Oil of gladness

A lot of Christian people have bought into the unbiblical idea of constant (discrete) creation as opposed to immediate and enduring creation (analog) that is described in the Bible.  Constant creation establishes a God who is making everything constantly and making everything happen that comes to pass.  The reason that many people think that this is a good description of God’s way of doing things is because it is the way they would do it if they were God.  Obviously, the enduring creation way of doing things leaves room for trouble.  After all, the stuff that God makes might have the capacity to forget Him and do something stupid…or evil…or sinful.  You see, there are only 2 ways of looking at this situation if you believe in God.  Either the constant creation idea is correct and God becomes the author of evil, or, the enduring creation position is truly descriptive of reality and creatures are able to rebel.

A really good example of the idea of discrete creation is the Big Bang theory.  Attempts to make the Genesis description of creation fit in with the Big Bang cosmology are foolish.  It is like trying to make an elevator arrive more quickly by continuing to push the lighted button.  An analog result cannot be derived from a discrete condition. 

In 2 Kings 4:1-7 we find Elisha giving a widow the opportunity to save her children from captivity.  Her dead husband owed money and she has nothing with which to pay except to turn over her two small boys to the creditor.  The picture that results from this story is a wonderful image of salvation.  Certainly the widow saves her boys, but there is also the picture of how salvation works in the world.  The oil does not cease until the last vessel is filled.  There is more available but nowhere to put it…analog condition.  (The discrete idea would be that a certain amount was destined and was made during each nanosecond of the pouring – Calvinism and Open Theism).

Notice that the oil does not stop flowing after the fifth pot is filled and the widow has to return unused vessels to their owners. 

Notice that the prophet does not tell the widow to only fill the pots that have handles and skip the jars. 

Notice that the woman does not fill only copper vessels and leaves the clay pots out on the front porch. 

In her need and in her desire to save her boys, she is obedient to the prophet’s word and fills all.  The oil is still flowing when she calls for another jar and all have been filled.  Then “the oil stayed” (verse 7).  This incident is not a picture of calvinistic pre-selection.  “Whosoever will” may be filled with oil.  Salvation is abundant beyond the need!  Calvinists lie when they say there is only enough for them (assuming they can produce proof of their certification of eternal pre-selection…something that the Bible does not guarantee) and everyone else was chosen to go to hell.

Here is the problem.  The calvinist wants to have both types of creation operating simultaneously.  Discrete and analog.  When they need to prove a difficulty they have caused themselves in one area, they switch universes and have God bail them out.  Look at the idea of de facto sovereignty.  Calvinists want a God who is constantly making everything and, as a result, making them perfect from before creation and injected into this corrupt creation that is the fault of evil --- evil that came about as a part of the analog creation and for which God is not responsible.  When you boil it down, it is just a new expression of the old heresy of dualism.

Is there any way that humans can describe exactly how God made the oil continue when, scientifically, the amount in the original jar should have been all there was?  If we are incapable of describing how God makes something as simple as extra oil, how are calvinists so confident in describing who gets saved and who goes to hell?  Is their God big enough to keep oil flowing but has to put discrete limits on salvation to humans that He cares enough for that He will die on a cross (Jesus is God!!).  Oil from a jar can flow and flow…blood from His own body has to be measured out drop by drop to the pre-selected, exclusive, special ones that God lets in on the game of hating reprobates?

There is a place where blood has been provided to wash any and all of humanity from our sins.  Jesus Christ died on a bloody Roman cross to provide salvation for people that is only limited by the total number of people that live from Adam to the return of Jesus.  No calvinist knows that number.  They, like all others who obey Jesus, are under orders to bring vessels that can contain oil – the ministry of reconciliation.

Come to the cross.

Champion of sinners.

"Led her to the Soudan's right."  Spenser

Bathsheba is caught up in the web of an intrigue that David’s son, Adonijah, inflicts upon the family of the old king (1 Kings 1:5-27).  David had promised that Solomon would be King of Israel when he died but Adonijah decided to make himself king.  David, even though he is old and cold (1 Kings 1:1), is not dead.  Bathsheba and Nathan, the prophet, stir him into action and he delivers a stunning rebuke to his own son, Adonijah.

When Calvin used this scene to illustrate his idea of justification, he must have been watching some 2-bit 1950’s black & white movie made by an English lawyer.  David, the judge who is napping on the bench with his ridiculous wig askew, is finally awakened by Nathan – the attorney – and Bathsheba.  Hearing their case, the old man gavels and sends a writ of right to Adonijah who reads the verdict and surrenders himself to Solomon.  Calvin’s idea of justification is a courtroom trial where God, knowing that a sinner is a sinner, shrugs off that status because He arbitrarily wants to acquit the sinner of guilt

The real picture of justification that comes from this passage shows that David, man with God’s heart in him, orders a military and spiritual challenge to Adonijah: rebel son without a promise to act upon.

Jesus (who is God!) followed a predetermined plan (no other persons were included in that plan) by which He could, as God and man, hold the rank and title of Lord of Hosts.  First-born from among the dead (Colossians 1:18), Jesus Christ is qualified to lead the dead who will follow Him and be the human component of His Host – His Army.

Jesus Christ is your judge if you surrender yourself to His ability to champion your cause – your lostness and hopelessness and rebellion against Him.  His verdict against the rebellion of Satan must be military and spiritual – not a lot of foolish rhetoric and paper shuffling.  Jesus invites humans to join Him in spiritual warfare; the ministry of reconciliation.  The door opens at the cross.

Come to the cross.

X+Y= Calvin, too.

In 2 Samuel 7:10, the Lord promises to give the Children of Israel a place to dwell that cannot be invaded by the “children of wickedness.”  I thought about this verse all week and kept noticing that my thoughts were drawn away from the conflict and focused on what is the common denominator. 

