“Come, let us worship and bow down, Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.” (Psalms 95:6, NASB)

How many times have we said these words – worship, bow down and kneel- standing erect, without so much as a genuflect? To be accurate, the three actions call for ducking, lowering ourselves. Gee! I thought that we learned to do that for our parents, even after we leave the nest and have our own families.

Is it legit to say we are doing the three in the SPIRIT?

The sight of mother or father always brings a barek, barek, bend the knee, bend the knee!. Even when we come to conscientiously disagree with them we bless – honour – our parents, often with head bowed. This generation is definitely cursed: for failing to reckon honestly with ancestral contribution to our times and our own wholehearted response to the river of life. Is that not what Malachi reports from Yahweh’s mouth?

Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.

Malachi 4:5-6, NASB

If we have not taken John the Baptist seriously responding to the Lord will hardly show up on our radar.

Human anger and vengeance is ignoble, juvenile and abominable. Do not, please, ask the people who are vigorously keeping peace from breaking out between Indians and Pakistanis, former African slaves in the disapora and former colonists, First Nations and the interloper entities such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and a host of South and central American nations to do anything noble in the search for justice. They love vengeance and cruelty. The problem is global: versions of the Hitler Nazis are appearing with a flourish. Versions of the Taliban are on the rise in the United States, and if I am reading the religious hopefuls correctly, all they want to do is impose either chaotic pluralism, misogynist and male chauvinist regimes, all ready to shut up anyone with a different view of the world. If the number of people jailed for crimes they did not commit and the number of people killed in their places of worship do not convince the angry and the aggrieved to pipe down and stick a pin in their malice.

We will not change our minds

The fixtures of American politics and religion (mostly Christianity) are people with minds of stone. Senators who do not know what impartial justice looks like, governors who lie about police bravery, and state legislators who are dead set on oppressing women, killing school children, will not change their minds. They are what the Bible calls reprobate silver. They have consciences that are dead. If I did not believe in God I would say they were incorrigible. The difference bewen the 44th and the 45th president is so stark that one has to be either an avowed denier of facts, typical a Republican governor, rogue bishop, crooked sheriff or corrupt mayor, or a simply a person lacking humanity and literacy, not to see how evil can get itself into power and serve as a magnet gathering the ugliest attitudes and sentiments to pose as a righteous rage. It must be clear that most of the players on the international scene simply are eager to have their own version of London, New York, Paris and Washington, all the while claiming to be proud nationalists and keepers of the peace. Frankly I do not know see the benefit of any nation emulating Beijing, Moscow, Delhi, Pyongyang, Washington and Jerusalem. Judaism of New Testament times was wholly intolerant of the Way, and no one needs to be reminded of the kinds of freedoms afforded people in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia.

A vast criminal enterprise

A vast criminal enterprise, backed up by pardons and lifelong appointments is the only way to define the revolution that almost prevailed. It began with the likes of Gerry Falwell, a host of Christian psychologists, false prophets amd apostles and illiterate persons posing as pastors, and the supreme court stacked with perjured jurists. If there had not been a violent revolution to end English tyranny there would be no United States, and such a beast, haviving been created, what beside the nobility and decency of humanuty can prevent the United States from descending into malicious anger, bloodshed and cyclical tyranny? Nothing.

We are perhaps familiar with the attitude towards Moses’ Ethiopian wife (Numbers 12) or with Pharisees, James  and Peter making Jews of Gentiles (Galatians 2:2:1-14, Acts 15:1-5). The case of discrimination  against Rahab may be unrecognized even though she is an example of inclusion and a (questionable) recipient of justification by works. James, in adjacent passages (one might say “in a single breath”) takes to the high ground of impartiality and sinks to the valley of discrimination. Discrimination has been at the heart of Nazism, European colonialism, the gee-whiz what-God-can-do gospel of the evangelical movement, and the medical miracle healing and prosperity talking points. The supposed proselytization through friendship is so not happening. Religious discrimination is both very old and have several modern new faces.

In the same breath

It does not take James too long after inspiring his readers with the distinct character of Christ’s faithfulness to and acceptance of all humans to plunge them into the abyss of dehumanizing the Gentiles. James exhorts his audience to keep holding the faith of Jesus with the exclusion of partiality.

My brethren, do not hold your faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ with an attitude of personal favoritism.

James 2:2, NASB

He illustrates this potential failure with the common and differential treatment of well-dressed and shabbily dressed persons coming into a Christian assembly. He contrasts God’s favourable attention to and endowment of the poor people with the oppressive rich people. James is certain that the kind of discrimination he is illustrating does not have God’s approval, but he says nothing about his own decision in the Jerusalem council to try to make Jews of Gentiles, after he and the entire council had heard that God had given the Holy Spirit to Gentiles believers, just as he had given the Holy Spirit to the believers in the Pentecostal Event, without reference to what Gentile people were eating, and apart from any instruction that came through Moses. It is clear that the glorious Lord Jesus was not James’ final authority. James digresses from the loving and imartial framework of faith to talk about how behaviour justified by God, or more precisely, how behaviour shows shows that a person is just[ified]. He selects Abraham and Rahab.

