Integrity Versus Situational-Ethics

We are going to pause our march through the book of Daniel and consider Integrity and Situational-Ethics. They are, by definition, antithetical to each other, because Integrity requires that we do the right thing all the time, while situational-ethics allows for doing what is expedient in each situation. Situational-ethics doesn’t acknowledge any higher-authority, so our question is “Are they mutually-exclusive?“

The core tenet of Integrity is that there IS a higher-authority, and that there ARE rules we are required to follow. There are safety-rules at a shooting range for a reason – to keep everyone safe, and if a person doesn’t follow them, they will be evicted from the range.

“Integrity, a standard of personal morality and ethics, is not relative to the situation you happen to find yourself in and doesn’t sell out to expediency. Its short supply is getting shorter – but without it, leadership is a facade.” — Denis Waitley

The core tenet of situational-ethics is that there is NOT a higher-authority, that YOU are the captain of your own ship, that YOU are the master of your own fate, and “if it feels good, do it“. That autonomy has been tantalizing humanity since the Garden of Eden. The serpent tempted Eve in Genesis 3:4 with “You will be like God, knowing good and evil“. We know how that turned out, because we have been living with the fallout ever since.

We find this commentary on the moral conditions in Israel during the time of the Judges; “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 21:25) If that isn’t a recipe for anarchy, I don’t know what is.

Situational Ethics: When you decide the moral goodness or evilness of something based on the situation.

Theologians and philosophers have been debating this topic for centuries, but being neither a theologian nor a philosopher, we are going to look at it from a Biblical perspective. Two particular questions come to my mind; 1) Is it ever okay to lie?, and 2) Is it ever okay to break the rules?

Is it ever okay to lie?
The root of the question goes back to the ninth Commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” The short version is “Tell the truth.” I can already hear the cogs whirring with the question “What if telling the truth jeopardizes the life or well-being of another person?” “Would be okay to lie to save another person?“

To answer that question, we are going to go back into the Old Testament to Joshua 2:1-7;
2 Now Joshua the son of Nun sent out two men from Acacia Grove to spy secretly, saying, “Go, view the land, especially Jericho.”

So they went, and came to the house of a harlot named Rahab, and lodged there. 2 And it was told the king of Jericho, saying, “Behold, men have come here tonight from the children of Israel to search out the country.”

3 So the king of Jericho sent to Rahab, saying, “Bring out the men who have come to you, who have entered your house, for they have come to search out all the country.”

4 Then the woman took the two men and hid them. So she said, “Yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they were from. 5 And it happened as the gate was being shut, when it was dark, that the men went out. Where the men went I do not know; pursue them quickly, for you may overtake them.” 6 (But she had brought them up to the roof and hidden them with the stalks of flax, which she had laid in order on the roof.) 7 Then the men pursued them by the road to the Jordan, to the fords. And as soon as those who pursued them had gone out, they shut the gate. (Joshua 2:1-7)

The first thing we should notice is that Rahab told a WHOPPER of a lie, not some “little-white-lie“. If that lie isn’t a violation of the 9th Commandment, I don’t know what is, but what is said later in the Bible about this event, and about her?

Because of her actions, Rahab and her family were saved when the Jews conquered Jericho. She married into a Jewish family;
22 But Joshua had said to the two men who had spied out the country, “Go into the harlot’s house, and from there bring out the woman and all that she has, as you swore to her.” 23 And the young men who had been spies went in and brought out Rahab, her father, her mother, her brothers, and all that she had. So they brought out all her relatives and left them outside the camp of Israel. 24 But they burned the city and all that was in it with fire. Only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord. 25 And Joshua spared Rahab the harlot, her father’s household, and all that she had. So she dwells in Israel to this day, because she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho. (Joshua 6:22-25)

Her son was Boaz. Boaz’ son was Obed. Obed’s son was Jesse, and Jesse’s son was David. (Ruth 4:18-22)

She became an ancestor of Jesus Christ: 5 Salmon begot Boaz by Rahab, Boaz begot Obed by Ruth, Obed begot Jesse, 6 and Jesse begot David the king. (Matthew 1:5-6)

She was inducted into the “Faith Hall-of-Fame“: 30 By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they were encircled for seven days. 31 By faith the harlot Rahab did not perish with those who did not believe, when she had received the spies with peace. (Hebrews 11:30-31)

She was highlighted as an example of faith in action: Likewise, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way? (James 2:25)

One question that has intrigued me for years is “Was Rahab an innkeeper who supplemented her income in the bedroom, or did she operate a whore-house and also have rooms for rent?” The ethics and morality of the spies is never questioned even though they sought shelter in her home, and while she is often referred to as “Rahab the harlot“, she is never characterized as an “immoral–woman“. It’s almost as if her line of work didn’t really matter, because her actions spoke for her true character.

From a historical perspective, young girls were trained to be housewives, to cook, clean, please their man, and raise children, NOT to work outside their home, and they usually married when they were young teens. A widow, who was too old to remarry and didn’t have any children to support her, was often forced to become a prostitute just to put food on the table. Did Rahab find herself in that situation due to no fault of her own? Her future daughter-in-law, Ruth, was a young widow.

A much more recent example of people lying to save other people is the heroic people who hid Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust. Integrity, or situational-ethics?

Is it ever okay to break the rules?
Think for a moment… Have you ever been told to do something that you knew was wrong, when disobedience might have serious consequences? Did you obey and do what you knew was wrong, and regret it later, or did you do what was right, knowing that you could live with yourself regardless of the consequences?

We noted two incidents in our previous session of Warriors for Life, one from Daniel 3, and the other from Acts 4, where men refused to obey a “lawful-order“, and in both cases, they were prepared to accept the temporal-consequences of their actions:

16 Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego answered and said to the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. 17 If that is the case, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king. 18 But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up.” (Daniel 3:16-18)

We find a striking-parallel to Daniel 3:16-18 in Acts 4:19-20. Peter and John had been arrested by the Jewish authorities after healing a lame man, and they were ordered not to preach anymore… 19 But Peter and John answered and said to them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you more than to God, you judge. 20 For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19-20)

They owed their allegiance to a higher-authority – God, and while they were living under the authority of a temporal ruler, that ruler wasn’t their ultimate-authority.

WWJD – What Would Jesus Do?
We are going to venture into Matthew 12:1-8 to see what Jesus did when He was confronted about His refusal to “conform“.

12 At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. And His disciples were hungry, and began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. 2 And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath!”

3 But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: 4 how he entered the house of God and ate the showbread which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? 5 Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are blameless? 6 Yet I say to you that in this place there is One greater than the temple. 7 But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. 8 For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

The incident that Jesus referred to is recounted in 1 Samuel 21:1-6.

We need to note that, while Jesus wasn’t questioning the Sabbath as it had been established by God, He was redirecting their focus back to why God instituted the Sabbath and questioning all their additional regulations. Where they thought that God hadn’t given enough regulations in His law, the Jewish religious leaders piled more on. They would be great bureaucrats in our government today, and if you think the CFR is bad now, just let them get their hands on it.

Imagine taking your kids to a playground and finding that there were fences around every piece of apparatus with a set of rules for each. Rather than just frolicking and playing, they would be constrained at every turn. I wouldn’t blame them for never wanting to go back to THAT non-play-ground.

The Old Testament does not prohibit plucking grain on the Sabbath in order to eat – the disciples were not farmers engaged in the work of harvesting, and it couldn’t even been considered gleaning, let alone reaping. They weren’t “working” by any definition. Jesus not only exonerated His disciples, He also claimed to be the Higher Authority.

We are going to rejoin Jesus in Matthew 12:9-14, when He healed a man on the Sabbath. Talk about stirring the pot, He kicked it into high-gear.

Healing on the Sabbath
9 Now when He had departed from there, He went into their synagogue. 10 And behold, there was a man who had a withered hand. And they asked Him, saying, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?”—that they might accuse Him.

11 Then He said to them, “What man is there among you who has one sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? 12 Of how much more value then is a man than a sheep? Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” 13 Then He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And he stretched it out, and it was restored as whole as the other. 14 Then the Pharisees went out and plotted against Him, how they might destroy Him.

