Worried but not despairing

eejoseph,

What are you most worried about for the future?

The resources of information and entertainment are being marshalled for a campaign of deception. Security, justice, and the common good are already being manipulated and diverted from the known courses. For example, civilization used to be measured by literacy, namely, writing and documentation, as compared to oral traditions. Today literacy is disappearing as cheap political and religious slogans multiply and dominate the market place, helped along by algorithms designed to sustain the supposed priorities.

Irresistible deception

Stop following the crowd blindly! Check the sources of information. Believe what your ears hear and your eyes see. The truth is more likely to be in the sights and sounds than in the spin. Deception is too easy these days, and even manifest falsehoods become treasured truths once they are repeated regularly and by trusted public officials. Be very worried, but arm yourself with unchanging truth and facts.

Decree and Declare, Prayer and Prosperity

eejoseph

Stick a pin in your decree and declare

It is a popular routine for people who, instead of talking to God in prayer, adopt the position of a preacher, announcing what is sure to be the result of prayer.  You are in a fortunate class if you have not heard someone decreeing and declaring things that every child of God possesses and declaring others to which no one has any right. Prosperity is the believer’s nickname because he stands totally and spiritually blessed, with no guarantee of gold, silver, employment, perfect physical health or exemption from common human troubles.  If believers choose to decree and declare instead of praying and believing we should not be surprised at the sound of balloons popping like clockwork.

It is telling that people asked to pray end up decreeing and declaring things for which the public has neither microscope nor telescope  to see and verify as granted. No Apostle of Jesus Christ or prophet of Yahweh ever ended a prayer with a decree and declare. Prayer is perfectly defined in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, so no one needs to redraft what effective prayer looks like. Back to the drawing board, please.

God did not authorize any eavesdropping on prayers by any agency for prayers to be fulfilled

We do not need anyone listening to our prayers and inventing the wheel by pretending to have insight into what God wants to accomplish in our lives.  The Lord Christ himself has assured us that our attitudes in prayer should include faith – assurance – that God hears us and confidence that God will not give us scorpions when we ask him for eggs.  In our current global distress with corona virus it is unimaginable that God has not heard the millions of people who have requested a specific end to the pandemic.  We should also be certain that speaking things into existence is a rare ability even among the royal priesthood.  Things we and our neighbours need and want should all be appearing day after day because God grants power and authority to his children to act as His Son does.

Decree’s terminology spaces

“Decree” in Job 22:28 (NASB, King James Version) means to cut, not speak.  The first time the term  appears in the Bible it means just that, cut or divide, and had nothing to do with talk.  “The king said, “Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other.”  (1 Kings 3:25, NASB).  It comes again in verse 26 “Divide him”.  Aramaicic gazar in Daniel’s prophecy is also  CUT but 5 times refers to the activity of soothsayers.

The chances that Eliphaz is roasting Job with a soothsaying charge are high indeed.  The term from which the translators get decree, gazar, is prominently related to speaking in Daniel’s prophecy as soothsaying.  Otherwise gazar means cut, and an emer is clearly related to talking, but what does cutting (off) a saying have to do with establishing something? We can be sure that no-one in the Job speech cycles embraced the idea that human sayings make a thing happen.  This, however, is not what the DECREE AND DECLARE CREW is doing.  Man!  We would have no hospitals, no need for grocers and bankers, men and women to procreate.  We would all be single having miracle babies, and unemployed making tons of money.  Can believers also grow in grace and knowledge apart from due diligence? It is obvious that our prayer and work experience are the critical contributors to our growth.

Is “decree and declare” to be taken as God’s standard answer?

Perhaps few of us are recognizing that prayer involves listening as well.  Prayer is not monologue but dialogue.   If we know anything about God it should include his treasury of things to say to us.  I cannot imagine any child of God approaching his throne and not expecting timely help in the areas God has promised, and just plain love talk.  It is next to Impossible to speak with God and not hear his loving reassurance that everything we need is in place.  Impatience is as oil to water in the prayer exchange.  Timely ( eukairon )  help is an essential part of the Lord’s prayer service, and we surely cannot think that timely means anything beside God’s timing (Hebrews 4:16). If the declarers and decreers are on a power trip then we should expect to see things happen by fiat such as when God said in the beginning “let there be”. Is it sufficient to imagine that everything they decree and declare is happening just as spoken, despite evidence to the contrary week after week, month after month, and year after year? Do we not know how many seasons of prosperity, how many deliverances from bondage, how many triumphs over evil spirits, how many demons have been sent back to hell by decree and declaration? Of course we don’t!

Everything we need for life and godliness affirmed by promises

2) Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; 3) seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.”

2 Peter 1:2-3, NASB

Expectations from divine words, written or otherwise, do not stray from the following.

  • teaching
  • reproof
  • correction
  • training in righteousness
  • adequate (complete)
  • equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17, NASB)

For getting the gospel banner

There seems to be no lack of space for reinventing the wheel in handling God’s word.  What happens when people pray is not rocket science. People should expect answers in word and deed.  Maybe it is our public prayer model that is baldly broken,   Even when we pile up promises around specific prayer requests we more often than not have no evidence of the answer.  it seems more likely that we have forgotten that all things that flow from Christ’s intervention are shaped by the gospel, not by the law, and not through creation models of speaking things into existence. How much time does a church service have to invest in the kind of waiting for the answer that goes with private (the essential quality!) prayer?  We should be leaving the answers to prayer in God’s capable hands.  Our hurry to see the answer to prayer is inconsistent with confidence, faith, and familiarity with God’s intervening mercy and grace. Perhaps a new translation of Hebrews 4:16b, NASB will help “… so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need”, lest we keep thinking that decreeing and declaring is a thing to take to prayer meeting.

