Month: September 2025

Why do they keep pushing law and order?

eejoseph, , , , , ,

Criminal, crooked and perverse powerbrokers keep trying to terrorize people into robots of a cultural revolution. The failure of Israel’s encounter with law and prophets has not impressed the fundamentalist and conservative fronts.  Are not Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome in tatters after God gave them authority over large swathes of humanity? Legislation and enforcement work for God because he is pure and absolute order.   Divine harmony and balance expose the needs of all creatures.  Principles, character and natural law need neither writings nor proclamation. Gravity and reward are evident in the Messianic revelation, so let the followers of Moses and all the neo-Pharisees commit suicide with their ball and chain religions, and pretend that their life is anything more than a name.

“To the angel of the church in Sardis write:  He who has the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars, says this: ‘I know your deeds, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead.

Covering their tracks

Today’s law-abiding citizen in North America and the Caribbean is a descendant of the first century Pharisee.  A massive con is their primary occupation.  They vainly hope that God is impressed with their rituals, festivals, long robes, wordy prayers, recital of supposed sacred texts, and well-rehearsed dramatics. According to Jeremiah:

  • They steal
  • They murder
  • They commit adultery
  • They swear falsely
  • They offer sacrifices to Baal
  • They walk after other gods
  • They go to their sacred gatherings
  • They  say, ‘We are immune!’

“Law and order” is a catch phrase used by governments for signaling that enforcing laws and policies take precedence over the will of the people, and often in defiance of statistics and the felt needs of the population.  They talk about reducing crime as they plot the demise of the poor.  They plot  cruelty to migrants and refugees in the name of security and self-defense.  They strain out flies and swallow camels.  They massacre the starving, render hundreds of thousands homeless and then complain that they are under attack.  Gaza, a Philistine city and stronghold, has entered the consciousness of 21st century people as a place where Jewish criminality goes to die.   What are the odds that Israeli politicians did not know that the Philistines captured and detained an Israelite hero until his death at his own hand?

Criminality and vice abound in church and state

Only the fascist and nationalist mentality in the Israeli leadership and settler community could have prevented Israel’s depravity because they are responsible.  Invoking the holocaust is close to becoming like the boy who cried wolf once too often.  There is no excuse for denying people inalienable rights, and calling oneself a democracy in a sea of authoritarianism delivers little credit when democracy is merely a tool to cling to Western support.  Democracy in some countries is merely an attempt to bring everyone to the table, essentially to the voting booth.  However, there is no sense of the distance needed to be separate from the despicable ideologies held by the disparate groups.  If it is only by having all viewpoints and political stripes represented in leadership that there can be genuine democracy then we are affirmimg solidarity with the perennial villains and despots.  When a society descends to a level where males can drag a female to the city square we can conclude that gross darkness has enveloped the people.  Wickedness in high places is neither strange nor infrequent.

“Law and order” is the cry of bankrupt people, all of whom will admit that law in its iconic and Jewish expression did not stabilize any society on the planet.  Those who use law as the paramount divine demand will soon commit themselves to ending free speech, defend at all costs the subjugation of women, girls and children, and among them will be the cream of the crop of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and the ungodly.

Demoniac homicidal genocidal maniacs

People like the criminal heads of Israel and the United States are the international poster boys for people whose overwhelming delusion is they have to kill innocent people they have labelled as evil.  Law and order as public policy never made a sustained contribution to genuinely strong leadership anywhere on earth.

People are reversing the meaning of human, public, private, citizen, patriot, felon, and migrant, and they are comfortable inventing alternate truths such as Israel is a chaste virgin, and Black people in America are the beneficiaries of the transatlantic slave trade.  Religious people are in the same boat: the experts, the mediocre and the extremists are getting ready to announce the equality of Jesus, Moses, Muhammad Ali, and whatsizname!  Talk about scrambling up the downside.

Who’s thinking?

eejoseph,

If you had to give up one word that you use regularly, what would it be?

“Think” can go the way of the dodo because so few are doing it.  The large volume of robotic expressions that dominate the media and our literature today in the 21st century is  shocking.  Society is repeatedly being dragged into silos of politics, religion and apathy by the proven brokers of regional and ancestral pride.  When I say “I think” I hope to mean I have heard, reflected, and repented. All the religions and political ideologies are happy to have people not think even though all are frequently heard saying “I think…”.

Let us all stop talking, start thinking, and see how far down the rabbit holes of the virulent lifestyles of the people whose names are in the limelight we get!

Logs on a hillside shed

eejoseph,

What does your ideal home look like?

My ideal home would be a sprawling log cabin with a few rooms recessed into the earth.  You would see ducts for catching the prevailing winds and eavestroughing all around for catching rain. It would have verandahs on three sides and sit behind a circular fire pit. Its colours would be those of the diverse logs’ bark and wood.  It would look like a shed.

