clearly not boasting nonsense. They sounded just like Jesus had. There stood the man, and none of the three were the least bit cowed by the number or appearance of the whole governing class of Israel arrayed before them.
The trio were led out of the hall while the Sanhedrin conferred over the situation. There was nothing they could do about the miracle; it was all over town by now. Notice they do not at all address the central claim of Peter and John about Jesus risen from the dead. Instead, they agree the preachers had to be silenced about the name of Jesus. Called back in, Peter and John were threatened. The two were not impressed, because they answered the command was at conflict with God's command. Whom did the Sanhedrin expect them to obey? Another threat served no purpose, and punishment was simply out of the question. There was no trumped up charge as they had against Jesus, and these two were at least as popular. A man over forty healed of lameness from birth -- this was not something the Sanhedrin could hush up quickly.
Upon release, Peter and John reported back to the swelling congregation of disciples in Jerusalem. Luke records a lovely prayer which contains no hint of fear, but a request for even more boldness, and more signs and wonders by the name of Jesus. We should assume that prayer was granted, for there was a sign in the shaking of the building itself. Further, they were all so bursting with spiritual power they had no trouble speaking boldly.
The primary manifestation in the several thousand members of the group was a divine sense of oneness. As noted previously, these people had turned away from their earthly identity as Jews to the heavenly identity as True Jews. They no longer cared much for the trappings of this life, and regarded it all as the means to bringing more glory to the name of Jesus. So selling their property holdings was no challenge at all, and giving away the proceeds was such a release from the cares of this world. There was plenty of money for just about anything anyone really needed to keep going, to keep telling the story of Jesus. One fellow in particular sold a very large estate. His name was Joses Barnabas, "Son of Encouragement." He was from the Tribe of Levi, and wealth was typical for them. What a contrast to the Sanhedrin, and what a testimony it was to the growing church in Jerusalem!
They first listened to the message Peter preached, and found he was expounding on the rebellious rabbi recently executed, Jesus of Nazareth, claiming He had risen from the dead. For the Sadducees, the political party which included the ruling High Priest and the priestly families, this challenged their assertion there was no afterlife and certainly no resurrection from the dead. For the Scribes and Pharisees, it was a promotion of Jesus as Messiah, which they could never allow. Since by now it was nearly dark, they arrested the trio and held them in custody overnight.
We don't know the occasion, but the entire extended household of the ruling priestly families were in Jerusalem, so virtually every possible member of the Sanhedrin, plus a large number of other political heavyweights, gathered the next morning for a hearing. They demanded Peter and John, standing with the formerly lame beggar, confess on whose authority this disturbance took place. Peter had no trouble answering directly. He wondered aloud why they were bothered with a man's healing, but it was in the name of Jesus the Messiah, from Nazareth. Peter pointedly notes the Sanhedrin were guilty of having Jesus executed, but God raised Him from the dead. Had the Sanhedrin produced the dead body of Jesus, or even firm testimony from a sergeant of the Temple Guard where the body lay, it would have been pretty simple business. Instead, they face Peter, who says Jesus is the one they found flawed, but which God chose as the foundation of His work.
In Palestine, most structures were built on sloping stony ground. The most common way to prevent slippage of stone structures was to cut into the hillside, place a massive block which tilted back into the soil, then place the rest of the stones up the slope against this immovable block. Were any cracks visible, it could not be used, since it bore the weight of the entire structure. Jesus was God's Chosen, the one and only name by which any man could approach God for reconciliation. He was the one and final offering for sin.
Both Peter and John spoke with a Galilean accent, the speech of country bumpkins in their day. Educated men would cultivate the refined speech pattern of the priests. Further, genuine rabbis would always speak in a certain predictable fashion, giving verbal footnotes every sentence or two, which made it hard for peasants to follow. These guys simply asserted the truth, as if it were self-evident. They were just laymen, yet clearly not boasting nonsense. They sounded just like Jesus had. There stood the man, and none of the three were the least bit cowed by the number or appearance of the whole governing class of Israel arrayed before them.
The trio were led out of the hall while the Sanhedrin conferred over the situation. There was nothing they could do about the miracle; it was all over town by now. Notice they do not at all address the central claim of Peter and John about Jesus risen from the dead. Instead, they agree the preachers had to be silenced about the name of Jesus. Called back in, Peter and John were threatened. The two were not impressed, because they answered the command was at conflict with God's command. Whom did the Sanhedrin expect them to obey? Another threat served no purpose, and punishment was simply out of the question. There was no trumped up charge as they had against Jesus, and these two were at least as popular. A man over forty healed of lameness from birth -- this was not something the Sanhedrin could hush up quickly.
Upon release, Peter and John reported back to the swelling congregation of disciples in Jerusalem. Luke records a lovely prayer which contains no hint of fear, but a request for even more boldness, and more signs and wonders by the name of Jesus. We should assume that prayer was granted, for there was a sign in the shaking of the building itself. Further, they were all so bursting with spiritual power they had no trouble speaking boldly.
The primary manifestation in the several thousand members of the group was a divine sense of oneness. As noted previously, these people had turned away from their earthly identity as Jews to the heavenly identity as True Jews. They no longer cared much for the trappings of this life, and regarded it all as the means to bringing more glory to the name of Jesus. So selling their property holdings was no challenge at all, and giving away the proceeds was such a release from the cares of this world. There was plenty of money for just about anything anyone really needed to keep going, to keep telling the story of Jesus. One fellow in particular sold a very large estate. His name was Joses Barnabas, "Son of Encouragement." He was from the Tribe of Levi, and wealth was typical for them. What a contrast to the Sanhedrin, and what a testimony it was to the growing church in Jerusalem!
Friday, May 22, 2009
Lesson 42: Epilogue
The path from Darkness to Light ends only at Eternity. So long as we breathe on this fallen earth, we have not arrived. The objective of this course was not to get you there, but to help you find the path. That journey will ever reflect certain lessons we have learned.
We must cultivate a reliance on that spiritual faculty. It is not for detailed directions so much as shaping the process of decision making. Within each of us is implanted a core of commitment, brought to life by the presence of the Holy Spirit, the Person of Christ reincarnated inside us. A primary task is clarifying that core of commitment by sweeping away the layers of sinful deception planted there by Satan, using the context in which we live.
A primary element of defining that core of conviction is retraining our minds to accept input from the Spirit. That input cannot be confined to what we normally consider reasonable under the conditioning of our culture and society. Rather, we embrace a far older cultural matrix, the one in which God chose to reveal Himself, the culture He built Himself by the guidance of His divine hand. Sadly, our modern materialistic Western culture fights such a change of heart by slandering God's own biblical culture, calling it "primitive mysticism" and making the logic of Heaven seem illogical.
Our embrace of the culture of Christ will thus constitute a revolt against the world in which we live. It is a rejection of this world and all its treasures for that Other World Above, and treasures incomprehensible to this one. While we may attempt to explain Heaven and God in terms of this world, it is generally impossible. We are required to use the parabolic and symbolic language and logic of the Kingdom, knowing God alone can make that language and logic meaningful in the hearts of those He elects. All things for us remain a matter of responding to God's choices, for He alone initiates all things.
We are the servants of an Eastern potentate, a nomad Sheik of Heaven, for so He refers to Himself. There is much we will never know on this side of our Eternal Home, so we apply ourselves to His pleasure as best we know it. We do so in the promise He measures the desires of our will, and calls us "holy" on that basis alone, not on the basis of action or some mere change in our nature. The concepts of being and doing are both immaterial in light of His emphasis on commitment, and the incomprehensible paradox of His being the Divine Initiator of all things, yet holding us accountable for choosing His will.
Our message to the world is a call for repentance along the lines of the Code of Noah. Whether the Lord brings actual life to one dead spirit or another is beyond our knowing. It is for us, instead, to promote the path by which He has chosen to reveal Himself to all mankind, the path of embracing His Way in the symbolic Law of Noah. Our life as His emissaries requires we keep an eye to those Laws ourselves as the starting point to manifesting His power and grace. We understand the Laws are summed up in the call for undiluted devotion to Our Maker and sacrificial love for others. Our call to a damned and dying world is the loving call to repentance. While the ostensible promise of the Laws is a life here as peaceful as can be after the Fall, we keep in mind it merely symbolizes the full life of the Spirit and Eternity in God's Presence as His child.
This is the path Jesus trod on earth. We seek to walk in His footprints. Our desire is to reveal Him, to glorify His Name in all the earth. For this alone all human life continues to exist. Welcome to the path from Darkness to Light.
We must cultivate a reliance on that spiritual faculty. It is not for detailed directions so much as shaping the process of decision making. Within each of us is implanted a core of commitment, brought to life by the presence of the Holy Spirit, the Person of Christ reincarnated inside us. A primary task is clarifying that core of commitment by sweeping away the layers of sinful deception planted there by Satan, using the context in which we live.
A primary element of defining that core of conviction is retraining our minds to accept input from the Spirit. That input cannot be confined to what we normally consider reasonable under the conditioning of our culture and society. Rather, we embrace a far older cultural matrix, the one in which God chose to reveal Himself, the culture He built Himself by the guidance of His divine hand. Sadly, our modern materialistic Western culture fights such a change of heart by slandering God's own biblical culture, calling it "primitive mysticism" and making the logic of Heaven seem illogical.
Our embrace of the culture of Christ will thus constitute a revolt against the world in which we live. It is a rejection of this world and all its treasures for that Other World Above, and treasures incomprehensible to this one. While we may attempt to explain Heaven and God in terms of this world, it is generally impossible. We are required to use the parabolic and symbolic language and logic of the Kingdom, knowing God alone can make that language and logic meaningful in the hearts of those He elects. All things for us remain a matter of responding to God's choices, for He alone initiates all things.
We are the servants of an Eastern potentate, a nomad Sheik of Heaven, for so He refers to Himself. There is much we will never know on this side of our Eternal Home, so we apply ourselves to His pleasure as best we know it. We do so in the promise He measures the desires of our will, and calls us "holy" on that basis alone, not on the basis of action or some mere change in our nature. The concepts of being and doing are both immaterial in light of His emphasis on commitment, and the incomprehensible paradox of His being the Divine Initiator of all things, yet holding us accountable for choosing His will.
Our message to the world is a call for repentance along the lines of the Code of Noah. Whether the Lord brings actual life to one dead spirit or another is beyond our knowing. It is for us, instead, to promote the path by which He has chosen to reveal Himself to all mankind, the path of embracing His Way in the symbolic Law of Noah. Our life as His emissaries requires we keep an eye to those Laws ourselves as the starting point to manifesting His power and grace. We understand the Laws are summed up in the call for undiluted devotion to Our Maker and sacrificial love for others. Our call to a damned and dying world is the loving call to repentance. While the ostensible promise of the Laws is a life here as peaceful as can be after the Fall, we keep in mind it merely symbolizes the full life of the Spirit and Eternity in God's Presence as His child.
This is the path Jesus trod on earth. We seek to walk in His footprints. Our desire is to reveal Him, to glorify His Name in all the earth. For this alone all human life continues to exist. Welcome to the path from Darkness to Light.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Lesson 41: Reading Revelation
It seems everyone has their own idea about John's Apocalypse. What's sad is the people who most vociferously quote his warning about adding to the meaning of the book are those most likely to transgress it. Does everyone forget? John was a Hebrew man following Christ, who happened to be a Hebrew Messiah. The Hebrew people were meant to be God's message to the fallen world, chosen to reveal Him by the testimony of their life under the Law of Moses. They failed; they rejected that Law. By the time they realized the utter necessity of embracing it, they no longer understood it. They rejected the teaching of Jesus to bring them back to a clear understanding of it. So Jesus fulfilled the mission of Israel, by first fulfilling the Law of Moses. When He died on the Cross, Moses was complete, retired, ended. The right to claim the name "Israel" fell upon Jesus alone. He applied it to His followers alone, according to Paul. John's Apocalypse is called "The Revelation of Jesus Christ" -- another form of the gospel message.
John's Gospel tells the story of Jesus as a spiritual King claiming His domain. He only accepted volunteers as citizens, those who embraced His Covenant of Spirit. Revelation is the spiritual explanation of Jesus, not as to His teachings and actions, but as to His nature. As we have seen, no one can explain the Spirit Realm in human terms, so we use parable to indicate the Truth too great for words. The Apocalypse is parable first, a revelation of how God operates in this world.
At no place in the book does John propose to tell the future in concrete terms. Rather, he stands as the very last living member of the apostolic band of twelve who walked with Jesus as a close disciple. Among the Twelve, John knew Him best on a human level, Jesus' closest pal. He was uniquely qualified to reveal Jesus to the world on His own terms. During a time of suffering, John fled into the Spirit Realm where things really mattered, leaving his fleshly life behind the in Lower Realm. In this condition, John saw a vision of heavenly things, things which no human tongue can tell. Using the only thing John knew from his life as a true Hebrew of God, he revealed in parable what was coming during that time between his own fleshly demise and the end of this world as we know it. John saw the world as we must know it; he wrote this message to his churches so they would know how to live after he died. If we do not grasp what he was telling his congregation for their lives in that day, we have zero comprehension of the book.
He begins by measuring some churches over which he was Senior Pastor, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses to symbolize for all time the many ways a congregation can go wrong or right. Real churches, real flaws, symbolic meaning. He then describes things in Heaven with a focus on what matters to believers living here below. He then describes how God would act in this world in the coming space of time before the Lord's return -- during that whole time, not just one tiny slice of it. He tells us three times over how sin would increase, God's wrath would increase, and hearts would harden yet more. It's a series of conceptual revelations repeating in a cycle three times, each cycle told from a different perspective. There are a mixture of other visions pointing out the context of things in Heaven using the same parabolic-symbolic description. Reading this with an eye to literal meaning is a rejection of what John wrote. It is demanding something John could not and would not have offered.
There are no secret clues; there is a large body of parabolic literature in the Old Testament offering plenty of explanation. That explanation remains out of reach until you understand the culture from which it arises. Some things you need to understand about Hebrew writing:
Finally, it's critical to understand John pointed out for his readers how utterly unreliable is human government. The only thing you can count is government running from bad to worse, and your problems with government and society at large will only get worse as your holiness increases. Not just the Rome of John's day, but every government in human history has rejected God's demand to obey Noah's Covenant. Instead, they always have, and always will, reject such constraints. In the end, government will strive to compromise the church. Government loves nothing but power, and will attempt to take the place of God at every opportunity. It will always ally with Babylon, the worldly merchant kingdom of evil. Materialism is the path to failure for every believer. Never trust anything anchored in this Lower Realm.
The Book of Revelation is John's Other Gospel. It is so intensely other-worldly, it's hard to imagine how so many who claim the name of Jesus demand we read it with a worldly understanding.
John's Gospel tells the story of Jesus as a spiritual King claiming His domain. He only accepted volunteers as citizens, those who embraced His Covenant of Spirit. Revelation is the spiritual explanation of Jesus, not as to His teachings and actions, but as to His nature. As we have seen, no one can explain the Spirit Realm in human terms, so we use parable to indicate the Truth too great for words. The Apocalypse is parable first, a revelation of how God operates in this world.
At no place in the book does John propose to tell the future in concrete terms. Rather, he stands as the very last living member of the apostolic band of twelve who walked with Jesus as a close disciple. Among the Twelve, John knew Him best on a human level, Jesus' closest pal. He was uniquely qualified to reveal Jesus to the world on His own terms. During a time of suffering, John fled into the Spirit Realm where things really mattered, leaving his fleshly life behind the in Lower Realm. In this condition, John saw a vision of heavenly things, things which no human tongue can tell. Using the only thing John knew from his life as a true Hebrew of God, he revealed in parable what was coming during that time between his own fleshly demise and the end of this world as we know it. John saw the world as we must know it; he wrote this message to his churches so they would know how to live after he died. If we do not grasp what he was telling his congregation for their lives in that day, we have zero comprehension of the book.
He begins by measuring some churches over which he was Senior Pastor, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses to symbolize for all time the many ways a congregation can go wrong or right. Real churches, real flaws, symbolic meaning. He then describes things in Heaven with a focus on what matters to believers living here below. He then describes how God would act in this world in the coming space of time before the Lord's return -- during that whole time, not just one tiny slice of it. He tells us three times over how sin would increase, God's wrath would increase, and hearts would harden yet more. It's a series of conceptual revelations repeating in a cycle three times, each cycle told from a different perspective. There are a mixture of other visions pointing out the context of things in Heaven using the same parabolic-symbolic description. Reading this with an eye to literal meaning is a rejection of what John wrote. It is demanding something John could not and would not have offered.
There are no secret clues; there is a large body of parabolic literature in the Old Testament offering plenty of explanation. That explanation remains out of reach until you understand the culture from which it arises. Some things you need to understand about Hebrew writing:
- Some passages are more parabolic than others. While there is a place for recounting literal details, that will not reveal truth. Truth is symbolic because it is so far above our fallen minds. It must be cloaked from the dead spirits of fallen men, but the Holy Spirit can use it speak to our hearts (our wills) and cause us to know how to obey the Truth. The biblical narrative is designed to give an impression, to make an impact, not to convey simple facts.
- Symbols are fuzzy, and their meaning can shift with the context. At no time should the reader assume a given symbol is precisely the same in every context. In one place Israel is an olive tree, and a fig tree or a vineyard in another. In Hebrew thinking, context is everything; holistic thinking is the basic assumption at every turn.
- It is guaranteed you will never get every question answered until Eternity. Our divine Nomadic Sheik of Heaven maintains some mysteries to keep us dependent on Him. One of the strongest elements in Eve's temptation was to know all God's secrets -- "you will be like God, knowing good and evil." You should delight in knowing you don't have to understand it all. Your only concern is obedience.
- It matters not a whit what you are in the sense of being, nor does it matter so much what you do, but what you desire. To what are you committed? To what will you always turn when confronted with a storm of confusion? Compare that with your vested calling, your place in God's plans as you know them. Where there is an inconsistency between His calling and your desires, you need to repent and ask for mercy to cleanse your sinful desires, which amounts to disloyalty.
- Some specific concrete actions are required because of what they symbolize. Baptism in New Testament preaching was a well known, long established ritual of cleansing. It was required for following Jesus in the sense you weren't following Him without it. He observed that ritual Himself without any spiritual need at all, but did so because of what it said to the world. It changed Him not at all, but changed what the world knew of God.
Finally, it's critical to understand John pointed out for his readers how utterly unreliable is human government. The only thing you can count is government running from bad to worse, and your problems with government and society at large will only get worse as your holiness increases. Not just the Rome of John's day, but every government in human history has rejected God's demand to obey Noah's Covenant. Instead, they always have, and always will, reject such constraints. In the end, government will strive to compromise the church. Government loves nothing but power, and will attempt to take the place of God at every opportunity. It will always ally with Babylon, the worldly merchant kingdom of evil. Materialism is the path to failure for every believer. Never trust anything anchored in this Lower Realm.
The Book of Revelation is John's Other Gospel. It is so intensely other-worldly, it's hard to imagine how so many who claim the name of Jesus demand we read it with a worldly understanding.
Treaties and Covenants: US Sin
It matters not whether a treaty signed by the US is good or evil in itself, if we sign and do not later make an official break with that treaty, God treats it as a covenant. God does not take lightly covenants on this earth, and backs them by His divine power.
The US signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and that's a covenant before God. We are now violating that treaty. As Mike Rivero notes:
We are allowing Israel to seduce into us sin against the very same God most Christians claim has rebuilt the modern Nation of Israel. To imagine God wants to us to violate a covenant to satisfy evil desires is utter foolishness. By the way, the biblical definition of "fool" is one who rejects God's viewpoint.
The US signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and that's a covenant before God. We are now violating that treaty. As Mike Rivero notes:
The United States is breaking a major treaty here. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, WHICH IRAN HAS SIGNED ALONG WITH THE UNITED STATES, Iran has the right under international law to build nuclear power stations and to make the fuel rods for them. Indeed, under article IV of that treaty, the United States is obligated to help Iran build those facilities, which would be a perfect way to make sure that it is only a power station. The IAEA inspectors have repeatedly confirmed that all they can find is a power station under construction.
The US is breaking this treaty obligation at the behest of Israel, a nation which has NOT signed the NNPT nor allows inspections of its nuclear facilities, even though it is well known Israel has been developing nuclear weapons underneath their facility at Dimona.
It should be pointed out that Israel made the same accusations against Iraq as it now makes against Iran, leading to Israel's bombing of the power station at Osirik. Following the invasion of 2003, and about the same time it was confirmed that there never had been any WMDs in Iraq (despite all the confessions under torture to the contrary), IAEA inspectors visiting the ruins of the Osirik reactor confirmed that it had been a power station and ONLY a power station.
So why is the US Government willing to break a major treaty on the word of Israel, whose prior record for accuracy is ... zero?
We are allowing Israel to seduce into us sin against the very same God most Christians claim has rebuilt the modern Nation of Israel. To imagine God wants to us to violate a covenant to satisfy evil desires is utter foolishness. By the way, the biblical definition of "fool" is one who rejects God's viewpoint.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Isaiah 46
Before Babylon every really amounts to much, Isaiah warns of her primary weaknesses. Like most pagan kingdoms, the Babylonians had a raft of deities and demi-gods. As empires came and went over that Cradle of Civilization, the Mesopotamian Valley, the names and apparent identities of gods came and went. It contributed to Babylon's fame as the world center of study of religions in ancient times. Her scholars could accurately assess what each god of the many nations demanded in various settings. Thus, Balaam was able to assist Moab regarding Israel's God during the last march toward Canaan Land before the Conquest under Joshua. Canaan called their chief deity Baal, which is more a title than a name, meaning "Lord" -- the same word people used to address the head of household, or any superior person. The Babylonian spelling of that word was Bel, which they considered the god of lower atmosphere (weather) and the dry land.
Bel was said to have a son, Marduk. His son was Nebo, Bel's grandson. Nebo was the patron god of science and academia. With the vast legacy of centuries of royal support for academia in Mesopotamia, Nebo was a major deity. It could easily be a Babylonian saying: "Knowledge is power." Babylon pioneered the use of scholarship in war, knowing so well the details of their enemies' lifestyles and gods. Even today the psychological effect on troops of targeted propaganda is recognized.
Jehovah was not impressed with these two deities. It was symbolic language to describe them as bowing and scraping to Him. He goes on to say they are actually nothing but hardware on which people lavished attention. Compared to Jehovah, who not only predicts the future, but controls it personally, these two famous deities of Babylon did nothing at all. You would think by now the people of Judah would have gotten this message. Isaiah rubs it in, over and over. The reason is they did not get it. From the very beginning, even during the Exodus itself, they carried pagan deities. The very idea there was but one God alone was simply too foreign culturally. For all the scholars' knowledge, this was the primary weakness of Babylon. Since Judah continued to act as if there were other gods out there, there is a certain justice to letting them be conquered and exiled by a nation which knew the name of every deity mankind had ever worshiped.
Today we are less obvious about it. Yet we have easily as many false gods as Babylon, and equally the weakness exhibited by Judah. We keep turning to other things in our lives to which we invest our ardor and loyalty. We allow a host of activities to intrude on our proper service in the Kingdom. Sure, Judah returned from Exile without ever again raising another idol before God. Yet, they were ever raising up a false image of their own God. We are hardly any better today.
Bel was said to have a son, Marduk. His son was Nebo, Bel's grandson. Nebo was the patron god of science and academia. With the vast legacy of centuries of royal support for academia in Mesopotamia, Nebo was a major deity. It could easily be a Babylonian saying: "Knowledge is power." Babylon pioneered the use of scholarship in war, knowing so well the details of their enemies' lifestyles and gods. Even today the psychological effect on troops of targeted propaganda is recognized.
