In this age of rights and competing privileges it may seem hardheaded to talk about people who have no right.  In most associations there are hard rules governing the conduct of their distinctive business.  For example, we will know exactly how topsy turvy our world is when a woman is the bishop of Rome.  We are neither topsy  turvy nor out on a limb when we say that people who turn from the gifts of the Risen Christ to the weak and useless rudiments of ancient Israelite life have no right to eat at the table with the people who are hospitable to outsiders, are not established in the community of the faithful by means of food and drink, but by the blood of Christ.

But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how is it that you turn back again to the weak and worthless elemental things, to which you desire to be enslaved all over again? You observe days and months and seasons and years.  I fear for you, that perhaps I have labored over you in vain.”

Galatians 4:9-11

To a man, every group of “Christians” obsessing about law and grace, law and order, law and righteousness, has found the low road. The easiest thing a person can do to impress his peers is to put on a show, you know, rend the garment and not the heart. The easy reality bypass is to say we are committed to doing everything God says, and that proves how deeply in love with him we are. We then pick all the things that have nothing to do with people being the supreme object of God’s love.

We have an altar from which those who serve the tabernacle have no right to eat.

Hebrews 13:10, NASB

Quit messing with our altar

No Gentile could ever become a priest in Israel’s ancient Levitical priesthood, nor can any Muslim convince adherents of Islam that he or she is a prophet.  We had better start worrying about why God for so many people is the ultimate do-as-I-say boss. I much prefer the God who opens the door for his amazing creatures to emulate him, especially in interpersonal matters. Woe is me for seeing an accessible God in the merciful Allah (ain’t that what they say?), or in the God of Abraham who turns a dead end couple from Mesopotamian into the ancestors of a family as numerous as stars in the sky.

Do not be carried away by varied and strange teachings; for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, through which those who were so occupied were not benefited.

Hebrews 13:9

The insane and the inane

So tell the world why do people turn from loving people to loving the law, the state or the political party. Is it not a leaky lifeboat that people are rushing to board when they tell us that it is a righteous or godly thing to do no work on the seventh day of the week while it is clear that God is works 365-24-7? People are insane and just plain inane to subscribe to a good news package that begins and ends with commands that can never produce life. The insanity proceeds to prefer so-called prophetic visions, tabernacle theories, opposing views of the Bible’s pronouncements on the means of salvation, what to eat, touch, and taste, and being more Jewish than the Jews, over the eyewitness accounts of the apostles, whose words the insane refuse to interpret from their purest forms. It is definitely a silly thing to claim to be the real McCoy when we do not even want to admit that our proclamation arises from mere and often poor copies of the handwriting of Messiah’s eyewitnesses. What right indeed have such people to call themselves disciples, to eat at our altar?