The short Bible notes on Paul’s Pastoral Letters has been updated and reformatted. You can see it here (gone now). As always, if you simply save the single HTML page as it is, all the formatting comes with it.
Update: This document was lost in the transition between computers.
Bottom line: I need a rowing machine because biking is still a very long way off. Rowing is the only way I can engage the aerobic training so important to my general fitness. I’d love to have a kayak or some way to row on the water, but that’s not always convenient to use like cycling.
Today I had a visit with an orthopedic surgeon at the VA. Apparently I had gotten incomplete information and some bad guidance previously. I wasn’t supposed to quit wearing the brace until they told me to take it off; I had thought I was on my own because I couldn’t get much response from Orthopedics in the past. But God in His mercy prevented me doing anything outright harmful, so I don’t have to worry about the brace, because I’m far enough along the healing path to be okay. The patella is knitting slowly, but the lack of pain when the doctor pressed on it was a good sign.
The stiffness and swelling is long term and part of the process. I need to avoid seeking any greater freedom of movement. Bending to 90° is actually quite good at this point. We are talking a year or more of very slow progress. Without a full range of motion, cycling is simply not possible, not safe. That doesn’t relieve the City of their duty to replace my trashed bike, but it might be sitting a very long time once I get it back. And aerobic exercise is critical to my heart recovery from the tachycardia events, so I have to find some other way of getting the kind of exercise, and I figure rowing is just about the best way to do that.
Pray with me that I can find something I can afford that will do the job. I’ve used the junk toys before and want to avoid them.
I go back in six weeks to the Ortho Clinic.
Let’s not get bogged down in the details. What Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, laud as good moral guidelines stands in flat contradiction to the Bible. Broadly, chivalry as a body of lore arising from the European Middle Ages was an attempt by church officials to impose what they imagined were good moral restrictions on the Germanic tribes slowly adopting civilization. Almost no one bought into this package of mythology wholesale, so it remained an imaginary ideal. And it remains with us today.
What most people cannot quite grasp is that it stands behind both left and right social agendas in the US. It’s the same basic assumptions about reality that make the whole debate possible. All the competing “should” and “ought” statements arise from the same pool of moral sewage. They are both expressions of the same cultural mythology, the same heathen worldview, the same badly broken morality.
However, we recognize that some propagandists will openly embrace the term “chivalry” as if it grants them some moral high ground. Let’s take a look at one particular issue: civilian casualties in war. You’ll hear a lot of absolutist rhetoric that is simply not possible. It presumes a mythical “innocent bystander” as the hapless victims of war. This presumes to know the motives of humans when most humans don’t even know their own motives. It takes a significant amount of work and introspection just to get started down that path. While utterly necessary for heart-led living, it is frankly near impossible without heart-led awareness. Motives come into play only when we narrow down to the business of individual awareness. Trying to impute motives in the aggregate requires at least a lot more study than most so-called analysts can engage. Further, group motivations are a moving target. The bigger your population, the less you can say about it in any meaningful way without losing any sight of the presumed “high moral ground.”
Humans war. Nothing you promote will change that; it’s part of fallen nature. The Bible does suggest some general moral guidelines, but you can be sure nobody actually engaged in warfare is interested. There’s nothing wrong with prophetically addressing things, so long as you don’t take yourself too seriously. But a heart-led evaluation starts with knowing biblical morality, not mindlessly walking in the mythology into which we are all born.
Reminder: Life is not precious. That statement is hyperbole designed to shatter a cultural myth, but remains a salient reminder that we cannot approach this with badly broken Western morals. The proper view is radically different.
So far as I can discern, no current warfare stands on good moral grounds. Defending your community in general is morally right. It falls under the broad moral goal of social stability (shalom). Most current warfare stands on some kind of imaginary national insult or simple greed and lust for power. For example, the US suffers from this hellish imagination that she is morally superior to the rest of the world, and that whatever some bureaucrat imagines is in our national interest (with all the paranoid bullshit concerns for “national security”) is naturally what God Himself wants us to pursue. We are the anointed nation, set apart to decide what humanity should be doing, which includes making our lives luxurious and convenient. The only thing our troops defend is our divine right to tell everyone else how to live.