Jehovah was not impressed with these two deities. It was symbolic language to describe them as bowing and scraping to Him. He goes on to say they are actually nothing but hardware on which people lavished attention. Compared to Jehovah, who not only predicts the future, but controls it personally, these two famous deities of Babylon did nothing at all. You would think by now the people of Judah would have gotten this message. Isaiah rubs it in, over and over. The reason is they did not get it. From the very beginning, even during the Exodus itself, they carried pagan deities. The very idea there was but one God alone was simply too foreign culturally. For all the scholars' knowledge, this was the primary weakness of Babylon. Since Judah continued to act as if there were other gods out there, there is a certain justice to letting them be conquered and exiled by a nation which knew the name of every deity mankind had ever worshiped.
Today we are less obvious about it. Yet we have easily as many false gods as Babylon, and equally the weakness exhibited by Judah. We keep turning to other things in our lives to which we invest our ardor and loyalty. We allow a host of activities to intrude on our proper service in the Kingdom. Sure, Judah returned from Exile without ever again raising another idol before God. Yet, they were ever raising up a false image of their own God. We are hardly any better today.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Pamphlet for Evangelism
In the next few weeks I plan to spend some time hiking and biking with very plainly lettered t-shirts with things like: "God's wrath is upon us" and "Repent while you can" and similar blunt messages. I'll be doing the stencils myself and so forth.
To go along with this, I'll be carrying a few copies of a pamphlet. I've made an HTML copy you can see here. If you try to print it directly, it should fit on two pages. The idea is to do a two-sided sheet, folded and ready to hand out with my personal contact information in place of the italicized part at the bottom of the second page. If you hand it out, use your own info.
I have a copy of it in OpenOffice format, and could probably export it to MS Word if you like. Send me an email and I'll get it to you as an attachment. It's the sort of thing you can give to sinners and saints alike.
To go along with this, I'll be carrying a few copies of a pamphlet. I've made an HTML copy you can see here. If you try to print it directly, it should fit on two pages. The idea is to do a two-sided sheet, folded and ready to hand out with my personal contact information in place of the italicized part at the bottom of the second page. If you hand it out, use your own info.
I have a copy of it in OpenOffice format, and could probably export it to MS Word if you like. Send me an email and I'll get it to you as an attachment. It's the sort of thing you can give to sinners and saints alike.
Lesson 40: Reading the Letters
Ancient emperors often sent dispatches around their realms. Archaeologists have found archives or them in various places, and they offer a look at what rulers and their servants had to deal with from day to day. Sometimes you have to plow through some highly formal language to figure out what is actually happening. Personal letters were usually less filled with formalities and more to the point. The collection of letters in the New Testament vary across the scale from formal to personal. Each of them serves to indicate some of the things the early churches faced in feeling their way along as they embraced the Kingdom of Heaven.
Accepting God's offer of divine citizenship is unlike any other previous loyalty. Earthly rulers can claim undiluted loyalty, and attempt to police compliance in various ways, but our Heavenly Sheik can read your very soul. His claims on your loyalty carry a gravity beyond this world. In the Roman Empire of the First Century, with all it's lesser feudal principalities, embracing Christ was more than a mere change of mental assent among the many tolerated or secret religions, but a radical change to the very core of life itself. The implications were both cultural and political, affecting economics and social stability in a fallen world already rife with conflict. Secular government reacted variously, depending on how the local officials interpreted the changes in human behavior among new Christians. But the surrounding society often had its own, different reactions. In most cases, those who did not know Christ reacted with various degrees of hostility to what they perceived as a threat from traitors.
On the one hand, translating the gospel message into another language carried no small concern over the pool of meaning one might face trying to identify equivalent words and phrases. On the other hand, some elements of the gospel require a rejection of the cultural and legal customs which give that language meaning. Across the Roman Empire, and beyond, people were already familiar with Jews and their odd ways. Christianity was a correction of Judaism. That Christianity was both an extension of Judaism, yet somewhat a repudiation of it, only complicated things. In places where there was no Jewish presence as a point of reference, there were complications of having to start from scratch. Either way, the gospel of Jesus Christ still suffered the same limitations on revelation from the very beginning: Ultimate Truth in the Person of God is not easily told in human terms.
The Letters form a corpus of examples in how this task played out in the real world. What constitutes a revolt against the sins of this world, embracing a new conquering Emperor named Jesus Christ, and instituting the changes He demanded in His newly acquired domain ran the gamut from calm acceptance to mass slaughter of Christians. People understood inherently the pleasure or displeasure of gods and rulers, but embracing the Code of Noah and Name of Jesus, living by His Spirit, could not help shaking things up. The letters serve to restate in various contexts what it meant to live by that Spirit. People who had embraced the gospel were often a very long way from Noah and Christ. Nailing the old self to the Cross was very much a daily, hourly, momentary task.
To then go on in recruiting more people as new revolutionary citizens of the Kingdom raised all sorts of new disturbances. You will note there are no neat evangelism packages offered. You may well try to make nifty packages from the Letters, but that invariably limits you to whatever cultural audience was addressed in the passages from which you take your package. Evangelism was not about memorized sales pitches, talking people into making a decision. What a man can decide, he can un-decide. It was about living, and therefore speaking, the ultimate truth of things in whatever context you found yourself. Nor was it about measuring results; that was God's part in the matter. It was about making His Presence known. All our focus on doing and being misses the point. Paul writes in one letter we have a mind to decide, and a body to act with, but it requires a complete change of will -- a divine miracle birthing a spirit -- to become a follower of Christ. It's not some static change of being, but a living birth into an eternal desire to please the only Person who really matters.
Trying to use the Letters as a source of rules is utterly foolish. Nor are they merely expositions of propositional theology. They are concrete examples of how Truth changes all things. The Empire of Truth, the Sheikdom of Love, the Kingdom of Heaven pays no heed to human borders and national identity. Call yourself anything you like, but without that miraculous desire to please God Almighty, you can't be a part of Him. The human intellect cannot begin to parse the meaning of holiness and sin, but the living Word of God can sharply cut and divide what pleases God in every case.
Accepting God's offer of divine citizenship is unlike any other previous loyalty. Earthly rulers can claim undiluted loyalty, and attempt to police compliance in various ways, but our Heavenly Sheik can read your very soul. His claims on your loyalty carry a gravity beyond this world. In the Roman Empire of the First Century, with all it's lesser feudal principalities, embracing Christ was more than a mere change of mental assent among the many tolerated or secret religions, but a radical change to the very core of life itself. The implications were both cultural and political, affecting economics and social stability in a fallen world already rife with conflict. Secular government reacted variously, depending on how the local officials interpreted the changes in human behavior among new Christians. But the surrounding society often had its own, different reactions. In most cases, those who did not know Christ reacted with various degrees of hostility to what they perceived as a threat from traitors.
On the one hand, translating the gospel message into another language carried no small concern over the pool of meaning one might face trying to identify equivalent words and phrases. On the other hand, some elements of the gospel require a rejection of the cultural and legal customs which give that language meaning. Across the Roman Empire, and beyond, people were already familiar with Jews and their odd ways. Christianity was a correction of Judaism. That Christianity was both an extension of Judaism, yet somewhat a repudiation of it, only complicated things. In places where there was no Jewish presence as a point of reference, there were complications of having to start from scratch. Either way, the gospel of Jesus Christ still suffered the same limitations on revelation from the very beginning: Ultimate Truth in the Person of God is not easily told in human terms.
The Letters form a corpus of examples in how this task played out in the real world. What constitutes a revolt against the sins of this world, embracing a new conquering Emperor named Jesus Christ, and instituting the changes He demanded in His newly acquired domain ran the gamut from calm acceptance to mass slaughter of Christians. People understood inherently the pleasure or displeasure of gods and rulers, but embracing the Code of Noah and Name of Jesus, living by His Spirit, could not help shaking things up. The letters serve to restate in various contexts what it meant to live by that Spirit. People who had embraced the gospel were often a very long way from Noah and Christ. Nailing the old self to the Cross was very much a daily, hourly, momentary task.
To then go on in recruiting more people as new revolutionary citizens of the Kingdom raised all sorts of new disturbances. You will note there are no neat evangelism packages offered. You may well try to make nifty packages from the Letters, but that invariably limits you to whatever cultural audience was addressed in the passages from which you take your package. Evangelism was not about memorized sales pitches, talking people into making a decision. What a man can decide, he can un-decide. It was about living, and therefore speaking, the ultimate truth of things in whatever context you found yourself. Nor was it about measuring results; that was God's part in the matter. It was about making His Presence known. All our focus on doing and being misses the point. Paul writes in one letter we have a mind to decide, and a body to act with, but it requires a complete change of will -- a divine miracle birthing a spirit -- to become a follower of Christ. It's not some static change of being, but a living birth into an eternal desire to please the only Person who really matters.
Trying to use the Letters as a source of rules is utterly foolish. Nor are they merely expositions of propositional theology. They are concrete examples of how Truth changes all things. The Empire of Truth, the Sheikdom of Love, the Kingdom of Heaven pays no heed to human borders and national identity. Call yourself anything you like, but without that miraculous desire to please God Almighty, you can't be a part of Him. The human intellect cannot begin to parse the meaning of holiness and sin, but the living Word of God can sharply cut and divide what pleases God in every case.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Extra: More on the Laws of Noah
In the past, when discussing the Covenent of Noah, I've been told by a few people I must be making this up. Actually, this is something entirely solid in Hebrew history. Even under the mistaken notions of the Talmud, Jewish scholars today recognize it as quite ancient.
I usually don't care much for the way Wikipedia covers things, but this one is rather well done: Seven Laws of Noah. They are summarized thus:
It should be obvious the Jerusalem Council saw no need to restate 2, 3, 5 and 7. Blasphemy was too obvious, and the rest were covered under civil law already.
I usually don't care much for the way Wikipedia covers things, but this one is rather well done: Seven Laws of Noah. They are summarized thus:
1. Prohibition of Idolatry: You shall not have any idols before God.
2. Prohibition of Murder: You shall not murder. (Genesis 9:6)
3. Prohibition of Theft: You shall not steal.
4. Prohibition of Sexual Promiscuity: You shall not commit any of a series of sexual prohibitions, which include adultery, incest, bestiality and male homosexual intercourse.
5. Prohibition of Blasphemy: You shall not blaspheme God's name.
6. Dietary Law: Do not eat flesh taken from an animal while it is still alive. (Genesis 9:4)
7. Requirement to have just Laws: You shall set up an effective judiciary to enforce the preceding six laws fairly.
It should be obvious the Jerusalem Council saw no need to restate 2, 3, 5 and 7. Blasphemy was too obvious, and the rest were covered under civil law already.
Lesson 39: Reading Acts
In teaching Biblical Literacy, a major element is not so much what the text of Scripture says, but what it assumes. All along this path we have kept our eyes on the covenants of the Bible. It is not something easily understood in our Western culture, but was the very foundation of the Hebrew culture, not to mention of the entire history of the Middle East up to New Testament times. One of the hardest tasks the Apostles faced was helping Hellenized Gentiles absorb this very different way of seeing the world.
So we see an early Jerusalem faith community who finally understand the full meaning behind all the Covenant of Moses meant, and the utter idiocy of the Talmudic teachings. It was such a joyful discovery to be out from under having to please the Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes, who always had that ultimate weapon: "God said so." Now they knew God didn't say so, only their leaders did. They were free to recover the true meaning of living their national covenant. Jesus had just given it new life; how could it be dead?
As the disciples began to fulfill the command to take the message to all the world, they naturally began with those having a cultural affinity. More than Hellenized Jews dispersed around the region, this meant Samaritans, who didn't have a Talmud from which to disentangle themselves, but simply had to admit the Messiah was a real Jew. When it came to pious Gentiles who believed but didn't quite adopt the full requirements of the Law, who didn't see a need to fully adopt the national identity, it got sticky. It required miraculous direct intervention from God to make the disciples realize their Old Covenant was no longer the one true path to Him. In the tangle of assumptions and feelings, they struggled against centuries of racism. It seems this was the last item on which they would shift from a worldly to a spiritual understanding.
In the ensuing debate, the Christian leaders in Jerusalem remembered Moses was for their nation alone, but Christ was for all humanity. At the same time, there had to be real world implications for spiritual truth. Most Gentile cultures had their own peculiar barriers to faith, but the broader Hellenist influence carried serious dangers. The solution should not surprise us, if we have kept an eye on the covenants. The Apostles urged the new Gentile believers to embrace the Covenant of Noah. They did not call it that, but we can easily see that's what it was.
Noah had implications we have not yet pursued in our study. It was aimed at taming unrestrained sinful impulses, a gift from God to prevent mankind destroying themselves again. The Flood was entirely just. While the basic character of Noah is a call for civility, it is more than that. It remains consistent with Jesus' characterization of the entire Old Testament: unlimited loyalty to God and loving respect for others. The letter the Apostles composed breaks it down a little differently by making specific applications.
The first and most obvious requirement is withdrawing completely from pagan idolatry. This is translated variously in English texts of the New Testament, but it was more than just food. Paul makes it clear later it's not the physical reality but the perception of the watching world. There is one true God, and our loyalty to Him is undivided. Joining in pagan celebrations would compromise the impact of that witness. There were no details listed, but it was left to the conscience of the individual believers in their communities scattered around the world to prayerfully work out in each context what that required.
The issue of sexual purity went back before Noah. We who have seen the thread of revelation know God has consistently condemned sex outside the provision of lifelong commitment to building a family. This is easily tied to the call for civility and social stability, if not the very fundamental threat of compromise in the soul by the flesh. It's a special case of idolatry deserving special mention. If we have to start arguing about various sexual appetites for something outside the husband-wife pairing, we are already on the wrong ground. God granted only one provision for human sexual appetites, and there is absolutely no fundamental right to sex, much less any particular fallen desires for sex.
Meat with blood is paired with strangling as a single item. This is not a matter of what goes in your mouth, as Jesus noted, but of what comes out of your heart. Blood is a spiritual symbol going back to the Garden of Eden. It symbolizes the gift of life itself, and taking it lightly is the primary symptom of evil. It was the sin of Cain, and of Lamech, and clearly points back to the command we shall love and respect others equally with ourselves. Taking life is very serious business. It is required to keep civilization alive, but remains a heavy burden on government, not a privilege. Those who find it easy to harm others are the greatest danger to all human life. But that's not enough; a casual disregard of lower forms of life is also dangerous. Noah kept kosher long before it was codified in the Law of Moses, but the Lord said humans could eat anything they found edible. Animals were distinctly lesser beings, but God forbade under Noah anyone eating meat without draining away the blood, because it symbolized our acceptance of this still active Covenant of Noah. Nature itself will rebel against us if we do not obey and adopt the strict respect for life.
Acts shows us how God fulfilled His promise to redeem all Creation by redeeming the souls of mankind whom He had first granted stewardship of it all. The character of that stewardship changed through the curse of the Fall, through every step of revelation in covenants, and yet again in the sacrifice of Christ. Redemption today in His Blood is the down payment for the promise things will come full circle back to what Eden was meant to be. It is not possible before that day to intellectually understand it all. We are granted enough understanding to begin moving into that world. A significant element of that understanding includes growing in our minds the mind of Christ. His Spirit empowers this, but the mind must be ruled by the Spirit. A critical element in that rule is for the mind to build the path from darkness to light, and that path includes making the mind accept knowledge on spiritual terms.
For us today, even more Hellenized than those Mediterranean Gentiles, our biggest choke point is the mind's fleshly refusal to go along peacefully. Our culture has built massive barriers against a knowing which cannot be fully buried in concrete, as it were. Those in Palestine who came up out of Talmudic Judaism understood the mistakes of the Hellenizing influence on their grasp of God's revelation. Much of what followed, in the struggles of the early Gentile churches, reflects a parallel escape from their own blinding human traditions. But we have even farther to go, over both time and space, along with the cultural distance. What was true for the Jews and Gentiles in Acts is true for us today. The Cross is the starting point, but we have not yet fully crucified the old self as long as we cannot come out of the rationalist assumptions of fallen man's mind. Having found in our hands the hammer by which we crucified Christ, we now must hang onto it for daily use in conforming ourselves to the Kingdom of Heaven.
So we see an early Jerusalem faith community who finally understand the full meaning behind all the Covenant of Moses meant, and the utter idiocy of the Talmudic teachings. It was such a joyful discovery to be out from under having to please the Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes, who always had that ultimate weapon: "God said so." Now they knew God didn't say so, only their leaders did. They were free to recover the true meaning of living their national covenant. Jesus had just given it new life; how could it be dead?
As the disciples began to fulfill the command to take the message to all the world, they naturally began with those having a cultural affinity. More than Hellenized Jews dispersed around the region, this meant Samaritans, who didn't have a Talmud from which to disentangle themselves, but simply had to admit the Messiah was a real Jew. When it came to pious Gentiles who believed but didn't quite adopt the full requirements of the Law, who didn't see a need to fully adopt the national identity, it got sticky. It required miraculous direct intervention from God to make the disciples realize their Old Covenant was no longer the one true path to Him. In the tangle of assumptions and feelings, they struggled against centuries of racism. It seems this was the last item on which they would shift from a worldly to a spiritual understanding.
In the ensuing debate, the Christian leaders in Jerusalem remembered Moses was for their nation alone, but Christ was for all humanity. At the same time, there had to be real world implications for spiritual truth. Most Gentile cultures had their own peculiar barriers to faith, but the broader Hellenist influence carried serious dangers. The solution should not surprise us, if we have kept an eye on the covenants. The Apostles urged the new Gentile believers to embrace the Covenant of Noah. They did not call it that, but we can easily see that's what it was.
Noah had implications we have not yet pursued in our study. It was aimed at taming unrestrained sinful impulses, a gift from God to prevent mankind destroying themselves again. The Flood was entirely just. While the basic character of Noah is a call for civility, it is more than that. It remains consistent with Jesus' characterization of the entire Old Testament: unlimited loyalty to God and loving respect for others. The letter the Apostles composed breaks it down a little differently by making specific applications.
The first and most obvious requirement is withdrawing completely from pagan idolatry. This is translated variously in English texts of the New Testament, but it was more than just food. Paul makes it clear later it's not the physical reality but the perception of the watching world. There is one true God, and our loyalty to Him is undivided. Joining in pagan celebrations would compromise the impact of that witness. There were no details listed, but it was left to the conscience of the individual believers in their communities scattered around the world to prayerfully work out in each context what that required.
The issue of sexual purity went back before Noah. We who have seen the thread of revelation know God has consistently condemned sex outside the provision of lifelong commitment to building a family. This is easily tied to the call for civility and social stability, if not the very fundamental threat of compromise in the soul by the flesh. It's a special case of idolatry deserving special mention. If we have to start arguing about various sexual appetites for something outside the husband-wife pairing, we are already on the wrong ground. God granted only one provision for human sexual appetites, and there is absolutely no fundamental right to sex, much less any particular fallen desires for sex.
Meat with blood is paired with strangling as a single item. This is not a matter of what goes in your mouth, as Jesus noted, but of what comes out of your heart. Blood is a spiritual symbol going back to the Garden of Eden. It symbolizes the gift of life itself, and taking it lightly is the primary symptom of evil. It was the sin of Cain, and of Lamech, and clearly points back to the command we shall love and respect others equally with ourselves. Taking life is very serious business. It is required to keep civilization alive, but remains a heavy burden on government, not a privilege. Those who find it easy to harm others are the greatest danger to all human life. But that's not enough; a casual disregard of lower forms of life is also dangerous. Noah kept kosher long before it was codified in the Law of Moses, but the Lord said humans could eat anything they found edible. Animals were distinctly lesser beings, but God forbade under Noah anyone eating meat without draining away the blood, because it symbolized our acceptance of this still active Covenant of Noah. Nature itself will rebel against us if we do not obey and adopt the strict respect for life.
Acts shows us how God fulfilled His promise to redeem all Creation by redeeming the souls of mankind whom He had first granted stewardship of it all. The character of that stewardship changed through the curse of the Fall, through every step of revelation in covenants, and yet again in the sacrifice of Christ. Redemption today in His Blood is the down payment for the promise things will come full circle back to what Eden was meant to be. It is not possible before that day to intellectually understand it all. We are granted enough understanding to begin moving into that world. A significant element of that understanding includes growing in our minds the mind of Christ. His Spirit empowers this, but the mind must be ruled by the Spirit. A critical element in that rule is for the mind to build the path from darkness to light, and that path includes making the mind accept knowledge on spiritual terms.
For us today, even more Hellenized than those Mediterranean Gentiles, our biggest choke point is the mind's fleshly refusal to go along peacefully. Our culture has built massive barriers against a knowing which cannot be fully buried in concrete, as it were. Those in Palestine who came up out of Talmudic Judaism understood the mistakes of the Hellenizing influence on their grasp of God's revelation. Much of what followed, in the struggles of the early Gentile churches, reflects a parallel escape from their own blinding human traditions. But we have even farther to go, over both time and space, along with the cultural distance. What was true for the Jews and Gentiles in Acts is true for us today. The Cross is the starting point, but we have not yet fully crucified the old self as long as we cannot come out of the rationalist assumptions of fallen man's mind. Having found in our hands the hammer by which we crucified Christ, we now must hang onto it for daily use in conforming ourselves to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Lesson 38: Reading Jesus
You can't summarize Jesus. Yet, we do it every day we live claiming His Name. Jesus is as much as anyone can know about Jehovah. What Jesus said was what His Father had always said. God is Truth, and everything else is false. That is, saying anything different from God is sin, by definition. Saying anything other than Jesus is a lie.
A piece of fruit did not bring death into the world, but how can you discuss something which cannot be told? Jesus said the truth must be told in parables. He spoke often about the failed fruit of Israel. Satan told Eve God was not being totally honest, that hiding things from her could not be from pure motives. If it were a man, that would be true, but God is not man. The failures of humanity are not a part of Him, because He made all things. What He made reflects Him, but is not Him. It was not about trees and fruit, but what they symbolize. If you try to take God's place, or you try to bring Him down to your level, it's called "blasphemy" and it attempts to smear God with your own sin. The fruit of taking that path, which leads through every temptation, is death.
There is no doubt plenty which God does not tell us. What He does tell us is so hard to follow, there is no way to put it in words. It requires an extraordinary miracle just to make us care. What has been revealed is more than we can handle, because nobody has replicated Jesus, yet. One of the things never explained for us is why we are held accountable, yet it must be His choice whether we come to Him. Are we free to choose? Yes. Is it up to Him? Yes. Human logic cannot reconcile that, much as it cannot reconcile anything spiritual. He is God Almighty, Creator of all things, and you are not Him. You are accountable to Him.
When emperors of old went out to visit their subjects, soldiers went out ahead, carrying the emperor's symbol of authority. Among those soldiers was the herald, who spoke for the emperor whatever it was he wanted them to know. Primarily it was a warning he was coming, and would measure their loyalty. Loyal servants would naturally make him feel welcome, honored and loved. That required cleaning, painting, road repair, or if necessary, building new roads and accommodations from scratch. John the Baptist was the herald for the Emperor of Heaven. The Lord was coming, and those who didn't demonstrate sufficient loyalty would be counted as enemies. But instead of physical infrastructure, this Emperor of Heaven wanted to see lives cleaned and built up to welcome Him. He wanted that good fruit. If they failed to produce that fruit of the Spirit, they would suffer. John's call was, "Repent!"
