Kingdom (multiple parts)

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Kingdom

Possibly the most important and least understood concept in the New Testament, and perhaps all of scripture is the kingdom. There is no way for me to break it down or simplify it, or clarify it, or even to say anything definitive about it. Yet I feel compelled to try, as I have since I was a kid. What is the kingdom is the single biggest unanswerable question of my time in the church.

I have done bits and pieces of this work together over countless years and articles and sermons. This is the first time I am attempting to put it all together in one, neat package. It will be the most challenging project I have done since Red Letters and should go for a handful of weeks before I wrap it up. There will be write-ups and podcasts. This is the first installment:

What is the kingdom?

The kingdom is a big, hairy, unexplained, and unexplainable mess. It is difficult to know where to begin. Let’s try something easy:

What should we call it?

In those days, John the Baptist appeared in the desert of Judea, preaching: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.” Matt. 3:1 - 2a

There we have it. We should call it the kingdom of heaven. But hold your taters! This is from Bible Odyssey:

Did you know…?

The Gospel of Matthew is the only biblical book that talks about the “kingdom of heaven” (thirty-two times) while the rest of the Bible refers to “the kingdom of God.”

Ah, shucks.. And I thought this would be the easy part. Hint: There is no easy part when it comes to the kingdom.

After John had been arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time of fulfillment has arrived, and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” Mark 1:14 - 15

John says kingdom of heaven while Jesus says kingdom of god. Matthew says kingdom of heaven while everyone else says kingdom of god. Adding to the confusion is the fact that it is also simply called the kingdom.

From my perspective, you can call it anything you want. There is no official name. That said, I discount kingdom of heaven most of all because Matthew had theological reasons for just about everything. Did a historical Jesus use any of these designations? There is no way to know.

The reason I devote some time to this question is because there are many Christians who believe that the kingdom of heaven and kingdom of god are different in some subtle way. They are convinced that there is some theological significance in the designation. This is likely a result of holding to verbal plenary inspiration. They put a lot of emphasis on the exact words used because god inspired and cares about the exact words.

That is enough time spent on the name of the kingdom. It doesn’t help us at all with the next aspect of this exploration. But don’t be surprised if naming doesn’t pop up again in another part of this study.

What kind of thing is the kingdom?

Is it a spiritual kingdom, physical kingdom, or both? The biggest difference between the two is probably land. A spiritual kingdom doesn’t require a patch of earth and a physical kingdom does. But don’t celebrate too soon. That does almost nothing to answer the question. So let’s start with the very first mention of the concept:

“Yet the Lord, the God of Israel, chose me from my whole family to be king over Israel forever. He chose Judah as leader, and from the tribe of Judah he chose my family, and from my father’s sons he was pleased to make me king over all Israel. Of all my sons—and the Lord has given me many—he has chosen my son Solomon to sit on the throne of the kingdom of the Lord over Israel. He said to me: ‘Solomon your son is the one who will build my house and my courts, for I have chosen him to be my son, and I will be his father. I will establish his kingdom forever if he is unswerving in carrying out my commands and laws, as is being done at this time.’ 1Ch. 28:4-7

Here, we find the kingdom of the lord. Interesting, that is yet another name to add to the list. That is interesting. But more so is the fact that David said he would be king over Israel forever. Then we have god saying that he has chosen Solomon to be his son (son of god) and god would establish Solomon’s kingdom forever. The plot thickens…

Is David going to be king forever? Or is it Solomon? We might be tempted to say that it is essentially the same thing. It is the reign of the house of David. But is this designation of forever king given to everyone who takes the throne? It kind of loses its meaning after a few declarations that a new person will be king forever.

There is also the question of what it means to be a king forever. I’m guessing it means that the king will always come from the line of David, and Solomon. It could also mean that the kingdom of the lord of Israel would last forever. Whatever the full meaning was, it would appear as though this kingdom was very much a physical kingdom.

At what point would anyone start to think of it as a spiritual kingdom? My guess is that it was when there was no longer much of a physical kingdom about which one could boast. You can’t really say that your sovereign kingdom has a leader from the line of David if you no longer have a sovereign state. In the time of Jesus, there was no sovereign state. That was kind of a big problem.

The announcement of the kingdom

First John, then Jesus announced that the kingdom of heaven/god was at hand. But if something is at hand, it is not yet actuated. What exactly was being announced. What did people hear? There was no physical kingdom at the time. But many were looking forward to one coming in the future. The job of the messiah was to finally reestablish and rule in the new, physical kingdom. That was the dominant expectation.

Do we have any reason to believe that the people hearing these announcements of the coming kingdom were thinking of anything other than a physical kingdom? With the memory of the Maccabees fresh in their minds, many would have very much understood this to mean that someone was going to make another play for Jewish independence.

Many Christians today believe that the heralded kingdom was a physical kingdom. For them, it is just a matter of timing. That physical kingdom has not yet come to fruition. But like the end of the world, it is coming soon and very soon.

When they talk about the kingdom, they are being quite physical and literal. They are envisioning a city (Jerusalem) and a king (Jesus) and a ruling class at his side (them) and robes, and crowns, and territories, and legislation, and power, and, and, and… all that and more. It is the kingdom of David renewed, with the whole world as the territory and Jerusalem as the capital city. It is the game of Thrones, but with them as the winners. They couldn’t be more literal. And they couldn’t be more serious.

Further, they believe that all, or at least many of the world governments will still be in place alongside the kingdom of the lord. There will also be people who are not onboard with the king of kings and who will want to dissuade the righteous and even overthrow the holy city. This kingdom of peace will also have other business which to attend.

If this all sounds a little funny to your ear, think millennial and it will all fall into place. Whether pre or post, there will be a 1,000 year reign of king Jesus the divine. This is no hippy-dippy spiritual kingdom proposed by the eschatological losers hoping for a manufactured victory of the rhetorical kind. This is for the real believers. And yes, they have a mace.

When John and Jesus were traveling the countryside proclaiming that the kingdom of god was near, they were talking to people who believed in a real kingdom with a real king. Arguably, one of the reasons Jesus was rejected by the Jewish leaders was that some of his teachings seemed a bit off for people who were expecting a real king and kingdom. They wanted a devouring lion but Jesus was a sacrificial lamb. Yet even today, one of the big Christian applause lines is that the first time, Jesus came as a lamb. The next time, he will come as a lion. They want exactly what the Jews wanted and expected. The desires and expectations for a physical kingdom have not really changed over the centuries, just the timing.

Spiritual kingdom

All that said, it is important to realize that not all Jews were alike anymore than all Christians are alike. I suspect that many Jews were sick and tired of wars and failed messiahs. They appreciated the old stories but were not in the market for yet another movement that would bring down the wrath of their current overlords.

It was time for a religion of peace and righteousness: Justice for the innocent, comfort for the poor, joy for the brokenhearted, rest for the weary, and acceptance of the disenfranchised. What they didn’t really want was more conflict. Maybe a spiritual kingdom could provide most of what they wanted without bloodshed. That’s a pretty nice idea.

Unfortunately, ideas are not governments. To change society on a grand scale, you need a government. The transformation of Rome into a Christian state was kind of like establishing a government. But we might be getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Without a government, what you could establish is a small society, a congregation, a church, the assembly of the saints.

Inside this kind of organization, you can have any kind of government you want as long as it doesn’t run afoul of the actual and ruling government. A religion can establish a physical presence with spiritual implications.

• Spiritual kingdoms can have a physically dead king
• Spiritual kingdoms can go without physical territory
• Spiritual kingdoms can have impractical but aspirational rules
• Spiritual kingdoms can have spiritual, without need for physical law enforcement
• Spiritual kingdoms can appeal to everyone who buys into the ideology
• Spiritual kingdoms can scale almost infinitely
• Spiritual kingdoms can span longer periods of time than physical kingdoms
• Spiritual kingdoms can be more easily revised to fit current needs than physical kingdoms

We could go on this way for a long time. But I think you get the point. There are lots of advantages to having a spiritual kingdom. As an idea with no walls that can be battered under siege, it can be highly resilient. I believe that Christianity eventually transformed into a spiritual kingdom because it failed as a physical one. Jesus and all of his apostles are dead. Jerusalem, as it once was, is dead. The temple is dead. The sacrifices are dead. The law is dead.

It is clear that the end would culminate in some kind of physical kingdom. But it never came to pass. So that idea had to be either put off so far into the future that people no longer saw it as imminent, or by transforming the whole thing into something that was meant to be spiritual all along. But why do I believe that Jesus envisioned an eventual physical kingdom?

First, scholars such as Ehrman believe that is what he was teaching. I happen to think he is right. But there was also the refusal to clearly and emphatically correct his disciples when it was clear they believed it would be a physical kingdom with an actual government. In fact, he seemed to encourage it at times. Remember when they were bickering about who would have the highest honors in the new kingdom? Jesus told them that in the new kingdom, there would be 12 thrones and that they would be ruling the 12 tribes from that throne. (We might come back to this one in another installment.) Never mind the actual heads of the 12 tribes. The disciples were told they would have that position. That is a position of leadership in an actual kingdom.

There was another place where his disciples were telling Jesus how much they had sacrificed to follow him. He told them that all who had given up such physical trappings such as houses and spouses would get it all back 100-fold in the new kingdom. That is the kind of thing that makes the most sense of a physical kingdom that has physical things. And again, it was the expectation of the disciples that Jesus kept feeding.

What happens when it becomes clear that there would be no magical reunification with the lost sheep of Israel? What happens when decades later, Christian’s are asking where this kingdom is that they were promised? There are only two things that can happen:

1. Punt the actuation of this kingdom down the road long after any of the people are still alive.
2. Make it a spiritual kingdom with some other, even better form than what you can imagine now.

For the kingdom of god, both methods have been conflated and deployed. Welcome to the kingdom, or at least the discussion about the kingdom.

See you in the comments…

David Johnson

Kingdom part 2: Who is the kingdom?

We might never fully know what the kingdom is. If we don’t agree on the matter after 2,000 years of debate, I don’t expect anything to com along that will clear it up. Perhaps we can find agreement to a different question: Who is the kingdom?

Some say it is the church, or Christendom at large. There are certainly good reasons to believe that. For instance, this verse:

But you are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people claimed by God as his own possession,” so that you may proclaim the praise of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 1 Peter 2:9-10

This can be found under a heading, “The Mystery of the Church”. While this passage never uses the word kingdom, it is dripping with kingdom language, especially the part that says, “Once you were not a people…” If anything in this passage sounds familiar, perhaps it is because you have read your Bible.

Moses climbed up to meet God, and the Lord called out to him from the mountain, saying, “You will say this to the house of Jacob and announce it to the children of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I lifted you up on eagles’ wings and brought you here to me. Now, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you will be my own possession from among all the peoples, for the entire earth is mine. You will be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation for me.’ These are the words you will speak to Israel.” Ex. 19: 3—6

The passage in 1 Peter is clearly an echo of the one in Exodus. Notice the words royal priesthood. Royalty is something we associate with a kingdom. The Exodus passage makes it clearer by saying kingdom of priests. These are the same things in the eyes of the New Testament writer. Also, notice the words holy nation. They were to be a nation, as in a political system with king and territory. These exact words were repeated in the New Testament passage.

The only thing that seems different is the people for whom this message was intended. In the Old Testament, it was intended for the “house of Jacob… children of Israel” these designations were specifically called out and emphasized. These designations are two ways of identifying a single group. Notice the absence of those designations in Peter. But read a little further and you will find a clue:

Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles not to succumb to the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul. Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles so that, although they now malign you as evildoers, they may observe your good works and glorify God on the day of visitation.

Who was he talking to that would be considered aliens and exiles? Exiles from where? Aliens from where? This doesn’t sound like some generic reference to all believers. They were to conduct themselves honorably among the Gentiles. Hang on! Were not Gentiles also Christians? If he is distinguishing them from Gentiles, he has to be talking to Jews. Then again, that greatly depends on what he meant by Gentiles. That is not a settled issue. We will return to this point shortly. First, there is another clue in the introduction of the book:

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to all the exiles of the Dispersion who are now living in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia…

Quick question: Who were the exiles of the Dispersion? We find this in the footnotes of the NCB:

1 Peter 1:1 Christians regarded themselves as the true Israel and made use of the term Dispersion, which designated the Jews who had been dispersed and awaited the reunion of their people (see Jas 1:1). By divine choice, they are the New Covenant, evoked by the mention of the Blood of Christ (see Ex 24:3-8; Heb 9:12-14). Related to the three divine Persons, the Church is born of the Trinity. This is an extremely dense salutation.

A dense salutation indeed. This commentator has to do a lot of fancy footwork to make sure their zionistic interpretation is the only one you accept. In this commentary, the Jews aren’t the Jews; the Christians are the Jews. They’re the new Jews - the new covenant. I see three possibilities:

1. The passage is referring to all non-Jewish Christian’s.
2. This passage is referring to Jewish Christians.
3. It’s more complicated than either choice leads you to believe.

Spoiler alert: It’s 3.

Old Testament Gentiles

If you think you know what a gentile is, I beg your indulgence as I believe it is one of the most misunderstood terms used in the bible. Growing up, I was taught that a gentile was any non-Jewish person as in Jews versus gentiles. But that isn’t quite right. It is also not entirely wrong. A better term than non-Jew would be outsider.

