Sabbath Breakers II

Notice of Upcoming Hiatus

2007-10-31T12:39:00.000-07:00

As I have mentioned before, my wife and I are preparing to have our first baby. As we became pregnant at least a year before we expected, this has involved a lot of reorientation for both of us, and we are spending a lot of time doing the kind of things we need to do as expectant parents: securing baby apparatus, planning our delivery, and any one of a thousand other responsibilities we are accepting as the caretakers of a new life. Every minute is precious to us, and we need to focus our attention on the baby and on my wife's prenatal care.

As a result, I will have to put this blog on hiatus for the next several months until we are back on a firmer schedule. I will post updates on our pregnancy and childbirth from time to time, and I hope that my readers will forgive what in the blogosphere generally amounts to an unconscionable time lapse (yes, I read blogs myself).

Until I am able to post on the Bible again, I want to leave you with a message that I have been attempting, sometimes successfully and other times unsuccessfully, to convey: The Christianity that is practiced in the majority of America's churches and households today is a dim shadow of the Christianity practiced by the apostles, by generations of martyrs, and by Jesus Himself. If you want the Christ of the Bible, you have to accept the Bible of the Christ--the Torah, the Nevim, and the Ketuvim, which comprise the Hebrew "Old Testament" Bible that Jesus and the apostles considered "the scriptures." It is not a matter of arrogant pietism--the Bible is abundantly clear that the Lord is concerned with far deeper issues than our appearance in front of others--but it is a matter of obedience, and respect.

To love the Lord is to obey His commandments. This is something Jesus Himself said, as recorded in John 14. If you love the Lord, if you really want to be a Christian, then you will have to jettison every bit of the materialistic selfishness that our society cherishes so deeply. To be Christlike is to be opposed, at the core of one's being, to the common pursuits and desires of this world, and anyone who is in Christ will face suffering and persecution as a result.

Those who have suffered and died for Christ knew that their blood and tears were shed in testimony of the Lord whose blood and tears bought their souls from damnation. They are not the "ideal" saints, the "perfect ones." They are, in the Lord's eyes, the norm for Christianity.

It is time for us to shake off the social acceptability of church attendance and choose, once and for all, where we stand in relationship to Christ.

It is time for us to declare, openly, where our hearts really lie.

Commandment #6: A Standing Order for the Church

2007-10-29T17:13:00.000-07:00

In the last 5 posts, we have discovered that the bulk of what we have come to call the Ten Commandments are declarations of God's sovereignty:

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.

The next 4 commandments are what our culture knows as the Ten Commandments, and it is here where the body of Christ has utterly failed the United States over the past 40-50 years. You see, ladies and gentlemen, you cannot get to the 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th commandments until you have obeyed the first 5. If you cannot, or will not, obey the Lord in the matter of refusing to worship another in your heart, then you certainly will not obey the Lord in any other matter--and if you claim the name of Christ, yet have no honor or love for Christ in your heart, then you will certainly not exhibit any of His attributes, either in this world or the next.

The 6th commandment is very simple, and I will present it to you in the King James version of the Bible so that you can understand exactly what the Lord means here:

Thou shalt not kill.

The King James version of the Bible was constructed largely through the work of William Tyndale, a 16th century English priest who was so consumed with the desire to set the souls of his countrymen free that he vowed to translate the Bible into a language that even the English plowman (who was generally illiterate) could understand. Tyndale was fluent in Greek and Hebrew, and he translated all of the books of the Torah into English, as well as 90% of the New Testament and most of the Hebrew Bible's chronicles and histories. Biographers of Tyndale have remarked that the simplicity of his translation, the ease with which it could be understood and received by even the lowest members of 16th century English society, has contributed more than anything else to the fact that the King James version of the Bible outranks Shakespeare in terms of shaping the development of our language.

Ladies and gentlemen, if a simple English plowman of 500 years ago could understand, in the words of this verse, the terrible gravity the Lord attaches to the taking of a human life, then we who have seen three world wars over the last hundred years must certainly do likewise. It is not acceptable for us, or anyone who takes the name of Christ, to invent exceptions to this commandment--it is absolute, and for the people called and chosen by God, for ancient Israel and for the body of Christ, it is a standing order. There are no allowances, no excuses, and the one who violates this commandment without appropriate fear and trembling--and who encourages others to do the same--may well find him- or herself burning in the fires of Hell.

Christ Jesus said as much:

Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, "Thou shalt not kill," and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment, but I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment, and whosoever shall say to his brother, "Raca," shall be in danger of the council, but whosoever shall say, "Thou fool," shall be in danger of hell fire.

Matthew 5:21-22

It is a dangerous thing, ladies and gentlemen, to invoke the name of Christ when you are supporting war, assassination, domestic abuse, or abortion, and yet we have seen Christ's name attached to all of these things in the past 50 or 60 years. Indeed, it is our nation's oldest sin, dating back to the destruction of America's original inhabitants and the institution of chattel slavery, and as war follows war, and murder follows murder, and hatred follows hatred, the lesson of this sin is lost, over and over again, to the hearts of a people who have shown themselves to be interested more in material gain than in true spirituality.

Even as Americans lecture other nations about nuclear proliferation, we ourselves are the ones who first unleashed the terrible prospect of global annihilation on the human race. Weapons of mass destruction, home invasion, serial killing--the list of violent acts we have invented outstrips anything that other nations of the world have done, with the possible exception of ancient Rome (a people who invented the crucifix and the coliseum). Yet we continue to see open support in our nation's churches for military enterprises, for the death penalty, and for violence as a means of self-defense.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for us to wake up.

To be Christlike is to exhibit Christ's attributes. Do you see the Christ of the Gospels slaying His enemies, asserting political or military power, or even defending Himself? Is this what you believe that Christianity--that adopting the Christ who said "turn the other cheek" as your Lord--represents?

We hear so much in the news today about militant Islam and about the threat that it poses to the civility of the 21st century world, but the fact is that Christianity has been no less destructive. During the past thousand years, when Christians have not been killing or enslaving foreigners (including the very descendants of the people who wrote the Old Testament), they have turned their attention to killing and enslaving each other. The reality of 10,000 denominations within the realm of Christendom gives mute but forceful testimony to the sad results of our factionalism, and yet, as more and more Christians are confronted with the darker side of Christianity's past, the church seems incapable of answering the blood of its victims with humility.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for us to be what the apostles were, what the ancient believers were, and what Christ was--and to begin to love our neighbors (be they friends or enemies) as ourselves. To take up a weapon in anger, or to encourage those who do so, is to mock--openly--Christ's sacrifice for each and every one of us on the Cross 2000 years ago. I understand that some of you believe nations and governments have a right to pursue order by any means necessary, including the sword, but it is the body of Christ I am concerned about here, not the actions of pagan or atheistic governments.

For the first 300 years of their history, Christians understood that to be part of the body of Christ was to exhibit the same attributes that Christ exhibited. Under the threat of summary execution, torture, and the lethal games of the Coliseum, Christians submitted, by the thousands, to the vicious whims of generals and kings. They sang, they prayed for their family members (many of whom turned them in to the authorities), and they entreated their judges and rulers to surrender themselves to the Lord, but they did not resist.

Isn't this the kind of Christianity that breaks the hearts of nations and kingdoms for the Lord?

I would like to end this post by quoting a passage from the book of Luke. It is one with which some of you may be familiar, but I think it illustrates what I have been saying in this post far better than my own words can:

Then the whole body of them got up and brought Him before Pilate. And they began to accuse Him, saying, "We found this man misleading our nation and forbidding to pay taxes to Caesar, and saying that He Himself is Christ, a King."

So Pilate asked Him, saying, "Are You the King of the Jews?"

And He answered him and said, "It is as you say."

Then Pilate said to the chief priests and the crowds, "I find no guilt in this man."

But they kept on insisting, saying, "He stirs up the people, teaching all over Judea, starting from Galilee even as far as this place."

When Pilate heard it, he asked whether the man was a Galilean. And when he learned that He belonged to Herod's jurisdiction, he sent Him to Herod, who himself also was in Jerusalem at that time.

Now Herod was very glad when he saw Jesus, for he had wanted to see Him for a long time, because he had been hearing about Him and was hoping to see some sign performed by Him. And he questioned Him at some length, but He answered him nothing. And the chief priests and the scribes were standing there, accusing Him vehemently. And Herod with his soldiers, after treating Him with contempt and mocking Him, dressed Him in a gorgeous robe and sent Him back to Pilate.

Now Herod and Pilate became friends with one another that very day, for before they had been enemies with each other.

Pilate summoned the chief priests and the rulers and the people, and said to them, "You brought this man to me as one who incites the people to rebellion, and behold, having examined Him before you, I have found no guilt in this man regarding the charges which you make against Him. No, nor has Herod, for he sent Him back to us, and behold, nothing deserving death has been done by Him. Therefore I will punish Him and release Him."

Now he was obliged to release to them at the feast one prisoner. But they cried out all together, saying, "Away with this man, and release for us Barabbas!"

(He was one who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection made in the city, and for murder.)

Pilate, wanting to release Jesus, addressed them again, but they kept on calling out, saying, "Crucify, crucify Him!"

And he said to them the third time, "Why, what evil has this man done? I have found in Him no guilt demanding death. Therefore I will punish Him and release Him."

But they were insistent, with loud voices asking that He be crucified. And their voices began to prevail. And Pilate pronounced sentence that their demand be granted. And he released the man they were asking for who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder, but he delivered Jesus to their will.

When they led Him away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, coming in from the country, and placed on him the cross to carry behind Jesus. And following Him was a large crowd of the people, and of women who were mourning and lamenting Him.

But Jesus turning to them said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.
For behold, the days are coming when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.' Then they will begin TO SAY TO THE MOUNTAINS, 'FALL ON US,' AND TO THE HILLS, 'COVER US.' For if they do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?"

Two others also, who were criminals, were being led away to be put to death with Him.

When they came to the place called The Skull, there they crucified Him and the criminals, one on the right and the other on the left. But Jesus was saying, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing " And they cast lots, dividing up His garments among themselves.

And the people stood by, looking on. And even the rulers were sneering at Him, saying, "He saved others! let Him save Himself if this is the Christ of God, His Chosen One."

The soldiers also mocked Him, coming up to Him, offering Him sour wine, and saying, "If You are the King of the Jews, save Yourself!"

Now there was also an inscription above Him, "THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS."

One of the criminals who were hanged there was hurling abuse at Him, saying, "Are You not the Christ? Save Yourself and us!"

But the other answered, and rebuking him said, "Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?
And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong."

And he was saying, "Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!"

And He said to him, "Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise."

It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness fell over the whole land until the ninth hour, because the sun was obscured, and the veil of the temple was torn in two. And Jesus, crying out with a loud voice, said, "Father, INTO YOUR HANDS I COMMIT MY SPIRIT." Having said this, He breathed His last.

Now when the centurion saw what had happened, he began praising God, saying, "Certainly this man was innocent."

And all the crowds who came together for this spectacle, when they observed what had happened, began to return, beating their breasts. And all His acquaintances and the women who accompanied Him from Galilee were standing at a distance, seeing these things.

Luke 23, New American Standard Bible

Christ said that believers would be persecuted, that the world would hate us for what He has placed inside of us (see John 14-15 and Matthew 24). At best, believers in Christ are tolerated by others--and at worst, as we have seen in Communist and Third World countries over the past 60 years, they are hunted down and killed. We have a hope, however, of a resurrection--the same resurrection that brought Christ out of the tomb 2000 years ago--and that hope is more precious than anything we can experience in this life.

Before I gave my heart to the Lord, I was terribly afraid of death. I knew that one day, as suddenly as my life had begun, it would end, and everything that was me would vanish.

I don't have that fear anymore.

The power of Christ is not the miracles, the exhibitions of divine power that we see in the Gospels and the book fo Acts. It is the simple power of truth undaunted, a holiness that cannot be quenched by threat of fire or sword. It is the power of one who knows that to be crucified is simply to go home . . .

Commandment 5: The Sad Diagnosis of a Wasted Society

2007-10-22T18:11:00.000-07:00

Thus far, I have been attempting to highlight, in this blog, all of the "laws" that are written in the first five books of the Bible--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy--and as we have seen, the corpus so far extends to (1) the Passover and (2) what we in the West know as the Ten Commandments. Whereas the Passover sacrifice was fulfilled in the Person of the Lord, Christ Jesus, and whereas the Passover seder was transformed in the Last Supper into a beautiful act which is celebrated today as one of the church's two single greatest sacraments, the Ten Commandments stand throughout history as unchangeable, words which were true in the time of Jesus, in the time of Adam, and in the time of postmodern man.

I have heard a lot of people--both on and off the 'net--argue that the Ten Commandments are universal, that they do not reflect the values of a particular community, belief system, or religion. To be honest, I think that many conservative Christians--and pseudo-Christians--are more interested in reducing the effect of Darwinistic teaching in the public school system than they are in acknowledging a very inconvenient truth: that the Ten Commandments were, and are, testimony to the character and purity of the God who uttered them on Mount Sinai 3000 years ago.

Ladies and gentlemen, I know that those of you out there who, as upstanding citizens, want to use any legal means available to return America's public educational institutions to a pristine era when we did not hear the words "Darwin," "evolution," or "Big Bang Theory" will be disappointed at the above paragraph, but the fact is that according to the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, the Ten Commandments were delivered from the mouth of the God of the Bible. It was with this understanding that they were written down in the first place, and the ancient Hebrew culture which recited these words generation after generation had no concept of their being divorced from the primacy of the Hebrew God. Their relevance to a secular culture which is interested only in indoctrinating its children in the principles of material acquisition is of little importance (after all, as I have stated several times in this blog, the commandments were given to the "chosen people," not to all the nations of the Earth). However, if one calls oneself a Christian, and claims the name of Christ, one should be aware that the same Christ who said "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28) was--and is--part of the Godhead that spoke to Moses from the burning bush one thousand years earlier and said, "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground" (Exodus 3:5).

It is with this in mind that I begin my post on the Fifth Commandment, one which breaks my heart personally more than any other commandment the Christian culture in the United States has seen fit to throw aside. As a new husband, as a new father, I understand more keenly than I ever could have understood as a single man the weight of responsibility that is on my shoulders . . . a responsibility that, it seems, too many practicing Christians are willing to encourage their brethren to forsake.

Without further ado, let us look at the text of the Fifth Commandment itself:

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.

Exodus 20:12

There are three portions of this verse that are crucial to our understanding of what it says:

1. "Honor . . . "

I took the opportunity to look this word up in Strong's concordance, and among other things, the Hebrew word translated "honor" in Exodus 20:12 also means "to reward." Ladies and gentlemen, our ancestors--and more importantly, the generations of Israelites who recited these words--knew well what it was to "reward" a parent for raising and taking care of his/her children. Multiple generations lived in the same house for thousands of years in ancient Israel, and among the Jews scattered around the world in the wake of the Diaspora, and it was normal not only for parents to house, clothe, feed, and train their children but for them also to feed and care for their own parents in turn. A man or woman who had grown too old for manual or intellectual labor in the nation of Israel had a place in society as a grandparent cared for in his/her children's home.

Sadly, we do not have the same values today.

The United States has become a land where the elderly are shut up in institutions that resemble insane assylums--and here again, the Christian community is to blame. A hundred years ago, men like Andrew Murray and women like Lilias Trotter would have been horrified at the very idea that a family would not take care of its elderly and invalid parents, siblings, and relatives, but their descendants seem to have uttered little more than polite chirps when an increasingly mechanized society decided that the time for America's aged and infirm to live in families had come to an end. Today, it is common practice for pastors, radio evangelists, and Christian counselors to recommend the institutionalization of elderly family members when they become, in conventional financial terms, a burden too great to bear.

2. " . . . your father and your mother . . . "

Ladies and gentlemen, it is very important that you understand one thing: This commandment was not written to children who were raised in pagan households, to children whose parents were selfish or abusive, or to children of dysfunctional homes. This commandment was written to a people that the Lord had selected, ransomed out of a nation that had held them captive, and nurtured through their travels on the way to the land of Canaan. It was written to a people whose families--unlike many in our culture today--consisted of a father, a mother, and children (along with servants and animals). More to the point, it was written to a people who had been "redeemed" (as believers in Christ have been redeemed) and set apart by the Lord (as believers in Christ have been set apart by the Lord) for His special purposes.

Some of you out there are reading this blog, and your experience of family and parenting is a far cry from praiseworthy--beatings, verbal abuse, molestation, and the list goes on and on. To you, I would say that it is more important to forgive your parents than to honor them. After all, if they did nothing to aid in preparing you for a life in Christ Jesus, then it really is more of a matter of forgiveness than honor, isn't it?

However . . .

If, as was the case for me, your family was a Christian family, and they nurtured and encouraged you and taught you, even if badly, the nature and character of Christ, then you are not exempt from honoring them--either with your words or with your actions. For believers in Christ who grew up in families that honored Christ, this is a standing order, and it brooks no exceptions.

I will go on record at this point and say that my parents made a great many serious mistakes in raising me. For one thing, they trusted in the capability of social institutions--public education, church, and entertainment corporations--to instill righteous values in the heart of a child. For another, they were extremely negligent in training me to approach the practical aspects of life with care and energy. These oversights were serious, and devastating, to the point that I have had to go through a veritable deprogramming regime in order to understand them for what they are and (with prayer and patience) overcome them.

I cannot say, however, that my parents did not love me, that they did not provide a secure home for me, and that I was not encouraged to be the best that I could be when I was growing up. My mom and dad were not pagans or atheists or anti-Christians, they were never dependent on drugs or alcohol, and they have never, ever been separated (let alone divorced). I may not have had the perfect home as a boy--far from it--but I did not grow up in a bad or dysfunctional home, and I can thank my parents for that, in word and deed.

3. " . . . so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you"

There are 2 principles here in this last section: one is physical/social, and the other is spiritual.

1. the physical/social

Let's be honest here: The reason your parents get to tell you what to do is because (1) they have lived longer than you have, (2) they have faced more struggles than you have, and (3) they know better than you what to do when life throws you one of its curves. Parental discipline is not a bludgeon intended to destroy the spirit and liveliness of a child--it is instead a surgical instrument designed to train a child to approach the world in a practical, logical, and resourceful manner. The end product that any decent parent--regardless of his/her beliefs about God--aims for is to see a child raising a family of his/her own.

I would say that approximately 75% of the families in this world prioritize the physical/social needs of their children--they want their children to be effective leaders in their societies, to raise decent families of their own, and to live rich and full lives. It may even surprise you to learn that both churchgoing Christians and mosque-attending Muslims understand keenly the concept of the man as the spiritual leader of the family, and this concept is shared by many of the other religions of the world as well.

2. the spiritual

What I am talking about in regards to the spiritual development of a child is this: Has that child been prepared to receive, intelligently, Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior?

Ladies and gentlemen, a lot of people have taken the idea of raising one's children to receive Christ as Lord and Savior as a process of indoctrination, but I am talking about something different here. Instead, I am talking about the character of a man or woman's parenting--discipline, nurture, and inspiration, not just Bible education. Does your mother and father's parenting style reflect the gentleness and purity of Christ? If so, how have you responded?

We live in a society that destroys, in its mechanistic zeal, every notion of what our ancestors of generations ago would have called "family." We put our children in public school for 8 hours a day, eating substandard food and listening to substandard instruction, then chase it down with a healthy dose of television at night and on the weekends, simply because we're too busy with our two incomes and two car garages and white picket fences . . . or is it because we simply don't want the bother of having to spend so much time with our children?

I mourned, along with my wife, the days when she and I were a couple and the Lord had not yet blessed us with a child because I know, having helped raise my nephews, that parenthood is a set of responsibilities more overwhelming than I could fathom. My wife and I will no longer be able to use profanity, to indulge ourselves with morally questionable forms of entertainment, to spend our time and energy as we wish. Instead, we will walk into parenting with the full knowledge that children--and the correct raising of children--will require more sacrifice in terms of money, time, energy, and personal resources than we can possibly imagine.

We are walking into the journey of parenthood with the fear of the Lord guiding us at every step . . . but it is there that our responsibility ends. If we have raised our child in the way the Lord wants us to raise it, if we have listened to the leading of the Lord and have obeyed His will for us as a family, then it will be up to our children whether or not they accept the example of Christ set before them.

In the end, speaking as an expectant father, I know no better way for my child--or any child--to honor his/her father and mother than to become a true believer in Christ, and to live as Christ lived, pure and free, obedient to God even unto death.

Commandment 4: A Sad Testimony of the Church's Misinterpretation of Scripture

2007-10-14T05:45:00.000-07:00

I want everyone to know that at this point, my wife and I have talked fully about what was going on with me last week, and everything is okay between us (though I must say it was one of the most embarassing conversations I have ever had with her). I must also say that I am not sure I should have published what I said in my previous post because, in retrospect, the whole thing turned out to be a lot less serious than I thought it would be. However, I will say this: men, just because you are married does not mean that passing thoughts will not come your way, and if you want to preserve some measure of sanity (and to foster a healthy marriage), I would advise you to share all of those passing thoughts with your wife as soon as possible. I know this would have saved me a week of inner turmoil (and annoyance from my wife, who was wondering why I was acting so strangely).

I know it may be frightening to open yourselves up in this way, and even (believe me) a little embarassing, but gentlemen, if you married her in a relationship of love and mutual respect, and if both of you truly love each other (and the Lord), she will want you to tell her if there is something going on. Nine times out of ten, you won't get a reaction more serious than laughter and a "I wondered why you were acting so oddly" (after all, you are in a mature sexual relationship, not at the high school prom). There are, however, cases when your wife will react more strongly to what you share with her, and gentlemen, if the two of you really love each other, that is a cue for you, as good husbands and fathers, to sacrifice your own desires and inclinations at the altar of your marriage, your children, and the Lord.

Today, our text will be Exodus 20:8-11, otherwise known as the "fourth commandment," and it is with the home in mind that I share this message with you. Ladies and gentlemen, we live in a church culture in the United States that has abused the verses quoted below to the extent that their original meaning has been virtually lost, and to me, this is one of the greatest sins that postmodern Christendom has ever committed.

The Lord's commandment regarding the Sabbath is very specific and straightforward:

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

I want to address two teachings common in the postmodern American church which, I believe, have done more to harm Christian faith and service in these days than any attack against Christianity from unbelieving governments and rulers ever can:

1. That Jesus abolished the Sabbath

Ladies and gentlemen, I know this will come as a shock to most of you, but whenever you read accounts in the Gospels of the Pharisees and Sadducees criticizing Jesus for "breaking the Sabbath," the argument in fact has nothing at all to do with the Fourth Commandment. I'll give you an example, one I recently came across in Luke:

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and his disciples began to pick some heads of grain, rub them in their hands and eat the kernels.

Some of the Pharisees asked, "Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?"

Jesus answered them, "Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and taking the consecrated bread, he ate what is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions." Then Jesus said to them, "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath."

Luke 6:1-5

Note that the argument arose not out of a genuine concern over a legitimate breach of the Sabbath (the disciples, after all, were not sowing crops, feeding livestock, or even harvesting grain in any real sense) but out of a very sharp, almost tangible jealousy on the part of the Pharisees over the authority Jesus and his disciples had to teach and to spread the Gospel about the Lord. The disciples were desperately hungry--after all, you have to be on the verge of starvation to eat raw heads of grain--and the priests' reaction was a clear exercise in stupidity and arrogance.

Let us look at another example that the Gospel of Luke provides, immediately following the passage quoted above:

On another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal on the Sabbath. But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said to the man with the shriveled hand, "Get up and stand in front of everyone." So he got up and stood there.

Then Jesus said to them, "I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?"

He looked around at them all, and then said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He did so, and his hand was completely restored. But they were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus.

Luke 6:6-11

Before commenting on this passage as a whole, I want you to look at verse 7 again:

The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus

The whole thing was a trap created by the Pharisees to prompt Jesus to say something contrary to the Torah and/or blaspheme the Father, and as we can see in the passage, it was a very ill-conceived one. After all, Jesus did not engage in some kind of physical application of bandages, poultices, and home remedies to cure the man (which would have constituted "work" under the Sabbath regulation). He merely asked a member of the crowd to stretch out his hand.

The Pharisees were well acquainted with miracles, ladies and gentlemen--after all, they had read the Hebrew Bible and studied the Torah with great alacrity--and they knew very well that a miracle of the Lord did not constitute a breach of the Sabbath regulations. Their reaction had nothing to do with a zeal for upholding religious laws--it was merely an attempt by pompous aristocrats to puff up their own priestly powers at the expense of the Lord. Jesus represented a threat to them--to their livelihoods, their standing in the Judean community, and ultimately to their lack of spiritual depth--and their unrepentant hearts were as hostile to the Lord as anyone has ever been in our time.

2. That the Sabbath constitutes the breaking of bread at church

I want us to look at the Lord's regulations regarding the Sabbath again, this time focusing on the portion of scripture that prohibits the Israelites from doing any work on the Sabbath:

On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates.

Note that the passage does not say "neither you, nor your pastor, nor your pastor's wife, nor your elder, nor your elder's wife." All of the positions mentioned--son, daughter, manservant, maidservant, animals, strangers--are unique to the Hebrew household.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, the Sabbath--and every other holy day in Israel--was to be celebrated by families, either gathering together in the home or traveling as a family to a specified place (sometimes Shiloh, sometimes Shechem, and sometimes Jerusalem). If you did not celebrate the Sabbath with your family, then in the ancient Hebrew context, you did not celebrate the Sabbath at all.

I am afraid, ladies and gentlemen, that we have allowed our culture's anti-family attitudes to dictate the way we approach church activities. Many conservative churches in America meet together on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday or Thursday evening, and Saturday evening, and parishioners are often led to believe that they are not very spiritual if they do not attend these activities regularly and often. As a result, family time suffers, and children often wonder why their parents are so consumed with "doing the Lord's work" that they have less and less time to play with them, to read with them, and to talk to them.

Ladies and gentlemen, as an expectant father, I am well aware of the fact that my child is going to be an adult someday, and it is very important to me that my child's formative years be perfect in the Lord's sight and that as an adult, he or she cannot say, as so many of America's children can, that Mom and Dad were neglectful. I will not go to my deathbed knowing, as I am afraid so many men will, that I have not been a very good husband or father.

If you are not a good wife and mother, and if you are not a good husband and father, then in the judgment of the Bible--and of the culture which produced the Bible--you have failed in your spiritual responsibilities. I am not saying that if you pursue celibacy for the rest of your life, you have sinned against the Lord--if that is true, then St. Paul was guilty of sinning against the Lord as well--but I am saying that if you have chosen to have a family and you abandon the responsibilites of being a good spouse and parent, you need to ask the Lord, and your family, for forgiveness.

My wife and I want to do some very specific things in order to raise our children in the right way, according to the conviction that the Lord has given us. We want to homeschool, we want to pursue some home businesses, and she and I want to work together as a couple so that our children can see a model for how they can pursue marriage someday (if they want). These things involve sacrifice, and they are not accepted in a lot of circles--we live in a culture that depends on corporate institutions for its physical, emotional, and spiritual needs, and it is virtually impossible for many Americans, even some of you who are reading this post, to fathom a lifestyle that does not follow the typical lines of public education-corporate job-retirement that so many families are pursuing today.

It is, however, a sacrifice we are willing to make for our children--and for the sanctity of our marriage.

Ladies and gentlemen, we live in a society where men and women are expected to pursue separate lives, even after marriage, and we dare to wonder why so many American couples divorce as a result of the pressures those separate lives bring to bear on their homes. It is time for Christian men and women to pursue something different, and to prioritize their children and their spouses over their institutional obligations. Without this effort, ladies and gentlemen, I am afraid that we are going to see the eventual demise of Christlikeness within our culture, a culture which has already seen the destruction of 40 million children at the altar of financial greed and institutional slavery.

Let me ask you this: Are you a married man or woman--and if so, did you promise to cherish your spouse forever?

Then why would you want your relationship with your spouse--and your children--to suffer?