This was only one a many times Jesus healed people and did other mighty works on the Sabbath, and in most cases, He double-dog-dared the religious establishment to do something about it, but all they could do was huddle in their enclaves and plot how to get rid of Him.

How are WE going to do?
The ONLY person who never got it wrong was Jesus. Every other person has blown-it, myself included, and I have blown-it many times. We have ALL blown-it, and may blow-it many more times before we take our last breath, but another essential part of Integrity is admitting it when we blow-it. We can all learn from David’s example in 2 Samuel 12. After David knocked-up Bathsheba, the wife of one of his generals, and had her husband murdered, God sent Nathan the Prophet to confront him. We see a fuller-picture of David’s repentance in Psalm 51.

Our society is coming dangerously-close to being as described in Judges 21:25, and if we don’t want that to be our epitaph too, we must be people of, and with integrity. It may be flawed and stuttering, but if our society is to survive, let alone thrive, we are going to have to be the people who hold it together. To do less is to deny that we have anything left worth saving.

Sola Deo Gloria!

Facing Who We Really Are

WARNING: Sometimes TRUTH is UGLY, and if you can’t handle the truth in all of its raw-ugliness, you may not want to read past this point. Nothing is candy-coated or censored. You may wonder “Why am I writing this way?” These are things I can’t deny, and writing them out makes them visible. Plus, I can’t weasel my way out of it.

An integral part to our healing is facing who we really are, because until we face and acknowledge who we REALLY are, we can’t grow past those chains that are holding us back. Why? Do you have, or have you had, broken-relationships? I have had my “fair-share” and then some. Losing my middle daughter to cancer past year was a grim-reminder that I have been leaving carnage in my wake for over forty-years.

I thought I was “a pretty good guy“, but if you believe that lie, maybe you would like some real-estate I have for sale, which is as worthless as what I thought about myself. In reality, I have been a pretty self-centered-asshole for most of my adult life.

God, much to my chagrin, is answering my prayer for Him to clean-out those dark-recesses in my heart that aren’t pleasing to Him, and I don’t like what I am seeing. God has been opening doors to chambers that have been collecting-dust for over forty-years, chambers, chapters in my life, that I would rather forget. Be careful what you ask for, because you may not like what you get…

What if something I said to Connie shortly after we got married plagued her til the day she died and may have contributed to her demise? I had told her that “she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket“. Did what I said make her feel “unworthy“, “less-than-adequate“? Connie has been gone since October 22, 1997, so I can’t turn-back the calendar and take-back those words. Yes, I was an arrogant-asshole. What if I really DO have blood on my hands, Connie’s blood? Words can kill…

What happens when a “virtue” becomes a “vice“? I grew-up poor, so taking good care of what was MINE, was a “celebrated-virtue“, but there are times when clinging to tightly to what is MINE is SELFISH. We really wouldn’t NEED that riding-lawnmower when we moved, but we took it anyway because my wife had bought and paid for it. Add SELFISH to my growing rogues-gallery. That is another dusty-chamber that hasn’t seen the light of day for almost forty-years. Been there, done that, and not proud of it.

Another one that hit me like a freight-train several years later was PRIDE. Aren’t Christians immune to pride? Doesn’t the indwelling of the Holy Spirit make self-obsession impossible? I wish the answer was “YES“, but sadly the true answer is a resounding “NO“. We aren’t immune to pride. In a previous piece, “Who Is YOUR “god”?, I mentioned a couple of things from my own life…times when I was self-obsessed…times when I was PROUD. My life would have been so much easier if God had decisively struck pride from my life, but He hasn’t.

“I wasn’t consciously proud. Maybe most proud people aren’t conscious of how proud they really are. But I felt that I had arrived. In ways that now shock and embarrass me, I thought of myself as a grace graduate. I didn’t minister out of my own need… In ways that are hard for me to imagine now, I thought I had spiritually arrived. I had a scary self-assurance.” (Paul Tripp, Dangerous Calling)

I remember an event from 1997 which shows just how deep my pride problem is. As I was leaving a 12-step meeting, a friend, who had been in many meetings with me, turned to me and said “Steve, you are the proudest person I have ever met.” Had he not inserted the “Steve“, I might have been able to wonder who he was talking to, but he left no doubt. Why was I PROUD? What did I have to be PROUD of? Was it because I was an ordained Elder in a conservative Presbyterian church? I was in a 12-step group…for sexual addiction. I had fallen to the lowest of the low…sexual addiction, and I was a porn addict on top of it. That wasn’t anything to be PROUD of, but PRIDE had obviously come through loud and clear from what I said in those meetings. I was stunned. I was a PROUD sinner.

What if the root-cause behind arrogance, pride, selfishness and self-centeredness is IDOLATRY? We are created to worship, and the problem is WHAT we worship. There is no such thing as an “atheist“, because even though atheists don’t acknowledge that there is a God, they have set themselves up as the “supreme-being” in place of God, so their “god” is themselves. I mentioned that pride is in direct opposition to God. Why? Because, when we are proud, we are telling God that we are more important than Him. If we are more important than God, we are placing ourselves in His place, and we are demoting the very God of the universe. We are making ourselves “god“. It is that plain and simple. God and pride don’t mix.

If you are beginning to wonder “Is this what it will be like to face God on the judgment-day?”, this is barely scratching the surface. God knows ALL the thoughts and attitudes BEHIND our words and actions, all those deep, dark, nooks and crannies that nobody else sees. In reality, we are far more polluted, far more sinful, than we have the capacity to realize. When Isaiah the prophet saw God in all His glory, he could only cry out:

“Woe is me, for I am undone!
Because I am a man of unclean lips,
And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips;
For my eyes have seen the King,
The LORD of hosts.” (Isaiah 6:5)

Who we are isn’t just about what we say and do, but it is also about who we are on the inside, our thoughts and attitudes, because our words and actions arise from our thoughts and attitudes. I was just reminded – again – that I have no room to judge anyone else. I received a call recently from a friend who told me something I was a bit surprised by, but shouldn’t be, because I have done the same thing. Why should I expect her to be any “better” than me? Just because her boyfriend got in her panties doesn’t mean that I never wanted to when she was my neighbor. I would be lying if I said that getting in her panties never crossed my mind, because it did, more than once. She’s a pretty cute gal. After all, I AM a man, and I am not dead yet, but she was more like my little-sister than someone I could be involved with romantically or sexually.

If you are thinking that this all sounds pretty harsh, you may need to be reminded of what Jeremiah 17:9 says; “The hearts is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?”(NKJV)

Is a rapist, pedophile, murder or abortionist really more “corrupt” than people who don’t do those things, or is that level of corruption ingrained in all of us? The verdict from Jeremiah 17:9 is that we are totally-corrupt. The ONLY difference is God’s restraining-grace.

Sin is a disease, and like its physical-disease analogues, it can’t be treated until it is diagnosed. Sin is soul-cancer, and like other forms of cancer, it may reappear at other times and in other places. I have a history of skin-cancer, and even though I haven’t had a skin-cancer in over five years, I can’t let my guard down. I HAVE to get checked every year, just in case, and those check-ups have to be thorough and all-inclusive. If it can’t be seen, it can’t be checked, so I can’t be bashful around my dermatologist. Yes, even “those” places need to be checked, because skin-cancer has the nasty-habit of showing-up in the most “unlikely” places. God is our soul-doctor and He sees EVERYTHING, whether we like it or not, but we have to be open to Him revealing what He sees. We can’t work with Him on what we don’t know about.

Circling back to the beginning: An integral part to our healing is facing who we really are, because until we face and acknowledge who we REALLY are, we can’t grow past those chains that are holding us back. Our healing from the cancer of sin is a life-long process, known as “sanctification”. In God’s redemption-economy, we are “justified”, made right with God, when we come to faith in Christ, but that doesn’t mean that we instantly sin-free, because we aren’t. “Positional-righteousness” is instantaneous, but “personal-righteousness”, becoming more and more like Christ, is a life-long process which won’t be complete until we take our last breath.

“This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.” (1 Timothy 1:15) These words, written towards the end of Paul’s Apostolic ministry, were not reflecting back on his life before his conversion, but were based on his growing awareness of his own sinfulness. Paul, though an Apostle, had not “arrived”. As I look back on my own life, Paul was a “rank-amateur” by comparison. If he was “chief”, I am “pro-grade”, but with the “bad-news”, Paul gives us the GOOD NEWS, the GOSPEL; “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”, which means that He came to save me, and to save you.

