You are deceiving yourself when you think that the institutions of the 21st century are going to bring about the end of bigotry, hypocrisy, and oppression. The answer to poverty is not more wealthy people. The trashy dreams of a new prosperous and secure reality, the influence of tech giants, the emptiness of soul that accompanies most moguls and philosophers are all going nowhere.

Never Happens Again

The next time you hear a politician, preacher, government official, or one of those media types talking about fixing some problem so that it never happens again just remember the following and save yourself from the idolatry of secular government and religious folly.

1. Law-abiding people and the enforcers are deceived. We are grateful for the latter but pass on being the cheerleader for either.
2. It has taken hundreds of years to face up to Caucasian hatred of people of color
3. Ethnic or religious states are examples of the abandonment of human conscience abd the betrayal of a divine ideal
4. People are rushing into slavery from Africa, Asia and Latin America as if the destinations are really interested in their wellbeing

My idol-smashing God

Ephraim is a pseudonym for Israel, Ephraim being one of patriarch Joseph’s sons. Both Israel and Judah, the two biblical jurisdictions with the most extensive legal system, never gave up the idolatry of Canaan, Aram/Syria, or the current world-ruling power. My God is not a thing: not state, not law, not family, not church, not a book. The gold dimmed a long time ago.

God’s people are not deceived, will not turn their minds over to the architects of imperial serial rapine as so many of the people aspiring to distinction have done.

Prepare to mourn the death of honesty. We have stopped nothing that prevents humanity’s wallowing in our mud.

Do we know when Yeshua is weeping?

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Matthew 23:37-39

It seems that our Lord may have passed by a blind person as he travelled with his disciples had they not seen an opportunity to get some insight into human disability and suffering, from someone who should know (vss 1-2). Everyone, even in our scientific and spiritual enlightenment, still is fascinated, if not disturbed, by human suffering, especially when the condition is from birth. The fire this inquiry started brings out both the shallows and the deeps of Hebrew thinking, the mysterious purposes of God (vss. 3-5), and the hard line between Moses and Yeshua. When the authorities get wind of the sabbath day miracle (vss. 6-7), an inquiry ensues, engulfing the man, his parents, and Yeshua (vss. 8-12). The Pharisees get roped into the action once they learn that Yeshua was responsible (vs. 13). After harassing the man about how he got his sight back, after interrogating the man’s parents, after assailing Yeshua’s reputation and calling him a sinner, and after finding that the man could not be bullied, the Pharisees retreat to their favourite cover: Moses vs the world.

For a second time, the Pharisees want to know how Yeshua made the man see again.

They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” John 9:26 (see vs 15)

The man is convinced that Yeshua was responsible, while the Pharisees press him to ascribe the whole affair to someone else. Once they realize that the man is not changing his report or gratitude they deride him. He could have replied “No, you are not, and I can prove it”.

And they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. (John 9:28) We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” (John 9:29)

The religious people, who seem to know everything, become the object of deserving ridicule. When God’s works, set in motion from birth get reversed, they ought to have known. Didn’t they?

The man answered, “Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. John 9:30

The kinship between the disciples and the Pharisees is obvious. Both believe that the man’s blindness is the result of personal sin.

1. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” John 9:2
2. They answered him, “You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?” And they cast him out. John 9:34

Both were barking up the wrong tree, but at least some people were aware of the underlying message, but the Pharisees were going to hear the amazing judgments of God, including sight to the blind and blindness to the sighted.

Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?” John 9:40

Yup! Blind and guilty followers of Moses (vs 41)

Devil-Jesus America

There is a nation whose name is “lamb dragon”

• It has lamb powers but behaves like a dragon. Devil-Jesus!. Revelation of John 13:1 Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon.

Isrsel-Judah prostitution Inc.

Why does anyone buy a nation named “God’s prince”?

• when the capital is ***peace/health but she’s missed her opportunity to seal the deal
• when she has been the poster girl for prostitution, taking the Oscar for paying her johns

Local leaders

Washington DC is supposed to be the memorial to a revolutionary turned politician. American politicians have the perennial distinction of being neither revolutionary nor courageous fighter for the truth.

World leadership

The current predictions of an amphibian GOP and a cowardly, demon-possessed chief executive leading the world will never happen, just as surely as Moses’ blueprint never saw the light of day. The result: no one can find the city on the hill.

Reveille

It is time to think about what your capital call is and consequently what your leaders ought to be pursuing. Your discovery might jolt you wide awake.

His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him.

John 12:16

Check Point Turnabout

God, the all-knowing, commits to not holding our record of rebellion against us and to purging his memory of the matter. The extent to which this works must be a factor of his unique power. We have no surefire method of purging our memory: events and people can pop back without notice. This makes forgiving and “moving on” more of a task than one imagined.

Dropped

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ Philippians 3:8

Abandoned

Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, Philippians 3:13

We like to think of ourselves as fighting to turn, to discard, and abandon our former life, when in fact we have only a false claim of overcomng sin. We cling to all the pride of pedigree, all the past things that cover up, like a fig-leaf, our rebellion and shame.  The cheapest and shallowest roads, avenues, and boulevards in the Bible are the ones named “Touch not”, “Taste not”, “Handle not”, and “Not those guys”.

Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. John 6:32

Its a sure deathtrap swallow the hook, but to what end does anyone want to swallow the line and the sinker? Christ had been busily converting people in Jerusalem, in Samaria, and outside of Israel, all the way to Antioch, when the Christians got thrown chum and a bit of live bait: submit to the Law of Moses and get circumcised.

The church with one voice said no to the law of Moses and yet found it gracious to respect – not adopt – dietary or ceremonial conventions of the law. That was the hook. The live bit was the recommendation that Christians get circumcised. Yeshua’s witness on diet and circumcision is unequivocal. It is not as if anyone had claimed that the Sinai covenant was permanent.

Things that Christ Eclipses

Unclean foods Matthew 15:11

It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.

If we are afraid of Pharisees we might recall that the Pharisees of NT times were not a concern.

Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit. Matthew 15:14

Temple centered worship. John 4:21

Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.

Levitical priesthood Hebrews 7:11

Now if perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood (for under it the people received the law), what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek, rather than one named after the order of Aaron?

Who opposed this change?

For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well. Hebrews 7:12

Tabernacle, ark, Sinai covenant, diet, and prohibited marriages all complete the list of things to be discarded so Christ can be preeminent.

We have always thought that the opposite of the opposite of love is hate but it seems that God has a different view. When John tells us that perfect love keeps driving out fear he’s on to something isn’t he?

Ultimately people want to interpret this to say that we are now mature or perfected. No one really arrives because they have God’s love. Love’s perfecting work is properly understood as an event plus the effects of that event.

As surely as the fear that love drives out is not the reverential fear of a son for a father or of an employee for the boss, the love in view is that unshakeable love that even the direst adversity does not change. God’s love not ours. It keeps driving out fear and our maturity is progressing.

The people stuck in the juvenile stage of divine instruction have lots to say about the adult stage, that is faith and the Gospel, but they keep cheering on Moses, slavery, and another gospel.

Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. Galatians 3:23-26