Month: March 2022

Context matters not

eejoseph, , , ,

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:5, NASB)

In the interest of accurate information, let us tag the two concrete elements in this saying: heart (inner, invisible and partial) and soul (outer, visible and total).  Recall that man is a living soul, so “soul” does represent all me me/you.   “With all your might” however,  comes from single Hebrew word, meod, מאד, meaning exceedingly, or with adjectives, simply “very”.  The writer most certainly means that our love can increase to abundant levels, knowing that no matter how much we love there is room to advance with whatever has been revealed and imparted to us.  We cannot claim to have loved precisely as God does.  So we keep increasing.

The very famous saying of Moses that precedes this command and forms the central pillar of the Mosaic legacy – The Shema – should not be separated from the context.  The context includes the love instruction and the following.

  • The time: today
  • The destination of the words: on your heart
  • The duty to teach and talk about constantly  “You shall teach them diligently to your sons…”
  • The duty to devise means to remind oneself of the message package
  • The purpose of remembering why the land of Canaan was a gift
  • The purpose of remembering (not forgetting!) that it was God alone who delivers from bondage (Deuteronomy 6:6-12, NASB)

The narrative of the heart’s function as a container of God’s or Moses’ words is an example of willing ignorance of the facts. Why would God give voice to a letdown antecedent to the Shema (Deuteronomy 5:29, NASB) with “‘Oh that they had such a heart in them, that they would fear Me and keep all My commandments always, that it may be well with them and with their sons forever!”?   The heart being the place where human appreciation of God takes root needs a innovative operation if it going to be home to increasing love.  Until then, fearing God and keeping his commandments can best be portrayed by stone tablets and books.  Some things can be taught and recited but other things, such as exceeding love are the exclusive gifts of the God who acts within the relevant context. Ignoring context is akin to ignition without fuel, preaching apart from eyes on the handwriting of the apostolic witness, access to God without covenant, and dare I say, Christians who prefer the crutches of their favourite translation and commentary to the sturdy legs of unchangeable Scripture.

Who is cheering the sudden burst of nationalism?

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Barbados and Australia have recently severed ties with the British crown but they have the same system of government as the colonial power that stole, sold, and oppressed Black and Aboriginal peoples for over four hundred years. Now Belize and Jamaica are pressing demands about the role of the British crown in the slave trade and colonization of the Caribbean islands. Who will apologize to all the generations of freed slaves for idolizing the broken and corrupt model of the people’s house? There is hardly a visionary dimension to be found in the governments of the greater and lesser antilles. Who beside the usual armchair freedom fighters and quasi-revolutionary Pan-African intellectuals are cheering?

Embarrassment’s epitome

It was not the British crown that made 99% of the nations in the Caribbean pull out all the stops to maintain a system of useless votes, dubious debates, bogus budget statements, apathetic amendments to law, and the facade of national unity. We did that ourselves because we have had too few leaders willing to think outside of the box. You guessed it if you are beginning to think that we have been robbed of outbox action. The people who were silent over the centuries and in the more recent decades when governments were imitating the United States and Great Britain with the oppression of poor people, the suppression of the legitimate Rastafarian religion, the idolization of law, and the frittering away of homeborn culture. Who should be embarrassed is quite clear.

Useless votes

Since the ballot box serves to establish the public sentiment it is an abject shame that the result of a plebiscite can be a tool in the construction of a national suicide. We should not allow our votes to be used to facilitate opposition and division. We know what happens to divided domains. Making our votes count is not rocket science but it takes a vision and courage.

Dubious debates

Parliaments that thrive on facts and reason are rare. All that matters is mathematics: how many votes in the house can be mustered in defence of the leading party’s initiatives. Speakers have a hard enough time keeping simple speaking order – speak then listen – so it is a Herculean task to hold members of parliament to logic and common sense. Let us not be deceived by what we hear on the hustings. People running for political office are unwilling champions of truth and civic society. What we hear at political rallies and in the pre-election advertisements is a mix of pollyanna rhetoric and juvenile wishes. Real debates are hard to find.

Bogus budget statements

In my experience a family goes shopping with cash or credit and both can run out when the spending is completely transparent. The millions and billions mentioned budgets statements need to be seen in their relevance to improving the lives of ordinary citizens. When the average citizen cannot see how the numbers add up in a Finance Minister’s statement to the nation, greed, discrimination and corruption are in the works.

Apathetic amendments to law

Following what is assumed to be a Biblical basis for legislation most nations in the Caribbean have allowed punishment and the violation of human rights to appear as the solution to the problems of civic society. When laws, amendments or originals, do not pass the smell test – justice, mercy and reliability – those innovations should be abandoned. We all know people who are so loyal to law that they no longer recognize human need. Remember the “too holy to help” kinds of people, like the people in the Good Samaritan story.

