Righteous Anger

Most of us have been taught that we should not get angry, and many of us get good at pretending we do not feel it. Anger can be a sin, but it is not always wrong. Mark tells us that Jesus got angry when he saw the hardness of heart of the Pharisees (Mark 3:5). His was righteous anger. It prompted him to heal a man with a withered arm.

Righteous anger is an appropriate response if when evil has done harm or someone is being unfairly attacked, because it invigorates us to respond at a time when we could be overwhelmed. Righteous anger inspired the prophets to speak boldly for God when the truth was being ignored by his people.

Unfortunately, righteous anger is a gift that can easily be misused. If a follower of Jesus has not been taught how to channel righteous anger with grace, they can easily slip into hard anger and speak harshly. This response will aggravate a precarious situation.

Unrighteous anger and malice grieve the Holy Spirit. We must be careful to avoid them when dealing with people who are different from us. The fruit of the spirit include patience, gentleness and kindness (Gal 5:22). They will flow if we are full of the Holy Spirit.

If Christians have not learnt how to speak with grace and truth when righteous anger stirs, they will tend to suppress it, but pretending we are not angry is not the same as having a spirit of grace and peace. The problem is that this bottled-up anger will eventually explode at a time when they do not expect it. They will tend to overact to a trivial event with an angry or harsh response.

Letting their anger explode does not help because it makes it seem like a person who cares intensely is the one with a problem. Uncontrolled anger does harm, because it lets the person who is doing evil off the hook. In contrast, righteous anger exercised with grace supports the truth.

Women Leaders in the Early Church

Michael Bird suggests that in the New Testament, we have indications that women were patrons of Christian assemblies but possibly also “overseers” as well.

• Mary of Jerusalem’s house provided hospitality to many people including the apostles, though we can say nothing in favor of any leadership role (Acts 12:12-17).

• Lydia of Philippi sponsored a house church and supported Paul’s missionary endeavours (Acts 16:14-15, 40).

• Priscilla and Aquila hosted a church in their home where both of them had some teaching role (Acts 18:26; 1 Cor 16:19; Rom 16:3-5).

• Philemon and Apphia, whether brother and sister, or husband and wife, seem to have been patrons of the church in Colossae where first Epaphras and then Archippus served as the main leaders (Col 1:7; 4:12, 15; Philm 2, 23).

• Phoebe was a deacon and patron of the church in Cenchrae whom Paul sent to Rome to deliver, and perhaps instruct upon, his message to the Roman churches (Rom 16:1-2).

• Nympha was the patron/pastor of the church of Laodicea (Col 4:15). Some would dispute the pastoral side, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, Nympha was both the patron of the Laodicean church (like Phoebe, Philemon/Apphia) but also the pastor of the church (like Archippus).

Red Eggs

I recently came across an interesting explanation of Easter eggs.

In traditional Russian culture, the children would use, or build, a small wooden structure (the “hill”), and roll eggs, painted red, down a chute. All Easter eggs were originally painted red. The game was played on Easter Sunday, since the rolling of the eggs symbolizes the rolling away (by angels) of the stones covering Jesus’ tomb. (The picture below is “Children Rolling Easter Eggs” by Painter Nikolai Koshelev.

The reason for the red eggs is an ancient tradition that Maria Magdalene happened to be proselytizing in ancient Rome when she was arrested and taken for an audience with Emperor Tiberius Caesar. She handed the Emperor a regular white chicken egg and told him about Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Tiberius exclaimed: “There is no such thing as resurrection. A man cannot rise from the dead, any more than this white egg can suddenly turn red.” And, as he said it, the egg turned red in his hand.

The Widow’s Mite

Jesus comments about the Widow’s Mite are often used by preachers to justify extreme giving to the church. However, the incident is usually misunderstood due to the chapter break coming in the wrong place. We miss the connection with Jesus comments to the scribes at the end of Luke 20.

Jesus condemned the scribes for “devouring widow’s houses” (Luke 20:47). He warned that they will “receive harsher judgment”. This was a strong accusation to make without giving any evidence to justify it. Actually, the evidence is in Luke’s account of the Widows Mite at the beginning of the next chapter.

As Jesus looked up, he saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. “Truly I tell you,” he said, “this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on (Luke 21:1-4).