How serious are you about becoming more like Christ?

Are you willing to embark on what may become an uncomfortable-journey?

Sola Deo Gloria!

Severe-Mercies

God loves us as we are, but He is never content with leaving us as we are. He always wants more for us than we want for ourselves, particularly as it relates to our growth in personal-holiness. One of God’s most “severe-mercies” is showing us who we REALLY are by ripping our “mask” off…

King David is a classic-example of one of God’s “unmaskings“:

You are that man!
Nathan Rebukes David
12 Then the Lord sent Nathan to David. And he came to him and said,
“There were two men in one city, the one rich and the other poor.
2 “The rich man had a great many flocks and herds.
3 “But the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb
Which he bought and nourished;
And it grew up together with him and his children.
It would eat of his bread and drink of his cup and lie in his bosom,
And was like a daughter to him.
4 “Now a traveler came to the rich man,
And he was unwilling to take from his own flock or his own herd,
To prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him;
Rather he took the poor man’s ewe lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.”

5 Then David’s anger burned greatly against the man, and he said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, surely the man who has done this deserves to die. 6 He must make restitution for the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing and had no compassion.”

7 Nathan then said to David, “You are that man! Thus says the Lord God of Israel, ‘It is I who anointed you king over Israel and it is I who delivered you from the hand of Saul. 8 I also gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your care, and I gave you the house of Israel and Judah; and if that had been too little, I would have added to you many more things like these! 9 Why have you despised the word of the Lord by doing evil in His sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the sons of Ammon. 10 Now therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised Me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.’ 11 Thus says the Lord, ‘Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight. 12 Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.’” 13 Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” And Nathan said to David, “The Lord also has taken away your sin; you shall not die. 14 However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die.” 15 So Nathan went to his house. (2 Samuel 12:1-15)

David would have been content for his sin to be kept hidden, “swept under the rug“, his own “dirty little secret“, but God wasn’t going to allow that to continue. God sent Nathan the Prophet to confront David with his sin, to peal his “mask” off and show him who he REALLY was, and that “picture” wasn’t pretty.

How long did those four words, “You are that man“, reverberate in David’s head, and echo in the halls of his palace? God wasn’t going to allow him to just “put the past in the past, and move on” either, as our culture would encourage us to do. NO! The rest of his life would be plagued by troubles, by the repercussions of what he did. His son, Absalom, DID rebel against his father, and he DID rape his father’s concubines in public.

There was treachery and rebellion in David’s family for the rest of his life. Yes, there were real consequences, beginning with losing that baby, that plagued David until the day he died.

God WILL break us…
God WILL show us who we REALLY are. It isn’t a matter of “if“; it is a matter of “when“, “where” and “how” He will break us. It may be an easier process for some than for others, but that doesn’t mean that it will be “easy“. Peter got “broken“after he denied knowing Jesus. Paul got “broken” on the road to Damascus, because God couldn’t use them to do His work until they had come to the end of themselves. It wasn’t pleasant for either one, and neither has it been for me, but God does it for our own good and His glory. It is difficult. It is painful, but most of all, it is humbling, because we don’t want anyone else to know who we REALLY are.

I DIDN’T want to confess my sin to anyone in my church because I have a pretty good reputation which I didn’t want to spoil, but God didn’t leave me that choice, so on a recent Sunday, I “spilled the beans” to some of the officers. It was hard, but it was liberating. Owning-up to my past became more important than saving whatever reputation I have.

Severe-Mercies…
God is merciful and just, but even as He is merciful, His justice demands that we acknowledge and own our sins. If we keep short-accounts, confessing our sins as we commit them, God doesn’t need to call us into account for them, but if we stubbornly ignore, or even deny our sins, sometimes He has to “take us to the woodshed”. It is not that God is angry with us, He loves us too much to let us get too far “out of hand”.

We tend to think pretty highly of ourselves, particularly if we compare ourselves to the “heathens” around us. If you read through the Psalms, it is almost shocking how many times David says “in my integrity”, and how many times he brags about “loving God’s law”, yet 2 Samuel 11 reveals a very different side of him, the kniving, adulterous, murderer, so God sent Nathan the Prophet to wake David up to who he REALLY was. I may not have been as bold and brash as David, but I sure knew how to play the self-righteous “victim-card”, but God knows me better than that. God knows WHO and HOW we REALLY are, so sometimes He sends us a “reality-check” to pop our bubble. My reality-check came from losing my middle daughter.

Losing my daughter, and seeing how completely she had “painted” me out of her life, forced me to confront by role in destroying our relationship, and it wasn’t “pretty”. This doesn’t absolve anyone else of their roles in destroying my relationship with her. It just gave ME a strong “reality-check”. Only God knows ALL the facts, and it is up to Him to call them into account for their actions.

Final thoughts…
It would be easy for me to be upset or mad at God, but this was long past-due. As with David, God called me into account for my good and His glory. I will be a better man for it.

Sola Deo Gloria!

Too Good To Be True?

Have you ever received news that was so incredible that it sounded “too good to be true“? Have you had times in your lives when it seemed that all you EVER got was bad-news, when you felt like the next “shoe” was going to drop at any minute? I certainly have, and after losing five people, including three family-members, in the last two years, frankly I was, and am dreading what this year will bring, particularly after finding out a few days ago that a dear friend has terminal-cancer. What next?

The children of Israel had had hundreds of years of bad-news. They had been treated decently in Egypt, as long as Joseph was alive, but once he was gone, all hell broke loose. They had become slaves, slaves of a long line of narcissistic Pharaohs who built their empires on the backs of slave-laborers. Then, Moses came along…

2 God spoke further to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord; 3 and I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as God Almighty, but by My name, Lord, I did not make Myself known to them. 4 I also established My covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they sojourned. 5 Furthermore I have heard the groaning of the sons of Israel, because the Egyptians are holding them in bondage, and I have remembered My covenant. 6 Say, therefore, to the sons of Israel, ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. 7 Then I will take you for My people, and I will be your God; and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. 8 I will bring you to the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you for a possession; I am the Lord.’” 9 So Moses spoke thus to the sons of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses on account of their despondency and cruel bondage. (Exodus 6:2-9)

What should have been music to their ears was ignored, because it sounded “too good to be true“. After all, the last time that trouble-maker came to town, rather than liberating them from Egypt, Moses had provoked Pharaoh to make their work even harder. Now, they even had to gather their own straw, rather than having it given to them to make bricks with. Their slave-drivers got even meaner and more cruel than ever before. Maybe it was time to run him out of town on a rail.

Now, it wasn’t that God didn’t intend to liberate the children of Israel from their bondage, that these were empty-promises, He didn’t intend to liberate them – YET. They did have to undergo more pain and suffering before God DID liberate them from bondage, but He eventually did.

We need to make note of the last phrase in the passage, “on account of their despondency and cruel bondage.” There are times when we should be skeptical of seeming “good-news“, and it’s not wrong to question whether it is legitimate or not. People over-promise and under-deliver all the time, which may have been where the phrases “Talk is cheap” and “Put you money where your mouth is” came from. I’m sure there have been plenty of times when I over-promised and under-delivered, but not God. He ALWAYS fulfills His promises, even if it isn’t when we want Him to.

God NEVER forgets a promise He made. Several thousand years elapsed between God’s first promise of a Redeemer in Genesis 3:15 and its fulfillment on Calvary’s hill, but it came “when the fullness of time had come” (Galatians 4:4-5), and many more promises followed that one, but nobody to whom a promise was given lived to see that promise fulfilled. God keeps a different “schedule” than we do, and it can be hard on us.

It is also hard believing the promise of Romans 8:28 when things are going from BAD to WORSE, but a promise is a promise, and if God makes it, it WILL come true. As I noted in “Romans 8:28 – What It DOESN’T Say”, we aren’t promised that the “good” will come in this life. It also doesn’t tell us what the “good” will be, just that “good” will come from even our worst experiences. God determines the “what” and “when”.

