Like Jesus, Christians must be from AMONG—not from APART
One of the things about Messiah Jesus that impresses me most is that not only was he human—and fully so—but that he stood among his fellow-humans on common ground. He ministered out of shared human experience, albeit without human failure.
“Is not this the carpenter’s son?” people said, “where did this man get these things? After all, we know his family and brothers and sisters.”
Not a piously aloof graduate of the Rabbinic Schools; he was in the trades! Whose son you were was one of the first questions asked about anyone who began to come to notice. Of David, Saul had asked the same question, “whose son is he?” Pedigree mattered!
Jesus’ schooling, apart from synagogue school when young, was life; and he was required to have some 30 years of it prior to launching into his Father’s mission. Life!—in a carpenter or artisan’s workshop, into which came every specimen of Nazareth’s and Galilee’s life of the day. Merchants and traders, farm boys, the well-heeled and the poor, the lame and the sick, fishermen, hucksters, tax-collectors and pretenders, newly-weds along with soldiers and women of doubtful repute. Jesus got to know them all; some were generous and some didn’t pay their bills or always had an excuse. Colourful language? He’d heard it all. He knew of drought and hardship, as he knew also of field and crop and agriculture, otherwise from whence did all the stories and similes come?
Full immersion in life was exactly why he connected effectively with all and sundry. He could tell stories of thieves and insistent widows and children’s games and of weddings and funerals and feasts and food and wine. He used experiences from life’s realities to touch every heart experiencing its joys and woes. Tales of vineyard owners and stewards; of disappointments and of women preparing bread or anxious over the housekeeping money they’ve misplaced; of fishers’ nets and farmer’s fields; of rogues, villains and cheats. Situations and people recognised by all. LIFE!
His years of immersion in ‘real’ life was utterly necessary so that his message, when it came, was not as one shouted across a chasm by a detached professor with a bunch of theories—like the message of the scholars and Pharisees. No! Where Jesus was ‘coming from’ would resonate instantly with commoners or aristocrat alike, evidencing rich human encounter and a wealth of observation of the ‘ticking’ of the worlds of men, women and children.
Having ‘seen it all’ and then some, he understood them and their joys, anxieties, longings and frustrations, and—he understood clearly his Father’s mission and heart for them all.
And so, he presented to them all (and each) an alternative personal government; the government, or kingdom, of God which could change everything—EVERYTHING—in the lives of those who would embrace it. Right there.
And...right now too!
One of the things about Messiah Jesus that impresses me most is that not only was he human—and fully so—but that he stood among his fellow-humans on common ground. He ministered out of shared human experience, albeit without human failure.
“Is not this the carpenter’s son?” people said, “where did this man get these things? After all, we know his family and brothers and sisters.”
Not a piously aloof graduate of the Rabbinic Schools; he was in the trades! Whose son you were was one of the first questions asked about anyone who began to come to notice. Of David, Saul had asked the same question, “whose son is he?” Pedigree mattered!
Jesus’ schooling, apart from synagogue school when young, was life; and he was required to have some 30 years of it prior to launching into his Father’s mission. Life!—in a carpenter or artisan’s workshop, into which came every specimen of Nazareth’s and Galilee’s life of the day. Merchants and traders, farm boys, the well-heeled and the poor, the lame and the sick, fishermen, hucksters, tax-collectors and pretenders, newly-weds along with soldiers and women of doubtful repute. Jesus got to know them all; some were generous and some didn’t pay their bills or always had an excuse. Colourful language? He’d heard it all. He knew of drought and hardship, as he knew also of field and crop and agriculture, otherwise from whence did all the stories and similes come?
Full immersion in life was exactly why he connected effectively with all and sundry. He could tell stories of thieves and insistent widows and children’s games and of weddings and funerals and feasts and food and wine. He used experiences from life’s realities to touch every heart experiencing its joys and woes. Tales of vineyard owners and stewards; of disappointments and of women preparing bread or anxious over the housekeeping money they’ve misplaced; of fishers’ nets and farmer’s fields; of rogues, villains and cheats. Situations and people recognised by all. LIFE!
His years of immersion in ‘real’ life was utterly necessary so that his message, when it came, was not as one shouted across a chasm by a detached professor with a bunch of theories—like the message of the scholars and Pharisees. No! Where Jesus was ‘coming from’ would resonate instantly with commoners or aristocrat alike, evidencing rich human encounter and a wealth of observation of the ‘ticking’ of the worlds of men, women and children.
