The Pastor said that if we become a Christian, it doesn’t mean we drive a Cadillac. But it does mean precisely that. I could buy a Cadillac, the pastor could buy a Cadillac, and most people in the congregation could secure a Cadillac of one form or another. Christianity and Cadillacs are inextricably linked. But I am guessing he was not meaning for us to take him literally, as literally as he takes scripture on occasion. But as a metaphor for wealth, the Cadillac is something which most of Christendom achieves by birth these days. In 1902 when Cadillac was formed from the remnants of Henry Ford’s first company, what we would consider junky old Cadillacs today, would have been unobtainable wealth. Each generation in America dreamed of one day owing such a status symbol, but as time went on they did achieve it. Of course the status symbol also moved to bigger and better things. But today your entry-level Ford can achieve things only the most expensive cars could a few years ago. The average person can buy a safe, reliable car that can go 100 mph. Of course there are a few stipulations to avoid debilitating poverty in the old U. S. of A. You have to finish High School, not have children before you get married, and get a job. Pretty easy, but that gets to the point; behavior has an effect on prosperity.

2011 Cadillac Ciel Concept

The sin of the Prosperity Gospel is not that they got the promise wrong, but that they applied the recipient individually rather than corporately. God promised he would bless his people, not that every person would always get what they want in every situation. It’s the American way. We Evangelicals almost have no concept of how God deals with his people corporately. We think it’s all about us, or rather me. Us would be an improvement. The other flaw in their understanding is their timetable. They expect it to be almost instant, again this is another fault inherent to Americans these days. But God’s promises take time. Abraham was promised that his descendants would out number the stars(it’s really too bad we think the New Earth will contain so few people, God says we won’t be able to count them)but it took almost 400 years until his people would enter the Promised Land.

We love sci-fi fantasies these days. But we don’t love them because they can take us to truth, we love them because we think they will allow us to escape from reality. We don’t want promises from God that require hard work and generations of faithfulness. 400 YEARS!? Who has the time? It would be much easier if God just swooped down and waved a magic want, cross shaped perhaps, and made everything right, sent us to rapture. But that’s just not what Scripture says. The blessings of God are not just theoretical or metaphysical.

God promised his people the land, but they had to fight for it, many people died fighting for it. They never saw the land, for them, where was the blessing? The blessing was for their children, and it was very real(twhink Oblivion or the Prestige). They really did get the land, most of it. It would have been easy for them to just give up and start saying that the promises were talking about a spiritual reality and not actual land. Which is not far from the truth. As Jesus found his people when he came to the earth; they were so delusional as to not even realize they were enslaved to the Romans(John 8:33). Because on some spiritual level they were better than any Romans. Jesus rebuked there theoretical dream world. And told them to take care of the actual poor, to actually be good people, to actually do good works, rather than just talking about it in theory. The way you behave on this real earth displays what is truly in your heart. You can’t just say you are a child of Abraham, you can’t just say you are a Christian, you have to prove it (John 8:39).

“What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” –Mark 11:24

And he told us what to pray for, what we should desire.

Our Father in heaven,
may your name be kept holy.
May your Kingdom come soon.
May your will be done on earth,
as it is in heaven.
Give us today the food we need,
and forgive us our sins,
as we have forgiven those who sin against us.
And don’t let us yield to temptation,
but rescue us from the evil one.
For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
– Matthew 6:9-13

When was the last time you heard about a famine? How many people do you know who have had a problem with demon possession? Have you seen a time with more forgiveness? We even forgive murderers when we have their crime on six videos. I would argue that his will is being done on earth at a level never before seen. God didn’t put us on this earth to fall, but to rule and subdue it, to turn the garden into a city. And we have done, in ways totally unimaginable to the disciples of Jesus. Of course it’s not all perfect. But insofar as these things are not happening, it is our fault, the fault of the Church.

Many of these things probably sound strange to us, Evangelicals. We find comfort waiting for the rapture, thinking our only task is to ‘get people saved’. I was raised this way and followed it a little too closely, to my own detriment But this task is meant to be added to our other tasks. Just because Jesus tells us he is the Bread of Life doesn’t mean we stop growing wheat. God works out his promises here on earth by human agents the way he always has.

Christendom is the wealthiest thing going, it always has been. Of course there were ups and downs, but Rome was blown away by this community of people who could actually accomplish even their pagan ideals of citizenship and community. There are always lies told about Christians, because we play by the rules and are blessed by it, this leads to jealousy. But we shouldn’t throw in with the world criticizing our place here, because we think the persecution means we are closer to the early church. The gospel was to be preached to everyone, the Kingdom spread to every tongue and tribe and nation. We mistake exhortations to resist Roman persecution as proverbs for all times and peoples. Do you really think things are getting worse? You need to talk to your grandparents. Or perhaps they should give you a talking too. And it’s not just about you and your problems or even the past generations, look at the bigger picture.