Rather than a mere distinction of non-Jew, gentiles was more of a racial epithet. It was a nasty, hateful term that described a group of people for whom Jews had nothing but contempt. To further clarify this idea, it helps to recognize that there were three kinds of Jews as I see it:

1. There was the full Jew born within the tribes of the southern kingdom.
2. There was the naturalized, or converted Jew from non—Jewish stock. Via conversion, they became Jews.
3. There were the Jews who were the scattered, the dispersed, the diaspora.

While the real Jews accepted the converted Jews, they did not accept the diaspora Jews because they had assimilated into the cultures of the many nations and had lost their cultural Jewishness. They intermarried with the nations which was strictly forbidden. They were unclean in every way imaginable. They had lost the right to be called Jews. They were the goy. From Strong’s lexicon:

Definition: Nation, people, Gentile Meaning: a foreign nation, a Gentile, a troop of animals, a flight of locusts

It could be something as simple as nations, or something nastier like the herd. What it always means is them and not us. It was a way of saying that those people over there are not any part of us.

The meaning of a word is only part of the story. The other part is how the word is used and what other terms and idioms are commonly associated with that word. To say that a person was gay in the 1800s meant nothing more than they were happy. Today, it means something quite different. Word usage can be quite different, even opposite of its official definition. When Michael Jackson declared that he was bad, he wasn’t confessing to being of low character. That was for a court to decide.

When the ancient Hebrews used the word goy, they were saying quite a bit more than nations. To get a taste of that, you have to know at least a tiny bit about the Hebrew kingdoms:

• There were two kingdoms because it was divided. There was the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom.
• The southern kingdom was called Judah and were considered the “real” Jews. At least, that is how they regarded themselves. The northern kingdom: Israel, were the rebels who were punished by being scattered to the nations.
• The northern kingdom was often referred to simply as Ephraim.

Once you see how Ephraim is used in the Old Testament, you will have a better foundation for understanding the way gentile is used in the New Testament.

Although you, O Israel, commit adultery, do not let Judah become guilty! Do not journey to Gilgal. Do not go up to Beth Aven.[a] Do not swear, “As surely as the Lord lives!” Israel has rebelled[b] like a stubborn heifer! Soon[c] the Lord will put them out to pasture like a lamb in a broad field.[d] Ephraim has attached himself to idols; Do not go near him! Hosea 4:15-17

Notice how Israel and Ephraim are used interchangeably? Ephraim is synonymous with the 10 tribes: with Israel, as opposed to Judah. Notice right up front how Israel is distinguished from Judah? Do not let Judah become guilty of Israel’s wickedness.

Also take note of how this prophet talks about Ephraim/Israel. It is with scathing rebuke and harsh condemnation. This is typical of how the prophets referred to Israel. They spewed venom of the most poisonous variety at the northern kingdom. They condemned the tribes for attempting to make pacts with Assyria and Egypt rather than relying on god. They were said to have voluntarily left god and his laws. They became the untouchables. Leave them alone. Don’t go near them. That was the message of the prophets and the order of the day.

While both the northern and southern kingdoms suffered conquest and diaspora, the southern kingdom survived and rebuilt. The 10 tribes, Ephraim, Israel, suffered the fate they were promised throughout the writings of the prophets. They were scattered to the winds and lost to history. God pounded them to sand. Judah remained stable enough so that Jesus could be a product of the line of Judah. Here are some excerpts from Bible Study Tools:

An Encyclopedia Britannica article traces the history of the 10, lost tribes of Israel. The original 12 Hebrew tribes took possession of Canaan, the Promised Land, after the death of Moses. Under the leadership of Joshua, the tribes named Asher, Dan, Ephraim, Gad, Issachar, Manasseh, Naphtali, Reuben, Simeon, and Zebulun—names of Jacob’s sons and grandsons—formed the Kingdom of Israel in the north in the year 930 B.C.E. Soldiers of the Assyrian empire conquered the northern 10 tribes of Israel in 721 B.C.E. The Israeli people of this region were then assimilated by other ethnic, tribal groups and “disappeared from history.”

Goy is another way of saying nations. It can also mean outsider. But in ancient times, it didn’t necessarily mean non-Jew. Some experts believe that idea was a Pauline adaptation. Here is an excellent article on the word that I recommend, but will not cover in this section. Consider it homework. Here is a snippet showing that it was, and still is, often used as a pejorative:

But the word "goy" has too much historical and linguistic baggage to be used as casually as "non-Jew" or "gentile." It starts with the obvious slurs – like "goyishe kopf," or gentile brains, which suggests (generously) a dullard, or "shikker iz a goy," a gentile is a drunkard. "Goyishe naches" describes the kinds of things that a Jew mockingly presumes only a gentile would enjoy, like hunting, sailing and eating white bread.

Nahma Nadich, deputy director of the Jewish Community Relations of Greater Boston writes:

I definitely see goy as a slur — seldom used as a compliment, and never used in the presence of a non-Jew.

With that background, we can begin making the connection between the goyim of the Old Testament and the gentiles of the New Testament:

New Testament gentiles

Here is an excerpt from another bible study guide:

In the Bible, the term "nations" often refers to distinct groups of people, tribes, or ethnicities that are separate from the people of Israel. The Hebrew word "goyim" and the Greek word "ethnos" are commonly translated as "nations" in the Old and New Testaments, respectively…

And here:

Corresponding Greek / Hebrew Entries: - H1471 גּוֹי (goy): Often translated as "nation" or "Gentile," used in the Old Testament to refer to non-Israelite nations.

As I already mentioned, the Old Testament usage of goy did not necessarily mean non-Jew. It had a variety of meanings. As the prophets used it, the word took on a distinctly nasty tone. Rather than non-Jew, it became something more akin to renegade Jew, or assimilated Jew. Or defector, traitorous Jew. Those Jews were so bent on wickedness and so embedded with those other nations that they became the nations. Israel became goyim to the southern kingdom, Judah.

That brings us to the New Testament goy. Who were they? Like everything else to do with the kingdom, the answer is not straightforward and leads us down a rather convoluted path. To get started unraveling this tangled skein, we need to revisited an article cited earlier:

Goy acquired the meaning of someone who is not Jewish in the first and second century CE. Before that time, academics Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi have argued, no crystallized dichotomy between Jew and non-Jew existed in Judaism.[23] Ophir and Rosen-Zvi state that the early Jewish convert to Christianity, Paul, was key in developing the concept of "goy" to mean non-Jew:

"This brilliant Hellenist Jew [Paul] considered himself the apostle of the Christian gospel "to the gentiles," and precisely because of this he needed to define that category more thoroughly and carefully than his predecessors. Paul made the conception that "goyim" are not "peoples," but rather a general category of human beings, into a central element of his thought... ...In the centuries that followed, both the Church and the Jewish sages evoked Paul's binary dichotomy."

— Haaretz journalist Tomer Persico discussing views of Ophir and Rosen-Zvi[14]

Before goy came to exclusively mean non-Jew and before it took on a heavily theological flavor, it meant all kinds of things and referred to all kinds of people, including Israelites.

From the same article:

The Biblical Hebrew word goy has been commonly translated into English as nation,[7][8] meaning a group of persons of the same ethnic family who speak the same language (rather than the more common modern meaning of a political unit).[9] In the Bible, goy is used to describe both the Nation of Israel and other nations.[10][7][8] As a word principally used by Jews to describe non-Jews,[5] it is a term for the ethnic out-group.[11]

It was not just the ethnic out-group. It could also be the political or religious out-group. The Mormons sound silly, but are technically correct when they describe non-Mormons as gentiles. That even includes other people you would regard as Christians. Apostates of any religion could be considered goy to those who remain orthodox. And so it was with the lost tribes (sheep) of Israel.

All that said, I believe that, at least initially, the goy of the New Testament were the same as the goy of the prophets. It was the scattered tribes of Ephraim who were lost to history. The way they were lost is they became indistinguishable from the non-Jewish nations. So while they were genetically Jews, they were separated from that which made them Jews. They didn’t even know they were Jews. That is definitely lost in my book.

Eventually, the goy became all people who were not orthodox Jews. It became a broad term that caught up just about everyone on the planet. This is where some of the complexity comes in. I pointed out speculation that this definition of goy was popularized by Paul for theological reasons. But I have no way of proving that. Every use of the term in the uncontested Pauline letters could also mean the lost tribes of the northern kingdom. And there is at least one clue that has me leaning toward that conclusion. (Maybe in a supplemental.) But first, what about Jesus?

To seek and save the lost

When Jesus spoke of the lost, what did he mean? Modern believers tend to think he was referring to all people who were not professing Christians. That came to be the people who confessed Jesus as lord and placed their faith for salvation solely in his sacrifice on the cross. It would have been a little different for those who were his followers before he died. What if they accepted him as their savior before he did and then doubted after he was killed? Yes, even salvation is tricky.

But I contend that Jesus had something different in mind when he spoke of the lost. According to a well-known passage, Jesus came to seek and save the lost. That should ring a little funny to the ear of the contemporary believer. Why should Jesus, or anyone else need to seek out lost people? If everyone but your small band of travelers is lost, no seeking should be required. They’re all lost.

If you think that passage is confusing, check out the one that comes right before it:

Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham

Salvation is another one of those concepts that requires more time and space I can spare here. But whatever is meant by salvation, the declaration is that it came to that house because that man was also a son of Abraham. That is directly followed by the great mission statement that Jesus came to seek and save the lost.

I have lost count of the number of commentaries I have read on these passages. Every one of them goes through gymnast-level contortions to make the passage say the opposite of what it says. The problem is the mission statement. Who does Jesus believe the lost is? It can’t have anything to do with Jewish ancestry or the whole enterprise of modern Christianity is done and dusted. So perhaps we can find clarity some place else:

And responding, he said, “I was not sent except to the sheep who have fallen away from the house of Israel.” Matt: 15:24 Catholic Public Domain Version

Here is a translation that is more familiar:

He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

The flavor of the translation doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, it is all the same. Let’s break it down:

I was sent: Jesus is responding to a woman begging for a miracle. He starts by declaring that he was sent. That is an interesting idea. He didn’t just decide that coming to earth would be a good idea. He was a good foot soldier who went where he was sent and did what he was commanded. But who sent him? Only the father god could send him. So there was a clear mission with boundaries.

Only to: This one is even more intriguing, especially since it didn’t have to be there at all. But it was important that this qualifier be present, at least to the writer, and to god if you believe he is somehow the writer. This places a huge restriction on the mission. It is not to everyone in some universal sense. Rather, it is only, or exclusively to…

The lost sheep: This is yet another qualifier. We are now stacking qualifier on top of qualifier on top of qualifier. It is a veritable qualifier sandwich. Is this the same lost that Jesus said he came to seek and save? It sure sounds like it. But this time, it is with even more force and specificity. He was sent, exclusively to, the lost sheep. If he wanted to make a universal statement, he would have stopped there. But he didn’t.

Of the house of Israel: I included the Catholic version so that you could see a slightly different wording. the sheep who have fallen away from the house of Israel.

This is one of the most awkward passages in all of the bible and might explain why commentators are practically soiling themselves to try and get these passages to say something that Jesus didn’t. Earlier, Jesus goes to the house of a goy Jew who is a tax collector: one of the worst of the outcast Jews. Jesus declares that he is just as much a Jew as the rest of them. It looks like he recovered one of those lost sheep he was sent to find.

Many of the commentators downplay the fact that this man was an ancestral son of Abraham. At least one I saw flatly denied it. They all made it clear that it made no difference that this man was a Jew of any kind. Rather, salvation came to that house because he repented and accepted Jesus by faith. They have made being a son of Abraham entirely metaphorical. You, too, can be a son of Abraham by repentance, faith, and obedience. That is how they repackage seeking and saving the lost.

It is a little different with the lost sheep of Israel. Jesus went and made it quite a bit harder to spiritualize. Jesus says he was sent exclusively to a particular group. The commentators change it to say that he was sent first to a particular group. Some change it to say that the particular group was his priority. But all reject the notion of exclusivity.

The last thing they can try is that the lost sheep of the house of Israel is just another way of saying everybody. We are all the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But to say that, you would first need to make the case that we are all Israel in some metaphorical way. We are the new Israel? We are the replacement Israel? We are the additions to Israel? We are spiritual Israel? What the heck is spiritual Israel?

Really, what the heck is spiritual Israel? We are Israel in that god forgives us and makes us his children when we accept Jesus as a sacrifice for sin? Like the actual Israel? That can’t be it. Every one on whom god shows mercy is spiritual Israel? Every one who wears spiritual clothes made of only one spiritual fabric? Really, how does any of that make any sense at all?

What the commentators are trying very hard not to do is take Jesus at his word. He didn’t save the one man, at least in part, because he was also a son of Abraham. He wasn’t sent exclusively to one group of people. And that group of people was definitely not Israel. These machinations to get Jesus to say something he wasn’t saying is why this topic is so hard. Look at how much more sense it makes if we just take the text at face value.

God created a special race of people for himself. That race of people demanded a king and became a theocratic kingdom. That kingdom quickly became hopelessly divided into two kingdoms: the southern kingdom and the northern kingdom. The northern kingdom was called Israel, and was often referred to as Ephraim, to mean the ones who rebelled and walked away from god. Almost synonymous were the words,

• Ephraim *10 tribes
• Northern kingdom
• Israel
• The nations
• goy

The goy/nations/Israelites were outcasts, despised, condemned, untouchable. These same ideas carried over into Jesus day. But even in prophetic times, there were some who had a vision of reunification.

