Month: September 2022

Saviour and Lord

eejoseph

Christ said he did not come to be served but to serve. He therefore does not become “lord” as an outcome of the mission to serve, and he does not save as a result of being received as “lord”. The two are not compatible even if they become part of the conversion narrative.

Forget the family, house, and country

Abraham’s experience of call and promise are expressions of Messianic interest and process. Loyalty to one’s family, household and country are secondary values and contrary to the kind of intervention that is necessary.

Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

Matthew 10:34, New American Standard Bible

As for people becoming servants of God, there can be no skating around the invitation to become children of God. Christ is Lord whether people confess or not. He goes to the cross to become Saviour. His mission to serve assures that he seeks no lordship, no estate, and no corps of servants. All through his life he showed that he was Lord and affirmed the fact.

Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.

Matthew 20:28

13) You call Me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. 14) If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.

John 13:13-14

If he was not and did not become Lord of people who have been the keepers of oracles and recorders of interventions for thousands of years how could one by saying it become servant to him? How does he become Lord as a result of a few doctrinal commitments or a pledge at the baptism pool? It is sufficient for him to be Saviour, and imposing lordship is just another shot at cheap authenticity and self-righteous. Where do we get the idea that we can tell another man’s servant how to behave?

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

2 Corinthians 3:17

Authority and prophecy

eejoseph

And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death.

(Revelation of John 12:11, New American Standard Bible)

LAMB’S BLOOD AND THEIR TESTIMONY

Can we suppose that the testimony of those who are accused by Satan night and day is not “testimony of Jesus”? Is not the witness common to all believers the gift of the Spirit? If there is one thing that marks Christ’s possession it has to be the Holy Spirit, because (a) the world cannot receive HIM (b) those who receive HIM have passed from death to life, hence they are no longer the world and (c) the Spirit reverses the effect of the flaming sword at the gates of Eden.  The testimony of Jesus is common heritage as prophesied and verified(Acts 1:8, John 7:39, Romans 8:9, Acts 19:2, Luke 24:49).

How we got from every believer testimony to charismatic exclusivity

The devil is accuser (prosecutor, like Moses), deceiver, and thief. He is occupied night and day with throwing accusations against God’s people. The term diabolos, the source of our word DIABOLIC, signifies “thorough slinging”, from dia διά, and ballo, βάλλω, respectively through and throw. This is why Peter exhorts believers (1 Peter 5:8) to be vigilant against the roaring lion seeking prey.

We and the believers of New Testament times got from reverence for all believers to reverence for one with exclusive gifts due to the immature patterns of the levitical system and the exclusiveness of male priority in the patriarchal age. Moses did not buy it. He thought that all God’s people should have the Spirit that gives them authority to speak God’s word (Numbers 11:29). Paul did not buy it (1 Corinthians 12:29, 14:5).

Man up therefore (Joshua 1:9) and recognize that the Spirit of prophecy is the believer’s living hands-on assurance, every hour of every day, divine presence is assured. You are not without God if you went to a theatre to see a movie or to an untimely grave. Immanuel means exactly what it sounds like and human arguments cannot change the fact. You know if you are faking sonship or not! Sonship such as the Heavenly Father offers cannot be successfully faked.

Apostolic affirmation of Christ’s cohabitation

eejoseph

Sometimes we are not aware of all the ways in which people try to twist us into pretzels to prove that we belong to Christ. They call up a host of external things and even a few internal ones. They try to make you think that you need to be perfect in everything you say and do. They make you feel guilty as if sin is always clinging to you. Paul makes it really simple. We know we belong to Christ because Christ is living with us Christ is in us.

Exhortations to the believers, 2 Corinthians 13:5ff

  • Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith;
  • examine yourselves!
  • (Or do you not) recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you–unless indeed you fail the test?
  • (But I trust that you will) realize that we ourselves do not fail the test.
  • (Now we pray to God that you) do no wrong; not that we ourselves may appear approved,
  • (but that you) may do what is right, even though we may appear unapproved.

For we can do nothing against the truth, but only for the truth. (2 Corinthians 13:5-8, NASB)

The egg, wall, king’s horses and men

eejoseph

If you have not noticed, all the powers on the planet are  mired in their own excreta.  Every claim of sovereignty is upended by rabbit holes, misinformation and rewritten history.  Trusted clergy, notaries public, judges, and representatives of the people at all levels are showing how easily they can be bought and sold.  Adoption, abortion, and anthropology are not subjects that require science, much less rocket science.  Neither is migration. They are not matters of extraordinary faith, but of a simple or childlike faith and rudimentary decency. Abortion and border policies come from the same uncaring pit of malice and ruthlessness.