Spiritual leadership does not occur in church boards and committees--it occurs in the home. And if you are not willing to engage in the spiritual responsibility of husband and father/wife and mother, then you are not eligible, in the Lord's sight, for anything else.

Paul said it very clearly in his first letter to Timothy:

He [the bishop/overseer] must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God's church?)

1 Timothy 3:4-5

And here:

A deacon must be the husband of but one wife and must manage his children and his household well. Those who have served well gain an excellent standing and great assurance in their faith in Christ Jesus.

1 Timothy 3:12-13

Spiritual education does not happen in Sunday School, church, or prayer meeting, ladies and gentlemen--it happens in the home. It is time that we who are in Christ acknowledge the wonderful and terrible responsibility the Lord has given us in raising our children and caring for our spouses. I am amazed at the incredible depth displayed by men and women like St. Paul, Lilias Trotter, and Mother Theresa of Calcutta who were called by the Lord to lead celibate lives of service, but most of us are called to be husbands/wives and fathers/mothers. If we want our parenthood to mean anything beyond the actions and attitudes of the hundreds of millions of families around the world which do not a firm foundation in Christ, then we need to step up to our responsibilites and face them as men and women of God.

Apology to My Readers

2007-10-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

I try to get these posts out on a fairly regular basis (weekly), and at times it is difficult because I am also doing whatever I can to help prepare for the birth of my first child. My wife is in good health and good spirits, though she does seem to be one of the minority of women who apparently experience morning sickness throughout their pregnancies, so she is not quite as positive as she could be. (She once said to me, "How would you feel if your penis were constantly growing in size over 9 months so that you could pass a baby through it?" and I have never since had a problem understanding how uncomfortable and frightening pregnancy has been for her.)

However, the two week interval between my previous post and this one stems from something more serious: namely, a spiritual struggle I have had during the past week or so. I have never been secretive about the fact that my sexual mores before marriage were questionable at best--I was emotionally promiscuous, I dabbled in pornography (soft- and hardcore), and I even had transexual fantasies--and my wife and I have worked hard to establish a very safe, open, and honest mode of communication between us, knowing that we both came into the marriage with these issues. I still have the temptation to "protect" her by keeping things quiet--she said a couple of days ago that I have, in her words, a "real secretive streak"--just because it's the way I chose to deal with the turmoil inside of me for so many years.

Last weekend, I had some fantasies that, while pretty conservative, did not involve my wife. They were unexpected, they did not result from exposure to pornography, and they revolved around a real person (female) toward whom, until last weekend, I had no inkling of desire. I was so overwhelmed (I felt like I was being spiritually assaulted) that I had no idea how to respond, and I did not, unfortunately, refrain from masturbating.

I know that some of you reading this blog are probably shocked at the extent to which I describe the above situation so graphically--perhaps others of you are rolling your eyes, as I would have a few years ago, thinking "come on, you didn't do anything serious"--but I want all of you out there who are husbands and fathers to know that sin, even if it appears to be light sin, will be destructive to your family. I have said before that the sharing of bodies between two people also involves a sharing of spirits, and if you are masturbating about a woman who is not your wife, you are inviting spiritual turmoil into your family, and yes, you are cheating on your wife, even if only in your imagination. By allowing myself to fall, even when the spiritual assault was so great, I allowed the temptation--and the evil spiritual energy behind it--to gain a foothold inside of me, and it has taken far more effort on my part to quench it than I would have had to expend if I had refrained from giving in to it 6 days ago.

My wife knows about everything I am revealing in this post (with the exception of the identity of the person--and if I haven't yet had the heart to say it to her, I am sure not going to say it on the internet), and we have talked about how she and I can communicate better so that she can help me in times of temptation. It is, I will say, difficult to have a very strong desire for your wife and not be able to fulfill it (to the extent you want) because she is pregnant. To me, it is not a matter of "getting my leg over" as some would crassly phrase it--I love my wife, and my sexuality is truly motivated by a desire to please her, especially now when she is going through so much discomfort in her pregnancy. I take solace (most of the time) in the thought that (1) the suffering we are both going through will only last 9 or 10 months and (2) that a little personal agony is worth going through for my wife as she embarks on what is, for women, the most difficult period of their lives.

Some of you may think I am taking too much liberty in revealing so many details about my personal life and the sexual dynamics I have encountered in marriage, but the Christian community in the United States seems completely insensitive to the need for young men and women to learn from their spiritual and physical elders about sexuality and about raising a family. So few "mentoring couples" talk about their experiences in a personal way that, I fear, an entire generation of men and women will be doomed to spend their lives over the next 20 years learning lessons the hard way, lessons that could have been learned through the counsel, wisdom, and inspiration of their elders.

As a result, it falls to me and others like myself to write from a personal perspective about matters that our culture has said are best left private--even though we are not elders, even though we have, at least in our own eyes, so little to give.

Commandment 3: A Distressing Sign of the Times We Live In

2007-10-02T05:35:00.000-07:00

Jessica and I are still working hard, and I am very happy to report that I now have access to some income for us, which will be very important as we move closer to our time of delivery. Ladies and gentlemen, I must confess that it is very humiliating to see the fruits, wrought upon my dear wife, of my negligence with money. I spent many hundreds of dollars when I was living alone in Texas on my own entertainment and selfish pleasure when I could have been storing it away so that my new family could have something to live on, and that fact haunts me every day as my wife and I struggle to make ends meet.

Our post will center on Exodus 20:7, and I think that more than anything else in the Ten Commandments, this verse is an overwhelming indictment of our time. Every age has seen its share of liars, thieves, adulterers, and murderers--the street gangs in London during the thirteenth century were just as vicious as the street gangs in New York are in the twenty-first--but no age has ever seen such a universal display of open disrespect toward God in everyday speech as we currently see in Western countries. And once again, at the forefront of this utter departure from the love and fear of the Lord . . . is the church.

I'll be honest, ladies and gentlemen--I struggle with the use of profanity and even with taking the Lord's name in vain. I learned to do both of these things when I was only 11-14 years old, and I became quite skillful at it, to the point that one of my fellow grad students at JMU (who herself was no angel in this regard) actually said to me, "Hey, you watch your language!" It has only been during the past 8 months that I have really been convicted about the effect that my words have on others--and more importantly, the effect that my words have on myself.

The Lord, however, makes his view on our use of language quite clear:

You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

I know that some of you, having read this blog, were expecting a metaphorical sermon pinpointing the extent to which people claim to be Christian in our culture when their words and actions testify that their heart lies somewhere else, and yes, I think that to claim the name of Christ without accepting Him into your heart is a grievous sin (on the order of Ananias and Sapphira--see Acts 5). However, I believe that it is in the use of profanity--often among faithful church attenders--that we most frequently display our lack of love for the Lord, and for others.

Let us take a look at another passage, Leviticus 24:10-23, which illustrates the extent to which the Lord takes the use of His name (and by extension, the use of our words) very seriously:

Now the son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father went out among the Israelites, and a fight broke out in the camp between him and an Israelite. The son of the Israelite woman blasphemed the Name with a curse, so they brought him to Moses. (His mother's name was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri the Danite.) They put him in custody until the will of the LORD should be made clear to them.

Then the LORD said to Moses: "Take the blasphemer outside the camp. All those who heard him are to lay their hands on his head, and the entire assembly is to stone him. Say to the Israelites: 'If anyone curses his God, he will be held responsible--anyone who blasphemes the name of the LORD must be put to death. The entire assembly must stone him. Whether an alien or native-born, when he blasphemes the Name, he must be put to death.

" 'If anyone takes the life of a human being, he must be put to death. Anyone who takes the life of someone's animal must make restitution—life for life. If anyone injures his neighbor, whatever he has done must be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured the other, so he is to be injured. Whoever kills an animal must make restitution, but whoever kills a man must be put to death. You are to have the same law for the alien and the native-born. I am the LORD your God.' "

Then Moses spoke to the Israelites, and they took the blasphemer outside the camp and stoned him. The Israelites did as the LORD commanded Moses.

I understand that some of you are doubtless shocked at the extent to which the Lord was willing to go in order to cultivate an attitude of respect for His name, but I'd like to go back to the beginning of the passage for a moment:

Now the son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father went out among the Israelites, and a fight broke out in the camp between him and an Israelite.

We live in a society that encourages its people to swear, to curse, to use profanity, and yes, to use the name of the Lord as an epithet whenever they are angry, frustrated, or (in the vernacular of our culture) "just need to blow off some steam." In the process, an entire generation has been taught to use their words as weapons, stabbing each other with the viciousness of their curses with the same energy that ancient men would have used in stabbing their enemies with swords, daggers, and axes.

I am very concerned at the extent to which we are training the future leaders of this nation to use their words to hurt others--and I am also concerned at the extent to which churchgoers are, whether they realize it or not, training their children to disrespect God. It seems that all we hear in churches these days is a mixture of political correctness, psychobabble, and (to me) mindless recitations of what one can only assume to have been the pastor's favorite reading while in seminary. In this environment, no one is taught to respect (and revere) the name of the Lord as it should be respected (and revered) because no one even understands the name of the Lord.

Ladies and gentlemen, I know that you may not believe that blaspheming the name of the Lord is a serious matter--after all, I felt that way myself for 15 years--but perhaps if you understood the nature of the Lord, you would think differently. After all, the Bible says that Christ Jesus is "the Word," that He "was with God," and that "He was God" (John 1:1). The Bible also says that through Christ Jesus, "all things were made" and that without Him, "nothing was made that has been made" (John 1:3). The apostle Paul, speaking under the revelation of Christ through the Holy Spirit, wrote to the Colossians that Christ Jesus "is before all things" and that "in Him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17). And of course, it is the name of Christ Jesus which is the only means of salvation for the human race.

It is the same Christ Jesus--the same "only begotten Son" of God (John 3:16), the same Christ who was with God in the beginning and who was God (John 1:1-2)--who was part of the Godhead speaking to Moses and to the ancient Israelites at Mount Sinai.

Let that sink in for a moment.

I understand that Christ Jesus was not "begotten" in a sense that we would recognize until the first century A.D., but if He is part of the Godhead, and if He was with God (and was God) at the dawn of creation, then the children of Israel heard His voice as surely as the first century apostles did. And if that is the case, do you think that He looks upon our callous use of His name as something less serious now than it was approximately three thousand years ago?

Ladies and gentlemen, if you feel shame as you are reading this post, it is because the Holy Spirit is convicting you about the importance of choosing your words carefully. Believers in Christ are called to speak the truth, to be kind and gracious to others, and to revere the holy name of the Lord in their speech as well as their actions. I know that some of you out there may have believed that it was okay to use profanity because it enabled you to "relate" to people who were not Christians, but the fact is, people who are not Christians need to see that those who claim the name of Christ also cherish the name of Christ in their hearts--and they need to see that when you adopt Christ Jesus as your Lord and Savior, it means more than simply buying a Bible and going to church every Sunday.

If you revere the Lord, if you really revere the Lord in your heart, then wouldn't you naturally want your speech to reflect that? I know that when I was a nonbeliever, in every case when I knew I was in the presence of a believer in Christ, that person was someone whom I could not imagine swearing, tearing others down with their words, or spitting out the name of the Lord as a curse. There was a holy reverence for the Lord that was exhibited in their every word and action--as if it were part of their very being.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of reverence that convicts the lost and dying of their sins, and it is the kind of reverence that turns unrepentant liars, thieves, adulterers, and murderers into holy men and women of Christ.

So many of us have fallen from a life of true purity in Christ--our words, our actions, our thoughts are so unrepresentative of the character, gentleness, and integrity of the Lord--and when I consider the extent to which my heart, soul, and (yes) mouth betray the committment my wife and I have made to Him, I cannot help but grieve for the abominable lack of heartfelt devotion inside of me. If there is anything, any sin in this world for which believers in Christ need to repent, it is our almost universal disobedience of the Lord's third commandment, and I fear that many of us, when we reach the throne of Christ, will find that we have spiritual blood on our hands.

Commandment 2: God's Barometer of a People's Spiritual Priorities

2007-09-23T13:01:00.000-07:00

It has been a week and a half since my previous post, a week and a half in which my wife and I have received a lot of direction (and redirection) from the Lord, for which we are both very thankful. At this point, we are preparing for our future (the coming of our child and other things as well) and managing two dogs which my in-laws bought a couple of weeks ago. I am also working heavily on my dissertation, in hopes that I can graduate from the Ph.D. program within the academic year.

Our text in this post is Exodus 20:4-6:

You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.

A lot of churches focus on the last 2 verses--God's curse on the sinful generations and God's blessing on the faithful generations--without taking them into their proper context. You see, ladies and gentlemen, the Lord was not sitting on His mountain saying to the Israelites, "Hey! I'm a fun God! I'll give you wonderful rewards for worshipping me!"

No, there was a very specific reason for God's promise of love to a thousand generations of those who love Him: to provide reasonings and incentives to obey a command.

Your next question should be, "Why this command?" After all, it is not as if the Lord provided anything that could be called an "incentive" or "reason" for following the other commandments (with one exception, which we will cover a few posts from now), so why would He have done so here?

I think it is because the Israelites had lived in generational slavery to the Egyptians--a people who made a practice of constructing statues and monuments in the (presumed) shape of their gods: birds, dogs, and even the sun. The Israelites were used to interacting with spiritual powers and principalities via images . . . and ladies and gentlemen, so are we.

I know, we live in a culture that does not cast gold, silver, or other metals into statues like the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans did, and let's be honest: when you hear about people around the world who still do that sort of thing, doesn't part of you inside just snicker a little bit? After all, we are a scientific people, and we know that cast images can't talk or sing, and they certainly don't merit the word "god," do they? Think about it: Don't you just find yourself smirking at the thought of people in India going to temple and worshipping little statues of their gods? Don't you automatically dismiss them as idiots for doing something so obviously ridiculous?

Or perhaps they are being a bit more honest than we are.

Let us look at the King James Version's translation of verse 4:

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

(italics mine)

Puts things a little more into perspective, doesn't it? You see, the Lord is not wanting the Israelites simply to abandon the practice of constructing god-statues like the Egyptians did but to eliminate the idea of associating God with an image altogether. This is, by the way, what ultimately became the ancient Israelites' undoing--they simply could not handle worshipping the Lord in a way that would require real trust, real faith, by abandoning the quest to associate the Lord with anything in the heavens or on Earth or in the seas of the Earth.

Ladies and gentlemen, we live in a society of images--the overwhelming majority of which are constructed by human beings for, I believe, some form of worship. Think about it: when was the last time you had to be told what product Mr. Clean, the Keebler elves, and the Pillsbury Doughboy represent? All of us know who George Washington and Abraham Lincoln look like, not because we're good students of history (by and large, Americans seem to have dismissed the idea that they should concern themselves with the affairs of the past), but because their faces are engraved on our money. Indeed, the city of Washington, D.C. is a city of images--the Washington Monument, the Vietname Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Pentagon--as are many other cities across the United States.

I will not be stupid enough here to say that television is the sole culprit for our dependence on images--we had an image-heavy print media decades before film and television were invented--but I do believe that Americans mediate their opinions, their cultural tastes, and yes, their spirituality through television. I think I can even go so far as to say that in general, Americans get more moral, philosophical, and spiritual teaching from their televisions than they will ever receive from the pulpits of their churches, and if you do not believe me, here's a simple test:

1. Can you recognize the name "Bart Simpson" and what it stands for without prompting?

2. Can you tell me, on cue, who Jerry Seinfeld is?

3. Now . . . can you say, without racking your brain, who Judas Iscariot was (without going back and reading my blog)?

4. Do you know what the word "messiah" means?

If you answered questions 1 and 2 without thinking but found yourself floundering through questions 3 and 4, you're not alone. Studies over the past 2 decades have shown conclusively that Americans, in general, are far more adept at naming television and film characters and celebrities than they are at identifying key historical figures and events such as Stalin, Kruschev, and Kristallnacht. These are the kinds of things that earlier Americans would have been ashamed not to know--and ladies and gentlemen, there was a time when almost every American would have known what the word "messiah" meant and who Judas Iscariot was. For them, those would have been questions as basic as "Who is Bart Simpson?" would be to Americans today.

I am not interested in making people feel condemned because they have a television in their home--my wife and I live with my in-laws, and they have a full home entertainment system proudly displayed in their living room--but I am very conscious of the fact that, when it comes to the prospect of allowing the Lord to restrict how much we watch the so-called "boob tube," many of us are as adept at finding excuses as the cocaine addict is for continuing his habit.

I used to hear the following line whenever someone would talk about censoring or protesting certain material on television that they found offensive for spiritual reasons: "If you don't like it, change the channel or turn the television off." Ladies and gentlemen, let's be honest--how many of you turn the television off or change the channel? Come on, don't you do what almost every American does when you get home from work--surf the channels and watch whatever is interesting for at least 20 minutes before switching to something else?

I think that before we criticize others for vocally opposing what we have accepted as normal, we may want to consider whether or not they may have a point.

I know this is a hard message for some of you, and I can only say that it was just as hard a message for me. My wife and I were both convicted during our courtship regarding the extent to which our spirituality was being mediated through music and television, and it was very difficult, in particular, for me to say goodbye to interests that I had found to be, in my perspective, innocent. It took a long time, for example, for the Lord to convince me that my addiction to sci-fi television was an addiction to false teaching that was interfering with my ability to listen to the Bible and to the Holy Spirit. I thank the Lord that I have stopped watching it, and I have seen the benefits of living without those interests, particularly in the wonderful answers my wife and I are receiving to our prayers.

Let me ask you this: If you claim the name of Christ Jesus and call yourself a Christian, then would you seriously entertain the thought of going to a mosque or Hindu temple or Buddhist shrine for instruction about the God of the Bible?

If not, then may I ask you . . . why are you doing exactly that when you watch television every day?

You see, the vast majority of television celebrities and producers are not Christians--some are non-Christian Jews, some are Muslims, some are Christian Scientists, and some are secular agnostics--and so, when you sit down in front of your television and turn on your favorite channel, chances are that you are watching a product constructed by someone who is not a believer in Christ. I am not saying, as others have unfortunately said before, that there is some sort of conspiracy by television producers and actors to destroy America's Christian institutions (it is obvious to me that money, more than anything else, is a motivation for the industry), but I will say that a nonbeliever is not going to create something that does not reflect their spiritual and emotional beliefs. Devout atheists, Muslims, and Rastafarians are not going to convert nonbelievers to the Gospel of Christ Jesus . . . and if a television producer or actor is not a devout atheist, Muslim, or Rastafarian, he or she is probably a devout capitalist.

Television, ladies and gentlemen, is not the only avenue of image worship, but it is by far the biggest, and if we who are in Christ are to have any impact in this world for the kingdom of God, we need to seriously examine our dependence on television. I am not saying that we should get rid of the television completely, but I am saying that as our society departs more and more from the Judeo-Christian traditions on which the original 13 colonies were founded, we are going to have to make a decision about whether or not we are more willing to be an irritant to our neighbors or a disappointment to our Lord.

As I have been saying over and over in this blog, I believe the Lord is calling those who claim the name of Christ Jesus to conduct themselves differently from other people, and I believe that in the matter of entertainment, we are falling woefully short of that mandate. We have given ourselves over to the images of our culture as readily as any pagan in ancient times would have given himself over to the worship of graven statues, and it is time for us to repent before the God we claim to serve.

If we do not, I fear, the Lord may use the winnowing fork of history to make us repent.

I know that some of you must think I am some sort of crackpot for saying these things--maybe I am--but Christ Jesus was not slain because He was nice to lepers, blind people, and demon-possessed madmen. He was slain for Who He was, and because everyone around Him knew in their spirits that every word that came out of His mouth was truth. I might add that He was slain publicly--beaten and tortured in full view of onlookers and led to the Place of the Skull, a hill overlooking the city of Jerusalem, so that His crucifixion could be seen by witnesses from miles away.

Some of you out there have this mindset that you can "go undercover"--that if you cuss, watch all the wrong TV shows, and listen to "cool" music, you can get under the world's radar and sort of sneak your friends and associates into the kingdom of heaven. I hate to tell you this, my friends, but speaking as someone who was a nonbeliever most of his life, I have to say that the Christians who made the most impression on me were the ones whose devotion to the Lord was open, real, and unadulterated. The "undercover evangelist" routine, as far as I (or anyone else who is not a believer in Christ) am concerned, is simply a rhetorical dodge created by people who simply don't want to be rejected by others.

People will reject you, ladies and gentlemen--it happens all the time.

Wouldn't you rather it was because they saw in you something that was not of this world?

Commandment #1--No Other Gods

2007-09-13T06:58:00.000-07:00

Before I begin this post, I would like to take a moment to apologize to my readers for the disjointedness that appeared at times in my previous post. As I mentioned in that post, my wife and I are currently going through a very difficult time as we adjust to the surprise child that the Lord has given us in our first year of marriage, and I am afraid that some of that struggle may have played itself out in the more jumbled and ridiculous-sounding areas of my post.

In particular, I would like to apologize to anyone who, for whatever reason, was sidetracked by my discussion of ways in which separating ourselves from the world may manifest itself in our daily lives. Yes, my wife and I are restricting our intake of television, and yes, we are planning and preparing to homeschool our children--and yes, we do see these things as a form of separating ourselves from the world. However, I do think, on reading that post again, that the section in which I articulated the necessity of not depending on institutions could have been better worded, and I am afraid that to some, the shoddy wording may have distracted from the real message that the Lord was trying to convey to them.

Ladies and gentlemen, I do believe that it is time for believers in Christ to choose whether they will continue to depend on the institutions of this world or depend on the Lord for their welfare. As I have said before in this blog, even if the United States were to remain a nation and government friendly toward Christianity, the social and economic situation in which we currently find ourselves is fragile at best. The governmental and corporate structures--things such as "retirement" or "credit" or "social security"--are tottering on very unstable legs, and eventually, as the baby boomer generation claims its retirement benefits, the economy will become increasingly strained.

I think that believers in Christ, under the circumstances, should not trust that the systems and structures of yesterday will remain in place tomorrow, and this, in part, is what brings me to the first of what we in the western world have come to call "the ten commandments."

In our first series of posts on the Lord's commandments to the ancient Israelites, we covered the Passover and its significance for the people of the Old Testament and the converts of the New Testament--and now, after covering the Lord's outlining of blessings and curses to the ancient Israelites in the desert, we come to what is arguably the most well-known, yet misunderstood, section of the Bible.

Let us begin by reading the account given to us in Exodus 19, leading up to the Lord's words in Exodus 20:

In the third month after the Israelites left Egypt—on the very day—they came to the Desert of Sinai. After they set out from Rephidim, they entered the Desert of Sinai, and Israel camped there in the desert in front of the mountain.

Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, "This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: 'You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites."

Here in verses 1-6 we have a beautiful promise--the Lord wanted the nation of Israel to be "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." What does that mean? It means that he wanted Israel to be a nation that was striking testimony to the world of the reality of God--and ladies and gentlemen, the Lord succeeded in this regard . . . but at great cost.

You see, Israel was never supposed to suffer the things that she suffered during her history after the exodus from Egypt--Israel was never supposed to be divided into two kingdoms, or destroyed, or led into captivity. However, all of these things happened, and the Bible tells us that they happened because the people of Israel refused to obey the Lord and because they looked to other gods.

Nevertheless, the Lord did (and does) have a living testimony of his existence in the words of the Bible--he indeed was glorified through the nation of Israel, but not in the way that, I believe, He would have wished.

Exodus 19 tells us that the Lord called the people of Israel to Mount Sinai so that they could hear--as Moses heard--the voice of the Lord speaking to them . . . and indeed they did hear it. Verses 16-19 describe this experience in vivid, frightening detail:

On the morning of the third day [after they had purified themselves for two days] there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled. Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the LORD descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, the whole mountain trembled violently, and the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder. Then Moses spoke and the voice of God answered him. [c]

Now, what was the very first thing that the Lord said to the entire people of Israel? What message did He first want to convey to them?

We find out in Exodus 20:1-3:

And God spoke all these words:

"I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

"You shall have no other gods before me.

This is the basis of the Bible--of the Old and New Testaments--and it is sad that in today's world, so few people who claim the name of Christ Jesus for themselves actually heed it.

The sin that brought the Israelites into disrepute and destruction and the sin that pervades so many of our churches today are, I am afraid, one and the same: syncretism. Merriam-Webster defines syncretism as "the combination of different forms of belief or practice," and the American Heritage Dictionary defines it as "the reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief" . . . but I have a less euphemistic way of defining syncretism:

Syncretism is, simply put, an attempt by man (and woman) to have his/her cake and eat it, too--to have the vitality and blessed assurance of salvation that comes with recognizing the one true God and to have the comfort and riches of this world as well.

Some of you may find this to be a bit uncomfortable, but ladies and gentlemen, the God described in the Bible is a "jealous" God, meaning that He "jealously" guards what is His--and Christ Jesus Himself said, "He who is not with me is against me" (Matthew 12:30). Do you think He looks upon your worship of money or sex or upward social mobility as simply a "viable way" to "combine different belief systems"?

Or do you, as so many people in our society often do, assume that He understands that sometimes situations call for compromises?

You won't hear this kind of talk in most American churches today. Most prominent pastors and televangelists are more concerned with being popular than with telling the truth, and so they will not tell you that repentance, not a few simple words muttered at the front of a tent or chapel, is what the Lord ultimately desires from each and every one of us.

If you have not put the Lord first in your life, my friend, than no matter how many Bibles and devotionals you have, no matter how many times you uttered the "sinner's prayer," and no matter how faithful your attendance at church has been . . . you are sinning against the Lord, and you must repent of that sin if you want to be right with Him.

I understand that you may find those words very difficult to accept . . . just as I once did.

I wasn't a very Christian or holy man for most of my life--in fact, I even went so far as to delve into some very dark spiritual things--but for much of that time, I was a faithful church attender.

I could even quote Bible verses . . . at least the ones I had taken in from my years at a Christian liberal arts college in Virginia.

I had other gods, however--gods that, in my heart, came first. One of them, as you may have gathered from reading my original Sabbath Breakers blog, was sex--I wanted endless sex and endless pleasure, any way I could get it, and I didn't care what kind of harm it was doing to my life, and my relationships with my family and others around me, and I didn't care what my obsession was destroying inside of me.

Another god, however, was freedom.

Freedom has become a very popular word in our culture today, but I wonder if we understand to the extent to which we abuse this concept in our daily lives, using it as an excuse for socially (and personally) destructive actions. Abortion is undertaken in the name of freedom, divorces often occur in the name of "liberating" one spouse from the other, and of course, the United States has waged a number of wars in the name of preserving freedom.

I wonder if we truly understand Paul's words to the believers in Rome when he said,

Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities for there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.

Romans 13:1

These words, of course, were written in a time when "the governing authorities" were military generals who ruled by force, using fear, intimidation, and cruelty as instruments of order.

More to the point, I wonder if we understand the words of Christ, as recorded by Matthew:

A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household!

So do not be afraid of them. There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight. What is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid--you are worth more than many sparrows.

Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn
'a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law -
a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'

Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

verses 24-39

Most megachurch pastors and televangelists will quote the softer-sounding portions of this passage, such as "the very hairs of your head are all numbered" and "what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs," without providing the context. Unfortunately, what many people are then left with in our society is a "Christianity" in which Christ can exist in the same room with "career" or "materialism" or even "my own political beliefs."

Note, in particular, the words at the end of the passage above: "anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me." These are among my favorite words of the Bible, and whenever I hear them, my soul is stirred with a longing for the Christ who took up His cross for me. So often, we hear in our churches today that the "cross" Christ is talking about is metaphorical--it can mean anything from problems at work to difficulties in the home--but when Christ said those words, they had a very concrete meaning to those who heard them.

The cross was a public method of execution designed to humiliate and torture its victim--and everyone in ancient Judea knew the kind of suffering Christ meant when he said "anyone who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me." You see, Christianity is hard (as I have said before), and very few people can meet with the real suffering, real persecution, and real pain that comes when we fully allow Christ to shine in our hearts. We live in a world, after all, that is cruel and heartless--and love, real love, is often tinged with tears.

