I have been compiling observations about a few statements that seem to hang around like a night-time trial of an innocent citizen. Sometimes we can be accused of having one eye closed but the things that I am observing include many that look more like having both eyes gouged out. Attitudes are so full of self (esteem, effort, and expression) that God and Christ are truly absentee landlords. Some of us have decided that drinking the bottle will give the advantage over just drinking the wine. Others find solace in monotony, repetition, insularity, elitism, relabelling things we do not own, clinging to sweet-smelling flowers, in a clear obsession with fading glory.

All flesh is grass, but God’s word endures.

All created things perish.

The biggie of fading flowers

There is no point to trying to comply with everything God ever said. Some things have become irrelevant and there are vistas of kingdom life that were kept under wraps until the Word became flesh and lived among men 2000 years. He revealed himself as the way to life.

That revelation was not in the law or the prophets or the writings. That revelation was reserved for the lips of God’s anointed.

If latching onto the ten commandments is said to be required them someone is trying to get away with spiritual adultery (see Romans 7).

Eden is a starting point

If we can imagine God giving the ten Commandments to Adam and Eve we can also imagine Christ saying “Keep the whole law and be saved”. Who buys that and for how long?

Moses glitter

• God’s promises eclipse the Mosaic tradition (Galatians 3)
• Christ distances himself from all of Israel’s caretakers, and calls them thieves and robbers. (John 10:8)

Kingdom glitter

• Kingdom law needs a king. There was no king at Sinai and it took three magi to bring the King’s birth to Jewish attention. (James 1, Matthew 2:1-2)

The older conventions are easy to claim: the vast majority are about festivals, food and drink, and bodily functions. All are elementary and juvenile, now faded into no glory by comparison with the Light of the world.

There is no evidence that people of ancient times living under Moses’ economy had even the common impartiality, justice, and respect for other people. Yet they had instruction on the disposal of human waste.

Denying that God changes things he said in antiquity in order to bring his eternal plan to light is to deny Christ and to conspire with murderers and thieves.

Who said love your neighbour as yourself was a lifeline or a life-sign? No one of note ever said that. So why is it is such a rage 2019 when love in its purest and fullest showing is no longer a mystery? We are confusing the way of life with the way to life.

All the recommended and idealistic behaviors of the human history are not the way to life. There is only one way to life and it does not include our performance.

No one is doing the critical thinking when the flesh of a animal that dies naturally is an abomination for me but that same flesh can be put on sale for my neighbour. It is likely that we do not have the heart to admit that neighbours are unavoidable and of equal value to God. It is obvious that heart was not one of the things Yahweh was willing to hand out wholesale in antiquity.

Individuals who refuse to commit to Christ without reservation are lost, and some who carry the name living creature are really dead. Only God knows the subject completely. In the blink of an eye the dead come to life. The way to life remains mysterious.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. John 3:8

The Democrats must respond with a robust denunciation of the package of lies and innuendo being squeezed out of the historically criminally besieged chief consorter with tyrants and bullies.

After the most complicated and exhaustive biblical research projects (that includes the simplest word studies) the results have to be simple and final. Much of the insecurity surrounding the quest for peace and stability comes from keeping alive senseless and distracting clichés and maxims. Public legislation and the principles of the kingdom of God are never going to be married, and even with the demise of all the great powers on record and the decadence of the rising powers our leaders do not know when to quit.

Many shocking surprises

The number of public figures who are secretly racist, misogynist, or just plain corrupt is alarming. All the vacuous statements about patriotism, diversity and security do not amout to a spoonful of milk. The number of Canadians and Americans who have never renounced the bigotry learned from their parents is a crucial question. May you never have to deal with the fact that the spiritual leader of your faith community is a shallow, poorly educated bigot.

Showing off the locks and not the door

Apparently, shameful lying about what one has and knows does not register on the sensors of some holy individuals. God is not looking the other way while the supposedly guys scrape away the last layer of decency and intelligence and date to call their plagiarism and majoring in minors ‘excellence’. There is still a steady stream of definitions of God that stretch imagination of Christ’s disciples, fouling up the air with a chain of childish things and an unvarnished malice towards those for whom Christ died. When there is more prison and death than liberty and life on one’s mind quitting time cannot be far off.

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. Matthew 23:13-15

The steady stream of terroristic moves we see in the public square are not independent from the private myths we have allowed into our private lives. Every rally, revival, and reform movement can be shown to have been mostly feel good moments in both political and evangelistic activities, and less to do with guarding the precious heritage that the founders of our nations and Christ left for us.

Why does anyone who has been pardoned of all things contrary to the divine pleasure still believe that God does not close the book on individual sin? They believe that Exodus 34:7 is the abiding condition under which God interacts with his people in every age.

Forgive vs condemn

keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.

Who does God clear? Who does he bring to life? Who does he hear? Who does he love?

1. Is it not the guilty and ungodly?
2. Is it not the dead?
3. Is it not all who call on him?
4. Is it not the world?

Rally to the Cross, not the Crowd

Who looks at the Crucified and see a thumbs up to racist xenophobic misogynist? Pharisees like James who think that zeal for the Law of Moses plays a part in the salvation of the world.

It is a Pharisee mindset that tries to keep up the wall of partition between those who have come to God and those who are yet to come. The faith of Jesus Christ is neither a political race nor a commendation of any tribal performance. The new and changed world must come from changed hearts, not from legislation. The less we have to learn and explain the more we grow. It is a wide road that leads to distinction. The words from God’s mouth are few and easy to find (if that is what we deem to be lifegiving). The words of prophets, patriarchs, and sages are all over the landscape. I am sure that God’s mouth is neither on loan or up for grabs.

To what are we saying amen these days?

Whose self-talk keeps clashing with the voice of the thunder from on high? Hopefully our own and not someone else’s popular Christless glitter?