Jesus said he came to seek and save the lost. This makes sense if the lost were truly difficult to find and would require someone to seek them out. But who were these lost ones? Jesus said he was sent for them, he was sent exclusively for them, and he identified them as the lost sheep of the house of Israel. That sounds a lot like the goyim we have been studying. To find these lost sheep of the lost tribes would require a divine intervention. And that is exactly what Jesus and his disciples brought to the table.

Divine intervention

When Jesus sent his disciples out on a missionary journey, he gave them specific instructions. He told them where to go and who to see, and where not to go and who not to see:

These twelve Jesus sent out after instructing them: “Do not go in the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter any city of the Samaritans; but rather go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.“ And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Matt. 10:5-7

Here, I want to introduce another possibility that also makes sense of the text. The house of Israel could refer to the tribe of Judah and the lost sheep could refer to those exiles from that southern kingdom who had not quite found their way back to Jerusalem and back to repentance due to poor leadership. This is an interesting take from a commentary:

But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. By Israel he here meaneth the two tribes that clave to the house of David, for the ten tribes ever since their captivity {2 Kings 17:6} had lost their share in that name. He calls them lost sheep in the sense that Jeremiah speaks, Jeremiah 1:6, My people hath been lost sheep: their shepherds have caused them to go astray. So that lost sheep here signifies wandering sheep, for want of proper guides. The Jews at this time had miserable teachers, so as they wandered as lost sheep. And this comporteth with what we had in the last verses of the former chapter. There was a great harvest and but few labourers; he is therefore providing them labourers, shepherds that should gather those scattered sheep into one fold. > Matthew Poole’s Commentary

Even if this mission was restricted to the diaspora Jews from the southern kingdom, I do believe the ultimate mission would have included all Jews, even those from the lost 10 tribes. Either way, we are left with a question that has to be addressed before we can close this part of the study: How were they to discover these lost sheep?

There had to be some brand of divine intervention at play because you couldn’t just tell by appearance who was and wasn’t a lost member of the house of Judah, or if more expansive, a member of the tribes of Ephraim. There would have been no visual indicators because they had been assimilated by marriage and culture for many generations. There was no distinction between one who was of the seed of Abraham and one that wasn’t.

Can you look at me and tell which tribe of Africa I am from? Is there any way to identify such a thing? None that I would submit to. Let’s make it even harder. It could be that we are all from some part of Africa. Is there any way for you to tell what part of Africa you are from? You might not even have skin color as a guide. What was your ancestral religion? You have no idea and no way of knowing it.

This is the situation describing the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Ask any Persian in the time of Jesus what Israeli tribe they were from and they wouldn’t be able to tell you with any credibility. They couldn’t even tell you if they were from any of the 12 tribes, or if the 12 tribes were even a real thing apart from stories. So how do you seek them out and identify them? With man, it is impossible.

However, we get this nugget of insight from another missionary journey involving a lot more of Jesus’ disciples:

“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. Luke 10:5-7

What is that if not spirit magic of some kind? What does it mean that your peace will rest on them or return to you? What I get from this is that the disciples were not to try, on their own wisdom, to detect who was and who wasn’t the right kind of person. They were to offer a simple greeting and the spirit would do the rest.

When Jesus was arguing with the Jewish leaders in the book of John, he said that his sheep hear his voice and that the reason they couldn’t believe was that they were not his sheep. How did these “sheep” get their special hearing? We don’t know. But again, it could be a hint that there was divine intervention.

I am told by Christians that the very act of faith is a gift from god that one cannot do unless god has proactively given it to you. Again, we are left to believe there is some kind of divine intervention at work. Those that hear him were his sheep in the first place. Those who have faith in the message are those who are given the faith. So all that need be done is for preachers to preach and the lost sheep of Israel will identify themselves by responding with faith and repentance.

Conclusion: Preaching the kingdom

Let’s briefly revisit that passage from Matt. 10:7:

And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

After 5,000 words, we have finally come full-circle and find ourselves where we began: the preaching of the kingdom. It was the first thing from John the Baptist and from Jesus. Now, it is the first message from his disciples.

With the added information that these disciples were to stay within the Jewish districts, it bears even more definitional weight that the message they were instructed to preach was the message of the kingdom. These disciples had a particular idea about the kingdom and they were to go and speak of the kingdom to people who would have had the same idea about it as they did.

They were not on a mission to redefine the kingdom. They were just to tell the people that the expected kingdom was near at hand. Who was the kingdom? From the teachings of Jesus (and others we might address in a supplemental) the citizens of the kingdom were the same as they were for the prophets of old.

And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD to minister to Him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be His servants— all who keep the Sabbath without profaning it and who hold fast to My covenant— I will bring them to My holy mountain and make them joyful in My house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on My altar, for My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations Isa. 56:6-7

This prophet thought that the house of prayer for all nations would be populated by those who knew and kept the covenants and laws and sacrifices and sabbaths. By some description, these were Jews. They may have been Jews in exile and who had compromised in order to assimilate. But the prophet is proclaiming that as long as they return to the Jewish religion, they would be welcome in god’s kingdom. So it is that we return to Jesus:

He said to them, “It is written: ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a den of thieves.” Matt. 21:13

Jesus reuses the same language as the prophet to describe the temple. He is happy to associate his understanding of the kingdom with that of Isaiah. In this final example, he is even more explicit:

The Rich Young Man.[d]A certain ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Honor your father and your mother.’ ” Luke 18:18-20

The answer Jesus gave can be summarized in the following way: Keep the law. Jesus loved the law and taught the law with his own special twist. But that is what all teachers did. Jesus thought he was taking people back to the original meaning of the law. He was not trying to abolish the law. If you want to be in the kingdom of eternal life, keep the law as it was originally intended. That is exactly and only who the kingdom was. And no, I haven’t forgotten about Paul.

More to come. See you in the comments…

David Johnson

Kingdom part 3: The kingdom according to Paul

Paul’s kingdom begins with the fraudulent section of Mark. Throughout his ministry, he was focusing on the law and the Hebrew people. But suddenly, there is a shift. Here it is:

And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

And these signs will accompany those who believe: In My name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not harm them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will be made well.” Mark 16:15-18

Note that these verses are outside of the original work and stand as fraudulent additions to the text. They are later additions. So I find it suspicious that the place where we find the great commission is in a part of the text that shouldn’t be there. We have no reason to believe this was something Jesus said, especially because it contradicts what he previously said. The commission in other passages was possibly cribbed from this text. I can’t prove that though.

Why would Jesus be so emphatic about where and to whom his disciples should teach and suddenly change his tune at the end? When he gave them their mission, he emphasized that he was sent ONLY for Israel. That slams a lot of doors such as the one where Christians say he meant first and not only. That would be like telling your partner they are the only one for you, then later saying that you clearly meant she was the first of many. We have to pay attention to the words and phrases that stand as qualifiers.

By the time this was written, Paul was likely already in prison. By the time we get this fraudulent addition, the church had likely already taken the turn to appealing openly to people who were never Jews of any description. We went from the narrow audience Jesus described to all creatures and every nation with a few strokes of the quill. This fraudulent text might be an indication that the Pauline doctrine had already taken hold in some communities. In fact, it would be kind of surprising if it hadn’t.

Even so, this passage is not necessarily at odds with what I believe Jesus taught. It could be that instead of Jesus flipping on the recipients of the message, he was only expanding the territory for seeking the lost sheep. At first, they were given restrictions on where they could go. Later, Jesus could have lifted that restriction since the scattered could literally be anywhere. That doesn’t mean that they were to shift exclusive focus from the lost sheep of the house of Israel. For the record, I don’t buy this idea. But it could be the case without doing damage to my theory. And it is just a theory.

From Jesus to Paul

The first third of Acts is all about the disciples preaching a Jewish message about the Jewish Messiah for and to Jewish people. That is weird given the Great Commission, if it really happened. They went on teaching this way years after Jesus told them to preach to every creature and in every nation. Yet it took about eight years and an act of god to get the lead apostle to do it. That makes no sense at all. He clearly didn’t believe he was supposed to be preaching to goy. This is yet another reason I don’t believe the Great Commission ever happened. This is the end of the first sermon after the resurrection:

Therefore let all Israel know with certainty that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ!” Acts 2:36

Peter was making his address at a Jewish holy day event to a crowd of Jewish celebrants. And he told them to spread the word to all the Jews, not to all the people. This is how the Christian era begins. Later in Acts…

Meanwhile, those scattered by the persecution that began with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, speaking the message only to Jews. Acts 11:29

This is after the conversion of Cornelius. The gospel was still only being preached to the Jews. Why, do you suppose, is that? We are nearing the halfway point of Acts, and preaching to anyone other than the Jews was still a novel and tentative thing. There’s more:

From the descendants of this man, God has brought to Israel the Savior Jesus, as He promised. Acts 13:23

This was from Paul. Even Paul was preaching to Jews and proselytes. (I believe the god-fearers were proselyte Jews.) He was addressing either natural-born or naturalized Jews. In this speech, he brings up the promised savior of the Jews. The messiah was a savior of the Jews, a Jewish messiah. That is how they understood it. He also brought up John the Baptist, who preached repentance to all of Israel.

We might consider this next bit a good candidate for when the turn took place:

The turn

Then Paul and Barnabas answered them boldly: “It was necessary to speak the word of God to you first. But since you reject it and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles. For this is what the Lord has commanded us:

‘I have made you a light for the Gentiles, to bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’”

When the Gentiles heard this, they rejoiced and glorified the word of the Lord, and all who were appointed for eternal life believed. And the word of the Lord spread throughout that region. Acts 13:46-49

Paul is not at all gracious about the rejection of his message by the Jews. So he makes the unverifiable claim that he had to preach to the Jews first. But now, god has given him a new mission. Since the Jews were no longer qualified for eternal life, he would take the message to the Gentiles. So there!

This little scene is getting pretty late in the game. It seems the Jesus who gave the great commission failed to let Paul in on it, leaving Paul to labor among the Jews. It was only after Paul lost his temper that he gained insight that he was to be teaching the Gentiles.

Here’s my question: Is this the turn? Is this when the kingdom went from being strictly Jewish to universal? That depends on something that I have already acknowledged I can’t fully assess. It depends on what this writer meant by Gentiles. It depends on who the goy were to them.

In these highly Jewish audiences, it is reasonable to assume that these were real Jews who were descendants of southern kingdom Jews. That means that goy could have been diaspora, southern kingdom Jews, the 10-tribes Jews, or just people belonging to other nations who were never descendants of Jews. They were all goy. I’m afraid the context doesn’t help.

A question keeps coming up about how any diaspora Jews could have been distinguishable from non-diaspora Jews. I quipped that with man, it is impossible. But the follow-on is that god is doing something that makes it possible. I hope you noticed this line from the last reading:

… all who were appointed for eternal life believed.

This wording suggests more magic is at play. But it is not on the preachers to figure it out. It is on god to spark the belief. Those who believed were those who, beforehand, were already appointed to believe. None of this works without something like that. I called it spirit magic. That still feels right to me.

At the beginning of this section, I asked if this was the turn? Again, I can’t know for sure. But I do believe it was one aspect of the turn. This is Paul giving up on Jewish (non-diaspora) priority and turning to something else. But to what did he turn? It could be that he believed that things had opened up to the lost 10, or just the lost southerns. That would also be a turn, just not the one most Christians are thinking about.

This is where I have to admit that while some of what Paul says on the matter seems pretty clearly Jewish-focused, some of it could be interpreted as universal. As we have seen in this section, Paul has definitely taken some kind of turn. The rest is speculation on how radical a turn it was. It is not just that I don’t know. It is that I don’t think we can know. Let the speculation begin…

Paul and the Gentiles

I ask then, did God reject His people? Certainly not! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. Romans 11:1

By Israelite, Paul means the 12 tribes. By tribe of Benjamin, he means Judah. He means real Jew. By this time, the 10 tribes had been completely written out of the story. This is according to some. The only Jews were southern kingdom, Judah Jews. Paul is saying that he is one of those, as if to add credibility to the idea that god had not given up on his people. Who Paul thought was god’s people is, for me, an open question.

God did not reject His people, whom He foreknew.

In this context, god’s people is some flavor of Israelite. Those he foreknew are Israelites.

Do you not know what the Scripture says about Elijah, how he appealed to God against Israel: “Lord, they have killed Your prophets and torn down Your altars. I am the only one left, and they are seeking my life as well”?

Who is the Israel Elijah prayed against? The better question is who did Paul think they were. Was it 12 tribes or 10 tribes? I don’t know.

So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace.

As god reserved 7,000 who had not bowed the knee to Baal, Paul claims that in his day, there was still a remnant. But a remnant of what? Whatever flavor of Jew he was referring to, it couldn’t be native non-Jews. Remnant would be a nonsensical description of them.

What then? What the people of Israel sought so earnestly they did not obtain. The elect among them did, but the others were hardened,

He was not saying that none of Israel obtained because he called out the elect among them. In Israel, there were still the elect: the elect of Israel.

