stickapinin

God’s kingdom and the other

eejoseph

Does anyone remember Herbert W. Armstrong?  He was for many years a strong voice for Christ on the airwaves preaching the kingdom of God.  He also established a college.  More significantly, Mr. Armstrong travelled the world making contact with leaders and talking with them about the need to order their nations in accordance with God’s written instructions.  I was riveted to his radio broadcast as a teenager until the Christ he was preaching was an unrealistic composite of Levitical and Christian models.  We know there is no levite interest on the ascendancy in the Messianic kingdom. Not a shred of sabbaths, diets, or exclusive tribal supremacy adorns the kingdom of God where Christ is the king.  The content of Mr. Armstrong’s conversation with national leaders is unknown, but we know now that trying to combine God’s old and new arrangements for his people and humanity ends in a disastrous waste, and that kingdom is a balloon that deserves a pin.

David’s Son, king of Israel, is not a levitical priest

Every step in Mr. Armstrong’s forceful teaching was levitical.  He taught that believers should observe the festivals in the statutes of Israel’s commonwealth, and like most other Christians he taught that the Holy Spirit was given to ensure that believers could keep the law of God (the only one we know was that given through Moses).   I speak as a mere mortal when I say that my own devotion to the Lord Christ as the one and only necessary messenger from God has led me to keep the Lord Christ separate from all other authorities.  That means that nothing from the patriarchs, prophets, priests and kings of Israel (or any other nation) can be allowed to shape my views and practices in relation to God’s kingdom.

Holy Spirit witness about the Lord Christ exclusively

The kingdom of God is definitely a future thing.  The kingdom of God was, if you take the Torah as the primary witness, the predicted rule of Christ from David’s throne in Jerusalem.  Most of us believe that, but we do not believe that Christ is without real authority in the world in the present age, nor has he left the Church without his lordship or royal rule.  It is as if Mr Armstrong did not see the full authority of the risen Christ, a  shared authority, I must add (Matthew 28:18, 20b).  I suppose that people who expect to prosper by means of recruiting people to follow Moses cannot be genuine beneficiaries of the Holy Spirit.   The Holy Spirit guides us into all truth that is integral to the Lord Christ, not into everything that ever was said or written.  It is a deep revelation of how impoverished a person can be to think that everything in the Bible is not sufficient for life and godliness.  If all believers need cannot be found in what the Lord Christ said then there is reason to look to the law and even the deluded visions and dreams of our peers. It is a symptom of mental laziness that neglects the apostolic foundation.

The Lord Christ did not give the apostles a testimony about Moses

The Holy Spirit was not going to be an agent of Moses and the prophets, to the contrary, the Holy Spirit was going to be an  exclusive witness of what Christ had said and done.

“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.”

John 14:26, NASB

Where do these guys get off bullying people to follow Moses and the prophets, as if they had not heard – from Moses himself – who Christ was and the extent of his authority?

Christ witnessed exclusively to his Father’s business

Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner.”

John 5:19, NASB

Christ exclusively mirrored his Father’s speech

““For I did not speak on My own initiative, but the Father Himself who sent Me has given Me a commandment as to what to say and what to speak.”

John 12:49, NASB

“Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works.”

John 14:10, NASB

An impersonal standard of righteousness is a pin-deserving balloon

One would think that from the multitudes running from Christ to Moses that there is no righteousness in the cross.  The centre of the gospel is Yeshua’s  passion and glory (death, burial and resurrection).  It is clear that people who believe that society needs the law of God for morality or justice are ready for a kingdom where they can circumcise, amputate, excommunicate, punish, discriminate and condemn because that is what the Law is for.  Innocent people have been the perennial victims of the levitical system, both in its tabernacle work and in the interpretation of its justice code. A kingdom of priests apart from the revealed righteousness of God in Christ on the cross (Romans 1:16-17) is a recipe for robbery, bribes, and extrajudicial homicide.  Do they believe that the Word of God, as a man, could have been lawless, rebellious, ungodly, sinful,  unholy and profane, patricidal, matricidal or homicidal?  What has the law cleansed or purified in the thousands of years since it was brought in (Romans 5:20, Galatians 3:11, 23)?   We who call Christ Saviour and Lord  can be certain that human hearts are cleansed – purified – before receiving the Holy Spirit (Acts 15:9), and we are sufficiently humble and transparent to confess that we have ways to keep purifying (agnizo, as in 1 John 3:3). 