What about ‘Christian’ South America? Of course there is no shortage of people claiming Christ, and not living it. The Catholic Church has a real problem with syncretism. Jesus says you will know them by their fruit. The fruit is real, the lack of fruit is real too. God created this world and gives us the rules because they are in harmony with the world he created. Don’t have sex with animals, because that’s where STD’s come from. Love one another, and be at peace and you can spend your efforts on things besides making IED’s, like going to the Moon. And so you can identify true Christianity by it’s fruit, on a large scale over an extended time. South American Catholicism doesn’t work. Neither does the Middle Eastern heresy of Muhammed. The interesting thing about Christianity is that Christ affected everything. Judaism was never the same after Christ appeared on the scene. Then he came back and wiped out the temple a few years later. Satan’s counterfeits were never the same, there have since been many anti-Christs. Muhammed admired the organizing ability of the Church and he wanted to use it much like Simon (Acts 8:9-24) so he mixed Christianity with his tribal Arab culture. This layer of Christian-proofing has resulted in a many very dark lands all but impenetrable by the light of the Gospel. But most of the Muslims I have met are themselves trying to live up to the Christian ideal. It has become standard in world politics and culture. Everyone wants to be like the west, except for a few who want to destroy it, even they indulge in it’s bounty. The West is the West because of all our ancestors who took the promises of Christ seriously. They lived a moral life, and used their leisure to explore and invent and discuss and think. And so now men can move mountains. Christ moved the temple mount into the valley of Gehenna, but we can move actual mountains, just drive over to Butte. We can also bring about his will on earth as it is in heaven. Every day, one decision at a time.

The problem with always comparing us to Rome is that Rome was not Christian. Christians may die but they come back from the dead. Christ conquered death. Rome was conquered, and was raised to newness of life under Christ. His Body the Church has been raising paganism and converting it to this day. If we continue to sit around and wait for something to happen while our nation continues to throw away it’s heritage an dembrace the darkness it will die, to be reborn. But it seems like an awful waste. I would rather we go on building. There are Cadillacs because there are Christians. Cadillacs are Christian. And I say keep them coming.

I see a lot of my fellow men struggling with their public persona, or perhaps it is more accurate to say women. From the lesser to the greater problems of self-consciousness seem to multiply with your audience. Some people are very comfortable with themselves and so as they are in front of more people they adapt, and are fine with it. Other people are always second guessing themselves and so the more eyes on them the more they doubt themselves. I have see this manifest itself in a few ways. Some people are always trying to prove they are better than they are, others are always trying to prove they are worse.

Even more true since our failed educational system gave us Obama and Obama liberated millions from gainful employment.

I can understand people trying to prove they are better than they are, it’s the pride of humanity, perhaps the most common and most vile of sins. But it seems odd that you would want to prove you are worse. I think it’s fair to say that, even though it seems odd it is the other side of the same coin. Making more of yourself or making less of yourself are really the same, you are making the self the focus and misrepresenting yourself. True humility is when you see yourself as you truly are. Be real. But what is real? I think it depends on who your god is. If your god is yourself, then anything you do or feel is by definition, real, true and good. If your god is other people, you are always taking Fb polls and trying to determining your worth for the day based on the number of likes your last selfie received. Or if you are a male, the pictures are of your latest project. There are many gods, but the solution to all of this mess is to make Jesus your Lord. If you hold yourself up to his character and honestly compare, you will probably find some flaws in yourself. Flaws that are preventing you from being fully human, by the true objective standard.

Now, that second god is a common demon these days. I have heard marketing described as trying to make the public perception meet the reality. But I think more often than not the purpose is to present the reality as something other than it really is. And today we each seem to be running our own marketing campaign, it’s called social media. But don’t let anyone find out, or realize the glimmer is off the rose. I just find it really odd that in an age of ‘don’t judge’ that’s all we do. We nit pick grammar, and every little fault of every public figure. Our entire press is geared towards destroying people who have risen by real merit. We are dying to believe that everything good is fake. Does that include God? I think it exempts us from our responsibilities, even our responsibilities as created creatures of that God.
On a larger scale western civilization has gone from extreme to extreme. From the rigid structure of Neo Classicism to the rule by emotion of Romanticism, to the reigning in of immorality that was Victorianism. But since our current conception of history is so narrow, these reaction are often happening yearly, monthly or even daily. We can’t leave well enough alone and stay in the middle with truth, because we don’t want to have anything to do with the Lord God of the Universe who made all of this. We want to try it our own way. Were the ‘solution’ to the last problem we created is the next overreaction. I still maintain that as a whole we are moving towards that which is more and more casual. If it’s spur-of-the-moment, with absolutely no planning or forethought, then it must be good, art even. Except for running half marathons. In which case, you can’t plan too much. And so you see people reacting and overreacting. We are bipolar.

There is an alternative. Instead of trying to earn the praise of our many gods, by works, which is always the way, find what is good, true, and beautiful, based on the real source, the One True God, and love it. Take that trip to that exotic location and post a million beautiful pictures because you really loved it, instead of trying to keep up with someone who travels more. Maybe you will inspire someone else to take a trip that they will love too. That’s good peer pressure, that’s good marketing. It’s selling something bigger than ourselves. And if something is difficult, don’t be afraid to share and reach out to others for support. Instead of worrying that your profile is too glamorous and in need of something ‘real’ or ‘down and dirty’. As your fellow Christians reach out to encourage you, they too will be encouraged in their own trials.

There is a time for all things. A time to mourn and a time to dance(Ecclesiastes 3). I’m not sure if this new push for the casual is laziness or a philosophical overreaction to too much structure, but it’s not good. There have always been glosses, to cover pimples or sins. There was airbrushing before Photoshop. It’s fine for a woman to put on some make-up, so long as she is not coving a prideful heart. You don’t put lipstick on a pig. It’s good to put on your sunday best as long as there is a soul underneath. There are vessels for honor and vessels for dishonor. There are body parts for public consumption and those which are kept hidden. Letting it all hang out is shocking at first, but very soon you are left with nothing being sacred, nothing is special. No parts are for anything, we are just left in a soup of Eastern Mysticism, where everything is one. The only problem is that then everything is nothing. Without distinct things, you have no relationships, no contrasts, no paradox. Even rebellion is nothing, it has nothing to be contrary to. We understand this a little, I often see people taking endless pictures of every laden plate before they eat, but I don’t often see the after pictures. Come on, what happened to keeping it real? Now maybe this is the future, but I hope not.  I envision a future which looks a lot like the medieval past.  Where discipline is considered real.  Where we can all work towards a standard that is better than ourselves, without being called fake.