That said, when we take a look at how other folks fight in their wars, Americans tend to think there is something sacred about avoiding civilian casualties and collateral damage unless we are the ones doing it.
But we shouldn’t be wringing our hands about this or that group of civilians bleeding in some blasted pile of rubble solely because they are civilians; the soldiers nearby are just as morally important. We make a legalistic distinction that didn’t come from divine revelation. If it so happens those soldiers are generally defending their community, then they are victims, too. How they go about defense really depends on the wider context of whom they fight, the tactics they face, the training they can get, and what they have to use against their enemy. And nobody in this world, or even the whole outside world together, has any business commenting on it beyond openly confessing their interests. Presuming to address things from some imaginary universal moral standard is downright evil.
Don’t get wrapped up in the activist propaganda. Weep over the bodies of children because that’s how we are wired, but don’t imagine the mere fact of a child’s death is somehow justification for cheering one side or the another in war.
If it were a simple matter of efficiency and logic, we would all simply commit suicide.
Perhaps he didn’t intend to teach what I caught from it, but one of the fellows who helped to shape my awareness during my youth said something that stuck. The man was a Baptist lay preacher and I went with him on a mission trip to the Alaska bush, which meant flying in tiny planes and camping in tiny villages with few or no roads. Half-joking, he once suggested that it made a lot of sense to evangelize with a shotgun. Not in the sense of compelling verbal confessions of faith, of course. He was all about a genuine born-again salvation experience. But he wondered if it wouldn’t save a lot of folks the needless turmoil of facing temptation and sorrow after “getting saved” if we just send them to Heaven right away. Of course, by the same logic, why didn’t he apply the same solution to his own life?
What he taught me is that logic (as commonly conceived) had nothing to do with it. Eventually I discerned that we surrender a great many decisions once we enter a covenant of faith with God.
Everything hinges on faith, particularly expressed in a sense of calling and mission. Along the way, we embrace mortality. If the biblical expression “Maranatha” means anything (typically translated as “come Lord”), then we aren’t that interested in hanging around in this world any more than necessary. However, the evaluation of what’s necessary is far above human reason. Paul wrote more than once that he would much rather be home with Christ in Heaven than to stick around much longer. That’s the natural desire of faith.
So you can imagine that the Prepper/Survivor movement is anti-Christian in that sense. That is, the whole thing rests on the assumption that we have a duty to fight and scramble for survival on any terms. That’s not biblical; that’s Anglo-Saxon. Notice the distinction here: If that’s your calling from God, your convictions will demand it. And those same convictions will tell you when to stop struggling and accept the end. The problem is the a priori rejection of accepting death. There is no room in Survivor Theology for facing death except on the most heroic terms. It forces the Cross into some bogus heroism instead of what it was in plain human terms. To all the world of human reason, Jesus failed. He died unjustly in the most miserable end known to man at the time, and His apparent cause died with Him.
The victory was in accepting the Cross as the ultimate goal of His earthly mission. It wasn’t some heroic resistance to a human enemy, but a very enigmatic direct surrender to the mob: “I’m your man. Take me into custody.” Peter was ready to resist, but Jesus verbally slapped him down and healed the wound to nullify resistance entirely. It was not heroic, but courageous in an entirely different sense. It was not a matter of being tough enough to face torture; He certainly cried out like any mere mortal. He didn’t deny them any satisfaction by refusing to admit the pain. Rather, it was the sense of focus that remained unaffected by all the weakness of the flesh. It would have made better sense by far to simply fall on Peter’s big knife and get it over with, but there was a point to making sure that the perpetrators carried through their malicious intent.