Say nothing about discipleship

eejoseph, , , ,

Theologians and many Christians have been calling Matthew 28:19-20 the Great Commission, and a precious few seem to have given the text a sober reflection.  If you think that all Christians have to go into all the world, doing the thing unveiled in Matthew 28:19-20 you are drinking your soup with your nose.  If you believe that the church exists to make hellbound proselytes then we can call you scribe, Pharisee and hypocrite (Matthew 23:15).  I want to expose the illiterate experts’ juvenile quest for commands to support the obsession for ways to Lord it over God’s people.

Eyeballing the text

The idea that believers can pray and approach Bible reading and acquire optimal accuracy was never a serious  road for anyone desiring the office of a bishop.  Once an aspiring bishop realizes that the church and its literature did not stake out ground in the 19th century the much more effective means of reading and understanding the Bible became attractive.  Bishops of most denominations are required to learn biblical Hebrew and Greek.  Biblical studies are juvenile and shallow as long as translations of the last 400 years are the materials in hand.

Grab a grammar hammer not a seer peer

Not even when the witness is authenticated by signs and wonders the most important knowledge in the pipeline is still the text of the New Testament, and the closer one gets to the early manuscripts the healthier the doctrine.  So when evangelism gets described using a model from the life of Messiah Yeshua we have to initiate a rescue using the grammar of the Greek New Testament.

Parts of speech: participles and imperatives

Imperatives are the forms of verbs that we use to (a) tell someone what to do or (b) ask someone to do something.  There is only one imperative in Matthew 28:19-20, yet all the verbs are treated as imperatives.

  • Go: a participle, a secondary tense in the sentence
  • Teach/disciple: the true grammatical imperative
  • Baptizing: a participle, a secondary tense in the sentence
  • Teaching: a participle, a secondary tense in the sentence

Punctiliar versus Linear

Punctiliar and linear kinds of action are clearly contained in the aorist and present tenses respectively. We make a genuine meme of these two types with a dot “•” and a line ‘-“.  They represent respectively a finished action and an ongoing action. It is a lazy mentality that wants to conflate the verbs of Matthew 28:19-20 into a package that ignores discipling.  That is the avoidance of textual reality that enables a commitment to a kind of evangelism that serves discriminatory practices exactly as James and his Pharisee allies brought to bear on the church as she began her mission to the Gentiles. 

Sign them up

First, by taking the aorist matheteusate as a foil for indoctrination.  The punctiliar action of matheteusate cannot be contained in teaching a prospective convert the doctrines of the apostles. To make a disciple in one action has to be the act of enrollment. We can sign them up or make them just like us and worse.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves”. (Matthew 23:15)

Using the text before understanding its parts

The present participles for baptizing (baptizontes) and teaching (didaskontes) are not simply separate actions from enrolment. Participle 101 tells us that they are verbal nouns.  They define a condition; they also describe something in the same way an adjective does.  how the enrollment proceeds.  The text, after its constituent parts are properly accounted for brings us to a different conclusion than “Teach all nations, baptizing them… teaching them…”. We have to admit that the goal of Christian outreach – the application of heavenly authority (Matthew 28:18) –  is neither baptism nor teaching.

The opening participle should be treated as the fundamental framework in which discipling all nations takes place.  Having gone into the places we are sent we are to make disciples of all nations, by baptizing them and teaching them.

Vocabulary of verse 19

  • Teach is from matheteuô, which does not mean “give lessons”, and it is not describing the kind of things that happens in a classroom. 
  • Baptizing is from baptizô, its meaning is clear
  • Teaching is from didaskô, its meaning is clear from the cognate noun didaskalos

Christian outreach is not grounded in making proselytes, but in opening the door to a relationship with God the Father through faith in  the crucified and risen Christ.  It is futile to teach unbelievers, persons who have not confessed and believed in Christ.  The looming problem with teaching unregenerate persons the priorities of Christ is that they are incapable of receiving or understanding the things of the kingdom.  There are simply too many rabbit holes involved when one teaches the things of God’s Kingdom to someone who is not enrolled as a believer or follower of Christ.

Surely we recognize that Christ taught his disciples by parables, and we can see that immediately after the resurrection of Christ the disciples still had not grasped the meaning of his death and Resurrection.  So we can scratch the evangelism model that says (a) first show people you care by meeting their earthly needs (b) teach them the doctrines of the church and (c) baptize them (=accept them into church membership).  You can see how all of this avoids the critical intersections of Messianic Majesty.  Nothing is said about Christ dying and rising from the dead, or that grace by means of faith alone brings the lost and condemned into the family of God.  If our fishing or reaping evangelism is to have a face of success it cannot be making proselytes twice as bad as the fishers or reapers

Disciple-making Fancy Grade

  • Set him up as a learner: enrol him
  • Baptize him
  • Teach him what Christ  commanded