So post your food if you love it. But don’t show off. And don’t be afraid of gloss. Post pictures of those beautiful, happy family moments. Clean the house before guests come over. Keep some things hidden, off scene(obscene). If you tell a good story and people can only find jealousy in their hearts, that’s their problem. If people are offended by that which is true, that’s their problem. Don’t be afraid to be what you were made to be in Jesus the Christ, even if it means being better or worse than others.

Further up and Further In: https://www.christkirk.com/sermon/surveying-text-lamentations/

What if you find yourself driving down the street and someone pulls out in front of you and cuts you off? If you get upset and yell at him or honk, most likely that is sin. At the very least it’s un-Christian. It is not you laying down your life for another it is you demanding your rights. You have been slighted and you think you deserve better. The fruit of the Spirit response, in this case, would be considerate, self-controlled, patient, understanding. It is to consider his position, maybe he is late picking up his daughter and he doesn’t want to leave her out in the cold. It is letting things go even if he had no good reason for doing it.

Now consider if the same guy pulls out in front of a small child crossing the street. And you yell something very similar to the first example. Is this sin? Is this un-Christian? I don’t think so. Though the man probably heard you the same in both examples, he was probably upset in both instances, the were different. You were standing up for the less fortunate. You were making a stand on principle, that the man needed correction. Not because of how it impacted you, or because you were demanding something but because you loved this child that was put in danger. The consequences of you not speaking up, or no one ever speaking up might be the death of someone in the future. Real love would not let this happen.

Now make it a little less emotional. You see the man pull out in front of another car and you yell. I believe the same thing applies. Now let’s say you are back in the first instance, and you yell but without any concern for yourself. You don’t care that you have been wronged, but you believe the man needs correction or he is going to endanger himself or others. I believe this too can be perfectly Christian. But it may not look like it. People will often assign you motives based on how they would behave. It’s an interesting thing, people may condemn you because you are worse than they are, but they may also condemn you for being better, because they can’t imagine how that’s possible.

This was exactly the case with Jesus and his disciples and many Christians throughout time. The Jews persecuted the Christians because they thought they were preaching a false Messiah. They thought they were blaspheming the one true God. But really the problem was that they were unable to understand a higher truth, a better motive.

So we shouldn’t really evaluate ourselves based on how people react. Of course they will hate us they hated Jesus and we follow him. We should try to fairly assess our own motives, but don’t get too caught up in it. Generally you know if you yelled from anger. But don’t overthink your motives, or let other people do it to you. You will soon be paralyzed with fear which is a fair characterization of the church these days.

And this is the point. We have taken verses like Philippians 4:5 and turned them into a call to be a wimp, to give in at every turn, sooner if possible. I could only find one translation that used the word ‘gentle’, the rest use something like moderation, reasonableness, or consideration. Given the context where Paul is exhorting someone to moderate a conflict between Euodia and Syntyche, I think those are getting more to the point. As Christians we are exhorted repeatedly to ‘Judge rightly’ “discern” and many other such phrases. We should be good at deciphering good from evil in every situation. We have the wisdom of God. This is precisely what preaching about being a wimp leaves out. These specific situations were given to us to help us in our situations, in our judging. Instead they are turned into warm fuzzy quotes fit for embroidery over the toilet at grandmas. Paul’s exhortations to gentleness and self control are not about acting like good little Victorians, they are about ending conflict by dropping things. They are about sacrificing yourself, as Christ did.

If we look at the word gentleness. It comes from gentleman, which was a political class in England. It was a few steps below royalty. This too is a good context, Christians are told that we are heirs with Christ, we will inherit the earth. We are royalty, we should act like it. Jesus the King is our Father. How do royalty behave? There is a time for quiet reasoned speech. There is also a time for yelling and fighting. Those who are reasonable and good moderators are equipped to judge the time and place for each. Sometimes Jesus was moved with compassion, he spoke gently and healed people. Other times he yelled at the Pharisees with the most vile of insults and chased them away with whips. Being a Christian doesn’t mean you don’t fight, it means you don’t fight for yourself. When other people or the credibility of your Lord is on the line, you fight. The Jews were not wrong in their method of stopping blasphemy. They were wrong in their identification of what blasphemy was. Oh that Christians today would take the commands of God as seriously as they did. People who don’t act on what they believe, are cowards. The other option is that you have cowardice embedded in your beliefs. Neither of these options is the way of the Christian.

