In Jeremiah, God sends a sword among the nations that causes a reaction like vomiting and drunkenness. In Revelation, we see the sword coming from the mouth of the Word of God. The writer of Hebrews says:

The word of God is alive and active. It cuts more keenly than any two-edged sword, piercing so deeply that it divides soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it discriminates among the purposes and thoughts of the heart. Nothing in creation can hide from him; everything lies bare and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render account. (Heb 4:12-13)

Paraphrasing Jesus in Matthew 10:34, the word of God is not a sword of peace. The reaction of those who have been pierced and cut by the word of God is like the nations to the cup of the wine of wrath: laid bare, they reject his message like vomit and become crazed in opposition to it.

And who is pierced by the word? All of us. All of us must drink in order to be awakened to the extent of our depravity. Once crazed, we can choose to drink the dregs of the wine of wrath, ensuring our eternal destruction, or to drink of the blood of Christ, ensuring our eternal salvation.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 2 Corinthians 5:17-20 (TNIV)

The specific passage my client is focused on is in verse 19: “he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” However, he doesn’t care for the word “reconciliation” (Greek: katallagē) and wanted to know if there were any other alternatives. The general meaning of katallagē is associated with the action of money changers, who exchange currency in foreign denominations for an equal value of currency in the local denomination.

My client would prefer a translation that places more emphasis on the meaning of the root, allassō, which means “to change” or “to transform”, e.g. God has given us the ministry of delivering a message of change — cf. Romans 12.2: “be transformed”. Unfortunately for my client, there appears to be near unanimity among English translations that “reconciliation” is the correct term for katallagē. The one exception was God’s Word translation:

He has restored our relationship with him through Christ, and has given us this ministry of restoring relationships. In other words, God was using Christ to restore his relationship with humanity. He didn’t hold people’s faults against them, and he has given us this message of restored relationships to tell others.

If I may extend the metaphor of the money changers, our translations seem to be saying that while we are in our old (sinful) denomination or currency, we are unusable by God in his Kingdom – but once we are exchanged at the rate of grace, we are transformed into God’s currency to be spent in the world as part of his new creation. We have value and can be used to add value to the Kingdom by delivering the message of our transformation. Not to be buried in the ground, but invested so that our testimony might produce returns of increasing worth (cf. Matthew 25.14-18).

And who is our money changer and purveyor of grace? None but Jesus Christ.

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” John 2.13-17 (TNIV)

It is not men who determine the worth and value of our lives, but Christ. Placing our lives in the hands of men is truly trusting our lives to “a den of robbers” (cf. Matt. 21:13, Jer. 7:11). It is no wonder then, that outside of Christ, we find little meaning, value or worth in life. This is the message that God has given us to deliver to the world — a message of true change, of being exchanged, a message of restoration and reconciliation to the Kingdom of God.

With the title taken from John’s experience of eating the scroll in Revelation 10, Peterson’s essential premise is that the meta-form of the Bible is narrative and that by the merging of imagination and faith with a captivated desire to read as if we were gnawing on a bone, we insert ourselves into God’s revealed story and make it the central authority of our lives.

Without this text, firmly established at the authoritative center of our communal and personal lives, we will founder. We will sink into a swamp of well-meaning but ineffectual men and women who are mired unmercifully in our needs and wants and feelings.

These last three things – needs and wants and feelings – Peterson identifies as a modern replacement Trinity, where we replace God with ourselves as the central authority in our lives. Selfish instead of selfless.

As I chewed on these passages, I thought of an analogy, perhaps imperfect, but that seems to fit. If you will, think of a lecher and a lover. Both find something attractive in the form or function of another person. Whether it is physical or emotional does not matter. Both may linger over soft curves or sculpted chests, reciprocated respect or unfettered feelings, both enjoying the attraction that consumes their desires.

On one hand, the lecher is private. By that I mean that the attraction they feel toward the object of their attention is for the purposes of making themselves feel good. They derive pleasure from someone else, but for the purpose of their own enjoyment. There is no reciprocity of feeling; the lecher doesn’t make the other party similarly feel good, that is if the other party is even aware of the attraction.

On the other hand, the lover is communal. The attraction they feel toward the object of their attention makes them feel good, like the lecher, but added is the reflection of that good feeling back toward the object of their attention. The primary purpose of their attention is not to derive pleasure but to give pleasure to the person they are in relation with. The other party cannot help but be aware of the attraction as they are receiving positive affirmation of their self.