Final thoughts…
You may have heard “If it sounds “too good to be true”, it probably is”, because we have all seen things that claim to be “free”, but the “shipping and handling” are more than the item is worth, so it behooves us to be wary of the “fine-print”. Sometimes “no-news is good-news”, or, “a silent-phone is a happy-phone”, because we can’t get “bad-news” if we don’t get any news at all. I don’t mind at all when my phone is silent for a whole weeks.

There is ONE piece of good-news that really is GOOD-NEWS, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ came to save sinners, of which I am “pro-grade”, so if God can save me, He can save anyone. That is one piece of good-news that “you can take it to the bank”.

Sola Deo Gloria!

Steve

Sex Is The “Rip-Stitch”

Have you ever tried to open a stitched-top sack, such as a large dog-food sack, by starting at the wrong end of the stitching? It can be done, given enough time and patience, but that is not how that sack-stitch was meant to be undone. When you start at the right end of the stitch, that rip-stitch will come out in short-order, but when it is in place, the stitch is as strong as the sack.

God is the creator and designer of sex. Sex was His idea, not man’s, and no, Satan didn’t invent it. God created us as sexual-beings. We don’t “become” sexual-beings when we start learning about sex. We are conceived and born that way. It is, literally, part of our DNA. We don’t “become” a boy or a girl by someone saying “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl” when a baby is born. Those are simply declarations of fact. Baby girls are BORN with enough eggs in their ovaries to last five lifetimes. Baby boys are BORN with the ability to achieve an erection, because baby boys have been observed with erections in the womb. Ask any mom who allows her toddler-son to run around naked how she can tell when he needs to use the potty? He has an erection, a “piss-hard-on“, just like men do occasionally.

The Bible teaches us about sex, and no, it is NOT all negative. The Song of Solomon is part of the Bible, and the pastor who claims to preach and teach “the whole counsel of God” but refuses to preach or teach through SOS, including the “juicy-parts“, is lying to you. He is preaching and teaching the “socially-acceptable” parts of the Bible. SOS isn’t the only part of the Bible that teaches us about sex. The Bible is our “handbook” for life, including our sex-life.

God put a “fence” around the “playground” of our sexuality, but religious teachers have insisted on erecting more “fences” around certain parts of that “playground” to “protect” us from the parts they don’t think are “appropriate“. Shouldn’t we accept that God is the one who knows best what is good for us, and what we should or shouldn’t do? Is it any wonder that kids who have grown up in the church are ill-prepared for marriage and sex, when all they have been told is “don’t do that“?

Marriage…
Marriage is stitched-together with many stitches, similar to that sack-stitch, but there is one master-stitch which holds it all together, and that is sex. Sadly, in many marriages, sex has gotten squeezed-out by many other things, things that may still be good, but they aren’t really as critical. They are secondary-activities.

When I wrote “Priorities – Time” five years ago, I put sex as the #3 priority, right behind worship and couple-time, and I still believe that sex belongs at that priority-level. Why did I put SEX as your number 3 priority? Tim and Beverly LeHaye, who are noted Christian writers and counselors, called SEX “The Act of Marriage” in a book by that same name. It is THAT important! The couple that prays together, plays together (has sex), stays together.

I have seen far too many marriages falter, and even dissolve, and the common-denominator was a non-existent sex-life. When one or both spouses decide that they are “too-busy” for sex, or just “not interested” in sex, the beginning of the end has arrived. It will just be a matter of time before the rest of the stitches give-way too. Think about how a rip in a garment starts – with one stitch that gave way. Unfortunately, I also speak from personal-experience.

Connie and I weathered a lot of storms together, but as long as we had a vibrant sex-life, we stuck together. Once our sex-life started unraveling, the end was in sight. Three times a week turned into twice a week, and became even more sporadic because of the situation in our family. In October 1997, she took her own life.

Sandy and I never really had a robust sex-life, but when sex became rare, and rarer, the end was in sight. It still took another seven essentially-sexless years before our marriage fell completely apart, but the seeds were sown many years before – when she started refusing sex. Once every two or three years is NOT enough, and that is what ours had deteriorated to.

I know a couple whose marriage is on the rocks, and it is a sexless-marriage, which means that it is no “marriage” at all. It is simply two people who share a common last-name and have a piece of paper, know as a “Marriage License“. One has no interest in sex, so that critical-tie is missing. The other has made noise about filing for divorce. Yes, they are both Christians.

How did sex become so critical to marriage? God created us that way. Period! God could have created humans to “mate” or “breed“, but He didn’t. He created humans for a lifetime of sexual-fidelity to their spouse. Sex unites us on far deeper levels than just the physical, if that wasn’t deep enough. Sex creates emotional, psychological, neurological, chemical and spiritual ties. Chemical? Yes, scientists have discovered that when two people have sex, certain chemical endorphins are shared between them – chemical-bonds, which is why “one-night-stands” take such a toll on both partners. They leave a part of themselves behind.

Sex is foundational to a successful marriage. The first couple – Adam and Eve, were commanded by God to “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), and when God instituted marriage, He said “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall BECOME ONE FLESH“. (Genesis 2:24) The picture of “one flesh” IS sexual union. It doesn’t get any closer than that.

The Apostle Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote: “Let the husband render to his wife the affection due her, and likewise also the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over he own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer, and come together again so that Satan does not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” (1st Corinthians 7:3-5) Sex is NOT an optional activity for when you both “feel like it” or are “in the mood“. Sex must become a high priority in your marriage. It doesn’t get any clearer than that…

Sex is NOT an “extracurricular-activity” for married couples. It is one of the “core-subjects“. Imagine an English-major in college that didn’t require any English or writing classes, but included such things as “underwater-basket-weaving” or “butterfly-watching“. Whatever degree was conferred at the end of that curriculum would be totally-worthless. A marriage without sex is NOT a marriage. It is simply a legal-contract-relationship.

What about “couples” that don’t consummate their marriage until weeks, or even months, after they got “married“? They are NOT married, even if they appear to be. They aren’t even “friends with benefits“, because at least “friends with benefits” have sex. Sex is the “benefit“. They are just “roommates“, even if they sleep in the same bed. Many states allow for annulling “marriages” that have not been consummated within a certain period of time. Why did they get “married” in the first-place? Did they just want to be friends and roommates, and the only “legitimate” way to do that was to get “married“?

Would the maker of a garment deliberately skip stitches once in a while? Of course not, because skipped-stitches are weak-points in the garment. If fact, they reinforce stress-points with extra stitching, even a bar-tack. So why, in something as vulnerable as marriage, do couples skip those vital-stitches which help hold their marriage together?

Final thoughts…
You may be wondering why I wrote ANOTHER article about sex, as if I have already covered the topic “thoroughly-enough“, but it has become sadly-obvious to me that people STILL aren’t “getting–it“. The evidence is that the divorce-rate among Christian couples still hovers around fifty-percent, which I believe would start falling if the church would return to teaching biblical-sexuality, instead of tip-toeing around it and being stuck with the fallout. Maybe divorces are easier to deal with than the hard, frank, biblical discussions about sex and sexuality. After all, nobody feels compelled to cover their children’s ears when divorce in mentioned, but the same can’t be said when the topic turns to sex. That’s an “adults-only” topic…

Another reason I wrote ANOTHER article about sex is because we need to get the conversation about sex going within the Christian community. Sex has been a “taboo” topic among Christians for many years, but why should non-Christians have a corner on good sex information? With the Bible as our “handbook” for life, Christians should be at the forefront in disseminating biblical sex information, not “also-rans“. One Christian commentator I follow on Twitter is being pretty frank in her discussions about sex, and it is making a lot of people queasy, but why? Aren’t Christians supposed to talk about sex?

Does talking about sex make YOU queasy?

Sola Deo Gloria!

Confronting Our Own Delusions

If you are anything like me, you wear a “mask“, 24/7/365, not only to hide you from others, but to hide the REAL “you” from yourself. Nobody is truly WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). We are master-illusionists, which is built around the delusion that we are “better” than we actually are. We don’t WANT others to see and know us as we are. We only want them to see the “mask“.