Having ‘seen it all’ and then some, he understood them and their joys, anxieties, longings and frustrations, and—he understood clearly his Father’s mission and heart for them all.
And so, he presented to them all (and each) an alternative personal government; the government, or kingdom, of God which could change everything—EVERYTHING—in the lives of those who would embrace it. Right there.
And...right now too!
'...HE SHUT UP JOHN IN PRISON'
(Luke 3:20)!!
Here was Herod the tetrarch’s way of handling the Truth as it came from God, via John the Baptist.
The prophet had dared to rebuke Herod for taking his own brother’s wife, along with other evils. She was known as Herodias.
So Herod shut John up by shutting him up!
When those in government and those who pull their strings don’t like the truth because it discloses sin, including their own, the reaction quickly becomes vindictive. Clearly, John was a bigot, a serial pest—and a danger to healthy society! He must be shut up! For goodness sake; didn’t John know you can’t go around calling out sin and confronting it!?
And—here we are today, with some civil leaders and governments doing all they can to silence gospel Truth. It too must be shut up. You can’t go around saying that certain actions and behaviours are sin. That offends—and to offend is the most heinous of sins—far, far worse that adultery or fornication, for example!
Actually, this disgusting creature John, SO offended Herodias that she ensured John could not even speak in or from prison—or ever again. She made certain he was ‘shut up’ permanently by contriving to have his head, off!
This is how Satan does his work in every age. Jesus too of course, was among the grossest of offenders. He took up where his cousin John had been cut off (in a manner of speaking!) and managed also to offend (it ran in the family!) not so much the government, but the religious elite!
Mark my words: Unless (until) we see a wide and deep spiritual revival in our land, this is where we are headed. The Truth will offend; the Gospel will offend. Not because we desire to offend but because sin will be exposed.
But the reaction of unrepentant and ‘offended sinners’ will be the same as Herod’s; to attempt to ‘shut up’ believers by passing laws that prohibit this offensive ‘hate’ speech—and when that doesn’t work, to decapitate the Church.
(Luke 3:20)!!
Here was Herod the tetrarch’s way of handling the Truth as it came from God, via John the Baptist.
The prophet had dared to rebuke Herod for taking his own brother’s wife, along with other evils. She was known as Herodias.
So Herod shut John up by shutting him up!
When those in government and those who pull their strings don’t like the truth because it discloses sin, including their own, the reaction quickly becomes vindictive. Clearly, John was a bigot, a serial pest—and a danger to healthy society! He must be shut up! For goodness sake; didn’t John know you can’t go around calling out sin and confronting it!?
And—here we are today, with some civil leaders and governments doing all they can to silence gospel Truth. It too must be shut up. You can’t go around saying that certain actions and behaviours are sin. That offends—and to offend is the most heinous of sins—far, far worse that adultery or fornication, for example!
Actually, this disgusting creature John, SO offended Herodias that she ensured John could not even speak in or from prison—or ever again. She made certain he was ‘shut up’ permanently by contriving to have his head, off!
This is how Satan does his work in every age. Jesus too of course, was among the grossest of offenders. He took up where his cousin John had been cut off (in a manner of speaking!) and managed also to offend (it ran in the family!) not so much the government, but the religious elite!
Mark my words: Unless (until) we see a wide and deep spiritual revival in our land, this is where we are headed. The Truth will offend; the Gospel will offend. Not because we desire to offend but because sin will be exposed.
But the reaction of unrepentant and ‘offended sinners’ will be the same as Herod’s; to attempt to ‘shut up’ believers by passing laws that prohibit this offensive ‘hate’ speech—and when that doesn’t work, to decapitate the Church.
