Line up here.  One entire generation got labeled wicked (evil), adulterous and crooked by Yeshua.  The same generation is called a brood of vipers by John the Baptist and Yeshua.  It is curious that people in the twenty-first century who conduct their lives in the footsteps of the Lord’s contemporaries should think that they are pushing something other than brilliant crap.  The ease with which people line up to make themselves look informed and conscientious with little evidence of either fundamental antiquity or lasting authenticity.  If  the fallout of corruption and failure that distinguishes the twentieth century does not awaken the conscience to the futility of making law and legislation the foundations of justice and honour then we may never realize that we are standing in a truly brilliant crap line.

For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.

Mark 8:38, NASB

The splendid unrecognized

The two things that should define believers in any age are the unshakeable foundation that is known as the gospel and the undeniable growth in grace or productivity in good works.  These two fall by the wayside as believers pursue a host of reformational and corrective measures.  People find themselves listening to proud religious morons and motivational speakers who more often than not have no interest in the original gospel or care about growing in grace and producing works that flow from Christ.  It is lamentable and worthy of rebuke that leaders (elders, pastors, evangelists, prophets and preachers) are often trying to heal the church.  They themselves apparently have not been healed, and in that case they are incapable of seeing that the church is not subject to failure, surrender, or loss.  The extremes of death and the grave are ineffective.  One can play the game of indignation, sincerity and dedication to our present truth chameleon for a lifetime.  The God of the Bible will never be recognized by people who are less than diligent to read the Bible with a child’s simplicity and the glasses of a first century Greek reader and the closed eyes of a young prince of Judah in Babylonian exile.

Calling the shots

We hear the religious people trotting out their must-haves and quiver with horror, but we can let the response to Yeshua calling God his father instruct us.  The Jewish people thought they had bread; they did not.  They thought they had divine residence (shekinah); they did not. They thought they had light; they did not.  The darkness that held 1st century Galilee in its grip was allowed to make the arrival of light all the more palpable. So when he said “no one comes to the father but by me” only the truly thoughtful and observant could swallow it.  Yeshua was doing all the things that had been reserved for divine power.  What else could he be but GOD?  Even when Moses acknowledges that his instructions are not final there are millions of people who are not Jews standing in line hoping to be convinced by a New England Protestant reformer that a man who went around touching lepers, working on the Sabbath, and declaring the Levitical priesthood habitual profaners of the Sabbath is the role model for both Jewishness and the Abraham’s global family. Snap! Don’t clap.  Here comes s’more crap!

​But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations. Isa 9:1​The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone. Isa 9:2

I will wager that if sunsets were hidden for a week not a soul could point out the holiness of a sabbath without a calendar or clock