Again I ask: Did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all! Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious.

Here, again, we don’t know exactly what Paul meant by Gentiles. I suspect these were the Hellenized and, worse, Samaritans. And worse, those of the nations so lost to Judaism that they didn’t even know they were Jews. These were the Jews that the Jews had written off as untouchables. Or, it could be never-Jews. It would read the same either way.

But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their full inclusion bring!

I am talking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch as I am the apostle to the Gentiles, I take pride in my ministry in the hope that I may somehow arouse my own people to envy and save some of them.

That feels like enough. We can see that something changed in Paul’s messaging from mid-Acts to Romans. Whatever gentile meant to him, I suspect it changed over time. He became more progressive and more radical in his teaching to the point that he started identifying with Gentiles. He admits to being proud of his ministry to the Gentiles. Perhaps he saw it as the only growth opportunity for this fledgling religion. His gentile progressivism did bring growth. But it also brought division.

A brief review

Not everyone agreed with Paul. There was a lot of tension in the church over this point. Before going further, I want to recap the transition from the Hebrew Scriptures to Paul.

Genesis through part of Kings was all about the house of Israel, as in the 12 tribes. Then, there was the divided kingdom, the nations, goy. We jump to the prophets speaking during and after the various diaspora. Some of them seem to have been believers in some sort of reunification. But they were clear that the people coming into the fold had to be Jewish with its various traditions.

Skip forward to Jesus, who would have been right at home with the Old Testament prophets. As an apocalyptic prophet, his message was very much about the end of the world and what it meant to get right before it was too late. He defined the kingdom in terms of who it entailed and what they needed to be like. He was on a mission to find the lost sheep of Israel. And like the prophets of old, he taught observance of the law.

Fast-forward again, this time, to Peter. He spends the first part of his ministry preaching only to the Jews because Jesus commanded them to confine the message to the Jews. They did that well into the Christian age and it took an act of god to change it.

Skip to Paul who was visited by Jesus after the resurrection and ascension. Jesus apparently forgot to tell Paul about the commission to preach to everyone because he didn’t. But for some reason, Paul had trouble connecting with the Jewish audience. So he wrote them off and dramatically announced that god told him to take the message to the gentiles.

However, with Paul the progressive, there was a twist. He started teaching his converts that they didn’t have to become proselyte Jews or follow Jewish rituals. This is a big departure from the prophets, Jesus, and Peter. There was a good chance that this transition was not going to go smoothly. In a surprise to no one, it didn’t.

Division over gentiles and circumcision

One of the things that created such tension between Jews and Israelites is the fact that the Israelites abandoned the Jewish laws and traditions. The Israelites were called Ephraim and were hated by the Jews. So it is no surprise that when prophets started talking about unification, it was with the caveat that the laws be kept.

This notion was maintained through Jesus and his chief apostle. When Paul lifted the burden of the law from incoming believers, this caused quite the stir, especially considering the historical enmity between the law-keepers and the non-law-keepers. He spoke about the keepers of the law with contempt. While not expressly mentioned in the Bible , we get the word Judaisers from the conflict. They were the ones insisting that non-Jewish converts have to get circumcised and keep the law:

Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.” This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. Acts 15

Here is where I will interject and say that I have no reason to believe anything that Luke the fabulist had to say on just about anything. I am not alone in believing he was concerned with whitewashing the division between the church leaders on this matter. It was a big one. But all the key players are all on the same side and get along quite nicely. Most importantly, they all agreed on the matter according to Luke. I don’t believe that is an accurate picture.

The Judaisers are never named, but the good guys are. I find that suspicious. But that’s just me. I will note the way this is presented. Those bad guys were saying that converts had to be circumcised according to the custom of Moses. Circumcision was not a custom but an absolute command from god. It applied to natives and converts alike. There were no exceptions. As an aside, the reason this issue didn’t come up at the inception of the church is because up until Cornelius, they were preaching to people who had already been circumcised.

I hypothesize that circumcision was a shorthand for all the Jewish laws, including things like Sabbaths and feast days. This was an issue that warranted a council with all the heavy hitters in the area.

The apostles and elders met to consider this question. After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them:

I believe the phrase After much discussion is doing a lot of work in this story. If the matter were so clear-cut, why would it warrant so much discussion? Why didn’t the Judaisers know about the rules for gentile converts? These Judaisers were also Christians. This rule change came suddenly and unexpectedly. I’m not so sure the Judaisers were the bad guys in this story.

“Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe.

This doesn’t sound like Peter to me. But let’s run with it as Peter. I would have expected a recap of the rooftop experience. I admit to finding the wording of this passage a bit confusing.

God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith.

Here is more of the spirit magic I spoke of earlier. God knows the heart…. He purified their hearts… This is god proactively doing something to some specific group of people. Perhaps he is giving the magical ears to hear him to his mysterious lost sheep.

Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”

How would keeping the only known law of god be testing god? How did the law that Jesus kept and loved become a yoke on the neck? In what way could the ancestors not bear it? After all, there were provisions in the law to atone for sin.

This speech plays well to never-Jews of today. It is the thing that allows us to read ourselves into someone else’s story. But none of this was obvious to the people of that day. They received the law from god through Moses, the prophets, and Jesus. All of them validated the keeping of the law and the divine beauty of the law. Suddenly, without as much as a “thus sayeth the Lord”, the law is an ugly burden and should never be taught to new citizens of the kingdom.

When they finished, James spoke up. “Brothers,” he said, “listen to me. Simon has described to us how God first intervened to choose a people for his name from the Gentiles. The words of the prophets are in agreement with this, as it is written:

“ ‘After this I will return and rebuild David’s fallen tent. Its ruins I will rebuild, and I will restore it, that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, even all the Gentiles who bear my name, says the Lord, who does these things’ — things known from long ago.

It is always interesting when a New Testament apostle cites an Old Testament prophet or precedent. You can see the eisegesis in real time. I recommend Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament for an interesting read on Amos 9:11-12: the text cited by James. There are differences in what the text says and how James uses it. First, the text from Amos:

“In that day

I will restore David’s fallen shelter— I will repair its broken walls and restore its ruins— I will rebuild it as it used to be, so that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations that bear my name, ” declares the Lord, who will do these things.

Now, a snippet from the commentary:

The explanation given above is also in harmony with the use made by James of our prophecy in Acts 15:16-17, where he derives from Amos 9:11 and Amos 9:12 a prophetic testimony to the fact that Gentiles who became believers were to be received into the kingdom of God without circumcision. It is true that at first sight James appears to quote the words of the prophet simply as a prophetic declaration in support of the fact related by Peter, namely, that by giving His Holy Spirit to believers from among the Gentiles as well as to believers from among the Jews, without making any distinction between Jews and Gentiles, God had taken out of the Gentiles a people ἐπὶ τῶ ὀνόματι αὐτοῦ, "upon His name" (compare Acts 15:14 with Acts 15:8-9). But as both James and Peter recognise in this fact a practical declaration on the part of God that circumcision was not a necessary prerequisite to the reception of the Gentiles into the kingdom of Christ, while James follows up the allusion to this fact with the prophecy of Amos, introducing it with the words, "and to this agree the words of the prophets," there can be no doubt that James also quotes the words of the prophet with the intention of adducing evidence out of the Old Testament in support of the reception of the Gentiles into the kingdom of God without circumcision. But this proof is not furnished by the statement of the prophet, "through its silence as to the condition required by those who were pharisaically disposed" (Hengstenberg); and still less by the fact that it declares in the most striking way "what significance there was in the typical kingdom of David, as a prophecy of the relation in which the human race, outside the limits of Israel, would stand to the kingdom of Christ" (Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, ii. 2, pp. 84, 85). For the passage would contain nothing extraordinary concerning the typical significance possessed by the kingdom of David in relation to the kingdom of Christ, if, as Hofmann says (p. 84), the prophet, instead of enumerating all the nations which once belonged to the kingdom of David, simply mentions Edom by name, and describes all the others as the nations which have been subject like Edom to the name of Jehovah. The demonstrative force of the prophet's statement is to be found, no doubt, as Hofmann admits, in the words כּל־הגּוים אשׁר נקרא שׁמי עליהם. But if these words affirmed nothing more than what Hofmann finds in them - namely, that all the nations subdued by David were subjected to the name of Jehovah; or, as he says at p. 83, "made up, in connection with Israel, the kingdom of Jehovah and His anointed, without being circumcised, or being obliged to obey the law of Israel" - their demonstrative force would simply lie in what they do not affirm, - namely, in the fact that they say nothing whatever about circumcision being a condition of the reception of the Gentiles. The circumstance that the heathen nations which David brought into subjection to his kingdom were made tributary to himself and subject to the name of Jehovah, might indeed be typical of the fact that the kingdom of the second David would also spread over the Gentiles; but, according to this explanation, it would affirm nothing at all as to the internal relation of the Gentiles to Israel in the new kingdom of God. The Apostle James, however, quotes the words of Amos as decisive on the point in dispute, which the apostles were considering, because in the words, "all the nations upon whom my name is called," he finds a prediction of what Peter has just related, - namely, that the Lord has taken out of the heathen a people "upon His name," that is to say, because he understands by the calling of the name of the Lord upon the Gentiles the communication of the Holy Ghost to the Gentiles.

Notice that when Luke quotes James quoting Amos, he uses the word gentiles. But the text from Amos uses nations. It is the same word that has been plaguing this entire exploration: goyim. Who did Amos think the goy were? I believe it was the same as almost all other uses of the word by the prophets, namely, Israel, Ephraim, the ten tribes, also, heathens.

An interesting note is that every commentary I could find linked this passage back to Acts 15 and used Acts to read a Christian interpretation into Amos. They have to do this because this is one of those existential passages. If it does not do what the writer of Acts wants it to do, the entire Christian enterprise is in danger of crumbling from the most ironic fate of death by text.

This was the only commentator I found who actually said the quiet part out loud: The text from Amos simply does not do the work intended by James and Peter. It does not say that new converts from the goy did not have to be circumcised or follow the law. I will remind you again of the house of prayer for all nations text: That came with the requirement of keeping the law. So whoever the goyim were in these passages, that requirement would not have been retracted.

James and Peter are hijacking a saying from an ancient prophet and trying to twist the words and meaning to their purposes. But an honest reading of the original text and a basic understanding of the prophets shows that Peter and James via Luke are hoisted by their own petard.

Conclusion: Easy believism

Growing up, there was a term we used to describe people who said that salvation by faith meant that you didn’t have to obey any laws. We called it easy believism. You can just be saved by granting space in your head for certain propositions without doing works of any kind, such as baptism. We believed in baptism the way Jews believed in circumcision. It was an absolute requirement. With that context, hear these words from James again:

It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.

I said earlier that Peter didn’t sound much like Peter in this passage. Well, James doesn’t sound much like James either. But I will leave that for another exploration that might never happen.

These words are the motto of easy believism writ large. Don’t make it difficult! Almost every utterance of Jesus made it difficult for people to follow him. He kept the law perfectly and demanded his followers to be perfect. Paul claimed perfection in keeping the law. But here in this pivotal moment of goyim inclusion, they all want to make it easy by removing the difficulty of keeping the law? Really? I just don’t buy it.

Instead, we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood.

Wait, why? Why ought they abstain from food polluted by idols? Didn’t the real Paul say that there was nothing wrong with eating food sacrificed to idols? Why abstain from meat of strangled animals and from blood? Who said those things were wrong? Could it be that it is because those things were a part of the law of Moses? Do those things, but not the circumcism thing. A finer example of cherry-picking I have never seen.

For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”

Just when you thought you understood what was going on, we have to end on this bombshell. These commands for the goyim were based on the law of Moses. It seems that maybe the goyim were those that would have been familiar with it. Otherwise, why bring up the fact that it has been preached in every city from the earliest times and read in the synagogues on every Sabbath? I have no idea. I eagerly await your clarification for this.

See you in the comments…

David Johnson

Kingdom part 4: Citizenship

We have devoted two parts to the who of the kingdom. But that was not quite enough to cover this complex issue. Rather than focus on what was meant by goyim (because no one can know), we will consider other, more pressing questions about the kingdom and the people who occupy it. No discussion of the kingdom can advance without some exploration of citizenship. Here we go:

Gaining citizenship

Every kingdom has rules for citizenship. There are very few successful nations with completely open borders and no rules for becoming a citizen. The kingdom of god is no exception. Here is a look at how it was done in the original kingdom of god:

Birth

This is an element of citizenship for all nations of which I am aware. If you are born there, you get to live there, particularly if you were born to citizens of that particular nation. This was true for the kingdom of god.

He made certain promises about the kingdom to Abraham. He didn’t make the promises to everyone in the world, or every tribe, or every patriarch. He singled out Abraham to be the father of his nation. So first and foremost, you had to be of the seed of Abraham.

But that wasn’t enough because the promise was very specific. It only applied to the child of the promise, which was Isaac. The other son Abraham sired had no part of the promise. Beyond that, the promise was even more specific. It had to go through only one of Isaac’s children.

So the other child of Isaac, though born of the child of the promise, had no part in the promise. These tribes of people who were Abraham’s seed but not of the right lineage were the first gentiles. These were Semitic people who were nevertheless outsiders because they were born outside of the promised line. Note that they were still closely related to the people of promise.