Children.

Human children.

How do human children get into the world?  Is it a spiritual process?  A rational process?  A function of the soul?  Do people talk about children and they appear?  Are there storks involved…?  Do parents order them from the Sears Roebuck catalog?  (Yes…this was told to small children once upon a time.  No doubt the modern equivalent is that they are purchased on EBay.)  Can preachers preach them into existence or do politicians derive them from villages?

There is a biological process that requires male and female cells to combine and make human children.   These cells are manufactured in the bodies of the two human parents.  When they are combined together, they share all sorts of information packets that begins the whirlwind process (air head young people should not “sow the wind” without expecting to “reap the whirlwind”) of grabbing proteins and other stuff with which to build a baby.  The baby is a human baby.

I am sure this all seems rather obvious to everyone.  It may even seem rather silly that I contemplate such things at my age.  However, if you will look at the 2^nd sentence in the paragraph above, I think you may see something very remarkable.  Physical, biological cells are manufactured in the human bodies of two separate persons.  Because of God’s creative power that He introduced into the human organism (you cannot make a case for constant/continuing creation without bumping up against the seventh day rest = Genesis 2:2), the mechanism of sperm/egg combination works today as it did on day one of procreation. 

Please stop for a moment and pay attention to what I am NOT saying.  The end result of the procreative process in a world that has been and is ravaged by sin and death can be very different from the likeness of God in Adam/Eve’s creation and the likeness of Adam to which we are all subject (Genesis 5:3…most people who make noises about man being in God’s image refuse to remember that we who have fig juice in our veins cannot go home beyond Seth).  BUT, the end result of the combination of human sperm to human egg (aka, conception) always results in human life.  It cannot turn into a dog (sorry, Calvin, you are wrong) or an indescribable critter that will become a new species.

100 billion instances of this process later, we find that it has 100% repeatability.  There is no evidence that out of 100 billion sperm/egg combinations, 1% of them (one billion), for instance, became something not human.  Even in the 1 in 100,000,000,000^th instance of an egg that is divinely fertilized (Luke 1:35), the resultant person who has the right to call Himself the Son of God, uses the title, “Son of Man.”  Jesus is GOD!  

Point? 

Calvin and Calvinists have a philosophy of “muddy mysticism” (C.S. Lewis) that teaches that corruption (depravity) in the human being is total.  This corruption, they say, reaches into all parts of humanity.  This defilement, depravity or corruption, they say, is intrinsic in all parts of the body and completely ruins the body.

Oops.  Calvin forgot to tell God how to create so that the procreative mechanism in humans would be ruined when Adam and Eve ate figs.  How sad that, once again, his ideas prove to be foolish and unbiblical and his notion of the sovereignty of sin is greater than what he calls “God.”  How sad for him that there are other human functions that cannot be understood as corrupted.  Human reasoning has to be reliable (‘Bulverism’ by C.S. Lewis) for Calvin to make his monumental mistakes in theology and for others to try to show where they need correcting.  Rain falls on the unjust and just thinker alike.  

Meanwhile, Jesus is that one in one hundred billionth instance of the reliability of the procreative mechanism with only a sinful female component – virgin birth.  Jesus fulfilled the destiny that He had been assigned when He made it plain - in time - that new creation begins at the cross (1 Peter 1:20). 

Come to the cross.

Forced March at Midnight

Forced March at Midnight

For Dr. (Major) Shawn Madden, USMC, Retired,

and all those who said ‘Yes’ to the call to serve and command to go for their country.

This one is personal.

1 Samuel is dear to me in a way that only those who know me can understand.

40 years ago today, I was in my last week of Navy boot camp – Chief Traylor was our company commander.  At one point, I did 2000 jumping jacks to redeem the 20 point deficit in our “inspection being perfection” week…

Jabesh Gilead (1 Samuel 31:11-13) was a small place with a tiny biblical history.  However, it was important to King Saul.  It was the place where he had first experienced military victory as a young king (chapter 11) without the help or interference from Samuel that caused him grief in later life (For you Calvinists who can’t read what the Bible really says but have to come up with your own imaginary version, compare Saul as king with Deuteronomy 17 and dare to accuse him of wrongdoing.  Y’all need to find a new sport and stop reprobate hunting – it’s not a spiritual gift.)  The men of Jabesh Gilead, hearing the news that Saul and his sons had been desecrated, rose up and marched all night to rescue the dignity of their king.

This valiant act of love and kindness was not motivated by pre-determined forces of sovereign power that needed another small story to close out the book of 1 Samuel.  These men were motivated by the fact that, while they were yet outcasts in the land of Israel (Judges 21:8-15), their king loved them and threw aside his pastoral life to become their champion.  Saul – anointed by the Lord of Hosts – led the host of their brothers to rescue the small and weak and worthless (aka, practical forgiveness…).  “Greater Love” was demonstrated by Saul – “greater love” was returned by the warriors from Jabesh Gilead 40 years later.  The redemptive power of Jesus worked through His chosen servant, Saul, to restore honor and dignity to men whose faith followed their love.

Faith follows love.  God so loved the world that He saw a cross from the moment of creation – planned the cross to open a way.  The way of the cross leads home for those of us who are human and will respond to that love.  The Holy Spirit knows how to get the motivating Love of Jesus into our hearts.  It is up to us to allow that love to overflow into action.  Putting feet to our faith, we must 1. enlist with Jesus, our Captain, 2. challenge darkness, and, 3. rescue the perishing.  The ministry of reconciliation is our military unit in spiritual warfare (2 Corinthians 5:17-21).  Our headquarters has a door that is a cross.

Come to the cross.