OT Prophets

The OT prophets were not turned in automatons by the Holy Spirit. They were human just like us. They had the same Holy Spirit, but in a more hostile spiritual environment. It was not easy for them to hear the Holy Spirit. When they were learning, I assume they would have got things wrong from time to time.

The Holy Spirit made sure that their mistakes did not get into the prophetic books of the Old Testament (Isaiah to Malachi), so there are not examples of mistakes in these books. These books were their best work, not their first work.

There are examples where I presume that they spoke without being led by the Holy Spirit. That often happened when they became too attached to their words or their ministries.

• Elijah calling down a bear attack on the cheeky youths seems to be an example, as Jesus ruled that kind of behaviour out.

• Samuel got attached to Saul and found it hard to let go when God moved on and was blessing David.

• Elijah told the people he was the only prophet of God left in Israel (1 Kings 18:22) although Obadiah had just told him that he has saved 100 prophets of the Lord by hiding them in caves (1 Kings 18:13). I presume that Elijah’s false statement opened the way for the spiritual powers behind Jezebel to attack him and fill with fear, causing him to run and hide.

Only Jesus lived a perfect life. The prophets of the Old Testament were special people, but they were not perfect, so we should not put them up on a pedestal. They had to learn to hear the Holy Spirit speak just as we do, and it is not easy.

Patriotism

Last night I read an article by a theologian comparing patriotism and nationalism. He said that patriotism is good, while nationalism is bad.

Patriotism can be loyalty to any or all of the following, but none are valid for the people of God.

• Land
• People
• History
• Government.

We need to think about each one separately.

• All land belongs to God. He created all land and declared that it is all good. If we raise one piece of land above another, we are dishonouring God’s judgment about it.

• God loves all the people of the world equally, so we must not raise one group of people above another. We cannot say that one group of people is better than another, because we do not them all, and we are not their judge.

  We are required to love the people in the part of the body of Jesus where we belong. We are also required to care for his body in other places. People who are not following Jesus belong to “the world”. They all need to hear the good news. We must not place one group of people of the world above another, because they are all in the same situation (vulnerable to the spiritual powers of evil). We must not be more loyal to some of the people of the world than to others.

• We can only honour the history of a nation, if we forget about all the bad stuff that the nation has done, and only remember the good stuff. The history of all nations is full of ugliness. God is the judge of nations. We do not know enough to judge the history of our nation. If we honour the history of our nation, then we are believing a lie.

• Some Christians want to celebrate their form of government, but we are to be loyal to the Kingdom of God, which is the Government of God. Loyalty to any other government is hostility to God. Confusing a human government with the Kingdom of God is a serious lie.

We must remember what Paul wrote to Timothy.

Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory forever and ever. Amen (1 Tim 1:17).

We must be loyal to the King of Kings and celebrate his glory. Giving glory to anything else is idolatry.

Seventy

Jesus told the seventy disciples sent out to share the good news that they should take no money with them. Instead, they should stay with a person of peace and eat the food given to them (Luke 10:7).

This seems odd.

However, the seventy disciples were healing the sick and casting out demons, so they gave far more than the received. This makes a big difference.

Racial Injustice

The beneficiaries of oppression and injustice have difficulty understanding its impact on its victims. These effects don’t just disappear when the injustice is removed.

In the 1980s, I was asked to attend a small conference at Moerewa about the links between the gospel and the Treaty of Waitangi. This was the covenant between the British governor and the Maori chiefs gathered at Waitangi that opened the way for the colonisation of New Zealand. Despite the promises made in the treaty, the Maori were quickly lost their land in a series of illegal political and military manoeuvres. My talk is here.

On the first morning of the conference, a young Maori Christian leader spent two hours recounting the history of Maori dealings with European colonists. For many of the Maori people listening, this was the first time they had heard a detailed account of the injustices that previous generations had experienced. As they listened, they all began to weep.

This experience was an eye-opener for me (When I talk about the experience I still feel like weeping). The reason that these people wept was that their hearts still carried the pain of the injustices their forefathers had experienced. They did not know what had happened, but they still carried the emotional scars from the injustices experienced by previous generations. As they listened, I saw the lights coming on for them. They got an understanding of the pain that they knew they still carried (despite their faith in Jesus).