Birth alone is the measure of identity

Are those conservative theologians going to circumcise their children before they leave their mothers’ wombs?  Why are there people registering their chickens before they are hatched?  Is that pre-registering what the stock market is all about? American exceptionalism has fallen off the wall, and we are watching frantic and futile attempts to mend the cracked egg.  The disappointing silence of the watchmen who are supposed to be on Zion’s walls cannot be described without superlatives because sonship, adoption, circumcision, naming, and only those groveling in juvenile visions, types and illusions will not see how empty and diabolic the plot of evangelicals to get their hands of the levers of government.  Even with a cloak of academic and miraculous accolades abortion, national security, and common sense are mere fig leaves.

Conscientious to condemn and courageous to compromise

Stupid is not a label we throw around lightly, but when we look at how the United States Supreme Court has been constituted we recognize that men of good conscience are rare indeed, and it is men of good conscience who vote for officials who the electorate expects to conduct themselves as men of good conscience. All nobility is compromised when money floats in the air. When so many of the persons on the front lines of justice and goodness turn out to be tainted in character, to be people who have made not merely made poor judgments in a case or two, but turn out to be rooted in malice and committed to injustice, men who flip flop between loyalty to law and support of insurrection, we are sure the egg is not being repaired in our lifetime, if ever. Forget conscience. The watchmen lack even the basic courage to defend all the people behind the walls.

Begotten, conceived and born

We know that abortion is a well-dressed pig, because a person is neither baptized nor circumcised until they leave the womb.  We also know that the communities into which people are born do  not recognize new members until a rite of passage (such as bar mitzvah) takes place.  It is no secret that it was not until a male of the tribe of Levi (those entrusted with the service that bound the tribes together) in ancient Israel reached thirty years that he was considered eligible (Numbers 4:1-3).  We also know that conception is not birth yet more and more Christians are using the term “born again” to describe the current experience of divine salvation and adoption, even when it is obvious that we have been begotten by grace through faith, are indeed sons of God now, and only the most deluded would want to deny that the Holy Spirit is given as a deposit of glory.   If you think that the religious intelligentsia are going to confess that they have soiled their undergarments with idolatrous and covetous doctrines of anthropology and salvation, pinch yourself.

Sons of God in the age to come

Sonship does have a defining crown when this age is over.  So in all our passionate defence of the unborn we stumble over the facts of human life, soil our garments with delusions of the divine process of adoption. We make ourselves like the fruit squeezed by human hands to appear ripe before its time. There are no grown up kids. Maturity cannot be faked or legislated. Israel’s first and second kings were thirty years old when they began their reigns (1 Samuel 13:1, 2 Samuel 5:4). Is that why God kept Jesus under wraps until he was thirty years. The Born again slogans and rhetoric are not helpful. Are those thirty years pictures of why we believers spend a lifetime as begotten of God to be born in the age when He gives us new bodies? You think about that!

The new devil: TIL

eejoseph

Listening to the daily political polemics one hears that when the incumbent loses all hell breaks loose. Civil war is looming, and it is mostly in the minds of people who do not think long enough to discover the difference between reality TV and American civic life. Justice has been subverted, but not by criminal enterprise. The executive branch has succeeded in writing deceit into the relationship between justice department, the legislative branch, and the supreme court. The extent to which the disease of public corruption has sunk in is evident in the fact that Americans – at least ⅓ of them – are ready to kill because the new evil is “the incumbent loses”.

What is worse than an incumbent elected official losing an election?

Criminal behaviour that goes unpunished because the perpetrator is a governor, sheriff, a judge or peace officer. When lying to the public is part of getting justices seated on the supreme court corruption hardly needs an explanation. When the highly respected churches lower their standaradin order to achieve political influence without the impartial application of justice church is now part of the wicked high place network. When lawsuits and veiled threats of riots and violence against the core institutions of civic life are the response corruption hardly needs an affidavit. Only public theft and open support of anti-democratic despots.

How four years can change society

I would love to see how the transformation of local society in the three years of Yeshua of Nazareth’s public ministry compares to a) the lifelong reigns of political leaders and b) the limited reigns (of a few years) of first ministers and heads of state.

