Only One Cross

Have you ever noticed that, in Luke 23:33, there are two thieves, one on the left and one on the right of Jesus?  One thing rather interesting about this part of the crucifixion story is that here are two men who have taken up their own personal crosses and are executed at the same time as Jesus.  Is anyone foolish enough to believe that their personal crosses had any value in regard to their salvation?  Verse 43 points out that one of the thieves made a good end while the other apparently went to Hell.  Obviously their own personal crosses had no meaning and no validity as an instrument of salvation yet, Jesus, in Luke 9:24 promises that taking up a cross and losing your life for His sake results in salvation.  How do we resolve this apparent difficulty in the scripture?

It has become common place for many people to describe their personal difficulty as "bearing their cross."  Trials and tribulation abound for humans.  Christians are not exempt but are promised strength and a status of overcomer (Romans 8:37-39).  However, trials and tribulation in any form do not qualify as ones personal crosses to bear.  If this were so then all humans would receive salvation since at one time all humans experience trials and tribulation.  The Bible does not teach Universalism anymore than it teaches random selection (Calvinism).

There is no real difficulty in resolving the issue of taking up the cross.  First of all it is a daily thing and as such coincides with the daily bread of The Lord’s Prayer.  Since The Lord’s Prayer is connected to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” then there is no doubt that bread and forgiveness refer to Jesus’ work on the cross.  This being true, there is no other cross to look for.  If I can manufacture my own personal cross, I have no strength within myself to provide daily bread or forgiveness.

Daily bread is available at the cross.
Forgiveness is available at the cross.
Salvation is available at the cross.

Only one cross is available for you and me and for all of us to take up, to follow after our Savior. That is the cross of Jesus Christ.  Come to the Cross!

Slithering covetousness

Why is it that we never hear any preaching or teaching on the topic of covetousness?  It is a good source for plenty of discussion and exposition.  After all, who is exempt from this nasty little sin? 

Ooops!! Maybe I have found my answer.

Maybe it is TOO common and we prefer to pontificate on the sins we are not presently committing.  I hate to admit that the guy I work for has it made and I would love to have his easy job doing very nearly nothing and getting paid fat money.  Of course, the only thing that makes his job so easy is that I am so all-fired good that he can coast. 

Uh-oh! I felt that slithering begin around my feet and thought I heard a hiss of pride from somewhere.  Something wicked is proud to hear me agreeing with his favorite topic…the proud me.

Maybe this side of coveting is too easy to detect and turn to forgiveness.  I can tell you the side that is more difficult.  It is the side that is prompted by an overactive sense of justice.  I call it the Calvinist facet.  It works like this.  Joe Blow works in a factory and has a difficult job that he detests because it feels like a prison.  In walks a Barry Lewis who has the job he wants but Joe could never be qualified to do.  Suddenly, he is Barry’s worst enemy and joins forces with P.D. Coker (a guy that works for the same company as Barry) and they begin to feed each other “the poison of asps” that they tuck into their lips like a disgusting dip of snuff (Romans 3:13).  The problem with Blow and Coker is that they can never recognize that they are doing anything wrong.  After all, they are justified in their inferiority complex and the fact that Barry is too good (or smart or healthy or successful or powerful or connected or________) for them.  The Calvinist facet tempts them to set up exclusive parameters as to who is really “in” and who is out.  If you are in with Barry, then you are out with them.  Basically, the covetousness here doesn’t want what the other has…it wants the other to not have it because he does not deserve it.  Hidden from this Calvinist facet mentality is the devilish sleight of hand that Blow/Cokerism is measured by the smallness of its adherents and not by any truly objective standard (like, maybe, the cross?).  The deceitfulness works because we should all be quick to champion a just cause…and what more just cause is there than tearing down Barry and all those damned upstart Lewises.  There is no mere foot-rubbing slither in action here.  When I look in the mirror I see my snake’s forked tongue licking sin/dust and loving its lack of flavor!

This one gets us all…even preachers, teachers, deacons, ministerial types…maybe especially so.  The gravitational pull of “Pharisee” is working from another dimension! 

Meanwhile, perhaps it is too easy to turn to the other sins that I don’t commit and remind myself of how good I am, masking the fact that I am far too focused on me and my results instead of having the cross at the top of my eye chart.  If the cross is the place where I lay my burdens down, then I should shed my burden of wanting to be important and take up His cross of reconciliation. 