Here’s a challenge for you who enjoy some of the more intellectual stuff. You are perhaps aware that Western Civilization is the very noxious mixture of Greco-Roman Civilization filtered through Germanic uncivilized mythology. More precisely, North American culture is distinctly Anglo-Saxon. We know from historical evidence that the Roman Church, as the last standing institution of Ancient Rome during the repeated waves of Germanic tribal invasions, managed to make peace with the unwashed hordes and remain largely intact. Eventually the Church convinced the kings of these Germanic tribes to embrace some elements of civilization, but especially something resembling Christian religion. Never mind whether the Church truly represented Christian faith at that time; they engaged the tribal mythology academically and twisted the gospel to meet Germanic heathen morals. The ancient Hebraic morals were replaced with something the German kings were more likely to swallow without a genuine conversion.
This worked so well that they decided to use it on all the different Germanic tribes wherever they had conquered. That includes sending missionaries to the British Isles where the Anglo-Saxons ruled. One of those missions produced the earliest example of English poetry: Dream of the Rood. Can you discern the determined effort to turn the Cross into a heroic symbol by perverting the symbolism into Anglo-Saxon mythical imagery? This is not mere translation in cultural terms, but accommodation and compromise of moral values. Hebraic thinking doesn’t turn the Cross into a sacred image of idolatry like that; it was just a piece of lumber used for a grisly task. The term “the Cross” signifies the death and what it purchased.
Sometimes you have to use a little hyperbole to shock folks into reconsidering all their false assumptions: Life is not precious.
I generally avoid this subject because there is much unadulterated bullshit about it. Here is an excerpt from my updated notes on 2 Thessalonians 2.
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Now we come to the point of this second letter to Thessalonica. Someone was trying to convince the church there that the Day of the Lord had come, as if that would explain their persecution. Paul warned them not to believe any such notion, whether it comes via spiritual revelation, a report of teaching or a bogus letter from Paul himself. During those three short weeks with them, he warned them that there would have to be certain conditions fulfilled before the Lord’s Return.
Paul runs through a brief summary of what he had previously taught them in more detail, which detail is no longer available to us. However, the outline is not hard to follow. First, there must be a general apostasy, but it is paired directly with the rise of an Antichrist figure claiming to be Christ. This draws a picture of the church drifting far, so very far that it mistakes some satanic deceiver for Christ. In other words, the genuine Return of Christ would be preceded by a fake one. This someone will eventually claim to be God. In his previous letter, Paul draws a picture of Christ coming in the air, and then we rise to meet Him. He changes and redeems all Creation, and then comes Eternity in Paradise. Christ will not return to stand on this world in its current fallen state. The qualitative difference is indescribable, so anything short of that means Christ has not come. Signs and miracles are not evidence of any new revelation from God that contradicts plain teaching and Scripture.
We realize the deep mystery of such a preposterous presumption is already at work in this world. Satan began the day Christ ascended, planning and preparing the way for his fake Messiah to displace the truth of Christ. The only thing stopping him is the restraining hand of God, working through some force Paul does not declare here. Nor does it matter, because the point is that we have not yet seen any such global deception focused in a single individual just yet. The Antichrist’s day has not yet come, and it precedes the Final Day of the Lord. When this Son of Perdition does come, he won’t last long. God will obliterate him with just a puff of His breath.
There is a clear distinction between those who embrace the Cross and those only pretending. The Cross is death and those who don’t quite grasp the nature of mortification aren’t there yet. Spiritual birth requires a death of the old life first. On top of that, the Spirit speaks only through the heart, not to the intellect. The brain has to take it’s orders from the convictions living in the heart. The mind is not capable, and cannot be made capable of discerning spiritual truth. The mind cannot guard against this overwhelming deception Paul refers to here.
The Antichrist will come with an easy gospel, signs and wonders; a solid majority of humanity will embrace whatever he’s selling, at least on some level. It’s not as if this hasn’t been offered in numerous packages already, but the following has never been quite universal in any sense. The final revelation of the Antichrist will provide the context that will so clearly separate those who willingly give all for Christ versus those who seek something else, because the reign of Antichrist will seek to destroy those who really do know the truth and recognize him.