So, with this analogy in mind, I ask: when you read the Bible, are you a lecher or a lover?

Do you read the Bible to derive pleasure for yourself, delighting in literary linguistics, theological hairpins or grammatical nuances, or do you read the Bible to absorb and reflect the beauty of God’s narrative onto the people who surround you in life?

Do you read for private pleasure or for public practice? Is your imagination and faith focused on systematic learning, the dissection of a corpse of information, or are your affections given to the living, the reflected attention of the hands and feet of Christ?

On this Good Friday, when we remember Christ crucified on the cross, it is easy to remember his death. But in less than 36 hours from now, we will be celebrating the resurrected living Word. As the practice of that celebration, make sure that you are focused on the world beyond you, not a stage where you sit leering at passersby, but the living world we are called to love.

Throughout Jesus’ time on earth he was attacked by evil, in demonic and human form. Eventually the devil thought that he won the victory, by having Jesus put to death on a cross. But he had no idea what was really happening on that cross, that Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for sins was, in a way which is beyond human as well as demonic full comprehension, a key tactic in the final defeat of evil. Three days later the powers of evil were taken completely by surprise when Jesus rose from the dead, and it became clear that they had been completely defeated.

My question is whether Satan intended for Jesus to die on the cross. Peter writes that the devil “thought that he won the victory”. I wonder, instead, whether the devil thought that by torturing Jesus, he would break Jesus the Man, such that he would give into temptation and call down the angels of heaven to rescue him. Because in the end, the authority and dominion of Death are granted by God, against whom Satan is in perpetual rebellion. If God has the authority to grant Death, he has the authority to reverse Death. And surely the entity who had been prosecuting Creation from shortly after the beginning would have been aware of the redemptive implications of Jesus’ death – even the “everyday” demons knew who Jesus was.

Satan needed to keep Jesus alive in order to keep him from Death and to deny him the titles of Savior and Author of Redemption. So, when Jesus was finally nailed to the beams, whipped and flayed, and uttered the words, “It is finished”, I wonder if the devil, Satan, knew that he had ultimately lost, not won.

HT: “Blessed is He who has brought Adam from Sheol”: Christ’s descent to the dead in the theology of Saint Ephrem the Syrian (Thomas Buchan, Gorgias Press LLC, 2004)

In 1990, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994) summarized an interpretation of the meaning of El Shaddai by Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1135-1204), popularly known as Maimonides:

[Maimonides] explains El Shaddai in terms of “the God for whom it is sufficient (shaddai lo): the God who is sufficient in Himself, whose essence is Himself, not in functions which He fulfills in relation to the world. That was the perception of our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of El Shaddai. On this the midrash comments, that our fathers – unlike the generation of Moses – did not demand signs and wonders upon which to base their faith in God. Now though, that Moses was sent to bring the tidings of the redemption to the Israelites, who did not know of God as El Shaddai, there was a need to use names of God that represented His actions in the world.

In slight contrast is a tradition that interprets the word Shaddai as derived from the phrase sh-dai meaning “that which is (sh) enough (dai).”

By knowing God as El Shaddai, the Patriarchs recognized the inherent holiness within everything that God created. It was through this holiness that they were able to connect with God. Moses’s generation, by contrast, failed to see the holiness that existed before them. They required grand gestures, miracles and wonders, in order to sustain their faith.

On one hand, God stands self-sufficient, not defined as “Creator” or “Savior”, but simply “God”; on the other, God is intimately understood by and through the products or functions of Creation. One views God from God’s perspective, the other views God from our perspective. The first embodies the classic proverb of not being defined by your work, the second finds the holiness in the function of using or working with creation, e.g. “work to live, don’t live to work”.

However, this post isn’t so much to compare the two etymological interpretations of El Shaddai, but to focus on the common conclusion in both – that the generation of Israelites leaving Egypt with Moses were unable to recognize and believe in the holiness of God without overt functional signs. Their perception of God had been reduced to seeking “grand gestures, miracles and wonders.”