Paul notes that it is not enough to be able to say that you were from the seed of Abraham. There were a lot of people who were born of Abraham who were never a part of the promise. But to be clear, even if you were from the right lineage to be qualified for the promise, that still wasn’t enough.

Snip snip

It was never enough that one was born of the seed of Abraham via the right lineage. God made a contract with Abraham. Like every contract, god made, it was signed with blood. Instead of his blood, it was the blood of the children of promise.

Circumcism is a barbaric act of genitive mutilation. It was required of every male child of 8 days old. When the contract was first made, it was required of every male regardless of whether they were 8 days or 80 years. They all had to get the snip. Here is a scene from the Moses story with which you might not be familiar:

Now at a lodging place along the way, the LORD met Moses and was about to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched it to Moses’ feet. “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said.

So the LORD let him alone. (When she said, “bridegroom of blood,” she was referring to the circumcision.) Ex. 4:24-26

God was about to murder Moses because his son wasn’t circumcised. If you were wondering how important circumcision was, it was that important. There were no compromises and no exceptions. Do it or you’re out.

Last time, we talked about the division in the church over Paul’s insistence that circumcision was no longer necessary. There were those who were demanding that the new converts be circumcised. Where did they get that idea from? They got it from knowing their Bible. God was willing to kill Moses for his son’s lack of circumcision. His life was only spared when his kid got the snip.

When did this change? The answer is that it never officially changed. Jesus didn’t change it. But out of nowhere, these new leaders were saying that circumcision, along with the bulk of the law, was an unnecessary and cruel burden on people seeking to enter the kingdom. Again, I ask, when did god deliver such a law? Never!

Naturalization

You needed to be born of the right lineage and you also had to be subjected to the snip. But that was not the only way in and birth was not the only path. There was also the process of naturalization. Those entering the kingdom from the outside were proselytes.

To be clear, all proselytes had to keep all of the law just as any natural-born Jew. That also includes the snip. There was no shortage of people wanting to be Jews. This is true of any successful religion. If you have a good story that appeals to people, you are going to need a way to bring them into the fold. That is how religions grow. Judaism was no exception.

So as important as birthright was, it could be bypassed by someone committed enough to take the next step: genital mutilation. But let us be very clear about this: there was no way to sidestep the snip. If you were committed enough to have a piece of your penis chopped off, you were clearly committed to the cause. Proselytes had to be just that committed.

This did not change in Jesus’ day. He was all in on the law. Peter and the other apostles were also all in. There was no disparagement about circumcision until the Jerusalem council. Suddenly, it was no longer a requirement to enter the kingdom. Just don’t forget that before that time, it wasn’t even questioned. Birthright was far less important than circumcision. But that leads me to another question:

Why was there ever any notion that the goyim couldn’t be a part of the Jewish kingdom? After all, they could always come in as proselytes since bloodline wasn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. The only answer I can come up with is that there were limits on proselytizing with which I am not familiar.

For instance, maybe only certain kinds of people could be proselytes. Perhaps the Samaritans were always off-limits. Jesus strictly forbade his disciples to enter the land of the Samaritans. They might interact with one here and there who happened to be outside of their territory. But there was no intentional proselytizing allowed in those territories.

For all I know, this restriction might have applied to the heathen goyim from the diasporas. Because of their willful rejection of god and his ways, they were out of the picture and could not use the method of becoming a proselyte as some kind of back door. There is more that I don’t know than I know about proselytization. It was a thing that happened with very little exposition in the text. The part about which I am confident is that whoever they were, they all had to be circumcised and keep the law like any other Jew.

Jesus and citizenship

This one is tougher than it seems because Jesus never mentions circumcision. He does mention the law quite a bit. But he was already talking to law keepers for the most part. So he didn’t have to get into the specifics. For instance, when he told the rich young ruler to keep the law, he didn’t get into all of the commandments. And I find it unlikely that he intended his truncated list to be exclusive. Here it is:

You know the commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not give false testimony, Honor your father and mother.’” Luke 18:20

That’s 5. Were the others meaningless? Recall the question that led to this answer:

“Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

Is this an exhaustive answer? If so, I’m in. After all, there is nothing in there about keeping the Sabbath. There is nothing about worshipping the Lord your god. Either Jesus didn’t think those things were important or this list is just shorthand for the first thing he said about knowing the law. Jesus’ answer was to keep the law.

There is a good chance that even the command to keep the law isn’t quite right. After all, there was nothing in there about believing certain propositions. There was no word about faith. Jesus focused on the works of the law. That’s interesting. The man called him teacher. Why didn’t Jesus correct him and proclaim that he was god? Why didn’t he make that belief a condition of eternal life? Maybe different people had different requirements.

It would have been much easier if Jesus had compiled a list of requirements for gaining citizenship into the Kingdom. I suppose we could start with one of the first things he said:

From that time Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Mt. 4:17

One might gather that the first requirement for citizenship was to repent. Now when the prophets called for repentance, they were already talking to Jews and Israelites. That was no different for Jesus. So all of the other things such as birth and the snip were already done. These messages were to wayward Jews who had left the ways of the law. The call to repentance was a call to return to the law, not mearly to be sorry about their sins.

From that perspective, those of us who were never Jews could never repent insofar as we were never under the law. We can feel sorry about our moral shortcomings and vow to change our ways. But again, in the context of the Kingdom, repentance always includes returning to a state of obedience to the law.

Take away the law and one has to wonder of what they were meant to repent. Let’s say that some cultures ate the meat of animals that had been strangled, and drank their blood. That would simply be a part of their culture, as it is today. What would make that wrong? if they were not familiar with Jewish law, what would provide any hint that it was wrong? What about wearing clothes made from two kinds of fabric? There is nothing obviously sinful about that. So how could they possibly repent of any but the most commonly agreed upon evils?

Here is John the Baptist with a similar message but with a bit more detail?

So he was saying to the crowds who were going out to be baptized by him, “You offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore produce fruits that are consistent with repentance… Luke 3

This is quite the message for someone trying to win over hearts and minds. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who had any respect for Jews or their traditions, and certainly not their standing as god’s chosen people. He uses a broad brush to paint the Jewish forefathers as a bunch of snakes. It is a wonder he wasn’t beheaded right then and there. He goes on:

… and do not start saying to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children for Abraham. But indeed the axe is already being laid at the root of the trees; so every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

At a glance, it seems like John is declaring that the old covenant was almost over and that there was no such thing as a chosen people anymore. God no longer needed them, if he ever did. God could turn stones into Abraham’s seed. That part never made any sense to me because why bother? If you are out of the covenant, then you don’t need to raise up stones to fulfill it. The line about the axe being already at the root is the most ominous of pronouncements because this is more than a few branches being pruned. The whole tree is about the be chopped down and discarded. Have fun working through that. Then, things get interesting:

And the crowds were questioning him, saying, “Then what are we to do?” And he would answer and say to them, “The one who has two tunics is to share with the one who has none; and the one who has food is to do likewise.” Now even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they said to him, “Teacher, what are we to do?” And he said to them, “Collect no more than what you have been ordered to.” And soldiers also were questioning him, saying, “What are we to do, we as well?” And he said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone, nor harass anyone, and be content with your wages.”

I love this passage because it is one of the few that attempts to put meat on the bones of repentance. Who is in the kingdom? Those who repent. What does it mean to repent? It seems to mean that you live a good life characterized by loving one’s neighbor. The problem with that simplistic synopsis is that it is not anything that the vast majority of Christian leaders would endorse.

Notice what’s missing? There was nothing in there about faith, or theological propositions, or heaven and hell, or homosexuality, or church, or anything of the kind. There was no doctrine, no catechism, no nothing. What are we supposed to do with that?

So far, the kingdom requirements according to Jesus and his herald were all works. One might even describe repentance as the ultimate work since it has no duration. It is an ongoing thing that you never stop. It is all about changing your heart and actions from whatever it is to something befitting the kingdom. Jesus has more to say about citizenship. This is from Luke 21 starting with verse 20:

Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.”

Time for a quick round of translation roulette. Many translations have Jesus saying that the kingdom of god is in your midst, or among you. But two versions of the KJV have him saying that the kingdom is within you. These are not remotely the same things. This little translation nugget is part of what has fueled the debate for centuries. Back to our regularly scheduled program:

If the kingdom is within you, as I was taught, then it is strictly a spiritual kingdom that could be attained even before Jesus was crucified. If it is among you, then he might have been talking about himself as the kingdom. But that is even more confusing because he started out preaching that the kingdom was near, not that he was the kingdom. Neither of these interpretations are any good. It also doesn’t help that he was addressing the Pharisees, a group he was happy to confound with mysticism and confusion. The rest is what he directed at his disciples:

Then he said to his disciples, “The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. People will tell you, ‘There he is!’ or ‘Here he is!’ Do not go running off after them. For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.

This seems to be saying that the coming of the kingdom will not be subtle. You will know it when it happens. So if it is not as obvious as lightning in the sky, it isn’t the real thing. But if the kingdom is spiritual, then it can never be that obvious. I find nothing obvious about the church being the kingdom. If anything, the modern church is obviously not the kingdom.

Has Jesus changed the Subject? We started with him talking about the kingdom. Now he is talking about the son of man. Is he conflating the two? It seems so. But it is really hard to tell. Maybe things get clearer if we just keep reading:

Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.

“It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.

“It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. On that day no one who is on the housetop, with possessions inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. Remember Lot’s wife! Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it. I tell you, on that night two people will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding grain together; one will be taken and the other left.”

Now, the kingdom is the plot of the Left Behind series. Things got real dark real fast. It is compared to god’s destructive rage fits of the past. He could be making a reference to the sacking of Jerusalem. But that tells us very little about the kingdom. Honestly, I question whether this speech is real. It feels like a compilation of greatest hits that were haphazardly jumbled together rather than a singular, cohesive thought about the kingdom. Let’s try one more verse:

“Where, Lord?” they asked. He replied, “Where there is a dead body, there the vultures will gather.”

That’s interesting. In the other gospels, the disciples ask when rather than where. Luke has them asking about where. That implies that this apocalyptic vision is a local affair. Here is a passage of commentary from * Barnes' Notes on the Bible*:

Where, Lord? - Where, or in what direction, shall these calamities come? The answer implies that it would be where there is the most "guilt and wickedness." Eagles flock where there is prey. So, said he, these armies will flock to the place where there is the most wickedness; and by this their thoughts were directed at once to Jerusalem, the place of eminent wickedness, and the place, therefore, where these calamities might be expected to begin.

Well that doesn’t clear up anything. If this commentator is right, this was all about the destruction of Jerusalem. That places the coming kingdom spacially and temporally. Technically, it places the signs of the coming kingdom spacially and temporally. But that is also a problem because Jesus had already died and rose long before these events. That most important Pentecost had already occurred. Was the kingdom not in full swing already? What did the sacking of Jerusalem add to the reality of the kingdom?

We can also observe that the Left Behind scenario didn’t happen with the raising of Jerusalem to the ground. As for who, Jesus seems to be referring to some kind of final judgement of the Jews. The good ones are taken and the bad ones remain. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Who knows? Thing is, he is talking about Jews and what is coming for them. If there is anything that can be learned from this passage about the kingdom, it is that it was made up of repentant Jews. Jesus did not seem to have anyone or anywhere else in mind. There is one more passage I found illuminating when considering who Jesus thought could enter the kingdom. Here it is:

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples:“The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. Matt 23…

Here, Jesus is not being cynical or mysterious. He seems to really mean that the teachers of the law really did know what they were talking about, and that the people should do everything they taught. Who is Jesus talking to? These are Jews. And the thing that Jesus told them was to obey the law as taught by the rightful teachers of the law. His instruction only warns them not to do as the teachers did because those teachers didn’t practice what they preached. Jesus never condemned anyone for keeping the law. He commanded it. He spent his ministry focusing on what he considered the weightier matters.

At risk of repeating myself, Jesus thought the kingdom was populated by law-keepers who also majored in the weightier matters such as love, good works, justice, and total reliance on god for everything. Just as following the law was insufficient without those things, those weightier matters were insufficient without keeping the law. Those weightier matters were not separate from the law. They were the essence of the law. Jesus wasn’t teaching that you shouldn’t keep the law, rather that you should keep it properly.

The reason the message was to repent is that Jesus was already talking to the citizens of the kingdom in all other ways. He was talking to Jews and directing his disciples to do the same. The Jews who lived out the Jewish law properly were the citizens of the kingdom. Those who didn’t would get a rude awakening as the axe was already laid at the root.

Paul’s innovation (whether he intended it or not) was to remove the law-keeping component altogether to make it easier for more people to join. But even so, there is one final wrinkle to explore:

When we arrived at Jerusalem, the brothers and sisters received us warmly. The next day Paul and the rest of us went to see James, and all the elders were present. Paul greeted them and reported in detail what God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. Acts 21: 17…

Paul goes to Jerusalem and talks about his success with the gentiles. But this isn’t going to go the way you think it will. After all, Paul had a reputation for telling Jews that they were not worthy of eternal life. Awkward!

When they heard this, they praised God. Then they said to Paul: “You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law. They have been informed that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs.