I wish, ladies and gentlemen, I could have relented and listened to this message sooner--I wasted so many years of my life attempting to seek fame and fortune--but the Lord has been very gracious, and with His help, my children won't have to learn the hard way as I did . . . and, I hope, neither will you.

Listen to your heart. Do you have other gods? If so, I believe the Lord is asking you to lay them aside.

I have said at numerous times that I believe that we are increasingly seeing a spirit in this nation that is hostile to Christianity and to Christ, and that one day, if believers in Christ are not willing to make their loyalties clear, we may see a time when the Lord will use the persecuting hand of non-believers to winnow out those in the ranks of Christendom who never really held Christ first in their hearts. Please, ladies and gentlemen . . . let's not make that kind of hard hand from the Lord necessary.

In Christ, we have a redeemer--one who cleanses us from all sin.

Let us not allow the pressures or pleasures of this world so great a place in our hearts that we fail to see our need for that redemption.

The Lord Who Heals: Promise to a Lost Generation

2007-09-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

Things have been busy at the homestead as of late. My wife is in the middle of her first pregnancy, and I am in the process of finding us some income as we recover from our recent move to South Carolina. I wish I could say I knew what I was getting into as a husband and (now) as a father, but the fact is, I am overwhelmed most of the time at the weight of responsibility that the Lord has given me. Jessica and I are in the unique position of having to trust in the Lord for every resource, every insight, every bit of character development we need in order to handle what was, to us, a very unexpected pregnancy, and during the past several months, we have had, I admit, our share of good days and bad days.

The Lord, however, has been very gracious, and every day we are thankful that in His wisdom, He put the two of us together. I wish that every couple could know the oneness of mind, body, soul, and spirit that Jessica and I share, and I must thank God for it, because without that, it would have been very difficult for us to make it through the summer without a great deal of marital conflict.

(Yes, conflict does happen even in the best of marriages--those of you out there who view wedded bliss as an oasis of sex, pleasure, and self-gratification will, I fear, find yourselves immensely disappointed after your marriage vows have been taken . . . )

Our text in this post is Exodus 15:22-27, but I'd like to begin with Matthew 7:13-14 because I feel that this passage has, for us, a very strong message. Listen to Jesus' words from the Sermon on the Mount:

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

To some of you, I know, this probably sounds a lot like sandpaper grating in your ears, but given the context of the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, I think you will find that this passage offers a very hard-hitting diagnosis from the Lord concerning a problem common not only in first century Judea but in twenty-first century America. You see, not very many people in our society are interested in truth anymore--only in how to get ahead, how to gain more pleasure for themselves, and how to prevent other people from getting in the way of those two pursuits. Divorce is now "no fault," the killing of unborn children is "abortion," and sleeping with a member of one's sex (as one would sleep with a member of the opposite sex) is termed a "viable lifestyle choice."

People like me who would point out the major sin issues within our culture have a hard time fitting in at social gatherings--we're not very popular. My wife and I once listened to a "Lake Woebegone" segment in which Garrison Keeler recounted a time when he was offered (by the Almighty) the position of prophet, and he turned it down because it would have meant that he would spend a lifetime telling people the truth--and most of the time, people just don't want to hear it.

I don't blame him for making that decision.

Being a Christian is hard, ladies and gentlemen--and one of the first things we must be willing to sacrifice, I'm afraid, is our popularity. The fact is, we are not part of this world, and no matter how much we try to camouflage ourselves, those who are nonbelievers know, instinctively, who the real Christians are. If you were under the impression that you could be in Christ and still slip under the world's radar, I can tell you from personal experience as someone who was "of the world" most of his life that you are deeply mistaken.

What does all of this have to do with Exodus 15:22-27? I believe that in this passage, we see the essence of the narrow road that Jesus later describes--and a promise for those who are willing to walk that road.

Immediately after the songs that Moses and Miriam sang in praise of the Lord for leading the people of Israel through the Red Sea (and after all of the other miracles that the Lord performed in order to deliver the Israelites from the bondage of slavery), we find the following passage:

Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the Desert of Shur. For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water. When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. (That is why the place is called Marah.) So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, "What are we to drink?"

Then Moses cried out to the LORD, and the LORD showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.

Isn't it amazing?

The Israelites, after experiencing the mighty hand of the Lord in freeing them from generational slavery, actually grumbled when they came to a place where water was bitter. Shouldn't they have expected that the Lord would provide for them in spite of their lack of water--and frankly, shouldn't they have been a little more respectful of Moses since he was the instrument the Lord chose to free them from the Egyptians?

Well . . . I guess we shouldn't be too hard on them. After all, as I will demonstrate later in this post, we are no better than they were.

After the account of the Lord's deliverance of the Israelites from thirst at Marah, we find the following 2 verses (25b-26):

There the LORD made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them. He said, "If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you."

Clearly, the Israelites were presented with two alternatives: (1) Obey the voice of the Lord and really live, or (2) disobey the voice of the Lord and suffer the same fate as that of the Egyptians. We will cover those alternatives in more detail during future posts, but I would like for us to link this verse (26) together with Jesus' description of the broad and narrow ways.

As we have seen from Matthew 7:13-14, the broad way "leads to destruction" and "many" undertake it. I believe that the broad way of Matthew 7 and the way of disobedience from Exodus 15 are one and the same: disrespect for the Lord.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not talking about the kind of disrespect for the lord that we see in the peoples and nations of this world today--the kingdoms of the world do not honor the Lord, and never have. Moreover, as we can see in Exodus 15, the Lord is presenting these two alternatives not to every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth but specifically to the people of Israel, a nation already in a very real sense commited to the Lord.

Sadly, it seems, the disrespect that most grieves the Lord does not come from those who never gave their hearts to him at all but instead from those who, for whatever reason, gleefully accepted him only to spit in his face when the road he wanted them to travel does not seem as easy as they thought it should be . . .

Ladies and gentlemen, we live in a world that does not want to be convicted of its sins--and frankly, why should it be, when those who are supposed to be examples of Christ are, in many ways, some of the worst purveyors of sin, rebelliousness, and hypocrisy? As I have noted on numerous occasions, the divorce rate within Christian circles is actually higher than the divorce rate outside Christian circles--and the number of abortions commited among Bible college students is, according to a recent article in Relevant Magazine, one of the dirtiest secrets postmodern American Christendom has ever kept. Though almost all so-called conservative Christians agree that homosexuality is a sin, it is very rare that a homosexual will find him-/herself in a Christian environment which is safe enough to promote the confession of sins one to another (James 5:16).

And these are only the highlights, my friends. What a sad state of affairs Christianity has fallen to when the proposition of charismatic speakers, flawless choral singing, and various pseudo-gospels of wealth and success and social acceptability draws more people into the walls of a church than the hard-hitting, soul-winning, heart-convicting power of the Holy Spirit?

Are we that spiritually bankrupt?

I am afraid we are, ladies and gentlemen--and I am afraid that because of our lack of enthusiasm for the Lord, we will find ourselves one day in a nation that will use very unpleasant means to make us decide once and for all where our loyalties stand . . .

I would like to suggest 3 areas where the narrow road of Christ-obedience may touch our everyday lives, so that at the very least, some of you will be prepared for what Christianity may one day mean for you and your families:

1. It may mean that you will have to restrict television's impact on your life.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the television which brings so many wonderful channels of entertainment into our homes 24 hours a day is, I fear, an increasing engine of hostility to the Christ of the Bible. I am not talking specifically about the relentless glorification of sexual perversion (or at the very least sexual immaturity), violence, and materialism--those things have been glorified long before humanity invented television--but instead, I am talking about the extent to which we have come to rely on television as a teacher. Television teaches us about a great many things, it seems, particularly regarding the expectations we should have about God, about the world, and about ourselves, and the doctrines it most often professes are very clear: There is no God, we are capable of greater wonders than we ever thought possible, and what we gain in this life (for ourselves or for others) is of paramount importance.

These doctrines may ring in your heart as inspirational and true, but they are not the doctrines that the Bible teaches. It may be, my friend, that you will one day have to choose between the Bible and your television set if you want to have a clear idea of where things stand--both in this world and in the world to come.

2. It may mean that you will have to revise the way you approach sexuality.

Our society, it seems, has tossed aside almost every restraint in its exercise of sexual intercourse for the sake of personal pleasure--and virginity is increasingly regarded as a sign of childhood rather than a stance taken for reasons of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. Unfortunately, as I can attest to you, the union of bodies under the sheets is also a union of souls and spirits, and if you think you can switch partners without suffering serious personal and psychological repercussions, you are deluding yourself.

I know that a lot of bad teaching (in the name of good morals) has confused many people about what the Bible says regarding the exercise of sexuality, and we will cover this topic in more detail later, but what I want you to understand right now is that if you share your body with someone, you are sharing your soul with that person as well. Therefore, it is of the highest importance that, if you value your soul, you will only allow it (and your body) to be shared with whoever Christ would have you share it with.

3. It may mean that you abandon some of the institutions of this world.

Jessica and I are going to join the growing ranks of homeschoolers across the United States, simply because we will not commit our children to an institutional regime that (1) does not recognize Christ Jesus as the Son of God and (2) cares more, in general, for its own self-perpetuation than for the students it is designed to teach. We are, after all, only stewards of the beautiful human beings that the Lord has given us, and since the Lord has given us the responsibility of raising them, we do not want to leave that charge to the care of strangers.

Our departure from the institutions of this world may occur in other areas as well, however:

Finances--Jessica and I may find ourselves lead to create home businesses rather than depending on multinational corporations for what seems to be readily available jobs and income.

Medical care--Jessica and I may be forced to choose between a dietary and health lifestyle that prizes good personal health habits over prescription drugs, and a lifestyle that will see us visiting doctors and hospitals over and over and over again.

Church--Jessica and I have essentially abandoned the practice of attending a congregation of strangers for 2 hours a week and instead are focusing our attention on a congregation that has far more personal significance . . . our family.

Let us look at Exodus 15:26 again.

There the LORD made a decree and a law for them, and there he tested them. He said, "If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you."

Now, why in the world would the Lord end his statement to the Israelites with something as dopey-sounding as "I am the Lord, who heals you?"

I researched this verse using Strong's Concordance, and I found that the Hebrew word translated "heals" means more than simply healing a wound or healing non-functioning organs. In short, the Lord is saying, "I am the Lord, who is capable of healing you of every disease and making you completely whole."

As I said earlier, believers in Christ are not citizens of this world, and so they will receive none of its promises or benefits--but they have something better in store for them. They will be "whole"--completely healed of every sickness, disease, and imperfection, and they will be far happier for it than anyone ever could be in this life. As Paul once said, those of us who are in Christ are being changed every day, our bodies and souls and spirits brought closer and closer to Christ's ideal, and when our Lord comes, we will be forever united with Him, and never again will we stumble, or walk blind . . . or sin.

Isn't that worth a little heartache in this life?

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not directing this post to the millions and millions of nonbelievers out there who have never considered or accepted Christ Jesus as their Lord and Savior--I am instead directing it to those who at one time accepted Christ but who now find themselves attracted, for whatever reason, to the things of this world. I want you to know that I understand where you're coming from--sometimes it seems that the road Jessica and I are on in Christ is a very hard road indeed, and we've both wanted to get off--but I also know that you will get nothing of lasting significance or enjoyment from this world. Pleasure--whether it comes from popularity or entertainment or physical highs--is fleeting, and it leaves you always cold and always, always barren inside.

If you are in Christ, you can't love the things of this world--and moreover, the world can't love you. As a nonbeliever, I was automatically (for reasons I would not have been able to explain even to myself) hostile to anyone and anything that bespoke Christ or Christianity. I was open to other religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Rastafarianism, but I hated Christ and everything He stood for--and so did all of my companions.

Make no mistake, my friend--if you accept Christ as your Lord and Savior, you are from that point on an enemy of this world, and this world will do whatever it can to demolish you. If you pursue what it has to offer, you will be tolerated but (in secret) laughed at and ridiculed as a hypocrite, and if you pursue the Lord at the cost of the things of this world, your very existence will be a stench of death to those who have not given their lives to Christ.

Either way, they will hate you.

Wouldn't you rather they hated you for the stand you took than for your lack of interest in following the Lord you profess to serve?

The Firstborn Covenant: Symbol of a Broken Church

2007-09-03T07:46:00.000-07:00

In Exodus 13:1-2, shortly before the account of the Israelites' deliverance from the hand of Pharaoh, we read this:

The LORD said to Moses, "Consecrate to me every firstborn male. The first offspring of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me, whether man or animal."

Why would the Lord have given Moses such a stern command, and what, if any, significance does it have for us today?

In Moses' recorded remarks to the people of Israel before setting out from the land of Egypt, we hear God's reasonings clearly stated:

In days to come, when your son asks you, 'What does this mean?' say to him, 'With a mighty hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the LORD killed every firstborn in Egypt, both man and animal. This is why I sacrifice to the LORD the first male offspring of every womb and redeem each of my firstborn sons.'

Exodus 13:14-15

I wonder if those of us in the body of Christ understand even a hint of the significance of these passages. You see, the blood of the Egyptian children was precious and real--and I do not believe it was something the Lord wanted to shed.

Think about it for a moment. In Matthew 18, we find Jesus (the Son of God) saying that "whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me" (v. 5), but "if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea" (v. 6). Why? Because "their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven" (v. 10).

Do you think that God loved the children of ancient Egypt any less than He loved the children of first century Judea?

The firstborn of every womb in Israel was, in light of God's great sacrifice, the very least that the people of Israel could give back in return for their freedom . . . just as the heart, body, and soul of every believer in Christ is the least that you and I can give back in return for the freedom we have through the sacrifice of Christ Jesus on the cross. If children were so dear to God, and if it was such a heartbreaking act for Him to kill so many of them in Egypt, how much more heartbreaking would it have been for Him to sacrifice the Son of God on the cross 2000 years ago? I don't claim to know all the mysteries of the Trinity, ladies and gentlemen, but I do know this: The Crucifixion caused God pain.

That is why Paul writes so eloquently in Romans 12:1, "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship." Note that Paul does not say, "Offer your time to God," or "Offer your best wishes to God," or "Offer your most honorable intentions to God"--he says "bodies" . . . your hands, your feet, your physical strength and manliness, your physical beauty and femininity, your eyes, your nose, and (yes) your reproductive organs.

We live in a church culture today that would have Americans believe that they are, in Christ, free to pursue all of the material vices of the world--with some socially unacceptable exemptions--because, it is presumed, the crucifixion represents one giant meal ticket for believers. Just say a prayer, mumble all the "right" words, and you can have a life of "freedom" in which you can do, essentially, everything you did before, with the possible exception of drugs, alcohol, or criminal activity. The postmodern church has, it seems, ditched the hard message of the Gospel for a theology that uses the cross of Christ Jesus to allow parishioners to pursue socially acceptable sins.

I hear it all the time on the Christian radio.

"Did you get a divorce? That's covered by God's grace--you can go on with your life now, free as a gazelle."

"Did you teach your children all the wrong things? Don't worry--God's grace will cover that, too, and you can go on with your life in the knowledge that God doesn't hold you accoutable anymore."

"Did you sacrifice your family for a business promotion? God feels your pain. Here, just hold fast to God's grace, and you won't have as much trouble looking at yourself in the mirror when you get up tomorrow."

Ladies and gentlemen, our Lord calls us to a higher standard of holiness than the rest of the world--and I believe that if you are really committed to the Lord, then you feel a stirring inside of your heart as you read this post, knowing that yes, there is a deeper Christianity than the Sunday/Wednesday tradition of superchurch attendance, nice sermons, and shallow lives. The believers in first century Judea were holy men who led lives that would drive any one of us to shame: healing dirty, poverty-stricken men and women with sores and moans and pressing needs as great as any suffered by a denizen of the Third World, fending off crowds of hungry people starving for a loaf of bread and yearning for spiritual insight, and hunted day and night by people who had the authority to imprison, torture, and kill.

I wonder where their spiritual descendants lost their fortitude?

When my wife and I were living in Fort Worth, Texas, we noted that it seemed every city block had at least one church building on it, if not two--and with so many churches (and presumably so many Christians), Fort Worth should have been an oasis for the poor and the homeless, right? Sadly, Fort Worth has as many miserable, starving, and desperate homeless people as any other city does.

It often seemed to my wife and me that if you had money or power, you were looked upon by many superchurch attenders with respect--but if you were poor, you were looked upon as an inconvenience or a project . . . when you were looked upon at all.

Our bodies are what the Lord is asking for--not simply our songs, our church buildings, and our prayers--and I believe that a day may well come, ladies and gentlemen, when the Lord holds the church in America to account for its lack of humility and love.

Healing the sick, bringing love to the poor and outcast, visiting those in need--these are standing orders in God's kingdom, and Christ Himself uttered them. If we are not doing likewise as the ancient disciples did (either before or after the Resurrection of Christ) then it is not simply because we are "weak" or because we live in a world that makes it "hard to follow Christ's commands."

It is because we have sinned.

Disobedience is sin, my friends--and it is only atoned for when, by God's grace, we are willing to turn away from it.

If we are to become part of that remnant which will meet Christ in the air someday, we must be willing to obey Christ in every respect--whether He is speaking to us from the Gospels or from the book of Leviticus. I am not saying that we must be utterly sinless--we are redeemed, after all, not perfect--but I am saying that we must be willing to pursue lives that, while socially vile to the rest of the world, exhibit the love and the power of Christ's kingdom on Earth. If we are at least willing, that is enough in God's sight.

You may feel secure in knowing that you gave God your time and your prayers--but it is also your body that God wants.

Will you give it to him?

Antichrist: The Spirit of This Age

2007-08-28T07:12:00.000-07:00

I know that many of you reading this blog may have been convinced, as I was, that the word "Antichrist" in the Bible simply referred to a person connected with what many Christians have called the "last days." This man, it is believed, will bring devastation unheard of to the ranks of Christians through a worldwide system of economic, military, and political control.

However, I would like to propose something to you that will, I think, open your eyes not only to the depth of scripture but to the ever-present reality of a spiritual warfare that is, I am afraid, far closer to home than you and I would like to admit.

Let me begin with a passage from Paul's letter to the Ephesians:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Ephesians 6:10-12

This is a favorite passage on the Christian radio and in many Christian sermons, but sadly, it is rarely understood. What, for example, does Paul mean by "our struggle is not against flesh and blood?"

I think that we will find part of our answer in another passage that is often quoted amiss by the institutional church:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

Romans 13:1-2

"Wait a minute," some of you may be saying. "Wasn't Paul saying in another letter that our struggle is against authorities?"

Yes--but if you reread the entire passage from Ephesians 6, you will find that Paul goes on to describe the authorities he is talking about as (v. 12) "the powers of this dark world" and "the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." You see, the "government" in Paul's time was not a democracy--it was military rule, a style of government that the Romans had established shortly before the birth of Christ in order to stabilize their society. Furthermore, this military rule was, in the eyes of Paul's people, an occupying regime since its soldiers had subjugated the land of Israel, relegating it to an outer province of the Roman Empire called "Judea" (or, as it should have been called by its own residents, "Judah").

This military regime punished its enemies by ruthless means. After all, the Cross, an instrument of death designed to prolong the life of its victim for days or sometimes weeks, was a unique invention of Rome--as was the Coliseum, and the deadly games that would seal the martyrdom of so many Christians in centuries to come. And yet Paul goes on in Romans 13:3-5 to say

For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience.

How, indeed, could Paul say these things about an empire that had humiliated his people and subjugated the known world by inventing methods of cruelty formerly unknown to humankind? Because, as Ephesians 6:11 says, his battle was not "against flesh and blood."

I am afraid, ladies and gentlemen, that in its zeal to "reform" the rest of the world according to the principles of representative democracy, our society has lost any sense of a Christianity that could look a dictator squarely in the eyes and say, "I believe you are a servant of God to bring order to my nation." The United States goes to war these days, it seems, not out of concern for the welfare and defense of its people (a legitimate reason for any government to go to war) but out of a desire to "improve" the nations around her. The governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, and Iran are "immoral" and "corrupt," and yet, except for Afghanistan (which was an anarchy that did strike first at the United States), all of these governments had, as their aim, to bring law and order to their people and to achieve some semblance of national cohesion and stability.

I realize that this is an unpopular assertion, given the times that we live in, but remember, ladies and gentlemen, that the body of Christ exists in more countries than the United States and its allies. There are Christians suffering and dying by the thousands in many nations around the world, including the Middle East, and I am sure that almost all of them would tell you that they are not dying for the benefit of a "free people" or "democracy" but simply because their allegiance to the Lord outweighs their allegiance to their governments.

Ladies and gentlemen, for 300 years Christianity was persecuted by the Roman Empire, and for 300 years, Christians submitted to the swords, axes, and fires of their executioners without duress--not because they were weak but because they knew that their bodies and souls belonged to another Ruler who would resurrect them, as He resurrected Himself . . .

It is my belief that postmodern Christians come to concepts such as "Antichrist" in the Bible with an understanding that is firmly rooted in the perspective of this world. Instead of understanding "Antichrist" as a spirit, a "power of this dark world" and a "spiritual force of evil in the heavenly realms," we instead understand him as some sort of evil dictator who rules the world in the same way that evil dictators in the movies do: through military force. And it is because of this understanding that we fail to see Antichrist at work in so many of our churches.

The first reference we see in the Bible to "Antichrist" appears in 1 John 2:18-19:

Dear children, this is the last hour, and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us, but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.

Note that John's main focus in this passage is not on the future but on the present. Antichrist "is coming," but "even now" Antichrist is active and at work--not in the military and political affairs of John's world but within the church.

John clearly identifies Antichrist as a spirit manifested in certain people, a spirit that is active within the church. He says that those who operated in the spirit of Antichrist "went out from us" but "did not really belong to us," signifying that one of the traits of this spirit is to do something "good" or "beneficial" in order to present itself as godly or God-driven. John says further that if they had been real Christians, they would have remained with John and the other apostles rather than going out on their own, but instead, they went out on their own, without the permission of the apostles.

1 John 20-25 outlines the specific qualities of Antichrist, and of the believer in Christ:

But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. I do not write to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it and because no lie comes from the truth. Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.

See that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you. If it does, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father. And this is what he promised us—even eternal life.

John says specifically here that those who deny that Jesus is the Christ (the Messiah) are "Antichrist"--but how do you deny that Jesus is the Christ? Not simply through words, it is clear from 1 John 2:18-19, but through lack of submission to His apostles.

You see, Christ submitted Himself to the Father, even unto death, as Paul so eloquently writes in Philippians 2, and hence, the mark of the believer in Christ is submission as well--to Christ and to the word of God.

Those who are not submitted to Christ and the word of God, we can infer from the above passage, do not have eternal life.

1 John 2:26-27 ends the discussion by articulating John's purpose in coining the term "Antichrist":

I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray. As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit—just as it has taught you, remain in him.

Again, John identifies representatives of "Antichrist" as operatives within the church--in his words "those who are trying to lead you astray."

I think that by now, ladies and gentlemen, you can see my point. It is the same one I have been making for several posts now: A believer in Christ does not long for anything in this world because he or she is a citizen of a better one. It only remains for believers to share with others the truth they themselves have received, and to win souls for Christ.

We live in a church culture today that would, I fear, prefer to win souls for itself. Pastors, radio talk show hosts, and televangelists center their sermons on non-confrontational topics such as grace or legalism (without defining very effectively what these terms mean) in order to attract more parishioners, more listeners, and more viewers. The result is a generation of people who have trouble seeing the difference between loyalty to their church and loyalty to Christ . . . and who are becoming increasingly apathetic toward both.

My wife and I are believers in Christ . . . but we do not attend church. We tried several churches in the Dallas-Fort Worth area before moving to Lancaster, South Carolina, but all of them exhibited the same spirit that John was describing in his letter--the unsubmissive spirit of Antichrist. The one congregation we found that evidenced the Spirit of Christ was, oddly enough, a small Orthodox Christian church--there were clear lines of authority, and it was obvious that the priest of that church was submitted in his heart to the Lord, Christ Jesus. It was the first time in a long while (years) that either one of us felt truly free inside a church building.

I know that some of you will read this and think I am endorsing Orthodox Christianity as the solution to America's spiritual problems. Unfortunately, it seems that Orthodox Christianity has its share of dead churches and equally dead parishioners as well (as my wife and I discovered when we researched the denomination further).

All I am saying is that the search for a real, vibrant group of believers in Christ who are really and truly born again is increasingly taking people like us in directions outside the realm of traditional Protestant Christianity. I wish I could say this was a good thing, but the fact is, it only evidences the sad reality that many, if not most, American churches are repositories of doctrines that John and the other apostles would have found dubious, if not repugnant.

There is a lot of bad teaching going on out there, just as there was in John's time, and believers in Christ need, more than ever, to find good resources. In the next few weeks, I will add a few that my wife and I found to the "links" section of this blog--and I would appreciate any feedback from other bloggers on Christian resources for new believers as well. Part of the reason I started this blog, after all, was so that other people wouldn't have to struggle quite as much as my wife and I did when we received Christ.

Our hope, ladies and gentlemen, is not in this world.

The life and possibilities we can have in Christ Jesus are truly endless.

Exodus 12:43-49: God's Warning to Those of Us Who Compromise

2007-08-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

In this post, I'd like to focus on the last portion of Exodus 12 (yes, I know there was more on the Passover commandments than you anticipated), and while I think it would be sweet and somewhat soothing for my readers to look at verse 46 ("It must be eaten inside one house; take none of the meat outside the house. Do not break any of the bones.") and its relationship to the crucifixion of our Savior, the ultimate Passover Lamb whose bones were not broken as He gave Himself freely for our deliverance from sin, I will instead focus on the following, which begins the portion of scripture that will serve as our text:

No foreigner is to eat of it. Any slave you have bought may eat of it after you have circumcised him, but a temporary resident and a hired worker may not eat of it.

What does that mean?

Simply this: in order to partake of the Passover, you had to be consecrated, part of the Lord's elect, His chosen nation. Anyone who was not a part of the Lord's nation did not have the right--either in God's sight or in the sight of God's people--to engage in the celebration.

Ladies and gentlemen, we live in a society today in which churches regularly "water down" the Bible, Christ, and Christianity in order, so they say, to be "relevant"--in other words, to attract new parishioners who will, it is hoped, enlarge the church rosters, donate generously to church projects, and provide some semblance of legitimacy. Youth groups, even in many so-called conservative churches today, are little more than dating scenes with a few Bible verses, guitars, and "hallelujahs" thrown in. College ministries are, in many cases, pairing ministries, in which young men and women play a game of relational "musical chairs" until the odd man or woman out is forced to "live a life of chastity" as everyone else strolls off, arm in arm with his/her future spouse, into the sunset . . . and into a life of meaningless superchurch attendance, shallow faith, and a suburban pseudo-Christianity that looks an awful lot like the feckless materialism so endorsed by other, more pagan elements of our society.

It really is amazing to me that so many professing Christians in the United States fail to see the glaring inconsistencies of a religious culture that publishes a lot of books, music CD's, and even (it seems) special movies about Jesus but which also happily sends its children off to public schools, endorses a home life which forces the man to spend 8 or more hours a day away from his wife, and acquires every bit as many technological gadgets, entertainment devices, and other toys as its atheistic and/or pagan counterparts.

Worse, many of the very denizens of this church culture balk at basic ideas which are found in the Bible, such as the fact that sin is not only wrong but is not to be tolerated in those who would educate others in the way of Christ, the infallibility of scripture, and (yes, I know a lot of you will want to dispute me on this point) the premise that the Earth is, in fact, only 6000 years old. I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that scripture supports, vigorously, each of these points, and I suppose that at some point the time will come when I will devote several posts to each of them, but for now, I would simply like to emphasize that there is a very sharp dividing line between those who have unflinchingly given their hearts, bodies, and souls to Christ and those who merely use Christ's name to gain for themselves good social standing.