When the injustices occurred, the people who lost their land felt terrible pain. Their children picked up that pain. Because their pain was real they passed the hurt on to their children. The history of the injustice was gradually lost, but the spiritual and emotional pain was passed on from generation to generation.

Hearing the history explained the pain, but it did not heal it. That would require repentance and restitution by the descendants of European colonists who benefited from the injustices. I hope that my talk contributed a little to making that happen.

When injustice and oppression occur, emotional and spiritual pain is passed on to subsequent generations. As time passes, the reason for the pain is forgotten, but it remains with the victims' descendants, crippling their lives. Those hurts need to be healed before they can live in true freedom.

I can see the same pattern in the United States. Many Christians assume that because slavery has been abolished and the Jim Crow laws have been repealed that blacks should just get on with becoming as prosperous as they are. They simply don’t understand the emotional and spiritual scars that slavery left behind, and how these are passed on from generation to generation. These need to be healed and the pattern broken. But that will not happen if the injustices are minimised and excused by its beneficiaries, because that just creates anger that deepens the scars.

Tom Skinner

In the early 1970s, a friend asked me to go and listen to the American evangelist Tom Skinner when he visited Christchurch. This was before I became a Christian. I was really impressed with the integrity of his message. I did not respond to his altar call, but this was probably the first time that I heard a clear statement of the gospel, so it was an important part of my coming to faith a few months later.

I recently came across a recording of the message he gave at Urbana 1970 called The U.S. Racial Crisis and World Evangelism. I gather that this message was not well received in some quarters, but he speaks boldly and shares the gospel clearly. It is a message that still needs to be heard.

No Staff

When Jesus sent out the twelve apostles, he told them not to take any staff with them. He was not telling them to leave their personal assistants and media teams behind.

He told them: “Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt” (Luke 9:3).

In Jesus time, people often carried a wooden staff as a defensive in case they were attacked while on a journey. Jesus told them to go into the world without any means of defence. Instead they were to trust in God for their safety and everything that they needed.

Gospel of Kingdom

Jesus went around announcing the good news of the Kingdom of God.

After this, Jesus travelled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God (Luke 8:1).

I am sure that many followers of Jesus can explain in a few sentences why Jesus death on the cross is good news. How many can explain in a few sentences how the Kingdom of God is good news?

Yet this is what Jesus did. Huge numbers of people followed him, so they obviously understood what he meant. And it brought change. In the subsequent verses, Luke explains that rich women were giving away some of their wealth to support poor disciples (Luke 8:2-3).

How can a new kingdom with a new king be good news? A kingdom is the people in a place ruled by a king? Even if the king is top class, the place and the people must be pretty special for the people to be attracted to the Kingdom.

Could you give a description of the Kingdom in a few sentences that would get people so excited that rich women would start giving away their wealth?

Body Love

Followers of Jesus were baptised into one body.

Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many (1 Cor 12:14).

The members of the body of Jesus are dependent on each other.

Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body (1 Cor 12:15).

The hand cannot say to the foot, your pain does not affect me, so I do not care about it.

If one part suffers, every part suffers with it (1 Cor 12:26).

If the foot is suffering, every member of the body should be feeling its pain.

The eye who has a professional salary, cannot say to the hand that has lost its income, your suffering does not affect me.

This is why John said,

If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person (1 John 3:17)?

In one member of a body of believers has worldly wealth, and another is suffering in poverty, the love that Jesus requires is missing.

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters (1 John 3:16)?

If love is working, there will be caring and sharing with one another. People will not be able to stay in poverty for long.

Luxury Prophets

Jesus said that prophets who are splendidly clothed and live in luxury are in the houses of kings and political leaders (Luke 7:25). Leaders like to have these prophets around because they build up their power and authority.

Most are not in the king's house physically, but to many are there spiritually.

Liberated

In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he describes what Jesus has done for us. Those who have been buried with him in baptism and raised with him, have been given full life in him. While we were dead in our sin and controlled by our sinful nature, he did the following for us.