The slavery of the Hebrews in Egypt epitomizes the subjection of humankind to the curse of sin and the futility of the soil: broken and beaten, men and women are unable to look beyond the physical reach of their lives and will grasp any seemingly miraculous display that offers immediate stimulation and relief, however fleeting. That search began with the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, reached the top of the tower of Babel, flashed in the forging of the golden calf, and so forth and so forth. Racing forward to 2000 years ago, we find echoes of this conclusion at various points in Jesus’ ministry:

He replied, “A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” (Matthew 16.4)

“No one has ever seen God, but the one and only [Son], who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” (John 1.18)

“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” (John 3.14-15)

“Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.” (John 4.48)

We are no different today. In the constant search of new titillation to feed our attention-starved lives, we look for signs of the day rather than accept by faith that God is “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty,” the All Sufficient One. (Revelation 1.8) Without this faith, we fall sway to signs from any source, including those of Satan:

The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. (2 Thessalonians 2.9-10)

However, despite our wickedness, God loved the world in this way:

He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Jesus is the ultimate sign of God’s holiness and sufficiency, and his death and resurrection is the true assurance of our faith that God is sufficient beyond the limits of Creation and the Curse.

Best is discussing the contrast between our rational need for order, symmetry, harmony and balance and the seemingly overwhelming chaos of creation:

But walk into a meadow and see if you can locate a straight line of buttercups all exactly the same height, each with exactly replicated petals. Or try to find a strictly triangular stand of perfectly symmetrical trees foregrounding a mountain range the left side of which is a mirror image of the right side. There is no landscape in which we can find any semblance of order, no storm at sea in which the waves are the same shape, height, creaminess or momentum. [...] Nothing repeats and nothing is predictable. (Unceasing Worship, p.135)

Best goes on to discuss the paradox between the randomness of what we see and the reality of underlying laws that do not randomly fluctuate. Commonly known as chaos theory, the effect is that immutable laws are seemingly worked out with randomness, asymmetry, unpredictability and endless variety, all the while germinating from a fixed set of initial conditions.

Parallel to my reading, I was reminded in a conversation on the new Theologer forums (one of those “distractions”…) of a different “working out”:

So you too, my friends, must be obedient, as always; even more, now that I am absent, than when I was with you. You must work out your own salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you, inspiring both the will and the deed, for his own chosen purpose. (Philippians 2:12-13, REB)

Once saved, we are called into a life of service, not as best friends forever with God, but as fearful and trembling slaves, wholly dependent on him for our redemption and freedom from sin. The terms of his gift of salvation are well defined:

If the confession “Jesus is Lord” is on your lips, and the faith that God raised him from the dead is in your heart, you will find salvation. (Romans 10:9, REB)

And yet our lives are filled with decisions and deeds that often appear to make no sense, are not straight and orderly, twist wildly in the winds of our days, and we tremble before the throne.

If we apply the notion of chaos theory to salvation, that is 100% correct. Once we have heard the message of the gospel and the Spirit moves our heart to accept it, and we confess that “Jesus is Lord”, then God resets our “initial conditions” and our eternal lives become based on his immutable plan of salvation, rather than our natural condition of sinful inclination (Genesis 8:21).

Then, just as an immense fractal starts with the smallest mathematical expression, once through the narrow gate of Jesus Christ, we are free to fill the infinite expanse of the kingdom with the trembling twists and turns of our lives. Like the buttercups in the meadow, the trees and mountains, the landscapes and the stormy waves, our salvation lives are worked out in chaos, with infinite variety and all for God’s chosen purpose.

Leviathan was conquered. Long live Leviathan!

Inside I was ripping myself to shreds, frustrated to point of questioning the fruits of my spirit, questioning whether I belonged at church or not. I went and, after dropping the boys off for Sunday school, found a corner of the sanctuary to sit in, trying to find a quiet place to rest and get reoriented.

I was mute during the music worship, fighting the words. Reflecting, reflecting, reflecting hard before communion… pleading to bear the fruit of the Spirit and not the foul garbage that had been evident earlier. My heart screamed as the woman in the pew in front of me read her junk mail during communion, wafer in one hand, Father’s Day ad flyer in the other.

Pastor came to the front and began his remarks. “… some of you may be having a crisis of Spirit and don’t know which way to turn … you may be questioning whether you even have the Spirit in you … you desire to be full, to experience life fully.” The sermon was on Ephesians 5:18 and being filled by the Spirit, the conclusion of a lengthy series that’s been taught on the Holy Spirit.

15 Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, 16 making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. 17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. 18 Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, 19 speaking to one another with psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, 20 always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:15-20, TNIV)

At the start of the day, I felt like I had been physically and spiritually cut open and all the crap revealed, so that I experienced the extreme negative of being empty in the Spirit. Then overflowing with goodness as the word was preached and taught and I was filled with the Spirit. I will try to post a little more on the sermon specifics later this week, but the reality is that the specifics of what was said mattered little; the reality is that my heart was prepared for the message and I received it.