The Lord was very serious about who could participate in the Passover celebration, and is even more serious about who can celebrate the resurrection of Christ Jesus. I believe two scripture passages from the New Testament will serve to illustrate this point:

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me." In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me." For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment. When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world.

1 Corinthians 11:23-32, emphases mine

It is important to note that Paul meant "died" when he said "fallen asleep"--this is corroborated by other passages in the New Testament which phrase death as "sleep" or "falling asleep."

Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. With his wife's full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles' feet.

Then Peter said, "Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? 4Didn't it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn't the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied to men but to God."

When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. Then the young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.

About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter asked her, "Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?"

"Yes," she said, "that is the price."

Peter said to her, "How could you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord? Look! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also."

At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.

Acts 5:1-11

I understand that the second passage I quoted does not specifically refer to the celebration of what we in the United States call communion, but think about it for a moment: Ananias and Sapphira lived in a community in which everyone shared everything in common, and in which believers in Christ were routinely ostracized. Don't you think that in this environment, Ananias and Sapphira probably celebrated the Passover and Christ's Last Supper along with the other believers? I think so, and I think this is why their sin was all the more grievous--it was a betrayal not only of finances but of heart and soul and blood, a stab in the back to friends, comrades, and to the very God whose Son they had so willingly accepted as their Savior.

I am afraid that the professionalization of most of America's seminaries has led to the rise of aliens and strangers not only in the body of Christianity but within its very leadership. I would like to be able to say that most of us do not know who these aliens and strangers are, but the sad fact is that all too many of us are well aware. And out of concern for popularity or fear or simple lack of determination, we just don't want to confront them.

At this point, I'm sure some of you are reading this post and thinking, "This guy is proposing that we engage in a postmodern spiritual witch hunt."

No.

That is not how you "confront" a leader within your church circles whom you know is not a real partaker of the body and blood of Christ.

What I am instead urging is that you treat such people within your denomination or home church the same way that you would treat anyone else who is not a believer in Christ: Lead them there, through prayers, through the winsomeness of Christ inside of you, and through the truth of God's Word, articulated in the power of unconditional love.

It works very well for the hard-core cocaine or pornography addict, and it has just as much power with a man or woman pretending to be a Christian. I know because I was such a man, and I was constantly driven to my knees by people around me who exemplified Christ and worshipped Him. I know now that to be a part of the body of Christ is more than to recite a prayer, attend church regularly, or even read my Bible--it is, in essence, to be a member of something beyond "cause" or "body" or "self." Believers in Christ--real believers--know instinctually who their brethren are, both past and present. It is as Paul wrote so many centuries ago:

There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

Ephesians 4:4-6

It follows, then, that those who are in the body of Christ have a bond with one another that goes beyond body and soul, and that each and every one of them would know, at least on a subconscious level, who is and is not a real Christian. (This verse, by the way, is not the only verse I can cite from the New Testament as either articulating or demonstrating this principle--for further information, I would encourage you to read the book of Acts and the Gospels of John and Luke.)

To those of you out there who are reading this post and are wondering, for whatever reason, if you are a real Christian or not, there is a very clear distinction between a "born again" (see John 3) believer in Christ and a non-believer who simply echoes the words and phrases of the Bible (and of the institutional church) without attaching any meaning or substance to them. It is my contention that anyone who is indeed a member of "the Lord's nation" as I phrased it at the beginning of this post already knows, even if only at a subconscious, instinctual level, who the real believers are . . . but we live in a world which has, for the most part, divested itself of any serious discussion of spiritual topics in relationship to religion in general (or Christianity in particular), so I would like to present a brief sequence of points at which you can see this divide between the Christian and the pseudo-Christian playing itself out:

1. Real Christians are holy.

I always heard, and from reputable as well as disreputable sources, that the word translated as "holy" in the Bible means "set apart," and this interpretation, I think, is borne out by the simple fact that in the Bible, anything that is holy is to be treated with great reverence and respect, over and above what one would do for objects that are common or ordinary. If a Christian is holy, then we must assume that Christians are (1) treated as if they are holy, even at an unconscious level, by those around them and (2) that they act, speak, think, and make decisions in ways that are different than those of their non-believing friends, relatives, or coworkers.

This second part is very important, because it is not a conscious or affected approach to life. Real Christians act, speak, think, and make decisions differently without even noticing, at times, that they are doing so--it is simply part of who they are.

2. Real Christians evangelize.

I understand that when most of you hear the word "evangelize," you think of those people who stand on street corners or who go door to door and pass out pamphlets--but this is not the essence of evangelism as it is presented in the Bible. You see, those who are part of the Lord's nation focus first on evangelizing their families.

1 Timothy 3:4-5, in the context of church leadership, articulates this principle very well:

He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God's church?)

In other words, what Paul was implying was that all Christians, regardless of whether or not they were bishops, deacons, elders, or simple laity, had, as first priority, the winning of their families to Christ. This will not be news to those of you who actually received Christ as your Lord and Savior and gave freely of your hearts, bodies, and souls to Him--after all, who were the first people you came to with your testimony? They were, of course, your family and closest friends.

Again, this is not a deliberate activity--it is, instead, an unconscious one. The first thing that a new believer with a broken family does is try to pray for that family, just as the first thing a new believer with an unbelieving family does is witness to his/her brothers, sisters, parents, and children. More often than not, real believers in Christ succeed in convincing their families to commit themselves to Christ as well.

3. Real Christians are Christ-like.

This is the one that is most evident to anyone who is "of the world." You see, people who are not in Christ lie, cheat, steal, and bulldoze their way through life, not because they necessarily mean to be evil most of the time but because this world is all they have and all they really know. It is a shock to them that someone would tell the truth, deal fairly with others, and share of themselves, even when it is not to their advantage--but you see, this is what Christ did even as a matter of course throughout His life.

You may say, "Well, Christ could afford to be a little lowly," and that is true . . . but it is also true of the believer in Christ.

I'll share an example from my own personal life: I tend to be a fairly "meek" person most of the time, and I don't always (or even sometimes) exhibit the "killer instinct" that a lot of people express in the workplace or in school in order to get ahead of others. I know this makes me vulnerable in the eyes of some, and yes, I have been taken advantage of, both personally and professionally, by people who have used what they saw as my "naivete" against me, but . . . I don't really care about this world. Its charms, its possessions, and its entertainments are nothing to me because I know that my life is going to end someday, and whatever the Lord has planned for me then will be far more beautiful, captivating, and mesmerizing than anything this pathetic excuse for an existence has to offer.

If you can't say in your heart that you love Christ more than you love the paltry things of this life, then you may be interested to know that even in the Old Testament, there was provision for those who were aliens and who wanted to participate in the Passover celebration.

Exodus 12:48 says

An alien living among you who wants to celebrate the LORD's Passover must have all the males in his household circumcised. Then he may take part like one born in the land. No uncircumcised male may eat of it.

Or, to put it in terms more applicable to the world we live in 2000 years after Christ's resurrection

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.

If you have been reading this post and know in your heart that you are not a real Christian, then you also know deep inside that you are a sinner. Romans 10:9 provides 2 preconditions for your salvation:

1. You must confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord."

2. You must believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead.

Paul goes on to say in the next verse that "it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved."

So I leave you with these questions:

Do you believe God raised Jesus from the dead?

Are you willing to allow Jesus to be Lord of your life?

Blood: The Essence of Salvation

2007-08-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

Our text in this post will be Exodus 12:21-27, continuing the regulations for the celebration of the first Passover which are outlined in this chapter:

Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, "Go at once and select the animals for your families and slaughter the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it into the blood in the basin, and put some of the blood on the top and on both sides of the doorframe. Not one of you shall go out the door of his house until morning. When the LORD goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the doorframe and will pass over that doorway, and he will not permit the destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down.

"Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the LORD will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony. And when your children ask you, 'What does this ceremony mean to you?' then tell them, 'It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.' "

Blood.

It is a central, indeed critical, element of both Christianity and the ancient Israelite understanding of God, and I am afraid that in our culture, it has lost almost all of its meaning. Westerners--both "Christian" and Jew--revel in the fact that they do not have to kill innocent animals for the sake of pleasing their God, and yet look at how bloody human history has become in the wake of this "freedom." In the past 100 years alone, we have killed more of our brethren--soldier and civilian, male and female, born and unborn--than all of our ancestors put together, and the reckless abandon with which we approach murder has not shown any signs of abating.

What a sad commentary.

I'm not saying that we should reinstitute a system of animal sacrifice--the Bible is very clear that in the wake of Christ's atonement, such a reinstitution would be meaningless--but I am calling into question the extent to which we shy away from something that is very central to both the Christian and ancient Hebrew understandings of God.

Blood is real. It is a core part of any life--human or animal--and if you take away the blood of a human being or animal, you have destroyed life.

Leviticus 17:10-12 clearly articulates God's feelings on this matter:

Any Israelite or any alien living among them who eats any blood—I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from his people. For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar. It is the blood that makes atonement for one's life. Therefore I say to the Israelites, "None of you may eat blood, nor may an alien living among you eat blood."

Blood is so important to God that innocent blood shed by another human being brings judgment from heaven. Genesis 4:10-12 says that, in answer to Cain's attempt to conceal his brother's murder in the face of an all-seeing God,

The LORD said, "What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth."

And in Genesis 9:6, we hear the Lord saying that "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God has God made man."

Ladies and gentlemen, I wonder how meaningful all of this is in a world that represents the shedding of human blood in movies, television, and video games as a casual, even enjoyable, affair. Statistics tell us that, on average, a child in our entertainment saturated society will have witnessed thousands of murders by the time he or she reaches adulthood. In fact, it is even possible that a child in our videogame rich society will have, by simulation, engaged in thousands of murders by the time he or she reaches adulthood.

Do you think this bodes well for the future of the United States?

I know that, to some of you, those words may seem a bit extreme, but let me ask you this: If someone has been trained from childhood to look upon the shedding of virtual blood as a casual enterprise, do you think they will shrink from the prospect of shedding real blood if the occasion be desperate enough and the action suitable to their purposes? And even if they do not commit murder in the sense of sneaking up behind someone in the middle of the night and stabbing that person to death, do you think that they will shrink from doing other things that will be less gruesome in appearance, yet have the same effect?

I spent 4 years tutoring students in writing at Texas Christian University, and in that time, I saw a lot of people--most of whom were majors in business or some related field, but some of whom were majors in other disciplines--whose concern, or even attention, to the impact that their future decisions might have on others was sorely lacking. It seems that, to many of our nation's up and coming business professionals, slashing salaries and benefits, to say nothing of outsourcing and simple exploitation of Third World labor, have a legitimate role in what they would call "making a company more efficient." Building relationships with their co-workers, treating their employees as human beings, these are increasingly going by the wayside, lost to a decidedly hostile spirit of greed and self-service.

I'm sorry to say this, ladies and gentlemen, but shedding someone's blood through the stroke of a pen is still shedding someone's blood, even if you didn't use a hatchet or a knife.

The principle to be learned in the scripture from Exodus 12, indeed the principle that is articulated over and over again in both the Old and New Testaments is simply this:

Sin has consequences.

You may not agree with me on this point, and that's all right--after all, I would have laughed at someone saying the same thing a couple of years ago myself--but let's look at a few examples:

When I log onto the internet and surf around, looking for pornography, if I am married, I am betraying my spouse's trust in me, and if I am single, I am destroying any semblance of awe and wonder I would have taken into the marriage bed. Either way, I am not hurting only myself.

When I snort cocaine, looking for that next high, I am cutting myself off from my friends and saying that my finances are at the beck and call of the next pusher that comes my way. So what happens when I have a family or a loved one who is depending on me for some financial support--to say nothing of love, care, and energy? Yes, that's right--I have just hurt someone other than myself.

When I steal, even in order to shoplift, I may think I am "sticking it" to some faceless corporation, but in reality, I am preventing someone else from having whatever I stole. That's the principle of stealing, after all: I want no one else to have what I want, so I'm just going to take it. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that's hurting someone else.

When I lie, even to myself, I am hurting every man, woman, and child who puts their trust in me.

When I shirk my responsibilities, I make it that much harder for everyone else to fulfill theirs.

When I lust after a woman who does not belong to me, I am seeking to rob myself and her of a happy life with happy relationships so that I can enjoy a few moments of selfish pleasure.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, sin has consequences.

I didn't even talk about Hell, which is a subject we will cover later on, after we have finished tackling God's commandments in the Torah, but of course the Bible is clear that there is a final judgment, and all souls who have lived in sin throughout the number of their days will experience a torment far worse than any we can experience in this life.

But I wanted to indicate to you in this post very strongly that the consequences of sin affect others in this life. You may not want to accept that, you may want to switch to another blog after reading this, but the fact is that your sin hurts other people, indeed everyone around you, and that is why the God of the Bible is so adamantly against sin.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is why we have the ultimate sacrifice, the Cross of Christ Jesus. His blood, shed for the remission of sins, poured out in streams on that wooden crucifix, making pools in the ground for you and for your atonement. You don't have to suffer the weight of bloodguilt for all the wicked things you've ever done in your life--that's what the blood of the Cross is for.

In the New Testament, Christ Jesus is referred to over and over as "the Lamb," and this is something very meaningful when you consider the original Passover regulations, because a Passover lamb had to be eaten in one night, signifying a new life freed from bondage to slavery, and the blood of the Passover lamb was used to indicate that the owner of the house was a Hebrew and therefore not subject to judgment.

I took some time to research the hyssop plant, mentioned in Exodus 12:22,

Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it into the blood in the basin, and put some of the blood on the top and on both sides of the doorframe. Not one of you shall go out the door of his house until morning.

and what I found was very interesting. All of the websites I looked up, including several botanical sites, indicated that the plant has certain healing qualities as an herb.

I'm not a fan of Wikipedia--as a resource, it is fairly hit or miss--but the following paragraph from Wikipedia describes the healing qualities of the hyssop plant in a way that is somewhat easier for the layman to understand:

Hyssop also has medicinal properties which are listed as including expectorant, carminative, relaxes peripheral blood vessels, promotes sweating, anti-inflammatory, anti-catarrhal, antispasmodic. Its active constituents are volatile oil, flavonoids, tannins and bitter substance (marrubin). A strong tea made from the leaves and flowering tops is used in lung, nose and throat congestion and catarrhal complaints, and externally it can be applied to bruises, to reduce the swelling and discolouration. An old English country remedy for cuts and wounds suffered while working in the fields was to apply a poultice of bruised hyssop leaves and sugar in order to reduce the risk of tetanus infection. An essential oil made from hyssop increases alertness and is a gently relaxing nerve tonic suitable for treating nervous exhaustion, overwork, anxiety and depression. The Herb Society's "Complete Medicinal Herbal" cautions however that "the essential oil contains the ketone pino-camphone which in high doses can cause convulsions. Do not take more than the recommended dose."

Isn't it interesting, also, that hyssop became a part of Christ's crucifixion? In his account of Jesus' last moments on the Cross, John provides for us the following vivid portrait of a longsuffering, merciful Savior:

Later, knowing that all was now completed, and so that the Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, "I am thirsty." A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus' lips. When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. (John 19:28-30)

The very stick on which the sponge that the soldiers used to give Jesus something to drink rested was from the hyssop plant. It seems that on this Passover of Passovers, when the Lamb of lambs was sacrificed, hyssop was again dipped in blood, not only for the freedom of the Jews but for the freedom of every man, woman, and child on the Earth.

Yes, your sin hurts other people, but my friend, it doesn't have to go on that way. Through Christ Jesus, you can be freed. Through Christ Jesus, you can be brought into a new world. Through Christ Jesus, the incredible weight and bloodguilt of your sin can be atoned for.

I know these are ancient, meaningless words to a lot of you--I sat through sermons on the atoning sacrifice of Christ Jesus myself years ago and ignored every word I heard--but for some of you, they may be everything you needed. We hear so often on the conservative radio today that America is a Christian nation, but I think that if we examine our hearts and look at the Bible, we will find that we are far more lost than we ever could have imagined.

Don't rest on your church membership or your casual adoption of the name "Christian." The Lord whose name you invoke will not accept anything less than a soul willing to turn away from sin.

The blood of Christ is crying out for your soul.

Are you going to listen?

The Festival of Unleavened Bread: Testament to a Sick and Dying Church

2007-08-18T07:53:00.000-07:00

Our text in this post shall be Exodus 12:14-20, and I'd like you to follow along very slowly (yes, even as a reader) because there is something here, I believe, of major importance for the majority of American Christians today.

This is a day you are to commemorate. For the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD, a lasting ordinance. For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast. On the first day remove the yeast from your houses, for whoever eats anything with yeast in it from the first day through the seventh must be cut off from Israel. On the first day hold a sacred assembly, and another one on the seventh day. Do no work at all on these days, except to prepare food for everyone to eat—that is all you may do.

Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. In the first month you are to eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day. For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses. And whoever eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel, whether he is an alien or native-born. Eat nothing made with yeast. Wherever you live, you must eat unleavened bread.

Let me start, ladies and gentlemen, by calling our memories back to another verse from the same chapter, Exodus 12:11

This is how you are to eat it: with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste. It is the LORD's Passover.

On the night that the Israelites were freed from the bondage of Egyptian slavery, the Lord provided for them a way to leave the country with full stomachs--by eating the Passover lamb (which we will talk about more later) and by eating the Passover bread. The firstborn of all Egypt, from the firstborn of the domestic servant to the firstborn of Pharaoh, were all killed by the Lord in one night--but those Israelites who put hyssop (dipped in blood) on their doorposts were to stand out as a people whom the Lord chose for His good and holy purposes (see Exodus 12:1-10).

Now, let us go back to those words: "Eat it in haste."

What does that mean?

Well, the very next morning, all the neighbors of the Israelites, the Egyptians who had been holding them in bondage, were so anxious for them (and their God) to leave the country, and so despondent over the loss of so many dear children over Pharaoh's stubbornness, that they literally ushered them off their land, giving them whatever they wanted just so they would go. The Israelites, therefore, had to leave in haste--and the night before, as you can imagine, was one in which they knew the seriousness of what they were about to enter into as a people. From that night on, they would be uprooted, never again to know the predictable terrors and comforts of generational slavery.

Yes, you read that right. I said "terrors and comforts"--because the same generation that walked out of Egypt the next morning with their heads held high was the one that grumbled against Moses, and God, for taking them away from a life in which they had beds to lie in, houses to work in, and regular allotments of food.

What does that have to do with unleavened bread, you may ask?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, as all of us who grew up in country homes can tell you, the process of leavening bread--i.e. the process of putting in that wonderful yeast that makes dough rise and acquire that wonderful fluffy texture to which you and I are so accustomed--takes a lot of time. It takes several hours for "leaven" (or yeast) to do its work, and all of this must happen before the dough is baked (another hour). There is absolutely no way that a couple preparing to leave in haste would be able to allow themselves the luxury of waiting until a batch of dough had risen before baking it, particularly when one considers the other main element of the Passover meal: the lamb.

This scene was to be reenacted every year by each and every household in the community of Israel. Why? Because every year, it was to serve as a reminder that, while not always comfortable, their lives would be free. The Israelites were to have a living (or at least edible) testimony every year that the Lord knew what their needs would be before they even asked, and that He would always be there to provide for those needs.

What a wonderful picture this is of the Lord's goodness . . . and how little even those of us who call ourselves Christians grasp it today.

In Matthew 16:6, we read the following words of Jesus, which I'm afraid are often misunderstood in today's American Christian context:

Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Later on, Jesus explains to the disciples that he is speaking metaphorically, since they at first assumed he was chiding them for not bringing any bread with them. (Ladies and gentlemen, we love to laugh at the disciples and their "tomfoolery," but we in the 21st century United States are no better.) However, the meaning and symbolism of Jesus' words are lost to us unless we first take the time to examine Exodus 12.

You see, the Pharisees had a very simple problem, one that every facet of American Christianity suffers from today: They assumed that the worldly systems and structures that kept them in place as respected members of their society would always remain, even unto the end of the age.

They were comfortable, they were complacent, and they had no inkling that the Roman system which allowed them to serve as honored men would only last as long as those in charge of that system wanted it to. Approximately 30-40 years after Jesus' resurrection, not only the priesthood but the nation of Judea itself were destroyed by the Roman emperors, resulting in what we have today come to call the Diaspora, or dispersal of Judeans (or "Jews") across Europe.

Much of American Christianity is in the same boat, ladies and gentlemen, and it pains me to watch people in conservative Christian circles talk as if the systems and structures of the United States are eternal, both in significance and longevity. Christian radio talk show hosts urge their listeners to vote, to write their congressmen, to march in political rallies, as if the American political system can always be trusted to serve Christian ends. They talk of supporting our troops and refer to military enterprises currently under way in the Middle East as if they were "our wars" fought by "our boys."

Ladies and gentlemen, I am all for loving our troops--as I am all for loving Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Nasrallah, and Iranian President Ahmadinejad. The Bible says, after all, that we are supposed to love our neighbors, and I believe Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan served as ample answer--then and now--of who our "neighbors" are.

I also believe in praying for our nation's leaders. Paul wrote in Romans 13:1 that "there is no authority except that which God has established," and this principle is clearly articulated throughout the Bible. I think it is also important for us to remember that Paul wrote those words in a world in which his own people were subjugated by a pagan empire that invented methods of torture and execution (including the cross) which were designed to prolong the victim's life as long as possible, with as much pain and suffering as possible. Whether the governing political authorities in a particular nation are "just" or "unjust" in the eyes of the world has no bearing on whether or not a Christian should submit to them--the Bible is very clear that to rise up in bloody rebellion is not only to disobey men but to disobey God.

No, ladies and gentlemen, what I object to is the whimsical attitude with which war and economic exploitation and, worst of all, nationalism are associated in the minds of most Americans with serving the Lord. Is this not the same Lord who, when His disciples attempted to strike his captors, rebuked them with the words "all who draw the sword will die by the sword" (Matthew 26:52)? Is this not the same Lord who reached out his hand to a Roman soldier--a member of the same army that would later crucify Him--and heal that soldier's slave (Matthew 8:5-13)? Is this not the same Lord who lifted up not one finger in anger against those who called him a servant of the devil, a drunkard, a glutton, and a madman?

Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you that the life we are offered in Christ is more than a comfortable life in a suburb, surrounded by friends who vote the same way we do, wear the same clothes we wear, and (probably) attend the same church we do. Christ said "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Matthew 19:24 and Mark 10:25), and that is as true today as it was 2000 years ago.

Are you willing to enter the alleyways and search out the homeless, the wanderers, the prostitutes, and the drug addicts in order to show them that there is a Savior and that, yes, they are worthy of love?

Are you willing to walk into a poor neighborhood in your city and share the same kind of warmth, smiles, and love that you share with your middle class neighbors in the cul-de-sac?

Are you willing to go to a country in which Islam is the main religion and risk life, fortune, and blood to win souls for the Lord, Christ Jesus?

Ladies and gentlemen, the American church today is full of leaven. We are too comfortable, too fat, too lazy to see a world of pain outside our doorstep, and the hurting souls that cry out day and night, "Where is the one who will tell me of a reason to go on living?" We don't want to leave our homes in haste, as the Israelites did for their Lord--in fact, we don't want to leave our homes at all.

A nation in which 80% of the people claim to be Christians while families and marriages are breaking apart in droves and children--born and unborn--are dying because of a pronounced lack of love in their culture is a nation which is an embarassment to Christ, not a testimony. We had better get on our knees, my friends, and beg the God of Heaven, and the Father of our Lord, Christ Jesus, to make us new creations and to spare our land from the measure of wrath which is assuredly being stored up against it. This land is bleeding--and the blood is crying out to God for vengeance, and the Lord is looking to us for answers (see Genesis 4:7-8)

We cannot afford to be complacent anymore. The system that has become so comfortable for us to live in is going to self-destruct in approximately 10-20 years, and the next generation, I'm afraid, is ill-equipped to take leadership in this country, either political or spiritual. We are simply out of room, ladies and gentlemen, and whether we like it or not, the Lord is going to call everyone who professes the name of Christ to take some steps into an economic and spiritual wilderness, just as the Lord called the Israelites to walk into a physical wilderness so many millennia ago.

It's time to separate the men from the boys (or the women from the girls, if you prefer). Are you willing to let go of the political and economic systems and structures of this world for the Lord, or is your allegiance to Christ only skin deep? You may think I'm harsh for asking this question in such blunt terms, and maybe I am, but my friend, it is better for you to find out where your loyalties really are here and now than for you to find out the hard way in a time when Christ and His people may not be so popular anymore.

Where is your loyalty?

Who (or what) does your heart really belong to?

Judas: Omen for the Last Days

2007-08-16T10:44:00.000-07:00

Normally I would continue in my study of the Torah, since that is what I said I was going to do for the next several months, but this past week, the Lord has given me a word that I want to share because it affects the way we look at the society we live in today.

In many of today's churches, when we hear sermons from the Bible at all, we hear sermons on "good" figures, such as Peter, or David, or St. Paul--and we hear, in my experience, something like this: "Peter was a godly man, but he was not perfect. He was saved. In like manner, you and I are godly men (and women), but we are not perfect. We are instead saved."

This is small comfort to me, ladies and gentlemen. In a nation where 80% of respondents to recent surveys said they believed in an afterlife--and even believe in God--but 60% of Christian (that's right, Christian) marriages end in divorce, I find sermons like the one above, so commonly heard in our congregations today, to be not only foolish but even, in a culture that prizes Playstations, Nikes, and Magnavox DVD players over spirituality, enabling.

No, I think it is far more instructive--and timely--for our pew warmers to listen to an example from the Bible that isn't so pretty, and from a life that isn't very often preached about these days. The example I'm referring to, ladies and gentlemen, is the example of Judas Iscariot. Yes, that's right--the "evil" disciple, the one who betrayed Jesus, that is the Judas I will be talking about at great length in this post. What is so compelling about this man, you may ask, that I would devote an entire (lengthy) post to his life?

Let me answer that question by outlining first what we know about this man from the New Testament accounts:

1. We know that Judas was one of the twelve disciples, one of Jesus' inner circle (Matthew 10:4, Mark 3:19, Luke 6:16, and John 6:71).

2. We know that his father's name was Simon, and that "Iscariot" was a family name (John 6:71).

3. We know that Judas was greedy, to the extent that he would help himself to the disciples' common treasury when it suited him (John 12:6).

4. We know that Jesus sharply rebuked Judas for his attachment to money and things (John 12:1-8, corroborated in Matthew 26:8-13), and that immediately after that, Judas went to the chief priests of Judea with the intent to betray Jesus to them (Matthew 26:14).

5. We know that Judas asked the chief priests what they would pay him to betray Jesus, and they offered him thirty silver coins (Matthew 26:15), which he accepted (Matthew 26:15).

6. We know that even though the Holy Spirit had informed Jesus of the identity of his betrayer, and even though Jesus demonstrated this beyond doubt at the disciples' feast of Unleavened Bread (otherwise known as the Passover), Judas still attempted to claim innocence (Matthew 26:25).

7. We also know that even as Judas' act of betrayal reached its fruition, he still attempted to put on a show of innocence by kissing Jesus and calling him "rabbi" (Matthew 26:49, Mark 14:45, and Luke 22:47), and that Jesus, incredulous, said, "Are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?" (Luke 22:48).

8. We know that Judas was so stricken by what he was willing to do for thirty pieces of silver, even though he had been under the direct tutelage of the Lord for 3 years, that he committed suicide (Matthew 27:3-5).

9. Finally--and this is important, ladies and gentlemen--we know that at the moment that Judas got up from the feast of Unleavened Bread to betray Jesus, the motivating factor in his actions was that "Satan entered him" (Luke 22:3, corroborated in John 13:2).

We live in a land where people betray each other for money every day--some for millions of dollars, and others for twenty, but the principal is the same--and there are spiritual forces at work in this nation that would seek to reduce every man, woman, and child to a mere "consumer," an animal that pampers its own fleshly desires at the expense of not only its brethren but at the cost of everything good and noble.

