Remembering

God is the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Exodus 3:6). He wants to create a family heritage. The blessing on as man like Abraham is worked out in the following generations. Each generation should have greater anointing and wisdom that those that follow. The million people that marched from Egypt to Canaan were called the Children of Israel. They were Jacob’s family line. That was Jacob’s heritage.

Abortion is terrible. A baby with its whole life ahead of it dies. However, it is worse than that. The family heritage of the dead baby is lost to the world. The blessing that would have come through the baby’s descendants are lost forever.

War has the same effect.

My uncle was killed in Italy during the second world war. My grandmother was promised that he would not be forgotten, because he gave his life for his country, but that is a distortion of the truth. (He is largely forgotten already, and when my generation dies, he will be totally forgotten). He did not just give his life. His family line was cut off.

My father who did not have to go to war has died of old age. He left behind six children and thirteen grandchildren. Now his great grandchildren are arriving. His family includes many followers of Jesus. His descendants are having an influence in the world.

I wonder what my Uncles family heritage would have been, if he had not been robbed. He was a kind, gentle, honest man. He might have twenty to thirty descendants by now. Many would be serving the Lord. Some would be pastors. Others would have had an impact on their culture. The world has lost this blessing because his family was cut off, before it began.

For the generals, he was just another casualty, a number to be added to the lists. From God’s perspective, a family line that he began before the foundation of the world was lost.

The politicians promised that those who had their lives taken would not be forgotten. But that was a lie. Most of the people who knew them are already dead. When the current generation dies, their personality and character is forgotten. Memory is more than a name on a stone on side of the road at the top of a hill or a set of medals in a drawer.

Fitch on Church Planting

In a seminar on church planting at Northern Seminary, David Fitch outlined three different models of church, and described their characteristics. This is my summary of the talk.

	Franchise Model (denominational)	Update Church (seeker, relevant)	Mission Model (Incarnation focus)
Goal	Caring for denomination members	Being relevant to people who are turned off church.	Reaching non-churched people, seeking injustices and bringing kingdom.
First Step	Get services running as people expect Sunday church service, children’s ministry.	Same things, but updated to be relevant, easy, convenient.	Inhabit a context. Move, work and live there.  Find people of peace
Context	Irrelevant Methodist is same everywhere	Survey the context to be relevant.	Exegete context. Find places of pain? What is causing pain?.  Where do people gather?
Getting started	Establish a church buiding with sign outside.	Do a launch with big publicity.	Landing.  Establish two or three leader people.  Get a job. Get involved in neighbourhood.  Find networks.
Horizon to self sufficiency	Three years	Three years, but getting harder.	Ten to fifteen years
Worship	Traditional	Better music and messages	Incarnational.  Aims to be part of rhythm of life.  Eating together is important
Leadership	Person from denominational school	Charismatic entrepreneur with celebrity to drive preaching	Polycentric group that know their giftings.  Push decisions down and out.
Preaching	Teaching for doctrinal reinforcement for people who already believe.	Relevant communication. Topic driven.  Equipping people to deal with problems of life.	Proclamation of the gospel into and over the context.  Where is God at work?  Explain how to serve Jesus as Lord there
Evangelism	Not a primary focus	Seeker sensitive, evangelistic event.  Assumes people find God by going to a church on Sunday	Training and locating people to be present in places of hurt, pain, brokenness, suffering and injustice to see what God will do.
Justice	Justice is something that government does.  Church might challenge injustice or train people to participate in government’s justice activities.	Find a project.  Use money for justice projects.  Might even have a justice centre/place where people who need justice and those who want to do it can meet.	Develop a presence amongst the poor, the hurt, the broken, the oppressed, the victimised, the lost.  Live with them in their community and see what God will do.

Interpretation of Moses' Laws

The following principles are important for interpreting and understanding the judicial laws of Moses.

• The scriptures were breathed by the Holy Spirit. We do not know how they were written down, and we do not know how involved Moses was in the process of recording God’s law, but that does not matter, because the Holy Spirit was at work. He got the stuff that he wanted recorded into the books of Moses. This provides our principle of interpretation. The best way to understand the judicial laws of Moses is to seek what the Holy Spirit is saying.

