Righteousness does not come from performing the requirements of the law.  Anyone who begins down that road does not deserve our time. That was Paul’s response to the attempt to subject the believers to the bondage of the law. He prized the liberation Christ purchased more than all his ancestral treasures. There is no terror more despised than humans wielding laws that authorize exclusion, and death.

Righteousness did not come to the kingdom of Israel since succeeding generations failed to erase the need for sacrifice for sin.  Christians do not have to apologize for rejecting practices and beliefs that have nothing to do with the salvation of the world.  The happy – righteous  –  people are those whose sins are forgiven.  If someone misses the fact that the righteous are first of all a forgiven and forgiving people he or she cannot avoid living in terror and the delusion that God’s kingdom is founded on the laws given to Moses, while Moses says Christ gets the last (and first) word on what humans need to know and do. People who talk about God’s law as definer of what is good and lovely are fear-mongering juveniles, who take pleasure in the prospect of undermining the peace and joy that the right way is expected to bring to home, church, and school.

Living in terror and delusion

Some happiness is completely bogus and short-lived. Happiness that comes from getting things despises God’s gift as aummed up in which we have to remind ourselves are not consumable. God’s priorities focuses on the spiritual security of those he has saved.  Is it not telling that the sermon on the mount does not promote happiness based on clinging to the ancestral heritage?  The generation that departed Egypt under Moses’ leadership was not a happy one.  The hundreds of years of prostituting themselves and finding a marital relationship with Baal and the asherah is a most unhappy sight. But there is a view of happiness or blessing that meets the essential human need for forgiveness.

The blessedness of forgiveness

The self-righteous and the deluded will disavow that God imputes righteousness not sin.

just as David also speaks of the blessing on the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works:

Romans 4:6

No one ever stopped sinning and everyone needs to hear from God, for instruction,  correction and assistance.  The poor, sick, and sinful will be with us until the end of the age, and it does not follow that Christ confirmed his gift of redemption by giving the Holy Spirit to those who had put their faith in God’s son only to terrorize them with ‘do not ever sin again’. So why does anyone want to get away with saying that they have been successful in keeping all of God’s instructions.  Thankfully talk is not the measure of that covenant.

The guy who thinks he has pleased God apart from grace is likely to be unproductive and likely to be deriving a happiness from his selective and partial obedience.  In any scenario, this happy guy is likely to be a victim of disinformation by comparing Christ with any of the heroes and witnesses in the biblical record.  Seriously though, whoever we choose to name as predecessor to the Incarnate Word is going to fall into the category of thief and robber.

Nothing more or less

When righteousness is not what the community agrees on we have an insoluble dilemma.  All of the glowing talk about obedience and loyalty fall flat and end up in the sewer. God’s righteousness, as promised to Jerusalem is not credit earned.  Was not Abraham concerned that God was involved in snuffing out the lives of innocent people and was not Jonah insensitive to the right to life of the Ninevites?  It is a spicy ball of nothing when we say, for example, that we are followers of God but we dare not step over the line from our human customs into the realm of divine character.  There is no day that God does not work so we can forget trying to make the prohibitions regarding the sabbath primary kingdom business.  If righteousness does not come, even indirectly, from the law, there is no work that anyone can perform in sync with Christ, who just happens to be in glory with no task related to the levitical priesthood. and is ahead of his followers, enjoying his rest.   

It will be righteousness for us if we are careful to observe all this commandment before the Lord our God, just as He commanded us.

Deuteronomy 6:25

There is no escaping what amounts to success for Christ’s ancestors.  Neither taking possession of the land of Canaan, nor establishing the highly significant priesthood, nor the celebrating of annual festivals are wholesome types of the ultimate measure of success.  Even though a festival, for example, may result in a revival or a reorientation the standard of righteousness was full compliance with EVERY COMMAND.  “All of this commandment” could not be clearer.   The number of Christians who are eager to prove the purity of their beliefs or the maturity of their practices amounts to a majority.  The simple odds that the majority holds the right view are extremely low and runs against the grain of Messianic revelation.  The Exodus and the wilderness journey,  if we are interested in biblical precedents, also point to the survival of only a few: only two men (and their families?) made it from Egypt to Canaan. One does not have to do any math to know that only one in four individuals who have “received” the message of salvation will eventually end up being productive.  Three quarters of the people hearing the gospel will fizzle out – until the next time the seedsower scatters seeds in their neighbourhood- not be saved.  Our Lord himself points to the hard fact of the small generational harvest of souls.