EQUALITY or ACCOUNTABILITY? Accountability? Of course, once you’ve managed to remove God, you’ve managed (in your mind at least) to remove the idea of final or ultimate accountability. From thereon once the words equality or inequality are used you have introduced into the discussion the idea that equal-ness is somehow always intrinsically right and true; in other words, righteous. And once you’ve gone that far and that idea has not only been planted but has taken root and begun to grow, why then the word inequality becomes freighted with certain connotations not only of wrong-ness, but eventually, of evil. But is equal-ness any sort of a synonym for righteousness? Of course not! Otherwise we would consider it wrong that someone is unequal in height to me, or I could imagine that I am suffering some form of injustice because I am less artistically (or athletically or intellectually or...?) capable than another. So what do people mean when they beat the ‘equality’ or ‘inequality’ drum? It seems to me there is frequently a distorted agenda where the word inequality is deliberately introduced to imply or mean injustice and of an evil which demands to be righted—where no such evil actually or factually exists. It is then being used as a ploy to fulfil a particular lust or agenda. It is merely and invention for the purpose of crying ‘inequality’ (and inducing guilt or shame). Though both boats, an oil tanker is an altogether different thing to a fishing vessel. It would be no good them crying inequality because they are each rated or taxed according to their purpose and accountability! So...men and women are not equal, but different. For one obvious thing they are very different in build, physical stature and usually, physical strength. In the sight of their Creator they are of equal VALUE but they are DIFFERENT, having different roles and, by and large, different accountabilities before Him. In the accompanying picture each side of the scale is of equal value or weight, yet clearly they account for their VALUE differently. A mother cannot be a father and will not be held accountable for not being one—and likewise, a father cannot be a mother and held accountable for not being one! Different accountabilities cannot be made out to be inequalities and therefore injustice. Jesus’ parable of the stewards given differing trusts teaches this. They were accountable only for that with which they had been entrusted. And that is why the terms ‘marriage equality’ or ‘marriage inequality’ (and many other such terms) are very often straw men. It’s just the clever use of words to imply an evil. It is nearly as silly as claiming injustice because someone else won a lottery in which I held no ticket. 
‘...ON THE SPECTRUM’
Fueling relativism? It was only a matter of time. After all, we all live it seems, at a particular point on some spectrum or another. Perhaps I am, on a scale of 1 to 100, about 3 1/2 on the autism spectrum; or somewhere on the kleptomania spectrum. Maybe I’m at 20 on the paranoid psychopath spectrum!? (Speaking of which—please don’t dare suggest I’m higher that. Things could get very nasty!) Once we are able to define every human deficiency or inclination as being somewhere on a spectrum of one or another mental disorder, it means that all this nonsense about us being sinners in need of repentance and salvation can be put to bed once and for all. (I am not making light of genuine mental disorders). The implication is that, given enough time and research dollars, all can be remedied with the appropriate chemicals in pill form! Of course, not everything is digital—on/off. Lots of things ARE analogue. In the colour spectrum there are infinite shades among each of the primary colours (red, green and blue). There are also grades of affectedness in many ills and diseases. The word ‘spectrum’ describes genuine degrees of colour or heat or affectedness in some relevant things, but it was only a matter of time before it suggested itself as a convenient descriptor for things which ARE actually and factually digital or binary—like biological sex. To posit that a person’s biological sex appears somewhere on a spectrum (which is up to them to discern), is rather like saying that the electric light in the room is neither on nor off, but somewhere on a spectrum between on-ness and off-ness. (If a dimmer is fitted in the circuit, the light may be on a spectrum of brightness, but it will still be either on or off). That is the nature of relativism; it loves the idea of everything in the universe being analogue. No absolute good; no black as opposed to white, only shades of grey; no absolute darkness. No absolutes! Relativism therefore hates a God who says, “I am the LORD, and there is NO OTHER; There is no God besides Me.” Or who says, “I AM the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” But there is no spectrum of truth. We can’t access at a point we consider comfortable along a truth spectrum, yet that is what people try to do. They select the ‘bandwidth’ that provides for them what they consider a safe bet. What God and Jesus have said is either wholly truth or a complete lie. We must make a digital choice—between light and dark; between truth and falsehood; between life and death! THE MYTH-MAKERS WALK AMONG US! In ancient times people such as the Sumerians invented stories to account for the creation, the historic flood and other events. The Gilgamesh Epic is one such story, as is the Rainbow Serpent story of the Australian Aborigines or the Incan Wiraqucha. It is important to understand that there were two streams of people walking the Earth (see my book ‘THE PEOPLE, The Sons of God (through the eyes of a Watcher’). One stream was that of those who followed God; the other, those who kept choosing independence from Him. They are known respectively throughout the Bible as the sons of God (benei Elohim) and the sons of men (benei adam). The sons of God in the line of, for example, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David etc. interpreted the handed-down history through the lens of their experience of the one, true God and His very evident work in those He called The People. Theirs was the correct interpretation and it has come to us by the grace of God intact, as the story of His grace which culminates in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in our behalf. Those known as the sons of men (because of their denial of truth and their choice to walk away from God) found it necessary to invent causes for the great events that remained in the human memory by story-telling. These are the myths such as the Gilgamesh Epic and the Rainbow Serpent and the Native American mythologies. But, the myth-makers are still at work. The sons of men—those rejecting God today—are hard at work on the great 20th & 21st Century myths in an effort to account for creation and events in a way that excludes God. So, we have men such as Richard Dawkins and many more, creating their own story (and persuading many), that all can be accounted for without the need for God! You see, it all arose of its own accord from a single entity (the origin of which is inexplicable) into a universe of such astounding complexity that it defies all attempts to fathom or understand. A sophisticated myth, but no less so than those mentioned above. And we had been told that only ‘primitive’ people invented myths! The spirit of the myth-maker is alive and well—and active within the sons of men today—and it’s simply the same spirit! 