Tabernacle and law take a dive

Blood was at the centre of and in the most secret operations in the tabernacle. So when the Jewish people heard the news that a man was the new sacrifice they scoffed. To them no man could be a sacrifice, even though Isaac, Abraham’s son, came within a hair’s breadth of being a burnt offering. What are we to make of Christ being proclaimed as propitiation? Propitiation is not only a concept: it was an object, a process, and a result. Christ is all three: hilasterion, hilaskomai, hilasmos, respectively mercyseat, atoning intervention, and the resulting atonement. There was no blood in the levitical system that suffices to purify people’s minds, pay for their sins, or bring an end to the annual cycle of defilement and uncleanness.

Christ the mercyseat

“whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed;  for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”

Romans 3:25-26, NASB

Christ the priest

“Therefore, He had to be made like His brethren in all things, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation (hilaskomai) for the sins of the people.” (Hebrews 2:17, NASB)

Christ the satisfaction or atonement

“and He Himself is the propitiation (hilasmos) for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.” (1 John 2:2, NASB)

If you feel trapped in an annual cycle, you can find your way out by demanding to see Yeshua the Anointed as the heir of all things of divine origin. If you feel trapped in a weekly cycle, you can begin to break out by giving up the symbols and start wrapping your mind around the reality. All the festivals are mere shadows of holy and eternal things. The fuller meaning of seventh day Sabbath has nothing to do with any 24-hour period, but rather with the rest God gives to those who have died with Christ and are now alive in him. The annual festivals are symbols of the means God uses to gather and keep his people. They are not themselves instruments of grace. Let’s not have a fit over these guys. They have fallen off the bus, fallen from grace, by their insistence that law supercedes God’s grace, mercy and peace. Let’s just be sorry that blindness has a hold on them, barring them from God’s kingdom.

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.

Solomon’s preacher: flying in the face of a lazy generation

eejoseph

The phrase “should never” appears only twice in the English translations, and a popular song tells people to “never be discouraged” while the facts are that Christ himself was profoundly troubled and needed encouragement in the last hours of his life. There however are lots of verbs with the following meaning:

The phrase “should never” appears only twice in the English translations, even though there are lots of verbs with the following meaning:

  1. let us never
  2. you/they must never
  3. we/I will by no means
  4. they will never 

The first “should never” is not even a command or expectation; it is one of the conclusions from the preacher (of Ecclesiastes).

“When I gave my heart to know wisdom and to see the task which has been done on the earth (even though one should never sleep day or night),”

Ecclesiastes 8:16, NASB

Three Clauses make up this verse.

  1. “When I gave my heart to know wisdom 
  2. and [gave my heart] to see the task which has been done on the earth
  3. (even though one should never sleep day or night),” (Ecclesiastes 8:16, NASB)
  1. כַּאֲשֶׁ֨ר נָתַ֤תִּי אֶת־לִבִּי֙ לָדַ֣עַת חָכְמָ֔ה
  2.  וְלִרְאוֹת֙ אֶת־הָ֣עִנְיָ֔ן אֲשֶׁ֥ר נַעֲשָׂ֖ה עַל־הָאָ֑רֶץ
  3.  כִּ֣י גַ֤ם בַּיּוֹם֙ וּבַלַּ֔יְלָה שֵׁנָ֕ה בְּעֵינָ֖יו אֵינֶ֥נּוּ רֹאֶֽה׃” (Ecclesiastes 8:16, WLC)

The 3rd clause seems to be the preacher’s conclusion that in both day and night (= every 4 hour day) his inner (heart) processes to (a) acquire wisdom and (b) to see [by looking at] the common inyan, business, come up empty-handed.

His conclusion: [my translation]

because indeed daily for sleepy eyes there is no sight.