After His ritual baptism at John's hands, Jesus took up the same call to repent, the same warning the fruitless trees would be cut down and thrown in the fire. John had explained in somewhat concrete terms what repentance looked like for various different groups, but made a point to denounce the Jewish leadership as having no clue, no fruit. Jesus noted the Jewish leaders were the cause of Israel having no fruit. They had twisted the Law of Moses so badly they had no idea what the fruit would be. They had poisoned the tree, making the fruit deadly. He willingly showed He carried the authority of the Law by bringing the fruit of the Law which was missing in Israel: prosperity, health, security. Wherever He went, there was no material needs unmet, no condition He could not heal, no demon He could not dispatch. Further, no one could harm Him until He permitted it.
He taught the truth behind the Law: personal loyalty to God without limit and humbly responding to His Creation with the respect He said it deserved. The ultimate privilege was service to others, as a service to God. He made these demands on everyone, regardless of who or what they thought they were. The entire Nation of Israel was bound under this, with the view in mind the whole world would know who God was. Had they obeyed this way in the first place, there would have been no poverty, sickens or demonized people in the Nation. Then all nations would have come to get a piece of that salvation for themselves.
In the midst of all this, He made clear the ultimate goal was not even that high standard of Law, but to see that as the indicator of ultimate unspeakable Truth. As He embodied all that Israel should have been, so He embodied what any man could know about God. Obeying the Law would bring prosperity, health and security, but would also point the way to spiritual prosperity, spiritual health, and spiritual security. A lawful kingdom was a very good thing, but the Kingdom of Heaven was far better. Awareness of the latter pretty much required a concept of the former. Thus, Jesus called the Nation to repent under the Law, so they could begin seeing the Kingdom of God.
The ultimate paradox of truth beyond reason was the necessity of His death at the hands of His own nation. The ultimate living Revelation of God could not finalize that revealing without going away to God so His Spirit could return. As long as His flesh was upon the earth, His Spirit was confined to Himself alone. Once He ascended, His Spirit returned to His spiritual Body, the ones who embraced Him. The message goes out to all, and all humanity is accountable to the message. At the same time, only the Father grants the Son to live in us -- more paradox. God owes us no explanation, for He is justice; what He does is just by definition. The Son who was Just, died at the hands of the unjust that He might make them just by His justice. It's really none of our business to make sense of it, nor can we pretend the gospel makes sense. It makes demands altogether unreasonable. If we could understand it that easily, where would faith come into the picture?
We who follow Him must take that same message to our world. We resurrect Him in us by doing what He did, what He would do if He were born in our place. There is no doubt Jesus spent time making sure the earthly government of His people knew they were off course from God's commands, and helped the understand what was required to fix that. Still, most of His time and efforts went into demonstrating the ultimate Truth -- revealing His Father -- by being the Truth, by being the Law which points to the unspeakable Truth. He summed up in Himself the Law of Moses, and closed it down on the Cross. He proclaimed forgiveness for all the failures of mankind since the beginning. The Law of Noah still stands for all mankind until He comes back from Heaven, but the sacrifice for sins was covered on all levels. Just as Jonah knew to preach Noah to the Gentiles in Nineveh, so we preach Noah to the world as the path to comprehending the higher Truth, the Person of God and His forgiveness.
Our journey has really just begun.
A piece of fruit did not bring death into the world, but how can you discuss something which cannot be told? Jesus said the truth must be told in parables. He spoke often about the failed fruit of Israel. Satan told Eve God was not being totally honest, that hiding things from her could not be from pure motives. If it were a man, that would be true, but God is not man. The failures of humanity are not a part of Him, because He made all things. What He made reflects Him, but is not Him. It was not about trees and fruit, but what they symbolize. If you try to take God's place, or you try to bring Him down to your level, it's called "blasphemy" and it attempts to smear God with your own sin. The fruit of taking that path, which leads through every temptation, is death.
There is no doubt plenty which God does not tell us. What He does tell us is so hard to follow, there is no way to put it in words. It requires an extraordinary miracle just to make us care. What has been revealed is more than we can handle, because nobody has replicated Jesus, yet. One of the things never explained for us is why we are held accountable, yet it must be His choice whether we come to Him. Are we free to choose? Yes. Is it up to Him? Yes. Human logic cannot reconcile that, much as it cannot reconcile anything spiritual. He is God Almighty, Creator of all things, and you are not Him. You are accountable to Him.
When emperors of old went out to visit their subjects, soldiers went out ahead, carrying the emperor's symbol of authority. Among those soldiers was the herald, who spoke for the emperor whatever it was he wanted them to know. Primarily it was a warning he was coming, and would measure their loyalty. Loyal servants would naturally make him feel welcome, honored and loved. That required cleaning, painting, road repair, or if necessary, building new roads and accommodations from scratch. John the Baptist was the herald for the Emperor of Heaven. The Lord was coming, and those who didn't demonstrate sufficient loyalty would be counted as enemies. But instead of physical infrastructure, this Emperor of Heaven wanted to see lives cleaned and built up to welcome Him. He wanted that good fruit. If they failed to produce that fruit of the Spirit, they would suffer. John's call was, "Repent!"
After His ritual baptism at John's hands, Jesus took up the same call to repent, the same warning the fruitless trees would be cut down and thrown in the fire. John had explained in somewhat concrete terms what repentance looked like for various different groups, but made a point to denounce the Jewish leadership as having no clue, no fruit. Jesus noted the Jewish leaders were the cause of Israel having no fruit. They had twisted the Law of Moses so badly they had no idea what the fruit would be. They had poisoned the tree, making the fruit deadly. He willingly showed He carried the authority of the Law by bringing the fruit of the Law which was missing in Israel: prosperity, health, security. Wherever He went, there was no material needs unmet, no condition He could not heal, no demon He could not dispatch. Further, no one could harm Him until He permitted it.
He taught the truth behind the Law: personal loyalty to God without limit and humbly responding to His Creation with the respect He said it deserved. The ultimate privilege was service to others, as a service to God. He made these demands on everyone, regardless of who or what they thought they were. The entire Nation of Israel was bound under this, with the view in mind the whole world would know who God was. Had they obeyed this way in the first place, there would have been no poverty, sickens or demonized people in the Nation. Then all nations would have come to get a piece of that salvation for themselves.
In the midst of all this, He made clear the ultimate goal was not even that high standard of Law, but to see that as the indicator of ultimate unspeakable Truth. As He embodied all that Israel should have been, so He embodied what any man could know about God. Obeying the Law would bring prosperity, health and security, but would also point the way to spiritual prosperity, spiritual health, and spiritual security. A lawful kingdom was a very good thing, but the Kingdom of Heaven was far better. Awareness of the latter pretty much required a concept of the former. Thus, Jesus called the Nation to repent under the Law, so they could begin seeing the Kingdom of God.
The ultimate paradox of truth beyond reason was the necessity of His death at the hands of His own nation. The ultimate living Revelation of God could not finalize that revealing without going away to God so His Spirit could return. As long as His flesh was upon the earth, His Spirit was confined to Himself alone. Once He ascended, His Spirit returned to His spiritual Body, the ones who embraced Him. The message goes out to all, and all humanity is accountable to the message. At the same time, only the Father grants the Son to live in us -- more paradox. God owes us no explanation, for He is justice; what He does is just by definition. The Son who was Just, died at the hands of the unjust that He might make them just by His justice. It's really none of our business to make sense of it, nor can we pretend the gospel makes sense. It makes demands altogether unreasonable. If we could understand it that easily, where would faith come into the picture?
We who follow Him must take that same message to our world. We resurrect Him in us by doing what He did, what He would do if He were born in our place. There is no doubt Jesus spent time making sure the earthly government of His people knew they were off course from God's commands, and helped the understand what was required to fix that. Still, most of His time and efforts went into demonstrating the ultimate Truth -- revealing His Father -- by being the Truth, by being the Law which points to the unspeakable Truth. He summed up in Himself the Law of Moses, and closed it down on the Cross. He proclaimed forgiveness for all the failures of mankind since the beginning. The Law of Noah still stands for all mankind until He comes back from Heaven, but the sacrifice for sins was covered on all levels. Just as Jonah knew to preach Noah to the Gentiles in Nineveh, so we preach Noah to the world as the path to comprehending the higher Truth, the Person of God and His forgiveness.
Our journey has really just begun.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Acts 3
Jesus had already stated the physical location of worship didn't matter because God did not reside in any man made structure. He was a Spirit in Heaven, desiring the worship of those whose spirits lived and could approach Him in the Spirit Realm. Rather than make the earthly Temple and rituals worthless, it was a matter of giving them their true meaning. After Pentecost (First Fruits), there was a long stretch of time without any standard festivals, and the visitors from the previous chapter were likely gone home to their far lands. The city was less crowded, and there weren't all that many trooping into the Temple during the hours of prayer. There were three: mid-morning ("morning offering"), mid-afternoon ("evening offering"), and sunset. This was the second of those.
We have yet to identify which of the gates was called "Beautiful," but that's not important here. What matters is the city residents witnessing this sign knew where it was. They knew about the lame beggar set there every day. Beggars in that time and place typically called for donations without making eye contact. It maintained the notion such gifts were gifts to God. So he stared off into space as the two disciples approached and made his pitch. They called for his direct attention, which usually meant a large gift was coming, and they would expect some serious gratitude. He was willing to play this game to live. Instead, Peter offered the man something far more valuable, pulling him up to claim a miracle healing.
Peter did so "in the name of Jesus" -- as if Peter were a high ranking servant of some great ruler. We have no doubt the man would much rather have that compared to mere coins. In Jewish culture, it was not big arms which marked a big man, but a fellow with strong legs. This was more than just a healing, but a restoration of manhood and life. He was no longer a mere offering plate with a voice, but a real person. The three then went into the Temple to worship, but this fellow had more cause to celebrate than anyone else there that day. All during this ritual, he was clinging to Peter and John, jumping and dancing and yelling loud thanks to God. The crowd knew who it was, and their jaded urbanite senses were stunned. After the ceremony, they crowded around to see the spectacle. This was Peter's chance to represent His Lord to yet another audience.
Peter denied he or John were any kind of miracle workers, as some traveling hucksters might claim. Instead, he carefully called attention in language they could not mistake to Jesus as the Messiah. Using formulaic terminology, Peter called Jesus the highest Servant of God, a Messianic term. He then lowered the boom, as before, telling them they had become the enemies of their own God by having Jesus executed. It was this crowd in particular which had been manipulated by the Sanhedrin to ask for Barabbas, instead of Jesus that day before Pilate. Yet, God proved them mistaken by raising Jesus back to life. Peter made it a point both he and John had seen the resurrected Jesus with their own eyes. It was the divine authority of this Jesus Messiah who restored the legs of this man they all knew. By having committed themselves to following Jesus as their ruler, they had His authority to heal.
Peter was hardly in a position to hold it against them, having betrayed Jesus more personally. At that time, he didn't know what he was doing, either. Knowing he could be forgiven a greater crime than theirs, he was offering them the same forgiveness. Even the Sanhedrin could be forgiven, since the prophets together had foretold the Messiah would suffer and die. He died at the hands of those who should have been first to recognize and embrace Him. Now was their chance to seize the blessing God made from their sin. Peter phrased it as the whole nation's chance, as every good thing God had promised was tied up in this Messiah Jesus.
If Jews could embrace Jesus as their rightful ruler, could seek a renewed understanding of the covenant as Jesus taught it, this would hasten Jesus' Return. Until that time, it was necessary for Him to return the Heaven whence He came, until His Father had restored all things under His authority. Would they be on God's side as loyal servants, or remain as His enemies? Peter quotes a Messianic passage from Moses' own words (Deuteronomy 18:15-19), calling to mind a fearful confrontation with God. They had not wanted to face God again as at Sinai. However, the promised Prophet Messiah would have the same fearful authority to destroy anyone who rejected His Word. This threat was confirmed by all the prophets from Samuel forward.
Peter reminds them they had been appointed by God to take His revelation to all the world. That was the reason for having prophets, for calling Abraham in the first place. In keeping with His Covenant, God sent His Son to them first. Would they embrace His message and turn from their sins? Would they accept this offer of redemption?
We have yet to identify which of the gates was called "Beautiful," but that's not important here. What matters is the city residents witnessing this sign knew where it was. They knew about the lame beggar set there every day. Beggars in that time and place typically called for donations without making eye contact. It maintained the notion such gifts were gifts to God. So he stared off into space as the two disciples approached and made his pitch. They called for his direct attention, which usually meant a large gift was coming, and they would expect some serious gratitude. He was willing to play this game to live. Instead, Peter offered the man something far more valuable, pulling him up to claim a miracle healing.
Peter did so "in the name of Jesus" -- as if Peter were a high ranking servant of some great ruler. We have no doubt the man would much rather have that compared to mere coins. In Jewish culture, it was not big arms which marked a big man, but a fellow with strong legs. This was more than just a healing, but a restoration of manhood and life. He was no longer a mere offering plate with a voice, but a real person. The three then went into the Temple to worship, but this fellow had more cause to celebrate than anyone else there that day. All during this ritual, he was clinging to Peter and John, jumping and dancing and yelling loud thanks to God. The crowd knew who it was, and their jaded urbanite senses were stunned. After the ceremony, they crowded around to see the spectacle. This was Peter's chance to represent His Lord to yet another audience.
Peter denied he or John were any kind of miracle workers, as some traveling hucksters might claim. Instead, he carefully called attention in language they could not mistake to Jesus as the Messiah. Using formulaic terminology, Peter called Jesus the highest Servant of God, a Messianic term. He then lowered the boom, as before, telling them they had become the enemies of their own God by having Jesus executed. It was this crowd in particular which had been manipulated by the Sanhedrin to ask for Barabbas, instead of Jesus that day before Pilate. Yet, God proved them mistaken by raising Jesus back to life. Peter made it a point both he and John had seen the resurrected Jesus with their own eyes. It was the divine authority of this Jesus Messiah who restored the legs of this man they all knew. By having committed themselves to following Jesus as their ruler, they had His authority to heal.
Peter was hardly in a position to hold it against them, having betrayed Jesus more personally. At that time, he didn't know what he was doing, either. Knowing he could be forgiven a greater crime than theirs, he was offering them the same forgiveness. Even the Sanhedrin could be forgiven, since the prophets together had foretold the Messiah would suffer and die. He died at the hands of those who should have been first to recognize and embrace Him. Now was their chance to seize the blessing God made from their sin. Peter phrased it as the whole nation's chance, as every good thing God had promised was tied up in this Messiah Jesus.
If Jews could embrace Jesus as their rightful ruler, could seek a renewed understanding of the covenant as Jesus taught it, this would hasten Jesus' Return. Until that time, it was necessary for Him to return the Heaven whence He came, until His Father had restored all things under His authority. Would they be on God's side as loyal servants, or remain as His enemies? Peter quotes a Messianic passage from Moses' own words (Deuteronomy 18:15-19), calling to mind a fearful confrontation with God. They had not wanted to face God again as at Sinai. However, the promised Prophet Messiah would have the same fearful authority to destroy anyone who rejected His Word. This threat was confirmed by all the prophets from Samuel forward.
Peter reminds them they had been appointed by God to take His revelation to all the world. That was the reason for having prophets, for calling Abraham in the first place. In keeping with His Covenant, God sent His Son to them first. Would they embrace His message and turn from their sins? Would they accept this offer of redemption?
Wrongly Right
God's Word says you cannot clean up your life sufficient to merit His saving grace. That is, nothing you can do under your own power will purchase eternal life. Grace is a gift from God, wholly at His discretion, on a basis you and I cannot comprehend. Our God has pointedly refused to explain to us why some are chosen and some are not. It is simply none of our business.
So we tell people, "You can't merit God's favor." This is a half-truth.
To say there is no blessing available to those who, lacking a spiritual awakening, do their best to live a clean and orderly life is simply false. Does the New Testament not remind us often we must apply our born-again selves to an orderly and clean life, too? It matters. We make a false dichotomy where there is none, and ignore the divide where this is one.
Jesus made much of the difference between the Talmud and the Law of Moses. For most Jews of His day, the Talmud was "the Law." When Paul writes about "the Law," only by noticing the context can we discern the difference between those two uses. Since the Covenant of Moses was closed at the Cross, ended forever, later references in time to "just conduct" point back to the broader context of what we now identify as the Covenant of Noah. All humanity is bound to that covenant even now. In that sense, you are required to seek God's favor with or without being born-again.
For us, to live by the Spirit will eventually recondition us to obey that ancient law. It's not a law of discrete commands, so there's no "spirit of the law" versus "letter of the law." As Jesus said, it's easily explained by loyalty to God and giving yourself no preference in how you deal with others. It won't matter whether people are able to do this, they are obliged to try, and judged accordingly in this life. We call it "consequences" but utterly fail to understand consequences are not an iron law of karma with random elements, but God actively observes and intervenes on behalf of His covenant with mankind as marked by the rainbow. Obedience is measured by desire, not performance, and fallen man without grace can be made to understand that. Spiritual birth does not make it easier to obey until we have been conditioned for a time by His Presence changing us, the same process for anyone who lacks the Spirit.
The dividing point between Lost and Saved in all this is beyond words. There is no mechanism in the human mind for grappling with this. It can be grasped in our spirits via parabolic and symbolic language such as Jesus taught. Consistently it comes to us in terms of being His children versus being hired servants. Mature servants can be more useful in performing the Lord's will, but His children are His own flesh. Because we insist on pulling such things down to the level of human logic, we then raise up false requirements for Kingdom living. We end up being quite legalistic even as we decry that. "Well, a mature Christian will always do this...." That phrase usually prefaces a very shallow cultural preference. No, a mature Christian will simply act at least as loving as the Lost who strive to obey what God has commanded all mankind to obey.
Somewhere underneath all this, we still have the unconscious insistence there is something we can do to bring people across the line into Eterntiy. We memorize manipulative sales pitches and somehow believe that's evangelism. We just have to talk them into being born again "right now." We deceive ourselves into thinking time matters, when God says it's not our concern. We deceive ourselves into thinking we can somehow "know" someone is born again. Even the silly convention of "we can only take their word for it," with a plan to keep an eye on them, and on ourselves, and we just have to sling that term "born again" all over the place -- it's like mowing down rose bushes because we don't like thorns.
Jesus is the answer, and we call people to walk in His footprints. We can never really know if another belongs to Him as child or merely as servant. That's wholly a matter for His concern, not ours. Leave it alone. Stick with things He has told us we must do, which is teach the whole truth. Along with the parables and symbolic language, we teach the clear command of God for a good and decent life. We know in our spirits such is merely a parable of the higher truth for which there are no words. So we present the parable of living right because we know that points to Jesus.
So we tell people, "You can't merit God's favor." This is a half-truth.
To say there is no blessing available to those who, lacking a spiritual awakening, do their best to live a clean and orderly life is simply false. Does the New Testament not remind us often we must apply our born-again selves to an orderly and clean life, too? It matters. We make a false dichotomy where there is none, and ignore the divide where this is one.
Jesus made much of the difference between the Talmud and the Law of Moses. For most Jews of His day, the Talmud was "the Law." When Paul writes about "the Law," only by noticing the context can we discern the difference between those two uses. Since the Covenant of Moses was closed at the Cross, ended forever, later references in time to "just conduct" point back to the broader context of what we now identify as the Covenant of Noah. All humanity is bound to that covenant even now. In that sense, you are required to seek God's favor with or without being born-again.
For us, to live by the Spirit will eventually recondition us to obey that ancient law. It's not a law of discrete commands, so there's no "spirit of the law" versus "letter of the law." As Jesus said, it's easily explained by loyalty to God and giving yourself no preference in how you deal with others. It won't matter whether people are able to do this, they are obliged to try, and judged accordingly in this life. We call it "consequences" but utterly fail to understand consequences are not an iron law of karma with random elements, but God actively observes and intervenes on behalf of His covenant with mankind as marked by the rainbow. Obedience is measured by desire, not performance, and fallen man without grace can be made to understand that. Spiritual birth does not make it easier to obey until we have been conditioned for a time by His Presence changing us, the same process for anyone who lacks the Spirit.
The dividing point between Lost and Saved in all this is beyond words. There is no mechanism in the human mind for grappling with this. It can be grasped in our spirits via parabolic and symbolic language such as Jesus taught. Consistently it comes to us in terms of being His children versus being hired servants. Mature servants can be more useful in performing the Lord's will, but His children are His own flesh. Because we insist on pulling such things down to the level of human logic, we then raise up false requirements for Kingdom living. We end up being quite legalistic even as we decry that. "Well, a mature Christian will always do this...." That phrase usually prefaces a very shallow cultural preference. No, a mature Christian will simply act at least as loving as the Lost who strive to obey what God has commanded all mankind to obey.
Somewhere underneath all this, we still have the unconscious insistence there is something we can do to bring people across the line into Eterntiy. We memorize manipulative sales pitches and somehow believe that's evangelism. We just have to talk them into being born again "right now." We deceive ourselves into thinking time matters, when God says it's not our concern. We deceive ourselves into thinking we can somehow "know" someone is born again. Even the silly convention of "we can only take their word for it," with a plan to keep an eye on them, and on ourselves, and we just have to sling that term "born again" all over the place -- it's like mowing down rose bushes because we don't like thorns.
Jesus is the answer, and we call people to walk in His footprints. We can never really know if another belongs to Him as child or merely as servant. That's wholly a matter for His concern, not ours. Leave it alone. Stick with things He has told us we must do, which is teach the whole truth. Along with the parables and symbolic language, we teach the clear command of God for a good and decent life. We know in our spirits such is merely a parable of the higher truth for which there are no words. So we present the parable of living right because we know that points to Jesus.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Lesson 37: Part 7, Introduction
We can't know all God was waiting for when He decided the time had come for His Son to be born. What we can know is something of the conditions in which Jesus was born. There are numerous scholarly surveys, but the easiest to find on the Internet is Edersheim's The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. Specifically, I would invite your attention to Book I, Chapters 2-4 for an examination of the influence of Hellenism. This one factor is our greatest aid in seeing just how vast was the gap between the mind of Christ and the Jewish leadership regarding the Law of Moses in particular and the Old Testament in general. One cannot embrace the joys of Grecian logical inquiry of the Word without giving up the spiritual grasp, because the differences in the very process of knowing are irreconcilable. Because His Spirit unfailingly guided His intellect, Jesus expressed the view of His Father on this conflict, which made Him an alien among His own people.
Perhaps most devastating of all was the complete absence of spiritual awareness. While the rabbinical professors surely knew the word "heaven" did not point to a literal place up on the sky, they had a very poor concept of what it meant, limited as they were to what rational logic could define. They saw Eternity as simply time without end, rather than living on a wholly different plane where time would be as variable there as space is here. Having words and concrete concepts for a variable fourth dimension is a poor substitute for spiritual awareness of things which cannot be spoken. While they would acknowledge the existence of unspeakable things, their actual practices utterly ignored it. This was the key to their failure before God. It won't much matter what you can grasp with your mind if you can't fulfill God's desire for you. God had always granted prophets and leaders with a living spirit to guide the understanding and obedience of those without that faculty. Their embrace of Hellenism closed their hearts to hearing from such voices, so God left them a few centuries with no such voice. They had reached the ultimate end of their purpose on earth, and it was time for Israel to die.
Jesus was born to replace, to fulfill all that Israel failed to do. When He died, what Israel should have been died. The veil in the Temple was torn in two by divine means, and the Temple ritual was terminated. It was symbolic of the end of the Covenant of Moses. Yet, in the hearts and minds of Jews, it had been dead for several centuries. The Shekinah Glory of God's presence in the Temple had been long gone. Now it rested in the soul of His Son, who with every breath clearly revealed what God had intended.