John the Baptist was beheaded for telling the regent of Judah that he had no right to marry his brother’s wife. He didn’t preach some generalization, or make suggestions, he said it right to Herod’s face. We have much the same situation today. Herod claimed to be a faithful Jew, vying for the place of Messiahship. Our political leaders claim to be Christians. Both blaspheme the name of the One True God. But our pastors don’t stand up. They don’t defend the sheep with their staffs, with the Word. Instead they teach the sheep to cower. “They are just the world, acting like the world.” Well that’s because you didn’t teach them how to act like Christians. If you can’t even teach your own people how to stand up and fight the world, how will we ever be light to the world? In a sense our cowardice is fighting, it’s fighting for our own hide. John didn’t worry about his own life, he spoke the word faithfully. And God took care of Herod. He lived in fear and was eventually devoured by worms.(Mark 6)

The founders of the United States brought with them the Geneva Bible, handed down from Calvin with his notes. Including notes about the doctrine of lesser magistrates. In Exodus 1 the Hebrew midwives are praised for fearing God rather than Pharaoh. They disobeyed the government, Pharoah, and obeyed God. Calvin’s notes made it clear that lower authorities had the right to call higher authorities to account if they overstepped their authority, became tyrants. Not only did they have a right to resist false authority, but they had a responsibility to intervene. If the sheep underneath you are being abused by the wolves, you have a duty to fight the wolves, even if the wolves have titles like ‘king’ or ‘president’. But tyrants don’t like this sort of thing. They want to be their own masters, they want to be above any rule or law, they want to be God. And so the homosexualist King James, made sure that these notes were absent from his new translation. And so many tyrants to this day preach this passive gentleness from Romans 13, which has been stripped of all context and turned into “sit down and shut up, and do whatever the government says.” Because that’s the power they covet for themselves. It’s no surprise that the founders stood up against the tyranny of George III. It’s also no surprise that our culture is off the rails today, as we all cower in fear. We hand our children less freedom every generation, less Gospel, less of the Kingdom. Is that loving? We are fools. We think the darkness we have created is a sign that Christ is returning. Really it a sign of the retreat of his Body, the Church here on earth.

So, when your wife attacks you, be gentle and understanding with her, forget yourself, repent and ask forgiveness. When someone attacks your wife, forget yourself and dive in to the fight whether by words or weapons. Both are gentlemanly, both are loving, both are Christian.

Today in church I learned that the goal of life is to get saved and wait for Jesus to come back. I could pray that it happens a little too, if I decide. And while I wait I should bash other people for their theology on matters of end times, that don’t really matter. So, that’s what I am going to do, but also point out some more important lessons we should be learning in church.

So, I am already saved. I was baptized by someone who was baptized by someone who was baptized by someone. . . you get the point. This is how the new covenant works, water is thicker than blood, the water of baptism. Wine is thicker than blood, the wine of the Lord’s Supper. This is not an ethnic thing. Which makes me wonder about the Jews today, who are supposedly an ethnic thing. How do they know. The common thread of Christendom is fairly obvious today. There were the early church fathers, and many splits, but though the tree has many branches there is one root, one foundation. Jesus the Christ and his apostles. How do Jews today know they are Jews? The records are all gone, there are no more Matthew 1 type genealogies. Which tribe are you from? No one knows. All they have to go on is that their parents were Jews, or maybe they can even trace back a few generations. But like the Church, today their connection is purely ritualistic or cultural. There is no proof of the ethnic part. I suppose we could do DNA research, but I doubt that will help us to determine which tribe is which, a key and necessary part of tribal, ethnic distinctions.

So, I’m in the right club, check. I occasionally pray the Lord’s Prayer, especially when I am visiting Presbyterian churches so, check again. Now onto bashing other people’s theology. I was raised in the same church I currently attend. I know what they believe I have heard it my whole life.  I understand Dispensationalism. Lobbing grenades from a fortress is fine in tribal warfare, but someone honestly attempting to understand another perspective has to try a different tactic. If you want to have an honest debate with different ideas, you need to understand the ideas. It’s easy to make absurd categorical statements about someone who disagrees with you, it’s difficult to truly understand what makes them tick. This requires hard work, imagination and humility. We all think we are right, that’s what having an idea means. If it’s wrong we throw it out. Ideas are in people and people are in contexts, always. That’s just how it works. And it’s not just something you do in philosophy, it applies to how you read the Bible. These people lived in a different time and different place with different evils. Their arguments and actions were not written to us, in order to learn from them we must translate their actions into our own time. Otherwise we just end up with a mess. Fortunately the tradition of the Church has made this work easier than other areas of study. They have been translating and commenting on scripture these 2000 years and passing it on. As opposed to some other texts we dig up, like some of the Dead Sea scrolls. We have to guess at their meaning because we are separated hundreds of years from the last comments about them. We don’t know why they wrote these things or why these issues were important the way we do with the canon of Scripture. We just have to guess.

On the other hand, if we can’t even honestly understand what people across town are preaching from their pulpits, how do we think we have the right to understand scripture? Especially given the nature of the New Covenant. It was to expand. It was for all tongues and tribes and nations. Like with all honest inquiry, don’t just take someone’s word for it, read what these people actually write, listen to what they say, get to know them. Honestly try to figure out their context and what they are trying to do. I have done this with many other faith traditions, Catholics, Covenant Theologians or Anglicans, current and past. And I must say our fortress mentality looks more ridiculous every day.

As to our text in Mark 13. People don’t just think these events happened in A.D. 70 because they are stupid. They believe it because verse 30 says “Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” In addition many of them follow the tradition passed down from the Apostles more faithfully than we dispensationalists do. Most of our forefathers believed that the Church was the new Israel, the people of God on this earth, including the Apostles in Acts. Which is why there was so much early controversy about whether or not you had to become a Jew first in order to be a Christian. We see it in Acts, Galatians and Hebrews.