He was accusing his generation of being busy sleepy heads, unseeing and therefore not wise.  Who is going to dispute the progress of the Israelite kingdom during Solomon’s reign?  The busy sleepyhead is not missing in the modern era. We find them in all the areas of public endeavour and public service. There are employers whose practice is to rob the worker, peace officers and judges who pervert justice, preachers, rabbis, imams, and  prophets who have no master.  If we think the Ecclesiastes preacher is arrogant then consider that lilies of the field and the birds of the sky know their path and follow it, yet they have neither book, prophet nor magic wand. I recommend a pin for that balloon: the idea that busyness is evidence of knowledge or wisdom.

Deny deny

eejoseph

Rabbit holes mark the places where feet of many have tried to lead God’s people. The identity of the human race and the place we occupy in the genuine picture painted by Moses and the prophets. Christ is not trying to save humanity by exercising their minds about creation; that is quite clear. For persons to migrate from hostile and rebellious the frame of reference must include what we are and what we can be. Beware! “Flesh and blood” does not mean spirit.

The living creature who named all the living creatures  was a living creature.

OUT OF THE GROUND; FORMED BY ELOHIM

  • Nephesh chayyah include swarms of marine animals (Genesis 1:20)
  • Nephesh chayyah include human beings (male and female). Then the Lord God formed man “dust from the ground“, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)
  • Out of the ground came every beast of field (Genesis 2:19)
  • Out of the ground came every bird of the sky (Genesis 2:19)
  • Beasts and birds are living creatures (Genesis 2:19)

Man is not an animal, huh?

“Man is a spiritual being, composed of body, soul, and spirit” is one popular mantra. The difference between spirit/wind and flesh/bone is graphic. Spiritual (of spirit) and of flesh (πνευματικος and σαρκινος) are even opposites.

“For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin.” (Romans 7:14, NASB)

Man is an animal, ranking below angels, who we know to be genderless spirit and fire. When we call someone an angel we promote them.

He makes the winds His messengers, Flaming fire His ministers.

Psalms 104:4

What is man that You take thought of him, And the son of man that You care for him? Yet You have made him a little lower than God, And You crown him with glory and majesty! You make him to rule over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet,

Psalms 8:4-6

Humans are known to sink below the understanding of animals we recognize.

An ox knows its owner, And a donkey its master’s manger, But Israel does not know, My people do not understand.

Isaiah 1:3

Waiting for the pin to pop that balloon of human essence is going to take a long time because human pride keeps getting in the way of truth and humility. We tend to challenge ourselves with both lies and truth.

Stick a pin in

eejoseph,

Do you realize that comedians have had people laughing at the most serious threats and indignities to which people with public accountability have exposed us? The schticks were funny and true. So where were the gatekeepers of human security while the late night laughter rolled? They were watching their balloons floating across the sky, painted with advertisements of well-oiled machines and cosmopolitan societies but filled with every kind of homicide, every kind of xenophobia and utterly disgusting attitudes and behaviours. It is certain that people are discovering a web of lies and balloons for which there is a pin.

Nobody ever said in prayer to the God and Father of the Lord Christ “I decree and declare”. Nobody! Not God’s Only Son, not David, Samuel or Moses.

Who is in agreement?

“Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven.”

Matthew 18:19, NASB

Two people agreeing on a request for something to be done and seeing God do it is the probability the Lord is affirming in this saying.

It is quite obvious that people at least say “amen” with great regularity in hundreds of  situations where the desired result is unambiguous, but there must also be, all across the globe, two persons who agree on what they want, why they want it, and where they want it.

How many graveside prayers have ascended in agreement for the departed to return for God’s glory or for the comfort of the bereaved? Given the current and repeated distresses of human beings, we can count how many people are in agreement about the peace of Jerusalem or the end of lies, homicide, and theft. Can we not?

The heavenly Father answers requests by the million each hour so why is there so little evidence that two people in agreement ensures that God the Father delivers the thing requested? Having piled up promises around prayer myself I think it is time to realize that Christ’s idea of agreement must be something other than saying a thing and having someone ditto it. The way we have used this verse to press the requests of dozens, hundreds or thousands of people only contributes to an alternate reality or a fevered imagination, and we can safely stick a pin in that balloon.