Numbers of Numbers

I began a study in the Old Testament book of Numbers this week and did something I don’t ordinarily do. I opened a commentary from a good Commentary series and began to work through some of the author’s ideas about the book. Everything seemed to be going along rather well for the first verse and I was hopeful that the work would be helpful.

Bam! Verse 2 and the author goes off into a long explanation of the inflated numbers (from his perspective and that of most credible scholars) in the census of chapter one. I started laughing out loud at the inability of scholars to read and understand what is being said. Somehow, the author (and his scholarly forebears) got hung up on the notion of the census as being primarily to enumerate the men who would be available to serve in a military capacity; signing them up for the draft, if you will. However, the best clues as to what is happening here begin with the instructions in verse 1.

Clue 1 = Moses and Aaron are given the task of numbering those eligible for the army.  This number is not revealed. The total numbers that are being counted (and recorded) relate to the households (Hebrew = toledah, a technical term that points to the first ancestor in a group. Numbers 1:20…KJV is “generations”) and is extensive. It extends all the way back to the 12 patriarchs.

Clue 2 = God instructs Moses to enlist particular men, called out by name (1:5-15), to stand for the poll (KJV…those of you using other translations may have difficulty here since most of those versions are inaccurate at this point). “Poll” is a good old word that means “skull.” The Hebrew here (1:18) is familiar to those who know their New Testament rendering of the crucifixion = gulgoletham…Greek transliteration = Golgotha, the place of the skull (John 19:17…by the way. You Calvinists who inaccurately think that you were enumerated in some magical Manicheean/Zoroastrian “spark of divinity” pre-existence before God made the stuff of creation need to understand that you must show up at the “place of the skull” to be numbered with Jesus. Come to the cross!). Why count skulls? Literally. The numbers of the census are predicated on the records (“…the books were opened…” Revelation 20:12) brought from Egypt along with the firstborn males that are standing before the Lord when the leaders of the tribes begin the count.

Clue 3 = The story continues to discuss the unique case of the daughters of Zelophelad (Numbers 27:11) who demanded an inheritance in the land. This part of the story stands in direct tension with the sidebar mention of Er and Onan (26:19) who died in Canaan…thus no inheritance allotment of land is ascribed to them. It is easy to see that the point of the census is primarily to establish the boundaries of the lands and the amount given to the families: the census is frozen at this juncture strictly in relation to the tribal allotments. You cannot go into the past and count anyone beyond the 12 and there will be no future adjustments in the allotments; no encroaching on the weaker clans.

Clue 4 = The scholarly difficulty in any story such as this comes when they forget that the rest of the story is already a known commodity. At the point of takeoff in Numbers 1, the people standing in front of Moses and Moses himself have no idea that they are about to fail a crucial test and follow the stupidity of democratic influence (10 spies vs. 2) instead of the direction of faith in the Lord. They are not aware of the report of the spies and their own foolishness that will result in 40 years of wandering and all the males over 20 years that have just been counted becoming gulgoletham on the last day of the 40 years. The numbering establishes what households receive property and, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb (26:65), who will be dead in 40 years…NOT who will serve in God’s army to invade the land.

Positively Bad!

An important Christian leader and author was recently describing a situation among people who needed to behave themselves with dignity and respect. The Christian leader concluded in several ways that the people were guilty of being negative and that they should be deliberate in finding positive ways of dealing with issues.

Some 30 to 40 years ago, the notions of positive thinking began to invade the vernacular of the church as those ideas simultaneously overwhelmed the minions of pop-psychology. As time went by, the language of the pulpit and the people of the ONE faith (there are not multiple “faiths” as is noised abroad in the media…Christianity is the one Faith – Ephesians 4:5) began to suffer from the inappropriate substitution of “positive” for “good” and “negative” for “bad.” Eventually, the condition became so acute that there are now people in leadership roles that have no capacity to say “good” or “evil/bad” since those terms are definitive of an old way of thinking. Positivism has won the day and Christians can no longer say what they mean.