In the same way, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? (James 2:25, NASB)

If this woman was justified on the same basis as Abraham why was her residence in the Israelite camp similar to a leper’s? Of course they were dissing her, and it did not matter in their world. They were going to kill thousands of Canaanite men woman and children because God ordered it, while allowing the men to pick attractive and suitable Cananite women for themselves. We cannot follow those fundamentalists who think they can justify bad – hateful – behaviour by saying “It is in the word of God’.

OUTSIDE THE CAMP like a leper 

The story of Rahab is not one that demonstrates Israelite virtue. The prostitute who assistance helped the Israelites succeed in taking Jericho ended up outside the camp. Joshua’s account of her reception into Israel did not take her actual location into account. 
Was she in the midst or outside the camp? If she did not live in the midst of Israel she would have to be outside, but it is clear that she was not treated as an insider while Israel was a moving community.

“However, Rahab the harlot and her father’s household and all she had, Joshua spared; and she has lived in the midst of Israel to this day, for she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.”

Joshua 6:25, NASB

Taking a look at the larger reach of the Gospel into all people groups I find it rather unfortunate that a certain American television host calls his program “gospel truth” without the slightest hint that the term defines the essential and non-discriminatory dimension to the Messianic message. He is not alone in having blinders on about this indispensible component of Christian life. James belonged to the camp that bullied Jews into a hypocritical treatment of Gentiles, which included eating with Gentiles in private when no Jews were around (see Galatians 2:11-14). It get way worse when love for one’s friend gats set aside for a commandment-keeping love, a phenomenon illusrated in the Good Samaritan parable and in the popular perception that preserving the sanctity of a holy day takes priority over helping people and animals on the sabbath.

Looking at the American predilection for discrimination God knows who else is also unware that “gospel truth” means non-discrimination.  “Gospel truth”calls for impartiality. At the level of the full counsel of the Scripture we find that Ezra, a man known as a sharp and zealous scribe, did not get it so let us not be surprised that people today do not get it. They will certainly say there is justified discrimination in the early prophets (Joshua), in the extermination of the Canaanites and in the post-exilic restoration (Ezra), even though the temple was built on land bought from a Jebusite, with materials and workers from Tyre, and Solomon’s great great grandmother was a Moabite. It certainly takes too long for people to realize that God’s name is actually excellent in all the earth and he wants all the nations to shout for the joy of salvation with no tribal strings attached..

“Don’t ever put me far from your presence” demonstrates perfect confidence. David is not afraid that God will throw away his own, or rob his child of the guaranted help. There are many reasons to consider that God was not always with all people, but how could the Everywhere-Present GOD be ever far from anyone? The certainty of divine presence and the immanu-el factor is not New Testament theology. It is Biblical. Solomon understood divine presence as he came to dedicate the temple. Adam and Eve, thrust out of their home in Eden, could not he;lp but feel elienated, especially if they were aware of the flaming sword barring their way back. A close look at Saul, the first king of Israel shows that he is quite unlike David. God’s Spirit left him to think his own thoughts, often homicidal and paranoid. David’s prayer in the matter of presence is uncomplicated because he, endowed with divine attitudes and desires – declared to be a person after God’s heart – was not at any time abandoned, even when he grieved ELOHIM with attitudes and behaviours that were homicidal and undoubtedly ungodly.

“μὴ ἀπορρίψῃς με ἀπὸ τοῦ προσώπου σου καὶ τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιόν σου μὴ ἀντανέλῃς ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ.” (Psalms 51:11, LXX)

The first two words, me aporripses, are to be taken as forbidding an action not yet begin, and so are the 3rd and fourth words from last, me antaneles

Like the  request in the disciples’ prayer – don’t ever lead us into temptation – David in this song requests, in full anticipation, that (a) God keeps him near and (b) that the Spirit [accompanying him since his anointing ] never be taken from him.

Well, glory be to God!

“καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν…” (Matthew 6:13, MorphGNT)

kai me eisenegkes, and do not ever lead

I want us to imagine that the only guarantee of help that believers have as a result of their faith in God’s son could ever be taken away from them. If that HELP was taken would it not be the result of a faithless, empty and uncalled for imagination? He does not ever lead us into temptation because he has no need to test us, as he admits he did Israel in at least two instances and in general (Exodus 16:4, 17:2, 20:20)

He has no need to tempt us; we do that all by ourselves in the exercise of our desires and the host of innate motivations.

For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. (Mark 7:21-22, NASB)

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.” (James 1:13-15, NASB)

Prayer ought to be shaped by agreement with what God has said or done. True, God invites us to ask what we wish, but, knowing that God has a detailed plan for every aspect of our lives, why would any child of God risk not listening to the Holy Spirit for what to pray for by asserting his or her own desires? The Holy Spirit, as present in every believer, cannot possibly inspire a prayer that asks for something outside of God’s will and plan. David’s prayer, using a prohibition (a negative command), can only be interpreted as (a) acknowledgement of personal weakness and (b) God’s caring oversight not to expose his servant to such a risk. For crying out loud, did not Adam and Eve, the first untainted humans stumble at temptation? As the Lord Christ reminds us, each day has its own evil. David is neither requesting freedom from temptation nor commanding God’s action in securing the same, but is a profound afrirmation of what he knows to be impossible. In that light there surely are tons of uninformed recitations, intercessions, requests, and petitions posing as prevailing prayer.