Understanding a text or an idea requires not only that you know something about the speaker, but about yourselves. If you find yourself hating black people, because that’s what you have always done, and what your parents have always done, you might just think that’s how it is. But if you look down and observe you are wearing a Nazi uniform, and realize that not everyone wears that uniform, past or present, if you consider what that means, you can begin to see that hating black people is part of your bias. In fact it’s a new thing that no one really thought about much before Darwin told the world that white people evolved from black people. We American Evangelical Christians in 2015 have many biases. The most stark bias is against anything old. We think anything new must be better and so it’s how we treat Mark, we throw out the old covenant theology for the new dispensationalism. We also have a big disadvantage with every non-modern text. We can’t relate. Poetry is almost gone in our culture. We treat every text as if it were a scientific treatise. This is not how pre-moderns wrote at all.

When Revelation says that the blood flowed as high as the horses bridles, we get out our meter sticks (even yard sticks are too archaic, a true modern uses the metric system). We measure and if the blood is a few millimeters short we move on and look for fulfillment somewhere else. The author of Revelation would laugh in our face, or cry. We have missed the point, the meaning.

I have already given an overview of what is happening here but what about the language used in these verses:

“But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.” Mark 13:24-27

Now look down at your modern uniform and realize that you have many biases. You think this means that some astronomical event must come. You look of the Greek words and try to figure out how many stars have to fall to fulfill this prophecy. Did that meteor shower last week qualify? Then you use the terms as technical terms to cross reference with other verses, especially in Revelation. That’s the juicy stuff.

But pre-moderns would see this as a painting with words. When do you see sun moon and stars previously in scripture? It sounds like Genesis to me, when the sun moon and stars are put in the heavens. Now they fall. This is the end of the world. But it doesn’t even have to be the whole actual, physical world. The context is the destruction of the temple of Israel. This is the end of the Jewish age, which was the end of the world to the Jews. Then we see the Son of Man, Jesus coming in glory. We are told that woman is the glory of man(I Corinthians 11:7). The Church is the bride of Christ, we are his glory.(Ephesians 5:25-27) The cloud is a symbol of his presence just like the cloud that descended on the temple.(Exodus 33:9, Exodus 40:34, Acts 2) Now the cloud descends on the new temple, our bodies. We are the Church, the body of Christ. This is Kingdom talk.(Mark 1:15) It’s happening now. It’s not complete but it’s happening. So the Body sends out angels, or messengers (though we like the word ‘angels’ instead, it’s much more Frank Peretti), to reap the harvest. This sounds like the same harvest Jesus sent his Disciples out to gather. The elect from every tongue, tribe and nation, Matthew 24:29-30 includes the tribe language also in chapter 28’s great comission.
We love to allegorize this stuff and turn it into a fantastic miraculous sci-fi drama. But really God uses human agents the way he always has. First he sent Jesus his son to the vineyard to collect the worship due him. They killed him.(Matthew 21.33-46) So in these verses, he uses Rome to judge Israel, not one stone remained on another. But that’s not the end, he comes in power, through us, through the Church. We have been conquering every tongue and tribe and nation to this day. The whole world has seen the return of the King, through us. There are still a few enclaves left, shining the light there is our mission. We don’t just wait for his will on earth as it is in heaven, we do it, we advocate for it. We build a world free from sin and death, starting with our own lives. We act like children of the king, blameless, yet battling the evil of this world. While we should beware of false doctrine, we should keep in mind who are real enemy is. Anyone who blasphemes the name of Jesus. Anyone refusing to submit to his commands and the blessings they bring.

The purpose of Romans 11 isn’t that we should sit around and wait for Jesus to do something with Israel. The point is that Israel was saved because from them came Jesus. They were punished for their rejection, but saved by the fact that Jesus and his disciples redeemed the whole world. Even in their rebellion they are a blessing because they are a warning to us.  The point is that we shouldn’t get lazy, because God can just as soon cut the Gentiles out and put the Jews back in. It’s not a fatalistic prophecy, that will happen regardless of what we do. We are not Muhammedans. We are like a new Israel, we are a people set apart for God. If we abuse our task, we will be judged. But our task is not to be set apart, with our superior theology, lobbing grenades. Our task is to get everyone into the Kingdom. And because this truth is so glorious, Paul breaks out in song. “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways” He doesn’t write a boring book of exegetical theology, he writes a book of exhortation and praise.

So burn your straw men, and get to the real work of actively bringing the Kingdom to the whole earth, by living a perfect sinless life as an example for those who are not in the club. Fight by praising his many works, despite the world around blaming him and us for every evil.  They learned to blame and point fingers from us, the mighty Bible Believing Christians.  But don’t just be Bible believers, be Bible doers.

It seems to me that Western Civilization has always distinguished premeditated murder form spur of the moment murder.  I think this is a good instinct.  A forgiving person let’s things go.  He forgives 70×7 times.  He treats every meeting with his brothers as if it were the first.  He doesn’t dwell on those wrongs, rolling them over and over in his mind.  The old fashioned term is stewing.  He gives the person a fresh start at every crossing.

In contrast a crime of passion is momentary anger flaring.  While we should strive to control our temper, this is quite a different thing.  It’s almost a form of accident. Rather than conniving and formulating small nothings into a great evil, it springs upon you suddenly.  It seems that it generally requires larger provocations.  While I’m sure there are crimes of passion involving little more than a printer which ran out of toner, generally what comes to mind is coming home early from work to find your wife in bed with the pool boy.  In that situation it’s only normal that you throw him out the window.  Whether or not he hits the pool or not, is a matter of chance.