We live in a land where the prevailing wisdom is "the Bible is boring, but my TiVo is more than I will ever need."

We live in a land where men who claim the passion of service as ministers of Christ to a lonely, hurting people are caught surfing the internet looking for porn, or embezzling money, or investing in questionable business ventures with equally questionable partners.

We live in a land where the words "abortion" and "divorce" and "adultery" are greeted, not with horror, but as a normal facet of everyday life, and we live in a land where "the home" is a place people run away from more often than they cherish it.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this land is a very sad land, and it is the one we live in--but I am not speaking today of America, or at least not the secular America of politics, public schools, and corporate-military power. No, I am speaking of the American church.

That's right. You and me--or at least those of us who profess to be Christians--we are the Judases.

You see, Judas was a disciple, just like Peter and John and James. He volunteered to live under the direct teaching of Christ Jesus himself, and continued to live under the Lord's guidance for 3 years. He was every bit as much a "Christian" (in the sense of being associated with Christ) as the other eleven were--but there was a difference:

Judas' number one priority was not Christ.

I want you to let that sink in for a moment.

There are a lot of you out there (I know because I was one of you not so long ago) who go to church regularly, listen to Christian radio, and play Christian music in your homes. You have family Bibles, you buy all the "right" devotionals, and you keep your television glued to "spiritual" programming (either the local TBN station or programs such as "Touched by an Angel" on other networks). You're against abortion, you vote Republican, and you accompany the thunderous statements of men such as James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson with enthusiastic applause and "amen"'s . . .

Inside, though, you don't have Christ in your heart as your number one priority. The Jesus who said "heal the sick" and "feed my lambs" is not on your radar, and when you hear the Holy Spirit saying to you, "You will always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me," just as Jesus said to Judas 2000 years ago in defense of the woman who poured a jar of perfume over his head worth a year's wages (John 12:8), you find yourself chafing at Jesus' apparent lack of concern for material things every bit as much as Judas did.

My heart grieves for you, my friend.

You see, we don't live in this world as residents and citizens but as strangers and aliens. The fundamental truth of the Christian walk in this world is that in Christ, our hope lies elsewhere--a future more bright, more hopeful, and more real than anything this ridiculous excuse for a world has to offer. Jesus himself even said that this world, as we know it, is passing away (Matthew 24:35, Mark 13:31, and Luke 21:33).

This world, and may I say it, this nation we call the United States, has no future. It will go the way of the dodo and probably before you and I expect it to . . . so, my friend, just what are you holding on to?

Do you think your retirement pension is going to help you? Ladies and gentlemen, you and I already know that most major corporations in the United States have found a way around allowing longtime employees to collect their pensions. It's called outsourcing, and companies all over the United States are using this concept to lay off men and women who have worked for them for 20 or 30 years in favor of "cheaper" labor overseas.

Do you think the welfare system is going to help you? It is well-known that the current entitlement spending system, coupled with the current crisis caused by millions of baby boomers all retiring at once, is going to go belly up in 10-15 years. And personally, I'm not going to put my trust in the warm feelings and goodwill of a bunch of overpaid politicians and staff members in Washington D.C. to make sure that I get a social security check 40 years from now.

Do you think that the next generation is going to help you? Ladies and gentlemen, over the past 10-15 years, I have gotten a good look at what is coming out of our public schools, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist, in my opinion, to figure out that given the popularity of a teen and college culture that prizes hard drinking, partying, and illicit sex over responsibility and concern for others, we are going to have a real leadership vacuum in this country in 15-20 years. A nation in which a presidential candidate is rudely caricatured in a striptease video made by college chums for the sole purpose of airing fraternity-style jocularity on the internet is a nation that should fear for the integrity of its future leaders, to say nothing of its own future.

Maybe I'm coming on a little strong in this post, maybe you're sitting at your computer thinking "this guy is over the top, and a fanatic," but the point I'm making is very simple: You can't count on the material prosperity of this world.

Our nation is not invincible. Other nations have risen and fallen before us. Even Rome, that great empire whose remnants continued to exist for almost 1500 years after Christ's resurrection, is no longer with us.

Are you going to trust in the wealth of a world in which nothing is held to be lasting or permanent, or are you going to trust in the Lord, Christ Jesus?

We are all Judases, my friend, but we don't have to end up the same way Judas did. Jesus loved Judas just as much as he loved Peter and John and James, and he was trying to reach him, even at the Last Supper.

Are you going to listen?

Some Notes on Recent Personal Reading

2007-08-08T17:40:00.001-07:00

Today, I read a chapter from Andrew Murray's book Full Life in Christ which focused on the importance of conforming to Christ's example in suffering wrong, and I wondered: Do people in America who take the name of Christ suffer wrong?

It seems that if they do, the wrong is of a far different sort than the kind that our Lord suffered 2000 years ago--no whippings, no remorseless jamming of razor sharp thorns into a man's skull, no hours of agonizing pain on a cross designed to extend the victim's life as long as possible, no spitting, no frenzied attempts by one's own townspeople to tear their victim to pieces with their bare hands, and absolutely, positively no homelessness.

I suppose that what goes for "persecution" today in the eyes of contemporary American evangelicals is name-calling, stereotyping, and the annual attempt by non-Christian groups to prevent the traditional display of the Nativity in the local town square during the Christmas holiday season. I wonder if the Jay Sekulows, the James Dobsons, and the Ralph Reeds of the world would be surprised to learn that even 400 years ago, Christians faced torture, mutilation, and fiery death--without complaint--as martyrs for Christ. I wonder if the same people within our nation's politico-religious establishment who regularly decry the evils of "Islamofascism" remember that the Christian-Muslim wars of today are simply skirmishes in a long (and equally sad) history of violence between brothers. I wonder if God is shedding tears over the malicious use of his Son's name (and sacrifice) for selfish human purposes, or if he has instead resolved to teach his so-called children a lesson . . .

Personally, I think that a nation with a 60% divorce rate in its churches, that kills 2 million babies (and then some) a year and that swallows the rest of us (born and unborn) in a tidal wave of materialism, substance abuse, and greed dares not invoke the name of the same God who destroyed the ancient Canaanites--as well as the nation of Israel--for engaging in similar practices. I think that a church which mobilizes against groups such as NOW and Planned Parenthood without addressing the very real vacuum it has created in an entire generation's sexual development dares not assume that Christ looks upon its disdain for young pregnant mothers with any less contempt than he would have looked upon those who scorned his mother Mary. And I think that a person who invokes the name of Christ in the cause of his own growing material prosperity without bothering to help those who are poor, blind, pitiful, and naked should read the Bible with a healthy dose of fear.

There are some within American Christendom today who would paint a nightmare scenario for us of Muslims slowly but surely infesting and taking over every formerly Christian institution, nation, and culture in the world--turning churches into mosques, forcing American women to wear burqas, and outlawing the use and/or dissemination of the Bible. Having known a few Muslims, I highly doubt that such a complex conspiracy is in the offing, but if it were, I will only say that I place more trust in the care of my beloved Savior than I do in my own life, and if my Lord were to require my life of me in His service, I would gladly give it, as so many generations of Christians have been called to give of themselves for the glory of the Cross, even unto death.

Those who so vigorously defend the institutions of American Christendom fail to consider that perhaps the Lord wishes sometimes to deal his self-proclaimed servants a few defeats in order to test how wide and how deep their loyalty really is. Christianity, from its origins to the present day, has not only thrived but rejoiced in its persecutions, and it seems that the purity of Christ's adherents shines the brightest when their lives are at stake. Is it so repugnant to the American psyche to lose one's life for Christ's sake (and the sake of the Gospel) that we cannot bring ourselves even to help the homeless, the widows, and the orphans in our own neighborhoods? Are Americans so ashamed of the Gospel their forbears held as sacred that their laptops, Gameboys, and satellite televisions mean more to them than the traditional family Bible once meant to generations that passed before us?

Herein is the mission of my blog: not to make you feel ashamed (after all, I am no less a failure in these matters than you are) but to call everyone--man, woman, and child--who invokes the name of Jesus the Christ to the standard this name implies.

Exodus 12

2007-08-07T20:12:00.000-07:00

As promised (approximately a month ago--sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but taking care of my pregnant wife is far more important to me, and the Lord, than providing daily reading material for the blogging public), I am going to focus on those portions of scripture (namely Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) that many Protestant Christians, to be frank, find utterly boring and/or unworthy of their consideration. I think, however, that you will find those portions of scripture to be far more simple and applicable to your daily life--and more importantly, your spiritual life--than you had at first believed.

Rather than beginning with Exodus 1, as most Bible explicators would do, I have instead chosen to begin with Exodus 12 because it is my intention to focus our energy on the actual directives handed down to Moses, rather than the "cool," "neat," or "interesting" stories that most Sunday School teachers, to their shame, manage to pick out for their pupils. The Torah has never been designed to be merely a story book--it is instead the heart of the Old Testament, the very foundation without which none of the other books of the Bible (including Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) can stand.

Let me begin by clearing up one very common misconception: The "Law" that followers of Jesus such as Paul and Peter spoke against was not, repeat NOT, the Torah. They were, after all, Jews themselves, and holy men, not rabble-rousing revolutionaries bent on destroying faith and nation for self-perceived priorities. It would have been unthinkable for Paul, a former priest schooled under Gamaliel, to turn his back on the very scriptures he so often mentioned in his letters as proof of Jesus' divinity, and it would have been even more unthinkable for Peter, whose zeal for righteousness was such that he was unable to enter the courtyard of Cornelius, a Gentile, without great internal struggle and the direct intervention of God Himself, to turn his back on the teachings that shaped his nation and his identity.

Instead, what Paul and Peter were opposing was the institution of systems and structures that effectively created a new corpus of "laws" equivalent (in the minds of their adherents) to the Torah. The Judaean priesthood essentially created a "new" Bible of rituals, rules, and regulations, which blotted out the simplicity and love inherent in the original text of the Torah. This is ultimately what blinded their eyes to the truth of Jesus' divinity, and why Jesus said that though they "searched the scriptures" because in them they hoped to find eternal life, they failed to see the fulfillment of those same scriptures when he was walking in their midst.

Today, we live in a society in which the church says, effectively, that the Torah, the Nev'im, and the Ketuvim (otherwise known as the Torah, the Prophets, and the Other Writings that comprise the Old Testament) have no meaning in the believer's life. Since we are Gentiles, not Jews, we are told that those commandments back there in the Old Testament are not for us, and even if they were, we have been absolved from following them because of Christ's sacrifice. But you can't comprehend Christ's sacrifice without knowledge of the Torah and the commandments contained within it--what one is left with, without this knowledge, is simply a whitewashed version of paganism, in which Christ (like the gods of most religions, both new and old) is a sugar daddy who lets his children get awaqy with anything, including murder.

The main corpus of commandments in the book of Exodus begins in chapter 12, and those of you who are Jewish should at least have some passing familiarity with the words below:

This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb [a] for his family, one for each household. If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats. Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the people of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the doorframes of the houses where they eat the lambs. That same night they are to eat the meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs, and bread made without yeast. Do not eat the meat raw or cooked in water, but roast it over the fire—head, legs and inner parts. Do not leave any of it till morning--if some is left till morning, you must burn it. This is how you are to eat it: with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste. It is the LORD's Passover.

Yes, this is a bloody ceremony.

Then again, in our country (the United States), hundreds of thousands of cattle, pigs, sheep, and (yes) lambs are slaughtered, brutally, each year for a far less noble purpose. The Israelites were a nation of slaves, bound within the walls of Egypt, and even though the Lord had struck down the produce and vitality of that nation in order to convince its rulers to let them go free, Egypt's Pharoah still refused to listen. The Lord then had one more task, one that would ensure that the people of Egypt would not only let their slaves go free but send them off with their gold and silver, their jewels and their household possessions.

This act is summarized below:

On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn—both men and animals—and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the LORD. The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.

In order for the Israelites to be freed from slavery, an entire generation had to die--human blood, to atone for the human blood that was being kept in bondage. In the same way, Jesus (who was crucified during a celebration of Passover) bled white so that we who are so bound to the shackles of greed, hatred, and foolish arrogance may be free ourselves.

A Christian is more than merely a "Jesus worshipper"--a Christian is someone whose acceptance of Jesus' blood sacrifice is joyous, heartfelt, and transformational, not just in him-/herself but in others. Being Jewish is not a barrier to receiving Christ as your Lord and Savior--after all, the Jews were always intended to be God's priesthood to all the nations of the Earth--and being Christian, much as the American public seems to assume otherwise, is not equivalent with being a Gentile. It is one of the greatest tragedies in human history that the very people Jesus longed to see ushering souls by the thousands into the kingdom of God rejected the author and finisher of their faith. Those of us who are Gentiles should take a little more care, as Paul notes in Romans 11, to attach proper respect and reverence to a God whose chosen people our forefathers harassed, persecuted, and attempted to exterminate.

Time for Redirection

2007-07-16T17:20:00.000-07:00

In my blog, I will focus on the Bible . . . meaning that I will take it as my text. This blog will not be a commentary per se

I need to read my former posts a little more often . . .

As you can see after even a cursory reading of my blog, it has ultimately turned into what I said it wouldn't be--a commentary. To some extent, I think this may have been a good thing (for starters, the entries on Genesis 1-4 serve to prove the point I made a couple of months ago that the story of the Bible is the story of God's failed effort to create a world of harmony), but I also think this focus, if continued, would be counterproductive to the purposes of "Sabbath Breakers."

As I said in my very first post, the Bible will be this blog's primary text . . . but I don't think that tackling the entire Bible in order from page 1 through page-the-last is the most helpful (or even the most interesting) way to approach that text.

I wish that more people had a profound, deep sense of love and respect for the Bible, as I wish that more people had a profound, deep sense of love and respect for God, not because I want everyone to agree with me about the nature or existence of God but because the more I see of 21st century Protestantism, the more I observe a church that refuses to take the God it claims to worship seriously. Christianity (or at least its Protestant incarnation) rabidly attacks the notion that one must approach one's Creator with an appropriate sense of fear as "legalism," but in doing so, it fails to comprehend that the very act of facing one's Creator is, in and of itself, an awe-inspiring, deeply penetrating, and (yes) mystical experience that should never, ever be cheapened. Christ's crucifixion was an act of blood, sweat, and terrible cosmic agony . . . something that reading those beautiful words in John 13-21 would bring to life inside of us, if only we would allow those words to speak for themselves.

The problem with Protestantism (indeed the problem with Christianity ever since its inception) is that so many of its adherents foolishly assume that a little knowledge, being better than none at all, is enough to tide over any hungry soul. The soul, however, has a far greater thirst for inspiration, hope, and (dare I say it) God than the materialistic 21st century mind can permit itself to conceive--and the soul's hunger, in my experience, cannot be met by anything less than the God who created it. That God, it is obvious from reading even one of the thousands of verses contained in the Bible's pages, begs for an audience inside our souls. It is we, not God, who are responsible for the distance and barriers between us.

I wish that Protestants would take even one moment to see for themselves the beauty, the majesty, and the awesome mercy and graciousness of the God they preach. Perhaps it is true that the ecclesiastical system their ancestors rebelled against was callous and manipulative, but much has changed in the past 500 years. Only in painful memory do inquisitions and the dreaded act of burning someone at the stake for heresy exist, and even a recent Pope was willing to stand up and publicly declare that the descendants of those who originally called themselves Protestants are his brothers in Christ. While Catholicism (and even Orthodox Christianity) at times present a God who is too mysterious for mortal hearts, Protestantism often presents a God who is (contrary to the Bible) as comprehensible and ordinary as we are.

If we allow ourselves to adopt the prevailing winds of popular doctrine, we will lose sight of the beauty and majesty of the God whose breath infuses every word of that Bible.

In my next several posts, I'm going to address a body of scripture that is all too often dismissed in popular Christian theology: the Law. In particular, I will cover all of those rules and regulations in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy that were supposedly so cumbersome for the ancient culture that adopted them. As we will see, however, the crux of those "cumbersome commandments" is love, the same love that drove Christ to allow himself to be whipped, beaten, and crucified on our behalf, and I hope that acquainting yourself with the proverbial "heart" of the Bible will enable you to glimpse, for a moment, the character and majesty of your God.

Genesis 4--The End Result of Dystopia

2007-06-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

Lamech said to his wives,
"Adah and Zillah,
Listen to my voice,
You wives of Lamech,
Give heed to my speech,
For I have killed a man for wounding me;
And a boy for striking me;
If Cain is avenged sevenfold,
Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold."

Yippee.

I crushed a soda can on my forehead once--does that make me a man, or the crushing of said soda can holy?

Let me give you a postmodern version of this assinine fallacy: "The United States has vanquished the nation of Panama for threatening a dozen of its citizens. If our ancestors were avenged for the deaths of hundreds in great wars, we will be even more greatly avenged for the deaths of one or two Americans in small wars."

I hate to break this to those of you out there who are unconditionally "rah-rahing" the military and political actions of this country on the basis of its so-called Judeo-Christian heritage, but I seriously doubt that the Founding Fathers (many of whom were Freemasons and/or Deists) were in tune with the cross of Christ when they wrote the Constitution. After all, this same Constitution classified African Americans in terms of fractions (3/5 of a person) and (initially) limited the hallowed franchise of voting to anyone with a substantially large portion of landed property. The Bill of Rights (which so many of us remember and cherish) did not originally appear in the Constitution but was a compromise to ensure that the 13 colonies would actually support it (hence the reason that the Bill of Rights is a set of 10 amendments (not articles) at the end of the Constitution).

I won't grouse about the inability of women to vote (personally, I think the American woman's voting record during the past 70 years leaves much to be desired) or about the ill-treatment of the first peoples who lived in the continental United States (who were not, contrary to PC education, pacifistic nomads who elected to walk meekly into oblivion), but I think that any honest treatment of American history should account for the fact that, in New Testament terms, this nation did not begin with the kind of "Christian" roots that conservative religious public figures depict in their lofty, wistful encomiums of "the good old days." Christ was right when he said to Peter that those who live by the sword die by the sword, but unfortunately, those few short words seem to have disappeared from many of our nation's churches, Christian schools, and ministries. Instead, it is "America, God's nation," and damn to hell anyone else who gets in our way.

Let me ask you something: Do you honestly think that the example Jesus set for us in the Gospels bears an iota of resemblance to this nonsensical hoopla? I'm not judging those of you who care about our country's well-being (as do I), but I am (emphatically) pointing out that the cross of Christ Jesus destroys for anyone who takes on the name of Christ Jesus the luxury of living up to any standard that is lower than the one set by Christ Jesus himself. Did you see Christ hitting people in the Gospels? Avenging himself on anyone? Even defending himself when he was accused? (I'm sure someone will be willing to take some verses out of context to prove me wrong, but be warned: if you do, realize that my knowledge of the Bible is as good as yours.)

There may not be a line of Cain (see Genesis 6-8 for an explanation of that), but there is a legacy of Cain. We are no less violent and wicked today than Cain's descendants were, and as the following chapters will show, we are no less potential objects of God's wrath today than our spiritual "ancestors" 6000 years ago.

Let us never forget that--and let us ever be mindful that Christ's mercy (which is God's mercy) should never be mistaken as a sign of weakness.

A Few Notes on the Desacralization of Christ in the American Church

2007-06-20T06:40:00.000-07:00

de·sa·cral·ize(d-skr-lz, -skr-)
tr.v. de·sa·cral·ized, de·sa·cral·iz·ing, de·sa·cral·iz·es
To divest of sacred or religious significance.

For the past few days, my wife and I have been listening to episodes of Adventures in Odyssey, a radio show for children centered on a small town (called Odyssey) and an ice cream shop owner who also serves as the town's resident Christian evangelist. I first heard this show on the radio a couple of years ago and liked it, so I was excited to discover that my wife and her family have been collecting episodes for years (they have over 20 albums of audiocassettes). Not only has the character development in these episodes been strong (one of my measuring sticks for quality in an entertainment product), but my wife and I have been very pleased with the way that Bible topics are handled by the producers of the show.

Which is why we found ourselves wondering what in the world those same producers were thinking as we listened to a 2 part recreation of the birth of Christ that denuded the story of any of the major miraculous events associated with the coming of our Savior into the world and reduced it to . . . a birth as ordinary, terrifying, and uncomfortable for the mother as any childbirth could be. All of the points of interest in the Nativity--the Annunciation (the angel bringing the news to Mary that she would conceive a child), Joseph's decision to keep Mary as his wife after hearing from an angel that her conception was truly immaculate (i.e. that it took place without sexual intercourse), the appearance of the chorus of angels to the shepherds tending their flocks outside Bethlehem--were either recounted secondhand or simply omitted from the story. Even the star, that great wonder that guided the three Magi to the Christ child, was lost in the parade of inane innkeepers, predatory Roman soldiers, and mad Zealots. Ultimately, the birth of Jesus was treated simply as yet another Third World birth--in a cave, accompanied by terrified screams from the mother.

This is not a critique of Adventures in Odyssey--as I said, my wife and I love the show--but it is an example of something I find very disturbing in the way that postmodern Christianity presents Christ. With no awe, no wonder, and perhaps not even a sincere acceptance of Jesus' claims about himself, churches present Christ as a "buddy," an "ordinary guy" who, in his common-ness, is supposedly "relevant" to a culture of "ordinary guys" (and, presumably, "ordinary girls") who stumble, pee, and worry about their relationships. The lessons that we learn in many Protestant Sunday School classes, if my wide experience with Protestant churches serves, is not about the awesome qualities of God-made-flesh-dwelling-among-us but about the relevance of a particular parable or quotation from Jesus (usually taken out of context) to a "real world" situation in our own lives in which we, in essence, should be nicer than we are to others.

I'm a fan of being nice to people (in fact, my wife says--and she's right--that I'm too nice to people), but that, ultimately, is neither the message nor the heart of the New Testament. The Christ of the Gospels was more than a schoolmarm who wanted everyone in his neighborhood to be nice to each other. (Otherwise, why would generations of his followers have died--willingly--on crosses, in coliseums, and in torture chambers of every size and description?)

The crux of the New Testament, and indeed of the entire Bible, is this: Is Jesus the rightful owner of your body, mind, and soul?

A nice guy, a good teacher, even a morally inspiring public figure, may be worth my attention and may even inspire my respect, but unless he or she was responsible for creating me, I cannot consider that person to be the rightful owner of my very being. There has to be more, something that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this person is indeed the rightful owner of my body, mind, and soul--not merely the artful presentation of ideas, not merely even signs and wonders, but a quality, a something that echoes throughout every cell inside me and says, with a voice of thunder, "This is he who knit me together in my mother's womb!"

When I began to read the Gospels, to really read the Gospels, I knew in my heart that when I was listening to the words of Christ, I was listening to the words of my Creator. It is not something I can explain--it just was. This man who walked on the Earth 2000 years ago and taught and healed and blessed as many poor, indigent, and lost souls as he could get his hands on owned me.

I wish that so many more people, indeed so many more churches, would rediscover this amazing quality of wonder and joy that I have in my life now whenever I hear even the name "Jesus." To some of you, that may seem childlike or even naive, and if so, perhaps you would do well to read the following:

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, "Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?"

He called a little child and had him stand among them, and he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven."

Matthew 18:1-4

It is this childlike sense of awe and wonder, this innocent submissiveness, that postmodern American churches, by and large, have failed to foster. When, after all, was the last time that you heard an inspiring message on the raising of Lazarus from the dead? Or the healing of a woman who had suffered hemorrhages for 12 years? Or the raising of the synagogue leader's little girl from the dead? I am dismayed at the possibility that, until the production of The Passion of the Christ (a movie produced, incidentally, by a Roman Catholic), many lifelong Protestants in the United States could not bring themselves to grasp the horror and wonder of the Cross. (Indeed, I fear that a large portion of American Christians walked into theaters and reacted with evaluative judgments regarding the "accuracy" of the film . . . much as the Judean crowds, soldiers, and Pharisees reacted to the real thing with evaluative judgments of Christ Himself.)

Again, this is not a commentary--favorable or otherwise--on a Christian entertainment product (personally, I found The Jesus Film to be far more compelling, spiritually and cinematically), but it is a commentary on the rather un-childlike way with which we approach Christ, his Bible, and his Church. A 4 year-old receives the wonder of the birth of Christ into the world--the chorus of angels, the fulfillment of prophecy, the star and the wise men--with all the wide-eyed gladness it is due . . . but the 40, 50, and 60 year-olds who are busily telling the story seem to have lost that wide-eyed gladness in themselves.

Is it because we are caught up in the cynicism of a workaday world in which people "compete" with each other for goods and services? Are we stupid enough to believe that our salaries, our mortgages, and our material wants are worth revolving our lives around? Do we honestly think that the wonder-filled joy of a child is somehow "beneath" us?

How sad.

The Line of Cain (continued)

2007-06-11T15:19:00.000-07:00

Lamech married two women, one named Adah and the other Zillah. Adah gave birth to Jabal--he was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. His brother's name was Jubal--he was the father of all who play the harp and flute. Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. Tubal-Cain's sister was Naamah.

I delayed writing this post because of something I will discuss at length below, but first, I think it is important for us to remember that according to the Genesis account, the line of Cain ended with the Flood.

This is of vital significance to our understanding the above passage, as it renders null and void a literal reading of "father" (i.e. the ancestor of a line of people). Jabal was not, in any sense, considered in the ancient Israeli mind to be the ancestor of a race of people with the "innate" knowledge of living in tents and raising livestock. Jubal, likewise, was not, in any sense, considered to be the ancestor of a race of people with an exclusive talent for playing the harp and flute.

A healthier reading of this passage from Genesis 4 should take into account the possibility that Jabal and Jubal were the first to do the things that they did, as Tubal-Cain was (perhaps) the first to forge tools out of bronze and iron (though the passage does not explicitly state this), but they passed on the skills they learned to others, perhaps even others outside their clan. It should be inferred here, as I have hinted in previous posts, that the descendants of Cain represent a departure from the kind of nomadic, agrarian lifestyle that Cain's father and brother Abel had pursued. Left without recourse to the fruit of the ground, Cain and his descendants would have had to invent ways to eke out a living for themselves--primarily by selling skills they had honed from non-agrarian pursuits.

We today have a term for this exchange of special services for food or other goods: capitalism. Yes, I know some of you balk at the idea that capitalism has anything to do with the line of Cain, but I would like to point out 2 things: (1) that capitalism has never, even from its outset, depended on the production of fruits and vegetables for its commerce and (2) that one of the hallmarks of capitalism is the creation of so-called "industrial centers" . . . otherwise known as cities. Capitalism prides itself on inventiveness--"new" goods, "new" services, "new" and "improved" technologies--to the extent that farming itself is becoming more and more unusual in our culture (or, at least, farming as it was done for centuries upon centuries before the mid-1800s). The family-owned pasture or homestead has given way to the corporately owned franchise, which sells processed foods of dubious nutritional value to a public that, in general, knows little about the raising and harvest of agricultural goods.

It is this sort of impersonal relationship, the cold exchange of dubious services for personal gain, that is represented in the above passage from Genesis 4. Cain was a murderer--and he passed on the callousness toward human life he had nurtured within his own soul to an entire line of descendants. Thus, even though the direct line of Cain's descendants ended with the destruction of the human race by floodwater, he still has "children" even to this day.

Lamech married two women, one named Adah and the other Zillah.

Here we come to the crux of what I have been wrestling with in regard to this text.

My wife and I have talked off and on about the merits of monogamy and polygamy ever since we first met, and each of us has done our share of reading on the topic (much of it either inconclusive or, to our minds, untrustworthy). It is no secret that polygamy constitutes a large number of the marriages within the Hebrew Bible--Abraham, Jacob, Esau, Judah, Joseph, Moses, King David, and so on--and while Christians often quote the following passage from Genesis 2 to support monogamy (as well as several other scriptures), there are plenty of other verses from the Old Testament that describe God as "blessing" someone with many wives:

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

This passage is mentioned by Jesus in the New Testament (see the Gospel of Matthew), which prompts many Christian Bible students--amateur or professional--to say that monogamy is God's ideal (or perfect) will for the human race. In fact, St. Paul seems to confirm this view when he says in his first letter to Timothy that elders and deacons should be husbands of only one wife.