Building a delusion…
Building a delusion is ridiculously-easy, but dismantling that delusion is painfully-difficult. To build a delusion, all you have to do is find someone who you think is “worse” than you, and suddenly, you have “bragging-rights“. If you are “better” at something, you must be a “better” person, or not…

So you think that you are a “model–employee“? You are ALWAYS on-time, or better, early, to work. You NEVER take more than your allotted-time for breaks and lunch, and you NEVER go home early. The “proof of the pudding” is your time-sheet. Check it out! But, what about that “slacker“, who is ALWAYS late to work, frequently takes more time for breaks and lunch than allowed, and frequently goes home early? You wonder why the boss puts up with a “slacker“? That is, until you find out that the “slacker” produces more “widgets” than you do, and theirs always passes inspection, and yours…you struggle to produce the ones you do make, and you often have to rework many of them for them to pass inspection. The boss is more concerned about how many shippable “widgets” there are, than how long it took to make them. Sorry, but you lose! Who REALLY is the “model-employee“? That person consistently gets top-dollar on their raises, but you haven’t had a raise in over a year. Who will get the pink-slip first? Ruh-roh…

So you think that you are a “good” driver, because you haven’t had an accident in five years? What about the truck-driver who has 2.5 million accident-free-miles under his belt? You haven’t driven 2.5 million miles, let alone 2.5 million accident-free-miles. Tell me, who is the REAL “pro“?

It is easy to build delusions around virtually any pursuit in life, because we can ALWAYS find someone “worse” to compare ourselves to. But, are we REALLY any better than them?

Confronting and dismantling our delusions…
The first step in confronting and dismantling our delusions is realizing that we have them, and that what we believe about ourselves is a lie, a carefully-fabricated cover-up. Oh, we can still hold on to our delusions, but to confront and dismantle them requires that we OWN them, that we acknowledge them, that we come to a deep realization that they ARE a lie.

The great “delusion-buster” is the fact that there is ALWAYS a “higher-standard“, but most of us don’t want that “standard” to confront and dismantle our delusions. Sometimes we are FORCED to confront and dismantle them, which is a good thing, even if it is hard and painful. God is the great “confronter“, and He uses various means to open our eyes to our delusions. One of God’s most severe, and painful mercies is forcing us to see ourselves as He sees us, not as we would like to see ourselves. Yes, He meets us where and as we are, but He doesn’t leave us where and as we were. He always has a higher-plan for our lives.

“Like Father – Like Son“, was my first confrontation with the lies I had believed about myself, that I was a “better” man than my dad. I wasn’t! I don’t remember what triggered that confrontation, but it had come, and it hit me like a freight-train. My second confrontation came when I discovered that I had lost my middle daughter to cancer – eight months later, and that nobody had bothered to let me know about it. It was a huge slap in my face to see that her family had even scrubbed my name from her obituary, as if I had never existed. That wasn’t the first time they had tried to paint me out of the picture. Her mother’s original death certificate had stated that she was divorced…NOT. I had to ask myself “What is wrong with this picture?”

I started reading “Tender Warrior“, by Stu Weber, shortly after I discovered that I had lost my daughter. While I will never hold up Stu as the perfect-example of a husband and father, and neither would he, with God’s help, he has opened my eyes to who I truly was as a husband and father. Again, I had been comparing myself to my dad, and I always came out on top. Yes, in many ways, I had done a better job of being a husband and father than my dad had, but I fell far-short of who I should have been. Was I as bad as my kids thought I was? No, I may even been worse than they realized.

David and Bathsheba…
After David had sex with Bathsheba and got her pregnant, he had her husband, Uriah, murdered. God sent Nathan the Prophet to David to confront him with what he had done. Nathan told him a story about two men, one rich, and the other, quite poor. Not wanting to kill one of his own lambs to feed a guest, the rich man stole the poor man’s lamb, killed it and fed it to his guest. After David pronounced a scathing-judgment on the rich man, Nathan said “You are that man”. (2 Samuel 11-12:23)

Imagine those four words, “You are that man”, echoing throughout the palace, and in David’s mind for weeks, maybe even months. He couldn’t just “forget it and move on”. Ongoing events were constant-reminders of one of the darkest periods in his life. Five minutes of pleasure brought a lifetime of pain.

When I ask “What is wrong with this picture?”, I have to admit that I am part of what is wrong with that picture. My own actions contributed to the reasons my kids don’t want anything to do with me. That doesn’t negate the actions of others that contributed to our estrangement, but I have to “own” my part.

David didn’t get off Scott-free after his confession. His baby died shortly thereafter, and that was only the beginning of his troubles. His son, Absalom, tried to usurp the throne, and while David was on the run, he raped his father’s concubines – in public. (2 Samuel 15-18)

I haven’t gotten off Scott-free either. I haven’t seen my kids in over twenty-one years, and I still carry the pictures they gave me just before Christmas 1997 in my wallet. I don’t have any newer pictures, other than the ones I have found online. It is too late to make amends to Carrie, my middle daughter, because she passed away in April 2018.

Some people have suggested that I put my past in the past and move-on, but God hasn’t seen fit to allow me to do that. Instead, He still sends periodic-reminders of my past, as if to say “You haven’t dealt with this yet.”

While God doesn’t send Prophets to confront us any more, He has a myriad of other ways to get our attention. I wouldn’t even put it past Him to erect a billboard, but He usually uses less-dramatic means, like hitting us up-side the head with a 2X4, or with a freight-train.

Solomon hit the nail on the head three-thousand years ago, when he said:
“All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the hearts.” (Proverbs 16:2)

Reasons to lose our delusions…
This is NOT to say that confronting, owning and dismantling our delusions is ever easy, because it isn’t. We have built-in defense-mechanisms that jealously guard our delusions, and if we have had them for quite a while, they have become a subconscious part of who we are.

The work necessary to lose our delusions may even be painfully-difficult. Mine has been, and is. Oh, how I would LOVE to go back to being the “good-guy” I thought I was, but I can’t, because those “masks” have already been ripped-off. So, I have to face the cold, hard, truth that I failed as a man, as a Christian, as a husband, and as a father. I was NOT the husband and father my wife and kids needed and deserved.

Living with a “mask” on is hard work, because we have to make sure our “mask” is “just-right” all the time. We can’t live authentic-lives while we are wearing a “mask”. We are always “putting on a show”, so when we finally lose our “mask”, we don’t have to pretend that we are “better” than we are. We can relax and be ourselves.

God always sees through our “mask”. He knows who we truly are, and for our own good, He wants us to know who we truly are. One of our most pervasive delusions is that we can “save” ourselves, that we can actually make ourselves right before God by our own efforts. Earlier, I mentioned that there is ALWAYS a higher-standard, and that is the Law of God, as revealed in Scripture. That higher-standard applies to all parts of our lives. If we think we can keep God’s Law perfectly, we need only answer one question: “Do I love God with my whole being, 24/7/365?” I dare say that we can’t love God with our whole being for one nanosecond, let alone 24/7/365.

Only one person has ever kept the Law of God perfectly, Jesus Christ, and He kept it perfectly for His entire life.

The Good News…
Amidst all the gloom and doom, there IS GOOD NEWS. While we can’t make ourselves right before God, we can BE made-right before God. We can’t do it ourselves, but Jesus Christ can do it for us. See, not only did Jesus Christ perfectly live the life we cannot live, He died the death that we deserve, and His perfect life and death were validated by His miraculous resurrection from the dead.

When we abandon our delusion of “self-salvation”, confess to God that we CAN’T save ourselves, and humbly ask Jesus Christ to BE our Savior, we are given what we could never earn, a right-standing before God. Then, we can quit pretending.

Will YOU believe and embrace the GOOD NEWS?

Sola Deo Gloria!

 

Do You Need Help?

That question is music to my ears – sometimes, but at other times, I hate that question with a purple-passion. Say what? Yes, there are times when I legitimately want and need help, but there are times when I could use some help, but am loath to admit it.

Thanks…
I wrote “Tired Of Being “Tough”” in September of 2017 about my struggles with handling all the losses I had had in the previous several months. That is one time when I am very grateful that help IS available, because since I wrote and posted that piece, I have had several more traumatic-losses, which now brings the number of significant-losses in the last two years to five. The last loss was in April 2018, my middle daughter, but I didn’t find out about it until New Year’s Eve. I lost my brother in July 2018, after a long illness. That is a LOT of losses for one person to process and handle at the same time. I am still seeing a mental-health counselor once a quarter, and I am thankful that he is there for me.