Jesus then looked up and saw the widow putting in all she had to live on, and pointed her out as a victim of the scribe’s teaching.

The widespread belief that Jesus was praising her is wrong. A careful reading reveals that Jesus did not commend her. He simply described what she had done, compared to other people. To understand what was going on, we need to ask some deeper questions. Is this what God wanted? Did he need the widow’s coins that would have kept her from starving? Did she need to starve, so that God could have a physical house to dwell in?

When God wanted a tabernacle, he enabled the plunder of the Egyptians, so the people could give the wealth needed to build it. The people did not have to starve to provide a dwelling place for God, because he paid for it himself.

God did not want the widow's two coins. She needed them to live on, and God wanted her to have enough to eat. She gave them to the temple, because she was under moral pressure from the false teaching of the teachers of the law. They were teaching that donations to the temple were a requirement of the Law of Moses. That was not correct. The Law required that money should be given to widows by their families and their neighbours.

God would have been happier if some of the wealth being put into the temple treasury had been given to the support of the widows and the poor as the Law required. He was not that interested in funding another tourist attraction for the Roman Empire. In a few year time, the temple would be destroyed, so the widows coins were wasted.

The widow got into poverty to pay for a temple that God no longer needed because Jesus had come to earth and he would send the Holy Spirit to live in his followers. Jesus paid the price for the temple of the Holy Spirit, so this widow did not need to.

This widow was an example of the religious leaders devouring widow’s houses. They were not stealing directly from them, but putting impossible burdens on them, when the Torah required that families support their widows.

The widow was trying to please God, but because she had been given incorrect teaching about money, she was putting herself into unnecessary poverty. Pastors should be careful that they don’t fall into the same trap by misreading what Jesus was saying and teaching people to give away money that God wants them to use to support their families.

Luke's Gospel - Message

Jesus teaching was quite different from what is heard in a modern church.

His big message began with a warning that those with plenty and privilege would lose it and that outsiders and those in poverty would be raised up (Luke 6:20-26).

He followed this up with call for his people to love their enemies and be kind and generous to them, expecting nothing in return. This was accompanied with a warning about judging others (Luke 6:27-45).

Jesus warned that those who followed him would suffer (Luke 9:22-27). He did not promise a life of blessing.

Jesus told numerous parables about people being rescued and restored from disaster (but nothing about turning back God’s anger), eg lost sheep, lost coin, lost son (Luke 15:4-32).

Jesus taught frequently about money. He didn’t call for giving to the church. Rather he warned about the dangers of wealth (Luke 16:1-31; 18:9-30; 19:11-27; 20:20-26).

Jesus spent significant time confronting the people with power who were resisting God’s new intervention. He warned that they would eventually be swept away (Luke 9:11-18; 10:13-16, 30-37; 11:29-52; 12:35-13:9; 14:15-35; 20:1-47; 21:8-33). Modern preaching rarely challenges the people with power.

Luke’s Gospel Action

Reading through Luke’s gospel again, I have been struck by how different it is from the gospel and organisation of the modern church. The contrast is so huge that I can’t see one in the other.

Jesus never said, “You need to repent of your sins and trust in my blood so God can forgive you”. (That sounds more like John the Baptist’s pre-Jesus message).

Jesus just told people that they were forgiven (Luke 5:20; 7:48).

Jesus did not tell the blind man who asked to receive his sight that he would have to repent and get right with God before he could be healed.

He just restored his sight with a word (Luke 18:41-42).

Jesus never said, “Receive me into your heart, and find a good church.

He preached the good news of the Kingdom of God.

Jesus never told his listeners that they should establish Sunday church meetings to attend for an hour each week. He told the people to love one another as he has loved us (Luke 6:27,10:27,37).

Jesus did not call people to be worship leaders (that seems to be an Old Testament model). He called people to make disciples.

Jesus never told his disciples to appoint senior pastors and submit to what they teach each week.

He sent out 120 disciples to preach the gospel of the Kingdom and heal the sick. Jesus ministry seemed to be a direct confrontation with evil (not a performance at a Sunday meeting).

• He announced deliverance for the oppressed (Luke 4:18).

• He rebuked evil spirits (Luke 4:35).