• The judicial laws must be interpreted through the lens of Jesus’ life, ministry and teaching Jesus. His life ministry was a full and complete revelation of the character of God. The gospels will help us understand how God’s laws should be interpreted and applied. Even Moses would not have fully understood what he received from God, because he did not know Jesus.

• The Old and New Testaments were both inspired by the same Holy Spirit, so they will be consistent with each other. Jesus never repudiated the judicial laws, so they must contain a message that is consistent with his gospel. If they seem to be inconsistent with the New Testament, then we have misunderstood them, or the translators have mistranslated them.

• We must not use the behaviour of the Israelites to interpret the judicial laws. They had been slaves in an empire ruled by a cruel dictator and in their new land they were surrounded by evil and violent nations. Therefore, their behaviour often fell short of God’s standard. We cannot take their behaviour as normative, because it was often immoral, not God’s will.

• Archaeological information from the surrounding nations is not very useful for interpreting the judicial laws. Some of these nations will have copied God’s law, because they recognised his wisdom, but they are controlled by principalities and power who hate God, so they will have distorted it. For example, the practices of the Babylonians will not provide many insights into the meaning of God’s law.

• Hebrew is not a precise language like Greek. The words are sparse, and can take many meanings. Hebrew is a very old language, so the meaning of many Hebrew words is uncertain. We should choose the meaning that is consistent with the New Testament.

• We cannot rely on the interpretations and translation of Jewish scholars, because they have a tendency to justify Israel’s history of violence and war. This causes them to cast a violent shadow over the law. The Israelites frequently rejected the Holy Spirit, so that often misunderstood God’s law. Their interpretations are unreliable, because they often choose the harshest possible meaning of a passage, whereas we need one that is consistent with the gospel. We have a huge advantage in understanding the judicial laws of Moses, because we can read them with the insight of the Holy Spirit and the knowledge of the gospel of Jesus.

• The Jews were scattered among the nations for a couple of millennia, and were controlled by the laws of those nations, so they had no need for the judicial laws. In this situation, it was more important to maintain their cultural distinctiveness, so they tended to focus on the cultural markers, such as sabbath and diet, and ignored the judicial laws, because they did not need them. Not surprisingly, they were gained more expertise on the former than the latter.

• Christian translators have tended to copy the Jewish translators, because they assume that they have a better knowledge of Hebrew. Unfortunately, their translations are often tinged by the cruelty and violence, because they did not know Jesus.

• Most Christian translators and interpreters of the Old Testament have focussed on pushing a distinction between law and grace. They have been content to make the Old Testament seem harsh and cruel, because it makes the gospel look better. They do not understand that the law is grace and has a different objective from the gospel.

I will often push the boundary of the meaning of some well-known passages. That is deliberate, because I am translating and interpreting them in a way that is consistent with the gospel. I believe that is the best way to understand what the Holy Spirit is saying. (More in Government of God.)

Mum's Garden

When God created the first humans, he put them in a garden. The garden was a place where God could work and create, frolic and play, rest and talk with humans. When they rejected God’s wisdom, they lost their place in the garden, along with all the fun and enjoyment that went with it.

I am always intrigued by TV programs about people in New Zealand and England who have turned huge areas of land around their house into a garden, because they enjoy creating and they find their garden a pleasant place to be.

My mother was very busy, raising six children, feeding farm workers, and active in church and community groups, but she loved her garden. At the back of the house, she had a big vegetable garden which kept the family self-sufficient in vegetables all year round. On the front and the sides of the house, she had flower gardens, including a shrubbery, a herbaceous border, with formal rose gardens and tidy lawns on which we children could play.

Mum planned her garden, so there was colour all year round (it was less than half an acre). She rarely went to a garden shop. Most of the plants were grown from seed or grew from cuttings that she got from other people’s gardens. Others came from the bring and buy table at a local community group she attended, or by swapping with friends.

She never worked in the garden on Sundays. When a friend or one of her many sisters visited on Sunday, they would walk around the garden together in the afternoon enjoying its prettiness. Each plant had a story. When her visitor commented about a plant, Mum would tell the story of how she obtained it and described the person who had given it to her.

Walking in the garden was restful for my mother. Even her more fractious sister became less critical when they walked in the garden together. The garden was also a place fun, where we played when we were growing up. It was the site of all sorts of games.

When I think of the Garden of Eden, I think of Mum’s garden. Gardens are a place of creativity, hard work, beauty, pleasure and enjoyment, peace, stories, people games and community.