The facade of national unity

It must be obvious by why we have examined thus far that the substantive notions of independence and good government have been left on the dusty shelves of our high school textbooks, treated as utopian fantasy, in full defiance of the combined weight of our sacred books, so no-one is raising his or her right hand as experienced offspring and root of what is precious and invaluable. Maybe it is best we say nothing about national unity, even when we have incontrovertible rocks to stand on, such as the men and women who took the first steps in shepherding our people, through the early years of our emancipation. Let it suffice to say that we can always trash our national heroes for moral failings, political missteps, and even for losing their way entirely, but we have no rationale for denying that figures of national importance are immovable rocks. How we build on what they have started will be the measure of our strength as a people and nation. The people of Australia, Belize, Barbados and Jamaica are being duped again by people who choose to forget our recent history and are willing to deny that our choice to imitate the oppressor and not the liberator is suicidal. There are no great dead peoples.

Federated and United People

eejoseph

UN Security Council Resolution 2254 (2015) languishes, plagued by malicious division, after a vote with no absences, no abstentions and none opposed.  Here is another example of how votes mean nothing.  People are willing, in national parliaments, regional forums and at the United Nations, to sign on to resolutions with absolutely no intention of doing anything to achieve what the resolutions say.  Syria, seven years after the resolution, is being propped up by the threat of  unspeakable Russian violence, is vulnerable to Israeli missiles, and fatally divided eleven years after Syrian people saw an opportunity to end the Assad regime’s brutal dictatorship.  The Arab Spring was not allowed to take hold in Syria.  The Security Council passed fifty-six resolutions in 2021 which generated a lot of paperwork but no relief to the war-ravaged, occupied and terrorized populations. All the federated, united, and people’s entities are a lot of hot air.

All those populous people’s republics

What exactly the people in “People’s Republic” means is clear from the stripping away of personal dignity and the vicious assaults on life that thinks and dreams of something other than government babysitting.

All those united divisions of humanity

What “united” stands for in the names of republics and kingdoms is out there for all to see when separatism and self-determination gets an honourable place in the houses where people gather in  the interest of the whole

All those mighty federations

Federations can be anything from a people or state typically crushed, intimated and bribed into community by a rising power to a people seeking self-determination within what they thought was a safe and honourable family.

Seven years later the ghouls walk the hallway

International unity is not dead, but on life support, quite literally.   Politicians who have thought that “taking out” the voices that protest or disenfranchising people who simply different face are still talking about assassination of foreign heads of state. 

International unity is not dead, but on life support, quite literally.   Politicians who have thought that “taking out” the voices that protest or have made a statute of disenfranchising people who simply different face are still talking about assassination of foreign heads of state. 

From United Nations

Short of being scientists, lawyers, or sages people are at risk of believing every vacuous headline, prone to deny the facts of life, and quick to say family is first.

Meanwhile it is no problem that

  • few people are the testers of every Spirit
  • a wonder-workers keep seeking solutions for things that are not broken
  • the majority of humanity finds a shield behind the armour of culture, behind discrimination and xenophobia

Poor rich renegade

eejoseph

The world is full of mercenaries and heroes who talk about their freedom and political convictions like foolishness is going out of style and they have to get their piece out.  Poverty of mind in low and high places is well documented in the Bible.  The twelve year old Yeshua from Nazareth visited the temple and amazed everyone, stumping “the teachers, both listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard Him were amazed at His understanding and His answers.” (Luke 2:46-47, NASB)  Leaders of every sector of society can easily talk and act without a shred of legitimacy.  In the age of accessible wealth and respect for authority we are plagued by poor rich heroes and renegades, extraordinary rebels and patriotic insurrectionists.

Who needs rebel patriotism?

Neighbours are what makes society strong, quite apart from whether or not we or they have a God or a stepgod.  I suppose neighbours are an alternate reality that depends on how the law separates people by citizenship and genealogy.  The Canadian Charter, like any well-intentioned law, cannot be expected to create an equal society,  except when upward mobility is the assumed goal of all residents.  Dogs will always eat dogs and competition always brings misery. Revolutionary individuals like George Washington and Toussaint L’Ouverture are not paradigms; not when bloodshed is rejected as a means for setting differences.

Not another insurrection,  revolution, book or prophet

The bold and ruthless men of any religious or political stripe are all cult leaders.  They often are misogynist and xenophobic, ready to forge alliances with disparate elements and force allegiance to themselves and their cause.  If you do not know what a religious  beast can do with civic or military power take quick stroll through the news, or fly through the eras covered in Bible for its witness to  how power was used.

Invasion and violence

The list of violent adventures and wannabe monarchs is longer than there is space here.

  • Egyptian colonies in Palestine
  • Jewish attempts to silence the Way
  • Mulsim invasion of Europe
  • Muslim invasion of India
  • Muslim states,  mostly Arab
  • Muslim invasions of Africa
  • Muslim complicit in the slave trade of Africans
  • European encroachment on Aboriginal lands all over the world

Only four powers were granted a license to govern huge swathes of humanity.   There is however in the modern era no shortage of heartless and unthinking emperors or whatever they like to call themselves.  Where do they think their mob mentality and bloody uprisings will end?