She was probably about two, a bundle of energy though respectfully contained in her Sunday best. A puffy black dress which complimented her cheeks, decorated with ribbons from head to toe. When she was unable to solicit the attention of someone else around her, she was in her own little world, content, laughing and playing. Then what was this? Something is happening. Men are walking around with shiny trays. Oh, I had better pay attention. Oh one is coming my way, it’s full of small crackers. Oh goodie. But just then grandma brushes me off and grabs the plate away from my view. Something is going on, and I’m missing out. Was I bad? Am I going to be in trouble when we get home? Then grandma whispers something in my ear about how it’s not for me. Why not? Then everyone seems to be eating together. A few minutes later, the men come again, this time with little cups. Again it’s not for me. The joy is gone. But it’s ok, soon I will be whisked off to my own world to color and play, junior church I think they call it.

How sad, I was crushed. But this is the message we send to our kids every month as we participate in communion with, or should I say without them. They are not in the fellowship. They are not in the group. They have to wait outside while the grown-ups go through their motions. Just then I remembered the words of Jesus, “Let the little children come to me.” We think we are all important, that our inclusion in the Church, the people of God is an adult thing. Children don’t know anything, they can’t participate or contribute on the same level as an adult so just forget about them. Until that one magical day when they reach the ‘age of accountability’ and can chose salvation for themselves. But this is not the picture Scripture paints. We are fallen, sinful, dead. We don’t go up to heaven or even reach up, and make fellowship with God. We are going about in our selfishness and He comes down to Earth for us. We don’t do anything, it’s by his grace. Yet we push our children to the outskirts of the body, always treating them as circumspect. “I wonder if little Lucy is really saved. . .” “I don’t know let’s test her. . .” No! “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”

Sinite parvulos venire ad Me (‘Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me’) Frans Francken II. c. 1640

But we like to pride ourselves for our decision to choose Christ and it impacts how we view our children. We think we made some sort of reasoned decision at church camp, that one night. Or perhaps it was in our twenties when we found ourselves at the bottom of the gutter, we made the choice to pick ourselves up and turn our lives around. But we forget that the gutter is our natural state. Or even worse, a people at it’s worst isn’t mixing up concrete and building gutters, without the hand of God we are cavemen. It was the hand of God, at the behest of his son Jesus, who reached down and pulled us out of that gutter. We evangelicals love a good turn around story. And those can be real. God does often work that way. But an even better pattern is for the next generation. He saves millions by placing them in Christian households and sparing them the pain and anguish of that sordid gutter lifestyle.

“For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith. For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.
That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all.” Romans 4:13-16

We used to look ahead in this country. Political debates were often couched in terminology about the children and the future. Even those have mostly blown away by the evil wind sweeping our nation, the same wind aborting millions of those children, aborting our future. At the beginning men laid down their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor so that generations and generations could go ahead of them and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Today we sacrifice our children for our own momentary pleasure. Today we stare at our own feet, we can’t even pass on the basics of our faith to our own children. Something which almost no other culture has ever had trouble doing, we can’t manage. The Jews didn’t teach their children to form a council every generation and decide if they were going to be Jews for another round. God told them to “train their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord”, oh wait that’s from the New Testament. The Old Testament says to “train a child up in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.” God says “Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.” But what if they didn’t make the right decision at the campfire that night? Paul tells us we are part of that covenant, we were grafted into Israel, we are children of Abraham. But we are also under a New and glorious covenant. Do you think this applies any less to us? The purpose of the New Covenant was not to exclude our children if they didn’t make a decision, it was to graft in all the nations to the tree of Abraham. It was to expand the Old Covenant to every tongue and tribe and nation.

“Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one—who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.” Romans 3:27-31

I think we can learn a lot from having those children at the table, rather than whisking them away to feed their infancy, let them learn to sit still and be part of this body. But we can learn from them as well. (It’s another wonderful paradox. Male vs. female, old vs. young. We like to be in groups of people just like ourselves, but the magic happens when we join the two sides of the paradox in tension.) That joy on her face, before it was taken away, that’s how we should view the Lord’s table. It’s not a mechanical requirement, it’s a blessed gift. The King of the Universe, Jesus the Christ has invited us to celebrate with him at his table. Regardless of how the battle looks outside, down here on earth, we know in reality it’s over. Jesus won. He conquered death, the final enemy. The Kingdom of God is at hand. And he asked us to celebrate at his table. He doesn’t lord it over us until we make a decision. Who are we to deny our children? Because they can’t make a decision? You are the parent, make it for them, choose life. Reach down to them as Jesus did and bring them up to your level. Lay down your life for them. Treat them like they are part of the party, offer them the bread and wine. Train them up in the joy of the Lord, so it’s all they ever know, so they wouldn’t think of ‘choosing’ anything else. Why is the default position to treat them like an enemy? Even the Matrix gets this right. Adults have to make a choice, the red pill or the blue pill. But after you choose freedom, and leave the Matrix, your children are born in Zion. They are freeborn children of Zion, they can’t choose to go back into the Matrix, that’s crazy talk. So, why do we pretend that we are facilitating some sort of neutral territory on which our children can decide if they want to go over to the dark side or not? It’s really insane. Especially given the history of it not working, at all. Our kids have enough against them, God already made a world where evil can look as enticing as good, we don’t need to be on the wrong side fighting against them.