• He forgave all our sins.
• The ordinances that held us captive were cancelled by the cross.
• The spiritual rulers and powers that controlled us were stripped of their power.

(Colossians 2:13-15).

Community and Culture

In an article called Will Loss of Religious Liberty Doom Evangelicalism? George Yancy has some interesting comments.

Evangelicals have gotten used to being the most powerful religious group in our society. That is not going to be the case for the foreseeable future, if ever again...

So beyond politics, it is also important that we think about protecting ourselves by building up our community. If there are fewer of us, but those of us who are left are more committed, then we can make demands on each other that will strengthen our larger community. Groups that do not have majority group power do well to have a strong notion of community so that their subculture can thrive.

What are some of the implications of building up our vision of being a Christian community inside a larger secular society? We can develop a powerful in-group loyalty that allows us to help each other. We can develop supportive economic structures that serve our subculture. We can focus on socializing our children to be ready for the struggles of a post-Christian world. These are only some of the important ways having a community mindset can provide us with the social means to persist in a society that wants to remove us from the public square.

It can be as a community that we can renew a focus on reaching out to the marginalized. A powerful group tends to ignore those who struggle in our society. In a society where we no longer have majority group power, we can humbly use our in-group loyalty to work together so that we can better minister to those society left behind. Such efforts not only enlarge our community by bringing some of the marginalized into our community but also provides a powerful witness of love for the least of these.

Ultimately, it is going to be these acts of love and a true demonstration of the values we say we hold to help us deal with the threat to our religious liberty. Since the threat comes from a change of cultural values, we can begin to neutralize it by impacting the culture. And the best way to impact the culture is to have a Christian community where we are encouraged to live with integrity, transparency and to love those around us. Building the right type of Christian community is vital for what we need today.

Misleading Models

In Debunking Economics, Steve Keen gives two reasons why mainstream economists did not see the global financial crisis coming.

• The economic models of these economists assume that economies always move towards equilibrium. External shocks may push an economy away from equilibrium for a short time, but it will quickly adjust back towards equilibrium. A long-term economic depression cannot exist in these models, because they are always trending back to equilibrium.

  Keen quotes Robert Solow.
  

  I start from the presumption that we want macroeconomics to account for the occasional aggregative pathologies that beset modern capitalist economies, like recession, intervals of stagnation, inflation, ‘stagflation’... A model that rules out pathologies by definition is unlikely to help (p. 259).

  Keen also quotes Minsky
  

  Can ‘It’—a great Depression—happen again: And if ‘It’ can happen, why didn’t it occur in the years since World War II? These are questions that naturally follow from both the historical record and the comparative success of the past thirty-five years. To answer these question, it is necessary to have an economic theory, which makes a great depression one of the possible states in which our type of capitalist economy can find itself (p. 381).

  Mainstream economists could not foresee the global financial crisis because their models could not forecast a crisis.

• The models of the mainstream economists did not include debt. They assume that money is neutral and does not affect the real economy. Likewise, debt is left out of their models, because they assume that it just shifts purchasing power from one person to another. They assume that debt does not affect the real economy.

  Keen quotes Paul Krugman as confirmation.
  

  Given both the prominence of debt in popular discussion of economic difficulties and the long tradition of invoking debt as a key factor in major economic contractions, one might have expected debt to be at the heart of most mainstream macroeconomic models—especially the analysis at the hear of monetary and fiscal policy. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, however it is quite common to abstract altogether from this feature of the economy (p.321).

  Unfortunately, by leaving debt out of their models, they could not explain or foresee the effects of debt deflation.

Cross and Power

Brian Zahnd writes that we need to understand how the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount ends up condemned by the Sanhedrin and executed by the Roman Empire.

Jesus was not preaching his sermons and working his miracles as “random acts of kindness” but as announcements and enactments of the arrival of the kingdom of God. By the kingdom of God we mean the government of God, the politics of God, the alternative arrangement of the world that comes from God. In his practice of radical hospitality Jesus was announcing the arrival of a new way of arranging human society. Jesus was proclaiming to the principalities and powers (the very rich, the very powerful, the very religious, the institutions they represent, and the malevolent spirits that energize it all) that their time was up because the alternative from heaven was now within reach.