Perhaps you are reading this and saying to yourself, “What difference does it make? After all, everyone KNOWS that I mean “good” when I say “positive.”” Perhaps you are right, when you are talking to people from the older frame of reference…anyone old enough to remember the 60’s. However, there are younger people that only know the more recent frame of reference; who only know the positive/negative referents. Should we Christians be vague in our communication and then expect them to make a clear decision about Jesus? (Those of you who practice vague communication should stop carping about the dominant movement of Calvinism with its strong and thoroughly inaccurate treatment of theology. At least they are strong enough to have a disciplined position…)

More importantly, this “positive” way of communicating was borrowed from evolutionary doctrine. Now we find ourselves in a diabolical frame of reference. Think about it. If evolutionary doctrine is true, then there can be no value judgments regarding good and evil. If evolutionary doctrine is true, then the first chapters of Genesis are a total fabrication and the tree of the knowledge of positive and negative should be more appropriate than the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Furthermore, the fruit juice of that tree has not been effective in the makeup of Adam’s progeny and there was no real need for Jesus to die for unguilty people (and, of course, if true, then the Calvinists win the day with their ridiculous notion of total depravity…another expression of evolutionary doctrine) since they could never understand when they did something wrong. Again, the terms “positive” and “negative” should be used in their technical capacity to show direction, not value. The very negative activity of digging a proper foundation is GOOD in relation to building a proper house (Matthew 7:26…notice that the man was a fool and not merely working from a negative disposition). The very positive activity of building a casino or brothel (see how the evolutionary terminology has embedded itself in your consciousness when you read this) is evil. Digging a foundation is negative because it removes and discovers (like criticism…so “constructive criticism” is impossible) what lies beneath. Erecting a building is positive because it adds material and purpose that was formerly missing. The value of the activity is established on the basis of its relationship to God (Luke 18:19).

Finally, positive thinking is evolutionary in origin and trajectory because it can be used for value judgment by those who want to join forces with evil and shift the basis of good and evil at will. If homosexuality is truly evil but positivism wins the day, then there is no basis for calling it bad. The minority opinion has to be absorbed into the majority opinion and the language shifted (the basis for this is the expansion of guilt-ridden democracy…Greek laden Americanism that feels guilty because it has departed from the one true God (Romans1:20-22)) to accommodate the “positive” aspect of existence. Evolution says, “All must be incorporated into the whole and we will see in the end which direction was the most positive.” It is another way of saying, “Existence is its own justification.” That idea is as stupid as the entire world in 1939 saying, “Hitler is a part of the whole and we must leave him alone to see whether his negativism is the force of the will to power that evolves and includes us all (Chamberlain).” Thank God that not all of the thinkers of that day had evolved in a positive way and made up their minds to crush evil with force when it was necessary (Churchill). The church of today would be confused as to what side it should be on. Leadership should only be allotted to those who think and speak clearly according to a cruciform frame of reference. The knowledge of good and evil embedded in each of us needs clear direction, not soft sell whoo haah based on Psalm 14.

Botanical Conundrum

I have been enjoying a lot of driving time through the hills of north Georgia and Tennessee for several weeks and have watched as the leaves have changed from green to all sorts of yellow, orange, red, and brown.   Yesterday, I found myself thinking about evolution and how it is such a thoroughly childish “scientific” idea.  The more I thought about it the more disappointed I became in the wasted years of the past century that many people have devoted to studying something so patently absurd and so easy to disprove.  The evolutionists are not even aware of the childlike nature of their position. 

Think about it for a moment.  Why is all evolution centered on animal life?  Look at the way all evolutionary doctrine presupposes a certain botanical background.  Never mind that (if evolutionists are correct) it would be necessary for the botanical background to come up from an evolutionary process as well.  The evolutionist establishes his workshop of development squarely in the midst of trees and grass and shrubs and a fruity/nutty environment that just so happens to agree with the digestive systems of the animal things. And what a lucky coincidence that the carbohydrates and proteins are already properly developed and stable in their abundant support for the MILLIONS of years that it takes to get animals to the upright and rational stage.  It’s as if someone coordinated the effort on the part of plants to be wholesome for the benefit of the animals that would come along.  Sounds suspiciously like the order of creation in Genesis 1.