James is being diplomatic as he is likely the one who spread this rumor about Paul. After all, he was the head of the Jerusalem church and was at the council meeting. Moreover, this wasn’t a rumor. It is a reasonable extrapolation from what Paul taught. Remember that James has emphasized that thousands of Jewish believers were among them and that they were zealous for the law. These were law-keepers. These were kingdom people as James understood it. This is not going to end well.

What shall we do? They will certainly hear that you have come, so do what we tell you. There are four men with us who have made a vow. Take these men, join in their purification rites and pay their expenses, so that they can have their heads shaved. Then everyone will know there is no truth in these reports about you, but that you yourself are living in obedience to the law.

This looks like a very deceptive coverup. James is saying that we can’t have all these Jews thinking that the reports about Pauls teachings were true (which they were). James orders Paul to join four other men who were taking a very specific Jewish vow that was heavy on appearances. It seems strange that Paul had to pay the expenses of the other men. But this, too, was a part of the performance. Paul was to look like he cared so much about these traditions that he was willing to pay for others to fulfill them.

The payoff is that it would gaslight the people and make them think that all the reports about Paul and his teaching concerning the law was false. It was also to show that Paul was living in obedience to the law. This is the kicker. Paul did not live in obedience to the law when he thought it would help him win Gentile converts. He boasted as much.

So this whole thing was to whitewash Paul and make him appear to be a law-keeping Jew. Notice also the phrasing: It was not that he was living according to the traditions, but rather that he was living in obedience to the law, as if to say that the law was something to be obeyed, not something to be optionally observed when it was convenient.

As for the Gentile believers, we have written to them our decision that they should abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality.”

Just when we thought things were simple, it gets weird again. What we can gather is that natural Jews had to keep the law. Naturalized Jews also had to keep the law. But gentile converts who were never Jews only had to keep a subset of the law. Even the bit about abstaining from sexual immorality was based on how the Mosaic law defined it. So in that sense, none were completely free from keeping the law.

Do you believe you can be a kingdom citizen without keeping the Mosaic law? What about the part about the meat of strangled animals? Did you say something about the big 10? Funny, because that wasn’t mentioned here. Christians tend to read that back into the text. Do you teach that Jews who convert to Christianity should keep the Mosaic law? Funny, because that is what they demanded here. How does one enter the kingdom? Maybe by keeping the law, maybe by keeping some part of the law? Or maybe it was something else entirely.

Conclusion: The mark of citizenship

He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.” Mark 16:15-19

Initially, I was going to make this section about baptism being the new circumcision. But we can do baptism in a supplemental. The more interesting part of this passage is the way you can tell who is a citizen. Jesus said of those who believe, accompanying signs include driving out demons, speaking in new tongues, picking up snakes with their hands, drinking deadly poison without being harmed, oh, and healing sick people just by placing hands on them.

This has to be one of my favorite passages from the gospels because it makes one of the more falsifiable claims in the Bible. If these signs mark the true citizens of the kingdom, then there is no kingdom. Even the bit about speaking in tongues is intriguing. It is not just speaking in a language, but in new languages. Healing would be accomplished by simply placing hands on a sick person. Can you point me to the person who can do that? I didn’t think so. Care to drink some poison? No? Maybe we can find someone who can verifiably cast out demons? I might have something for that coming soon.

Outside of charismatics, it is hard to find Christians who claim to be able to do any of this. They have all kinds of excuses for why they don’t have these powers. That is the case for the VAST majority of Christians today. Maybe it is that there was some kind of kingdom that has long vanished. Or maybe we are still waiting on the kingdom to come and for kingdom people to finally get their super powers. But that idea makes hash of the teachings of Jesus. If everyone who believes gets the powers, I should have gotten them. No believer should ever die without having those powers. No powers, no believers. No believers, no kingdom.

And with that, I’ll see you in the comments.

In the meantime, I’m out.

David Johnson

4S: Hard sayings

Hard sayings

Growing up, I watched my denomination struggle with various doctrines that were difficult to understand and more difficult to live with. But if it was one of those doctrines that was foundational to our beliefs, or just seemed to be pretty airtight with regard to clarity of scripture, we just had to go with it. Questions about those doctrines would often be met with a phrase like, It’s a hard saying. This is something that was said of some teachings of Jesus. Here is a an example:

Many of His disciples therefore, when they had heard this, said, “This is a hard saying; who can hear it?” Mt. 6:60 KJV

For a more modern take…

When many of His disciples heard this, they said, “This is a difficult and harsh and offensive statement. Who can [be expected to] listen to it?” AMP

This was the net effect of many, if not most of his teachings. It is a hard saying. Who can be expected to listen to it? This is what immediately came to mind when I ran across this article from The Christian Post:

2 toughest truths in the Bible

What the author was getting at was that these, for him, are hard sayings. The two he chose were the doctrine of hell and the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. I think I would have to put those in my top 5. But that set me to thinking about what my 5 hardest biblical sayings are. And why stop at 5? I probably could rattle off 10. So rather than start out with a specific number, I will give you a few, hopefully in descending order. I expect to do some editing on that front. From the least hardest saying to the most, here we go:

7. Holy wars

As a human with no powers beyond that which is common to humanity, I understand why we have war. We have to. Some things are beyond our ability to resolve any other way. It is a natural limitation that we have at this stage in our evolutionary development.

This goes sideways once a god is inserted into the picture. We don’t need a god who can win wars for his cause. We need a god who can forward his cause without the need for a war at all. The god who orders holy wars is just a being much like us, but with the power to win all of his wars, unless the enemy has iron. God acting as a general in a war that he ordered is a saying that is too hard for me.

6. War crimes

While we are on the subject of war, I would at least expect this god of war to do it better and cleaner and more righteously than we would. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. We have limits to how far we would go even in war. But god doesn’t have any such limits. Without recounting the greatest hits, I believe it is fare to say that many of his actions in war would be considered war crimes. When a god orders war crimes, it is too hard a saying for me.

5. Generational curses

There are so many generational curses I could have pulled out as an example. But limiting myself to just one, I would have to say that the whole original sin thing is the quintessential generational curse of all curses.

It only took one person to commit one sin and suddenly we have childhood cancer. There are many instances where the punishment of a thing was said to be to the third, even the fourth generation. I believe there is one that extends it to the tenth generation.

This type of curse is an inescapable trap because since everybody sins, the curse just starts over from there, so every generation gets a fresh three to ten years of curses. We would need some type of divine intervention to break the divine curses. Even if you say that god changed his mind way back in the Old Testament, we are still under the ultimate generation curse as we are all born with a corrupted nature. Generational curses; too hard a saying for me.

4. Capital punishment

To be clear, I am on the record as being in favor of capital punishment. But it is not because I believe it is ever a corrective action. It is a little like war in that it is sometimes the only option that remains for dealing with certain kinds of dangerous people. We are not gods and cannot solve some problems that a god could. So I am willing to give a bit of grace to us mostly hairless apes.

However, a god always has a better option. Knowing who would have needed to be executed under his law, he could have made sure they weren’t born at all. There is no reason that anyone should be born whose life inevitably ends in some form of capital punishment.

There is another aspect of this that I don’t hear much discussion about: It is especially cruel to require humans to kill other humans. If killing is a thing that can have the effect of fundamentally rotting one’s soul, why have us do it even for righteous purposes?

No person, in the role of executioner, should have to kill their brother. If killing is the way god must deal with some crimes (a proposition I don’t buy) he could do it himself without any ill-effects for him. Instead, he has us running around killing people we mistakenly believe to be witches, or correctly assess as adulterers or same-sexuals. That these things are ever worthy of death is a hard enough saying. But that we should be the ones tasked to do the dirty work is beyond my comprehension.

3. Human sacrifice

This one made the article that inspired this write up in the author’s top two. That I have it as #3 means that I also think this is awful. The thing is, I don’t hear many Christian’s expressing the sacrifice of Jesus as any kind of hard saying at all. They seem to be pretty pleased with it and not at all grossed out by the concept. Perhaps they have just been desensitized to the reality of the thing to be offended by it. Or perhaps they can only see personal benefit in it and that makes it seem like a beautiful thing rather than the grotesquery it is.

Jesus was said to be human. We need not nitpick over the biology. Any part human is human enough. If they see Jesus as any kind of atoning sacrifice, then he was a human sacrifice. No amount of dancing about can distract from that basic fact.

If the believer attempts the ploy that rather than human, Jesus was god, I would say their situation is even worse. If sacrificing an innocent human is bad, sacrificing a much higher-order being is much worse.

It is like acknowledging that sacrificing a family pet would be bad. But that is not what happened. Instead, we sacrificed the human owner of the pet. You will have gone from bad to worse. Make it a god and you have gone from bad to infinitely worse. If god requires that something bleed before he can forgive, that is a hard saying to which no one should listen.

2. Hell

There is no version of hell that makes it other than a nightmare drawn from the twisted imagination of a monster. Nothing, NOTHING mitigates that fact. Anyone who believes that lesser versions of hell make it okay have given themselves a strong delusion that eats away at their remaining humanity.

Many have moved to the notion that instead of the fire and brimstone torture chamber, hell is more akin to a room that we lock from the inside. There, we are left alone with only the company of the darkness of our poisoned soul. Worse, we might have to share that room with others who are equally bereft of goodness. Since we didn’t want anything to do with god, he stepped aside and ultimately gave us what we wanted. See how that makes it all better?

Except it doesn’t. You have only traded fire torture for mental anguish. Do you really believe that one is better than the other? People get burned all the time. What little experience I have had with it has been awful. People who are burned still want to live. They just don’t want to be in agony, which they are for a long time.

Mental anguish, on the other hand, can make you want to die. For those suffering the worst forms of it, life has become a living hell. It is that which one cannot imagine anything worse. Believing that god leaving people in the worst kind of mental anguish forever is somehow better than burning is a failure of understanding and perhaps of human empathy.

For the record, I don’t care which is worse. They both are unthinkable to impose on another person without even the release of death as escape. That leads to the only version of hell that makes any sense at all, annihilationism. Thing is, I don’t consider that hell. Jesus says that hell is a place rather than a state of not being. He describes it as a prepared place.

However, while not hell as I know it, annihilation is no picnic either and is also the domain of a twisted mind. There are a handful of possibilities because not all annihilation is the same.

1. There is the annihilation an atheist tends to believe in which is that once we die, we stay dead. This is not generally the annihilation Christians are talking about.

2. There is the kind where we are raised from death, judged, and killed again. This is one of the most dickish moves a god could make and that is deemed reasonable by his followers. Consider, the person is already dead? They might have already died in a fire. But this god so needs the last word that he has to perform a full resurrection just to tell them that he is condemning them to death. Then he kills them again. What the annihilation is that all about?

3. Finally, there is the kind where they are resurrected, read their sentence, then killed, but in a slow and tortuous way in accordance with their sentence. That means that a person could have an annihilation of being burned in flames for the next billion years before being allowed to die. Under this formulation, that is still allowed under the doctrine of annihilationism. Choose your annihilationism wisely.

Point being that there is no good hell that makes god any less a monster than he is under the most accepted view of hell. It is a doctrine that simply can’t be saved.

1. I never knew you

While it is difficult to imagine what could be worse than all that, I believe there is a particular saying that is harder than all of those combined:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my heavenly Father. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not drive out demons in your name? Did we not perform many miracles in your name?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers!’ Matt. 7:21-23

If you are not chilled by this passage, you are simply not grasping the full implications of it. You can cry context all you like. There is nothing here that suggests these many people are insincere, or reprobate, or any such thing.

Jesus says that calling upon his name is not enough. In other places, we are told to call upon the name of the lord. Yet here, that is not enough. We learn that these many people are not just calling upon the name of the lord, but doing many good deeds in the name of the lord. That is still not enough.

Then we examine these deeds and discover that these are things they could not possibly do without the special help of the lord. According to this Jesus, demons either couldn’t or wouldn’t cast out other demons. That has to be from god. In this passage, these many people are casting out demons and performing legitimate miracles in the name of the lord. But somehow, that still isn’t enough.

Think about how many times we have been told that a person is of god because they prophesied correctly, such as the Old Testament prophets, or because they performed miracles that could not be explained any other way, like the apostles, or that they received some confirmation from god that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. This one passage pounds all that to nuclear sand.

Even if god is the one giving you the power to cast out demons all the way to the very end, you might be left at the gate with Jesus pouring salt into the wound by announcing to all that he never even knew you. Not only were you not one of his in the end, you were never one of his. You are, and always have been quite literally dead to him. He was never really into you.

I have often spoken of my works of faith and have usually been met by Christians with sneers and jeers. They would say that my boasting of my Christian resumé of works is part of my problem. I was clearly trying to work my way into heaven and apparently still believe that all those works were supposed to have punched my ticket into heaven. I have to bite my tongue every time because they do not know what they are saying.

I probably knew more about faith and works at 7 then they do today. I wasn’t trying to work my way into heaven as they assume. I was working out my faith as a response to my great gift of salvation. It is hard for them to believe such a thing because their own walk of faith is so different. But I took it seriously. I didn’t need to work my way into heaven. I worked as a response to my salvation and gave god the glory for every damn bit of it.

I studied till my eyes dried out because I wanted to know god better. I knew where I could do better and devoted my self to spiritual improvement. How the hell does that later get turned into a bad thing by internet apologists? There was no act of devotion I wouldn’t do, or at least try to do. There was nothing I took for granted. I prayed so much, it was reflexive. I would often catch myself doing it and not remembering when or how I started. So habitual was it that I continued to do it even after coming out as an atheist.