The only thing that took my mother’s peace was if one of us children left the gate open and some hens or a cow got in and started wrecking the garden. That was a family disaster.

US Declaration of Independence

I was surprised when I read the US Declaration of Independence for the first time. According to this document, the British king was doing all the following.

• He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures;
• He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power;
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation;
• For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;
• For protecting them, by a mock trial from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states;
• For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;
• For imposing taxes on us without our consent;
• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of trial by jury;
• For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences;
• He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people;
• He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation;
• He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers.

The great irony is that most of these activities have been done by US Presidents, either at home or abroad. Power does not change.

Sin and Gospel

I listened to the gospel call in a message preached by Billy Graham in the late 1950s. His focus was on sin and his promise was that all our sins can be forgiven. That message worked in his time, but it would not be so effective today, because the culture has changed.

The 1950s was a time when society was conservative and a rules-based culture dominated most people in the west. The church was part of the establishment and attempted to impose its moral standards on the people of the world. Most people had failed to comply with the social rules that were accepted. Many had rebelled at times against the accepted moral standards. So most people had a strong sense that they had missed the mark and failed to comply with the standards expected by society. Guilt was the prevailing mood. In this culture, a message about sin and failure to comply with moral standards resonated strongly.

Likewise, in Jesus’ time, the Pharisees had created a guilt culture by imposing impossible interpretations of the Torah as a burden on the people. Most felt that they could not live up to God’s standards, so Jesus had to deal with their shame by offering forgiveness of sins.<

The culture is different now. The rules that shaped society back them have mostly gone by the board. The church is no longer so influential and its standards are no longer seen as compelling. People have been taught to seek their own fulfilment instead of living by standards imposed by others. They do not see themselves as sinners who have failed to live according to the standards of the church, and they do not see God’s standards as relevant.

Modern people see themselves as victims of life. They need someone to rescue them from their struggles. They may have made mistakes that made their situation as worse, but they largely see themselves as victims of circumstances that they did not control. Many people have been battered and beaten by trials that were too great for them. They don’t see themselves as sinners needing forgiveness, so much as victims who someone to rescue. The prevailing mood is sickness and struggle.

In this situation, the gospel call will be more effective if it announces that Jesus has rescued those who will put their trust him from the attacks of the spiritual powers of evil and put them on a path that leads to victory from the world. Many people who are struggling with life want to be rescued.

We might need to stop using the word “saved”. The gospels are full of the word “sozo” which is usually translated as “save”. Unfortunately, we don’t use the word save much these days, apart from a religious context (or saving at a bank). Rescue is a valid translation for sozo, and it a word that has more resonance in the modern world. People who are drowning are rescued, not saved. Lifeguards rescue people who get into trouble at the beach, rather than save them. People who are lost in the bush are rescued, not saved.

We would get a better response if spoke of Jesus ability to rescue people from trouble and oppression. To modern ears, the word “saved” is less meaningful. The gospel promises,

Jesus came to seek and rescue the lost (Luke 19:10).

When dealing with people, Jesus mostly rescued them from their problems first. After they were delivered, he told them to stop sinning, if that was necessary.

Moral Equivalence

Apart from scale, there seems to be no moral difference between the following:

• a policeman kneeling on the neck of a prisoner for nine minutes.
• imposing punishing economic sanctions on the people of Venezuela because you don’t like the government they elected.
• establishing a blockade on Yemen to starve the people because you want them to be ruled by your Saudi friends.
• waging war against the Pushtun people of Afghanistan for twenty years, because... nobody remembers why.

East and West

The modern view seems to be that evil spirits are more active in Africa than they are in the West. I have always assumed that they are just as active in the West. It would not make sense for them all to pack up and move to Africa. In fact, they would gain greater benefit from operating in the West, which is the centre of world power. So, I have assumed that they are just as active in the West as in Africa, but we have not understood how they are operating.

Tabernacle and Blood

I seem to be asking questions that no one else is asking.

Although I had always read the OT, God taught me to love the Torah (as commanded in Psalm 119) when I was engaged in developing a political theology. Once I loved the law, I had to work out which parts were fulfilled and no longer mandatory, and which were still relevant. Clearly the tabernacle and related sacrifices are fulfilled by Jesus, so are no longer applicable, but I felt that if I loved the law, I needed to understand the purpose of the bits that are fulfilled.