We have all been in stores when we can’t seem to find ANYTHING, at least not what we are looking for. WalMart is infamous for rearranging their stores in a seemingly-random manner, and even if we have been in that same store a hundred times, there is always something we can’t find, and only store employees know where it is. That is when I don’t mind asking, or getting asked, if I need help.

I was in Staples a few months ago looking for a new desktop computer, and one of the employees was there to explain the differences between the various models they have, and make recommendations about which one would best suit my needs. A new computer will have to wait a while, because I have several more important issues to take care of first. Thank you very much!

I called Tire Kingdom a few days later about two tires for my vehicle. The store manager graciously helped me select the tires that would best suit my needs, based on his many years of experience in the tire business, and what he runs on his personal vehicles. His recommendations verified my own gut-feeling, so my new tires were shipped in from their warehouse, and installed a few days later. I also found out that my vehicle’s brake pads and rotors were worn-out, so I had to have them replaced. Thank you very much!

Thanks, but no-thanks…
There are also times when I DO need help, but I am too stubborn to admit it. Maybe, it’s more like, too PROUD to admit it. I have needed those tires for several weeks, but haven’t had the money to buy them, so I have kept putting it off. Now, it is crunch-time, because I just don’t trust them, particularly on the highway, any more. I made the mistake of admitting to one of my church’s deacons that I need two new tires but don’t have the money for them, so he offered help from the deacon’s fund. Thanks, but no-thanks!

2017 was a different story, because my refrigerator died suddenly in March, and I didn’t have any choice about accepting help to buy a new fridge because I didn’t have the money. I was able to maximize the help by getting my new fridge on sale. That helped me be a good steward of the resources God provided through my church.

In the early 90’s, my family and I were subsisting on my very-meager income – $200/week. We certainly would have qualified for food-stamps, but we were too self-sufficient (PROUD) to apply. My wife was the only person I have ever met who could pull something out of an “empty” pantry and an “empty” refrigerator and put a meal on the table for a family of six thirty-minutes later. We could have eaten “better” on food-stamps, but we never went hungry, thanks to her creative-genius in the kitchen. We thought that other people needed that help worse than we did. Thanks, but no-thanks!

Why was 2018 any different? I know that I wasn’t as frugal with my resources in the last year as I should have been, but, then again, I was counting on some income to help pay me extra expenses which never materialized. That left me in a bind as far as taking care of my own needs.

I have been taught to “own” and accept my choices and decisions, for better or for worse, and to deal, as best I can, with the outcomes. Maybe I am too stubborn, or maybe I am too proud, but I can’t accept financial-assistance to buy my tires. Thanks, but no-thanks!

Bartimaeus Receives His Sight
46 Then they came to Jericho. And as He was leaving Jericho with His disciples and a large crowd, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the road. 47 When he heard that it was Jesus the Nazarene, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 Many were sternly telling him to be quiet, but he kept crying out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49 And Jesus stopped and said, “Call him here.” So they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take courage, stand up! He is calling for you.” 50 Throwing aside his cloak, he jumped up and came to Jesus. 51 And answering him, Jesus said, “What do you want Me to do for you?” And the blind man said to Him, “Rabboni, I want to regain my sight!” 52 And Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and began following Him on the road. (Mark 10:46-52)

Bartimaeus couldn’t have descended much lower of the social-scale. He was blind, and a beggar. Only lepers were “below” him, and even servants and slaves “ranked” higher than him because they could at least work for their living. When he heard that Jesus was coming, out of desperation, with nothing to lose, and potentially everything to gain, he called-out to Jesus; “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

Jesus’ reputation had been spread far and wide, so Bartimaeus had probably heard many stories about His miraculous-healings. Would Jesus help him? Why did he throw aside his cloak when he was led to Jesus?

Do you detect a bit of “imagery” here?

50 Throwing aside his cloak, he jumped up and came to Jesus. 51 And answering him, Jesus said, “What do you want Me to do for you?” And the blind man said to Him, “Rabboni, I want to regain my sight!”

What did Bartimaeus call Jesus when he made his request? “Rabbi” was the typical title for religious leaders, but Bartimaeus called Jesus “Rabboni“. “Rabboni” is Hebrew for “my master“, a recognition of and submission to Jesus’ authority. Who else called Jesus “Rabboni“?

Since Bartimaeus was claiming Jesus as his master, he may have not wanted to appear before Jesus dressed as he was. That cloak may have been all he owned, and was probably little more than a rag. There was no shame attached to nakedness in the Bible, other than the shame associated with extreme-poverty or enslavement, so Bartimaeus’ only “shame” would have been his poverty, symbolized by his tattered cloak.

God commanded Isaiah, in Isaiah 20, to prophesy barefoot and naked for three years against Egypt and Cush. When they were conquered by the Assyrians, they would be led-away as slaves, barefoot and naked. Isaiah’s nakedness symbolized how they would be treated when they were conquered. It was also to serve as a warning to Israel, which had, contrary to God’s command, made a defense-pact with Egypt and Cush. It was not “shameful” for Isaiah to prophesy naked, but they would be shamed in their captivity.

After Bartimaues made his request to Jesus, Jesus healed him immediately, saying; “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and began following Him on the road.

Following Jesus, in gratitude for what He had done for him, was the natural-result of this incredible miracle. There are many other instances when Jesus healed people and they became His followers.

What about us?
We are constantly putting on a “show” for others, and ultimately for God, but why? We try to pretend that we have it all together, that we are self-sufficient, and that we have everything under control, and while we may fool the people around us, we can’t fool God. He sees us naked, as we are, stripped-bare of all of our pretenses, so why do we try to fool Him too?

Regardless of the resolution of my financial-situation, there is one person I, and you, need never be ashamed for asking for what we need – God. He already knows our needs before we ask Him, so why aren’t we willing to take our needs to Him? He won’t ever embarrass us, and He has far more resources than we can ever imagine. Yes, sometimes we need to be more like Bartimaeus, and less like stubborn-me, but we also need to have the wisdom to know when we REALLY need help, and accept it when we do.

Sola Deo Gloria!

The “Otherization” Of Jesus

I read an article recently in a well-respected publication that was trying to explain why Mary and some of Jesus’ other disciples didn’t recognize Him immediately after His resurrection. Aside from the obvious fact that they still didn’t understand the Old Testament prophesies concerning His death and resurrection quite yet, that author attributed their lack of recognition to some kind of “physical changes” in His body, as if He had suddenly become some kind of “other“. Did that mean He was no longer “completely-human“? WHAT???

“Docetism“, the belief that Jesus was not truly and fully-human, has been around for almost two millenniums, and our churches are frequently infected with “docetism-lite“, such that, while not outrightly-denying His true and full humanity, they have trouble handling the “details” of His humanity. While Docetics would prefer a body-less resurrection, they will accept a bodily-resurrection, as long as God leaves the parts they don’t like behind. SO, what parts would they “leave-behind“? The parts they like to cover with “fig-leaves“?

This insidious “otherization” of Jesus even shows up in our Christmas carols where we don’t even give it a second-thought. Do you recognize these lyrics?

The cattle are lowing the baby awakes

But little lord Jesus no crying he makes.

I love you lord Jesus; look down from the sky

And stay by my side until morning is nigh.

That is the second stanza of “Away In A Manger“. Am I being overly-picky, or not? What our kids hear and learn growing-up becomes part of the building-blocks of their theology later in life, so if they grow up accepting this “otherization” of Jesus, that there might have been some “changes” to His body when He was resurrected doesn’t raise any red-flags, but it does for me, because I have been studying Christology and realize how important it is.

Maybe Barbie and Ken are their ideal-prototypes…

I have found the Heidelberg Catechism quite helpful in its concise explanation. In question 16, we read:

Q: Why must he be a true and righteous man?

A: He must be a true man because the justice of God requires that the same human nature which has sinned should pay for sin. He must be a righteous man because one who himself is a sinner he cannot pay for others.

