Admittedly the goal of human life is an approach to realizing a likeness to God. In the Old Testament the focus seems to be on man’s compliance with divine commands (Ecc. 12:13) and covenant-keeping (Exo 19:5 and Gen 17:10). Examples of godliness have appeared that are not related to either commandments or covenant. The happiness that comes from being forgiven is a measure of godliness, just as the happiness of the peacemaker is a measure of godly status.
Commandment-keeping and covenant (such as circumcision) have not surfaced as reliable or effective means to achieve godliness, the first due to human brokenness and the latter due to its purely physical nature. A new standard must be available since the call to holiness is to be found on both Testaments especially in view of the claims of Christ to be the Way, Truth and Life and his provision of a way past the essential obstacle between man and God. With the atonement Christ proved that godliness could only be achieved through divine help. Godliness must therefore be redefined as possessing characteristics that belong to God and not merely as claiming to have responded to Him.

The Godly Individual
The term man of God is to be applied to all believers because of their adoption into God’s family. Such persons have qualities that separate them from unregenerate humans. They are first of all faithful. They are all flawed persons. They recognize that Christ as the template for human beings is in certain aspects separate from human beings. When they contemplate their path to God’s ideal they are aware of an infinite gap between Creator and creature.

How Much Like Christ?
Christ does not hold forth a family likeness other than identity since all notions of human performance can never approach Christ’s. Since compliance with covenant has changed and obedience to the Law is no longer the primary demand we turn to the two demands of the scriptures: be and do.
The call for a change of identity rests on a divine act. Unlike Israelite process of becoming God’s people through complete compliance with the law humans become godly by God’s will and graceful intervention. No-one can stand before God and claim to be His child on the basis of obedience to any set of regulations or instructions. On the contrary humans become children of God by means of faith alone.
We can never be God-from-God, saviour of the world, sinless sacrifice, and head of the church.
Do as I say and Do as I do
Since men cannot claim to have done all what has required from earliest times it is left only for us to find our likeness to God in (1) cherishing our identity as sons and (2) imitating the Son of God. Instead of an unreliazable set of commands two things bring us to genuine godliness: faith in the Son of God and loving as He loved us.

The Holy Spirit fully empowers us to do what Christ did: deeds of love, compassion, and power. Herein lies the most secure version of godliness. Performance of legal requirements is bound to be broken and incomplete at some point.
[end]

On June 20, 2016 I wrote an essay entitled The Triumph of Buffoonery in which I mused on the candidacy of Donald Trump for the presidency of the United States of America. I also hoped that the Republican Party would soon take a principled stand against the uninformed magnate. This week, 7 weeks later, reports abound that a serious attempts are afoot to (my words) “heave him over the side and thank him for saying the kinds of things they have wanted to say for decades but could not for fear of offending an increasingly sensitive and polarized population and for fear of being exposed as the party with a hateful agenda”.
Pardon the violence, but even prophets of God get thrown overboard. This writer lays no claim to the prophetic mantle but does not mind being charged with believing that there enough decent and conscientious politicians and party members in the Republican party who know that the Trumphoon is a shallow megaphone who cannot see why his style and nobility are highly questionable and deeply offensive. Most of us will admit that at least a crude thought comes to mind from time to time, but this abominable wannabe does not have a single bone of contrition, humility, or common nobility.
The Trumphoon is going to crash because he thinks the United States is a business. He is going to crash because he thinks that tweets and slogans are the stuff of political leadership. The Trumphoon is going to crash because he has maligned everyone, including his party, his “team”, and his president. Did anyone ever talk to him about speaking evil of leaders?
Let’s recall that his candidacy was received as a joke, a stunt by a reality TV personality. It was seen as unrealistic and destined to fail. Hate speech and murderous intent do not inspire informed people. The Trumphoon’s tasteless humour, unfounded statistics, and crude language with rebuke by the GOP leadership show the depth of the political poverty Americans have inherited.
Let’s watch the next 3 weeks for a meteor to come crashing down on New York city and GOP Central causing damage that will take the GOP decades to repair.

It is now 2 years – August 2018 – and the 45th president has been exposed in court as a criminal. His personal lawyer and fixer pled guilty to financial campaign violations at the then candidate’s direction.

I make these observations knowing full well that many respected leaders in the Christian community hold views that are contrary to Messianic teaching. I venture to share the observations because the risk is too great if I didn’t. To a man, the globally renown evangelists, popular and respected apologists, telepreachers and seminary professors, confidently proclaim that the dead are not dead. They are either competent charlatans or (like the apostle Peter) believers whose interests do not include divine things (Matthew 16:21-23).
The eternal state of being is uniquely God’s. Man has both nonexistence and being. Just as it was an affront to speak of the Son of God as having a beginning at one point so now it is egregious to talk about man having absolute being. Absolute perfection gives life to the dead. It is highly irregular for life and death to have the same face. The primary characteristics of being are defined as location, time, and essence. The difference between God and man in these aspects of being settles every notion of anthropology. A Christ-centred theology best explains what life and death are under all circumstances.
We have discovered a perfect explanation of religious proclamation that makes shipwreck of the apostolic traditions. Instead of holding the New Testament’s precision as the anchor the practice of Messianic interpretation has been subjected to speculation and outright denial of Christ’s lordship.
The vast majority of Evangelical heavyweights will with total conviction tell us the following:

• The departed saints are in heaven.
• The dead are in hell facing eternal torments

The Saviour himself tells us that:

• All who are in their graves will come forth when he utters his voice

We learn from this Messianic saying that:

• graves house both the lost and the saved
• They come forth and face respectively to the resurrection of life and the resurrection of damnation.