Jesus called upon all who heard him to rethink everything (repent) and believe that a radical rearrangement of the world was good news. But...
The empire always strikes back.

The principalities and powers had a vested interest in keeping the world as it had always been arranged — an arrangement that benefits the elite. So Caiaphas (the very religious), Herod (the very rich), and Pilate (the very powerful) colluded together to execute this Galilean disrupter who threatened their preferred social order. A mere five days after arriving in Jerusalem, Jesus is betrayed, arrested, tried, condemned, spit upon, beaten, scourged, and crucified.

Prophets and Power

When prophets become puppets of political power and war,
lies justify murder and violence.

If a ruler listens to lies,
all his officials become wicked (Prov 29:12).

When the prophets of a nation believe a lie,
evil is at the door.

A prophet can be a trumpet that sounds a clear call to a nation (1 Cor 14:8).
A prophet who is a trump-pet leads the people astray.

Bullies rarely generate peace.

Too many prophets trust the power of a gun more than the power of the Holy Spirit.

A prophet carrying a gun will corrupt God's word with violence and war.

Ministry of the Prophet.

Debunking Economics

I have just read Debunking Economics by Steve Keen, an Australian economist. He is no slug, because he is one of the few economists who warned of the GFC before it happened.

In this book, he goes through the development of economics and exposes all the false assumptions and illogical foundations that plague neoclassical economics.

It is many years since I formally studied economics, so I had forgotten how bad the experience was. Reading this book reminded of how frustrating it is working with assumptions about economic and personal behaviour that are totally unrealistic. No wonder economic predictions are usually wrong and that policy recommendations fail to achieve the results they promised.

Everyone studying economics formally should read this book.

Future

When we get a vision of our future, we must be careful. God can show his plans for the future, but we must not just assume that it is from him. The enemy sometimes shows us his plan for our future. If we agree with it, then he has permission to fulfil it. So the evil plan becomes self-fulling. Therefore, we need to discern whether what we have seen laid out is from God or the enemy, before we agree to it.

Spiritual Realms

Both good and evil are present in the spiritual realms. If we are open to those realms, then we will almost certainly experience both. We should ask the Holy Spirit for the gift of discernment so that you can discern which experiences are good and which are evil.

Chao is worse than Tyranny???

A well-known theologian recently gave this justification for the power of the state.

God wants the world to be ordered not chaotic. There is a role for civil authorities, and sooner or later, faced with wicked angry, violent bullying people, they have to do restrain them, and restraint involves violence.

Chaos is worse than tyranny.

Anarchy does not solve anything.

This is a common view, but there are two problems with his statement.

• Throughout history, most of the violence and bullying has been done by civil authorities. If they are given authority to use violence, who will restrain them. This model does not protect people from wicked and bullying governments. Tyranny is often terrible.

• More importantly, this statement cannot be justified from the scriptures. God did not establish governments and kings to establish order in the world. Kings were an ideal stolen from the surrounding nations.

God gave his law to provide order amongst his people. His law applied by local judges is the best protection against violence, bullying and wickedness.

Law is good if it is used in the right way. We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful (1 Tim 1:8-9).

Law is good when used for the right purpose. God gave his law to restrain law-breakers and rebels. Yet his people ignore his law, and choose to live under civil authorities, who claim a monopoly on violence and yet fail to protect their people.

My book Government of God explains how God's law applied by local judges in a community of love brings the order to society that people want.

One Another Stuff

The New Testament does not teach us to worship with one other.

Instead, it tells us to do all these "One Anothers".