… receive mercy and find grace towards (εις) timely help

We receive mercy and we receive grace in the direction of God’s timely help, because God controls the timing of the help.

Staying ahead of one’s students

eejoseph,

What makes a teacher great?

I like to give my students opportunities to discover, tasks they can complete with pride in their accomplishments, dazzle them with the beauty of applied knowledge, and help them find their wings.

A great teacher sizes up every student, anticipates the range of questions that can arise, and is willing to say “Let me get back to you on that”. Great teachers pave the way for success, by exposure and testing. A great teacher beams with pride when students learn and explodes with gold medal thanksgiving when students learn to use the knowledge imparted.

I suppose the ultimately great teacher is the one who finds genuine joy in being eclipsed by a student.

Vox turbinis

eejoseph

The story of Elijah’s search for the voice of God has informed the modern reader that God’s voice is not always loud or energetic such as in the whirlwind or in the fire or in the earthquake.  It has therefore become popular to think of God’s voice as being the still and calm one, as if he never yells, never screams he never speaks animatedly.  Gee, I, and many of you, have become accustomed to treating the voice of mother or father as the voice of God, and their voices, we know, often get animated, loud and urgent.  So let me take the still calm voice of God for spin, having become aware that God speaks in the African whirlwind every year.  Vox turbinis is the voice of the Atlantic hurricane season, sometimes, verifiably, the voice of God.

Africa and the annual cyclones

What a fascinating discovery it is that the Atlantic hurricane originates in Africa and crosses the Atlantic degrees past the islands of the Caribbean and impacts the North American continent.  So let’s call it an African whirlwind.  The damage repeated every year is a loud message to populations who seem unwilling to batten down the hatches, move inland and keep our heads down. Beach front properties are still quite popular. Millions of people in the Caribbean and North America do their best to cope and millions more wish they can best the hurricane. One thing is certain: westward movements from Africa are a fixture. There is no stopping the African whirlwind, people or hurricane! I’d like to think that the voice of God is playing in the hurricane. Defying it can be costly. American politics obviously wants to play ostrich as hurricanes intensify and the call for accountability for the slave trade gets louder.

He ain’t no revolutionary

eejoseph

There are many servants today who are each breaking away from his master.  (Nabal to David’s servants when they asked for food and supplies)

A lot of people talk like revolutionaries or they toe the line of the status quo, and the former was the case when David, waiting in the wings to be king of Israel,  asked for support from a man called Nabal. Some people are even impressed by the chaos that comes out of revolutionary conflict, but they do not stand for the ideas of a just and caring society.  Nabal’s insult to David ended with him losing his life without a sword being lifted.

David the armed rebel

David is clearly a figure that fits the changing times.  The people of Israel picked their first king  because of his looks and his stature, but God picked David because of his heart.  God also built into David’s experience the form of the ultimate monarchy and the design for a combined governance of priest and king.  Of course, Nabal did not get the memo.

People in the modern era can idolize Fidel Castro, Lech Walesa, Muammar Gaddafi, Haile Selassie, Nelson Mandela or even Harry Sussex, but real page turners are hard to find.  John the Baptist was just a herald, announcing the imminent kingdom of God, but his own task was revolutionary in its own right.  Then comes Yeshua, unmistakably new and fresh when compared to Israel’s prophets, priests and kings.  His clashes with the intelligentsia and leadership of Judea are pattern setting, but when you take his donkey ride into Zion you have an entirely iconoclastic horizon. Compared to Christ the people in charge of Moses’ legacy did not know justice.  Most of us want to be in the safe lane and be at the same time recognized as revolutionary-minded.  Yeshua rocked the boat so distinctly that people thought he was just intent on crashing the Jewish tradition.

17) Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. 18) For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. (Matthew 5:17-18, NASB)

Perhaps when people begin to think that we are destroying the ancestral traditions we will know that we are in the lane of the true revolutionary.  When our actions appear in defence of the new and bold without destroying the old we will be standing with the brave and visionary.

Three days and still downhill

eejoseph

If a fire in your kitchen called brought three fire trucks and three hours later the fire had spread throughout your house you would have doubts about the value of taxpayers funding the fire services.   Expecting religious talk and an indoctrination treadmill to hold back the avalanche of incivility, evil, and depravity is a pipedream we cannot deny.  Every Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the last thirteen centuries communities all over the globe are witness to Islamic, Jewish and Christian preaching, celebration and devotion and still every, every, society spirals into the abyss of human futility.

Edutainment fails grandly

Excuse me for saying we can do better with every succeeding generation, but excuse me also for seeing that we have not.  The echo chambers of religious zeal are woefully mired in supremacy jargon, featuring claims of older, wiser, and ultimate.  Are our weekend gatherings just simply rabbit holes? Very often the weekend exercises turn out to be a little more than entertainment or performance dressed up to look like education.  The failure is on a grand scale, and the three relevant practitioners are highly unlikely to see the ditch into which they have fallen.  We have to conclude that what happens in public is different from what goes on in private. Wisdom is not cute talk; it moves towards visible progress for all the people. Ask Solomon and watch Yeshua.