The preparation was painful, but at the finish of the service, I sang (finally!) and made music from my heart to the Lord, experiencing the joy of worship again. Amen!

CALCULATING GOD’S WILL
By Michael A. Halleen

“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7:12)

John Cardinal Deardon once observed that “The designs of God are not able to be calculated.” We prove Deardon’s insight when we try to discover the will of God in the details of our lives. Does God want me to sell the house?… Attend this college, or that one?… Change jobs?… Get married?… Go on that mission trip? One church member told me it was God’s will that she had been sick at home all week because she had been able to receive a lovely phone call from her sister. (I didn’t dare ask her what she thought about God’s will for those who experienced the cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China that same week.)

The will of God, I think, is more basic than we have made it out to be. Our difficulty is in calculating — or accepting — the simplicity of God’s expectation. God speaks grace, but we hear law. Jesus made it plain: God’s will is that we should treat people as we ourselves would like to be treated in a similar situation.

So the specific circumstances of my life are not, in themselves, what God “wills.” What matters is the kind of person I am in the midst of those circumstances. Married or single, living in Phoenix or in Sydney, healthy or unwell, God’s will for me is the same. Employed or unemployed, waiting tables or waiting in line, running an errand or running a company, I am to love (to be kind and truthful toward) the people around me wherever I am and whatever the circumstances of my life and theirs — family, neighbors, enemies, those who disappoint or fail me — all of them. No one earns his way into God’s love, and no one ought to have to earn her way into mine.

Occasionally one hears some objections to this “Golden Rule”:

• People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Love them anyway!
• If I do good, people will accuse me of having ulterior motives. Do good anyway!
• Being kind and truthful with people will make me vulnerable. Be kind and truthful anyway!
• I may spend years trying to build a relationship that the other person may tear down overnight. Build anyway!
• People need help, but they end up attacking you if you help them. Help people anyway!

God’s designs are not able to be calculated, but God’s will is clear: We are to do for others just what we hope they would do for us.

——————-

Copyright 2008 Dr. Michael A. Halleen. Permission is granted to send this to others, with attribution, but not for commercial purposes.

Ezekiel 15:1-8 (TNIV)

The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, how is the wood of a vine different from that of a branch from any of the trees in the forest? Is wood ever taken from it to make anything useful? Do they make pegs from it to hang things on? And after it is thrown on the fire as fuel and the fire burns both ends and chars the middle, is it then useful for anything? If it was not useful for anything when it was whole, how much less can it be made into something useful when the fire has burned it and it is charred?

“Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: As I have given the wood of the vine among the trees of the forest as fuel for the fire, so will I treat the people living in Jerusalem. I will set my face against them. Although they have come out of the fire, the fire will yet consume them. And when I set my face against them, you will know that I am the LORD. I will make the land desolate because they have been unfaithful, declares the Sovereign LORD.”

John 15:1-8 (TNIV)

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.

I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

Both passages speak to the usefulness of believers (Israel and believers in Christ) and their connection to the Lord. Ezekiel condemns Jerusalem for its unfaithfulness, for turning the special wood of the (grape)vine (symbol of Israel) into an ordinary branch of wood, no different than the nations around them, used for the ordinary and mundane. Christ condemns those who are unfaithful to the vine, who go their own way, and lauds those who remain in the vine (Him), bearing fruit and bringing glory to the Gardener.

“The sense of sacrifice appeals readily to a young Christian. Humanly speaking, the one thing that attracts to Jesus Christ is our sense of the heroic, [but] the sense of heroic sacrifice is not good enough.”

There has been a lot written lately in blogdom about what types of relationship should exist between men and women in marriage and in the Church, primarily focusing on the passages from 1 Corinthians 11 (v3) and Ephesians 5 (vv. 21-33). Paul writes in Ephesians 5:25 that husbands are to “love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy…”

Men, how easy is it to make giving up yourself to your wife the object of your marriage!? You try to honor her by sacrificing all of your time, your resources, your energy, your interests, etc. to fulfill her desires, but in the end, it’s incomplete. You find that you’ve completely missed the mark and turned your heroic sacrifice into an idol, the false object of your marriage. Your marital relationship is distorted because you forgot to put God at the front of your sacrifice.

Christ sacrificed for us, but he did so under the direction of the will and wisdom of God. Instead of blindly giving up everything to fulfill the needs of my wife, I need to seek God’s wisdom first. I am responsible to God first, not my wife. How easy it is to distort a valid Biblical teaching and lose sight of our focal point – Screwtape would be so proud!