Supper in Emmaus. Paolo Veronese. c.1559

Historically Christians treated their children as Christians. Just like how Jews treated their children as Jews, Americans treat their kids as Americans, and the Smiths treat their children as Smiths. That’s just common sense. You don’t choose your country or your gender or your family. But we are fine with our Children choosing inhumanity, being connected back into the Matrix, because it preserves our notion of free will. And so we have sacrificed our children on this alter for the past few generations. We perpetuate the insane idea that every generation rebells, it’s just how it is, so go with it. We will cast out some nets and see if we can’t catch a few as they wash down the gutter into the sewer. They might have some sensational conversion stories. Well that is one way to reproduce. But it doesn’t make much sense, and it betrays that we worship James Dean and Steve McQueen, and not Jesus the Messiah.

It seems to me that Halloween gets more disturbing every year. It seems to manifest the typical degeneration of our culture which is all around us these days. When I was a kid no one’s parents dressed up for Halloween. It was something fun for kids, but then the kids grew up. Perhaps this is just a further proof of how people no longer grow up, they just get bigger. There were no yards decorated with lavish sick and twisted displays of the undead, by the brain dead. There were no office Halloween parties, nor a month of celebration. But now each of these things is common. It’s almost as big as Christmas. It’s one last excuse to dress up like a themed prostitute, before winter. It’s a big deal. And I don’t think it means nothing.

I suppose people and even Christians will say it’s all in good fun. Let’s say we ignore the police statistics and take them at their word. It is quite true that it could all be in good fun. I was reading C. S. Lewis recently and he said that given the ease with which God can turn evil into good or Satan can turn good into evil, he isn’t so sure that the origin of things means much. It should be no surprise that Christian Holidays were once pagan holidays, because most Christians were once pagans. Christians are often accused of destroying the Classical world, when in reality they are the ones who preserved the works of Plato, Aristotle, and dozens of others for us today. They took the works of those philosophers and they made it Christian, as they did with all of ancient culture. Then they out Romed Rome, they became more ideal citizens than the Romans ever imagined. They baptized the Greco-Roman world and made it Christian. They used the observed planets and their connections with the Roman Gods and created rich characters each with their own themes and motifs; Apollo, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Sol. But you probably know them better as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Yes even the days of our week were once pagan deities, but hardly anyone even knows that anymore. And I don’t think it really matters, they have become Christian in the general sense. This is the work of the Middle Ages.

The case can be made that Christmas intentionally took over the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. But who cares? It is obviously now a Christian holiday. The pagan trees or the timing have been given Christian meaning. They were sanctified just like many non-Christians were baptized, and became Christians. Besides, where did the pagans get it in the first place? Often we give evil too much credit. Evil is not creative, it’s destructive and contrary. Most real innovations on this planet can be trace back to Israel in Egypt or Babylon or to Christianity. We must remember that we all descended from Adam and then Noah. All paganism then, is merely a corruption of the true relationship between God and men which Noah and his sons understood. There are many threads of this wisdom that we know nothing of. Methuselah could have know Noah, and he had lived almost a thousand years. The unknown wisdom they had of the workings of God and his world, was passed down through oral tradition from Adam. It includes all sorts of things we can only imagine. Many of the pagan mythologies contain seeds of truth, twisted into paganism. Christians twisted it back and added the Gospel.

Halloween is one of these holidays. Originally the last night of October was the last night of the year in the Celtic calendar. It consisted of the usual pagan rituals. But Christians baptized it into ‘All Hallows Eve’ or “Eve of All Saints”. It was a night to remember the dead, the saints who had passed along. But today it’s being twisted back. Our culture is again becoming pagan. We are forsaking the One True God, the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, the Father of Jesus the Christ, and so it shows in our worship, that is our ho—ly days. We have forsaken God’s prescription for relation between the sexes, we are obsessed with porn, so we love being any excuse to parade our women around in their underwear. Trick or treat? How about some sanctioned destruction? And what makes destruction more fun than another excuse to get plastered? About the only part we do object to is the infusion of sugar. Because like every pagan religion, the rules about food abound. When you reject the freedom of God, you are left making arbitrary rules. We call our rule ’science’ and our priests ‘scientists’ but the results are the same, superstitions about everything you eat, or don’t eat.

Le Jour des Morts (All Saints Day). 1859. William Adolphe Bouguereau.

The connections with the occult are obvious and have almost continued unhindered from the days of full fledged paganism. We take this for granted these days because supernatural evil activity is rare. That’s because we enjoy Christendom. It’s no surprise that Jesus encountered demonic activity so often in first-century Israel. The Gospel writers were deliberately pointing out that Israel was rife with evil. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, they were ripe for destruction, because of their rampant evil. Jesus gave them one last opportunity to repent, and many did, but most did not. So, he sent the hands of the Romans to crush Israel and it’s wickedness. We in cozy American today, don’t really know what evil is like. We think it’s cute or a joke. So we play around with it more and more, as we glorify Halloween more and more. But it’s just a sign of the times. No it’s not a sign that the rapture is near and we can just escape to a fluffy cloud. It’s a sign that we are letting the pagans rule Christ’s kingdom. We should wake up and be wise. We should let Christendom direct the modes of our culture and it’s celebrations. Since we are far less wise than the men who set down much of it in the past, we should defer to them. We don’t know what the Gospel is capable of when applied to every area of life, we would do well to follow those to did, even if it doesn’t make sense to us. Don’t celebrate Halloween. Make Sunday the prominent beginning of your week, it’s a feast day a celebration, supper with the Lord, the King. Don’t be sucked into the calendar of your sport, or job or school. Remember the great events of Church history and make those the focal point. Christmas, Easter, Ascension Sunday, Reformation Sunday, Pentecost. Remember that on the 31st of October, 1546 is commemorated the day when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg.