• Love one another (1 John 3:11,23; 4:7,11;).
• Love one another (2 John 1:5;).
• Love one another (1 Thes 3:12;).
• Love one another (1 Pet 1:22; 4:8;).
• Love one another (Rom 13:8).
• Be devoted to one another (Rom 12:10).
• Honour one another above yourselves (Rom 12:10).
• Live in harmony with one another (Rom 12:16).
• Stop passing judgement on one another (Rom 14:13).
• Build up and edify each other (Rom 14:19).
• Instruct (admonish) one another (Rom 15:14).
• Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you (Rom 15:7).
• Greet one another (Rom 16:16; 1 Peter 5:14).
• Agree with one another so that may be perfectly united (1 Cor 1:10).
• Have concern for each other (1 Cor 12:25).
• Serve one another in love (Gals 5:13).
• Carry each other's burdens (Gal 6:2).
• Bearing with one another in love (Eph 4:2).
• Be kind and compassionate to one another (Eph 4:32).
• Forgive one another (Eph 4:32).
• Speak to one another (Eph 5:19).
• Submit to one another (Eph 5:21).
• Agree with each other (Phil 4:2).
• Forgive one another (Col 3:13).
• Teach and admonish one another (Col 3:16).
• Encourage one another (1 Thes 4:18; 5:11).
• Build each other up (1 Thes 5:11).
• Live in peace with each other (1 Thes 5:13).
• Be kind to each other (1 Thes 5:15).
• Encourage one another daily (Heb 3:13).
• Spur one another on toward love and good deeds (Heb 10:24).
• Encourage one another (Heb 10:25).
• Keep on loving each other as brothers (Heb 13:1).
• Confess your sins to each other (James 5:16).
• Pray for each other (James 5:16).
• Love one another deeply, from the heart (1 Pet 1:22).
• Live in harmony with one another (1 Pet 3:8).
• Offer hospitality to one another (1 Pet 4:9).
• Serve each other (1 Pet 4:10).
• Show humility toward one another (1 Pet 5:5).
• Greet one another with a kiss of love (1 Pet 5:14).
• Have fellowship with one another (1 John 1:7).

If we only come together for worship and listening to sermons, which the New Testament does not require, we will not have time to do the "One Another Stuff" that the New Testament does require. For these, we have to be together.

Torah

The Books of Moses (Torah) were not a set of rules for earning salvation. God had already rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt by grace when he gave them. He had given them a new land by grace, too.

The Torah was not a system of salvation by works. It was a way to preserve the deliverance and salvation that they had already received by grace. They needed protection from three things.

• The tabernacle sacrifices provide them with protection from the spiritual powers of evil.
• The justice laws provided protection from internal conflict that could tear them apart.
• The laws of separation and defence provided protection against attacks from the surrounding nations.

Works of Law

Theologians argue about what Paul meant by “works of the law” (Rom 3:20,28; Gal 2:16;3:2,5,10). They argue about which laws the expression describes, but this misses the point. Work of law are "works of law", not "responses to grace". When any law stops being grace for protection, and becomes a work to earn salvation or blessing, it is a work of law. Any law can stop being grace for protection and become an effort to earn blessing by works.

Paul was responding to Jews living under the domination of the Roman empire. This made it impossible to apply the justice laws and the Instructions for Economic Life. In this environment, it was easy to focus on the laws about food and the Sabbath that distinguished them from the Romans.

While living under Roman rule, they did not feel like that had been delivered by race, so it was easy to slip into trying to earn God’s blessing. Without a sense of God grace, it was easy to fall into the trap of turning Sabbath and food laws into works of law.

Messiah

Paul has been criticised for claiming that the Judaism was faulty. The issue is not that the Torah was faulty, but that it was incomplete and needed to be fulfilled.

• The tabernacle sacrifices were effective for dealing with the spiritual powers of evil, but they pointed to Jesus. It was because they foreshadowed Jesus perfect sacrifice that they spiritual powers of evil had to accept them. Once Jesus died and rose again the temple sacrifices became redundant, because Jesus sacrifice did every that they tried to do, but more completely. That is why God shut them down in AD 70. When the Jewish leaders rejected Jesus, the temple sacrifices lost their efficaciousness, and the spiritual protection of the people and the temple was lifted.

  If the leaders of modern Israel rebuild the temple and start the sacrifices, they will not be effective for dealing with the spiritual powers of evil, because they would not point to Jesus.