The immediate union with Christ is part of triumphal Christianity, equal to the obsession with miracles and power manifestations. While it is true that the Cross brings on unspeakable victories and triumph to the life of the believer there is no warrant for claiming that the dead are not dead.
The die and immediately go to heaven doctrine is pernicious and Satanic and it bears the stamp of many quasi-luminaries among whom we find Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge and 99% of the writers of our times who call themselves Evangelicals. ‎
Let the reader beware! Tin and brass can be made to look like gold. The belief that people die and immediately go to heaven or hell is cardinal among believers worldwide. We do well to steer clear of this kind of absent-mindedness and the waste of our hard-earned cash.
He that has an ear must listen to what the Holy Spirit says to the churches. Who knows the resurrection better than Christ? Let us believe him when he says, Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, (28) And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation. (29) John 5‎

The Prince of Peace gives peace that is not defined by circumstances. If one is invited to walk on water one needs eyes on the destination and inviter, not on the waves.
We often find ourselves in doubt about our status: concerned about work, play, health, finances, and relationships. If anxiety accompanies our reflections then we are missing an important part of our heritage.
Whatever is on your front burner ought to be under God’s care. Peter encourages us to cast all our cares on Yeshua and as we do we will find that He is caring for us.
Since the heavenly Father has given us peace we need not concentrate on the appearance of chaos. Like the anointing we have from God our peace does not come and go. On a dark day the sun is still present, so is divine peace ‎when turmoil and chaos surrounds us.
The peace that God gives is permanent and irrevocable, surpasses our observation ‎and is royal. Embrace it and treasure it without doubting.

Canada is no paragon, but it is my home and land. I hope that Canadians will change their naive course of celebrating multicilturalism without defining the core values. It seems that given the ready embrace of newcomers in the Canadian Charter we will have either a healthy integration of people or an unhealthy competition to dominate. All the cultures and religions that have surfaced in the Canadian fabric seem willing to assert their tenets as superior and worthy of a place of equal value. I, for one, do not find any reason to hope for moral excellence to emerge from the multicultural template on which we are currently focused, due to xenophobic, racist, and political strains in the many traditions.
First consideration is that is any group of people should have a value system to which we can all aspire.  Secondly, the parts of the mosaic tend to be sanitized to the extent of being hypocritical, and therefore dangerous. Believe it or not, the fabric of every society is the victim of shallowness and extremism.

Here we are, 149 years into the nation building enterprise, and we have barely scratched the surface of that monumental challenge to do justice, be reconciled, and to choose our allies with due caution.  We are protesting a la Quixote, acquiring concubines and mates like a foolish Solomon, erecting idols like Aaron’s magic golden calf, revelling in Internet without embrace our intranet: building bridges to nowhere.

No Cross

The absence of the cross from the range of declarations made by possibility preachers is diagnostic. The Cross is comprised of sacrifice: body and blood offered for sin remission. Cross also distinguishes Christian life from unregenerate life with its glory in suffering. A possibility preacher will tell you unabashedly that he/she rejects adversity and infirmity. The possibility preacher wants only to wear a crown and identify only with the Risen Christ. However, Christ is in glory because He suffered and learned obedience to the Heavenly Father’s will, even in mundane expectations, comparable to the wonders worked for Israel’s benefit. However, things such as the care of widows and the cleansing of lepers were never met, yet the life of the disciple is spoken of as a place of unfettered access to everything. Our inheritance in light does not include the temporary world. The world is not ours to buy or sell, damage or fix. We serve the earth, just as Adam did and are often at its mercy. Does not God strengthen us for all these things?

It has become popular among evangelicals (broadly speaking) to claim that a victorious Christian life must have at its core invincibility and, frankly, omnipotence. When these claims are made against the background of the Gospel their blasphemous character must be clear, since the believer’s daily needs and experiences are no different from the rest of humanity. Christ taught us to ask for bread daily. One possessed of omnipotence does not need anything and therefore has no need to ask. It ought to be clear that the absence of the Cross and the need for a prayer-life of the believer is contradictory to possibility-preaching and deliverance ministry’s main claim.

The Extremes of Human Existence

Man is either inside or outside of Eden. The flaming sword on the eastern side of Eden is perhaps the best explanation of the axis of human impossibilities. The way back to the tree of life is the same for the man.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. Genesis 3:24

With this decree man is put at at risk and his bandwidth reduced. He does not have power over everything as he did inside the garden. The curse, as this new regime is called, has a dramatic effect on man, the serpent and the ecosystem. There are conditions that persist to this day, and there is no natural condition against which man is inoculated.

Condition #1. The Serpent is declared cursed to travel on his belly, and eat the dust.

And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: Genesis 3:14

Condition #2. The woman is subjected to pain in conception, and her longing for her man.

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. Genesis 3:16

Condition #3, The man is destined to eat of the ground in sorrow. The ground itself is cursed.

And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Genesis 3:17

The signs of these conditions are all around us. The cross is not a reversal of these conditions. It brings relief from the human-wide rebellion (all have sinned) and the sentence of death. The reversal of the Edenic curses is co-ordinate and simultaneous with the renewal of the earth itself. The wonder of spiritual regeneration could not be in clearer contrast. The cross brings an open door to spiritual renewal. Not even the resurrection of the dead as it occurs (and this was rare even in New Testament times) before the parousia, being the most dramatic reversal of the curse and death decree – you shall surely die – is a manifestation of the decisive and final reversal of the curse. Man remains subject to adversity and exposed to risk until the redemption of the body in the great end-time transformation when we shall all be changed.

There is little biblical support for faith as capable of bringing the reversal of man’s corruption or of demonstrating kingdom power as primarily effective in healings and other temporary fixes.

We have seen already that “all things” may need interpretation as less than absolute, yet there is still a popular appeal to sayings that refer to “all things” and human capacity or competence. Philippians 4:13 is a well-used example.

(to be continued)