You cannot really love something that does not make sense. So even if a Toral command is no longer binding, I need to understand its purpose and how it was actually fulfilled. Most Christians have been content to ignore the parts of the Torah that they don’t like or don’t understand (this pick and mix approach works quite well in a pragmatic sense, but it does not work for me).

God seems to be ambivalent about the tabernacle sacrifices. In some passages, he says that he did not require them (see Hebrews 10:1-18). I was struck with the contrast between the Holy of Holies where beautiful incenses were offered on a golden altar and the bronze altar which was all blood, gore and smoke. They didn’t seem to be for the same God.

Although I am truly saved, I have never been able to understand the blood. The songs say it is beautiful, but I grew up on a sheep farm and encountered real blood. My father would sometimes slaughter two or three sheep to provide food for the family and to feed the working dogs on the farm. He would cut the sheep’s throat to drain the blood out of the carcass. Blood is awful stuff. It stains everything that it comes into contact with. If left in the hot sun, it stinks. It would stink even more if it was burnt, so why would God want that.

We sometimes burnt the carcasses of ewes that had died during the lambing season on a metal frame, using a bit of kerosene, until the fat started to melt and keep the fire burning. It was a stinking, rotten smelly smoking job. It was hard to see how God would enjoy it. Only someone with a warped mind would enjoy it. It then occurred to me that being with the most warped minds are the spiritual powers of evil.

Another question I wondered about was why the tabernacle was such a dangerous place for people. Surely God was not capricious. I wondered if it was the spiritual powers of evil that made it dangerous.

God did not need the tabernacle sacrifices to visit the Israelites and rescue them from slavery. He led them through the Red Sea and into the wilderness. He rescued them and provided bread from heaven before the tabernacle was established. So why was it needed? Then it occurred to me that it was for the spiritual powers of evil, everything fell into place (see Tabernacle).

I love the Old Testament, as Jesus did, and try to understand it by looking backwards in the light of the understanding of the spiritual/cosmic warfare revealed by Jesus and the Holy Spirit who was sent to reveal all truth. The Israelites were in a season of intense spiritual struggle between good and evil (without fully realising it) when the evil powers were proportionately stronger, because there were fewer humans on earth. Seeing the tabernacle sacrifices as a weapon given by God to restrain them prior to their defeat of the cross is the only explanation that I know of that makes sense.

Ransom

The cross was gory. The place where Jesus was crucified would have stunk of fear and death and the earth would have been stained with blood. I don’t believe that God needed this gore for his satisfaction. I believe that the spiritual powers of evil demanded it, and God reluctantly agreed in order to free the humans that he still loved despite them rejecting him.

Here is a story. A rich man paid for his son to travel around the world as part of his growing up. While in a foreign country, he developed a gambling addiction and racked up massive debts in a casino.

When the son could not repay the money he owed, his creditor threatened to torture him until he settled the debt. The son was too ashamed to ask his father for help, so he found another wealthy man and sold himself to be his slave for life in return for him paying the money owed to the debtor. The son escaped torture at the price of a life of slavery.

When the father heard what had happened to his son, he wanted to rescue him. He could have hired some retired special-service warriors to invade the foreign country and rescue his son. The problem is that he did not want to engage in “might is right” activity.

The son had freely sold himself to be a slave, and his new owner had paid real money for him, so the rich father agreed to pay the ransom that the owner demanded to set the son free. He was not comfortable with paying a ransom, but had no alternative, if he did not want to engage in “might is right” behaviour. The son was freed, and the father knew that in the circumstances, he had done the right thing.

Patriotism

Patriotism forces us down a path of moral distortion. Patriots have to build up the good things that their nation has done, and play down the bad things it has done. They have to ignore the bad things their nation has done and magnify the bad things done by others.

For example, American Christians will agree that slaughter of Jews in Nazi death camps for the simple reason that they Jews was evil.

However, the firebombing of Dresden which had almost no military significance with 4,500 tons of explosive and incendiary bombs that killed 30,000 civilians and seriously injured many more simply because they were German was good.

Dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the military authorities had offered to surrender and killing 200,000 civilians just because they were Japanese was good.

Providing logistical support to the Saudi Arabian military forces bombing and blockading Yemen must be good.

This moral dissonance is dangerous.