More than once during His ministry, Jesus warned God was about to take away the last vestige of sponsorship of Israel. They had rejected His favor, and He was about to withdraw it one final time. Their refusal to be the conduit from fallen sinfulness, into Lawful behavior, and ultimately to spiritual birth, had borne fruit of wrath. Within a generation of rejecting their Messiah, the Temple and City were destroyed, the people scattered and no longer a nation in God's eyes. Not only had they failed Moses, but they failed Noah. By casting aside all truth, and replacing it with a false image of God, they had become a bigger tool of Satan than those who simply denied the truth. The demons now ruled what was left of the people of Israel. As God had surely cast down other nations, all lost in the sands of time, so now was their time for such an end come.
What we see today in Judaism is nothing more than a continued rejection of God, in that they cling to something He rejected. Jesus had warned their Talmud was but a pile of human nonsense burying the Word of God. He called the Traditions of the Elders the traditions of mere men, at conflict with God's revelation. Having corrupted and defiled the treasure of God's truth, there is now nothing more than a mere sub-cultural ethnic identity. It reflects precious little of ancient Israel, and a mere parody at that.
We sin mightily in participating in this fraud. We sin all the more when we adopt the error of Pharisaism in rejecting the ancient Hebraic perspective of Scripture itself. If we leave rational pursuit to the things it can handle, we are safe, but it has no place in spiritual matters. The faculty of faith, of loyalty and commitment to God, outstrips reason and demands things reason cannot grasp. Demanding Bible teaching pass the test of reason is cutting out God's Spirit, because it means man's reason. There is a separate spiritual logic revealed from Heaven. Embracing the Hebraic pattern of learning and knowing, we can prepare an intellectual foundation to receive God's Truth. But typical rationalism rejects that. Modern Christianity is too often a modern Pharisaism, truth corrupted and defiled by the same Hellenism, with it's rational analysis closing off the voice of God's Spirit.
Perhaps most devastating of all was the complete absence of spiritual awareness. While the rabbinical professors surely knew the word "heaven" did not point to a literal place up on the sky, they had a very poor concept of what it meant, limited as they were to what rational logic could define. They saw Eternity as simply time without end, rather than living on a wholly different plane where time would be as variable there as space is here. Having words and concrete concepts for a variable fourth dimension is a poor substitute for spiritual awareness of things which cannot be spoken. While they would acknowledge the existence of unspeakable things, their actual practices utterly ignored it. This was the key to their failure before God. It won't much matter what you can grasp with your mind if you can't fulfill God's desire for you. God had always granted prophets and leaders with a living spirit to guide the understanding and obedience of those without that faculty. Their embrace of Hellenism closed their hearts to hearing from such voices, so God left them a few centuries with no such voice. They had reached the ultimate end of their purpose on earth, and it was time for Israel to die.
Jesus was born to replace, to fulfill all that Israel failed to do. When He died, what Israel should have been died. The veil in the Temple was torn in two by divine means, and the Temple ritual was terminated. It was symbolic of the end of the Covenant of Moses. Yet, in the hearts and minds of Jews, it had been dead for several centuries. The Shekinah Glory of God's presence in the Temple had been long gone. Now it rested in the soul of His Son, who with every breath clearly revealed what God had intended.
More than once during His ministry, Jesus warned God was about to take away the last vestige of sponsorship of Israel. They had rejected His favor, and He was about to withdraw it one final time. Their refusal to be the conduit from fallen sinfulness, into Lawful behavior, and ultimately to spiritual birth, had borne fruit of wrath. Within a generation of rejecting their Messiah, the Temple and City were destroyed, the people scattered and no longer a nation in God's eyes. Not only had they failed Moses, but they failed Noah. By casting aside all truth, and replacing it with a false image of God, they had become a bigger tool of Satan than those who simply denied the truth. The demons now ruled what was left of the people of Israel. As God had surely cast down other nations, all lost in the sands of time, so now was their time for such an end come.
What we see today in Judaism is nothing more than a continued rejection of God, in that they cling to something He rejected. Jesus had warned their Talmud was but a pile of human nonsense burying the Word of God. He called the Traditions of the Elders the traditions of mere men, at conflict with God's revelation. Having corrupted and defiled the treasure of God's truth, there is now nothing more than a mere sub-cultural ethnic identity. It reflects precious little of ancient Israel, and a mere parody at that.
We sin mightily in participating in this fraud. We sin all the more when we adopt the error of Pharisaism in rejecting the ancient Hebraic perspective of Scripture itself. If we leave rational pursuit to the things it can handle, we are safe, but it has no place in spiritual matters. The faculty of faith, of loyalty and commitment to God, outstrips reason and demands things reason cannot grasp. Demanding Bible teaching pass the test of reason is cutting out God's Spirit, because it means man's reason. There is a separate spiritual logic revealed from Heaven. Embracing the Hebraic pattern of learning and knowing, we can prepare an intellectual foundation to receive God's Truth. But typical rationalism rejects that. Modern Christianity is too often a modern Pharisaism, truth corrupted and defiled by the same Hellenism, with it's rational analysis closing off the voice of God's Spirit.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Lesson 36: Review
We pause in our journey to rest a moment, to glance back at the long path behind us. The places through which we have passed have left their mark on us, as it should be.
We have seen from the very begining God intended for us to know Him. When the choice in the Garden corrupted our knowledge of Him, He did not cease from that time working to restore that knowledge. That knowledge is hardly a mere exercise of intellect, but of relationship. He bound us to Him in covenants, starting with the requirement we seek Him, that we seek to renew our knowledge of Him. Thus, in the day of Seth, we began to call upon His name.
He then bound us to a tribal structure under Noah. Not merely the trappings of civilization, as we refer to civility, but the requirement to be bound to others in the irresistable urge to seek their welfare. We are obliged to choose a manner of living which places our own well being in the same basket as the welfare of the people nearest us. This choice is the definition of "love" -- we are commanded to love one another. Seeking any advantage seperate from another is inherently evil. While we recognize this is a high standard, it does not require a living spirit to obey this, as God surely demanded all humanity to follow it. Indelibly stamped in human instinct is the revulsion for disloyalty to blood kin. That we should surely fail at times is assumed, and the bulk of civility training is as much about cleaning up messes, of restoring broken relations, as it is about avoiding breaking them in the first place. Bound to a tribe, we are tightly held to that higher standard which God demands of all flesh, which we call His Laws.
The purpose of such a covenant is to provide the fertile ground for planting the seeds of spiritual awareness. At one point, men mistook that demand for a path to centralize rule over all humanity. That rule bore the taint of sin itself, in attempting to renege on the first covenant to call upon God, and surely to deny love. Such is the nature of centralized human government -- it calls itself a god and recognizes on other. So it was destroyed, and God placed communication barriers between unspiritual men to emphasize the awareness of our isolation from one another without love. It then awaited some few rare souls, nurtured by God's grace, to struggle to the light of spiritual awareness. In one man, Abraham, God drove down the initial stake to mark the path to personal spiritual redemption. The elements of sacrificial ritual common to the mixed multitude of human cultures pointed to the requirement of sacrificing the self, all possessions, dreams and choices, as a living offering to the Creator.
Through this Covenant of Abraham, Our Lord called into being a path of redemption for all. First, He granted a greater clarity of what Noah meant by forming a discrete demonstration of His Laws for humanity in the Law of Moses, a covenant of Laws with mere earthly provisions. But this was also imbued with a strong symbolic framework of ritual, a parable of spiritual truth. It pointed to something far higher, to that place where Abraham stood before God in the Spirit Realm, a covenant of Spirt, not of Laws. That nation who received this covenant of Law was called to teach the Laws of God so all could know, to refresh the offer of earthly covenant. But they chose to keep it themselves, seeking to gain advantage for themselves over all humanity, summing all the mistakes of past epochs of human failure. They rejected God's constraints and ate the forbidden fruit, sought to tread on others as means to climb the tower of human accomplishment into God's presence, sought to gather power over all others, and became utterly lawless even as they clung to the mere form of Law. While their choice did not frustrate the plan of God to reveal Himself more fully through them, they chose to be a dead instrument, instead of a living member of His power.
All this is reflected in the story of Jonah. He was the first missionary God sent to Gentiles. There was a festering guilt over his nation's continual rejection of both Moses (Law) and Noah (Laws), along with a deep sense of fear what Assyria would someday do to the Northern Kingdom. Thus, Jonah refused to take the warning to them, hoping instead the wrath of God would destroy them utterly. After God forced the issue, Jonah obeyed his calling and preached in the city of Ninevah. He did not preach Moses, but Noah; Moses was for Israel only. Their sins were obvious, all stemming from a rejection of love and a preference for hatred. They repented, and God heard their cry for mercy. Jonah was infuriated, in part over the ease with which the Ninevites repented, compared to his own nation, the nation whom God had specifically chosen to bear His truth, but refused to live it themselves.
Jonah himself failed the test of love, and God helped him see that. It was that nationalist pride, that hubris to which men so quickly resort, which corrupted Jonah's heart and hindered his spiritual insight. Take a moment to notice the interplay between Spirit and Laws here. Jonah did not bring spiritual redemption to Ninevah, merely the earthly redemption of Laws. Yet, he was himself a spiritual man. Perhaps we can learn from Jonah the fundamental truth which we have so confused in our own times. The ultimate mission is spiritual birth. The method is the Laws.
God has always used Laws, and the Law, as the path to the Spirit. Fallen man is at war with God. To awaken consciousness of that condition requires Laws, a clear standard of God's demand on humanity. The first step is to awaken the awareness of sin, primarily by pointing out what sin is. We are not accountable for the response of the hearers, but only the message condemning sin. If that message is not carried on the wings of His love, it will go nowhere -- the message of Laws is love. The lessons of punishment are lost on those who do not know, and without love, there is no message to know. Once loving truth has done it's work, God grants to whom He wishes a hearing ear. Among those who hear and embrace that message, He also grants a birth of spirits. The path to the Spirit is through the conviction of sin, and the path through conviction of sin is His love working in us.
Jonah did not know how that green shade plant grew up there, nor did he anticipate the worm which cut it down. God chooses and acts well outside our knowledge, keeping His counsel on things we cannot possibly handle properly. We cannot pretend to manipulate the spiritual process, cannot pretend to control the results of our obedience in taking the message to the world. We have only that loyalty we can choose, that exertion of love, which is the message of Laws. Our greatest errors are in failing to understand what the Laws include, and presuming to choose for God how our love bears fruit.
We have seen from the very begining God intended for us to know Him. When the choice in the Garden corrupted our knowledge of Him, He did not cease from that time working to restore that knowledge. That knowledge is hardly a mere exercise of intellect, but of relationship. He bound us to Him in covenants, starting with the requirement we seek Him, that we seek to renew our knowledge of Him. Thus, in the day of Seth, we began to call upon His name.
He then bound us to a tribal structure under Noah. Not merely the trappings of civilization, as we refer to civility, but the requirement to be bound to others in the irresistable urge to seek their welfare. We are obliged to choose a manner of living which places our own well being in the same basket as the welfare of the people nearest us. This choice is the definition of "love" -- we are commanded to love one another. Seeking any advantage seperate from another is inherently evil. While we recognize this is a high standard, it does not require a living spirit to obey this, as God surely demanded all humanity to follow it. Indelibly stamped in human instinct is the revulsion for disloyalty to blood kin. That we should surely fail at times is assumed, and the bulk of civility training is as much about cleaning up messes, of restoring broken relations, as it is about avoiding breaking them in the first place. Bound to a tribe, we are tightly held to that higher standard which God demands of all flesh, which we call His Laws.
The purpose of such a covenant is to provide the fertile ground for planting the seeds of spiritual awareness. At one point, men mistook that demand for a path to centralize rule over all humanity. That rule bore the taint of sin itself, in attempting to renege on the first covenant to call upon God, and surely to deny love. Such is the nature of centralized human government -- it calls itself a god and recognizes on other. So it was destroyed, and God placed communication barriers between unspiritual men to emphasize the awareness of our isolation from one another without love. It then awaited some few rare souls, nurtured by God's grace, to struggle to the light of spiritual awareness. In one man, Abraham, God drove down the initial stake to mark the path to personal spiritual redemption. The elements of sacrificial ritual common to the mixed multitude of human cultures pointed to the requirement of sacrificing the self, all possessions, dreams and choices, as a living offering to the Creator.
Through this Covenant of Abraham, Our Lord called into being a path of redemption for all. First, He granted a greater clarity of what Noah meant by forming a discrete demonstration of His Laws for humanity in the Law of Moses, a covenant of Laws with mere earthly provisions. But this was also imbued with a strong symbolic framework of ritual, a parable of spiritual truth. It pointed to something far higher, to that place where Abraham stood before God in the Spirit Realm, a covenant of Spirt, not of Laws. That nation who received this covenant of Law was called to teach the Laws of God so all could know, to refresh the offer of earthly covenant. But they chose to keep it themselves, seeking to gain advantage for themselves over all humanity, summing all the mistakes of past epochs of human failure. They rejected God's constraints and ate the forbidden fruit, sought to tread on others as means to climb the tower of human accomplishment into God's presence, sought to gather power over all others, and became utterly lawless even as they clung to the mere form of Law. While their choice did not frustrate the plan of God to reveal Himself more fully through them, they chose to be a dead instrument, instead of a living member of His power.
All this is reflected in the story of Jonah. He was the first missionary God sent to Gentiles. There was a festering guilt over his nation's continual rejection of both Moses (Law) and Noah (Laws), along with a deep sense of fear what Assyria would someday do to the Northern Kingdom. Thus, Jonah refused to take the warning to them, hoping instead the wrath of God would destroy them utterly. After God forced the issue, Jonah obeyed his calling and preached in the city of Ninevah. He did not preach Moses, but Noah; Moses was for Israel only. Their sins were obvious, all stemming from a rejection of love and a preference for hatred. They repented, and God heard their cry for mercy. Jonah was infuriated, in part over the ease with which the Ninevites repented, compared to his own nation, the nation whom God had specifically chosen to bear His truth, but refused to live it themselves.
Jonah himself failed the test of love, and God helped him see that. It was that nationalist pride, that hubris to which men so quickly resort, which corrupted Jonah's heart and hindered his spiritual insight. Take a moment to notice the interplay between Spirit and Laws here. Jonah did not bring spiritual redemption to Ninevah, merely the earthly redemption of Laws. Yet, he was himself a spiritual man. Perhaps we can learn from Jonah the fundamental truth which we have so confused in our own times. The ultimate mission is spiritual birth. The method is the Laws.
God has always used Laws, and the Law, as the path to the Spirit. Fallen man is at war with God. To awaken consciousness of that condition requires Laws, a clear standard of God's demand on humanity. The first step is to awaken the awareness of sin, primarily by pointing out what sin is. We are not accountable for the response of the hearers, but only the message condemning sin. If that message is not carried on the wings of His love, it will go nowhere -- the message of Laws is love. The lessons of punishment are lost on those who do not know, and without love, there is no message to know. Once loving truth has done it's work, God grants to whom He wishes a hearing ear. Among those who hear and embrace that message, He also grants a birth of spirits. The path to the Spirit is through the conviction of sin, and the path through conviction of sin is His love working in us.
Jonah did not know how that green shade plant grew up there, nor did he anticipate the worm which cut it down. God chooses and acts well outside our knowledge, keeping His counsel on things we cannot possibly handle properly. We cannot pretend to manipulate the spiritual process, cannot pretend to control the results of our obedience in taking the message to the world. We have only that loyalty we can choose, that exertion of love, which is the message of Laws. Our greatest errors are in failing to understand what the Laws include, and presuming to choose for God how our love bears fruit.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Isaiah 45
Parable is the language of Heaven among men. It takes a peculiar kind of silly literalism to miss what Isaiah says of how God operates. Cyrus, not yet born when this was written, foreshadows the Messiah. What God plans for Cyrus to do is symbolic of how the Messiah will operate spiritually when He comes.
Cyrus was anointed by God to subdue the nations, that is, the Babylonian Empire, plus a little extra. Because he was chosen by God, no armor could save his foes; no depth of hiding would keep plunder from his reach; no fortification would keep him out. God will do this and nothing man could dream up would frustrate God's plans. To ensure everyone has no excuse for doubting this, God makes much of predicting him by name. God's greatest blessing is revealing Himself to His Creation.
Just as God orders rain from the sky, He can also order Gentile rulers to bring about His brand of justice. A confused understanding via pagan religion is no barrier to God using anyone, and He can choose to speak any way He wishes. To some degree, the Persians did manage to obey the Covenant of Noah, far better than any previous empire in that part of the world. But it's foolish for any living being to suggest he might have grounds for evaluating what God does, to dispute God's choice through whom He will work. As surely as God rules the heart of every man, by the same hands which laid out the pattern of the universe, he will direct Cyrus to restore the City of Jerusalem and the Temple. Further, it will require no bribery -- and it did not, since Cyrus was deeply concerned with having the good favor of Jehovah.
If it were necessary, God would reverse everything done to Israel in the past. The slavers of Egypt would send slave labor to Judah, as well as her allies. Such men would willingly come as their just recognition of Jehovah as God alone. What many would miss is how God pokes at Judah for her increasingly unfaithful response to God's even clearer revelation to the Nation of Israel. If the Sabeans could know there is only one God, and desire to serve in rebuilding His Temple, why do the current Israelis, with their far more complete revelation, fail to be faithful? So it is Isaiah then adds his own voice, proclaiming there is no other God, and all too soon Judah will be deeply ashamed for her idolatry. If Israel is to be saved, it will be by the miracle of God's divine grace, but only to those who are loyal to Him.
Isaiah reminds all Israel, she was made a nation by God's power, not her own greatness. The Land was a gift to her, for she hardly could claim to have fully driven out the awful Canaanites. She did not work for it, much less make it. God did not hide His revelation; Israel hid it from her sight. This was not some big joke on the nation when God commanded she seek His face. He has not failed; Israel has failed. Should the pagan nations come before God to argue against Him, it would be an easy case to win in court. By implication, why would Judah so foolishly then adopt those same non-existent deities?
So it is, while He would keep the door open for a time, in the end the Nation of Israel would cease to exist. Instead, the Gentiles from the whole world would come eagerly to be His people. Whether sooner or later, all humanity must acknowledge Him as Lord. Would it not make more sense to embrace the Lord faithfully now? Indeed, many Gentiles would do just that. At that time, Israel would cease to be anything special, and could find God's favor only by joining those other nations.
It should be obvious the intent was to provoke Judah to jealousy, out of a justified fear their special standing with Jehovah would come to an end. This threat comes in the context of noting Cyrus would be like the Messiah in some ways, hinting the true Messiah would take His message to all the world, since Israel would reject it.
Cyrus was anointed by God to subdue the nations, that is, the Babylonian Empire, plus a little extra. Because he was chosen by God, no armor could save his foes; no depth of hiding would keep plunder from his reach; no fortification would keep him out. God will do this and nothing man could dream up would frustrate God's plans. To ensure everyone has no excuse for doubting this, God makes much of predicting him by name. God's greatest blessing is revealing Himself to His Creation.
Just as God orders rain from the sky, He can also order Gentile rulers to bring about His brand of justice. A confused understanding via pagan religion is no barrier to God using anyone, and He can choose to speak any way He wishes. To some degree, the Persians did manage to obey the Covenant of Noah, far better than any previous empire in that part of the world. But it's foolish for any living being to suggest he might have grounds for evaluating what God does, to dispute God's choice through whom He will work. As surely as God rules the heart of every man, by the same hands which laid out the pattern of the universe, he will direct Cyrus to restore the City of Jerusalem and the Temple. Further, it will require no bribery -- and it did not, since Cyrus was deeply concerned with having the good favor of Jehovah.
If it were necessary, God would reverse everything done to Israel in the past. The slavers of Egypt would send slave labor to Judah, as well as her allies. Such men would willingly come as their just recognition of Jehovah as God alone. What many would miss is how God pokes at Judah for her increasingly unfaithful response to God's even clearer revelation to the Nation of Israel. If the Sabeans could know there is only one God, and desire to serve in rebuilding His Temple, why do the current Israelis, with their far more complete revelation, fail to be faithful? So it is Isaiah then adds his own voice, proclaiming there is no other God, and all too soon Judah will be deeply ashamed for her idolatry. If Israel is to be saved, it will be by the miracle of God's divine grace, but only to those who are loyal to Him.
Isaiah reminds all Israel, she was made a nation by God's power, not her own greatness. The Land was a gift to her, for she hardly could claim to have fully driven out the awful Canaanites. She did not work for it, much less make it. God did not hide His revelation; Israel hid it from her sight. This was not some big joke on the nation when God commanded she seek His face. He has not failed; Israel has failed. Should the pagan nations come before God to argue against Him, it would be an easy case to win in court. By implication, why would Judah so foolishly then adopt those same non-existent deities?
So it is, while He would keep the door open for a time, in the end the Nation of Israel would cease to exist. Instead, the Gentiles from the whole world would come eagerly to be His people. Whether sooner or later, all humanity must acknowledge Him as Lord. Would it not make more sense to embrace the Lord faithfully now? Indeed, many Gentiles would do just that. At that time, Israel would cease to be anything special, and could find God's favor only by joining those other nations.
It should be obvious the intent was to provoke Judah to jealousy, out of a justified fear their special standing with Jehovah would come to an end. This threat comes in the context of noting Cyrus would be like the Messiah in some ways, hinting the true Messiah would take His message to all the world, since Israel would reject it.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Lesson 35: Reading the Period of Silence
Our path from Darkness to Light takes us through a time when Scripture was not written. Yet, we find the New Testament opens onto a world very far different from that left by the prophecy of Malachi. A lot of things happened, and I cover the historical details in other places. Here's an outline:
When things got exciting for the Jews, they often wondered if this or that hero was the Messiah. We have signs they wondered about Zerubbabel, as they did the Maccabean brothers. Notice how it seems directly related to their activities in politics, the possibility of delivering on the False Messianic Expectations. Those expectations were partly the result of a very fundamental corruption of the Hebraic worldview with Hellenism.
Notice the crazy thing here. By no means did the Jews resist Hellenism. What they resisted was the overt removal of their supposed ancient ways of doing, not the displacement of their ways of thinking. While it is safe to assume God blessed the half-measure of the Maccabees in returning to Judaism, it had no underlying power to keep that success. The victory was hollow, and collapsed upon itself. The miniscule level of independence under Roman rule was the perfect context for Jesus to show the utter impotence of Hellenized Judaism.
The Messiah had been promised from the very beginning (Genesis 3:15). This was the single thread tying together the entire Old Testament narrative. The sole purpose for Israel's existence, when reduced to its essence, was to provide the channel by which the Messiah would arrive on earth. Once He came, and accomplished His mission, the Nation of Israel and the Covenant of Moses no longer had a purpose. It was closed. But what if Israel had somehow managed to keep their identity, and keep some semblance of faithfulness? It would never have divided. The Northern Ten Tribes would never have disappeared. There would have been no Exile to Babylon. God would have kept her independent in the midst of the maelstrom of wars and political maneuvering by the surrounding nations and empires. Instead, the Messiah would have been born the new King of Israel as an existing kingdom. They would have rejoiced, embraced Him, learned from His more perfect understanding of the Law. The Temple rituals and priesthood would have dissolved peacefully, as the whole world would see what nations should have looked like all along under Noah. But it would not have changed a whit the greater outcome of the Messiah sacrificing Himself for the sins of the world, because somebody would have killed Him one way or another.