However . . .

One thing my wife and I have learned over the years is that whenever we read a biblical exegesis (or reading/study of a particular Bible passage or topic), we need to consider the attitude of the author as well as what the author says. Paul was writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit when he wrote those words to Timothy, and Jesus was speaking the word of truth when he quoted Genesis 2:24 to the Pharisees who were trying to trick him into saying something repulsive about marriage and divorce . . . but what about the Christian writers 20 centuries later who quote those verses in their publications and on the internet?

I agree with the position that monogamy is God's ideal for marriage--after all, the Bible does explicitly say that God created one man and one woman--but I am troubled at the extent to which this position is argued in Christian circles out of fear. Christianity is, in general, losing its once total hold over the culture of the United States, and I think that, for many people, the prospect of a nation (and indeed a world) in which Christianity is no longer a dominant religion represents a serious challenge to their faith. But Christianity's growth through the first thousand years of its existence had less to do with popularity than with truth, and therefore, our arguments, whatever they may be, must have their basis in truth and conviction, not fear and self-interest.

I love my wife (she is the only woman I have ever loved, at least in that sense), and I know, deep within my soul, that the moment we began to interact sexually was the moment that God began to look upon us as "married." Maybe he always looked upon us that way--it is my view, at least, that from the moment of our birth we were designed to be together--but whatever the case, our union was not consummated until we began to interact sexually. Both of us understood, at least unconsciously, that a sexual union was the end of "singleness" and the beginning of "marriage," in God's sight if in no one else's, which explains for us, in part, why we never gave ourselves in that way to anyone else.

Not many couples, married or not, take sexuality this seriously, but we do, and I wish that everyone else in our culture did as well. Think about it: If you were to understand yourself as "married" to someone you had given yourself to 10 or 15 years ago, even for only one night, I think you would also understand the extent to which you may have had to cut off the natural yearnings of your body and/or soul for that person in order to remain faithful to your current spouse. That is the power of sexuality--it unites us spiritually with another person as fully as it does emotionally and physically, and I am not convinced that in God's eyes we ever stop being "married" to that other person.

I am not saying that if you lost your virginity to someone you did not eventually marry, you are damned to a life of constant yearnings and temptations to infidelity--as I said, if you are in Christ, I believe the Holy Spirit is more than capable of rendering you a loyal, and monogamous, spouse--but I am saying that in God's eyes, the giving of our bodies and souls to others, in whatever guise, is deadly serious business. If you give your body away to someone, under any circumstances, you had better be certain that it is an act of love and holiness, because if it isn't, you may still find yourself bound to that person--for better or worse.

Genesis 4--The Line of Cain

2007-06-07T15:23:00.000-07:00

So Cain went out from the LORD's presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

Yes.

And I realize that much Christian editorializing has gone into this verse, to the effect that Cain's descendants founded the civilization that later became known as Babylon--but this ignores one fundamental point, of great significance to our comprehension of the story as it was recited and understood by the ancient Israelis 3000 years ago: The descendants--or line--of Cain ended with the destruction of the human race by flood.

(For further information on this event, see Genesis 6-8, which we will discuss at greater length in a few posts.)

Noah, who we will cover later, was descended from another ancestor--Seth--and therefore did not pass on either the line of Cain or the so-called "mark" of Cain . . . which begs the question: Why even mention this family line at all, since it is not the one traced throughout the book of Genesis?

Simple: Cain's family line exemplifies everything that the Israelis were taught not to be.

Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then building a city, and he named it after his son Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad, and Irad was the father of Mehujael, and Mehujael was the father of Methushael, and Methushael was the father of Lamech.

Two things to note here, and then an aside:

1. Cain built a city--a rather strange thing to do for someone who had spent his entire life tilling and cultivating the soil. However, remember that the previous verses of chapter 4, Cain had been banished from the soil; in essence, his livelihood was destroyed because of his cold-blooded murder of Abel, his brother. In order to eat, and in order to make a life for himself, Cain was reduced to other crafts and trades.

Throughout human history, the endeavor to build cities, and more fundamentally, ways of living outside of farming, has brought about a great many advances, but it has also, I fear, done a great deal of damage to the human soul. It seems we are at our best when we are tied in some way to the soil, a fact recognized (and celebrated) in many of our greatest works of art, music, and literature. When we walk away from the soil, when we "say goodbye" to close-knit communities in which men and women have tilled the ground for generations, we lose a sense of respect for the wonders of the creation that we were always designed to steward (see previous blog entries on Genesis 1 and 2).

The argument that human beings should be able to abandon the feeding and care of livestock and the growing and harvesting of plants for "higher pursuits" is, at its heart, fatuous. What higher pursuit could there be than to dedicate one's physical, mental, and spiritual energy toward making things grow? And what greater metaphor could we have for the necessity of cultivating holistic spiritual, mental, and physical vitality in our families, our communities, and ourselves than in the simple miracle of a seed germinating into beautiful, productive life?

An inability to comprehend the importance of agriculture will, inevitably, lead to a civilization's decline, and a culture that abandons all pretense of agriculture will, in the process, I fear, abandon all pretense of real warmth and understanding in its households and communities.

2. Cain's family line was short. We do not hear of anyone after Lamech, and probably for good reason. In Genesis 6-8, the Israelites preserved an account, recited from memory over dozens of generations, of a great flood which destroyed every member of the human race--except for one family. This family, the family of Noah, was not descended from the line of Cain but from the line of Seth, another one of Adam and Eve's sons.

Which brings up another important question, and one I want to address here:

Where did Cain find a wife?

The answer, I think, should be obvious--if only we could, for a moment, look past our own rather benighted concepts of marriage to a culture in which the union of husband and wife was the union of two families. The ancient Israelis, like almost every other human civilization on Earth before 1900, had a keen understanding of marriage's implications, that it was the union of two souls as well as two bodies and minds. Therefore, to them, it was deadly serious business, with potentially devastating consequences for both bride and groom if lightly undertaken.

Ancient Israeli families, like the families of many other pre-Industrial cultures, were very careful about making sure their children had spouses who loved them and who brought out their best qualities . . . and this is the reason why marriages were, for the most part, arranged in ancient Israeli society. What better way to assure that your son or daughter will find a mate you can trust with their welfare than to look for suitable spouses in your local community, neighborhood, or family?

Yes, family--fathers and mothers often arranged marriages between 2nd or 3rd cousins, and sometimes even between people who were related more closely, with an interest in maintaining family traditions or simply in protecting the physical, mental, and spiritual welfare of their children, and so it would not have been as difficult for them to imagine where Cain's wife might have come from during the recitation of this chapter than it seems to be for us.

I doubt that Cain married his sister, as some Christian writers have argued, but almost certainly, he married a niece--and while this offends every sensibility of the postindustrial, postmodern mind, I would like to remind you that while we may find the marital practices of the ancients repugnant, we cannot escape the conclusion, given the state of our own culture today, that their marital practices were, on the whole, better than our own.

Consider, if you will, the standard scenario that our culture considers "normal" today: Young men and women, upon entering puberty, are expected, without guidance from their parents or elders, to be wise in the application of their sexual desires. Predictably, they do what anyone in their situation would do--they make decisions based on their own fantasies rather than on a clear estimation of their personalities and needs.

Therefore, the story we often recognize as "acceptable" in our culture goes something like this: These young men and women begin to date absolute strangers, often without bothering to tell their parents what is happening and how they feel about it. Dating leads to a "relationship"--which can involve sex, but more often involves the loss of emotional virginity--and these "relationships," which have not been grounded on the basis of mutual needs, beliefs, and interests, end in what we euphemistically term a "breakup."

Unfortunately, in too many cases, the cycle simply repeats itself, until the son or daughter in question finds someone he or she "might marry," who is then subjected to the obligatory family "interview" (which is often simply a rubber stamp for whatever the child actually wanted). If the "interview" (usually no more than 2 hours) is successful, then engagement and marriage ensue shortly thereafter.

This scenario is extremely dangerous for the people involved in these relationships because often, they are not afforded an adequate review of their romance by those who know and care for them the most. The reason we have a 60% divorce rate within the United States is that we do not invest enough time and energy in training our children to approach every potential relationship with the opposite sex as if it were a decision of grave importance. Instead, we allow our children, in the absence of our own accumulated wisdom, to soak up fantasies about love and marriage that ultimately lead them, if they (and we) are not careful, to a union with someone that neither we nor they can trust.

Think about it: If you have a son or daughter, who you spent 20 years of your life training, feeding, and fixing band-aids for, wouldn't you want to make sure that son or daughter marries someone you know will give them the same love, care, and dedication that you did?

Genesis 4--The Curse of Cain

2007-06-02T09:50:00.000-07:00

Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is Abel your brother?"

And he said, "I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?"

He said, "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to Me from the ground. Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you. You will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth."

Cain said to the LORD, "My punishment is too great to bear! Behold, You have driven me this day from the face of the ground, and from Your face I will be hidden, and I will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me."

So the LORD said to him, "Therefore whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him sevenfold "

And the LORD appointed a sign for Cain, so that no one finding him would slay him.

2 things to note from the dialogue here:

1. The same rebellion in Adam and Eve's response to God's questioning of their actions manifests itself in Cain's initial response to God--except that Cain's response is more openly hostile, while his parents' responses simply amounted to fearful (and rather ill-conceived) attempts to distract God's attention from themselves. Therefore, God's response to Cain--depriving him of home, soil, and livelihood--is far more harsh than his response to Adam and Eve.

Apparently, in Israeli culture, there were degrees of rebellion. We will explore what these degrees may have been at greater depth later, but for now, it is important for us to observe that to God, the attitude of the heart is more important than the words of the mouth.

2. This is the second example we find in the Torah of human beings attempting--and failing--to hide their sins from an all-powerful, and all-seeing God, and it will not be the last. The ancient culture that produced the Torah understood the importance of educating its children to fear and respect God--and how better to do so than by reciting, in as many variations as possible, the methods and creativity applied by various individuals to the project of deceiving God? As we have seen, however, even God's questions (such as "Where are you?" in Genesis 3 and "Where is your brother?" in this chapter) are leading questions--God's way of allowing the perpetrators of sin a chance to come clean.

Unfortunately, the postmodern era in which we live seems as likely to heed the warnings of the Torah in this regard as the ancient Israelis were 3000 years ago.

A Few Addendums to My Previous Post

2007-05-25T15:58:00.001-07:00

I just read my last posting on this blog, and . . . let's just say I was surprised at the lack of quality it exhibited and leave it at that.

Let's begin again by quoting the entire text (as I have been going over it so far) from Genesis 4:

Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, "I have gotten a manchild with the help of the LORD." Again, she gave birth to his brother Abel, and Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground, so it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the LORD of the fruit of the ground. Abel, on his part also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions.

And the LORD had regard for Abel and for his offering, but for Cain and for his offering He had no regard, so Cain became very angry and his countenance fell. Then the LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door, and its desire is for you, but you must master it."

Cain told Abel his brother, and it came about when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.

There are 2 levels of meaning we need to consider in this text:

(1) the meaning it held for the culture which originally produced it

(2) the meaning it holds for us today

As I mentioned in my previous post, this story is part of an oral "encyclopedia" of ancient Israeli culture that was passed down from generation to generation via nothing but the human memory. The use of genealogies, repeated phrases, and concrete, easy-to-understand concepts and imagery all point to a narrative that was intended for memorization and recitation. Hence, in this case, the story of Cain and Abel served a double purpose for the culture that recited it:

1. It established the fact that, as I strongly suggested in my posts on Genesis 3, the line between attempting to be "like gods" and destroying everything around us that lives is very, very slim. Whether or not we believe that the story represented in Genesis 4 was the human race's first murder, it is important for us to respect the fact that the ancient Israelis believed it. Therefore, it is of great concern to us that, for them, the story appears only one generation (and barely a dozen verses) from the human race's first sin.

As we see all too often today, dictators (like Hitler, Amin, and Pot) who attempt to grasp the throne of godhood often overwhelm their cultures and eras in tides of blood. After all, one who assumes the "moral authority" of godhood must, by necessity assume to oneself the right to decide who is worthy of life and who is not--hence, for one reason or another, almost every war that has been fought between cities and civilizations has been termed a "moral" war in which the "enemy" is "evil" and worthy of extermination in the name of "justice."

However, no war, including World War II, has ever deserved this claim. Those who assert that World War II was a divine judgment against Hitler's Nazi regime are, I think, quite right--after all, the Bible does point to the downfall of regimes at outsiders' hands as the judgment of God on evil--but the self-interest which spawned the United States' contest with Japan, as well as the Allies' embrace of the depredations and imperial ambitions of Joseph Stalin, give the lie to the perspective that our "side" was "holy," "just," or even "good." Moreover, as we will see, the Bible describes a God who evaluates the instruments of his judgment as closely as he evaluates the targets of his judgment.

2. For the ancient Israelis, this narrative underscored the importance of following God's strict prescriptions regarding the form and nature of ritual sacrifices. This is a point which is virtually lost in all of the evangelical Protestant sermons and literature on this text, and yet it is of singular importance, because it provides the "why" behind the laws recorded in Exodus and Leviticus regarding ritual sacrifice for sin. Cain's offering is not approved because he did not ask the Lord how it should be given--it is as simple as that.

Cain's rebellion, then, echoes Israel's rebellion from God, recorded in far greater detail later in the Old Testament--it is, essentially, his mad act of defiance against a God who, in his opinion, is unjust for even asking him to follow a prescribed plan for sacrifice in the first place.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, leads me to my final point:

We are as guilty in Christian circles of this brand of rebellion as Cain was.

From Christianity's beginnings, it seems that there has been a push from within to abandon the simple doctrine of obedience to Christ for something more flashy, worldly, and more importantly, the way we like to do things. We take God's grace, evidenced in the cross of Christ Jesus, as a sort of "getaway car" we can use to allow the worst sorts of sins, evils, and abuses of scripture to manifest themselves in our lives, families, and churches.

The ancient culture in which this story was produced, for example, would have shuddered at the very notion that God would, in any way, be "happy" with a 60% divorce rate amongst his chosen people. As we will see, this was a society which was taught to stone to death anyone who was caught in adultery--and which viewed marriage, and sexuality, as deadly serious business. The institutional Christian culture, however, which attempts to trace its ancestry to that which produced the Bible, would have been considered worthy of stoning and extermination by its "forbears" on this basis alone.

I am not saying this to condemn anyone--but I am saying this as a warning, that the God we so often invoke in our prayers and our church services is, as the Bible strongly indicates, a God who has every one of our heartbeats in his fingers. Dare we, then, to presume that he will overlook our attempts to establish our own mode of worship and sacrifice?

Genesis 4--Dystopia Sealed (continued)

2007-05-24T14:47:00.001-07:00

Again, she gave birth to his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

Eve gives birth to two sons--a narrative that occurs over and over again in the book of Genesis. The ancient Israelis, perhaps more keenly than any other nation in the world they inhabited, understood the concept of family as one in which healthy and unhealthy patterns occur.

For example, the family of Adam and Eve was one which started only after they had been expelled from the Garden of Eden, only after the "fall." The consequences of the events recorded in Genesis 3 included a complete realignment of masculinity and femininity as they had existed in Adam and Eve before--obviously, this would have had a profound effect on something so basic as the establishment of a human family. The ancient Israelis understood, as we intuitively understand today, that the ways in which families often function do not correspond to an ideal of love and community that, deep inside, they must have sensed should be central aspects of family life.

So it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the LORD of the fruit of the ground. Abel, on his part also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions, and the LORD had regard for Abel and for his offering--but for Cain and for his offering He had no regard, so Cain became very angry and his countenance fell.

Remember here that (1) this is a narrative that served, in part, as the "encyclopedia" of Israeli knowledge 3000-4000 years ago, and (2) that this particular portion of it occurs one generation (and one chapter) after the "fall." The latter is important because it establishes (and probably established in the minds of the people who heard these words recited) that the seemingly "harmless" divisions between man, woman, the animal kingdom, and God have consequences both immediate and deadly to our species.

Cain, having inherited the knowledge of good and evil that his parents had essentially stolen with the express purpose of becoming "gods" themselves, sees God as unjust for preferring Abel's offering to his own, without even bothering to inquire why God would have done so. The fact that a reason is never given only serves to underscore the point that to Cain, the reason was unimportant. It is clear (and probably would have been to the story's original audience) that Cain did not concern himself with discovering what he could do to more effectively please his Creator--he only wanted the "blessing" of God, whether or not it was merited in God's eyes--and in the spirit of his mother and father, he attributed it not to his own actions or motives but to God's "lack of judgment."

Then the LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it."

This, in essence, is the "moral" of the story.

Cain, having been raised by parents who rebelled against God, knew what both "sin" and "obedience" were. As I have mentioned before, he also had the ill-gotten knowledge of good and evil twisting its way inside his heart, prompting him to engage in the same evil practices they had modeled only a generation earlier. Therefore, it was important for him to discipline the inclinations of his heart.

Unfortunately, like so many of his parents' descendants today, Cain failed to discipline himself, and instead allowed his thoughts and feelings to assume any direction, regardless of its credibility. It is this failure, above all else, that leads Cain to, instead of talking with God, as his mother and father had done, to stand silently at the altar while God attempts to convince him to see reason. It is this failure, also, that leads Cain to conclude that his brother, not the selfishness in his own heart, is the problem.

Cain told Abel his brother, and it came about when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.

From the first sin to the first murder . . . the brevity of space (generationally and textually) between these two events would have been significant to the ancient culture that produced the book of Genesis. Those who heard this verse (and the ones that preceded it) understood, clearly, that any act of disobedience against God, no matter how inocuous it may seem, will have deadly consequences--particularly for one's offspring. Later, we will see the following refrain over and over in the Torah:

visiting the sins of the fathers on the children to the third generation of those who hate him

The Israelis who lived 3 or 4 millennia ago understood the family as not only the unit containing parents and children but a line spanning generations. No one's actions were considered to be isolated--instead, they were potential points of direction for the spiritual vitality (and quality) of a family line and, thus, of central importance to that line's maintenance. It was understood that a wicked man's actions would taint his family line, prompting the Creator to dismantle that line.

Cain is, in essence, committing exactly the same sin that resulted in his parents' exile from the Garden of Eden--in a far more brutal and callous way.

Genesis 4--Dystopia Sealed

2007-05-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, "I have gotten a manchild with the help of the LORD."

Genesis 4 begins a transition from the archetypal narrative of humanity's "fall" from utopia to the narrative of Israel's departure from the God of the Torah (and its eventual self-destruction) . . . but as we will see, the "transition" is not synonymous with a "stop." Remember that the book of Genesis was part of a 5 book encycylopedia of what it meant to be an Israeli 3000 years ago--and as we will see, a defining characteristic of this book is the lineage (or genealogy) it presents. In this case, Genesis 4 begins with the first birth of a new human being--a promise of hope which Eve must have clung to after the events of Genesis 3.

Indeed, with the birth of every new generation, there seems to be a new sense of hope that a culture or time period will become better, that much-needed changes will occur. Genesis 4, however, establishes clearly what almost anyone older than 25 can readily understand at a passing glance--that far from bringing new hope and promise, each new generation seems to excel at creating new ways of inflicting pain.

These words were written at the beginning of a week when my wife and I were preparing to move from Texas to South Carolina, and they have even more relevance for both of us today than they did 12 days ago.

Genesis 3--The Consequences

2007-05-11T07:29:00.000-07:00

Until this moment, there had been no war, no disease, no conflict between animals and animals, humans and animals, humans and humans, or humans and God. Humans had a subject place to God as stewards of his creation, caretakers of the animals and tillers of the soil--and more importantly, they had harmony with God. "Adam" and "Eve," unlike their descendants, did not originate without a clear knowledge of who they were and who their designer was. They had no reason to ask the question that so often torments the minds and hearts of every one of us today: "Why am I here?"

To be one with God, to understand the reasons you were created and to experience the Creator . . . the joy I'm describing here of being able to talk with God in "the cool of the day" rather than having to undergo the pain and torture of allowing ourselves to be conformed to his likeness from a state that is less than holy, this joy is not imaginable to anyone in a society whose postmodern cultural notions and technologies have made it possible for human beings to ignore this fundamental quest for truth and meaning within their souls.

The LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle, and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you will go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life--and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel."

Whether or not the "serpent" in the minds of the ancient culture that heard these words symbolized an actual animal or something more sinister, it is clear that human beings and animals began to exist in competition with each other at this point. Serpents do, after all, strike at the heels of human beings in order to defend their territory (and themselves), and human beings instinctually know that killing a serpent is simple--destroy the head, and the body dies. If there was a literal "serpent" in the Garden (which I doubt) talking with "Adam" and "Eve," it would not have originally been designed to slither along the ground.

I suspect, however, that the ancient Israelis (or at least the ones who finally wrote these scriptures down after reciting them for generations) understood the "serpent" to be a symbol for the evil "it" I spoke of in my previous post. If so, then at this point, it is important to highlight the fact that this evil, whatever it is, is a subject creature. The words "cursed are you above all cattle" equates this force (or "Satan") with everything we know to be created by God. Moreover, God's words to the effect that this "creature" will be doomed to crawl on its belly and eat the dust of the Earth place it firmly in a subject position to God, just like animals, plants, and humans.

This is an importnat point because, while institutional Christianity has almost given "the devil" a position of deity in popular culture, the Bible makes it clear that whatever he is, he is a creature just like we are. Later, in the New Testament, we will see that Christians--and indeed Christ himself--identify Satan as an angel who (along with his cohorts) denies the authority of God and instead attempts, through subjugation and terror of God's creation, to be a pseudo-god himself.

It is not, however, his fault that his plan for the Garden of Eden succeeded.

It is ours.

To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain you will bring forth children--yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

This verse has become excessively controversial these days, and it is important to note 2 things:

1. Childbirth through the centuries has always been an arduous--indeed dangerous--process, and one that throughout much of human history came without the comforts of anesthetics, hospitals, or even sterilization. Women during the Middle Ages, for example, were often grateful for the option of becoming nuns, not because of their lack of desire for sex but because of a palpable (and plausible) fear that they would die in the process of bringing a child into the world. Again, within our genetic code, we seem to understand that this level of danger, pain, and terror associated with pregnancy and childbirth are not what should accompany the beauty of new life. (This inner sense is what has prompted the use of midwives, hospitals, and surgical wards over the past few centuries--the purpose of which is to make labor as "painless" as possible.)

2. As we see in the classic story of the girl who runs away with a man who catches her fancy, a woman's desire is for her husband, and (in a sense) her husband does rule over her. I do not mean this in a dogmatic sense--the husband being the head of the household--but rather in a more fundamental, essence-level context. As a result of the "fall," the very core of feminity itself changed in relation to masculinity.

This final aspect of God's "judgment" of Eve can be seen in the great wealth of literature on the problematic dynamics of sexual relations between men and women during the past 6000 years of human history. Divorce, homosexuality, and suspicion between males and females had their precursors in the bizarre sexual behaviors of the ancient civilizations (such as Babylon, Greece, and Rome) from which our own cultural matrix springs. Every man and every woman, it seems, has a "heartbreak" story--a reason to distrust and suspect the motives of the opposite sex--and these suspicions manifest themselves in almost every facet of human interactions between the sexes. Yes, a woman's desire will be for her husband, but that desire, by necessity, leads to pregnancy and childbirth, which are at once wondrous and terrifying for women--this dichotomy has bred a great many heartaches, divides, and focal points of hostility between men and women, a logical consequence of a "fall" in which the first man and woman found themselves at each other's throats when confronted by the presence of God.

Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it,' cursed is the ground because of you. In toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you--and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you will eat bread 'ill you return to the ground, because from it you were taken--for you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

We often forget that these "judgments" spoken to Adam and Eve were actually designed to be methods of bringing them--and their descendants (this means "us")--in subjection to their Creator. For example, women--desiring husbands and enduring terrible pain in pregnancy and childbirth--are forced to trust in the Lord for two things: (1) that the husband who rules over them will be a good one, and (2) that their pregnancy will not end in death or a debilitating physical condition. Similarly, men (who have been "given" rule) must trust the Lord to bring about good produce as they apply their fortunes, sweat, and blood to the soil of the Earth in the name of feeding their families. God also pinpoints another reason for increasing (by magnitudes) the amount of work required to plant, raise, and harvest a crop--it is to remind us that, while we may pretend in our hearts to be gods, we are not far removed, both cosmically and genetically, from the soil we till.

I have said in previous posts that human beings are, genetically speaking, not far removed from the soil of the ground--in fact, the molecules that make up our cells are of the same "family" (carbon-based molecules) as the molecules and nutrients that inhabit the "dust of the Earth." It is a fact most unpleasant to our species that when human beings die, they decompose and (essentially) break down in form until they become indistinguishable with the soil in which they are often buried. The use of objects such as vaults and caskets to preserve the form of the dead simply slows this process--it does not prevent it. We understand--regardless of who we are or what we believe about God--that the mortality of human beings is the one aspect of our species in which we can never be "gods."

Now the man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.

This is the first point in the Bible at which one of the two human beings in the Garden are named. It is important here to note that "Adam," the name generally associated with the man, is not really a name--it is simply the Hebrew word for "human" and applies both to male and female members of the species. (Thus, we see the "rule" of men implied in this verse from Genesis 3--the man names his wife, just as he had spent time naming the animals in Genesis 2.)

The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them.

It is significant here that "skin" is used to clothe "Adam and his wife." For the first time in human history, blood was shed between humans and animals--and animals were used, and destroyed, for humanity's needs. The enmity that has existed between humans and the other animated species of the Earth begins in this verse.

Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil--and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"--therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out--and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.

Two things to note here:

First, the "Us"--as we will see, it is used later in the book of Genesis in the context of the dividing of the human race into tribes and nations. If God is singular, how can He be referred to as "Us?"

Simple: The New Testament clearly outlines a Godhead that is Father/Son/Holy Spirit, or what we call the Trinity. God is one Person, but He is also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three distinct identities. The Hebrew Bible uses the word "Elohim" in Genesis 1:1 to refer to God, a word which is plural--yet the ancient culture in which the Bible was produced had the saying, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one." It is therefore not a contradiction for God (in the Hebrew Bible) to refer to Himself as both "Me" and "Us," and neither is it a contradiction for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to refer to each other in the New Testament as three distinct entities, even though they are understood to be the same God manifesting Himself in different ways.

Now for the harder concept: Why is humanity's acquisition of eternal life so dangerous in the eyes of God?

Remember the impulse for attaining the knowledge of good and evil in the first place--to be like God. The fruit of this tree was not taken with God's permission or consent--the action was simply a product of humanity's arrogant attempt to assert its powers of reason, deduction, and free will. In addition, the outgrowth of our knowledge of good and evil over the past 6000 years has been a plethora of depredations, tyrannies, and institutional matrixes, each more insane, destructive, and idiotic than the last.

What would the outgrowth of immortality--taken without God's permission or consent--be?

If the existence of fallen angels serves as any indication, it would make our species irredeemable. After all, the "fire reserved for the devil and his angels" in Matthew 25 is the only logical answer to an immortal creature's obstinate refusal to subject itself to the will of God--and if we were to adopt immortality ourselves without acknowledging our Creator's right to order our bodies, minds, and souls as He sees fit, we would in an instant earn the same fate. It is not our potential to harm or "rival" God that the Creator is concerned about here but rather our potential to harm each other. Immortality, in the wrong hands, can be abused to such a degree that humans would essentially have (in their minds) final authority over other humans, simply by obtaining a quality that their brethren lack. Unfortunately, our species seems heedless of this prospect of eternal desolation in its continued quest to prolong life by gaining power over the atom, electricity, and even the human genome itself.