 And then we have the same absurdity in the realm of theology.  Calvinists think they are so grown up in their understanding of God vs. most of mankind.  Their development of the limited and limiting notions of pre-determination is all processed in a framework of love.  It’s very much like the botanical background above.  Calvinists skip over the part about God caring for that which He created to try and advise Him on what few things in His workshop are worthy of Him.  They want to get all the developmental details of what is worth having in the Eternal Realm firmed up without noticing that God’s love was put into operation before there was any sense of what is worthwhile.  And then, of course, all the Calvinist hype is designed to avoid the crazy notion that God/Jesus (Jesus IS God) is willing to BECOME sin itself in order to cleanse that for which He declared His love.  We are all better off continuing to be confessing sinners while we remain in the workshop of Grace (1 Corinthians 3:10-11).  Our only alternative, it would seem, is to become so “good” that we turn Pharisee and lock in our homeland as Hell (John 8:33).  There is one remedy: cling to the cross.

God doesn't grade on the curve.

I have never done the research to find if the works of Clarence Larkin were impacted by real scholars or others with influence in Biblical Studies.  Larkin, heavily influential over the flawed thinking of modern End Times prognosticators like Tim LaHaye, John Walvoord and Hal Lindsey, self-published a book in 1918 with lots of charts and pictures of his own that illustrated his ideas of the biblical messages in Revelation, Daniel, etc.  Between page 127 and 128 is a chart that I ran across a few years ago when doing research on the ridiculous notion that the fig tree of Matthew 24 represents Israel (many of the end times “experts” have whipped up foolish frenzies over this passage by their calculations regarding Israel becoming a nation in 1948).  This chart of Larkin’s shows the 7 church “ages” he has calculated on the basis of his notion of each of the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 being representative of that idea.  When you do the math, his system comes out to be a Bell curve.  100 years of Ephesus, 150 years of Smyrna, 300 years of Pergamos, 900 years of Thyatira, 250 years of Sardis, 150 years of Philadelphia, and 100 years of Laodicea (years are approximate… Note that Larkin’s perspective is the old school notion that there was no overlap between the eras. This overlap idea is a more modern development (from the 70’s…probably invented by LaHaye) that overlaps Philadelphia and Laodicea in order to claim that there can be some “true Christians” in what they are designating as the “Laodicea” era). 

A Bell curve is a measurement of human conditions or activities and largely anti-biblical (Good example of a Bell curve in operation is to survey a busy Wal-Mart parking lot in relation to the entry doors…most people gather in the middle lanes instead of on the fringe where they may actually be closer to the door according to proximity absolute). When the Holy Spirit wrote the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew, there was no Bell curve of 6 generations, 12 generations, 58 generations, 12 generations and 6…or some such nonsense.  Larkin’s interpretative overlay is a purely human construct and should be discarded as unsupportable.  A good test for it would be: can we make it work in Ethiopia?  What do we know about the history of the church in Africa from 33 AD to the present?  Does the biblical message apply to Christians throughout the world at all times or only to select persons who are in an area where some measure of history was recorded and preserved (Calvin’s ridiculous notion of the elect…another Bell curve dynamic)?  If the YES goes to the universality of the message, then we have to reject Larkin’s work and his heir apparent in “End Times” studies, Tim LaHaye.

The Spiritual Gift of Suffering Philippians 1:29

Jesus can fill you with the fruit of righteousness no matter what your situation, if you follow Him.  Paul was in chains in prison, but he did not let that stop his service to God.  One thing is always certain in this life, it will get messy, you will have trouble and there will be suffering.  Through Jesus you can be the person that shines His light whatever happens to you! It is your choice to not fall way from God during hard times but to lean into God, not away from God.  Your spiritual welfare depends on your spiritual warfare!  Read the first chapter of the letter to the Philippians and remember that you are reading someone else's mail!

Paul is very confident that God can begin a good work in everyone, whatever happens to them.  If we want our love to abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight we have to look at things as God looks at them.  If we are believers we should have the same attitude as Paul about living and dying.  We are to advance the gospel no matter what! 

How we handle the inevitable struggles that come our way in life depends on our faith in Jesus and our relationship with Him.  Pastor Chris Rygh says, ‘don’t waste a crisis’.  This is the type of attitude that fully trusts in whatever happens to us can bring glory to God! Put on the full armor of God: work, prayer, sacrifice and preparation.  Through His strength we can be the person that never falls away, always leans into God, with the attitude of ‘make it as bad as it needs to be’ so we can suffer for the sake of Jesus and consider suffering a gift when it comes from God!