Sin will always reject Truth. It's hard to imagine a scene of that sort which still does not destroy Israel. Had they been the willing followers of the Messiah, they would have been attacked by every nation on earth. Instead, the pitiful little human organization He did have was destroyed in that sense. Their focus and purpose moved to the spiritual, and their earthly loss was of no consequence. So instead of a New Israel mostly built from a nation of Hebrew DNA, it was built from a tiny circle of Hebrew men. The rest of the nation was excluded by choices made, one at a time, over many centuries. Their end came with the Cross; they saved their hides, as it were, but lost their souls. The nation into which Jesus was born was a parody of its former self.
- The Persian Empire gave way to Greece under Alexander the Great. The Jews embraced Alexander.
- Alexander conquered much, then promptly died, leaving his new empire to four of his generals. They divided things up by regions.
- The Jews had built a huge community presence in Egypt, and were favored by the rulers there. That dynasty sought to keep control over their home in Palestine, too.
- The dynasty of the one who took Syria fought with the dynasty that took Egypt, and Judea changed hands between them a couple of times.
- When the Syrian dynasty finally won out, it was ruled by a man who felt compelled to force the whole of Greek culture on the Jews. He defiled the Temple, among other things.
- While he was enforcing his numerous anti-Mosaic laws, a priestly family (Maccabees) in the country rose in revolt. They led a guerrilla war that managed to free Judea for a time.
- The Maccabees were priests, and eventually the priesthood displaced the royal family in political power. Politicking and partisan warfare within Judea brought Rome in, which had been conquering Greece's empire anyway. Rome simply took over.
- The new "royal family" of Jews was whittled down, then forcefully intermarried with that of the old Edomite kingdom, whose ruler Herod gained a legitimate claim over the Jews which Rome accepted.
When things got exciting for the Jews, they often wondered if this or that hero was the Messiah. We have signs they wondered about Zerubbabel, as they did the Maccabean brothers. Notice how it seems directly related to their activities in politics, the possibility of delivering on the False Messianic Expectations. Those expectations were partly the result of a very fundamental corruption of the Hebraic worldview with Hellenism.
Notice the crazy thing here. By no means did the Jews resist Hellenism. What they resisted was the overt removal of their supposed ancient ways of doing, not the displacement of their ways of thinking. While it is safe to assume God blessed the half-measure of the Maccabees in returning to Judaism, it had no underlying power to keep that success. The victory was hollow, and collapsed upon itself. The miniscule level of independence under Roman rule was the perfect context for Jesus to show the utter impotence of Hellenized Judaism.
The Messiah had been promised from the very beginning (Genesis 3:15). This was the single thread tying together the entire Old Testament narrative. The sole purpose for Israel's existence, when reduced to its essence, was to provide the channel by which the Messiah would arrive on earth. Once He came, and accomplished His mission, the Nation of Israel and the Covenant of Moses no longer had a purpose. It was closed. But what if Israel had somehow managed to keep their identity, and keep some semblance of faithfulness? It would never have divided. The Northern Ten Tribes would never have disappeared. There would have been no Exile to Babylon. God would have kept her independent in the midst of the maelstrom of wars and political maneuvering by the surrounding nations and empires. Instead, the Messiah would have been born the new King of Israel as an existing kingdom. They would have rejoiced, embraced Him, learned from His more perfect understanding of the Law. The Temple rituals and priesthood would have dissolved peacefully, as the whole world would see what nations should have looked like all along under Noah. But it would not have changed a whit the greater outcome of the Messiah sacrificing Himself for the sins of the world, because somebody would have killed Him one way or another.
Sin will always reject Truth. It's hard to imagine a scene of that sort which still does not destroy Israel. Had they been the willing followers of the Messiah, they would have been attacked by every nation on earth. Instead, the pitiful little human organization He did have was destroyed in that sense. Their focus and purpose moved to the spiritual, and their earthly loss was of no consequence. So instead of a New Israel mostly built from a nation of Hebrew DNA, it was built from a tiny circle of Hebrew men. The rest of the nation was excluded by choices made, one at a time, over many centuries. Their end came with the Cross; they saved their hides, as it were, but lost their souls. The nation into which Jesus was born was a parody of its former self.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Lesson 32: Reading the Restoration
After roughly a century under Babylonian control, the Medo-Persian troops conquered the empire and made it their own. A part of the peculiar Zoroastrian religion of the Persians was all the other national gods were friends of their god. Thus, it was necessary to send the captive nations home to rebuild their gods' temples to ensure there was no deity with a claim against the ruling families. Israel was just one of many nations sent home. Except they were allowed to choose, and frankly very few went in the first round. In particular, the priests stayed behind because it was they who had delved most deeply in the material prosperity.
On the other hand, they had constructed the synagogue system. So thorough going was the training from childhood, there was a rather odd pride. They felt the land of Mesopotamia had absorbed such a great depth of covenant blessing from their zeal in the Law, it became more holy than the ground of Zion. Notice there was a ton of lip service to spiritual understanding and modicum of Eastern perspective, but the bulk of how men acted and talked betrayed a very materialistic perspective. Further, it was now tinged with racism.
It's not what you might expect. Surely the blue-blooded priests who stayed behind were quite snooty, but most of the people who now called themselves "Jews" had long carried the understanding anyone who embraced the Covenant could become a member of the nation. The issue with Ezra and Nehemiah ordering men to put away their foreign wives was not a matter of mixed DNA, but there were women who refused to convert, clinging to their old pagan gods. By now, the Jewish leaders were particularly intolerant of such a thing. So when Jesus said His Father could raise up children to Abraham from the stones of the street, that was hyperbole, but it was Law. Still, the racism crept in, and the snooty attitude spread in the background of thinking. Instead of reaching out to enlighten the Gentiles, they became harsh, even hateful in despising them.
The other edge of that sword was the superiority complex. They had learned their lesson, no more pagan uncleanness, and now they had Jehovah right where they wanted Him. There was a pretense of almost demanding God allow them to stomp on the rest of humanity. It was during this time was born the Messianic Expectations. While the prophets had, indeed, promised a coming Messiah, they read all those promises with fleshly and materialistic eyes. They built up a body of scholarship which predicted the Messiah would suffer, then overcome by some military victory, crushing all those who opposed Jewish supremacy. Then the whole world would realize it was good and right, would voluntarily enslave themselves to the Jews, dragging with them all their worldly goods. God would add more by miraculously turning the stones to bread, kosher animals would willingly come to them as they had to Noah's Ark, etc. This was a very ugly corruption of God's promises.
Then came Alexander the Great, stomping the Persians and bringing his zeal for Hellenistic culture. Jerusalem capitulated quickly, and Alexander left some teachers of Greek culture. That culture included the likes of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. The basic starting point of that culture was man as the measure of all things; if man could not logically grasp and analyze a particular thing, it was not real. While the Jews didn't quite buy into the overt assertion, they did buy into the subconscious assumptions. All the more so as their community by now stretched all the way down to Egypt, where a major Jewish presence stood. The community of Alexandria was the perfect place for a new Greek cultural center, right next to the Jews. Having embraced the Hellenistic frame of reference, they just knew they were smarter than anyone else. These resented the old Babylonian blue blood priests and built their own version of understanding the Covenant from a purely rational, highly structured, and concrete framework.
The effect was altogether obvious when we contrast the Pharisees with Jesus in discussing the Law. God was reduced to a static and objective principle, not in those terms, but as the obvious assumption from which they operated. Truth was no longer a Person. Loyalty was redefined as rote performance according to some objective standard, not love and commitment to that Divine Sheik of Heaven. This great body of scholarship was entirely rational, and Jesus referred to it as the traditions of men, an attack on the real Law of Moses. The Jews eventually called this body of teaching the Talmud, which had held the minds of Jewish leaders captive for some 200 years before Jesus was born.
Judaism (the name actually came later) was alive, and Old Testament religion was all but forgotten. Oh, how far they had fallen! This made the teaching of Jesus incomprehensible to them.
On the other hand, they had constructed the synagogue system. So thorough going was the training from childhood, there was a rather odd pride. They felt the land of Mesopotamia had absorbed such a great depth of covenant blessing from their zeal in the Law, it became more holy than the ground of Zion. Notice there was a ton of lip service to spiritual understanding and modicum of Eastern perspective, but the bulk of how men acted and talked betrayed a very materialistic perspective. Further, it was now tinged with racism.
It's not what you might expect. Surely the blue-blooded priests who stayed behind were quite snooty, but most of the people who now called themselves "Jews" had long carried the understanding anyone who embraced the Covenant could become a member of the nation. The issue with Ezra and Nehemiah ordering men to put away their foreign wives was not a matter of mixed DNA, but there were women who refused to convert, clinging to their old pagan gods. By now, the Jewish leaders were particularly intolerant of such a thing. So when Jesus said His Father could raise up children to Abraham from the stones of the street, that was hyperbole, but it was Law. Still, the racism crept in, and the snooty attitude spread in the background of thinking. Instead of reaching out to enlighten the Gentiles, they became harsh, even hateful in despising them.
The other edge of that sword was the superiority complex. They had learned their lesson, no more pagan uncleanness, and now they had Jehovah right where they wanted Him. There was a pretense of almost demanding God allow them to stomp on the rest of humanity. It was during this time was born the Messianic Expectations. While the prophets had, indeed, promised a coming Messiah, they read all those promises with fleshly and materialistic eyes. They built up a body of scholarship which predicted the Messiah would suffer, then overcome by some military victory, crushing all those who opposed Jewish supremacy. Then the whole world would realize it was good and right, would voluntarily enslave themselves to the Jews, dragging with them all their worldly goods. God would add more by miraculously turning the stones to bread, kosher animals would willingly come to them as they had to Noah's Ark, etc. This was a very ugly corruption of God's promises.
Then came Alexander the Great, stomping the Persians and bringing his zeal for Hellenistic culture. Jerusalem capitulated quickly, and Alexander left some teachers of Greek culture. That culture included the likes of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. The basic starting point of that culture was man as the measure of all things; if man could not logically grasp and analyze a particular thing, it was not real. While the Jews didn't quite buy into the overt assertion, they did buy into the subconscious assumptions. All the more so as their community by now stretched all the way down to Egypt, where a major Jewish presence stood. The community of Alexandria was the perfect place for a new Greek cultural center, right next to the Jews. Having embraced the Hellenistic frame of reference, they just knew they were smarter than anyone else. These resented the old Babylonian blue blood priests and built their own version of understanding the Covenant from a purely rational, highly structured, and concrete framework.
The effect was altogether obvious when we contrast the Pharisees with Jesus in discussing the Law. God was reduced to a static and objective principle, not in those terms, but as the obvious assumption from which they operated. Truth was no longer a Person. Loyalty was redefined as rote performance according to some objective standard, not love and commitment to that Divine Sheik of Heaven. This great body of scholarship was entirely rational, and Jesus referred to it as the traditions of men, an attack on the real Law of Moses. The Jews eventually called this body of teaching the Talmud, which had held the minds of Jewish leaders captive for some 200 years before Jesus was born.
Judaism (the name actually came later) was alive, and Old Testament religion was all but forgotten. Oh, how far they had fallen! This made the teaching of Jesus incomprehensible to them.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Christian Property Management
When a family shares property, it's not communism. It's probably what communists dream it should be, but cannot ever be, because communism does not permit the atmosphere of love and grace which makes a family possible. You cannot remove love and expect people to act lovingly.
In Scripture, the definition of love is not a mushy feeling, nor a simple warm positive regard. Those are probable symptoms of love. Rather, love is the choice to commit oneself to seeking the welfare of another. Love for another may or may not be justified, but only the one offering love can decide. In the Kingdom, we seek the welfare of Christ. That He needs nothing is not the point; we are committed to pleasing Him. The result of a justified commitment to Him is a powerful warm feeling for Him and His concerns. His concerns are those who serve Him, as the means to revealing Him. His ultimate concern among humans on this earth is to reveal Himself.
The Early Church in Acts 2 was not communist, and suggesting it was simply shows either a gross inability to grasp the Bible or is intellectual dishonesty. It was family. It was a commitment to a feudal Lord, the divine Sheik of Heaven. They surrendered all their persons and property to His ownership, and generally trusted those He placed in leadership. Nobody expected perfection of performance in handling these things, but had confidence God could work it all out. When there was a need no human could provide, God took care of it Himself. He chooses mostly to work through fallen, broken people who love Him, but has long ago prepared to act when they naturally fail.
Even under the Laws of God for flesh, the standards offered a recovery for failure. Understand: The Law of Moses was a subset of the Laws of Noah. The former had a distinct expiration in the death of Christ on the Cross, but the Laws of Noah remain in effect until Creation is redeemed in the Second Coming. The broader Laws of Noah permitted a measure of failure because it's based on God's realistic understanding of fallen human nature. You can make recompense to God and keep the blessings, with some measure of ameliorated natural consequences. Yes, God will help clean up the mess you make of your life even if you are spiritually dead, because that's the way Noah's Covenant works. Those who are spiritually alive are not accountable to God under Noah, but we obviously should understand we promote observance of Noah simply by our obedience to the Spirit. We are going to fail, but we are privy to the Sheik's counsel on the deeper issues of pleasing Him on a personal level.
It pleases Him His children should share as one household. No one in the Kingdom has a claim on the property you hold except Christ. The dynamic of "enforcement" is not via some human police agency, but the Spirit working in the hearts of His servants. You can ask. Your brother can say "no." It changes nothing in the Spirit, but we can't avoid feeling bad about it at times, until we begin reaching a higher grasp of self-death. The Lost don't have that advantage, and have to work hard to get that. We get it by grace, by the mere Presence of the Spirit. So we remain humble in realizing we might have been wrong to ask in the first place. And if our brother was wrong to refuse us, that's his problem, between Him and the Lord. It's not a matter we miss out on the blessing of his stuff, nor would it hamper God's planning in any way. Still, we continue to teach and preach the shared holding of things under Christ.
The problem with this is not the teaching, but our huge burden of cultural background, which makes followingn biblical model extermely difficult. Capitalism and communism are simply two faces of the same human regard for tangible property, and both will inevitably result in failures. We might think the former comes closer to what Noah intends, but that's simply an intellectual bias. Capitalism may see many sharing voluntarily out of a sense of guilt, but it remains a form of enslavement via the contract. Contract is a very, very poor substitute for covenant. Even under Noah, no one in this world has any business making commands and demands on you who is not blood kin. The Laws of Noah assume tribal feudalism, and a failure to grasp that is a rejection of God's Word.
In Scripture, the definition of love is not a mushy feeling, nor a simple warm positive regard. Those are probable symptoms of love. Rather, love is the choice to commit oneself to seeking the welfare of another. Love for another may or may not be justified, but only the one offering love can decide. In the Kingdom, we seek the welfare of Christ. That He needs nothing is not the point; we are committed to pleasing Him. The result of a justified commitment to Him is a powerful warm feeling for Him and His concerns. His concerns are those who serve Him, as the means to revealing Him. His ultimate concern among humans on this earth is to reveal Himself.
The Early Church in Acts 2 was not communist, and suggesting it was simply shows either a gross inability to grasp the Bible or is intellectual dishonesty. It was family. It was a commitment to a feudal Lord, the divine Sheik of Heaven. They surrendered all their persons and property to His ownership, and generally trusted those He placed in leadership. Nobody expected perfection of performance in handling these things, but had confidence God could work it all out. When there was a need no human could provide, God took care of it Himself. He chooses mostly to work through fallen, broken people who love Him, but has long ago prepared to act when they naturally fail.
Even under the Laws of God for flesh, the standards offered a recovery for failure. Understand: The Law of Moses was a subset of the Laws of Noah. The former had a distinct expiration in the death of Christ on the Cross, but the Laws of Noah remain in effect until Creation is redeemed in the Second Coming. The broader Laws of Noah permitted a measure of failure because it's based on God's realistic understanding of fallen human nature. You can make recompense to God and keep the blessings, with some measure of ameliorated natural consequences. Yes, God will help clean up the mess you make of your life even if you are spiritually dead, because that's the way Noah's Covenant works. Those who are spiritually alive are not accountable to God under Noah, but we obviously should understand we promote observance of Noah simply by our obedience to the Spirit. We are going to fail, but we are privy to the Sheik's counsel on the deeper issues of pleasing Him on a personal level.
It pleases Him His children should share as one household. No one in the Kingdom has a claim on the property you hold except Christ. The dynamic of "enforcement" is not via some human police agency, but the Spirit working in the hearts of His servants. You can ask. Your brother can say "no." It changes nothing in the Spirit, but we can't avoid feeling bad about it at times, until we begin reaching a higher grasp of self-death. The Lost don't have that advantage, and have to work hard to get that. We get it by grace, by the mere Presence of the Spirit. So we remain humble in realizing we might have been wrong to ask in the first place. And if our brother was wrong to refuse us, that's his problem, between Him and the Lord. It's not a matter we miss out on the blessing of his stuff, nor would it hamper God's planning in any way. Still, we continue to teach and preach the shared holding of things under Christ.
The problem with this is not the teaching, but our huge burden of cultural background, which makes followingn biblical model extermely difficult. Capitalism and communism are simply two faces of the same human regard for tangible property, and both will inevitably result in failures. We might think the former comes closer to what Noah intends, but that's simply an intellectual bias. Capitalism may see many sharing voluntarily out of a sense of guilt, but it remains a form of enslavement via the contract. Contract is a very, very poor substitute for covenant. Even under Noah, no one in this world has any business making commands and demands on you who is not blood kin. The Laws of Noah assume tribal feudalism, and a failure to grasp that is a rejection of God's Word.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Acts 2
Jesus was the Passover Lamb. His death on the Cross ended the system of ritual sacrifice in the Temple, ended the Covenant of Moses. His Ascension into Heaven allowed Him to return in Spirit to the earth and live among all His followers. Up to that moment, they were spiritually alive, but not yet able to process truth through their spirits into their hearts. The lack of intellectual training was hardly an issue, but knowing what to do with the teachings of Jesus was beyond them. They were operating under a renewed, but still human, grasp of the Law for guidance in obedience. This was about to change.
Under the Pharisees' version of the Law of Moses, it was all about nit-picking with precise and concrete rational analysis. Jesus showed that was all wrong, not the way God worked, not the way the Law worked. If we haggle over the precise meaning of Luke's choice of words, we easily miss the drama of what he tells. Jesus taught them some forty days after His resurrection to insure they understood what the Old Testament said about Him and His teaching. That puts His Ascension about the forty-third day. A week later was Pentecost, the Greek word for the Hebrew First Fruits celebration. Those gathered that day in the Upper Room were the first fruits of this new covenant, not of laws, but of the Spirit.
There was the roaring sound of wind, and "wind" is the same word for "spirit" -- the Lord dramatically returned in a form of great power, but not visible to human eyes. Only the effects are seen and felt. In Luke's day, the only source of light on earth was fire. What they saw appeared as tongue-shaped flames, or brightly luminescent manifestations about half the size of a man's hand. This glowing presence divided itself among the members of this gathering. This was the presence of illumination entering their very beings. Each of them suddenly began to speak in other languages, apparently human languages. We dare not miss how this was the reversal of the curse at the Tower of Babel. Under this power alone would man be permitted to unify under a single authority, that of God alone.
Take note of how the Spirit of Christ is manifested. There is unseen power and illumination, all of which grants a singular unity not otherwise available upon this earth. It all served one purpose: To bring about the revelation of God through those who received this unspeakable gift. This sound and sight drew a crowd right away, as the disciples spilled out into the streets to address them. What was all this roaring and shining lights business? They came and heard the message declaring the things God had done on the earth to reveal Himself. They were bringing to life again all the things Jesus did during His days of ministry.
How did all these losers and bumpkins speak so as to be understood by the mixed multitude from out of town? Were they drunk? On the day of First Fruits, Jews would fast until mid-morning. It was just now about the time they could start eating and drinking, so drunkenness was simply out of the question. Peter, who had so recently been ashamed and broken, now in the Spirit, stood up with the confidence he never had before, and spoke assertively with an assurance God alone could give. No, this was the fulfillment of Joel's prophecy (2:28-32). This was the one last chance for people of Israel to call on the name of the Lord, to reclaim the redemption they should have found by walking in the Law and perceiving the higher truth to which it pointed. As they drove the Law farther and farther away from them, it was necessary to restore its real meaning in Christ. Once again, the Father seeks to raise a nation of priests to the world, by calling the Nation to His Son. Peter makes it clear all this finds fulfillment in the man they had just recently executed. God had raised Him from the dead, a Son whose power over death was in His very nature.
David prophesied of it, too (Psalms 16:8-11). Does anyone think David meant it literally when he said God would not allow him to stay dead? Well, David's bones rested still in his grave in Jerusalem, a short walk from where Peter stood that very moment. No, David spoke parabolic terms regarding one of his descendants. It was the same sort of symbolic language which predicted the Messiah would take David's throne. Think for a moment how very far these men had come to realize now there would be no earthly kingdom of Christ, but a spiritual Kingdom on the earth! So this Jesus, of the royal household, came out of the grave, and He now sits in Heaven. He sits there awaiting the Father's promise to crush all His enemies. As it was Israel who crucified His Son, who now qualifies as His enemies?
It was not simply the words of Peter, but the power of the Spirit working in Him and through those words, which brought conviction to those listening. Had this been the old crew following Jesus in months past, their Galilean accent would have been hard to follow by men born and raised in far countries. Those Jews could handle Greek as a common tongue, and were supposed to be familiar with some Aramaic, but Peter's message was clear to their ears. What could they do to redeem themselves before God? Peter's words are so easily missed. First, it was the demand of the Law all along to repent, to turn away from sin. In this case, to disavow the crucifixion and embrace Jesus as Whom He claimed to be, the Messiah. In a sign of the new loyalty to the Messiah, they should participate in the old Mosaic ritual of cleansing in water, but now in the name of Jesus the Messiah, cleansing away the old life and living in the new life of the Kingdom of Heaven. In the eyes of the Jewish leaders, this was a form of treason, had they considered what this all meant. It meant repudiating their Jewish identity in favor of a higher claim on their loyalty. Those who were able to do such a thing would find this same power and enlightenment would be theirs. Notice Peter says no man can choose this for himself, but it is the Lord who chooses and calls, and national identity among men means nothing.
This preaching went on for some time that morning, as Peter and the others warned them the Jewish leaders were perverse, and following them led to God's wrath. Eventually some 3000 people passed through the ritual cleansing and joined this new community of Christ. This was not some mere ritual, for they spent days and weeks trying to absorb this new teaching of ancient truth. They dug into the Old Testament with the clarity of understanding Jesus had given. Their was a powerful sense of unity with no earthly explanation, sharing as close kin when there were so very many reasons in the flesh to be strangers to each other. But this divine peace with each other was merely a direct result of their new peace with God. They also shared a sense of awe and unworthiness, as they witnessed the signs of God's power at work. Like any close kin in a single household, they shared their possessions.
This new loyalty to Christ did not mean leaving behind the old Temple, but gave them its real meaning for the first time. All the places and habits of life gained a new meaning in light of this new Life in Christ. Rather than being clannish, though, it made them even more loving to those outside their new community of faith. This was a powerful contagion of healing, love and grace, lifting more daily out of death to New Life. All Israel was ever meant to be was reborn.
Under the Pharisees' version of the Law of Moses, it was all about nit-picking with precise and concrete rational analysis. Jesus showed that was all wrong, not the way God worked, not the way the Law worked. If we haggle over the precise meaning of Luke's choice of words, we easily miss the drama of what he tells. Jesus taught them some forty days after His resurrection to insure they understood what the Old Testament said about Him and His teaching. That puts His Ascension about the forty-third day. A week later was Pentecost, the Greek word for the Hebrew First Fruits celebration. Those gathered that day in the Upper Room were the first fruits of this new covenant, not of laws, but of the Spirit.