I produced the kind of works that all the sermons suggested my faith should produce. I did them with joy and anticipation of doing more. I was earnest in a way that only kids without greater worries or time constraints could be. And yet…

Before trying to go to sleep every night, there were two things keeping me awake: the dread of secret sins that I didn’t even know about, and the double-dread of standing at that gate and being told that he never knew me. At the moment of my faith’s ultimate fulfillment, I would find myself headed inexorably to the flames with the cold as ice face of Jesus mocking me all the way down.

The worst part about this vision was that when examined under the cold light of reason, I couldn’t debunk it. The existential terror evoked by this saying of Jesus is that a person could be doing the best they knew how to do with the best intentions and with all the confidence we are told to have, and still never know how far from the mark they were. That is the terror that should freeze your soul.

The people in the saying of Jesus had no indication that they were on the wrong track. Worse, they had many indications that they were on the exact right track. There is nothing to indicate that they were harboring some secret wickedness. But let’s just grant that possibility and play it out to see how it holds up:

They were wicked because Jesus said they were wicked. Fine. Which heaven bound believer is not equally wicked? Which one will enter in without some kind of un-kicked jones? Will not smokers who knew they should have quit, not make it in? Will drug addicts who just couldn’t kick the habit be disqualified? Will people who harbor some racism be turned away? Will the preacher shot by the angry spouse of the person he was having a secret affair with be denied because of his weakness? How many of you who are convinced you will be in heaven are not also evildoers in your own eyes. All of you are. So what has that to do with being told by Jesus to hit the bricks?

The saying is hard because it is not something a person can do anything about. You already believe you are on the right track. You already pray. You already call upon the name of the lord for your salvation and only hope. And on top of that, you also do as much in response to those things as your faith and current reality allow, and always wanting to do even more. You are already there.

You are already getting all the right signals from your sensus divinitatis. But something is off, something you don’t know about. In this saying, god didn’t let them know and try to redirect them to the right path. He watched them the whole time, gave them magical powers, or watched demons give them the powers in the name of Jesus. He watched it until they died. And at the last moment, he informs them that he never knew them and they are going straight to hell with no advocate of the court.

You thought the sign said, Forgiven Unconditionally. But in the end, it was just a big F U!

Those are my 7 hard sayings. What are yours?

See you in the comments…

David Johnson

4S: God’s timing

God's timing

This week’s sermon is all about god’s timing and how it is very different from what we might expect. It is true that god might seem a bit capricious with regard to his timing. I wonder why anyone should expect anything different from that source. Here are a few observations I have on the matter?

Just another failed theodicy

This kind of appeal for god’s unpredictable timing is just another way to explain why bad things happen to good people, why evil is so prevalent, and why god seems hidden from the people who most need Him. In other words, it is just another failed theodicy. It is a way of making god unfalsifiable by saying that you can’t expect to find Him when you most need Him because He has His own timing that you can’t possibly understand.

It is not that an all-powerful and all loving god doesn’t exist in your hour of need. It is just that your hour of need is not the same as His hour of help. So if you are thinking that god owes you a visit just because you are in a bit of human hot water, you are the one with the problem and not god.

It is your job to wait patiently for the Lord. You shouldn’t expect that you can snap your fingers and get a timely rescue. Don’t you know that god allowed His own people to cry out to Him in slavery for over 400 years before He bothered to intervene? Even after He began His intervention, He allowed the suffering of His people to increase before He finally freed them. You haven’t even been crying out for 40 years. God is not slack concerning His promises. You simply don’t have enough faith and patience to wait on the Lord, who, after all those years of suffering, is indistinguishable from nonexistent.

It is never a failure

The thing about being faithful to the lord is that you can never call your efforts a failure or ever decide that god really doesn’t exist. It is all in how this type of Christian defines faithful. You should never do the math and decide that it is no longer worth it. You should never give up doing the same thing over and over regardless of how often it fails. The moment you do that is the moment you declare that you have given up on god. That means you were never truly a believer and you are now disqualified for that amazing fulfillment that god had in store for you had you just remained faithful one more day. Oh well… that’s on you.

What does it mean to wait on the lord? How long is a person intended to wait before deciding that help is not on the way? For this type of Christian, if you die waiting, that is still a part of god’s timing. What he has in store for you is unfathomable and so much more than the small relief you were asking for when you were alive.

In most situations, you would be a fool to sit around waiting for help that is not coming rather than doing everything you can do in your own power to save yourself. There are al kinds of schemes we come up with that won’t work. That is not to say it is wrong to try them. But is definitely wrong not to bail out when it is clear the scheme is not viable. That is true for everything except when the scheme involves a god. In that case, you can never bail out because you can never declaim that god failed. In that relationship, you are the only one that can fail.

Never taking no for an answer

Have you ever encountered the salesperson who simply refused to take no for an answer? Believing in god’s timing is a way of talking yourself into never taking no for an answer. The preacher said right up front that god could say no. Then immediately talked himself out of it with the illustration of David and the temple.

He detailed how David wanted to build god a temple and god denying the request. But then said that what god was really saying is that god was only saying that David couldn’t be the one who did it. The preacher never acknowledged that this was god saying no. He is the kind of preacher who can never take no as an answer. He has to recontextualize it so that he still has a chance.

God isn’t saying no; he’s saying not right now. He is not saying no; he’s saying not this way. He’s not saying no; he’s saying not this current version of you. We can contextualize all day until no has no meaning. You might want to play a musical instrument and 10 different instructors have told you that you are not cut out for it. But that doesn’t stop you. So you put in your 10,000 hours and you still suck. At some point, you need to consider that maybe this isn’t for you.

We need to learn how to assess our situation realistically. That will serve us in good stead in most situations. But when a god is involved, that goes out the window. Where a secularist takes the loss and moves on, the Christian can’t acknowledge the no. It is not god saying no. It is god molding you into the kind of person who can eventually receive a yes. This kind of contextualizing is not a healthy pursuit.

Conclusion: Indistinguishable from no god at all

I will repeat a point I made in the show. If you have to wait years for god’s response and you have to build character along the way, you have to build strength along the way, you have to do all the work that you would normally have to do were you doing it on your own, then in what way is god actually helping you that is clearly distinguishable from you just doing it yourself?

In the story of water to wine as told by the preacher, it would have cost the servants less time and effort by just going into town and buying more wine. What good was Jesus’ miracle when the servants had to do more work to get it than they would have had to do without it?

If Jesus is going to carry my burden for me, my back shouldn’t be bent and broken from the effort. If his yoke is easy and his burden is light, why are we all used up, swayback mules? If he carried me through the storm, why are my arches fallen and my feet bloody to the bone? If getting god’s help means I have to do all the work and give him the credit, I see no reason why I would ever want his help.

It becomes just another matter of faith that god did anything for you at all. The Christian response would be to question how we know that god didn’t help. Maybe we would have been dead had god not stepped in and intervened. But that is begging the question because it is assuming that god helped: the very fact we are trying to determine.

At the end of the day, god’s help is as hidden as he is. And that should be enough for you to see through the ruse and escape the madness. I did and I’m out. And I fervently wish the same for you.

See you in the comments…

David Johnson

4S: Prophecy

Prophet

John Piper has always been one of my favorite preachers, and I find him far more winsome and honest than the likes of Craig. He has a sort of vulnerability that draws you in and makes you think he isn’t trying to sell you a line but is earnestly seeking the same way you are.

In this week’s podcast, I cover a talk he did on the subject of prophecy, where that self-deprecating vulnerability was on display. He said the one thing he could have that made me lean forward to listen to what he had to say. He admitted that he was also unsure about prophecy. Unlike a lot of people in his position who might say a thing like that just to get you on their side, I think he actually meant it. I respond positively to that sort of epistemic humility.

To be sure, he had some rather peculiar notions about prophecy. But I grant him the grace of the equally unsure. Back in my preacher days, I didn’t consider myself an expert on the subject either. My father, on the other hand, was an expert on the minor prophets. That was his major focus of study at seminary.

I read the minor prophets but never took to them like my father did. I don’t think he liked them because of anything to do with what we think of as prophecy. I think he saw them as the cowboys of the holy writ. We were very much into westerns. Those heroes had a certain brand of swagger about them. I suspect he thought the minor prophets had a bit of that flavor. For me, it never took.

While being at the deep end of the kook theological pool, I can’t help but come back to prophecy every year or so. It is perhaps the single most important subject for Christians, whether or not they realize it. That is because when it comes to explaining why anyone should consider the Bible to be a holy book, it always comes down to prophecy. There is no way to validate the Bible as a magic book of some kind or other without appeal to prophecy. They all do it eventually. So one can never be quite done with the topic.

Sure, I used to appeal to prophecy when I was a Christian just as Christians do now. But I ultimately couldn’t maintain it. There are far too many questions that the inquiring mind can’t let go. The answers to these questions are far too sparse, and when attempted, far too bad. So while I can’t understand how the thinking Christian can hold on to the idea that biblical prophecy is anything special, I at least want them to understand why I, and others like me don’t. Into the rabbit hole we go:

Too many definitions

When a word has too many definitions, the meaning of it becomes less clear. Prophecy is an overloaded word that means too much. When a word can mean everything, it no longer means anything. Here are three common ways the word is used by people of faith:

1. A predictor of future events
2. Having knowledge of things one could not have by natural means
3. One who authoritatively speaks for god

There could be more definitions than these. But these are sufficient for the point I am making. I find that believers do a lot of context switching with this word, often in the same paragraph. So it can be hard to keep up. Also, the context is different from one person to another. You cannot assume that the person you are talking to about prophecy means the same thing as the last person with whom you engaged on the matter.

If I had to guess, I would say that the most common understanding of the word is something akin to fortune telling. It is a prediction of the future. That is certainly one of the strong definitions of the word as presented by the bible. You can know that a prophet is not speaking for god if they make a prediction that doesn’t come true. Not only is that a false prophet, but one that will face retributive death.

However, the way prophecy was handled in the bible suggests something a bit less. It seems to have mostly come down to warnings rather than predictions. If you don’t straighten up and fly right, god is gonna get you! Once a prophet was established as a prophet, they could make statements like that in an authoritative way.

Verification of a prophet

That leaves the question of how they became established in the first place and who actually recognized them as authoritative. I suspect the way a prophet became established then is much the way they become established today. They do it via some kind of magic. They accurately foretell the future or they do some kind of miracle that could only come from god.

At that point, they could speak for god much the way preachers do today. Preachers get up in front of audiences and teach gods will to people. In doing so, they are speaking for god, at least informally. They are validated by their congregation, at least until the congregation decides to fire them. For Hebrew prophets, it was less clear, they were accepted as authoritative by certain communities. But it seems they all died badly. So they clearly were not considered authoritative by the people who killed them.

A historian can only say that a person was regarded as a prophet by some. They could not say that a person actually was a prophet. As an outsider, I am not sure why I should care of some handful of people from a very long time ago and a place way over there considered Isaiah some kind of oracle. That is meaningless to me.

It also doesn’t matter if he was some kind of oracle. Let’s say he spoke for a supernatural power and made some accurate predictions. I am told by that same book that such could be done by spirits. How can we determine that the Old Testament prophets were not empowered by demonic forces to lead people to a false messiah? We don’t and can’t know. When I have pointed out to people that Sathya Sai Baba raised the dead at least twice, they say that it doesn’t matter if he did because it would have been by the power of demons.

The lack of reliable a way to verify that a person is speaking for god is even worse in the New Testament and into the current age. When speaking of ancient prophets, we can wrap them in mystery and ancient documents and mythology. We can’t really do that for contemporary prophets. We need something more concrete as mythology and a cloak of mystery are not available. A prophet actually has to prove herself in some way.

How did Paul do it? We can’t be sure. Did he do magic to prove he was from god? I don’t believe that was his origin story. His power seemed to come from a powerful testimony of a changed life due to an overwhelming encounter with god. So it is today. And sure, there was also magic.

Most people who call themselves Christian prophets do not do so on the basis that they have raised dead people. It is more to do with a powerful testimony of an encounter with god. It is all about the calling, and whether or not they can get enough people to believe them. Paul was very good at getting enough people to believe his claims. He based it largely on his redefinition of what it meant to be an apostle. Paul managed to change it in such a way that he could sell people on the idea that he was one. Much the same happens today. It is more about the art of the sell.

For my part, there is simply no way for anyone to validate their claim to the title of apostle, prophet, or even pastor. There is no way to verify whether a person was called by god or called by their own desire and ambition. If I can’t determine validity for today’s prophets, there is no way I could do it for yesterday’s prophets.

Circular reasoning

John Piper outlined the differences between Old Testament prophets and New Testament prophets. To my ear, it all came down to question begging and circular reasoning. How do we know that the Bible is truly the word of god? Prophecy. How do we know that prophets are speaking the word of god? Bible. It doesn’t get more circular than that.

If Christians want to claim that the validation of a prophet is that what they say is consistent with the Bible, then they can’t claim that the Bible is validated because of prophecy. They are going to have to let one of those go. If prophecy is to be validated based on predictions being fulfilled, then there has to be a lot of clarification of that criteria.