The answer here is focusing on the need for a real human nature. Why? Because the penalty for sin requires suffering in body and soul. And only a human can do this (cf. Heb. 2:14; John 12:27). Jesus did not only share in our nature, but also he had to identify with us in the experiences of the fall (Heb. 2:17-18). But it was essential that Christ himself did not sin in this identification with us. Otherwise, how could he pay for our sin? Berkhof writes, “Only such a truly human Mediator, who had experimental knowledge of the woes of mankind and rose superior to all temptations, could enter sympathetically into all the experiences, the trials, and the temptations of man (Heb. 2:17, 18; 4:15-5:2) and be a perfect human example for his followers (Matt. 11:29; Mark 10:39; John 13:13-15; Phil. 2:5-8; Heb. 12:2-4; 1 Pet. 2:21). L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, p. 319.

In short, the answer is Jesus had to be a man so that he could identify with us, suffering in our place and sympathizing with us in our weakness.

We don’t need for Jesus to have undergone some kind of “changes” during His resurrection to be able to explain why Mary and some of His disciples didn’t recognize Him immediately. When Mary went to the tomb, she was looking for a BODY, a DEAD-BODY, not her living Lord. She had seen Him die and be buried, so she was still convinced that He was as dead as a stone. People didn’t survive crucifixion. Period! The same was true of His other disciples. They knew that He was DEAD. STONE-COLD-DEAD! John and four women, including His mother and Mary, were at the foot of the cross when He breathed His last, so when He appeared to them, that He could possibly be alive was a TOTALLY-LUDICROUS.

Shortly before Jesus’ own death, burial and resurrection, John, in John 11:1-44, recorded the death, burial and resurrection of Lazarus. Why does this matter? There were two people present at all three events, Mary and Martha. They had nursed him while he was sick, they had prepared his body for burial, and they had buried him, so if there was something “different” about after his resurrection, they would have been the first to notice it, but there wasn’t. The Lazarus who was raised from the dead was the same Lazarus they had buried just a few days earlier. Why would Jesus’ resurrection have been any different? Jesus’ disciples knew Him as intimately as Mary and Martha knew Lazarus, so they would have been the first to notice that there was something “different” about Him, but they didn’t record anything.

It isn’t until later in the New Testament that we read about “glorified-bodies“…

When I lost my first wife in 1997, I did NOT know unequivocally whose body was in that casket. I did not witness her death, even though I saw evidence that something had happened in our home, and I never saw her dead-body because it was a closed-casket funeral, for which I had no hand in making the arrangements. All I had was a piece of paper, a “Death Certificate“, which already had fraudulent-information on it that I had to have corrected. I lived with the nagging question of whether her “death” was a cruel-hoax for many years, particularly since I continued to receive mail addressed to her for several years even after I had moved over a thousand miles away. That was NOT the case with Jesus. His death was witnessed by many people, including the Roman soldiers who crucified Him. Joseph and Nicodemus had prepared His body for burial and buried Him, events that were witnessed by others.

We DO affirm that there WAS a certain “otherness” about Jesus, because He IS the incarnate Son of God, the “Word made flesh” (John 1:14), very God of very God, Creator-God, but that did NOT diminish His humanity. No other person in all of history has been BOTH God and Man, but His favorite title for Himself was “Son of man“.

We also know, from the Gospels, that Jesus, after His resurrection, exhibited capabilities He had not displayed before, such as the ability to appear and disappear at-will. Did that make Him any less human. Absolutely-not! He still ate and drank…

Does it REALLY mater?

In a word, YES, because His resurrection body was His ascension body, and the rest of the New Testament makes it very clear that we have our own flesh-and-blood in Heaven, with all His parts intact. making intercession for us. SO, we either do our own flesh-and-blood, with all His parts intact, or we don’t. If part of that “change” was that He no longer has all His parts intact, then Jesus is no longer HUMAN. He is an “other“, a “changeling“, and is a worthless mediator, and our “salvation” is worthless.

What we believe concerning Jesus Christ DOES matter, because, unless we have a fully-qualified Savior, we have no Savior at all, which required that His humanity be genuine.

Sola Deo Gloria,

Steve

Church – or Religious Social-Club?

It should have been an older Pastor’s ultimate “gravy-job“. It was a large church, in an affluent part of a major city, and they were looking for a Senior Pastor. The salary and benefits package would have done many corporate CEO’s proud. It really WAS a “plum-job“, for the right Pastor. Looking for a change in scenery, and hoping to retire in a few years, Pastor-Bob applied, along with a several other applicants.

A few weeks after Pastor-Bob applied, he got a cordial letter from the Pastor Search Committee of the church asking him to come candidate(preach) at the church. When he went there to candidate, the facilities were impressive, and the parking lot was full of late-model upscale cars, an obvious display of the affluence of the members, but when he went into the church, he sensed that all was not as it seemed. Many of the members were aloof, and there seemed to be quite a few cliques, because the members didn’t really mingle. They just huddled in small groups. He might have his work cut out for him if he went there, because it seemed more like a social-club than a church.

The Pastor Search Committee was impressed with his grasp of the Word, and his ability to articulate the great truths of Scripture, so they voted unanimously to call Pastor-Bob to be their Senior Pastor. That was when he began planning his “not-so-grand” entrance.

While some of the details are contrived or embellished, it is based on a true story from an American Pastor, and the church could really have been almost any church in the world.

When he walked into the church for his first Sunday as their new Pastor, his breath smelled of cheap whiskey and stale cigars. He had fished his tattered clothes and mismatched shoes out of a dumpster. His hair was long and unkempt, and he had a scraggly beard. He resembled a hobo, a vagabond, or one of the homeless people down by the bus station. He came in limping and leaning on his cane, not exactly what the church was looking for in a Senior Pastor. The only person who greeted him was the usher who shuffled him to the far-back corner of the sanctuary. Everyone else ignored him, looking away in disgust. Some even moved farther away from him when he sat down.

Only two people were in on this little skit, his wife, and the Clerk of Session. His wife dropped him off about a block from the church so that he could walk by himself into the church. She parked their older car in the back corner of the parking lot and slipped inside quietly, where she could observe what was going to happen.

As the service progressed, the congregation wondered who was going to preach, because the chair where their Pastor usually sat was empty. Finally, the only Elder who was “in the know” stood up, and said that it was his great honor and privilege to welcome their new Pastor, Pastor-Bob. As Pastor-Bob slowly made his way to the front of the church, the congregation let out a collective “gasp“. Who was THAT man? Certainly that wasn’t their new Pastor, was it? That wasn’t the man who had candidated there a few weeks before, or was it?

When Pastor Bob got to the pulpit, and shook the hand of the Elder, he faced the congregation and said “I’m not sure that I am in the right place. I thought that I was coming to Pastor a church, but what I see here is a social-club, masquerading as a church.” Then he opened his Bible and said, “Turn with me to James 2, beginning at verse 1:”

2 My brethren, do not hold your faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ with an attitude of personal favoritism. 2 For if a man comes into your assembly with a gold ring and dressed in fine clothes, and there also comes in a poor man in dirty clothes, 3 and you pay special attention to the one who is wearing the fine clothes, and say, “You sit here in a good place,” and you say to the poor man, “You stand over there, or sit down by my footstool,” 4 have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil motives? 5 Listen, my beloved brethren: did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him? 6 But you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into court? 7 Do they not blaspheme the fair name by which you have been called?

8 If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. 9 But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. (James 2:1-8)

After reading from James 2, he related both his experiences when he had been there before, and what he had just experienced, and asked “Do you want to be a church, or do you want to be a social-club, masquerading as a church? If all you want is a “feel-good” Chaplain for your social-club, I am the wrong man for the job, but if you want to truly be the church of Jesus Christ, we have some work to do, but God can do it.“

How we treat those around us, and those who walk through our doors matters – to God, and it should matter to us. We show the genuineness of our salvation by how we treat others, and God WILL judge us by our actions, or inaction:

31 “But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; 33 and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35 For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; 36 naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink? 38 And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You? 39 When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ 40 The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’

41 “Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; 43 I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.’ 44 Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’ 45 Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ 46 These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:31-46)

How we treat those who walk through the doors of our churches matters – to God, and it should matter to us too. Having been a Deacon in a church, I know first-hand that occasionally someone will come to our churches seeking some kind of help. While it behooves us to be good stewards of the resources that God has provided to our mercy-ministries, we can’t treat every sob-story with suspicion, because where there ARE genuine-needs, needs we should meet to the best of our ability. Sometimes it will be best if one of the Deacons goes with the person to get what they need, rather than handing them money which may get used for drugs or alcohol instead.