There was the roaring sound of wind, and "wind" is the same word for "spirit" -- the Lord dramatically returned in a form of great power, but not visible to human eyes. Only the effects are seen and felt. In Luke's day, the only source of light on earth was fire. What they saw appeared as tongue-shaped flames, or brightly luminescent manifestations about half the size of a man's hand. This glowing presence divided itself among the members of this gathering. This was the presence of illumination entering their very beings. Each of them suddenly began to speak in other languages, apparently human languages. We dare not miss how this was the reversal of the curse at the Tower of Babel. Under this power alone would man be permitted to unify under a single authority, that of God alone.
Take note of how the Spirit of Christ is manifested. There is unseen power and illumination, all of which grants a singular unity not otherwise available upon this earth. It all served one purpose: To bring about the revelation of God through those who received this unspeakable gift. This sound and sight drew a crowd right away, as the disciples spilled out into the streets to address them. What was all this roaring and shining lights business? They came and heard the message declaring the things God had done on the earth to reveal Himself. They were bringing to life again all the things Jesus did during His days of ministry.
How did all these losers and bumpkins speak so as to be understood by the mixed multitude from out of town? Were they drunk? On the day of First Fruits, Jews would fast until mid-morning. It was just now about the time they could start eating and drinking, so drunkenness was simply out of the question. Peter, who had so recently been ashamed and broken, now in the Spirit, stood up with the confidence he never had before, and spoke assertively with an assurance God alone could give. No, this was the fulfillment of Joel's prophecy (2:28-32). This was the one last chance for people of Israel to call on the name of the Lord, to reclaim the redemption they should have found by walking in the Law and perceiving the higher truth to which it pointed. As they drove the Law farther and farther away from them, it was necessary to restore its real meaning in Christ. Once again, the Father seeks to raise a nation of priests to the world, by calling the Nation to His Son. Peter makes it clear all this finds fulfillment in the man they had just recently executed. God had raised Him from the dead, a Son whose power over death was in His very nature.
David prophesied of it, too (Psalms 16:8-11). Does anyone think David meant it literally when he said God would not allow him to stay dead? Well, David's bones rested still in his grave in Jerusalem, a short walk from where Peter stood that very moment. No, David spoke parabolic terms regarding one of his descendants. It was the same sort of symbolic language which predicted the Messiah would take David's throne. Think for a moment how very far these men had come to realize now there would be no earthly kingdom of Christ, but a spiritual Kingdom on the earth! So this Jesus, of the royal household, came out of the grave, and He now sits in Heaven. He sits there awaiting the Father's promise to crush all His enemies. As it was Israel who crucified His Son, who now qualifies as His enemies?
It was not simply the words of Peter, but the power of the Spirit working in Him and through those words, which brought conviction to those listening. Had this been the old crew following Jesus in months past, their Galilean accent would have been hard to follow by men born and raised in far countries. Those Jews could handle Greek as a common tongue, and were supposed to be familiar with some Aramaic, but Peter's message was clear to their ears. What could they do to redeem themselves before God? Peter's words are so easily missed. First, it was the demand of the Law all along to repent, to turn away from sin. In this case, to disavow the crucifixion and embrace Jesus as Whom He claimed to be, the Messiah. In a sign of the new loyalty to the Messiah, they should participate in the old Mosaic ritual of cleansing in water, but now in the name of Jesus the Messiah, cleansing away the old life and living in the new life of the Kingdom of Heaven. In the eyes of the Jewish leaders, this was a form of treason, had they considered what this all meant. It meant repudiating their Jewish identity in favor of a higher claim on their loyalty. Those who were able to do such a thing would find this same power and enlightenment would be theirs. Notice Peter says no man can choose this for himself, but it is the Lord who chooses and calls, and national identity among men means nothing.
This preaching went on for some time that morning, as Peter and the others warned them the Jewish leaders were perverse, and following them led to God's wrath. Eventually some 3000 people passed through the ritual cleansing and joined this new community of Christ. This was not some mere ritual, for they spent days and weeks trying to absorb this new teaching of ancient truth. They dug into the Old Testament with the clarity of understanding Jesus had given. Their was a powerful sense of unity with no earthly explanation, sharing as close kin when there were so very many reasons in the flesh to be strangers to each other. But this divine peace with each other was merely a direct result of their new peace with God. They also shared a sense of awe and unworthiness, as they witnessed the signs of God's power at work. Like any close kin in a single household, they shared their possessions.
This new loyalty to Christ did not mean leaving behind the old Temple, but gave them its real meaning for the first time. All the places and habits of life gained a new meaning in light of this new Life in Christ. Rather than being clannish, though, it made them even more loving to those outside their new community of faith. This was a powerful contagion of healing, love and grace, lifting more daily out of death to New Life. All Israel was ever meant to be was reborn.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Lesson 33: Introduction, Part 6
Israel had lost her way. Worse than the Jewish people losing their ancient heritage of mystical religion was their utter inability to share any truth with any other nations. Jehovah had revealed to them they were to be a kingdom of priests, in the sense they were to teach the nations the Laws, by living the Law and showing how it brought such rich blessings. By this, they would bring God to man, and man to God. Israel failed this calling miserably. She failed mostly because she simply no longer understood the Law, nor the God who gave it.
It waited for Jesus to be born to both explain the Law and show where it pointed. The ultimate truth of things cannot be declared in human terms, so He spoke always in parables, by which the Kingdom of Heaven was symbolized. The other half of His work was explaining the proper understanding of the Law, which Law was itself the ultimate parable. The alienation from the Law as revealed by God was only half done in the Exile. The work and words of Jesus make no sense if we do not grasp the full extent of the displacement we find when the Gospels open the New Testament. The true meaning of the Law was utterly incomprehensible to the Jewish leaders of His day, and we must show how they got there.
But on the way to that understanding, we must take a moment to show something critical. The Nation of Israel was called to live the Law and teach the Law. They did not live the Law, and so lost the understanding to teach it. Jesus corrected that. The teaching of Jesus was altogether a matter of the Law and it's ultimate spiritual meaning. The Cross was hinted at in the Law, a full realization of what Moses meant. While His death and resurrection have opened to us His presence living in us, there have always been people with living spirits, people who had been "born again." Only once did He mention that phrase as a term for spiritual birth. He used it in discussion with Nicodemus, a Doctor of the Law, as it were. This man, so far as we know, did eventually serve Christ. We notice during that meeting at night the man had no comprehension of symbolic language, and stumbled over the literal meaning of the terms Jesus used. Jesus went on to point out the necessity of symbolic logic and parabolic thinking. What first grabbed the attention of Nicodemus was Jesus' teaching of what the Law meant. Jesus insisted His was the most accurate understanding, since He was not just another rabbi, but the Son of God, the ultimate source of all man could know about God. In the teachings of Jesus, we see Him discussing obedience to God via the Law, as a path way to the Spirit. Yet, He openly admitted most of the world would never become spiritual. So in His teaching there was still something for those on the level of the flesh. It was altogether challenging for men without a living spirit, but not out of reach. Jesus taught the Law.
In reaching out to a lost world, we do not counsel them to be born again, but to turn from their sins. This is not merely a tool to manipulate people into realizing they are sinners in need of a Savior. The lost souls of this world are not somehow simply a project, people unworthy of our attention otherwise. We must work from the basis of a genuine love for them where they are, in the flesh and under the Laws. They need to know what God offers to them without regard to whether they are born-again. In raising high the standard of God's Laws, we point out a spiritual truth, but there are no words for that spiritual truth. Those things are taught as Jesus did, in parables, in the Laws as parable. Those with a living spirit will grasp the parables. Those without must still see the Laws. The way to spiritual birth is through the Laws, not as the Judaizers who bound men under the false legalism of broken Judaism, but the Laws of God for all mankind as He revealed them. Jesus said the whole Laws of God hung from choosing to love God, in the sense of loyalty, and loving your neighbor based on that loyalty. A lawyer present recognized it as true. Israel was not called to teach deep spiritual truth, but to teach the Laws and their blessings on earth at that same level of understanding. It was not merely observance of restrictions and demands on behavior, but of loyalty from the heart -- that was the Law. Within that framework, God would have awakened spirits to eternal enlightenment. To the dead spirits of the world we call out with the Laws of God, warning of sins and the loss of shalom, the promises for those who embrace the Laws of God. We must have an earnest calling to all fallen mankind, showing them the way to the best this life has to offer under God's hand. In the process, some of them will awaken in the spirit, and seek the deeper truth beyond.
Our message to the world is "live right," not, "be born again." They cannot choose the latter, but they must choose the former. Today we see a conflict in Christians, a divide between those who embrace the miracle aspect of spiritual rebirth (Calvinist/Reformed) and those who see the Word demanding we walk according to the Laws (Legalist/Arminian). What keeps them apart is not a question of who is right and who is wrong, but Aristotle. His brand of abstract logic, brought into the church, demands men follow things to their logical conclusion. The Word of God is neither Reformed nor Legalist, and certainly not Universalist, nor any of those other things. The Word is also not Aristotelian, but most of Church History sees Christians embracing Aristotle's false framework for structuring knowledge. Only by the mixing of his pagan understanding do we see a conflict where none exists.
Aristotle rejected the Hebraic understanding of things. Among his students today are Christians who disparage what they call "Eastern Mysticism" without realizing that label applies to the Bible's own viewpoint. But because that label lumps together a host of varying and discordant things, the whole is rejected for something which seems so obvious, so familiar and so easy to us. Our civilization is built on Aristotle, as it were. How did we get from the First Century Christian worldview to a pagan Western rationalism? We took our cue from the Jews, who embraced it first.
It waited for Jesus to be born to both explain the Law and show where it pointed. The ultimate truth of things cannot be declared in human terms, so He spoke always in parables, by which the Kingdom of Heaven was symbolized. The other half of His work was explaining the proper understanding of the Law, which Law was itself the ultimate parable. The alienation from the Law as revealed by God was only half done in the Exile. The work and words of Jesus make no sense if we do not grasp the full extent of the displacement we find when the Gospels open the New Testament. The true meaning of the Law was utterly incomprehensible to the Jewish leaders of His day, and we must show how they got there.
But on the way to that understanding, we must take a moment to show something critical. The Nation of Israel was called to live the Law and teach the Law. They did not live the Law, and so lost the understanding to teach it. Jesus corrected that. The teaching of Jesus was altogether a matter of the Law and it's ultimate spiritual meaning. The Cross was hinted at in the Law, a full realization of what Moses meant. While His death and resurrection have opened to us His presence living in us, there have always been people with living spirits, people who had been "born again." Only once did He mention that phrase as a term for spiritual birth. He used it in discussion with Nicodemus, a Doctor of the Law, as it were. This man, so far as we know, did eventually serve Christ. We notice during that meeting at night the man had no comprehension of symbolic language, and stumbled over the literal meaning of the terms Jesus used. Jesus went on to point out the necessity of symbolic logic and parabolic thinking. What first grabbed the attention of Nicodemus was Jesus' teaching of what the Law meant. Jesus insisted His was the most accurate understanding, since He was not just another rabbi, but the Son of God, the ultimate source of all man could know about God. In the teachings of Jesus, we see Him discussing obedience to God via the Law, as a path way to the Spirit. Yet, He openly admitted most of the world would never become spiritual. So in His teaching there was still something for those on the level of the flesh. It was altogether challenging for men without a living spirit, but not out of reach. Jesus taught the Law.
In reaching out to a lost world, we do not counsel them to be born again, but to turn from their sins. This is not merely a tool to manipulate people into realizing they are sinners in need of a Savior. The lost souls of this world are not somehow simply a project, people unworthy of our attention otherwise. We must work from the basis of a genuine love for them where they are, in the flesh and under the Laws. They need to know what God offers to them without regard to whether they are born-again. In raising high the standard of God's Laws, we point out a spiritual truth, but there are no words for that spiritual truth. Those things are taught as Jesus did, in parables, in the Laws as parable. Those with a living spirit will grasp the parables. Those without must still see the Laws. The way to spiritual birth is through the Laws, not as the Judaizers who bound men under the false legalism of broken Judaism, but the Laws of God for all mankind as He revealed them. Jesus said the whole Laws of God hung from choosing to love God, in the sense of loyalty, and loving your neighbor based on that loyalty. A lawyer present recognized it as true. Israel was not called to teach deep spiritual truth, but to teach the Laws and their blessings on earth at that same level of understanding. It was not merely observance of restrictions and demands on behavior, but of loyalty from the heart -- that was the Law. Within that framework, God would have awakened spirits to eternal enlightenment. To the dead spirits of the world we call out with the Laws of God, warning of sins and the loss of shalom, the promises for those who embrace the Laws of God. We must have an earnest calling to all fallen mankind, showing them the way to the best this life has to offer under God's hand. In the process, some of them will awaken in the spirit, and seek the deeper truth beyond.
Our message to the world is "live right," not, "be born again." They cannot choose the latter, but they must choose the former. Today we see a conflict in Christians, a divide between those who embrace the miracle aspect of spiritual rebirth (Calvinist/Reformed) and those who see the Word demanding we walk according to the Laws (Legalist/Arminian). What keeps them apart is not a question of who is right and who is wrong, but Aristotle. His brand of abstract logic, brought into the church, demands men follow things to their logical conclusion. The Word of God is neither Reformed nor Legalist, and certainly not Universalist, nor any of those other things. The Word is also not Aristotelian, but most of Church History sees Christians embracing Aristotle's false framework for structuring knowledge. Only by the mixing of his pagan understanding do we see a conflict where none exists.
Aristotle rejected the Hebraic understanding of things. Among his students today are Christians who disparage what they call "Eastern Mysticism" without realizing that label applies to the Bible's own viewpoint. But because that label lumps together a host of varying and discordant things, the whole is rejected for something which seems so obvious, so familiar and so easy to us. Our civilization is built on Aristotle, as it were. How did we get from the First Century Christian worldview to a pagan Western rationalism? We took our cue from the Jews, who embraced it first.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Lesson 32: Reading the Exile
In the seven centuries of life between the Conquest and the Exile, the core of Hebrew culture suffered too much from accommodation. It began nobly with the somewhat determined rejection of soul-stealing human comfort. They were tent-dwelling nomads, fully capable of defeating every enemy under God's divine protection, and living comfortably enough they could ensure no one starved in their nation. They had health, reasonable prosperity, security and an identity unique in all the world. Slowly, step-by-step, they gave away this powerful legacy for the comforts of civilization gone to seed. They used the phrases and expressions of tented nomads, even as they crawled in their narrow city alleys. They developed the invasive bureaucratic government structure which denies the humanity of the governed, all to feed a vast class of parasites who did nothing useful, even as their policies drove a stake through the heart of the Covenant. At every turn, they accommodated the sinful pagan world, because they just could not be left out of all the "blessings" of sin.
As a nation, they could have survived in that state, but it meant inevitably absorbing idolatrous compromise to get there. It was less the vast number of localized deities and more the relentless pursuit of what drove Lot's wife to turn back to destruction -- the creature comforts of a brand of civilization which destroys the soul, pulling it away from utter dependency on God, and replacing Him with the god of Self. It's one thing to want so much to know what makes the world tick mechanically; it's another to presume you can know enough to ditch your trust in God. Science is not the enemy of faith, nor vice versa; sin is in assuming human knowledge can cover everything important. It's all tied to the roots of human temptation: Lust of the Flesh, Lust of the Eyes, and Hubris, the trinity of Hell. Chasing any of the human wants and wishes outside the channels of God's provision is the whole of the problem. Make no mistake: This applies whether in the Spirit Realm or in the flesh. Israel as a whole, then Judah alone, could have remained sufficiently close to the Covenant if they had pulled back and revived the other-worldly elements of their culture, but they continued running from it.
That flight demanded they explore all the other options, rather than rely on the revelation of God to keep them away from things which defile. Ritual cleansing cannot change a wounded loyalty. There is nothing particularly helpful in sowing wild oats so one knows what sin is like. The most powerful spiritual people are those who never fought much with God, but accepted His revelation from the start. That is Holiness. Israel plumbed the depths of depravity, seeking to find the depths, just as Satan tempted Eve, suggesting God had somehow denied them their rightful taste of all things.
The Exile was God's answer to their complacency. Having God's House in their capital city did not make Him their hostage. Babylon came and took it all away, then took them away. While it is true their culture did finally turn away from blatant idolatry, particularly symbolized by the extremes of King Manasseh, it was at the cost of driving farther away from the sensitivity of spirit. Most of what we know about the Exile comes from Esther, Ezekiel and Daniel. While things are seldom bluntly stated, we can detect a drift in the national character based on larger spiritual issues. Idolatry without graven images is still possible, and the Jews drifted farther and farther into idolatry. They may have done a better job of implementing the letter of the Law, but completely lost their grasp on the spirit of the Law, by way of losing their entire cultural foundation.
That loss came in steps. First, the previously noted slide into empty modernity and urbanity. Second, Solomon introduced the economics of growth by credit, an idea learned from Tyre and Sidon.This, from the man who wrote, "Debt makes you a slave of the lender." In Babylon, the Jews came up against the root of all human failure in the guise the all-encompassing merchant culture: Everything has a price, and that's all that matters. In their century of Exile, Israel became very wealthy, in large part due to their engaging primitive banking. The Law allowed charging interest on loans to Gentiles, which becomes eventually the excuse for making no loans at all to their fellow Jews, unless they received back a stake in future profits. Loans for charitable purposes became a mere formality, a tiny portion of their wealth to purchase ritual purity. A significant element of Haman's proposal to the emperor for slaughtering the Jews was the prospect of breaking all the liens and confiscating the vast wealth of the Jews.
In ancient Hebrew culture, all wealth was a gift from God, and was never directly tied to hard work. You worked hard because that was your duty to God; your recompense was at His discretion. Thus, working to gain wealth and comfort seeks to take God out of the equation, a fundamental violation of Spirit. Those with wealth were managers of a divine asset, property of God's domain. Your placement in the community was God's assignment to manage His assets for the benefit of His prosperity. Loans to your fellow community members were, in essence if not in fact, a means of protecting your own kin, your nearest relatives in the Family of God. You give of your surplus, and God is the guarantor; taking collateral was just a formality to encourage responsibility to God, not to you. You loaned knowing it may well turn out to be a gift, because you knew it was God's property, and it was He who would absorb the losses, even as He held to His promise to keep you from harm. That promise was based not on direct accounting, but on the broader, life-long and mysterious tracking of God in Heaven.
Daniel reveals a deep sense of shock at learning his people had utterly lost this understanding. The Jews became so enamored with accounting by the books, they dismissed the mystical logic entirely. They left behind the very anchor of what made them special in the world, to become merely one more nation devoted to grabbing a bigger share of the pie, as if there were no real God. Jehovah was reduced to a big CEO in the sky, and the concept of covenant was exchanged for contract. The nation which returned to Palestine was spiritually dead. They still reaped a modicum of Covenant blessing for their partial adherence to the letter of the Law, but no longer knew it as a path to something far higher. The Law was for them the sum total of God's revelation, and all the spiritual matter behind it was completely forgotten.
As a nation, they could have survived in that state, but it meant inevitably absorbing idolatrous compromise to get there. It was less the vast number of localized deities and more the relentless pursuit of what drove Lot's wife to turn back to destruction -- the creature comforts of a brand of civilization which destroys the soul, pulling it away from utter dependency on God, and replacing Him with the god of Self. It's one thing to want so much to know what makes the world tick mechanically; it's another to presume you can know enough to ditch your trust in God. Science is not the enemy of faith, nor vice versa; sin is in assuming human knowledge can cover everything important. It's all tied to the roots of human temptation: Lust of the Flesh, Lust of the Eyes, and Hubris, the trinity of Hell. Chasing any of the human wants and wishes outside the channels of God's provision is the whole of the problem. Make no mistake: This applies whether in the Spirit Realm or in the flesh. Israel as a whole, then Judah alone, could have remained sufficiently close to the Covenant if they had pulled back and revived the other-worldly elements of their culture, but they continued running from it.
That flight demanded they explore all the other options, rather than rely on the revelation of God to keep them away from things which defile. Ritual cleansing cannot change a wounded loyalty. There is nothing particularly helpful in sowing wild oats so one knows what sin is like. The most powerful spiritual people are those who never fought much with God, but accepted His revelation from the start. That is Holiness. Israel plumbed the depths of depravity, seeking to find the depths, just as Satan tempted Eve, suggesting God had somehow denied them their rightful taste of all things.
The Exile was God's answer to their complacency. Having God's House in their capital city did not make Him their hostage. Babylon came and took it all away, then took them away. While it is true their culture did finally turn away from blatant idolatry, particularly symbolized by the extremes of King Manasseh, it was at the cost of driving farther away from the sensitivity of spirit. Most of what we know about the Exile comes from Esther, Ezekiel and Daniel. While things are seldom bluntly stated, we can detect a drift in the national character based on larger spiritual issues. Idolatry without graven images is still possible, and the Jews drifted farther and farther into idolatry. They may have done a better job of implementing the letter of the Law, but completely lost their grasp on the spirit of the Law, by way of losing their entire cultural foundation.
That loss came in steps. First, the previously noted slide into empty modernity and urbanity. Second, Solomon introduced the economics of growth by credit, an idea learned from Tyre and Sidon.This, from the man who wrote, "Debt makes you a slave of the lender." In Babylon, the Jews came up against the root of all human failure in the guise the all-encompassing merchant culture: Everything has a price, and that's all that matters. In their century of Exile, Israel became very wealthy, in large part due to their engaging primitive banking. The Law allowed charging interest on loans to Gentiles, which becomes eventually the excuse for making no loans at all to their fellow Jews, unless they received back a stake in future profits. Loans for charitable purposes became a mere formality, a tiny portion of their wealth to purchase ritual purity. A significant element of Haman's proposal to the emperor for slaughtering the Jews was the prospect of breaking all the liens and confiscating the vast wealth of the Jews.
In ancient Hebrew culture, all wealth was a gift from God, and was never directly tied to hard work. You worked hard because that was your duty to God; your recompense was at His discretion. Thus, working to gain wealth and comfort seeks to take God out of the equation, a fundamental violation of Spirit. Those with wealth were managers of a divine asset, property of God's domain. Your placement in the community was God's assignment to manage His assets for the benefit of His prosperity. Loans to your fellow community members were, in essence if not in fact, a means of protecting your own kin, your nearest relatives in the Family of God. You give of your surplus, and God is the guarantor; taking collateral was just a formality to encourage responsibility to God, not to you. You loaned knowing it may well turn out to be a gift, because you knew it was God's property, and it was He who would absorb the losses, even as He held to His promise to keep you from harm. That promise was based not on direct accounting, but on the broader, life-long and mysterious tracking of God in Heaven.
Daniel reveals a deep sense of shock at learning his people had utterly lost this understanding. The Jews became so enamored with accounting by the books, they dismissed the mystical logic entirely. They left behind the very anchor of what made them special in the world, to become merely one more nation devoted to grabbing a bigger share of the pie, as if there were no real God. Jehovah was reduced to a big CEO in the sky, and the concept of covenant was exchanged for contract. The nation which returned to Palestine was spiritually dead. They still reaped a modicum of Covenant blessing for their partial adherence to the letter of the Law, but no longer knew it as a path to something far higher. The Law was for them the sum total of God's revelation, and all the spiritual matter behind it was completely forgotten.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Isaiah 44
God's plans are unconditional; that's the meaning of "sovereignty." His promises do not depend on anyone but Himself. The promises of the Law stand as long as the fallen earth exists. However, those promises cannot be claimed and appropriated unless we go where they stand. The word "confession" is a reasonable translation of the languages in the Bible manuscripts, but only as we recognize it's original roots for English: to stand with. Thus, only as we confess our God -- stand with Him on matters of His declaration -- do we stand where His promises stand. His plans are to give those promises, but Israel refuses too often to stand with God where those promises can be found. Israel removes herself from God's plans, so He will make a New Israel. It may well be, from Isaiah's perspective, the Israel which goes into exile, then returns, can choose to be that new Israel. If she still refuses to take the vestments of that office, it awaits another to fulfill it.
