Whatever became of answers like, “Yes” to the question “Are you an incorrigible liar?” If you think that your obedience to a set of regulations and your observation of a festival or holy day put you above the class of sinners you will have no short answers, for the simple reason that you need to tell five or six stories to be transparent.
But let your statement be, ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’; anything beyond these is of evil. (Matthew 5:37, NASB)
After violating the sacred trust of the Ontario Greenbelt and doubling down on the wisdom and assumed popularity of his housing plan Premier Ford announces he is reversing his intervention and is pledging to make no changes to the heritage initiative.
Far be it from me to tell you who to trust, but ethical concerns from a government agency and two ministerial resignations are self-explanatory matters of trust. Mr Ford was sure there was no other way to build homes in Ontario.
Heritage shmearitage
Mr Ford had even resorted to calling out the Canadian Federal government for not having a housing policy that met with his approval and one that met the needs of people who are not even residents of Canada, new immigrants. Ford’s about face may be nothing more than a sobering lack of public confidence in his government and party or a desperate attempt to hang on to supporters who are beginning to look elsewhere for political leadership. Ford’s leadership has been rooted in gimmicks (like buck-a-beer) and power-grabs like dismantling democratic priorities in the city of Toronto government. Can I trust a man who sends in the bulldozers, sees the walls crumbling, then decides It’s a bad idea? May it never be!
What would your life be like without music?
Dull and unimpressive
One of the most absurd sayings that’s been circulating now for practically centuries is the idea of how much God loves people or how much Jesus loves the sinner, to be specific. Have you recently asked a Christian to love a sinner and observed his or her response? The primary tenet of Christianity the recognition that God is love. How then can we repeatedly talk about how much God loves? Can God love a little or a lot? Then there is the lunatic fringe insisting that love for God, already acknowledged as a smokescreen when people do not love their neighbours, is exemplified by unwavering obedience to elementary principles of biological life and by an obsession with holy things. When all the religious people abandon everything but philanthropy we will be closer to recognizing that God’s love is immeasurable and accessible to few individuals.
He who can only see greatness in the past has a mental problem. Or might that be senility forcing a stable genius, who refuses to read documents, steals them and moves them around to deny the owners access, to keep repeating unhinged nonsense about rights and law and order? Who rides a bike? Whose oversize backside is frequently glued to a golf cart? The loser who can’t stop losing or the sitting president of the United States? Eyes! Stop seeing!
Everyone with a properly working brain knows that the 45th president and his party are either practically all brain dead or they have stopped thinking. They repeat the same outlandish allegations and outright lies like souped up robots. If the 2024 election in the United States is the most important in history it is so because the 45th president has been trying for 4 years to prove that the 2020 elections were fraudulent.
“If a ruler pays attention to falsehood, All his ministers become wicked.” (Proverbs 29:12, NASB)
Increasingly, people who do not win elections find it convenient to charge the winners with dishonesty. The world is turning with relish to an environment of lies and wild allegations. Politics has always been full of robotic and repulsive rhetoric.
Explanation, exhortation and experience do not always fall neatly into place. The priests of ancient Israel were perhaps the most affected by the hiding of the Messianic kingdom. The prophets were in a different predicament; they wrote about the Messianic Kingdom without knowing how or when its details would play. We can forgive those who sought to know the timing of the greatest mystery, but the ridicule and catastrophe that comes from posing as experts of the prophetic panorama is deserved.
Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature; a wisdom, however, not of this age nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away; but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory; the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory;
1 Corinthians 2:6-8, NASB
The rulers of the age in which Paul lived did not know God’s mystery. Neither the Roman authorities nor the Jewish administrators of religious life seems to have had second or third thoughts about trying to respond to Yeshua of Nazareth with homicide. They thought nothing of killing him. He was just another troublesome Galilean. The Romans thought that by sacking the temple they would remove any Jewish resistance to Roman rule. The Jewish people on the other hand thought that by killing Yeshua they could remove the revolutionary uprising that Yeshua’s followers presented. Both the Romans and the Jewish people were doomed to lose against two permanent unchangeables: the son of David and the city Jerusalem.
“‘But to his son I will give one tribe, that My servant David may have a lamp always before Me in Jerusalem, the city where I have chosen for Myself to put My name.”
1 Kings 11:36, NASB
“then there will come in through the gates of this city kings and princes sitting on the throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses, they and their princes, the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and this city will be inhabited forever.”
Jeremiah 17:25, NASB
Faith’s mystery comes down to the matter of residence, first the residence of God among humans, God being one of us, and, second, the residents of God’s people in Jerusalem as a permanent feature. Neither mosque nor Solomonic temple are divine priorities. Faith in the prophets does not ideally end with a prophet, but with God himself intimately connected with individual human beings.
“In You, O Lord, I have taken refuge; Let me never be ashamed.” (Psalms 71:1, NASB)
Indigence is a common cause for embarrassment and feelings of shame. Sometimes that just comes down to our perceptions. In the real world however, we find that our conditions in life do not necessarily bring us to shame and disappointment. In addition to our exultation concerning the glorious hope believers also exult in their tribulations, “knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” (Romans 5:3-5, NASB)
Let’s face a couple of facts. Some of the help offered us for coping with life’s spiritual priorities are mere distractions and theories. The same must be said of the cultural, political and economic solutions and help, with one distinction; they’re all manifest failures. God never handed anyone a political, economic or spiritual system, and all of our ancestors, no matter where we come from, will tell us, if they could, “our failures were the best we could have done”. We are all victims of the same wannabe infection. Wars and competition have sapped the human energy to live harmoniously with neighbours and distant partners. When we realize how many homicides have robbed us of a path to a sustainable lifestyle we will stop looking for heroes to force us to be diligent about our personal potential and considerable gifts. God has used one homicide to demonstrate his great love and install a fresh vision in human minds about accountability.
The fact that someone is naked or hungry or without shelter does not necessitate shame or disappointment. God is able, in whatever circumstance we find ourselves, to glorify himself and to satisfy us to overflowing.
When we choose our refuge fear ought to vanish. We must therefore not merely copy David’s prayer, such as appears in Psalm 71:1, because shame is not on God’s agenda. The experience of shame was not intersectional to nudity, vulnerability, or any at risk situation. Many things are in the Scriptures for us to avoid, so do not let people tell you that because David prayed in such a way . Every risky situation, every adversity, comes with a way out, pre-planned and held in abeyance. That is where hope resides, a necessary thing to have to connect us to the next assured stop in the spiritual journey. We are not ashamed of eternal life. We are not embarrassed to have love for our enemies develop in our hearts, and to prove that God 5 not done with us he pins our hopes to a flower that by all descriptions will unfold without end.