Chosen, Few, and Little,

​“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

Matthew 7:13-14

For many are called, but few are chosen.”

Matthew 22:14

God’s gifts and the persistent fear

Lies persevere because their producers depend on terror and threats. The liar’s method is kill, steal, destroy, and, by all means, deceive. When they have no power to shun, eject, slander, censure or silence Christ’ followers they turn to murder. This has always been the case. Warmongers will try to glorify the wars they have fought but the reasonable and the wise seem to have perished from the earth, and the rising generation scarcely gets a chance to rid itself of the baggage of the previous, which is still a great deal of empty traditions and power games. People who are converted by strong arm methods and compunction will not make it to Yeshua’s safe arms.

In righteousness shalt thou be established: thou shalt be far from oppression; for thou shalt not fear: and from terror; for it shall not come near thee.

Isaiah 54:14

​“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Luke 12:32

The spiritual heritage

Our spiritual security is not going to come from anything other than the Spirit Himself, who we all confess is also the author of the words preserved for us in Scripture. No vision, inspired storytelling or comment rises to the level of apostolic teaching. The best we can do to avail ourselves of the protection is to draw as near as possible to the teaching without the possibility of faulty communications slipping into the stream.

Many believers get baptized and join a church after a gospel worker tells him or her what he thinks they need to hear, and too often without the goal of attaching the believer’s faith to Christ. Typically an evangelist introduces people to Christ as saviour. The practice in our times is a combination of demanding lifestyle change which means gathering information about the individual: their employment (unemployed are 3rd class citizens), their food and clothing (both irrelevant for kingdom purposes), and their past Fear drives the agenda. We should not think that fear is forbidden, because fear is the natural response to God, even by good and just people.

Kings and queens are not popular in the 21st century, at least not when the official title is actually king or queen.  Many of our prime ministers and presidents do exactly what ancient kings did.  The ancient rulers had less invasion of their occupational space by their subjects.  For most of the four or five year terms of the modern ruler ths citizens get to shape much of what the nation ends up getting.  The government heads that spend a lot of time messaging are mostly trying to fill the void of their loss of control.  The aversion to monarchy is a weird condition because the vast majority of people on the planet are ruled by a despot, a family of despots, a twice-elected hero, or an oligarch,  Even when the system of government is called by various forms of democracy, republicanism or socialism the result is the same: headless publics.

The revolutionary character of the New Testament may appear as a natural shift.  The Land of the boiling pot had many kings in the Period following the Persian exile.  The Roman emperor was the head honcho.  The Levant was home to four ethnarchs, each ruling an ethnic group.  The arrangement was Rome’s method of softening local resistance.  The Jews having a king was not a threat to Rome.  Pilate, the Roman governor in the days of Yeshua of Nazareth, was careful to stay out of local Jewish sectarianism and religion.

When the magi showed up in Judea announcing their intention to worship a newborn king Herod, the tetrarch, was beside himself that he had a contender for the throne.  King of Israel was a title few people wanted or cared about, and the consensus was that an Israelite king in the form the law prescribed was treachery to Rome, but the unveiling of Israel’s ruler landed on the obscure town of Bethlehem.

Kingdom everywhere we look

If you want to be governed by a king (and his house) be ready for some shenanigans that will affect the prosperity of both the king and the people.

It has not escaped our notice either that the sons of Israel were offered a covenant aimed at creating a kingdom of priests.  The high priest was the first person whose authority was the law and whose ability to affect Israelite lives was near absolute.  Having a king was foreign idea to the Hebrew people, but God had a plan for monarchy and a set of cautions.  He even had a prophet who was aware of the complications of having a king like Israel’s neighbours.

The prophets also made sure the people heard that the house of David was going to be God’s means of achieving his plan.  The Solomonic dynasty, created to elevate David’s passion and personal integrity, could only be distinguished from God’s sovereignty by the length of life of the crowned heads. Every time one of them died the milk spilled out.  In the same vein of weakness and incapacity,  justice for a family affected by homicide was set aside and a potential killer walked free when a high priest died.  The king of Israel was best when he was also a priest and possessed of an endless life. Both the priest and the kings ended up saturated with greed blind to justice.

Monarchy byways 

Moses is first to notice the problems of monarchy.  His warnings are as follows.