So despite the necessity we saw in the previous chapter of destroying the Temple, Israel still has another chance to accept her role in God's divine plan. Somewhere, some day, there will be an Israel who is Jeshurun -- Upright. It remains at least once more her choice to be that Israel. The Spirit of God would be poured out upon whomever accepts this vestment, but it will surely not be the generation of Isaiah, so perhaps a later one. They will be recognized by seeing them take upon themselves the full manifestation of God's revelation and holiness, clearly and utterly loyal as the property and servants of the Lord.
Who is this Lord? In the early days of the Nation of Israel, the depth of cultural immersion in their times made it well nigh impossible to swallow the notion of there being only one deity, One True God. But this is some 700 years later, and there is no longer any excuse for it. Of all the various pagan deities, not one could claim to have foretold the future accurately. Indeed, a wise man might guess what will come tomorrow on a broad scale, if he has enough information. However, God has declared in advance things no man could expect. He said He would dry the sea floor for Israel to cross, and did it. He said He would feed them in a land which could scarcely support a small clan, much less the million plus marching under Jehovah's banner. God's claims are the only ones which come true, simply because He is the one who makes them happen.
We can be sure the ancient pagans did not necessarily believe their images were the actual gods themselves, but a point of focus. They weren't so primitive as to be utterly animist, at least in the ANE. However, God said there were no others, so it might as well be the idols were the gods themselves. Thus, we have this comical satire of men calling out to a chunk of material which required the help of a skilled craftsman to turn it into a god. Indeed, a man would cook his food and warm his body from one half a log, and with the other he has to work long and skillfully to make the god to which he kneels. Oh, what a mighty god that is! What a tragic figure is the man who cannot see what a fool he makes of himself that way.
Unlike that sort of deity, the wild imagining of a fearful man who makes his own god, Jehovah has made His people, Israel. There is but one purpose for redeeming Israel from slavery: That the whole earth would resound from their witness of His glory. All Creation waits, standing by to support the songs of praise Israel should be singing right now. Should Israel but obey the Covenant, every idolater would be shown the silly babbler he is. Every Israeli would be shown the wise and unopposable force for revelation, making that nation unassailable on the earth. Would she but remain faithful, her land would become like Eden, the Paradise Garden of God. In her path returning from Babylon, He would smooth the mountains, dry up every water barrier. This is the God who calls by name Cyrus of Persia before he is born, making him the servant of God to release His people from captivity. He will order and fund the rebuilding of Jerusalem to even greater glory than before, Temple and all.
This was the offer standing before Judah was ever carried off by Babylon. This is the offer she began to accept. Yet, as history shows, and the Word itself, she never quite claims that garment of holiness, that vestment of greatness as God's revelation on earth. It waited One who would come much later to fulfill all things.
So despite the necessity we saw in the previous chapter of destroying the Temple, Israel still has another chance to accept her role in God's divine plan. Somewhere, some day, there will be an Israel who is Jeshurun -- Upright. It remains at least once more her choice to be that Israel. The Spirit of God would be poured out upon whomever accepts this vestment, but it will surely not be the generation of Isaiah, so perhaps a later one. They will be recognized by seeing them take upon themselves the full manifestation of God's revelation and holiness, clearly and utterly loyal as the property and servants of the Lord.
Who is this Lord? In the early days of the Nation of Israel, the depth of cultural immersion in their times made it well nigh impossible to swallow the notion of there being only one deity, One True God. But this is some 700 years later, and there is no longer any excuse for it. Of all the various pagan deities, not one could claim to have foretold the future accurately. Indeed, a wise man might guess what will come tomorrow on a broad scale, if he has enough information. However, God has declared in advance things no man could expect. He said He would dry the sea floor for Israel to cross, and did it. He said He would feed them in a land which could scarcely support a small clan, much less the million plus marching under Jehovah's banner. God's claims are the only ones which come true, simply because He is the one who makes them happen.
We can be sure the ancient pagans did not necessarily believe their images were the actual gods themselves, but a point of focus. They weren't so primitive as to be utterly animist, at least in the ANE. However, God said there were no others, so it might as well be the idols were the gods themselves. Thus, we have this comical satire of men calling out to a chunk of material which required the help of a skilled craftsman to turn it into a god. Indeed, a man would cook his food and warm his body from one half a log, and with the other he has to work long and skillfully to make the god to which he kneels. Oh, what a mighty god that is! What a tragic figure is the man who cannot see what a fool he makes of himself that way.
Unlike that sort of deity, the wild imagining of a fearful man who makes his own god, Jehovah has made His people, Israel. There is but one purpose for redeeming Israel from slavery: That the whole earth would resound from their witness of His glory. All Creation waits, standing by to support the songs of praise Israel should be singing right now. Should Israel but obey the Covenant, every idolater would be shown the silly babbler he is. Every Israeli would be shown the wise and unopposable force for revelation, making that nation unassailable on the earth. Would she but remain faithful, her land would become like Eden, the Paradise Garden of God. In her path returning from Babylon, He would smooth the mountains, dry up every water barrier. This is the God who calls by name Cyrus of Persia before he is born, making him the servant of God to release His people from captivity. He will order and fund the rebuilding of Jerusalem to even greater glory than before, Temple and all.
This was the offer standing before Judah was ever carried off by Babylon. This is the offer she began to accept. Yet, as history shows, and the Word itself, she never quite claims that garment of holiness, that vestment of greatness as God's revelation on earth. It waited One who would come much later to fulfill all things.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Lesson 31: Reading the Prophets
As near as anyone can tell, we owe most of the Old Testament text to the efforts of Samuel's College of the Prophets. Not only did they try to keep fresh copies of what they received, but probably wrote and edited most of what we have. Aside from the Pentateuch, Chronicles, and David's and Solomon's books, there's not much they didn't put together.
The actual writing of the prophets deserve their own studies, each in their own context. However, there are common elements. Most obvious is the common Hebrew culture, which we have tried to see is so different from ours. More than that is the issue of the word "prophecy" itself. How often have you heard someone say instructively prophecy is more about "forth-telling" than about foretelling? Yet so often the same teacher goes on to talk almost entirely about the foretelling. Such lipservice will hardly promote a genuine understanding of the prophets in the Bible.
For far, far too long, leaders in various churches in the West have been pouring concrete around certain ideas. It makes us comfortable when things aren't too flexible, too malleable. We want stuff to stay where we put it, and know when we come back, it's still there, still the same. But it's a false security. When we invest too much in this world, we find our hearts and our loyalty tied to these things, and struggle to attach our affections to the indefinable and mysterious Spirit Realm.
We like to have clear signposts to mark our progress along a path with a fixed and known goal. We have a cultural revulsion for simply enjoying the journey, and find fault with those who don't know where they are going. In the Kingdom, we are not permitted to know the end point of this journey. We say we are walking to the Light, but that's just an expression, a way of saying we are not going to stay where we are, but draw closer to the Lord of Light. Our fleshly mind is ill equipped for such undefined existence. Everything in us rages against the necessity of resting in Him with no concern for tomorrow, as it were. It's not even proper to think of what we are doing, but in terms of our loyalty to Him by the moment. Our human nature rebels against that.
So it's no surprise so very many teachers and preachers insist the prophets were dropping hidden clues about certain milestones of the future, a future yet ahead of us. It is next to impossible to break away minds from such a false understanding. The most important thing to understand about Bible prophecy is they did not reveal secrets, but went back over the very plain teaching which had always been there, but so often ignored. When Elijah spoke to King Ahab, it was not to reveal deep secrets of God's plans for the future. It was to remind Ahab of what he should have known about God's nature. That Elijah did occasionally foretell something coming down on Ahab's head was just a minor element in the much bigger message. Elijah revealed what man could know about God, based on previous revelation, which Ahab rejected. Most prophetic material in the Bible is aimed at calling people back to the God they should already know.
For those of us lacking the vast heritage of Hebrew oral lore, there is much in the prophets which tells us new things. Still, the point remains, the fundamental nature of all prophecy is: This is what God is like. Telling what God has done demonstrates what matters to Him. Telling what God will do is more about what matters to Him. Most of the time, warning of future events is nothing more than explaining how God operates when we sin. The ability to deliver specific warnings about this or that future event is utterly meaningless if we do not see it in the context of knowing God, the Person. Only a fool could assert God would not send prophetic messages these days about future events, however unlikely that may be, but it takes a greater fool to ignore what's most important in any prophecy.
Further, the only purpose for bothering to reveal anything about God is so we can obey Him. Indeed, there is a sense in which Scripture has only one real purpose for existing -- so we know what God requires of us. Not in the sense of rules and regulations, as you surely understand by now, but in terms of how our loyalty works out in daily living. God is not harmed by our wasting lots of time doing things which don't matter, but our blessings will surely glow like the sun if we begin to filter out those things. We don't need to know about tomorrow, and we surely waste time in trying to nail down some obscure prediction based on wild and silly readings and semantic juggling. The only reason prophecy is so hard to follow sometimes is because the Western churches long ago rejected reading prophecy from the Hebrew viewpoint. To assume the Pharisees, and modern Judaism, reflect Hebraic thinking is to ignore everything Jesus taught. We have to travel far, far back into ancient history, to a distant land and a people long gone, as it were. We have to go back to where God first revealed Himself to make sense of how He last revealed Himself in His Son, whom we propose to follow.
The actual writing of the prophets deserve their own studies, each in their own context. However, there are common elements. Most obvious is the common Hebrew culture, which we have tried to see is so different from ours. More than that is the issue of the word "prophecy" itself. How often have you heard someone say instructively prophecy is more about "forth-telling" than about foretelling? Yet so often the same teacher goes on to talk almost entirely about the foretelling. Such lipservice will hardly promote a genuine understanding of the prophets in the Bible.
For far, far too long, leaders in various churches in the West have been pouring concrete around certain ideas. It makes us comfortable when things aren't too flexible, too malleable. We want stuff to stay where we put it, and know when we come back, it's still there, still the same. But it's a false security. When we invest too much in this world, we find our hearts and our loyalty tied to these things, and struggle to attach our affections to the indefinable and mysterious Spirit Realm.
We like to have clear signposts to mark our progress along a path with a fixed and known goal. We have a cultural revulsion for simply enjoying the journey, and find fault with those who don't know where they are going. In the Kingdom, we are not permitted to know the end point of this journey. We say we are walking to the Light, but that's just an expression, a way of saying we are not going to stay where we are, but draw closer to the Lord of Light. Our fleshly mind is ill equipped for such undefined existence. Everything in us rages against the necessity of resting in Him with no concern for tomorrow, as it were. It's not even proper to think of what we are doing, but in terms of our loyalty to Him by the moment. Our human nature rebels against that.
So it's no surprise so very many teachers and preachers insist the prophets were dropping hidden clues about certain milestones of the future, a future yet ahead of us. It is next to impossible to break away minds from such a false understanding. The most important thing to understand about Bible prophecy is they did not reveal secrets, but went back over the very plain teaching which had always been there, but so often ignored. When Elijah spoke to King Ahab, it was not to reveal deep secrets of God's plans for the future. It was to remind Ahab of what he should have known about God's nature. That Elijah did occasionally foretell something coming down on Ahab's head was just a minor element in the much bigger message. Elijah revealed what man could know about God, based on previous revelation, which Ahab rejected. Most prophetic material in the Bible is aimed at calling people back to the God they should already know.
For those of us lacking the vast heritage of Hebrew oral lore, there is much in the prophets which tells us new things. Still, the point remains, the fundamental nature of all prophecy is: This is what God is like. Telling what God has done demonstrates what matters to Him. Telling what God will do is more about what matters to Him. Most of the time, warning of future events is nothing more than explaining how God operates when we sin. The ability to deliver specific warnings about this or that future event is utterly meaningless if we do not see it in the context of knowing God, the Person. Only a fool could assert God would not send prophetic messages these days about future events, however unlikely that may be, but it takes a greater fool to ignore what's most important in any prophecy.
Further, the only purpose for bothering to reveal anything about God is so we can obey Him. Indeed, there is a sense in which Scripture has only one real purpose for existing -- so we know what God requires of us. Not in the sense of rules and regulations, as you surely understand by now, but in terms of how our loyalty works out in daily living. God is not harmed by our wasting lots of time doing things which don't matter, but our blessings will surely glow like the sun if we begin to filter out those things. We don't need to know about tomorrow, and we surely waste time in trying to nail down some obscure prediction based on wild and silly readings and semantic juggling. The only reason prophecy is so hard to follow sometimes is because the Western churches long ago rejected reading prophecy from the Hebrew viewpoint. To assume the Pharisees, and modern Judaism, reflect Hebraic thinking is to ignore everything Jesus taught. We have to travel far, far back into ancient history, to a distant land and a people long gone, as it were. We have to go back to where God first revealed Himself to make sense of how He last revealed Himself in His Son, whom we propose to follow.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Household of Faith: Money and Love
Money is a tool. Love is a weapon.
In the a Household of Faith, there is no offering baskets and no budget. Any time, any where, any one can offer a gift to any other believer. If it happens to be money, that's fine. If it happens to be any other sort of tangible goods and services, that's also fine. There is no tax deduction; you give because you cannot do otherwise. No one has to ask; no one has to tell you. Sometimes it is appropriate to mention a need, but that remains independent of the expectation for giving. The mere act of "taking up a collection" is pressure not appropriate in the Household.
Love is the weapon for fighting back the darkness. There is no step-by-step sales pitch evangelism training. Everyone knows how to be loving. We all know how we want to be loved, so it's not a mystery. Evangelism is nothing more than expressing genuine affection. The only training we need it learning how to remove barriers within ourselves to loving others. There is no need for silly, syrupy sentimentalism, but for a genuine positive regard for another simply because they breathe. Christ died for them; surely you can care about them regardless of their sins, since He did the same for you.
We are all different because the world in sin is all different in their needs. No one of us is called to reach all humans, or we would all be alike. The hand of God shaped each of us differently to send in His love to different targets for that divine weapon.
In the a Household of Faith, there is no offering baskets and no budget. Any time, any where, any one can offer a gift to any other believer. If it happens to be money, that's fine. If it happens to be any other sort of tangible goods and services, that's also fine. There is no tax deduction; you give because you cannot do otherwise. No one has to ask; no one has to tell you. Sometimes it is appropriate to mention a need, but that remains independent of the expectation for giving. The mere act of "taking up a collection" is pressure not appropriate in the Household.
Love is the weapon for fighting back the darkness. There is no step-by-step sales pitch evangelism training. Everyone knows how to be loving. We all know how we want to be loved, so it's not a mystery. Evangelism is nothing more than expressing genuine affection. The only training we need it learning how to remove barriers within ourselves to loving others. There is no need for silly, syrupy sentimentalism, but for a genuine positive regard for another simply because they breathe. Christ died for them; surely you can care about them regardless of their sins, since He did the same for you.
We are all different because the world in sin is all different in their needs. No one of us is called to reach all humans, or we would all be alike. The hand of God shaped each of us differently to send in His love to different targets for that divine weapon.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Household of Faith
Hang onto your hat; this will probably strike you as radical.
Jesus organized His disciples. They assumed the model was the royal court of an Eastern potentate, as would be typical in Hebrew culture. It also included elements of an extended household, men of shared noble lineage, chosen by the Sheik as His closest aides, His retainers. This is often referred to in English as the Kingdom of Heaven. The problem is we tend to think in terms of Medieval Feudalism, as opposed to ANE Feudalism. Not merely the trappings, but the basic assumptions are quite different, and the former is thoroughly misleading in that respect. We do better to keep in mind the Eastern Sheik model, as that's what God chose for Himself.
Jesus remains our Sheik, our Master, the Head of Household. The issue was never shared DNA, but spiritual DNA. You who serve Christ are my brothers and sisters, as we have long ago adopted. Where we go wrong is not seeing that relationship through spiritual eyes; instead we flavor it with a world of subtle Western-isms inappropriate to the Sheikdom of Heaven. I won't write that book right now, and simply alert you to the necessity of examining it in your heart. Meanwhile, no man on earth sits on any throne of organization in the Household of Heaven. We are all members of the same family, and some rise to leadership for reasons obvious to anyone with spiritual sense, that divine faculty often called "faith." It could also be called "loyalty" under the intensely personal loyalty model of men and women serving an Eastern Sheik.
In this Covenant of His Blood, we still organize, but organize according to His chosen model. When we come together for fellowship and operations of faith in this world, we come together as "church" in the English language. With so very much baggage attending that term, I'll avoid it for now, as I paint it from the same palette as the foregoing. We come together as a gathering of the Household of Faith. We share a mystical union which transcends blood and DNA, and declare ourselves "kin" by the authority of the Spirit. Thus, at any time and place, the sign out front could read, "A Household of Faith Gathers Here."
For what it's worth, I will use that terminology as this ministry effort grows. There is only one Temple, and that one is in Heaven, God's own Divine Court. We build no temples here any longer. Rather, we build houses as homes. The act of gathering is too important to smudge with formalized trappings. Organization is necessary for our fallen natures, not for the sake of the Spirit. He is the organizer. We take away as much as possible the man made veneer to grant Him the fullest freedom possible. While only experience can teach each gathering what that means for them, in my case that means avoiding dedicated facilities, if possible. We dirty the concept of holiness if we allow any human excuse for labeling any physical structure "holy." The local Body of Christ should reflect as much as possible the very physical form of some ANE household operating under the Master's authority, in His domain.
Obviously this limits the size of such organizing. That is as it should be. We can share a lot of excitement in huge crowds, but we can hardly be united with every member if we can't name them all. The numbers will vary with cultural backgrounds, but here in good old US of A, we tend to lose track when the class is bigger than 12, and the worship is bigger than some 75 or so. Occasional rallies are another issue, but regular weekly worship should be smaller. It becomes all too easy to rely on emotion as an actual barrier to the Spirit of sharing with our fellow worshippers. Removing barriers is the whole point. Yes, I've watched strangers get all huggy after a great worship concert, but that's just cathexis, the emotional simulation of what the Holy Spirit does. Cathexis can deceive you in romance, and can deceive in spiritual matters. It's not a sin, but it's not a spiritual answer to a very real fallen human need.
That need is a genuine covenant commitment, loyalty to others because of a shared loyalty to Christ. You need to see the face of Christ in my willingness to face you when things are not so huggy and happy. When we commune at our worst, we have won a mighty battle in the Spirit. Emotions are there to celebrate, but serve no other purpose. Worship without emotion is just as valid in God's eyes, just as pleasing to Him, as it expresses loyalty. We have a long legacy of confusing Spirit with emotion, and we must make it a conscious effort to swing that Sword of the Spirit to cut the division cleanly.
It occurs to me this blog has become the catalyst of my effort to dig out the understanding of things long lost. No, it's not secret; it's been there all along, in plain sight. Others have spoken of it, but you will have a tough time finding their works. Perhaps I'm just a little more obsessive about it, so feel free to dismiss me for a wacko. I'm not about to seek an organization in the mainstream sense. It would be all too easy for me to build such a thing, create a new denomination, grow a big membership, make a fat living and have my name remembered for a long time. Yes, I do condemn that. No, this is something else. I'm seized by a powerful understanding of God's revelation. It has made such a huge difference in my soul, and now makes a growing difference in my life. Other people are reading my record of discovery and finding, to varying degrees, something useful to their journey of faith.
Sooner or later, the effort to offer this understanding to more people will mean organizing a larger gathering than now meets in my living room every Sunday. There are no particular plans for this; it's simply how God operates. My plan is to meet the need as I go, or prepare for things as God shines the light of my path farther out ahead of my walk. He has placed in my heart a concern to limit the human factors of organization, to prevent by pre-planning things which should not happen in order to be consistent with the teaching. Words are only symbols, a parable, of higher truth. I'm going to call the local gatherings "a Household of Faith." I will not cooperate with anyone who seeks incorporation by man's laws so long as those laws require some compromise with the liberty necessary for following our Lord. For now, that means no incorporation, no tax-free status, no formal budgets and board meetings, no constitutions and by-laws documents, etc.
Instead, it will always be the basic house church model. You join the household, not in the legal human sense, by necessarily moving into the physical home, but you join spiritually the family of faith which gathers there. It operates under the authority of some householder, the host/hostess of the home. It's always a "private" gathering in that sense, and by their own spiritual inclinations, they control who gets in the door, and who has to leave whenever they choose. Obviously, if they do a poor job, the rest of the family meets elsewhere next time. Nobody owns the organization, nobody controls it, but the whole group must find a way to operate under the burden of spiritual discipline. The host must always love the family enough to explain just about anything they ask regarding the meetings and related activities. A literal head of household in the ANE would do that, too. Who teaches or leads the worship is for the host/hostess to decide.
In the end, you end up with a very powerful element of accountability, with nothing to gain from politics. In the long run, a phony will blow it, provided the membership aim at keeping a spiritual sense. Members are not bound by anything other than inclination to participate for each meeting. Every activity is volunteer, and runs on the bodies who show. The host remains in charge, in so far as anyone is. When it works, it quickly looks like an extended family under a head of household. When it doesn't work, people vote with their feet.
I can claim I am called to be a head of household. For now, I am also the host, as it were. Let me be the first to proclaim that is subject to change, because I have no vested interest in control. My only urge is to see the message set before others. Indeed, I honestly predict this will someday gain a new front man, so to speak. I have no doubt someone out there will be touched by God to join this work, and be far more talented than I at teaching and leading. Nor will I pretend to control the content of teaching. It's not possible for me to be involved without teaching in some way, but if the group moves off on their own, that's not my problem. The Lord is washing from me any ambitions. If you aren't moved by my words, I'm not talking to you. The results remain my Father's business, not mine.
So the ministry here and at the static archive website will still be called "Kiln of the Soul." Anyone who wants to coordinate with me can use that label with my blessings (for what that's worth). The individual gatherings under this teaching will be called "Household of Faith." The terms symbolize the focus on embracing a different cultural image, and setting aside previous trappings of Western Evangelical churches. May we never find ourselves returning to the traps of the past, but always treat the human organizational concerns as ever temporary tools of the Household.
Note: "ANE" is the abbreviation for Ancient Near East.
Jesus organized His disciples. They assumed the model was the royal court of an Eastern potentate, as would be typical in Hebrew culture. It also included elements of an extended household, men of shared noble lineage, chosen by the Sheik as His closest aides, His retainers. This is often referred to in English as the Kingdom of Heaven. The problem is we tend to think in terms of Medieval Feudalism, as opposed to ANE Feudalism. Not merely the trappings, but the basic assumptions are quite different, and the former is thoroughly misleading in that respect. We do better to keep in mind the Eastern Sheik model, as that's what God chose for Himself.
Jesus remains our Sheik, our Master, the Head of Household. The issue was never shared DNA, but spiritual DNA. You who serve Christ are my brothers and sisters, as we have long ago adopted. Where we go wrong is not seeing that relationship through spiritual eyes; instead we flavor it with a world of subtle Western-isms inappropriate to the Sheikdom of Heaven. I won't write that book right now, and simply alert you to the necessity of examining it in your heart. Meanwhile, no man on earth sits on any throne of organization in the Household of Heaven. We are all members of the same family, and some rise to leadership for reasons obvious to anyone with spiritual sense, that divine faculty often called "faith." It could also be called "loyalty" under the intensely personal loyalty model of men and women serving an Eastern Sheik.