• When he preached, the spiritual powers of evil stirred up so much anger in his listeners that they wanted to kill him (Luke 4:28,29).

• Healing the sick and casting out demons was the heart of his ministry, not a Sunday sermon (Luke 4:40, 5:15, 5:18, 6:18,19, 7:21, 10:17, 13:32, 17:11).

The focus of Jesus ministry was rescuing people from the spiritual powers of evil not making peace between them and God. Jesus is a redeemer, rescuer and saviour (Luke 1:47,51,68,71,74; 2:11,30,38). We should remember that a “saviour” is a deliverer, not a sacrifice on an altar.

Distributed Power

Aurelien suggests that the US dominance that emerged after the end of the Cold War was never as powerful as many pundits believed.

There has never been a time when the world has actually been unipolar, or dominated by a single power. Things changed at the end of the Cold War, but what changed were perceptions: at least as much as reality, and often more so. The resulting fiction of a unipolar world was partly a deliberate creation, partly the result of ignorance, partly a collective hallucination of people who didn’t know any better.

American political culture generally is competitive, aggressive, power-obsessed, and prizes victories, even empty ones, over agreements and consensus. All political questions in Washington are settled by defeats for some and victories for others, and the weak are trodden into the ground. Consensus, where absolutely required, is a long and exhausting process of trials of strength, with agencies not scrupling to privately or publicly dissociate themselves from that consensus.

This culture contributed in two ways to the rise of the illusion of unipolarity. First, the decision-making process in Washington is so exhausting and time-consuming that there is little time, energy or inclination to worry about what others think and, from the US perspective, no reason to do so. With the Cold War over and the Soviet Union gone, the narcissist tendency to self-absorption became absolute.

And there were, of course, failures: Iraq became a nightmare, Afghanistan a political graveyard. But it didn’t really matter, not least because for the first time in world history the most powerful single grouping in the world had an unchallengeable and inextinguishable faith in its own rightness and in the tenets of the Liberalism it professed. And it lived in a hall of mirrors where its own glory was reflected back on itself by the media and by its acolytes elsewhere in the world. Failure was always somebody else’s fault.

Yet to the more perceptive, it was always obvious that the collective fantasy of a unipolar world dominated by a hyper-power was a dangerous illusion which concealed a much more complicated reality... So the real question is, how effectively has the West been able to use its power to determine the way the world is run, since power in the end can only be evaluated by what it produces.

The answer is, not very, at least if we concentrate less on rhetoric and theatre and more on underlying mechanisms. At the most basic level, every war, every military intervention and every nation-building enterprise the West has engaged in over the last thirty years to make the world more like itself has failed. Indeed, it could be plausibly argued that the world today is a great deal less to the taste of the collective West than it was thirty years ago... But much of what was intended and attempted was probably impossible anyway, and was never going to happen.

He suggests that we are moving back toward distributed power.

Being Church Where We Live

The Kindle version of my book Being Church Where We Live will be available at Amazon.com for the special price of $US2.00 for the next three days.

Darkness before Light (4) Prophets of Darkness

The dawn of day is coming
but the night must come first (Isaiah 21:12).
Because the people of God are so unprepared,
the night will be much longer and darker than many expect.
It is good for watchers to share about the light of the dawning, because it gives people hope.
But if they don’t warn about the darkness of the night that comes first,
it will be a false hope.

Many prophets know that God needs his church to change
They are talking about a big paradigm shift
in a season of restructuring;
a metamorphosis from one shape to another;
but they don’t seem to know the detail of the change he needs.
The church urgently needs more guidance about what he requires.

There is a time to laugh and dance,
but also a time to weep and mourn.
The twilight is a time for weeping, mourning and seeking.
Continuing to celebrate as if victory is being won
is discouraging for an army that is being overwhelmed
by forces that are stronger.

God is calling prophets of the night
who can prepare God’s people for the long darkness
that we must pass through to get to the dawn of the new day.
Some of the changes he requires will be painful.
If we don’t make them now in the twilight,
we will have to do it during the darkness of the night.
The changes will be the same,
but they will be hugely more traumatic during the darkness.

Darkness before Light (3) Light Breaks Out

When followers of Jesus hide together in their homes
something amazing will happen.
Holy Spirit will make his home amongst them.
He will heal those who are sick and broken,
and many people will choose to follow Jesus.