• First, everyone who is claiming to speak for god must do so by first making a prophetic prediction that comes true. As we all know, that is simply not how it is done. Since that is not how most people gain the right to speak for god today, the criteria of accurate predictions is already dead.

• If we are continuing with the predictions model, the prediction must be intentional and clear.

• Predictions must be specific enough so that there is only one way to fulfill them. And that fulfillment must be obvious.

• Prediction fulfillment must be verifiable in the lifetime of the audience. Otherwise, that person could never be considered a prophet by the people they are prophesying to. This means that for verification purposes, prophecy must be very near-term.

Truth is not verification

As was brought up in the comments, prophecy doesn’t have to come true to be of god. This is why I described Old Testament prophecy as warnings rather than predictions. Warnings and threats never have to come to fruition to be valid. The one making the warning can always say they decided to show mercy instead, or that the warning was conditional based on changed behavior. You can never invalidate a warning because the ultimate threat was not fulfilled. That is just how warnings and threats work.

With this in mind, Piper made a grave error when he recounted the story of the woman who prophesies that his wife would die while bearing a daughter. While that didn’t happen, the prophecy cannot be invalidated even by biblical standards. It might have been a prophetic warning to accomplish the goal of getting Piper to humble himself and cry out to god. Maybe he wasn’t doing enough of that at that time. So the prophecy, indeed, brought him to his knees and he did, indeed, cry out to god. Therefore, god relented, spared Piper’s wife, and granted him with a son. You see, not a failed prophecy at all.

That is why truth (fulfillment of the prophecy) is no validation anymore than the lack of fulfillment can falsify the claim or claimant. Notice the context shift. Piper was thinking of prophecy as future-casting while the woman was thinking of it as a warning from god with an unspoken conditional. In this way, prophecy is just like all the other extraordinary Christian claims: It can never be falsified.

But they were prophets

Early in the show, Piper made a big deal about how Jesus didn’t appoint prophets, but apostles. We can see this in Luke 6. But I must push back against that notion. They were prophets in all but name. Just ask yourself what the difference was between prophets and apostles. You will find almost nothing to say.

• Prophets were chosen by god. So were apostles.

• Prophets had authority that wasn’t to be tested. So did apostles.

• Prophets occasionally made predictions. So did apostles.

• Prophets spoke for god and could give messages and warnings from god that couldn’t be validated by any means. So did apostles.

• Prophets usually came to a bad end. So did apostles.

In the same way that Jesus was called Emanuel, the apostles were prophets. It gets worse:

The office of prophet

And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers Eph. 4:11

You might be tempted to use this passage to show a distinct difference between apostle and prophet. But I believe that would be misguided. Even if there were a difference, nothing stops a person from having a dual role. It could ever be argued that the role of prophet is a subset of what it means to be an apostle. No one would argue that the apostles were not teachers because this passage separates the roles.

What makes this passage bad for prophecy is that it seems to be assuming that there were people in the church who had the gift. Based on how Paul redefined apostle, there is no need to assume that was an exclusive title either. Indeed, many church leaders today are called apostles. You can’t possibly say they aren’t.

Therefore, we have to do something with the office of prophet. It was a named office. The problem is that it is never given a description of how it operates, or a way to determine who is or is not a prophet. It is an office with a name, but is lacking anything of use. We are left to decide for ourselves what it means.

Conclusion: The Jews beg to differ

I finish where I often do when this topic comes up: The Jews would beg to differ. If you believe the Hebrew Scriptures are prophesying the Christian, triune god, I know a few rabbis who would like to have a word with you. This is going to be true for the vast majority of Jewish scholars who ever lived and who will ever live. It is one of the least controversial things I can say. For the most part, Jews don’t believe their scriptures are pointing to Jesus.

The only thing a Christian can say to this (and they have) is that the Jews neither know or understand their own scriptures. So thorough has been the Christian appropriation of Jewish text, I strongly believe that most Christians have forgotten, if they ever knew, that the fat part of their bible preceding Matthew is Hebrew Scriptures. They are the originators. We are the interlopers.

But Christians do not tend to take into account the studied opinion of religious, Jewish scholars. This might have to do with the bias of the New Testament writers, especially the gospels. Jewish scholars were the villains of the story almost from the beginning. They were the fools who rejected and ultimately killed the immortal god. It only makes sense that Christians generally couldn’t care less about what religious Jewish teachers think about messianic prophecy. The only Jewish scholars they tend to cite are those in the diminishing minority that happen to agree with them.

At some point, Paul, the former religious Jew, redefined just about everything in the Hebrew Scriptures to make his case. He had to sell it because almost no one saw it the way he did until he explained it. Even so, he had to resort to other means to convince people. It was just a matter of him pointing out the correct reading. It was also about his testimony: the fact that he convinced a lot of people that he saw god and had a conversation with him. Where Paul can’t twist a Hebrew text into the pretzel he needs, he pulls out the trump card that says, God told me in our private conversations. I received it from the lord… That sort of thing.

Prophecy works exactly the same way today. It has less to do with any real magic and more to do with how good of a story you can tell and how strong your testimony is and how many people you can get to swallow it whole. That was prophecy then and it is prophecy now. I was once in the thrall of it. But now, thankfully, I’m out.

See you in the comments…

4S: Why I hate the Santa

Why I Hate the Santa

I must have been a weird kid because I never really liked the idea of Santa Claus. I knew my parents were the ones buying the gifts and putting them on layaway and picking them up from the store and the works. I always knew that there was a limit to the gifts I could expect because there was a limit (a hard limit) to the family budget. We were kind of poor. So as a result, Santa was kind of poor. That’s life as a poor kid. Fantasies about rich Santa were a luxury we didn’t really have.

That said, I loved all the pageantry surrounding Christmas. I loved the lights, the trees, and all the decorations. I loved the wrapped presents and the hopeful anticipation of it all. I even came to love the much-needed infusion of socks and underwear that was the mainstay of our gifts. That’s not to say that we never got any nice things here and there. Every year, there was at least one thing. The rest was filler, like the summer sausage gift boxes with the one thing you really want and the rest being filler.

Thing is, I was never bitter about what I did or didn’t get. My older brothers often got nicer things. Being the youngest of three does have a few downsides. But all in all, I was pretty okay with Christmas despite the cognitive dissonance of our religion sometimes teaching that celebrating Christmas was a sin. Never mind all that. It has nothing to do with why I hate Santa. At least, I don’t think it does. Here are a few things that do:

But it’s a lie

I took my religion seriously even as a young kid. It mattered to me. I was earnest in a way that only kids can be. They have no pressing issues to eat up their time and attention. So they can super-serve an idea like no one else. So I super-served my faith. I knew how big of a deal lying was. So one of the hardest things for me to deal with was how even Christians were a part of the great collusion to lie to kids about where their gifts really come from.

Primarily, all good things come from god. Secondarily, they came from your parents, as well as friends and other members of your family. There was no Santa. And every year some kid didn’t know that was a year they would be praying to the wrong source and thanking the wrong people for their joyous occasion. How was it possible that even Christians were in on this?

Worse, I had to become a part of the lie. I wasn’t allowed to liberate children from this pernicious fantasy. On the contrary, I was expected to perpetuate it. I was probably going to hell because of that damned Santa creature. For a long time, I struggled with the idea of lying. Sometimes, it was okay. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Theologically speaking, I still can’t.

Manipulative

Once you wrap your mind around the fact that Santa is a lie, all manner of new insights open themselves to you. One of the biggest of the new insights is the discovery of why the lie is so important. What exactly is it adults are trying to do with this deception?

When you ask it that way, the answer is obvious. They are trying to manipulate you. They are controlling you by controlling what you know and believe.

He knows when you are sleeping…

How creepy is that? Who is this dude who can look into my bedroom and not just know when I’m in bed, but when I’m sleeping? What exactly is he doing with that information?

He knows when you’re awake

Maybe you wake up in the middle of the night and get away with a little mischief your parents didn’t catch. But you can’t get away from the all-seeing eye of Santa. He knows…

He knows when you’ve been bad or good. So be good…

And there it is. You might think you are getting away with something. But you aren’t. He absolutely knows when you’ve been bad. He has a list, don’t you know? He’s checking it twice, which is weird for someone with such powers. Does he think he might miss something? But at the end of the day, you had better be good, and not at all for the sake of being good, but to avoid the vague threat of what will happen if you aren’t. That is manipulation writ large.

The thing about manipulation is once it has been identified as such, it loses its power. A good manipulator has to be subtle. As in sales, it is best to let the mark (I mean customer) think the sale was his idea. You didn’t get one over on him; he got one over on you. But the moment he recognizes you tightening the screws, he’s out. And you’re out of a sale. That is a manipulation fail.

Once I realized that these stories were all about trying to scare me into good behavior, it was over. Lying to me to make me dance to your tune was the death blow of trust. Any adult that would smile at me and lie to my face to try to get me to do something was on my naughty list. I had some early trust issues. Turns out that was probably a good thing.

Too much like god

Quick question: according to the stories Christians approve of, where did Santa get his powers? You see, I found it a little unsettling that this human could wield the power of god without any reference to god. And surely it had to be god. After all, who else would have that kind of juice?

Santa’s power was equivalent to hearing and answering prayers. Who does that sound like to you? He also had the power to reward and punish (by withholding reward). Satan can’t do that. He was the master of space and time and could bend both to his will. He could talk to animals. He could fly and do the most amazing miracles, even being in multiple places at once. Did I mention that he knows when every person on Earth is sleeping and awake? Yeah, that’s god, or something a lot like god.

I remember the first time I cajoled someone into trying to answer this question about Santa’s powers. The answer was something like, he works for god. A slightly better answer is that he was not human at all, but one of god’s angels. But if that was remotely true, where is he in the Bible? Surely, he didn’t fly under the radar such that no biblical writer knew about him. Maybe he didn’t get his commission until after the Bible was finished? At that point, we’re just done. Why bother with the charade any longer?

However, it did leave me with a lingering, nagging thought: If Christians could make up one god-like figure with all of these attributes, they could make up others, including the god I still believed in. This Santa was not a helper of any god I served; he was a threat.

Santa is us

As I grew into my young adulthood, I encountered yet another issue I had with the Santa myth. I was expected to be Santa. That has got to be the worst-case scenario for anyone expecting something good from Santa. As a child, he was manipulation. As an adult, he became a guilt trip.

I got involved with churches that went all out on the Christmas nonsense and that also was involved with a lot of charities in the local work. That is something I really didn’t have a lot of experience with as a kid because that version of my denomination did not do much of that sort of thing.

But as I got older, I had the opportunity to do things with Toys for Tots and other such programs. We delivered a lot of presents to one of the local orphanages. We also did caroling and that sort of thing to bring all that Christmas cheer. I was constantly reminded that if we didn’t do this, all those kids would go without Christmas. So it somehow became my responsibility to deliver Christmas to the less fortunate.

I didn’t mind doing it, so that is not what I am complaining about. There were actually two things that gave me a very uncomfortable feeling about it all:

1. What about the kids we couldn’t visit? What about all the kids that fell through the cracks and had no charity-minded groups to bring a truckload of gifts to? They also have to fit into the Santa story. And where they fit are the kids on the naughty list. They must be naughty, otherwise, Santa would have brought them gifts. The whole tradition made naughty listers of every poor kid on the planet. If we had to pretend the Santa story is meaningful, then we also had to wrestle with that aspect of it.

2. This overflow of peace and goodwill toward men was a one-day affair. Should kids in unfortunate circumstances only get one toy (for less than $20) a year? Is that the way this works? Do we care about their miserable lives the following month? Do we follow up in any meaningful way? Or is it just for the holidays? I hated the message that we care about you today but not tomorrow.

As much as I enjoyed volunteering, I hated the Santa-wrapped bullshit that came with it. And no, I was never really in a position to help a lot of kids in difficult circumstances. And I didn’t have the resources to do any meaningful follow-up. That said, I was a foster parent once upon a time and I have also taken in random strangers into my household who were in obvious and desperate need. That sort of thing is not easy and not without risk. I never felt like I was doing enough, and still don’t. It can never be enough.

My point is that when someone like me has to become someone like Santa, the system falls apart in catastrophic ways.

Conclusion: We don’t need Santa

I’m done with fantasies about ill-defined gods and their ill-defined powers to do ill-defined harm and ill-defined goods to the people who displease or please them. What a waste of a life that seems to me. Spend your 120 years however you like. But Santa and his boss will not be able to claim much more of mine.

But it is not just that. Santa is not just a waste of time because he is potentially harmful. He is a waste because he isn’t needed, and never was. If I’m Santa, then he’s not needed. Heck! I’m not even needed. The kids in the orphanages will do better by sending their Christmas wishlist to all the local churches who are able to fill them all with a single special collection. Santa isn’t needed.

If parents want to reward their good kids with rich gifts, more power to them. Santa isn’t needed for that. And the kids can learn to thank their parents more often. If poor families want to feel bad about their lot in life without thinking they must have done something wrong, Santa isn’t needed for that either.

If parents need that kind of manipulation to keep their kids in line, I question the quality of the parenting while recognizing how hard a job it is. There is no shame in not being particularly good at it. But parents can learn better behavior just like the children they are trying their best to raise. And Santa is certainly not needed for any of that.

You know who else is not needed for any of that? Santa’s boss.

And that’s the view from the skeptic.

David Johnson