If you drive the streets of any city in America, you WILL encounter people who are homeless, particularly here in Florida, where our moderate climate makes it easier for them to survive on the streets. They may be begging on a street-corner, or huddled in an alley, but they have no place to call “home“. Sadly, many of them are Veterans, men and women who have been used-up by our Armed Forces, and dumped back on our streets, with little or no support-system or training to reintegrate into our society.

The person in need may NOT be homeless, but may be your neighbor. It may be necessary to exercise the same level same level of prudence that churches must exercise when supplying needs. I used to have a neighbor who was frequently broke, but she would pay the satellite-TV bill and buy beer before she bought groceries, so I didn’t usually hand her money, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t sometimes take care of her needs. I did buy some of her medications and took her grocery-shopping when she was broke, not because she had mismanaged her money, but because she didn’t have any income due to illness or injury. There was a difference.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, WE are the church, and we bring our attitudes towards those who are less fortunate than us into that building we call the “church“. The problems that Pastor found in the church in the story were amplified-symptoms of the attitudes of its members. While there were homeless people on the streets trying to eke-out their existence, church members were well-fed, lived in virtual-mansions, and drove cars that cost more than many houses, and they didn’t care. After all, they HAD earned that “right“…

I don’t live in a mansion, eat steak and lobster every night or drive a luxury-vehicle, but I DO have a place to call “home“, eat well, and have a dependable vehicle, which is far more than homeless people can enjoy. Maybe I SHOULD keep some extra cash in my vehicle to give people in need, and take that giving-attitude to church with me. How about you?

Church – or Social-Club?

The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’

Sola Deo Gloria!

Do You Need Help?

Sometimes that question is music to my ears, but at other times, I hate that question with a purple-passion. Say what? Yes, there are times when I legitimately want and need help, but there are times when I could use some help, but am loath to admit it.

Thanks…

I wrote “Tired Of Being “Tough”” a little over a year ago about my struggles with handling all the losses I have had in the last several months. That is one time when I am very grateful that help IS available, because since I wrote and posted that piece, I have had several more traumatic-losses, which now brings the number of significant-losses to four. The most recent loss was in July, when I lost my brother. That is a LOT of losses for one person to process and handle at the same time. I am still seeing a mental-health counselor once a quarter, and I am thankful that he is there for me.

We have all been in stores when we can’t seem to find ANYTHING, at least not what we are looking for. WalMart is infamous for rearranging their stores in a seemingly-random manner, and even if we have been in that same store dozens of times, there is always something we can’t find, and only store employees know where it is. That is when I don’t mind asking, or getting asked, if I need help. I have even been known to ask another customer if they know where what I am looking for is. Sometimes it is almost right under my nose but I was too blind to see it.

I was in Staples recently looking for a new desktop computer, and one of the employees was there to explain the differences between the various models they have, and make recommendations about which one would best suit my needs. Thank you very much! A new computer will have to wait a while, because I have several more important issues to take care of first.

I called Tire Kingdom a few days ago about two tires for my vehicle. The store manager graciously helped me select the tires that would best suit my needs, based on his many years of experience in the tire business, and what he runs on his personal vehicles. His recommendations verified my own gut-feeling, so my new tires are being shipped in from their warehouse. Thank you very much!

Thanks, but no-thanks…

There are also times when I DO need help, but I am too stubborn to admit it. Maybe, it’s more like, too PROUD to admit it. I have needed those tires for several weeks, but haven’t had the money to buy them, so I have kept putting it off. Now, it is crunch-time, because I just don’t trust them, particularly on the highway, any more. I made the mistake of admitting to one of my church’s deacons that I need two new tires but don’t have the money for them, so he offered help from the deacon’s fund. I declined.

Last year was a different story. My refrigerator died suddenly last March, and I didn’t have any choice about accepting help to buy a new fridge because I didn’t have the money. I was able to maximize the help by getting my new fridge on sale. That helped me be a good steward of the resources God provided through my church.

Why is this year any different? I know that I wasn’t as frugal with my resources in the last year as I should have been, but, then again, I was counting on some income to help pay me extra expenses which never materialized. That left me in a bind as far as taking care of my own needs.

I have been taught to “own” and accept my choices and decisions, for better or for worse, and to deal, as best I can, with the outcomes. Maybe I am too stubborn, or maybe I am too proud, but I can’t accept financial-assistance to buy my tires. Thanks, but no-thanks!

That brings us to the story of a man who WASN’T shy about asking for help:

Bartimaeus Receives His Sight

46 Then they came to Jericho. And as He was leaving Jericho with His disciples and a large crowd, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the road. 47 When he heard that it was Jesus the Nazarene, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 Many were sternly telling him to be quiet, but he kept crying out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49 And Jesus stopped and said, “Call him here.” So they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take courage, stand up! He is calling for you.” 50 Throwing aside his cloak, he jumped up and came to Jesus. 51 And answering him, Jesus said, “What do you want Me to do for you?” And the blind man said to Him, “Rabboni, I want to regain my sight!” 52 And Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and began following Him on the road. (Mark 10:46-52)

Bartimaeus couldn’t have descended much lower of the social-scale. He was blind, and a beggar. Only lepers were “below” him, and even servants and slaves “ranked” higher than him because they could at least work for their living. When he heard that Jesus was coming, out of desperation, with nothing to lose, and potentially everything to gain, he called-out to Jesus; “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

Jesus’ reputation had been spread far and wide, so Bartimaeus had probably heard many stories about His miraculous-healings. Would Jesus help him? Why did he throw aside his cloak when he was led to Jesus?

Do you detect a bit of “imagery” here?

50 Throwing aside his cloak, he jumped up and came to Jesus. 51 And answering him, Jesus said, “What do you want Me to do for you?” And the blind man said to Him, “Rabboni, I want to regain my sight!”

What did Bartimaeus call Jesus when he made his request? “Rabbi” was the typical title for religious leaders, but Bartimaeus called Jesus “Rabboni“. “Rabboni” is Hebrew for “my master“, a recognition of and submission to Jesus’ authority. Who else called Jesus “Rabboni“?

Since Bartimaeus was claiming Jesus as his master, he may have not wanted to appear before Jesus dressed as he was. That cloak may have been all he owned, and was probably little more than a rag. There was no shame attached to nakedness in the Bible, other than the shame associated with extreme-poverty or enslavement, so Bartimaeus’ only “shame” would have been his poverty, symbolized by his tattered cloak.

God commanded Isaiah, in Isaiah 20, to prophesy barefoot and naked for three years against Egypt and Cush. When they were conquered by the Assyrians, they would be led-away as slaves, barefoot and naked. Isaiah’s nakedness symbolized how they would be treated when they were conquered. It was also to serve as a warning to Israel, which had, contrary to God’s command, made a defense-pact with Egypt and Cush. It was not “shameful” for Isaiah to prophesy naked, but they would be shamed in their captivity.

After Bartimaues made his request to Jesus, Jesus healed him immediately, saying; “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and began following Him on the road.

Following Jesus, in gratitude for what He had done for him, was the natural-result of this incredible miracle. There are many other instances when Jesus healed people and they became His followers.

What about us?

We are constantly putting on a “show” for others, and ultimately for God, but why? We try to pretend that we have it all together, that we are self-sufficient, and that we have everything under control, and while we may fool the people around us, we can’t fool God. He sees us naked, as we are, stripped-bare of all of our pretenses, so why do we try to fool Him too?

Regardless of the resolution of my financial-situation, there is one person I, and you, need never be ashamed of asking for what we need – God. He already knows our needs before we ask Him, so why aren’t we willing to take our needs to Him? He won’t ever embarrass us, and He has far more resources than we can ever imagine. No, He probably won’t lead you to what you are looking for in that store, or get that item at the back of the top-shelf that you can’t reach, but He may just send someone who CAN help with what you need. Money probably won’t come raining-down from heaven, but some other provision may arrive unexpectedly. Yes, we need to be more like Bartimaeus, and less like stubborn-me.

Sola Deo Gloria!