People are resistant tio change. Even though the people of the first century were all touched by Messianic influences one can only hope to be not very excited that the seeds of the Lion of ‘judah’s reign was not going to become mainstream. It simply is not that kind of conbtributor to the lifescape. Those who are guaranteed up to eaight years at the helm of a state become worse than deluded “I never lose” magalomaniacs, they recommend destruction of the sacred bond of humanity, the duty to care for the other. The daily political journey, which is mostly words, goes into the lanes of the judge on the bench defining humans, their relationships, and their identities.

Just like the ancient and most impressive empire Babylon the modern head of state is not satisfied with being the head of gold, he wants to occupy every stage and act of the show,

I never thought I would live to see a leader destroy his nation in plain sight and one-third of the population not see that the new devil is the incumbent who loses.

Science, fact, and the failure of faith

eejoseph

Constitutional lawyers,  evangelists, pastors, medical doctors, and elected representatives in the United States of America have convinced a third of the population that they can use the label “pro life” to indicate the nobility of faith and respect for science.  Do they want people to  forget that faith and bloodletting have a tenuous relationship? Americans, peace officers included, have spent the last two hundred years shedding innocent blood like eating cereal, bacon and eggs for breakfast.  If you believe that the GOP and the majority in the Supreme Court are philanthropists, your faith is sewer-bound. The facts of life are hidden in plain sight if you are a Bible believer.

Who wants homicidal liars defining person and life?

You are not allowed to cut a baby’s prepuce before eight days under the sun, and we know that no child gets circumcised on being begotten, or at conception (to use the scientific term).  Do the hosts of Catholic and Protestant theologians not know that in the New Testament gennao means both beget (addressing conception) and give birth (or passively, be born)? Obviously not.  Had they been cognizant they would not be defining person from conception.

The Law of Moses (God’s law for Israel) values a woman at 30 silver shekels and a male at 50 silver shekels.  By comparison the patriarchs sold their brother Joseph for 20 shekels four hundred years earlier.  We cannot however lose sight of the census of the sons of Levi, in which, if you were younger than thirty years, you did not matter.  Now we understand why child labour is vigorously exploited worldwide. Now we understand why protecting juveniles in their schools from homicidal assaults is not a thing.

Take a census of the descendants of Kohath from among the sons of Levi, by their families, by their fathers’ households,  from thirty years and upward, even to fifty years old, all who enter the service to do the work in the tent of meeting.

Numbers 4:2-3, NASB

Whatever version of state rights or republican partisanship people invent they stretch credulity.  They want to be seen protecting the unborn when their regard for the living does not tip the scales. Preachers who have been silent over the moral majority insurrection, building for fifty years with less than a third of the population giving informed consent, are stumbling all over one another trying to find their voices. What comes out is FLIP FLOP. Pride in the darkness of their lairs prevents them. Will they come out of hibernation? Maybe.

The love of life, respect for science and genuine faith is in a steep decline in America, despite the brisk business of book sales, thousands of new faith leaders, and the proliferation of radio and television broadcasts.

A royal “nunc dimittis”

eejoseph

When our late sovereign was twenty-one years old she pledged herself to serve and invited her subjects to join and help her. She probably did not imagine how many the fiery trials she would have to endure, but she was most certainly aware that her reign would end and release would surely come. Humans tire, and the wise ones know when they have caught the vision of ultimate glory in the present, and when to throw in the towel.

Now you may dismiss

Now Lord, You are releasing Your bond-servant to depart in peace, According to Your word;

Luke 2:29

nunc dimittis servum tuum Domine secundum verbum tuum in pace,

Secundum Lucam 2:29, Vulgate

I am sure that as she kept hitting benchmarks raising her head above her predecessors in various ways she must have said, as her strength waned, “Just one more, Lord”. Please allow me to fantasize that E👑R may well have ended her meeting with the latest UK Prime Minister with a “Lord, release me now”, considering how quickly her strength waned after that occasion.

Like a hen, God.

eejoseph

America, America, God shed His grace on you, and you’ve pulled your pants down and showed the nations otherwise. There are not a few examples of nations that have squandered their heritage, as they pursued emptiness and utter beastliness.

There has been no shortage of profoundly thoughtful American women and men, no shortage of courageous and strong champions of human ingenuity and philanthropy, but the student of history will not allow us to forget that a plentiful crop of crooked sherrifs, forsworn judges, and brutal and homicidal officers of the law has been reaped every year since the nation won its independence. The theologian will not stand by either and pretend that God has not sent help, and placed incredibly opportunies to benefit all before the nation that calls itself respectable.

It is foolhardy to argue that nations do not deserve a swift rebuking kick. You name the nation: kick. They all need to correct their trajectory, but no, foolish pride prevents them.

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not have it! (Luk 13:34, NASB)