There are few Sauls becoming Pauls.  There are even fewer Ezras posing as passionate interpreters of the divine message.  Today’s zealots are as ignorant of Christian excellence as was Ezra of alien (Moabite, Jerichoan, Tyrian) inclusion in ancient Israel-Judah.

“This Ezra went up from Babylon, and he was a scribe skilled (quick to answer) in the law of Moses, which the Lord God of Israel had given; and the king granted him all he requested because the hand of the Lord his God was upon him.”

Ezra 7:6

“But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of Mine, to bear My name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel;”

Acts 9:15

From riches to rags in a flash

There is one miraculous event that seems to escape the net of the triumph harvesters.  They forget that life, like a conversation, has give and take.  Wealth rarely comes overnight except by lottery  inheritance or theft.  There is no controversy that wealth and fame have disappeared like dry ground in a flash flood.  Christ’s disciples left all to follow him but today’s disciple want to have all as they follow, and insist that having abundance is a measure of covenant durability.  A little rain, a little greedy magnate can wake up stripped of his treasure.  The representatives of the people with their cushy benefits and privileges and the loud patriots show us exactly what the poor-rich hero looks like. When they wake up and find their riches are on the street as worthless bits of paper and metal.

The weight of the world

eejoseph

What story can we tell of a burden borne or a price paid or a battle won that puts us in the saviour class? None really, because all our crushing experiences, subjectively or objectively, short of the one that extends to blood. Victim and victor find their perfect example in the Lord Christ Christ Yeshua who shed blood in his resistance and warfare. None of us will ever know what the weight of the world feels like because it has been done, just as planned from the foundation of the world.

“And being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.”

Luke 22:44, NASB

In fact it is not a secret that people who are most corrupted by playing the victim card are looking for hero status. They want to be known as overcomers. But what of the person who fabricates a whole new world to keep their defeats and triumphs alive? They are neither exceptional nor rare. Entire nations have been snared by the “strong loser” portrait.

Being sick and tired of striving for personal strength is a recipe for catastrophe
Spiritually musclebound people are not the result of miraculous interventions

Whose personal hostility?

Who is the pattern of suffering and glory?

People who have little to show of the benefits from divine instruction are the last to shoulder their life’s load and the first to blame every one but themselves. Men, women, boys, girls, Jews, Gentiles, cops, criminals, the educated and the uninformed do it.

Get ‘er done

I do not believe it was ever truly popular, but people can no longer count on a perpetual stream of sympathy coming from their neighbours. It is time to strengthen our own week knees and elevate our own drooping arms. No one is going to do it for us. Let us show some diligence for spiritual muscularity.

No veto in the EU Parliament

eejoseph

When God gave the nations into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar he also placed limits on the actions the king could  take against those peoples.  The United Nation may be stymied by communists , despots, and amoral religious extremists but justice is going to have her day apart from the tribal instincts that have dominated international relations for the last century.   No amount of media manipulation can prevail, and the time has come for the beasts to act with a human heart.  There comes an end to vetoes over just resolutions.

Limits on superpower a activity

20) He says, “You are My war-club, My weapon of war; And with you I shatter nations, And with you I destroy kingdoms. 21) With you I shatter the horse and his rider, And with you I shatter the chariot and its rider, 22) And with you I shatter man and woman, And with you I shatter old man and youth, And with you I shatter young man and virgin, 23) And with you I shatter the shepherd and his flock, And with you I shatter the farmer and his team, And with you I shatter governors and prefects. 24) But I will repay Babylon and all the inhabitants of Chaldea for all their evil that they have done in Zion before your eyes,” declares the Lord,” declares the Lord.” (Jeremiah 51:20-24, NASB)

They shall not cleave

The prediction of the last world ruling power specifies that they will not stay united, and it is clear that they (the Ten Horns, the original European kingdoms) did not with the defection of the United Kingdom. 

“And in that you saw the iron mixed with common clay, they will combine with one another in the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, even as iron does not combine with pottery.”

Daniel 2:43, NASB

The European Union is now a different beast, no longer seven heads and ten horns, and clearly joined in heart and hand, doing the right thing.

Before the con-sensus

eejoseph, , ,

If you wish to see how malevolence will appear to triumph using decent standards such as clear language and the production of popular counts (like views, clicks and downloads) let us watch the development of a consensus apart from the United Nations and apart  from simple observations over the violent encroachment of Russia upon Ukraine.  The push back begins with the simple question “Is it an invasion” and it gets cornered with the question “Are you for or against Russian actions against Ukraine”?

Please visit  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_2021%E2%80%932022_Russo-Ukrainian_crisis to see how data manipulation goes to a satanic level.

Believe your ears before they are a-tingle.  The fallout is a shower not a sprinkle.