• NO FOREIGNER CAN BE CROWNED. When you enter the land which the Lord your God gives you, and you possess it and live in it, and you say, ‘I will set a king over me like all the nations who are around me,’ you may not put a foreigner over yourselves who is not your countryman.
• THE CROWN CANNOT ACCUMULATE MILITARY CAPACITY  FOR HIMSELF. (vs 16a) “Moreover, he shall not multiply horses for himself, 
• HE MUST NOT COUNSEL HELP FROM EGYPT. (vs 16b) nor shall he cause the people to return to Egypt to multiply horses, since the Lord has said to you, ‘You shall never again return that way.’
• THE CROWN MUST NOT BE POLYGAMOUS.  (vs 17“He shall not multiply wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away; 
• THE CROWN MUST NOT ACCUMULATE MONEY FOR HIMSELF. nor shall he greatly increase silver and gold for himself. 
• THE CROWN MUST BE HAVE HIS OWN HANDWRITTEN COPY WITH THE LAW (vs 18. Now it shall come about when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself a copy of this law on a scroll in the presence of the Levitical priests. (At the time the Law consisted of the unfinished books of Moses) (vs 19) It shall be with him and he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, by carefully observing all the words of this law and these statutes[,]
• THE CROWN’S COMPLIANCE WITH THE LAW CREATES THE POTENTIAL TO BE LONG-LASTING.  (vs 20) that his heart may not be lifted up above his countrymen and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, to the right or the left, so that he and his sons may continue long in his kingdom in the midst of Israel.

References to (a) king, (b) king of Israel, and (c) queen, can be seen in comparison to the references to (d) Yahweh as king (King of Israel-prime).

With such a dominating frequency of monarchy in the Old Testament there is every reason to believe that a rift is in play.  King of Israel, like the levitical service, must be resolved in something real and effective.  How long does it take for a people to recognize that  their king ought to be a person who does not slumber or sleep?  How else could he keep them safe when there are enemies all around? How many annual days of official atonement can a community endure before it admits that the blood of animals facilitates the forgiveness of sins?  The flow of the monarchy record consists of accession to the throne, a narrative of selected deeds, their deaths, their burials, and an epitaph of serving Yahweh or not (essentially did evil or not). 

The king of Israel presented by the New Testament writers is part of a revolutionary proposal.  It has little to do with the law, the temple, or Jerusalem.  The sparse frequency of the records of kings’ accession to the throne, their deaths and burials in the New Testament marks a sharp departure from the narratives of the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament framework for viewing the facets of the king are also few. Those facets are:

• The mocking of the crowds when Yeshua was hanging on a tree
• Nathanael’s perception that the king (Yeshua) knows everything
• The report of Yeshua’s ride into Zion on a donkey and the people’s response

The other kings mentioned in the New Testament are not candidates for being recognized as king of Israel, and Jewish monarchy governing Judah (or Judea) was not even mentioned when the Persian exile ended, and was even more remote.  The events of the New Testament unfolded in a province of the Roman Empire.  A king with the stature of the kings of Judah and Israel was most unwelcome.  The only Jewish person that could be named king in New Testament times had to be approved by Rome.

1. An unwelcome king
   1. The framework shows that the disciples’ king was not welcome.  
   2. The king acclaimed by the crowds was not welcome. 
2. An extraordinary depth of knowledge and authority
   1. Nathanael was impressed by Yeshua’s knowledge of hidden facts
   2. At age twelve Yeshua had the Jewish leadership at the temple scratching their heads
3. The habit of attaching Yeshua’s experiences to prophecies from the Old Testament is almost avoidable.  The donkey ride into Zion stands out.
   1. The donkey ride into Zion may seem to be adrift until we see the original context of the prediction in Zechariah’s prophecy

Justice, Salvation, and Humility

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, Humble, and mounted on a donkey, Even on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

(Zechariah 9:9, NASB)

One can find no excuse for rejecting such a king and there is none.  Recognizing that Yeshua did not appear to be a fan of Moses and took the functioning of the temple as a personal responsibility – he called it “My Father’s house” – leads to a number of mistaken views.  that the Old Testament is yesterday’s book, and that the idea of monarchy is unsuited for the modern  world. One has to be pretty gifted president or prime minister to not want to be ruler forever.  There are, after all, no humans who have lived forever.  Maybe there are but they are hiding. What is with the forever thing anyway? Adam is dead, Abraham is waiting for his resurrection, and so are all the apostles.  There is no forever throne for David. We know where his tomb is.  With large portions of the world about to go virtual,  all of the forms of government will be known for what they really are, despite the repeated debates and proclamations, headless failed states, headless republics and headless publics.

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The mosquito’s charm is minor compared to the female body and hoth of these pale beside the popular hypocritical righteous grab bag. You may not be a warrior for the righteousness that is of debt and performance, but the words obey and precept are triggers that often lead to disaster.