God will raise up elders amongst them,
to watch over them
to teach them the way of Jesus
and to bond them into his body.
They will have balanced giftings,
with all the ascension gifts;
complementing each other
and submitting to each other to produce unity.

Evangelists will be released in pairs
to heal the sick and cast out demons in streets and marketplaces.
Taking others with them
to train them to be evangelists too.

People with pastoral gifts will watch over the new disciples:
praying for them;
teaching them to listen and obey the Holy Spirit;
helping them get rid of their junk,
encouraging them to move in the gifts of the Spirit,
building strong relationships with other followers of Jesus,
teaching them to do the One Another Stuff.

The elders will replicate their ministries,
in the people they are discipling,
pastors will produce pastors
prophets will produce prophets
evangelists produce evangelists.

They will form Kingdom Communities
from which they can take the gospel into the world
and expand the Kingdom of God on earth.
They will agree in prayer to push all evil spirits out of the territory
where they have authority
to establish a place
where the Holy Spirit is free to work.

These kingdom communities will expand
by sending their leaders out as apostles,
as others step up into their place
so the best elders can go out in a team
with balanced giftings, (pastor, prophet, evangelist)
to establish a new community,
where they will carry on loving and serving each other,
while keeping on listening and obeying the Holy Spirit;
and he will keep doing what Jesus did.

Darkness before Light (2) Prepare for Darkness

Instead of sitting around
and waiting for prophecies of revival to be fulfilled by God,
his people should be getting prepared to live through the darkness and position themselves in a place of strength,
so they can share life and hope
with those who are lost in the dark.

The current model of doing church is inadequate for this task
because it cannot cope with the darkness of the night;
nor will it cut it when the light of the dawn comes,
because it cannot carry the Kingdom of God.
Reliance on personality pastors (or their sons)
and programs in buildings
will not be viable during the darkness that is coming.

Followers of Jesus should be preparing
by seeking the wisdom of God for their circumstances,
but they should base their preparation on an assumption
that they might not be able to drive to church meetings,
and that pastors might be unable to share messages with them
or even contact them,
because they have been shut down.

During an intense spiritual struggle
standing alone is the most dangerous place to be.
Attending a church meeting once a week will not be sufficient
to sustain spiritual life when real pressure comes on.
The best possible protection during tough times
is to be living close to other followers of Jesus
who can provide emotional, spiritual and material support
when it is needed, not when the next meeting is due.

Followers of Jesus who lived in isolation from other Christians
should move closer to other believers they trust:
close enough that it is an easy walk
to gather for prayer, for spiritual, emotional,
and material support for each other;
for loving one another as Jesus loved us,
and for serving each other and our neighbours.

The twilight season might last longer than we expect,
but if the darkness holds back for a time,
it is not a sign that revival is coming,
but an opportunity for followers of Jesus
to advance their preparation.

Full series here.

Darkness before Light (1) Darkness Coming

The light of dawn is coming
but the night must come first (Isaiah 21:12).
The light that shaped New Zealand is fading;
spiritual darkness is rolling out over the land.
It will be deeper and darker than anyone expects,
so it will take a long time for the light to penetrate and break it up.
A bright spiritual light will shine again
but not before we have passed through a season of darkness.

The spiritual powers of evil seizing territory
and controlling it without facing any opposition
gaining control of places of authority without any resistance.
Political leaders have been given more power
than they have ever had,
because they are expected to deliver us from evil
and restore our lives to blessing.
They lack the wisdom to achieve what they have promised,
but their pride is amplifying the power of spiritual evil.

New Zealand is entering a season of spiritual darkness:
with ambivalence towards the gospel
and hostility towards Christian moral standards.
The people of the world will feel free to harass the churches,
and Christians will be afraid.
They will hear rumours of evil
happening in other places,
and unknown fears are more fearful than known ones.

The church is floundering and confused,
doing the same old things over and over again,
hoping for better outcomes,
but knowing that it probably won’t work;
knowing that they need more of the Holy Spirit,
but unwilling to obey his voice.