• The Torah also needed the Holy Spirit to be fulfilled. Without the fruit of the Spirit, loving your neighbour as yourself was almost impossible. Jesus death, resurrection and ascension opened the way for the Holy Spirit to be poured out. The Spirit was able to the Torah on the hearts of those who choose to serve Jesus.

If Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, it was natural that he would change Torah observance.

• Jesus made the temple sacrifices and priesthood redundant. He expected people to trust his perfect sacrifice and redemption.
• Jesus modified the Sabbath for an urban culture and re-focussed it on meeting human needs.
• The feasts were fulfilled by Jesus and replaced with the Lord’s Supper.
• Food laws were modified to allow his followers to take the gospel into alien cultures.

God’s system of justice and protection remained. Jesus declares that the laws of justice continued to be authoritative.

Jesus confirmed the Instructions for Economic Life and used them to restore village life. When he sent his disciples out on a mission, he told them to go to a village and stay with a person of peace. Their aim was not just to get converts, but to invigorate the Instructions for Economic Life to restore village communities to God’s model for economic life. The disciples took no money with them, so they would be dependent on giving and sharing for their survival. They would give healing and deliverance from evil spirits. The people of the village would give them food and shelter. The experience would jolt them into implementing the Instructions for Economic Life.

Jesus tightened the law for his followers by changing “love your neighbour” into “love one another”.

Big Box

The Torah is a big box. It contains the following.

• Creation
• History
• Patriarchs
• Genealogies
• Land distribution
• Covenant
• Sacrifices
• Tabernacle design
• Priesthood
• Feasts
• Vows
• Blesses and curses
• Infection control
• Food rules
• Instructions for Economic Life
• Judicial Laws

The judicial laws and the Instructions for Economic Life were really important protecting the peace and welfare of their society.

The Torah was not intended to make people righteous. That could only happen after the cross and the Spirit. The tabernacle sacrifices were given so that unrighteous people could have spiritual protection and be at peace with God.

Judaism

Although the Torah is grace, not works, Judaism at the time of Jesus and Paul was not really Torah-observant. Being controlled by the Romans, they could not apply the system of justice and defence that God gave in the Torah. They were also neglecting the Instructions for Economic Life. As Jesus pointed out, they were ignoring the weighty parts of the law like justice and economics. Instead, they were obsessed with the less important parts of the law, that distinguished them from the surrounding culture:

• Food laws
• Sabbath
• Circumcision.

Perhaps these were the easiest to practice when living in a strange culture and wanting to be separate from it.

Note: Circumcision was not part of the law. It had been given to Abraham as a way of distinguishing his physical descendants.

Judaism had given up some important parts of the Torah as it accommodated with Roman and Greek culture. The point of the laws of separation was to provide spiritual protection from the evil spirits that surrounding nations carried. Once Jews had moved to living amongst the Romans and Greeks, refusing to eat with them was pointless, because they had already given up the spiritual protection that the Torah provided.

Gentiles

The civil laws in the Torah dealt with the following:

• Assault
• Murder
• Theft
• False Witness
• Adultery/sexual immorality
• Judicial process
• War
• Parents
• Sabbath
• Mixture
• God
• Blasphemy

Some theologians argue that Paul did not tell Jews to stop observing the Torah. They say that he only told the Gentiles to stop being Torah-observant. Once the full scope of the Torah laws is understood, it becomes clear that this is wrong.

Paul taught the Gentiles to obey the weightier parts of the Torah.

• Paul taught gentile Christians to apply the Instructions for Economic Life. He supported giving and sharing within communities and between communities (2 Cor 8,9; Phil 4:10-19).)

• Paul taught gentile Christians how to implement the justice and protection laws in their communities (1 Cor 5, 6:1-8; Rom 13:1).

• He encouraged the application of laws about adultery and sexual immorality (1 Cor 6:9-19).

• Paul encouraged children to honour their parents (Eph 6:1-3).

• Paul encouraged a day of rest on the Lord’s day.

• With regard to food, Paul focussed on meat that had been offered to idols. He explained that this was fine if Christians gave thanks to the Lord. Interestingly, the Torah did not forbid eating meat that had been offered to idols.