Turned on by viral words

When people affirm their salvation by grace through faith there is sometimes a violent disapproval. “Grace through faith” is not enough but depending on shaky human will and standing next to the fireplace labelled “perfect compliance” .human will and freedom of choice.

Word of God in the heart

Tbe word of God is not a condom. People sin while reciting and magnifying a host of sayings from the Bible. A very common sin is lying: lying about miraculous deliverance while the messenger is in the grip of disability and disease easily corrected by human diligence

Are you turned on by grace or obedience, by God’s personal customized package of amens or a servant’s collection of negatives?

What a difference between the sight of a mosquito and a dragonfly!

This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles.

Psalms 34:6

Most readers are not capable of getting the meaning of the text from the simplest of sayings. Even when the saying is a single clause such as “I shall not want” (Psalm 23) the difference between drama and the expression of fact, being a basic feature of the Hebrew language seems to have been ignored as inconsequential. The major translations (or versions) of the Bible are complicit in this substandard word-handling. Most translators might say they were interested in being simple, but it is better to translate based on the actual words and the context.

The actor’s “I will bless”

The difference between a promise (there is no Hebrew word for promise corresponding to the Greek epaggelia) and a plea is completely avoided. “I will sing” in the Psalms makes people lie in public. The verb shir in the imperfect aspect (often treated as a future tense) is not a pledge. “I will sing” and “I will play” appear more often than not in their cohortative aspects of the verbs. No-one but an angel ceaselessly utters thanksgiving or adoration. None of the psalmists are angels. They all use their mouths for other things and saying “Bless God” or “Hallelujah” often does not cut it. The practice of peppering one’s speech with words that might reflect blessing or praise is barking up the wrong tree. The cohortative is more a plea for permission (may I please) and an expression of determination (I only want to) than a prediction (I will).

The more time we spend approaching the word of God as a treasure for which some careful digging – like an archaeologist – is required, the more secure our witness and our lives become. Getting the meaning of a saying from a Bible dictionary or a lexicon is a preliminary exercise, and this is what many interpreters do to show that there is commendable word handling in progress. Knowing the meaning of words (Hebrew and Greek) ought to lead to examining the critically important matters of word order, the various aspects of the verbs, and the host of idiomatic expressions (blessing I will bless = I will most certainly bless, dying you will die = you will definitely die).

So here we are, in the age of increasing deception, shallowness, and laziness, creating illustrations and fanciful applications of important statements of facts. The obsession with storytelling is destroying the transmission of healthy doctrine. We ignore the difference between indisputable conclusions and drama to the catastrophic destruction of our houses. We build on reliable conclusions about God’s completed actions and promises not stories.

““Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.”

Matthew 7:26, NASB

The great nations of the world are now at the bottom of the barrel doubling fown on junk theories, gone wild possibilities, misfiling words with empty promises, and trying to be relevant when it is clear that they are all loud gongs, and their intellectual enterprises show that the gold is definitely turned to tin.

If I said the same thing about religions someone is bound to be offended. If I presented all the evidence I have collected about the start, progress and decline of the popular religious groups someone will still be offended. It is good to remember that human goodwill and good sense did not bring us to the twenty-first century. Active and proactive goodwill and good sense are neither latent nor manifest in the ancient religions. One has to dig real deep to find the expected excellence.

The meaning and mouthing of God’s words

While Yeshua said that people live by God’s words and Moses was absolutely clear that people needed to comply with God’s words. Life, land and death are incidental to Moses’ teaching. Life is central to Yeshua’s work and teaching. We cannot say the same about Moses and the Israelite experience. involved and the proof of that is that the first generation who complied with God’s words by leaving Egypt under the blood of a lamb painted onto the door post all died and did not see the promise which everybody thought was given to every generation.

I am not given to repeating maxims and slogans; not even popular sayings like John 3:16. I have an aversion to repeating promises and judgments that have no anchor to the gospel. Just think. How how many sentences can a preacher string together and ask the congregation to say them before the congregation realizes they are up the creek in the land of Oz saying lots loudly and meaning nothing.

There are no excuses for the kind of ignorance that accompanies the rabbis, pastors and imams. They know they are not up to snuff. They betray their calling and education. They are good at broadcasting the trivia of words without demonstrating divine approval.

One of these days all the secondhand wisdom and sons of Sceva powers will be shattered. The ears will stop tingling because people prefer the meaningless appearance of knowledge rather than integrity and honesty. The man of God will do as instructed; “… break the jar in the sight of the men who accompany you” (Jer 19:10, NASB)