People are praying for revival,
begging God to move by his Spirit,
but God is not the problem,
because his spirit is always moving.
The problem is the church.
It does not seem to be willing to make the changes
that God needs it to make
before it can carry the spiritual life that he wants to release.

The season for revival has passed
and will not come back for a long time.
Refusal to do what revival required
has allowed the spiritual powers of evil
to entrench their stronghold over the nation
and they will not be pushed out easily.

Gabor Mate on Addiction

Bryony Gordon describes Gabor Mate's teaching on addiction.

I met Gabor Maté, I mumbled shyly that, as a recovering addict, this was a bit like meeting Father Christmas. His intense gaze didn’t falter. “You’re not an addict,” he said, seriously.

“Nobody is that dysfunctional. You may have drunk in a way that was harmful to you and your emotional life and maybe even your physiology, but that doesn’t mean that’s who you are. It just means that’s something you did and you did it for a reason. What did it give you?”

“Oblivion,” I whispered.

“And why would someone want oblivion?” he continued, very matter-of-factly.

“From pain?” I suggested.

“Yeah. And is pain relief a good thing or a bad thing? Addiction wasn’t your problem, it was your attempt to solve the problem of pain. It is a pain response. And it is totally normal to escape from pain [with addiction] when you know no other way.”

There, in one short conversation, Maté had succinctly and unemotionally summed up his teachings.

Consequential Event

People who are interested in the trajectory of world events should read Larry Johnson’s article called You have Witnessed History today in Moscow and it is Consequential.

Babel Heaven-scraper

The first human government to emerge was established by a man called Nimrod.

Cush begot Nimrod; he began to be a mighty one on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD.” And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. From that land he went to Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah (that is the principal city) (Gen 10:8-12 NKJV).

Nimrod was the most powerful strongman on the earth so he established a kingdom in Babel. This is the first mention of a kingdom in the Bible. Nimrod extended his kingdom to Nineveh. This makes Nimrod the grandfather of all the early kingdoms and empires on earth.

The name Nimrod comes from the expression “we will rebel”, so when the Bible refers to Nimrod “before the Lord” it means in opposition to the Lord. The first governments were started by a “rebel against God”. The fruit of this rebellion was the tower of Babel.

Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth" (Gen 11:4).

Heaven-scraper
Nimrod’s followers decided to construct a massive tower that would enlarge their reputation throughout the earth. Reading about their plans through modern eyes it all seems a bit stupid. Only crazy people would think that building a “too-big-finish tower” would enhance their political power.

However, something more serious was going on. If we read the story through a three-agent lens, we get a different perspective. The spiritual powers of evil were threatening a dangerous assault on the purposes of God.

The people of Babel planned two things:

• a tower that reaches to the heavens,
• a name for themselves (apart from God).

This plan was a serious rebellion against their creator.

• A “name” represents a person’s authority. The people of Babel intended to establish authority (name) for themselves apart from God. They would achieve this goal without God by attaching their political power to that of the spiritual powers of evil.

• A "tower" represents authority. This tower was an attempt by the people of Babel to extend their authority right up into the spiritual realms (heaven) by cooperating with the spiritual powers of evil. They wanted to expand the authority of their earthly empire into a spiritual empire. They believed that they had a chance to do it, and the spiritual powers of evil working with them believed that they could squeeze God of the spiritual realms in a reversal if the way that they had been pushed out by the holy angels (Rev 12:7-8).

This tower was a serious threat to God’s authority. The most powerful people on earth got together with the spiritual forces of evil in an attempt to wrest control of the heavenly realms from God. A gang of evil spirits that had been thrown down on earth, planned to use evil people on earth to regain their position in heaven. This was serious stuff.

God had no choice but to send a Protective Judgment to put the forces of evil back in their place. The evil was constrained by sending confusion of language that made combining for a common purpose more difficult.

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city (Gen 11:8).

Bank Crises

Well, the Fed has rescued Silicon Valley Bank and the big US banks have rescued First Republic Bank, for the meantime (remember that six months passed between the failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in 2008). The Swiss National Bank has kicked the Credit Suisse can down the road, meaning its derivatives do not need to be unwound in a hurry, although the Swiss people will have to pay the price with an “inflation tax”.