In this Covenant of His Blood, we still organize, but organize according to His chosen model. When we come together for fellowship and operations of faith in this world, we come together as "church" in the English language. With so very much baggage attending that term, I'll avoid it for now, as I paint it from the same palette as the foregoing. We come together as a gathering of the Household of Faith. We share a mystical union which transcends blood and DNA, and declare ourselves "kin" by the authority of the Spirit. Thus, at any time and place, the sign out front could read, "A Household of Faith Gathers Here."
For what it's worth, I will use that terminology as this ministry effort grows. There is only one Temple, and that one is in Heaven, God's own Divine Court. We build no temples here any longer. Rather, we build houses as homes. The act of gathering is too important to smudge with formalized trappings. Organization is necessary for our fallen natures, not for the sake of the Spirit. He is the organizer. We take away as much as possible the man made veneer to grant Him the fullest freedom possible. While only experience can teach each gathering what that means for them, in my case that means avoiding dedicated facilities, if possible. We dirty the concept of holiness if we allow any human excuse for labeling any physical structure "holy." The local Body of Christ should reflect as much as possible the very physical form of some ANE household operating under the Master's authority, in His domain.
Obviously this limits the size of such organizing. That is as it should be. We can share a lot of excitement in huge crowds, but we can hardly be united with every member if we can't name them all. The numbers will vary with cultural backgrounds, but here in good old US of A, we tend to lose track when the class is bigger than 12, and the worship is bigger than some 75 or so. Occasional rallies are another issue, but regular weekly worship should be smaller. It becomes all too easy to rely on emotion as an actual barrier to the Spirit of sharing with our fellow worshippers. Removing barriers is the whole point. Yes, I've watched strangers get all huggy after a great worship concert, but that's just cathexis, the emotional simulation of what the Holy Spirit does. Cathexis can deceive you in romance, and can deceive in spiritual matters. It's not a sin, but it's not a spiritual answer to a very real fallen human need.
That need is a genuine covenant commitment, loyalty to others because of a shared loyalty to Christ. You need to see the face of Christ in my willingness to face you when things are not so huggy and happy. When we commune at our worst, we have won a mighty battle in the Spirit. Emotions are there to celebrate, but serve no other purpose. Worship without emotion is just as valid in God's eyes, just as pleasing to Him, as it expresses loyalty. We have a long legacy of confusing Spirit with emotion, and we must make it a conscious effort to swing that Sword of the Spirit to cut the division cleanly.
It occurs to me this blog has become the catalyst of my effort to dig out the understanding of things long lost. No, it's not secret; it's been there all along, in plain sight. Others have spoken of it, but you will have a tough time finding their works. Perhaps I'm just a little more obsessive about it, so feel free to dismiss me for a wacko. I'm not about to seek an organization in the mainstream sense. It would be all too easy for me to build such a thing, create a new denomination, grow a big membership, make a fat living and have my name remembered for a long time. Yes, I do condemn that. No, this is something else. I'm seized by a powerful understanding of God's revelation. It has made such a huge difference in my soul, and now makes a growing difference in my life. Other people are reading my record of discovery and finding, to varying degrees, something useful to their journey of faith.
Sooner or later, the effort to offer this understanding to more people will mean organizing a larger gathering than now meets in my living room every Sunday. There are no particular plans for this; it's simply how God operates. My plan is to meet the need as I go, or prepare for things as God shines the light of my path farther out ahead of my walk. He has placed in my heart a concern to limit the human factors of organization, to prevent by pre-planning things which should not happen in order to be consistent with the teaching. Words are only symbols, a parable, of higher truth. I'm going to call the local gatherings "a Household of Faith." I will not cooperate with anyone who seeks incorporation by man's laws so long as those laws require some compromise with the liberty necessary for following our Lord. For now, that means no incorporation, no tax-free status, no formal budgets and board meetings, no constitutions and by-laws documents, etc.
Instead, it will always be the basic house church model. You join the household, not in the legal human sense, by necessarily moving into the physical home, but you join spiritually the family of faith which gathers there. It operates under the authority of some householder, the host/hostess of the home. It's always a "private" gathering in that sense, and by their own spiritual inclinations, they control who gets in the door, and who has to leave whenever they choose. Obviously, if they do a poor job, the rest of the family meets elsewhere next time. Nobody owns the organization, nobody controls it, but the whole group must find a way to operate under the burden of spiritual discipline. The host must always love the family enough to explain just about anything they ask regarding the meetings and related activities. A literal head of household in the ANE would do that, too. Who teaches or leads the worship is for the host/hostess to decide.
In the end, you end up with a very powerful element of accountability, with nothing to gain from politics. In the long run, a phony will blow it, provided the membership aim at keeping a spiritual sense. Members are not bound by anything other than inclination to participate for each meeting. Every activity is volunteer, and runs on the bodies who show. The host remains in charge, in so far as anyone is. When it works, it quickly looks like an extended family under a head of household. When it doesn't work, people vote with their feet.
I can claim I am called to be a head of household. For now, I am also the host, as it were. Let me be the first to proclaim that is subject to change, because I have no vested interest in control. My only urge is to see the message set before others. Indeed, I honestly predict this will someday gain a new front man, so to speak. I have no doubt someone out there will be touched by God to join this work, and be far more talented than I at teaching and leading. Nor will I pretend to control the content of teaching. It's not possible for me to be involved without teaching in some way, but if the group moves off on their own, that's not my problem. The Lord is washing from me any ambitions. If you aren't moved by my words, I'm not talking to you. The results remain my Father's business, not mine.
So the ministry here and at the static archive website will still be called "Kiln of the Soul." Anyone who wants to coordinate with me can use that label with my blessings (for what that's worth). The individual gatherings under this teaching will be called "Household of Faith." The terms symbolize the focus on embracing a different cultural image, and setting aside previous trappings of Western Evangelical churches. May we never find ourselves returning to the traps of the past, but always treat the human organizational concerns as ever temporary tools of the Household.
Note: "ANE" is the abbreviation for Ancient Near East.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Acts: Introduction and Chapter 1
Introduction
We could easily call this book 2nd Luke. He is the author, dedicated it to the same fellow who sponsored his Gospel, and continues directly from the end of it. Everything we could say about him still applies. The research Luke did for this narrative was conducted and the material compiled during the same period he worked on his Gospel. Acts simply carries the story forward into the immediate period following the Ascension. We could also call it the Acts of Peter and Paul, since they are the prime movers in the narrative. Peter fulfills his call as the leader of the Apostles until it was simply too dangerous for him to be the front man. The danger is the transition to a man who struggled hard to make it even more dangerous, until a miracle leads him to change sides. Luke's narrative relates how these men passed the baton from Christ to the Christians at large across the Empire.
However, we find at 16:10 Luke suddenly includes himself by shifting from the third person plural ("they") to the first person plural ("we"). Thus, when Paul had his vision of the Macedonian call from Troas, we safely assume it was at Troas Luke joined the mission. Naturally, there is no explanation for this, but I'm sure Luke had told his wealthy and educated Gentile sponsor those details which aren't part of the greater narrative.
The substance of the book can be summed up thus: This is how the gospel of Jesus Christ went from a tiny sect of Judaism to a global faith embracing all mankind. From a handful of Jewish men, mostly with rather poor education, this faith was adopted by a very politically powerful and well-educated Pharisee who was the perfect man for carrying such an odd-ball minor Eastern sect across the Empire to become the religion which shook Rome to its core.
Chapter 1
Luke mentions Jesus in His resurrected form remained for some 40 days on earth. During that time, He met with His disciples extensively in Galilee, after which they returned to Jerusalem. What Luke and John seem to emphasize was the critical importance of their understanding how the Old Testament prophesied of His death, burial for three days, and His resurrection. They were taught quite a bit during this time based on their changed understanding of these things. Still, they did not have the Spirit. This Jesus assured them would come very soon, describing it as a baptism in fire.
But because they lacked that illuminating Presence, they still stumbled over their impression the Kingdom was meant to be a human political order on earth. Was Jesus about to set Israel free from Roman domination? They had no doubt He could. Jesus had already told them repeatedly this was not in the plans, but their minds were not ready for it. Instead, He pointed them back to the fundamental principle of believers living under various human governments. God retains full authority over such things, had long since ordained how it would all turn out and when, and seldom deemed it necessary to inform humans of his plans. Instead, they were to focus their minds on the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the mission which paid little heed to governments among men -- to carry the gospel across all national borders to all men.
It almost seems as if we can see them hiking out of the northeastern gate of the city, across the Kiddron, up the long sloping road to the pass between two peaks on Mount Olivet. As they crossed the zenith, they started down the slope toward Bethany, Jesus walking firmly in the lead. Except He doesn't head down the road to Bethany, but simply steps off into the air and floats away into the clouds, turning to raise His hands and bless them. As they stood there watching for one last glimpse of their Master, they are told the time for such things was past. Turning to look at who spoke, they see angels. They promised Jesus would someday return in pretty much the same fashion.
It was a Sabbath Day's Journey back into the city. By that time, the Pharisees had fiddled with the meaning of the phrase until it stretched as much as 2.25 miles (3.6km). We find they had moved their latest base of operations away from Bethany to the home in the Bethesda Quarter which hosted their banquet before Passover. Luke names the eleven surviving disciples, as well as the women associated with Jesus' ministry, but includes the Lord's own younger brothers. Indeed, the group had grown to about 120 members. About the only thing they could take action on was replacing Judas Iscariot. Luke explains Judas' betrayal bribe was used to purchase the field, apparently where Judas had decided to hang himself. This was the evening before Passover Day, when no one was going to retrieve a dead body, particularly one having died so shamefully as hanging. Since he wasn't dealt with until sometime later, his swollen body was pretty hard to handle, and may have already fallen to the ground. The easiest answer for the Sanhedrin, seeking to keep all this secret, was buying the field where he lay and designating it as a pauper's grave site. The money they used was Judas' reward for betrayal, which could not be returned to the Temple treasury -- blood money. Since the secrecy was so poor, the acreage was eventually called "Field of Blood" in honor of Judas' death there, and the dirty money used to buy it.
It turned out there had been a handful of men who strung along with the Twelve pretty much the whole time they followed Jesus. While He officially called the original group, nothing kept others from participating as volunteers. Perhaps they were younger men not yet working, or wealthy enough to afford the time. It's typical of ancient, and particularly Eastern cultures, to pay little attention to this minor detail, since it was too common. Central figures in a narrative get named, but it was almost silly to name servants unless they took part in the action, and equally silly to assume there were none present. Jesus had a steady entourage much bigger than the Twelve, except in those places when the Gospels specifically says otherwise. At any rate, these men had experienced pretty much the same as the Twelve, so they chose one of them for the office Judas held. The method they used was a holdover from the Temple rituals. It was still appropriate because the Holy Spirit was not yet present to change the mode of operations.
There is nothing to indicate Peter was wrong to seek fulfillment of the passages in Psalms (69:25; 109:8). Both of those were long regarded as pre-figuring the trials of the Messiah, so finding in those verses a call to fill Judas' empty place is typical of Hebrew thinking. On the other hand, we have almost nothing about this man. Luke never mentions him again, but that's not exactly surprising, since this is about mostly Peter and Paul, and events which connect them. However, the scraps of information we can find among the Early Church writers is contradictory. Perhaps a historian might guess he eventually went on mission to Ethiopia, but little else can be said. What matters is these people continued applying the Law of Moses as best they understood in the absence of the Holy Spirit to clarify things. It may have been a pointless gesture in the grand scheme of things, but the action was not wrong in the context. They simply did the best they knew until the one defining miracle of God changed it all.
We could easily call this book 2nd Luke. He is the author, dedicated it to the same fellow who sponsored his Gospel, and continues directly from the end of it. Everything we could say about him still applies. The research Luke did for this narrative was conducted and the material compiled during the same period he worked on his Gospel. Acts simply carries the story forward into the immediate period following the Ascension. We could also call it the Acts of Peter and Paul, since they are the prime movers in the narrative. Peter fulfills his call as the leader of the Apostles until it was simply too dangerous for him to be the front man. The danger is the transition to a man who struggled hard to make it even more dangerous, until a miracle leads him to change sides. Luke's narrative relates how these men passed the baton from Christ to the Christians at large across the Empire.
However, we find at 16:10 Luke suddenly includes himself by shifting from the third person plural ("they") to the first person plural ("we"). Thus, when Paul had his vision of the Macedonian call from Troas, we safely assume it was at Troas Luke joined the mission. Naturally, there is no explanation for this, but I'm sure Luke had told his wealthy and educated Gentile sponsor those details which aren't part of the greater narrative.
The substance of the book can be summed up thus: This is how the gospel of Jesus Christ went from a tiny sect of Judaism to a global faith embracing all mankind. From a handful of Jewish men, mostly with rather poor education, this faith was adopted by a very politically powerful and well-educated Pharisee who was the perfect man for carrying such an odd-ball minor Eastern sect across the Empire to become the religion which shook Rome to its core.
Chapter 1
Luke mentions Jesus in His resurrected form remained for some 40 days on earth. During that time, He met with His disciples extensively in Galilee, after which they returned to Jerusalem. What Luke and John seem to emphasize was the critical importance of their understanding how the Old Testament prophesied of His death, burial for three days, and His resurrection. They were taught quite a bit during this time based on their changed understanding of these things. Still, they did not have the Spirit. This Jesus assured them would come very soon, describing it as a baptism in fire.
But because they lacked that illuminating Presence, they still stumbled over their impression the Kingdom was meant to be a human political order on earth. Was Jesus about to set Israel free from Roman domination? They had no doubt He could. Jesus had already told them repeatedly this was not in the plans, but their minds were not ready for it. Instead, He pointed them back to the fundamental principle of believers living under various human governments. God retains full authority over such things, had long since ordained how it would all turn out and when, and seldom deemed it necessary to inform humans of his plans. Instead, they were to focus their minds on the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the mission which paid little heed to governments among men -- to carry the gospel across all national borders to all men.
It almost seems as if we can see them hiking out of the northeastern gate of the city, across the Kiddron, up the long sloping road to the pass between two peaks on Mount Olivet. As they crossed the zenith, they started down the slope toward Bethany, Jesus walking firmly in the lead. Except He doesn't head down the road to Bethany, but simply steps off into the air and floats away into the clouds, turning to raise His hands and bless them. As they stood there watching for one last glimpse of their Master, they are told the time for such things was past. Turning to look at who spoke, they see angels. They promised Jesus would someday return in pretty much the same fashion.
It was a Sabbath Day's Journey back into the city. By that time, the Pharisees had fiddled with the meaning of the phrase until it stretched as much as 2.25 miles (3.6km). We find they had moved their latest base of operations away from Bethany to the home in the Bethesda Quarter which hosted their banquet before Passover. Luke names the eleven surviving disciples, as well as the women associated with Jesus' ministry, but includes the Lord's own younger brothers. Indeed, the group had grown to about 120 members. About the only thing they could take action on was replacing Judas Iscariot. Luke explains Judas' betrayal bribe was used to purchase the field, apparently where Judas had decided to hang himself. This was the evening before Passover Day, when no one was going to retrieve a dead body, particularly one having died so shamefully as hanging. Since he wasn't dealt with until sometime later, his swollen body was pretty hard to handle, and may have already fallen to the ground. The easiest answer for the Sanhedrin, seeking to keep all this secret, was buying the field where he lay and designating it as a pauper's grave site. The money they used was Judas' reward for betrayal, which could not be returned to the Temple treasury -- blood money. Since the secrecy was so poor, the acreage was eventually called "Field of Blood" in honor of Judas' death there, and the dirty money used to buy it.
It turned out there had been a handful of men who strung along with the Twelve pretty much the whole time they followed Jesus. While He officially called the original group, nothing kept others from participating as volunteers. Perhaps they were younger men not yet working, or wealthy enough to afford the time. It's typical of ancient, and particularly Eastern cultures, to pay little attention to this minor detail, since it was too common. Central figures in a narrative get named, but it was almost silly to name servants unless they took part in the action, and equally silly to assume there were none present. Jesus had a steady entourage much bigger than the Twelve, except in those places when the Gospels specifically says otherwise. At any rate, these men had experienced pretty much the same as the Twelve, so they chose one of them for the office Judas held. The method they used was a holdover from the Temple rituals. It was still appropriate because the Holy Spirit was not yet present to change the mode of operations.
There is nothing to indicate Peter was wrong to seek fulfillment of the passages in Psalms (69:25; 109:8). Both of those were long regarded as pre-figuring the trials of the Messiah, so finding in those verses a call to fill Judas' empty place is typical of Hebrew thinking. On the other hand, we have almost nothing about this man. Luke never mentions him again, but that's not exactly surprising, since this is about mostly Peter and Paul, and events which connect them. However, the scraps of information we can find among the Early Church writers is contradictory. Perhaps a historian might guess he eventually went on mission to Ethiopia, but little else can be said. What matters is these people continued applying the Law of Moses as best they understood in the absence of the Holy Spirit to clarify things. It may have been a pointless gesture in the grand scheme of things, but the action was not wrong in the context. They simply did the best they knew until the one defining miracle of God changed it all.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Lesson 30: Kings and Chronicles
Samuel's Academy of the Prophets became much more formalized, with at least three branches at one time, becoming more like a College of Prophets. It was they who wrote Samuel and Kings. The various royal court recorders gave us the Chronicles, which covers the same time frame. We note the College of Prophets did not require being spiritual, only committed, and capable of grasping some subtle nuances in what appears to have become a code of ethics, morals and practices. These were based on the rituals explained by Moses. Signs from God were granted according to the Law. In other words, having a professional class of prophets was a natural extension of the Covenant.
Unfortunately, the leaders of Israel didn't always pay attention to these prophets, spiritual or unspiritual. David pacified the nation's borders, amassed a pile of materials for the Temple, and gave his royal heir everything possible. Solomon began deeply spiritual, and knew enough to ask for a miraculous measure of wisdom. After a lifetime of writing some of the greatest material in the Bible, he still failed to put that wisdom in practice. Instead he chased skirts like his father, and allowed his wives to corrupt his loyalty to God. While his Temple was a huge drain on the people in terms of forced labor, it was acceptable. His equally painful continuation building up his palace and fortress was foolish. Worst of all, he introduced banking and credit into the kingdom. In the end, he dies a complete fool, deeply swayed by demons.
His profligate and crushing taxation was the basis for God calling up the chief political leader of the Northern Tribes to prepare his heart to obey God and receive a throne. We are aware there had long been a cultural division between the more cynically secular-idolatrous North and the prissy and pretentious religious South. Solomon's son was completely lacking in wisdom and gave Jeroboam the excuse he needed to make the break formal. Then the north promptly went officially pagan.
The North remained rather contentious until the Omride Dynasty, at the peak of which Ahab ruled long and wise, but deeply compromised and demon-possessed. In the end, the alliance between Israel and Syria was their doom, because Assyria was more than their match. Indeed, were it not for God's eternal purpose regardless of Judah's sins, she would have been swallowed up by Assyria, too. Sadly, that protection became the smug over-reliance on the presence of the Temple -- "God's Own House" -- which ended in another long reigning pagan king, Manasseh. His sins brought the final doom from Babylon, though not immediately.
A thousand compromises color this long decline. Solomon brought in horses, savvy political alliances with pagan nations, the rise of oppressive credit practices, and a sickening level of urbanity and silly emulation of the worst practices of the nations prophets condemned. Several prophets make much of exploiting the politically powerless peasantry. It was a major sin to leave behind the primitive tribal existence for high culture and high finance. The clan leaders fancied themselves nobility without actually being very noble. If people would open their eyes, they would realize the prophets condemned most of what we associate with "free market capitalism," though it's evil to demand we must then choose socialism. A primitive tribal economy and polity avoids the necessity of either extreme, because that false dichotomy is itself founded on removing all things into the impersonal realm, and destroying the familial ties inherent in tribal living. Families are neither left or right, but simply family. In essence, that root element of Lawful society was pushed aside.
God's polity is tribal; family is everything. God's economics are the personal thrift and gift economy. The person is central to everything, and everything is personal. Contract commerce, displacing the persons with a legal fiction of property as persons, remains today the cornerstone of greed and hatred. All the changes we see as Israel united, then divided, and finally Judah alone, slide down that long slope into avoiding personal responsibility and accountability. They become so very worldly wise in aping the worst failures, letting the gentle sweet whispers of demons reshape their society into just another ancient nation surviving only because God refuses to give up.
The Northern Tribes were lost, cut out of the Covenant. Judah was carried off to another land. To top it all off, the very worst of changes in their national character are yet to come.
Unfortunately, the leaders of Israel didn't always pay attention to these prophets, spiritual or unspiritual. David pacified the nation's borders, amassed a pile of materials for the Temple, and gave his royal heir everything possible. Solomon began deeply spiritual, and knew enough to ask for a miraculous measure of wisdom. After a lifetime of writing some of the greatest material in the Bible, he still failed to put that wisdom in practice. Instead he chased skirts like his father, and allowed his wives to corrupt his loyalty to God. While his Temple was a huge drain on the people in terms of forced labor, it was acceptable. His equally painful continuation building up his palace and fortress was foolish. Worst of all, he introduced banking and credit into the kingdom. In the end, he dies a complete fool, deeply swayed by demons.
His profligate and crushing taxation was the basis for God calling up the chief political leader of the Northern Tribes to prepare his heart to obey God and receive a throne. We are aware there had long been a cultural division between the more cynically secular-idolatrous North and the prissy and pretentious religious South. Solomon's son was completely lacking in wisdom and gave Jeroboam the excuse he needed to make the break formal. Then the north promptly went officially pagan.
The North remained rather contentious until the Omride Dynasty, at the peak of which Ahab ruled long and wise, but deeply compromised and demon-possessed. In the end, the alliance between Israel and Syria was their doom, because Assyria was more than their match. Indeed, were it not for God's eternal purpose regardless of Judah's sins, she would have been swallowed up by Assyria, too. Sadly, that protection became the smug over-reliance on the presence of the Temple -- "God's Own House" -- which ended in another long reigning pagan king, Manasseh. His sins brought the final doom from Babylon, though not immediately.
A thousand compromises color this long decline. Solomon brought in horses, savvy political alliances with pagan nations, the rise of oppressive credit practices, and a sickening level of urbanity and silly emulation of the worst practices of the nations prophets condemned. Several prophets make much of exploiting the politically powerless peasantry. It was a major sin to leave behind the primitive tribal existence for high culture and high finance. The clan leaders fancied themselves nobility without actually being very noble. If people would open their eyes, they would realize the prophets condemned most of what we associate with "free market capitalism," though it's evil to demand we must then choose socialism. A primitive tribal economy and polity avoids the necessity of either extreme, because that false dichotomy is itself founded on removing all things into the impersonal realm, and destroying the familial ties inherent in tribal living. Families are neither left or right, but simply family. In essence, that root element of Lawful society was pushed aside.
God's polity is tribal; family is everything. God's economics are the personal thrift and gift economy. The person is central to everything, and everything is personal. Contract commerce, displacing the persons with a legal fiction of property as persons, remains today the cornerstone of greed and hatred. All the changes we see as Israel united, then divided, and finally Judah alone, slide down that long slope into avoiding personal responsibility and accountability. They become so very worldly wise in aping the worst failures, letting the gentle sweet whispers of demons reshape their society into just another ancient nation surviving only because God refuses to give up.
The Northern Tribes were lost, cut out of the Covenant. Judah was carried off to another land. To top it all off, the very worst of changes in their national character are yet to come.
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