Genesis 3--Utopia Fallen

2007-05-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

This chapter of Genesis is central to the Bible's discourse about evil, about the fallen condition of the world in which we live, and about the love of God for a world which, as-- we turn page after page of the Bible (and page after page of our history books) spins more out of control with each passing day. And whether read as a literal event or as a metaphor, its message is still the same: the rift that took place between us and God, between us and creation, and between us and each other, is no one's fault but our own.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, "Indeed, has God said, 'You shall not eat from any tree of the garden'?"

The serpent . . . evil, the devil, Satan, whatever you want to insert in this particular "blank," the point is clear--something was amiss in the order of creation, and whatever it was wanted to manifest itself in the actions of human beings. I'm not sure what origins evil had, and frankly I'm not sure any of us can know this side of Christ's return, but the character of evil is constant throughout the Bible and, I would argue, throughout human history. It is (1) innately hostile toward God and (2) eager in its attempts to pervert whatever God creates.

Whatever the "serpent" is, whatever it represents, it poses a question that, for the first time, accesses the full range of human free will. After all, if humans bear the stamp or image of God, it is certainly most evident in our exercise of the will, a faculty which (as we have discussed in the previous posts) animals simply do not have. Free will, however, is utterly meaningless without the room to exercise it, and what better situation in which to exercise free will than in the choice to obey or disobey God?

The serpent, then and now, is the "other side of the coin," the agent who attempts to elicit a response contrary to God's will and design. As the first person to make the choice between God and the serpent--between her design and an attempt to pervert that design--the woman had the privilege (and dreadful responsibility) of setting the tone for the entire human race.

The woman said to the serpent, "From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat--but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, 'You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.'"

Notice that the serpent's first question is a direct contradiction of the command God had given both the man and the woman in Genesis 2--this is the first ploy of the tempter, to divide us from our Creator, taking away from us what Jesus would say in the book of Matthew to be what humankind lives on: every word that comes from the mouth of God. The ancient Israelis, a culture that lost its own holy books over and over again through the centuries, would have keenly understood the signficance of being divided from the "word of God." Hence, to an Israeli listener, the woman's response should have been, "God has said, 'You shall not eat from it, or you will die.'"

The "and touch it" in these 2 verses is very significant--it indicates that the woman, at this point, is vulnerable, either through her inattentiveness to God or through her surprise at the serpent's twisting of God's word.

The serpent said to the woman, "You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

This is the second ploy of the serpent--after attempting to divide the woman from the word of God, he then offers a tantalizing "goodie" in reward for disobeying God. The Hebrew Bible is replete with stories like this one, and everyone within the context of the culture that recited its words would have understood that the lure of evil is not destruction for destruction's sake but a promise of something "good," "pleasurable," or "useful" in return.

In this case, it is the one thing that human beings seem to have been unable to resist throughout their history: the temptation to become gods. Whether it is called "deciding your own destiny," "becoming your own person," or "being a free thinker," the temptation is the same . . . to become our own gods, to adopt a position of final authority (even life or death) over ourselves and others. The knowledge of good and evil has wrought more harm, more pain, and more misery on the generations of the human race than any other idea, force, or concept in our history--because it is never motivated by a desire to do the right thing but a desire to assume a position we neither earned nor deserve.

When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate--and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked--and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.

These verses form the core of the tragedy that the Bible recounts in its pages. Instead of remembering the words of God, the woman utilizes her own faculties of reason, assuming a place of equality with God (even though she has neither created the Earth on which she lives or herself) in her critique of his logic for banning the tree from them in the first place. She sees that it is "good for food," that it is a "delight to the eyes," and that it is "desirable to make one wise"--in other words, what we have here is the prototype of every sin known to humanity. Lust, for example, is based on these three precepts--consumption, visual appeal, and utility . . . and so are all the major religions of the world.

Yes, religion is one of the manifestations of this prototype--and I would even go so far as to say that institutional Christianity is a manifestation of this prototype as well. As the above verses indicate, it is our knowledge of what is right and wrong that gets us into trouble most of the time, and generally, religion (while claiming to serve as a force of moral instruction across cultures and time frames) aims to subjugate one person (or group of people) under the rule of another. The Hindu caste system, for example, is buttressed by all of those wonderful concepts of karma and reincarnation that have become so popular in American media, and in many countries around the world, Buddhism also creates a caste system in which a priestly class is essentially worshipped and treated as demigods.

Christianity, however, even Protestant Christianity, has been one of the worst offenders--and this is unfortunate, given that the Christ of Christianity dismantled--through His words and actions--the very systems that allow men and women to be condemned by human beings, governments, and institutions on the basis of morality. Our depredations during the Middle Ages and beyond are obvious--the Crusades, the Inquisitions, and all of our internecine acts of violence against both adherents of other religions and each other--but institutional Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, is no less inclined toward self-deification today than it was centuries ago. Anyone, for example, who argues that a pastor or priest has final authority over the well-being of someone's soul, or demands that a person conform to a particular culture or perspective without making recourse to Christ as his/her final authority, is in disobedience to God.

This may sound harsh, and I know that there are those reading this blog who would quote passages from Paul's letters in order to refute me, but Paul, more than anyone, understood that ultimately, whether a man or woman is in good standing with God has more to do with that man and woman's personal priorities than with any badgering, cajoling, or threats that a deacon or overseer may utilize. In that respect, his letters to the Corinthians are particularly tinged with grief, because he sees a group of people who are hardening their hearts against the Christ they adopted, and they are choosing to slip away. Paul--a man who would have been more motivated than anyone else to do anything, right or wrong, to avoid losing even one soul for Christ--understood keenly that what a man or woman prioritizes in his/her heart will guide the choices he/she makes, no matter what anyone else--even God--says . . . and he knew that the Corinthians, for good or ill, were beyond his control.

They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. Then the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"

Obviously, the story personalizes God to an extent that ancient Israeli listeners and reciters would have understood--and remembered--this story, but what is importnat here is that the man and woman separated themselves from God.

I have heard a great many pronouncements in Protestant Christian circles that sin (an inanimate idea) separates us from God . . . but this verse demonstrates it to be actually humans who separate themselves from God. Intimacy, communion . . . these things are the first to go whenever we decide, in our hearts, to pursue something that is against the way we were designed--and we are the ones to discard them. I think it is emblematic of our culture today that 50% of marriages end in divorce--and that the statistic is actually higher in institutional churches. We are, as any foreigner can readily attest, an anti-relational society, right down to the Gameboys, Blackberries, and other assorted gadgets we have invented in order to give ourselves an excuse not to talk to each other.

He said, "I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself."
And He said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?"
The man said, "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate."
Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?"
And the woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

In this section of dialogue, we have history's first blame game--at least as the ancient Israelis would have understood history. Instead of taking responsibility for their actions, which God was giving them a chance to do, the man and woman point fingers at someone else--and in the man's case, they even subtly point fingers at God ("the woman whom You gave to be with me"). The road to maturity in ancient Israel was understood to be a road in which one takes responsibility for his or her actions--to assign blame to "society" or "God" or "events from my past" is not enough. It was understood among those who first heard this text that the ability to make decisions entails an ability to understand, at least unconsciously, their consequences.

Again, we live in a Protestant Christian culture which uses the word "sin" as an escape hatch--it is "sin" which separates us from God, not ourselves. The Bible, however, is clear--if we are separated from God, then it is no one's fault but our own. We have chosen to hide ourselves from Him--either to conceal something we did and knew was wrong or simply because we don't want to deal with a conversation that will end in our discipline--and though He may seek us out (as He is shown doing here), it is our choice to respond either with honesty . . . or with lies, obfuscation, and blame.

Yes, we have evil in the world . . . a serpent, devil, Satan, or whatever you want to fill in that particular "blank," but that agent of temptation is not responsible for all the suffering and misery that have been, and continue to be, peculiarly indicative of human history.

We are.

Until we begin to recognize this fact, we will continue to stumble in the dark, not knowing who we are, at war with ourselves, each other, and ultimately, with God.

Genesis 2 (yes, still continued)

2007-05-05T10:11:00.000-07:00

Before I move on with the story of the creation of woman, I'd like to take the opportunity to make a couple of brief notes on Genesis 2:5-6 and Genesis 2:10-13. This aside is largely the result of my wife's input--she looked at my last post and thought I did not focus enough on what a correct or appropriate handling of these verses should be. (After much hunching of my shoulders and a series of "but"'s and "I meant to"'s, I agreed that she was right about what she was saying.)

Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground. But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.

My wife has been studying ecology this semester, and she said it was possible that the Earth's biosystem was originally intended to bring water to the soil in this way. It makes sense to me (although I was much less agreeable yesterday) because the Earth's present system (in which rain comes down upon the ground in a variety of downpours, thunderstorms, and severe incidents of weather turbulence such as hurricanes or cyclones) does not seem to fit the harmonic description of a paradise created by a God of order (both in Genesis 2 and in the song recorded in Genesis 1:1-2:3). One of the Bible's constant themes, as we will see in the coming months, is God's unchangeable nature--why would a God who, according to Hebrews 13, is the same yesterday, today, and forever create a weather system as erratic as the one that exists on Earth today?

Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon--it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good--the bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon--it flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris--it flows east of Assyria--And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

I mentioned in my last entry that the above verses have become the stuff of a great deal of speculation among people who (to be quite honest) have far too much time on their hands . . . but what I didn't cover was the significance they had for the ancient Israelis, and the significance they should have for us 4 millennia later. The ancient Israelis, it seems, had a fairly good idea where the Garden of Eden was--it seems that to them, given verses 11 and 12 which describe a place that was real and commonly known to the Israeli society of the time (obviously a place in which precious metals were mined and/or traded), the Garden of Eden constituted more than a convenient story to tell little children but a memory passed down from generation to generation. To them, the Garden of Eden was a literal place--it existed, it had form, and it was a location that would have been identifiable to the Israelis who heard Genesis 2 recited.

What does this mean to us?

I've studied the origin stories of several ancient civilizations, and all carry the same theme of a paradise that was destroyed or lost due to a rift between human beings and "the gods." Whether or not you believe Genesis 2 and 3 to have been a literal event in the history of the human race, it is impossible, in my view, to take all of these stories as mere fairy tales. Indeed, even today, humanity carries inside of its core the fundamental awareness that disease, death, and natural disasters are wrong. What scientists and secularists have taken to be a sign of humanity's inventiveness (the stories of ancient cultures) may instead be an expression of an unconscious memory, the memory of a time in which the natural rhythms and processes of the human body and soul existed in harmony with creation and Creator, free from the constraints of infirmity, old age, and physical collapse.

With these notes in mind, let us turn our attention to the story of the creation of woman . . .

Genesis 2:18-25 is the crux of the Bible's teaching on men and women--everything the Bible says about sexuality, about social relations in and outside the home, and about families and marriage derives from these 8 verses, which serve as the "why" behind the rest of the Bible's coverage of these topics. It has become a great deal harder these days to determine the veracity of claims by this or that faction regarding the "true intent" of the Bible as it relates to men, women, and sexuality--particularly in a culture whose "bible" is the corpus of products distributed by entertainment companies--and I think that even a cursory reading of the Bible demonstrates that, to a certain extent, all sides battling for supremacy in what has become known as America's "culture wars" are in error.

Let us first consider Genesis 2:18, which serves as the reason for the creation of women:

Then the LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone--I will make him a helper suitable for him."

If it is one thing that social scientists have conclusively proven (though they seem to have proven little else), it is that human beings are, in their terms, "social animals." We live, we thrive, and we conceive ourselves in relation to one another--sons to fathers, wives to husbands, workers to management, and so forth. The preponderance of human civilizations, large and small, demonstrates that we cannot live isolated, bereft of human companionship. The occasional soul who divests him-/herself from communities and social ties to seek a life of solitude is rare, and usually the products of their isolation are fraught with misery and pain.

However, I think an even more fundamental point about our species needs to be made here. Genesis 1:27 says

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him--male and female He created them.

Male and female cannot exist apart from one another--they are essential qualities that can only have meaning in the shadow of the other. Men generally perceive their masculinity in a sense that is not female, just as women through the ages have perceived their sexuality and identity as not male. Both male and female, moreover, bear the stamp (or image) of God--so a reading of Genesis 2:18 in light of Genesis 1:27 implies that in God's eyes, humanity was incomplete without both masculine and feminine qualities. (I know that, to some extent, this is a mundane point, but you would be surprised at the number of people who lack even a rudimentary understanding of this dynamic as it relates to the human soul. To me, it is no surprise that a culture which has essentially tossed aside every concept of masculinity that it once possessed--however imperfect--is experiencing the explosive development of GLBT communities. Human beings cannot exist as "asexual" entities, and any attempt to bring about a culture of "asexuality" will foster alternative sexualities that are, at their core, unconscious attempts to restore the essential division between male and female.)

Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them--and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.

These verses are important in the narrative because they establish (clearly) that for human beings, male and female coexist together within our species. Again, this is a rudimentary point, but it also reveals a fundamental understanding among the ancient Israelis who heard these words recited: that the human soul, in both its male and female aspects, is essentially different from the life qualities of an animal. As I said in my previous post, there is a "something" about human beings that is qualitatively different from animals--and this is not always good.

A female donkey, goat, or lion can neither appreciate, nor be appreciated by, a man in the same way that a woman can be. The reason has less to do with differences in anatomy than in the fact that human beings, in their sexual relationships, look for love, a concept that animals neither understand nor are capable of giving. Let's face it--love, as we generally understand it (and always have understood it) is the complete joining of two human hearts together as one . . . anyone who has ever owned or caref for animals knows that the mating of male and female birds, cats, dogs, cattle, and lions bears little resemblance to our homey concept of the human family. Cats, for example, mate without regard to any semblance of a family unit--the male "boinks" with the female, then leaves her (presumably for another female) to raise a litter of kittens which will leave her care in a matter of months.

Something inside of us revolts at the idea of considering the above scenario to be right, good, or normal for human beings, regardless of culture or historical time frame. To the extent that we look to sexual relationships as a source of genuine affection and love, we prove that, at its core, the human soul is (both in its male and female qualities) different from the life of an animal.

So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept--then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.

Two things to note here:

First, this verse was the inspiration for the modern surgical procedure of anesthitizing the patient before opening his/her body. The fact that human beings perform a version of this procedure on each other demonstrates the likelihood that a man could have been rendered asleep by God, opened up, then "sewn" shut again.

Second, the theory that women have fewer ribs as a result of God's "surgery" is . . . false. (Medical science has conclusively proven that both men and women have 24 ribs.) However, it is also a given in medical circles that a rib can grow back in its entirity after removal from the human body, in the span of approximately 2 or 3 months, so for those people who are looking for some sort of "evidence" that human beings were created by a divine originator, this verse will simply prove to be a waste of time. (The ancient Israelis, by the way, were no less intelligent than we are, even if they did not have the surgical technology we have, and I am sure they were well aware that men and women had equal sets of ribs.)

The Bible, at its core, does not give human beings easy formulas. Instead, it invites the human soul to reconcile itself to the God that the Bible celebrates on the basis of one thing: faith. This quality is severely lacking in our culture, which is unfortunate, because without it, one cannot appreciate this text, nor any other portion of the Bible, in the ways in which it was designed to be appreciated.

The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.

The man said,
"This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man."

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife--and they shall become one flesh.

The core of the Bible's discussion of human sexuality derives from these three verses in Genesis 2 (verses 22-24). These are verses which Jesus himself quoted in an argument with the Pharisees over divorce (see Matthew 19:1-12) and which Paul quoted in reference to the ideal relationship between husbands and wives (see Ephesians 5). They are, in addition, the wellspring from which all of the sexual commandments in the Torah originate.

We practice this concept even today, though in a somewhat different fashion than what conservative Christians may like to imagine. The scenario in which a man leaves the home of his birth to seek a relationship with a woman with whom he lives as a common-law spouse is a story as familiar to individual experiences as it is to our culture's entertainment products, and I might hasten to add that the union between man and woman, or what the ancient Israelis would have referred to as "marriage," differs greatly from the institutional model we see in our society today.

This verse--and all the other passages about sexuality in the Bible--make it perfectly clear that to the ancient Israelis, and to first century Christians, sexuality--and ultimately, marriage--was a bonding together of two souls into one. Any reading of the Bible that treats marriage as a ceremonial union involving paperwork, the lighting of candles, and a house with a white picket fence utterly misses the original meaning of the text as its original recipients would have understood it. As I mentioned earlier in this blog entry, humans over the millennia have always sought one thing over all others in their sexual relationships: love. What is love other than eternal union of two souls as one?

If it is one thing that Christianity has mishandled, it is this concept . . . a principle that lies so deeply within the core of humanity's consciousness that it is accepted as a given across cultures and time frames. According to the Bible, one is not married to someone simply because he/she engages in a ceremony but because he/she, for whatever reason, unites his/her soul with that person. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is what essentially happens during the sexual union--not merely a uniting of bodies but a uniting of hearts, minds, spirits, and souls.

This is why the Bible treats of sexualities that do not respect this principle with horror--not because they represent attempts by individuals to overturn a social order but because they (in effect) bring about the uniting of hearts, minds, and spirits that are not designed to be united. Only a couple suited and designed to be together can, in good conscience, do as the first man and woman are said to have done in Genesis 2:25:

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Genesis 2 (still continued)

2007-05-04T06:18:00.000-07:00

Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground. But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.

These two verses (Genesis 2:5-6) were the springboard of some very weird speculations in the charismatic circles I frequented for several years in DFW, Texas. In particular, I remember television personalities saying (with straight faces) that these verses indicated the method through which God brought all of the floodwaters upon the Earth (see Genesis 6-8)--essentially breaking the firmament of the heavens so that instead of dew, full rain showers would fall upon trees, hills, animals, and human beings. I think that one luminary even connected these verses with Genesis 1:2, suggesting that Creation was the first great struggle between God and Satan for control of the Earth (i.e. that the Earth was formless because Satan had laid it waste).

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when your spirituality is derived from television.

Not to offend anyone who believes these ideas (and others like them), but Genesis 2:5-6 clearly states that the "mist" fell before human beings were created--ergo, when the first man and woman appeared, rain fell on the ground. Anyone with even passing knowledge of the Earth's weather systems understands that rain is part of Earth's biosystem, not an aberration of it. Worse, this area of speculation fosters exactly the kind of mis-reading of the Bible that has become so endemic in our age--taking 1 or 2 verses out of their original context, and using them to generate a wide array of bold new doctrines.

The point of these verses in the original text is simply to provide the background for the more important event which follows:

Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life--and man became a living being.

Today, we know that human beings are, essentially, made up of molecules similar to those that exist in the ground . . . I am, of course, referring to organic molecules. What human beings, animals, plants, and the soil all have in common is that our molecules all contain one specific element on the periodic table: carbon. The presence of carbon (or lack thereof) is what distinguishes an organic molecule from an inorganic molecule, and thus, given the existence of this element in us and in the soils of the ground, the link between human beings and the dust of the earth is not inconceivable, even if it is somewhat difficult for minds steeped in postmodern secularist ideologies to imagine.

As for the breath of life, the metaphor we normally imagine in terms of this verse (mouth-to-mouth resuscitation) does not capture the essence of what the writer(s) were attempting to convey. The whole point here is that human beings were given "the breath of life"--that quality, that attribute, that soul which distinguishes us as thinking, breathing entities with minds, personalities, and hearts--not how it was given to them. Anyone with a passing knowledge of human civilizations knows that there is an essential core quality in our species that allows us to exist as more than mere intelligent animals. Our ability to make buildings, communities, love, and war is not in any way similar to the capabilities and inclinations of animals to mate, to build nests, and to defend their territory.

I wish I could say that this statement is necessarily a compliment to our species--in fact, I think it has borne out to be our greatest source of shame. After all, the destruction caused by animals is generally random, with no concern for anything except for instinctual goals. The destruction caused by human beings, however, is far more self-conscious, purposeful, and overtly evil.

The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden--and there He placed the man whom He had formed.

This verse was the springboard for even more weird speculations within the charismatic circles I once frequented. They would use this verse and the following verses from chapter 2 to engage in a flurry of wild theories about where we can "now" find the Garden of Eden:

Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon--it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good--the bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon--it flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris--it flows east of Assyria--And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

Of course, the failure to consider that time, tide, and erosion might have been used by God to destroy and/or hide the Garden of Eden from prying human eyes, not to mention (assuming that one takes these stories, on faith, as having actually occurred) the rising of floodwaters over the surface of the Earth, undermines these theories to the point of absurdity.

I'd like to mention, at this point, that the following verses

The name of the first is Pishon--it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good--the bdellium and the onyx stone are there.

are personally significant for me.

My first moment of departure from the nonsense I was accepting from charismatic circles (in particular, television and radio programs) occurred when I was listening to my stereo one day to a talk by a well-known African prosperity preacher. His text was Genesis 2:11-12, and as he read these verses, I could hear him intone the word "gold" with emphasis. The entire atmosphere and spirit of the talk--in which he essentially propounded the notion that aligning oneself with God will result in unimaginable monetary and financial bliss--were so overtly demonic that I actually got up and turned the radio off 20 minutes into the show.

Again, ladies and gentlemen, this is what happens when you base your spirituality on the products of radio or television.

Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Yes, I skipped Genesis 2:9 earlier. ;)

This verse establishes what becomes the crux of the Genesis 2-3 narrative: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The following question, of course, arises from contemporary interpretations of the text: "Were these actual trees?" For the purposes of the story . . . yes, they were actual trees. Remember that stories orally passed down from generation to generation generally have a very "concrete" feel--real items, real things that human beings see every day, became resources in the telling of the story.

As for whether or not they were real trees, I think such conversations miss the point. After all, mankind's fall from utopia (and its condition over the past 6000 years) derive not from "little" things, like eating the wrong apple from the wrong tree, but from an overdeveloped sense of self-righteousness that justifies (in our minds) actions that are destructive. This, ultimately, is what upset the balance in humanity's relationship to its Creator--not the biting of an orange or banana but the idea that our God-given stewardship of the Earth gives us the right to be gods ourselves.

Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely--but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."

Again, this has essentially been the result of humanity's unwillingness to be contented with the subject position of stewarding the Earth under the authority of God. It is neither the Bible nor Christ but our own self-righteousness that has been responsible for more wars, more atrocities, and more spiritual, emotional, and physical abuse than anything else in our benighted 6000 years of history. Our pathetic notions of superiority--particularly moral superiority--have bred genocide after genocide, horror after horror, across the face of a world whose soil has been covered in human blood.

Yes, we have surely died, over and over, as our world reels from the devastation of human wars, depredations, and greed.

Genesis 2 (continued)

2007-05-03T16:19:00.000-07:00

This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made earth and heaven.

Thus begins the textual account of what we know as the biblical story of Genesis--the line of ancestors through which ancient Israel was originated.

Remember that the verses above Genesis 2:4 comprise a song--equivalent to a modern children's Christmas song--that ancient Israeli men, women, and their families must have recited regularly. This song recounted the days of the week, established God as the creator of everything--including us--and encapsulated in verse form the position that humanity held in the larger order that God made out of the emptiness of non-existence. (It is of some note, I think, that the Bible's terminology describes the earth as "void" or "empty"--a metaphor which I think would have been the most apt one that ancient cultures could find to describe the "nothing" out of which God created stars, galaxies, and human beings.) This song also established an order in the heavens and on Earth which has been routinely broken over the past 6000 years, thanks to the continual depredations and idiocy of human civilizations--an order in which humans and animals lived in harmony, without the competition for habitats and food that we have seen ever since.

It is a standing assumption in a lot of Christian seminaries that Genesis 1 and 2 represent a classic case in point of the Bible--the infallible word of God--contradicting itself. As you, I hope, are beginning to see, this assumption rests on 2 false premises: (1) that the two narratives--Genesis 1:1-2:3 and Genesis 2:4 onward--serve the same purpose and (2) that indicating a contradiction within the text does, by necessity, negate the claims of divine authorship associated with the Bible.

Personally, I think this perspective--and the arguments it has generated--is evidence of a postmodern, indeed post-Christian, tendency to read the Bible as we would read The Wall Street Journal. While perhaps a practice with some merit, given the spiritual decay occurring in the United States, reading the Bible in this way does not allow it to speak to us in the same way it spoke to the ancient Israelis who read it, weeping at the extent of their sins. They read the Bible as more than a text, more than an "account"--to them, the Bible not only was a repository of cultural, spiritual, and sacred knowledge, but it was a fundamental, conclusive statement of who they were as a people.

As for divine authorship, I think that no further argument need be made than to point out that wherever the Bible appears, spiritual awakening and ferment result--indeed, wherever the Bible is read, it seems to inspire one of two responses: (1) reconciliation with God or (2) denial and abandonment of even the concept of God. My question to you today is this: Why would a collection of texts 2000-4000 years old either utterly attract or utterly repel you if the God it celebrates were not its author?

Would you be so convicted--whether as a secularist or a believer in Christ--about the Bible's possible origins (and their implications) if it were a text on the order of Hansel and Gretel?

As we continue with Genesis 2 and 3, I want you to think not only about what this text meant to the ancient Israelis but also about what it means to you, personally. Do you think there might be some sort of message in this text for you, and if so, what do you think it is?

Genesis 2 and Some Notes on the Fall of Man

2007-05-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

I am heartbroken today over the Christian community's lack of concern for the men, women, and children around the world who are crying, starving for some litle morsel of truth, love, and hope. Why is the church in the United States, for example, more content with guns, bombs, and soldiers making their way to the Middle East, when what the peoples of the region need, more than anything else, is a drop of Christian love? Why is it that conservative Christians, who talk so forcefully about the need for America to return to Christian values, cannot find it in their hearts to love their enemies, turn the other cheek, and (maybe) reach out to the Osama bin Ladens, Nasrallahs, and Ahmadinejads of the world?

Jesus said (as quoted in Matthew 24) that in the last days, the love of men would "grow cold." In an age when Christians would rather turn on their TV sets, watch "Praise the Lord," and vote Republican than address the very real spiritual decay that is occuring both around the world and within our own borders, perhaps we have moved even beyond coldness . . . to a complete lack of interest in love itself. When we have lost the ability even to allow our hearts to soften in the face of the suffering, the lonely, and the afraid, we have lost any semblance of what it means to have Christ inside of us--the same Christ who touched lepers, the same Christ who was mobbed by beggars, sickly people, and disreputable vagabonds and criminals and said not a word of exasperation or disdain.

We should all be on our knees, begging the God whose name we invoke whenever we lie, steal, or covet not to cast our souls into the abyss . . . quaking with fear before the Christ whose sacrifice we demean by using it as our personal escape clause.

That is the point of this blog entry--to highlight the fact that, in spite of 6000 years of recorded history, in spite of the Bible's record of a God who is trying--and failing--to get a humanity interested in its own desires to wake up and allow itself to become mature in its relationship to its Creator, and yes, in spite of all our technological advances, we are no better today than the people recorded in Genesis 2 and 3 were. In our ignorance, we look at the story of Genesis 2-3 and wonder why the first man and woman could have walked away from God in their hearts, when we are busily hungering after the same fruit they ate, and the same promise of elevation to godhood.

If it is one thing that the Bible shows us, it is that we are fools. We may try to avoid this ugly truth about ourselves by taking verses out of context or even dismissing the Bible altogether, but its message--and that message's implications--still stand. As we look over Genesis 2, 3, and 4, may we also examine ourselves, and see how deep and how wide and how monstrously undeserved is the love of the Christ we invoke so frivolously.

Genesis 2 and a Few Notes on Textual Transmission

2007-04-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Bible, as we know it, was not originally constructed in the way that it appears in many editions today--books divided into chapters, which in turn are divided into verses. For example, the book we are studying now--Genesis--was originally written down in scroll form and passed down as one complete text, without divisions at all. (No chapters--and yes, no verses.)

Chapters and verses were inserted into both the Old and New Testaments during the Dark and Middle Ages in Europe, as scribes who were invested with the task of copying the Bible used a number system in order to track the sentences they were writing. Eventually, as the system worked well for clergymen who were given the task of interpreting the Bible for illiterate European towns and villages, chapters and verses became the norm.