Silicon Valley Bank failed due to investments in US Treasuries that went bad when the Fed raised interest rates sharply. What is not so widely known is that the US small regional banks have big exposure to the Commercial Real Estate (CRE) sector. JP Morgan has noted that almost $2 trillion of CRE loans are held at smaller banks, while around $0.8 trillion are held at larger ones.

Zero Hedge noted last week that real solvency risk facing the regional bank sector is their exposure to commercial real estate in general, and office buildings in particular. After residential real estate, malls, and hotels, it is now offices' turn to crumble. Office-building landlords are some of the biggest decliners among US real estate stocks. The S&P Composite 1500 Office REITs Index has dropped sharply back to August 2009 levels. Vornado is back to levels last seen in November 1996.

This decline will be putting pressure on the balance sheets of US small regional banks. US Commercial Real Estate is a trigger to keep an eye on.

Liberalism - Aurelien

Some important thinking by Aurelien on Western Liberalism.

As I’ve pointed out frequently before, it’s a peculiarity of Liberalism that to has no real basis for its beliefs other than assertion: no divine revelation, no hallowed traditions, no systematic body of theory claiming to be based in the real world. For this reason, Liberalism’s dominant figures have always felt ideologically insecure and uneasy, especially when confronted with systems of thought that are anchored in something other than simple assertion. Liberalism has always had a problem with Islam, for example, whose intellectual basis is firmly in revelation and whose popular base is in societies that do not share Liberal views. Revealingly, Liberalism has never been able to domesticate and absorb it as it has done with Christianity, and even Buddhism...

Liberalism, with its firmly-held but poorly-grounded ideology, is incapable of living peacefully in the same world as the kind of political and social systems we find in China, Russia and India today. This is an inherent problem with any universalist ideology, as I have described before, and reflects the fact that Liberalism is now the nearest thing that western elites have to a religion, and that it acts as a force for precarious unity, or at least uneasy co-existence, for most of them. The longer the West tolerates the existence of rival systems of thought, however, the more people will start to question Liberalism’s universalist pretensions...

During the Cold War, ideological competition between the two blocs was based largely on economic and social performance, as each system claimed to be more successful than the other in material betterment of peoples’ lives. That is no longer the case: Liberalism is by definition universally true and valid, and does not need to prove itself or compare itself with anything. Those societies that have not (yet) embraced Liberalism should therefore be persuaded or compelled to do so. To the extent that they refuse to do so, they are seen as objective enemies. Unlike in the Cold War, peaceful co-existence is not actually possible, nor is it desirable. Similarly, people and factions in other countries who embrace Liberalism are on the side of history, and are to be automatically supported. If they do not win elections that’s a shame, but it’s the fault of the electorate for not being enlightened enough. Eventually, they will come round.

The problem arises when Liberalism encounters a force as large, or larger, than itself, and which refuses to follow its lead, and even refuses to be cowed. Much of the world, of course, has been engaged in passive resistance to Liberalism for some time now, although we seldom notice it. Most nations outside the West are generally concerned to retain at least elements of their traditions, history, culture and society, and not to follow the Liberal West into an individualism red in tooth and claw. But larger and more important countries, like China, India and Russia, have in recent years become tired of simply coping with the West and its Liberal ideology: the have started to actively resist.

Now none of these countries, so far as I can see, shares the kind of universalist assumptions that characterise Liberalism. The Chinese seek to spread their influence and the culture, but to my knowledge they aren’t trying to convert the world to Confucianism, any more than the Indians are trying to convert it to Hinduism. Indeed, when these countries talk about a more balanced and plural world system, they are really talking about a kind of ideological peaceful co-existence, that means that nations do not try to impose their norms and practices on each other. But as I have suggested, Liberalism is incapable of peacefully accepting the presence of other ideologies for very long.

It is this, more than anything else, that explains the unremitting enmity to Russia and China that has typified the last 15-20 years. There is, of course, no objective reason for this enmity: the West can live quite happily with these two countries (and India) if it wants to, for the advantage of all. China may be an economic competitor to the US in some ways, but it is also an important supplier and an important customer. No rational human being believes that a war over Taiwan makes the remotest sense, or is even likely. But war... is understandable (I hesitate to say “rational”) on the basis that the West simply cannot live indefinitely with the presence of other systems of thought that put its universalising ideology in jeopardy.