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The Dispensationalists have really perverted this thing. Christ is only going to return once. The above characterizes what must come before The End. Then, He’ll come to gather the saints to Him in the air and send everyone else to His Father’s Judgment. Next, He’ll restore Creation to its unfallen state rather like Eden and bring us all to our new earth. Even then, the language is mostly symbolic.
It’s all finger-pointing and blame-shifting.
The teachers complain that parents don’t know how to raise well-behaved children. Parents say the teachers spend more time with their kids than they do at home, which makes the teachers the dominant influence in behavior. Cops say both are to blame for letting kids run wild to become criminals, and wonder why churches aren’t more involved, as if churches are accountable to their secular wishes. Church leaders insist the problem is folks have forgotten God, which is code language for demanding society give the preachers more civil authority.
Fact: Children are not naturally bratty little shitbags. It requires an ambient cultural failure to promote moral images for child behavioral modeling. There’s money to be made in dysfunctional families and our culture opens the door wide to such corruption. Our social mythology has created an impossible situation and everyone insists it has to be that way. We just need to [insert politicized social agenda demands here].
I don’t have any quick and simple remedies. All I can do is offer my best understanding of God’s moral character woven into reality.
Do your best to detach your children from this damned world. Withdrawing from society need not be an absolute. If you can think and operate in terms of heart-led awareness, you can easily pass that on to your kids, or anyone else’s kids that come under your influence. No other single factor will make nearly as much difference. But expand on it; get used to dealing with Creation as alive. Teach them to interact with nature on that basis and they’ll be less inclined to surrender to the empty thrill of damned media influences.
Live your faith vividly.
I’m very fond of Edin-Adahl. I have several of their songs on my FTP server. Not only was their music writing and arrangements very innovative, but Frank Adahl’s voice is a singularity, with a range and skill hard to match. He was also very skilled at music production, so their recordings more highly polished than most. Everyone noted that their Swedish lyrics often didn’t get properly translated into English. For me, the real hindrance is that some of their songs still reek of evangelical Christian mythology at times.
One song in particular is stained with such idiocy: “Let All the Earth Proclaim” from their 1982 Alibi album. Despite being such a fine rock worship anthem, it repeats the tired old notion that Satan viewed the Crucifixion as a victory and was ready to crank up the evil with Christ out of the way.
Nothing — nothing — in Scripture promotes that silly image. It arose from pagan European mythology that stands firmly on the false notion that Satan is a competitor with Christ, as if the two were foes of relatively equal power. This myth suggests that Christ won because of a trick God pulled on His Son’s behalf by raising Him from the dead. This nonsense is the whole story behind Carman’s much more famous “The Champion” from the 1985 album of the same title. It belongs to the highly heathenized Western Christian religion that ignores all the scholarship pointing out how utterly different the biblical cultural background was.
Let’s make something clear: At no time did Satan or any demon question the authority of Christ as the Son of God and superior to them.
Do you recall the Wilderness Temptations (Luke 4:1-13)? The whole point was to divert Jesus from His path into becoming a different kind of Messiah. The temptations were directly related to known Jewish rabbinical expectations of what the Messiah would be. It was a very materialistic and political body of expectations. While drawn somewhat from Old Testament prophecies, it was all the worst literalizing of Hebrew parabolic language. So Jesus was tempted to fulfill the false dreams of the rabbis and refused based on the existing written revelation.
Satan’s attempt bore the marks of a somewhat sarcastic “adviser” to his master. His claim to have the power to deliver the political situation into Jesus’ hands was accurate enough in a certain sense, but not as his choice of words seem to imply. It was a sort of over-the-top lampoon that he knew Jesus would not take seriously in the first place. That business of waiting to come back at “a more opportune time” to try again was how Satan viewed it, and we see it most vividly in the scene where Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Satan didn’t want Jesus to die on the Cross. That is, insofar as we can deduce he had any particular interest at all. However, it was his duty to tempt Jesus and to provoke men to crucify Him. Satan surely knew what it all meant. Why do you think he worked so hard very soon after to squelch the gospel message with Judaizers? Then he followed up by creating an entire civilization that denied a priori everything necessary to truly follow Christ.