AT THE END...
At The End some will say, "Why didn't you tell me?" And HE will say, “Tell you? Remember those of my Followers I brought across your path? You dismissed them as people who needed to see the ‘real’ world when you were actually the one refusing to see it. Or those times when you heard from me at Followers’ funerals or weddings and justified yourself by relegating my Story to ‘folklore’. And remember when I saved your life in that accident? You even said, ‘thank God’! I had your attention for a little time, yet despite that, you still managed to persuade yourself you could handle things better on your own. Your fun and fast-paced lifestyle and career (not to mention pursuit of knowledge and travel—immersing yourself in what you called the ‘real’ world) usually contrived to silence my voice, because I rarely shout. “Yes, I have been ‘telling you’ all your life; but my voice, and what I’ve had to say wasn’t what you chose to hear. You hoped I would say something I cannot, and affirm you in your lost-ness. No, I actually gave you life in the hope you’d become your ‘found’, true-self in me! You have saddened me deeply with your life-long refusal to heed and yield to my kindness, but I will have to let you go into the end you’ve so clearly told me every day, you’ve chosen.” Put yourself in this shirt!
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MIRACLES AND THE ONION SKIN My problem with the anti-creation camp is as follows: many are too easily swayed by the mantra, ‘but the science is saying this’ or ‘the science says that’ and automatically jettison any possibility of, for example, an actual 6-day creation. I am not anti-science by any means, but science, remember, is forever only the attempt to understand (and explain) what is observed. What today’s science would have observed (if it could have) when Jesus made wine out of water, was something like the manipulation of time, or the condensing of time. For not only was water made wine in a matter of moments—but the best wine! The maturation process was somehow accelerated within those huge jars. It is not difficult for me to accept that what he can do in a jar in Palestine, he can do in an infinitely larger space with different matter. What the science would have seen when a lad’s lunch fed more than 5000 people was matter somehow being formed, or at least multiplied—instantaneously. When three men walked unharmed in a furnace that normally consumed flesh instantly, some temporary shift from matter to non-matter appears to have occurred (a reality that Quantum Science now concedes as possibility). What we call miracle, after all, is the implementation of laws that have to date eluded our understanding. You don’t have to read or understand much of quantum physics to see that there is much that baffles the very best scientists—and the best and most modest of these, say so! We can (and should) go on through all the miracles of the Bible and hear what we call the realm of the miraculous, is saying. Certainly for the Christian, that becomes our platform when confronted with, ‘but the science is saying this’, and be bold enough to say, ‘yes, but that other realm, the miracle/eternal realm is saying this!’ In my view, something from the eternal realm that we are forced to call miracle, is the pinnacle; miracle trumps currently known principles of physics and miracle is the ground Christians occupy. Just recently it has been announced by scientists studying quantum effects that ‘time may be illusory.’ Well ....hello! The sciences are scratching (as they should) at tiny fragments of the outer layers of an onion that is huge beyond comprehension! Unfortunately, it too often acts as though it has found the core—and that's what offends me! Surely the way God gets things done does not necessarily need to be explicable to science in its current state (or ever?) Science will forever be catching up to miracle because God is just a little ahead of us! He knew about the quantum world before Max Planck, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein found it (they simply found what was there and started trying to explain it!) As time continues we will probably be allowed to discover more mysteries He knew about before He set this thing in motion! We need to get over ourselves! And ... a lot of scientists need to get over themselves. As one secular scientist—Jeff Forshaw, has wisely said, “By overstating science’s power and not acknowledging its limitations, we risk fostering the growth of a religion-substitute, with the scientists as high priests. Such hubris not only irritates people, but more significantly it risks promoting the misconception that science deals with certainty—and that is the very antithesis of good science.” |