Yet of course the West cannot expect to win a war against either Russia or China singly, let alone together. This creates a highly unstable situation, where western leaders are obliged to use bellicose rhetoric and make threats and escalate tensions, in the hope that somehow these will have the desired political effect. The problem is that the Russians and Chinese are not intimidated, even though western leaders have led their publics to suppose that the West is so fearsome and powerful that it can always get what it wants. Quite how western leaders can escape from that unstable paradox is not clear...

How Liberalism will react once it realises that what it thought was an irresistible force has slammed into a genuinely immovable obstacle is hard to say, but it won’t be pretty, and will probably resemble a mass political nervous breakdown of some kind.

Apologetics

David Fitch has some interesting comments on the role of Apologetics.

I worry about the posture that apologetics, as traditionally conceived, trains us into. It can, if we’re not careful, think about answering questions that we do not even know if they’ve been asked yet, within our own specific culture. It’s a posture problem. We presume to know what people are asking before we have listened to them, and see how the Holy Spirit is working in people’s lives? This is bad posture.

Any apologetics that shall engage a culture for the gospel in these times of post-Christendom, must be displayed in a person’s life, or a community’s life, as lived. It’s an old adage, that no one has ever been argued into the Kingdom. No one becomes a Christian based on a rationally argued reason. It is the compelling, often jarring, witness of how a person’s life is changed, and lived, that becomes a compelling reality that challenges another person’s life, and a culture’s injustice...

We live in a culture that has become unequivocally turned off to the Christian faith because of the way people have lived their lives as Christians before a watching world. We have seen hypocrites, dispassionate people, even violent Christian Nationalists, act out terrible things in the name of Christ these past decades. Our own kids are walking away from church in droves because of this. Perhaps it’s not Apologetics we need for the engagement of culture, it’s Apologizing to all the people we have mistreated, all the ways we have been hypocrites, in this culture.

That makes sense to me.

Samaritan Woman

Caryn Reeder has an interesting take on The Samaritan Woman, whose encounter with Jesus is recorded in John 4. Some points to note.

• Jesus does not accuse the woman of sinning. He does not tell her that she needs forgiveness or to stop sinning.

• Jesus noted that she had had five husbands, but did not condemn her for that. The Jewish culture of Jesus' time was male dominated. Men could eaily divorce their wives, but a divorced women would be financially insecure. It seems this woman had been discarded by several men, which would have left her in a vulnerable postion, needing to rely on any man who would support her. I presume that Jesus felt compassion for her, whereas mostly male commentators have assumed the woman was at fault.

• Drawing water in the middle of the day is not a sign of immorality, as is frequently claimed by Bible commentators. The historical evidence shows that women in the ancient world went to get water whenever they needed water.

• Instead, he engages in a theological discussion about the true nature of worship. How and where you should worship was a serious question.

• This is the largest conversation with Jesus recorded in John’s gospel.

• She allows Jesus to explain that his kingdom is open to everyone.

• The woman went to her village and told everyone that she believed the messiah had arrived in their region. She may have been a leader in her village.

• She was the first evangelist.

• The people accepted Jesus as the messiah because they believed her. Many of the Samaritans of that city believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified.

• The woman was a witness to Jesus. John uses the same expression for Jesus as he does for the woman: her word – his word. And because of his word many more became believers.

• The woman helped start a harvest. While the disciples were worrying about food for themselves, she was helping Jesus bring in a harvest.

• The woman was an ideal disciple.

  • She listens respectfully

  • She asks insightful questions

  • She seeks understanding.

  • She shares with others.

• John contrasts the woman with Nicodemus, who came in the night and then did not share with anyone.

War and Spirit

In a spiritual world, everything is connected.

When political powers give authority to a powerful spirit, their power enhances its power. So if a nation engages in violent conflict and war, a spirit of violence will also be released at home.

If a nation sets out to be the preeminent military power in the world, enforcing its dominance with violent military force, it should not be surprised if gun violence explodes in its towns, schools and homes.

If a nation like New Zealand backs war as the solution to disputes between nations, and engages in a war by training participants to use powerful artillery, it should not be surprised if a violent spirit takes hold at home and releases violence in society (and its parliament).