It is that civilization, a blend of heathen European tribal mythology and Greco-Roman materialist philosophy, that climaxed in The Enlightenment as the foundation for all current Western evangelical and fundamentalist Christian religion.
When does this thing take off? When you start running with it and spread your wings.
It’s the nature of a blog that most of those who read it are only seeking some measure of entertainment. Maybe it stirs some warm sentiment, some fresh thinking, or perhaps just a way to distract from something unpleasant. For such I am still grateful to serve. The last thing I want is for this blog to become famous. That runs the risk that some folks would try to paint some of that fame on me. It’s not my color.
There seems small risk of that, though. What does worry me is the number of people who treat my blog seriously enough to think it represents their commitment to God, but that commitment is little more than reading the posts and comments. Granted, there is a dozen or so that seem genuinely active and use the faith teaching to change their lives. It means all the world to me that I was able to plant a sign you could read to discover the true home for your soul. But some of you seem to think you can’t do what I do, that somehow I’m too far out there ahead on the path.
I’m not begging for you to post and make me feel good; I don’t need that kind of validation. What does bless me is when you tell me how something I wrote helped you see through the lies of this world. I don’t need you to throw flowers at me; throw stories. Don’t make up something. It doesn’t have to relate directly to my writing. Tell me about how your faith carries you through temptations and trials. Do you remember what I wrote about how I was spiritually ready before the bicycle wreck and my injuries? That was faith in action. And this thing isn’t done yet because I’m still recovering and the City hasn’t yet responded to my claim. You are going to hear more about how God works miracles with those who trust Him, always leveraging things exponentially more than we can imagine. And maybe your story ain’t that cool, but it’s not about having a rock-em-sock-em testimony. It’s about using what God puts in your heart.
And maybe I’m not the most charming on the phone, and I struggle to chat very long, but you can still call me or text me if that’s your style. Request my number by email; just look at the “About” page for the address. I’m the pastor/elder for anyone who tolerates me. But I’m not any kind of bigshot and I’m not your proxy in faith. This religion thing we do here aims to build your faith.
I’m still waiting to see if anyone wants to participate in writing the booklet on Radix Fidem. That’s covered in previous posts, so I’m not pushing that here. Scroll down the main page of the blog or use the search function for “booklet”. Just reminding you, see?
Go ahead and steal my ideas and make them your own.
A source of countless contemporary songs, this is one of the most popular psalms, and for good reason. Some doubting scholars question whether David could have written this. There is no doubt this psalmist was way ahead of his peers in moral discernment. You would almost think it was penned after Christ, but we know its actually quite ancient. Instead, it scolds us for imagining that ancient beliefs were too primitive for such soaring spiritual awareness.
It’s clear David must have been looking back from late in his life when things were going well. He gives glory where it is due — to the God who carried him like a child through all the sorrows of his life. The sweetness of life is the mercy of God forgiving his sins and healing his suffering. This is no mere theory or doctrine, but a personal experience both long and vividly remembered.
But not only for me, says David, but His mercy falls on anyone who calls on His name. He is the same God to all Creation and all living. He revealed Himself most famously through Moses (up to that point in history). And if there is any proof of God’s mercy, it’s in His dealings with rebellious Israel. David notes most forcefully that Israel never received the full measure of wrath she deserved. God’s patience and forbearance is off the charts. The space between heaven and earth cannot contain His mercy. The distance between east and west hardly match His power to separate us from our sins. He treated Israel as His own child, and never forgot that humans are just so much wet dirt.
Have you ever noticed how those desert flowers pop up during the brief rains? Yet when their time is past and the dry season returns, you would think the ground had never seen a single blossom. Just so, the Lord forgets our sins, because His mercy is more durable than the rocks in that same wilderness. He keeps His covenant promises long after men have forgotten His name. How much more so for those who seek His favor!
The eternal Jehovah established His throne outside this realm of existence. Not only we creatures, along with all Creation, but the angels owe Him praise and glory. His authority reaches from the heavens to our very lives here. Let no one fail to praise and glorify Him.