You may wonder how the ancient Israelis were able to keep track of textual information whenever they needed to copy and recopy it, if the original texts of the Hebrew Bible did not include chapters and verses. The answer is as simple as it is shocking to 21st century ears: They knew the stories through oral transmission, so they knew when one ended and another began.

For example, Genesis 1 ends on the sixth stanza of what the ancient Hebrews would have remembered as a seven-stanza litany of God's creation and order, as well as God's relationship with humankind. In the Bibles published today, however, the seventh stanza appears, not at the end of Genesis 1, but at the beginning of Genesis 2:

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

I believe that this song, in its entirity, must have been recited by schoolchildren, as it evidences a rhythm and verb phrasing that could be easily memorized. Moreover, Genesis 1:1-2:3 serves as an excellent introduction to children of not only the existence and lordship of God but of the seven day week, the Sabbath, and the relationship between God and adam or human beings. An agricultural society in which writing was generally restricted to the priestly class (and in which writing may have been severely limited within the priestly class itself) would have passed on its knowledge, its traditions, and its beliefs from father to son, and mother to daughter, through the use of songs and stories.

Even in the 21st century, almost every schoolchild knows the significance of the words "Once upon a time . . . " even when those words are not followed by an actual story--and most of us know the structural significance of "And they lived happily ever after" in children's stories, that those words always appear at the end. Is it not conceivable that a generation of people who grew up memorizing songs like "row row row your boat" and "happy birthday to you" could imagine a culture in which knowledge was passed down from parent to child in rhyme and verse?

If not, then perhaps it would be instructive for me to provide an example of the kind of song I think Genesis 1:1-2:3 bears closest resemblance to (structurally) today:

On the first day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

A Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the second day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

2 Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the third day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

3 French Hens

2 Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the fourth day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

4 Calling Birds

3 French Hens

2 Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the fifth day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

5 Golden Rings

4 Calling Birds

3 French Hens

2 Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the sixth day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

6 Geese a Laying

5 Golden Rings

4 Calling Birds

3 French Hens

2 Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the seventh day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

7 Swans a Swimming

6 Geese a Laying

5 Golden Rings

4 Calling Birds

3 French Hens

2 Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the eighth day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

8 Maids a Milking

7 Swans a Swimming

6 Geese a Laying

5 Golden Rings

4 Calling Birds

3 French Hens

2 Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the ninth day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

9 Ladies Dancing

8 Maids a Milking

7 Swans a Swimming

6 Geese a Laying

5 Golden Rings

4 Calling Birds

3 French Hens

2 Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the tenth day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

10 Lords a Leaping

9 Ladies Dancing

8 Maids a Milking

7 Swans a Swimming

6 Geese a Laying

5 Golden Rings

4 Calling Birds

3 French Hens

2 Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the eleventh day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

11 Pipers Piping

10 Lords a Leaping

9 Ladies Dancing

8 Maids a Milking

7 Swans a Swimming

6 Geese a Laying

5 Golden Rings

4 Calling Birds

3 French Hens

2 Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the first day of Christmas

my true love sent to me:

12 Drummers Drumming

11 Pipers Piping

10 Lords a Leaping

9 Ladies Dancing

8 Maids a Milking

7 Swans a Swimming

6 Geese a Laying

5 Golden Rings

4 Calling Birds

3 French Hens

2 Turtle Doves

and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

Yes--I'm saying that Genesis 1:1-2:3 is the structural equivalent of "The 12 Days of Christmas." (I hope I haven't been responsible for someone's heart attack as they read the above lyrics and realized, to their horror, the analogy I was making.)

The Bible is a remarkable collection of texts . . . but even more remarkable is the time period and civilization in which they were produced. As we will see, the ancient Hebrews were, according to the Torah, intended to be a society not only vastly different from the postmodern cultural matrix we inhabit today but also a nation far different than any of the kingdoms--such as Assyria, Persia, Babylon, or Egypt--that we have come to associate with the Middle East as it was (or must have been) 4000 years ago. To understand fully the depth and complexity of Israel's relationship with the God that Western societies adopted as their own for two millennia, it is important for us to fully appreciate the blueprint, core values, and structure of Israeli civilization--both as it was, and as the Torah indicates it should be.

Genesis 1 (continued)

2007-04-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

The society in which the book of Genesis was composed did not (and does not) bear any resemblance to that of the United States or to Western European nations--indeed, the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, is thorougly Middle Eastern in character, tone, and temperament . . . a point which seems to have become lost on seminarians, church leaders, and the grass roots elements of what has been ubiquitously termed "America's religious right."

The culture in which the Bible was first produced was a culture without mass literacy, without individualism, and without the concepts of economics that we would normally classify under "capitalism." The Torah, in particular, is written in such a way as to suggest that, rather than a composite of two groups of authors, it must have originated first as a series of oral compositions passed down from generation to generation in story or song form. Hence, the books that compose the Torah, particularly the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, are themselves collections of materials that were originally recited from memory by the ancient Israeli priests.

I would recommend that anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of the nature and character of the texts which we collectively call the Old Testament (or the Hebrew Bible) read Eric A. Havelock's Preface to Plato. His thesis is that the Iliad and the Odyssey, while traditionally attributed to the genius of an anonymous poet referred to in later Greek literature as "Homer," was in fact the equivalent of a modern encyclopedia--a repository of cultural information that was originally recited by the Greek high priests in song and rhythmic utterance. Using the frequency of particular words and phrases in the text, which are often repeated, Havelock argues that both the Iliad and Odyssey must have been great songs that were recited, in part or in their entirity, during religious festivals or community events, then written down when it became expedient for priests to have something more permanent than human memory to use as a base for their recitations.

Havelock's argument is convincing, particularly as it covers the development of a society that, at the time in which these two epics were composed, was largely illiterate--and I think the same logic also applies to the Hebrew Bible, particularly since many verses in the Torah, the Wisdom literature, and the books of the Prophets urge the listener to "keep the word of God" on his "mouth." Indeed, the bulk of the Old Testament is not written for readers but for listeners, as is clear in verses from Isaiah such as "They will hear but not understand," and even verses from the New Testament such as the injunction from James to be "doers of the word" rather than "hearers."

Reading silently--the mode which we normally associate with the act of reading--was uncommon before the advent of mass publication via the printing press. In ancient times, when the New Testament was read at all, it was read aloud--to an audience without the benefit of microphones, labor saving devices, or modes of transportation more effecient than the horse or the human foot. We must also keep in mind that the community of people to whom these texts would have been read would have been Middle Eastern, not European, with values more similar to the precepts of traditional Arabian societies than to anything we would notice as "Western" or even "American." We often, in our zeal to preserve some vestige of spiritual ferment in a postmodern matrix that is rapidly decaying, fail to consider this basic point, and in order to have even a minimal appreciation of what God was attempting to accomplish in the creation of Israel, it is important for us to move beyond concepts of culture mired in a 21st century industrial/information complex which the writers of the Bible would at the very least have found alien, if not utterly antithetical, to their core values.

With that in mind, Genesis 1 becomes, not a record or an account, but a repository of cultural information and priorities in song--and at its core, Genesis 1 is a relentless eulogy of order. Its stanzas, its metrics, and its word choice are intended to convey the impression of a God who exacts a degree of unparalleled stability and peace out of darkest chaos. Its structure, moreover, firmly places God in the position of preeminence, preexistence, and pretemporality.

Verse 1 inaugurates the story of God's interaction with the human race in bold terms:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

This, in the text, is the equivalent of an overture--the preamble of everything not only contained in this chapter but in the entire Torah. The next 4 verses serve as the first of 6 stanzas in a song that encapsulates every aspect of Israelis' understandings of God and his purposes in this world:

The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good--and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning, one day.

God's establishment of highly defined borders--"light" and "dark"--pervades every subsequent stanza in this narrative:

Then God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse--and it was so. God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.

Then God said, "Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear," and it was so. God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters he called seas--and God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them," and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind--and God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning, a third day.

Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years--and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth," and it was so. God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also. God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness--and God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

The rhythmic pattern begun in stanza 3/day 3 continues in the following stanza:

Then God said, "Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens." God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind--and God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." There was evening and there was morning, a fifth day

And at the beginning of stanza 6/day 6 as well:

Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind," and it was so. God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind--and God saw that it was good.

Here, however, the song takes a completely different direction:

Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him--male and female He created them.

These last 2 verses, verses 26 and 27, do not correspond to the rhythmic formulas of either the previous stanzas or of this one--they are, in character, more like the first verse of Genesis 1, which serves as a declaration or "stop." The point of this song, after all, is God's relationship with humankind, not merely God's creation of the Earth, and those who recited and memorized these verses must have been keenly aware of this fact as they spoke these words. It is not enough that human beings are given dominion over every living thing on the Earth that God has created, but in the rhythm of the statement "God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him--male and female He created them," the act of stamping the "image" of God onto the first man and woman is celebrated in both lyric and cadence--echoing the very first verse of the Bible:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

These two "stops" or breaks in the rhythmic utterance of the Earth's creation represent an important link--doubtless obvious in the minds of its original hearers, even if on an unconscious level--between God's dominion and humankind's subject position to God. In the image of God we are created--in other words, we have core attributes that are evocative of the attributes of God--but we are not God ourselves.

This is a concept that would have been far more acceptable to a culture such as those that existed in the Middle East 4000 years ago than it is to postmodern American or Western Europeans today. People without electricity, without running water, without the ability to contact family and friends long distance except through the undertaking of arduous, often dangerous, journeys . . . these people would have had a far more concrete understanding of the relationship between human beings and their God, a God on whom they depended for rain, for good harvests, and for protection from their enemies. This understanding, unfortunately, is virtually impossible for a person mired in the multimedia, materialism, and mechanical smoothness of the 21st century "first world" to imagine, let alone adopt, without severe changes in the way he or she approaches technology, ideas, and other people. It is for this reason that scholarship on the Bible, and on the verses I have here focused my attention in this blog entry, increasingly misses the point.

For example

God blessed them--and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed--it shall be food for you--and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food," and it was so.

was not understood to represent a carte blanche from God for human beings to commit rampant acts of destruction upon the Earth in the name of "development" or "domestication." It was, instead, understood by ancient Israelis to signify a relationship of harmony between human beings and the rest of God's creation--Israelis, after all, were well aware that eating meat was not healthy, either for their own bodies or for the survival of the animals on which they depended for clothing, sacrifices, and milk.

Genesis 1 ends with the following verse, which also ends stanza 6/day 6:

God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Note that day 6/stanza 6 represents an interruption in the rhythm of the song--it is a suggestion in the minds of the listeners that humanity's introduction to the creation constituted an interruption in the order of God. Nothing in Genesis 1 states explicitly that human sin brought disease, pain, and chaos to the world God intended to be a paradise, but Hebrew children who memorized this chapter at home would certainly have been aware of something un-utopian in its structure. Human beings, having been given characteristics evocative of God, are placed in direct subjection to God--having authority over all the plants and animals of the Earth but not final authority.

It is perhaps at this point in their recitation that ancient Israeli priests understood, more keenly than a human heart can express in words, the tragedy of the story that is recounted in Genesis 2 and 3 . . .

Genesis 1

2007-04-21T10:36:00.001-07:00

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the waters. The God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

These words have caused more animosity within the United States over the past several decades than any other words from the Bible. To advocates of atheism, or advocates of the vigorous separation of church and state in public school curricula, Genesis 1:1-3 serves as the anthem of everything inimical to their freedom. To conservative Christian groups, and their grass roots supporters, these verses serve as a reminder of what the United States has lost in its relentless 150 year drive toward secularism. Even within Christianity itself, there is a bitter division between those who read these verses (and the rest of Genesis 1) literally, and proponents of liberation, feminist, and other theologies that advocate, at the very least, a metaphorical reading, if not absolute dismissal.

Personally, I think these arguments miss the point. After all, anyone with even minimal intelligence can see that this world, so intricately interwoven in all its raw elements, did not accidentally take the shape or form in which it exists today--and neither did we. Moreover, even the most ardent student of evolution must admit, even if only to himself, that the process of species change is, to our knowledge, severely limited to the development of particular animals and plants. (It is impossible, for example, that an amoeba can evolve into anything other than an amoeba, even it it becomes a better amoeba.)

Perhaps it would behoove us to ask ourselves another question as we consider Genesis 1: Why is it so easy for us to believe in a God who assumes human form, dies on a cross, and rises from the dead . . . but not a God who can create the world and the rest of the universe we can see in 6 days? If modern (and postmodern) skepticism and logical empiricism have not proven the existence of God, after all, they have not disproven his existence, either--and I believe that a society whose best answer to the question of God's existence is "I don't know" has no business attempting to prove or disprove the veracity of a 6 day creation.

Ultimately, it is a matter of faith--either I trust that the God of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is capable of creating the world in 6 days, or I don't. If Jesus was capable of raising the dead, healing the blind, and delivering people of demon possession in a matter of seconds, then surely the same Jesus, through whom John tells us that the world came into being, was capable of bringing every atom of our world and sky together in a matter of days.

Listen to John 1:1-3 . . .

In the beginning was the Word [Jesus Christ], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and apart from him nothing came into being that has come into being.

Or Colossians 1:15-16 . . .

He [Jesus Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities--all things have been created through him and for him.

And lest we think that the writers of John and Colossians were smoking weed . . .

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God--in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day--therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.

Exodus 20-8-11, #4 of the 10 Commandments

And this is what Jesus himself said of the above words (and others like them) from the Torah:

Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets [the Old Testament]--I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

Matthew 5:17-18

We will cover these verses, and the rest of Genesis 1, in detail during the next post, but I want all of you to remember one thing: This book that rests in so many of our houses unread is the account of a God who asks one thing of each one of us--to take what he says at face value, in faith. It was a requirement, not only for the ancient Israelites and their forefathers but for men like Paul, Peter, John, Mark, Luke, Matthew, Apollos, Stephen, and hundreds, thousands, perhaps ten thousands of believers who gladly and wholeheartedly took on the name of Christ during the church's inception and over the last 2000 years of its existence. If you, or I, or anyone, cannot take this collection of writings at face value, on faith . . . then our Christianity is in serious doubt.

An Apology to Readers

2007-04-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, as my wife and I were returning home from an outing at Uno's, a local Italian restaurant in Fort Worth's downtown area, we stopped at the bus station so that she could use the bathroom. While I was waiting for her, an African American man (who had clearly not eaten for a while) walked up to me and asked if I could spare some change so he could get something to eat. I gave him a dollar, which was all I had (though I did have some spare quarters which I didn't even think about giving him)--then he asked if I could spare whatever was in the "to go" box I was carrying from Uno's (two slices of pizza left over from our dinner).

I said no.

My wife came out immediately afterward, and as we walked to the bus station, she asked me what was wrong (my wife always knows when I'm upset about something). I told her what happened, and the more I revealed, the worse I felt, until I decided that she and I would search the building for the man so I could give him our pizza.

We didn't find him.

I know some of you have finished reading this story thinking, "What's the problem?" After all, the institutional church tells us, we live in an age of grace, and God isn't going to get upset over a little box of pizza, is he? Besides, the man was probably scamming for whatever he could get from me, right?

If that's your point of view, you may find the following passage--words quoted directly from Jesus himself--somewhat disconcerting:

But when the Son of Man [Jesus himself] comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep on his right and the goats on the left.

Then the king will say to those on his right, "Come, you who are blessed of my Father; inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited me in; naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me." Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed you, or thirsty, and give you something to drink? And when did we see you a stranger, and invite you in, or naked, and clothe you? When did we see you sick, or in prison, and come to you?" The king will answer and say to them, "Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even to the least of them, you did it to me."

The he will also say to those on his left, "Depart from me, you accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels--for I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in; naked, and you did not clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit me." Then they themselves also will answer, "Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of you?" Then he will answer them, "Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me." These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

--Matthew 25:31-46

I know--and have heard--a lot of preachers loudly proclaiming the stakes of not being right with God, that eternal life in hell awaits those who do not fall before the feet of Christ and allow their souls to be surrendered to him, but hellfire is not simply for those who fail to recite a 60 second loyalty oath to Jesus Christ in a church. It is for those who, turning a blind eye to the suffering and needy, prefer to cater to their own selfish desires rather than risk life and possessions for others. In this respect, then, people like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini represent the cream of the crop in terms of hell-worthiness, but the rest of us, particularly those of us who live in and actively pursue the cultural priorities of the United States, may not be far behind.

Jesus came to me yesterday, and asked for the equivalent of a loaf of bread . . . and I turned him away.

A Note on What Happened in Virginia a Few Days Ago

2007-04-20T07:40:00.000-07:00

I have said before that in a nation where inspiration and soul-health are regarded as less important than buying a nicer car, having the "right" friends, and pursuing as many forms of entertainment as possible, acts of violence will become increasingly bizarre, desperate, and animalistic in their brutality.

What disturbs me about this crime is not the university's apparent lack of foresight in attempting to inform students of potential danger but the fact that, even in the face of a mass slaying that repeated--spiritually, emotionally, and physically--the brutality of Columbine, no one seems to care about the social and spiritual dimensions of a culture that produces random acts of violence. I remember that in the days and weeks after the Columbine shootings, students of the school talked at great length about the social caste system that existed there, a system in which certain people were targeted for cruelty because they were not part of an established group. Eight years later, in the wake of a similar (but deadlier) incident, it seems that none of the dialogue that occurred in high schools and colleges as a result of the events at Columbine carries any weight--either for students, or for our society as a whole:

Once, in English class at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., when the teacher had the students read aloud, Cho looked down when it was his turn, said Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior and high school classmate. After the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho began reading in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said.

"The whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,'" Davids said.

To me, the brutality of a society in which an Asian student can be stereotyped, harassed, and mistreated at will by both teachers and students is alarming, but what is even more alarming is the following sentence, taken from the same Yahoo article in which I found the above incident described:

Another expert who has worked with mentally disturbed young criminals suggested that Cho's actions probably had genetic causes.

"This is very different" from someone who was bullied to the breaking point — Cho was clearly psychotic and delusional, said Dr. Louis Kraus, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center.

In my spare time, I have been reading The Holocaust Chronicle, a compendium of articles and photographs which leads the reader through a year-by-year account of the events that occurred in Germany and the rest of Europe in the 1930s and '40s, and one of the more disturbing aspects of the Nazi state was the extent to which genetics became an all-determining factor. Children's hair, eyes, and teeth were examined for specific racial characteristics, either to grant them status as full citizens or to identify them as targets for future isolation and liquidation. One photograph in particular displayed a child whose chin was raised by a medical doctor who, given the amiability of everyone in the frame, was in the process of certifying the child as "fit" for school and citizenship.

This photograph was taken in 1935 . . . and it seems that 72 years later, we are poised to begin making the same mistakes all over again. The doctrine of "survival of the fittest" assumed a place of first importance in a society that would see 6 million people killed in gas chambers, firing squads, and death camps--and it seems that this doctrine has more than adequate support in the United States, a country which routinely murders at least 2 million babies a year in the service of personal convenience.

I shudder at the prospect of the nightmares this nation can bring to the world if we, as a people, cannot find it within our hearts to abandon the culture of self-indulgence we have created.

Some Notes on the Book of Genesis

2007-04-19T16:12:00.000-07:00

In the last year I attended my parents' church, I sat in on a Sunday School class in which one of the students proclaimed her antipathy for the first 5 books of the Old Testament, and for the Old Testament in general. The disregard for human life, in particular, was a source of consternation for her, as it is for me . . . but I suspect that part of the reason she didn't like these books of the Bible lay in all of the rules and regulations for the ancient Israelites.

It is a common complaint within the American churches these days that the Old Testament is, at its core, obsolete. After all, so the argument goes, we are under grace now, not law, and it is not necessary for us to adhere to all of those "ridiculous" statutes in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Torah (as those books are called) is for ancient and modern Jews, not Christians, and certainly has no application to a world with eletric generators, nuclear physicists, and the World Wide Web--a world, it is presumed, which has outgrown such barbarities as animal sacrifice.

As I read the Torah years ago, and as I have been re-reading it in recent months, I have come to realize that what so many of us find objectionable in its pages has nothing to do with animal sacrifices . . . instead, our opposition arises from the simple prejudice of a heart that is unwilling to see its desires challenged. From sexuality to diet, even to the way we dress and conduct ourselves toward strangers, the Torah is a surgical instrument cutting away at the fat that keeps our spiritual blood from pumping. The God of the Torah is not the nice God of the 21st century American church--death, while a stiff punishment for adultery or idol worship, serves to illustrate the point that every sin has a price.

Today, American culture is an endless scream of wants--voices crying out words like "freedom" and "liberty" in the name of self-gratification. It is inconceivable to generations born less than 40 years ago that we can do without things such as VCR's, televisions, and cell phones, and yet for centuries, human beings not only existed without such conveniences but thrived in their absence. Having an ability to split the atom or conduct genetic research does not indicate that a culture is enlightened--and we should not make the mistake our Greco-Roman forbears made in confusing technology and ingenuity with lasting wisdom.

What the Bible teaches us--what the first 5 books in particular teach us--is that a nation's viability lies not within its clever tricks and devices, but within its people's surrender to a consistent pattern of obedience to a God who demands nothing less than self-sacrifice in the service of others. Where Israel went wrong was not in its lack of interest in committing bloodshed--the Old Testament, after all, is replete with stories of genocide and atavistic violence in the name of God--but in its lack of interest in allowing God to divest its people of their petty conveniences: mental, physical, and spiritual.

The book of Genesis, in this context, is not merely the origin story of an obscure people who happened to be remembered because of one of their descendants (Jesus Christ)--it is, instead, a series of promises, reminders of what Israel could have been . . . and wasn't. The first four chapters of Genesis parallel the rest of the Old Testament, telling the story of a dream created by God that became darkest nightmare through the actions of men and women. The fall of Adam and Eve parallels the slower, later fall of Israel in the pages of Kings and Chronicles, as soul-potential is wasted again and again . . . and in the distance, I believe we can hear the laughter of the very same serpent who tore paradise apart.

I hope that, as we read Genesis together, you see not only what the Lord was saying to the ancient Israelites who preserved its contents over three millennia but what the Lord is saying to you, me, and every one of us. The same judgment that fell on the ancient kingdom of Israel is one that looms over every nation that does not set as a priority the well-being of its people . . . and it looms over the heart of every man, woman, and child who takes the name of God but fails to heed the cries of strangers in pain.

April 20, 2007

2007-04-19T07:16:00.000-07:00

We live in a society in which the Bible rests comfortably on bookshelves or coffee tables, and is never actually read. As a result, the Bible becomes a tool for debate, an intellectual puzzle, or repository of pagan-style chants rather than what it actually is . . . and as I read (and am now re-reading) the Bible, I see that it is neither a love letter nor a set of instructions, as evangelical and/or charismatic Christians around me always claimed.

Instead, the Bible is a sad story.

In its pages is the account of a God who works tirelessly to prevent a world from rushing headlong into a chasm of darkness and self-destruction, only to fail. The garden of Eden, meant to be an idyllic paradise without suffering, became one of the human race's most bitter memories; the nation of Israel, meant to be a pure exemplar of God's character and power to a world divided against itself, instead became a source of tears and ridicule; and the church, having begun in a display of clear manifestations of God through Jesus Christ and the baptism of the Holy Spirit . . . decayed. The end of the Bible, the book of Revelation, which describes in detail Christ's return to the Earth, was a source of hope for Christians languishing under persecution, but it is also a testimony of deep sorrow. In the end, God is left with a second coming that will constitute, not a redemption for the entire human race, but the gathering of a few scattered people here and there whose interests lay in the well-being of others.

The Bible, at its core, is not designed to make its readers comfortable--hence, I suspect, people feel more drawn to Christian self-help books, videotapes, and CD's which offer promises of self-actualization and fulfillment without due soul-searching and personal reflection. Instead, at its core, the Bible is a window of truth into the dark heart of the human race, unrelenting in its honesty.

We live in a society without inspiration, without ideals--a soecity that, no matter how many toys it generates, is utterly lifeless. This absence of spiritual vitality is nowhere more evident than in the events that occurred at Virginia Tech 3 days ago--in a society in which soul-health has become less important than the prospect of buying a car, having the "right" friends, and engaging in as many selfish modes of entertainment as possible, it is inevitable that acts of violence will become all the more bizarre, desperate, and animalistic in their brutality. The greater our efforts to ignore the spiritual deficit which is so plainly obvious in every facet of our society, the higher the price we will eventually pay when we can no longer avoid the consequences of our actions.

It is with the hope of averting a catastrophe beyond humanity's worst nightmares that I write this blog. I hope that as you read it, you will be confronted not only with the words of the Bible but with the spirit of the Bible as well, a spirit that yearns for the reconciliation of every lost and wandering soul in this world with its creator. Christ, as John so eloquently states in his gospel, is every word of God revealed in the pages of the Bible personified--love, judgment, and mercy, as well as unrelenting truth.

May you come to know him through its pages, and may you encounter his spirit through the reflections contained in this blog.

April 19, 2007

2007-04-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

Hi, and welcome to my blog. I am sure you are probably wondering what the II in Sabbath Breakers II stands for--I haven't posted in my original blog for some time now, essentially because I have spent the past 3 or 4 months getting engaged, married, and reoriented to all of the changes in a man's life that having a woman brings. I also felt that it was time to move from a purely self-reflective chronicle of my spiritual wanderings and issues into an online journal that was centered on the Bible.

With that in mind, I think I should share some of my personal history with the Bible and with the Christian faith. I began reading the Bible in 1996, partially as a result of a spiritual quest sparked in a class at Eastern Mennonite University called Faith and the Old Testament. The class was fairly unremarkable in terms of spiritual depth, but it was the first time I had ever attended a university-level course (or a course of any kind) in which the Bible was a textbook. I had tried to read the Bible several times before on my own, but to me, it was gibberish--it didn't make any sense.

With the historical understanding I had gained from Faith and the Old Testament, I began reading the Bible from the first chapter of Genesis in 1996 . . . and resumed reading 3 years later, midway through the book of Exodus. By early 2000, I had finished reading the Bible all the way through, and as a result, I had become a different person. I knew that the God of the Bible was real and that the Bible itself, due to the complexity of its origin and the fact that through all of the books collected in its canon one voice carried over all others, was divinely inspired.

I received Christ as my personal Lord and Savior in October 1999, and I wish I could say that my spiritual questions and dilemmas ended then (for more information on that, please see my original Sabbath Breakers blog). Sadly, it seems that the institutional churches of the United States are poor instructors of what it means to be a Christian. As a result, whenever I write online regarding anything spiritual, particularly anything Christian, I write as if I were corresponding with another soul who, like me, has encountered hurtful behavior from people whose faith should scream "peace."

In my blog, I will focus on the Bible . . . meaning that I will take it as my text. This blog will not be a commentary per se--God knows we have enough of those, and frankly, too many of them aren't collecting dust in a library somewhere, as far as I'm concerned. It will also not be a devotional--I find devotionals to be almost as interesting as the paper they're written on most of the time, with the possible exception of those little booklets from RBC ministries, and I am quite tired of the multimillion dollar cottage industry that has sprung up around the concept of the 365 day devotional.

Instead, this blog is . . . what I just called it--a blog that focuses on the Bible.

One warning, however: In this blog, I will not, repeat NOT, offer platitudes, easy to remember sayings, or half-baked spiritual home remedies. If you are here looking for some sort of quick fix to the issues that plague your soul, you've come to the wrong place. I can't heal your soul any more than I can make an alarm clock spin around with my mind, but I can point you in the direction of someone who not only has the ability to cure you of every spiritual disease, but who has been desperately waiting for you to give him a chance.

I'm speaking, of course, of Jesus Christ. Romans 10:9 says that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Note that it doesn't say that if you mumble a few words along with a preacher during an altar call or recite all the right answers you remembered from summer Bible school, you will be saved. Confession here is the same as confession anywhere else--it is the act of admitting something you already accepted.

Receiving Christ as your personal Lord and Savior is a matter of the heart--and if I may ask, where is your heart as you read this blog entry?