Halloween should be about remembering the saints of the past, many great men who fought and died for the world we enjoy today. Add a Church calendar to your smart phone. Look up the saints for each feast day. Remember. Most of the Christian parts of our culture are becoming lost. If we don’t remember them and bring them back to their vibrant life who will? Who will push the light of the gospel even into the corners of Halloween, and the rest of this world ‘as far as the curse is found’? That is our mandate, to tell the world about their new King, and that they can be his very heirs. To make every inch of this earth a place where people bow to that king. Where his will is welcome as it is in heaven. You don’t do that by signing up with the world and doing things there way. We have the truth of God people. We are the heirs of the King. Act like it.

I often hear Christians and even Christian leaders brush of their involvement in someone else’s life by saying “well, they are an adult, they can make their own choices.” On the whole I think there are very few adults in this time and place, but I don’t think this the correct model of the Church, even were we as wise as Christians once were. I wonder if Christ thought the Pharisees he berated constantly were adults. Was Peter an adult when Jesus called him Satan? (Matthew 16:23) Is the great care in pointing out sin in another person, given to us by Jesus in Matthew 18, for adults? Were the Corinthians adults when Paul told them he was feeding them milk instead of solid food? And on less of a crisis note, when Paul told the Church to meet together and bear one another’s burdens(Galatians 6:1,2) was he speaking to adults? Were any of his letters of exhortation written to adults?

Jews never mix meat with dairy, but in the Church the Old must disciple the Young.

So, we make the adult vs. non-adult division, but Paul uses some different divisions. In I Corinthians, he is addressing division in the Church. The people had divided themselves in warring factions, or sects, or tribes. There was the Apollos camp the Paul camp the Peter camp and even the Jesus camp. The last one is a little odd, and seems to indicate that claiming exclusivity with Christ in argument, is worse than getting along with the whole body.

Paul gives them some better divisions.

1:18 The Perishing vs. Those Being Saved

1:20 God vs. The ‘Wise’ Scribes

1:22 Jews Demanding Signs & Gentiles Demanding Logic vs. Christ Crucified

1:25 The Foolishness of God vs. the Wisdom of Men

1:28 The Low and Despised of God vs. The Chosen of the World

But God chose the foolish and the weak and the low and the despised, for his team.

Then he gets into the division of the mature from the immature.

2:6-8 We Give the Mature Wisdom vs. The Rulers of This Age
The Secret Wisdom of God vs. Wisdom of This Age

2:13 Taught by Logic vs. Taught by the Spirit

2:14,15 Spiritual Man vs. Unspiritual Man

Then Paul gets to his audience and their situation, with one final division Milk vs. Meat. But they are on the wrong side, they are not spiritual men they are infants. We as Christians are to view things differently from the world. Maturity is not about how many years you have been on the planet or whether the government considers you responsible for yourself legally. It’s about drawing these divisions the correct way and then judging which side we should be on. Ironically the main charge agains them is that they have not judged rightly. They are down in the nursery forming cliques. They pride themselves on which branch of doctrine they are following, while they miss the whole point and what is happening on the adult level. It’s about the work of God, not our work choosing the right tribe. It’s about being connected to the body of Christ, about building on the foundation laid by the Apostles. We shouldn’t play the game like the world, boasting about which scholars we understand or claim as our teachers. We shouldn’t take pride in having the most advanced degree from the best schools. That’s child’s play. We are children of the King, we shall inherit the Earth, all of it. It’s ours. So act like it. Act like an adult.

Adults know how to tell good from evil, they get past the gospel and on to good living by it (Hebrews 5:11- 6:3). Paul continues; Don’t tolerate sexual immorality, judge disputes amongst yourselves, don’t be unrighteous; immoral, idolaters, adulterers, homosexuals, thieves, greedy drunkards, revilers, robbers. And live like a free man, everything else is permissible, so go nuts. Except don’t pick up prostitutes.

We like the adult vs. child comparison, because we all want to be hyper individualistic. We fancy ourselves mature adults. We think we have everything under control and we don’t need anyone. We are Americans after all. Later in Chapter 12 Paul speaks of the Church as a body. Our tendency is to join a tribe of eyes, or a club of hands or a league of feet. But instead, we should each do what we do individually, while still being united to the whole. The real whole, the Church catholic, universal, all those denominations we dislike for petty reasons. This is modeled after the character of God, the trinity, he is both three and one. We are not a bunch of autonomous adults, we are each a part of the puzzle, working closely together.

We shouldn’t neglect the small sins or the separation by members of the body, by saying they are an adult and they can fend for themselves. They can’t, you were put there to see what they can’t see, to advise when they need it. I think often we like this individualism because we like our own sin and we don’t want anyone telling us what to do. Or on the other hand we have spoken up in the past only to have our heads ripped off. Listening to wise counsel is not exactly in our cultural DNA. Pastors and leadership can see correction as pointless, because people can just go to another church or start their own. But it’s worth it. Speak up!  How will the less mature ever learn to be more mature without exhortations like those of Paul, without the older adults speaking to the younger?

I’ve heard a lot of comparisons between The Martian and Robinson Crusoe. I understand the juxtaposition between someone shipwrecked and someone stranded on a foreign planet. But the comparisons are very thin and exemplify the fact that no one knows what Robinson Crusoe is really about.

His helmet is cracked just like his theology.

A deserted Mars is a lot like a desert island. But the Mars of the movie is more sterile and desolate, not because it’s so far away from earth, but because it’s so far away from reality, because there is no faith there. Oh sure they throw a crucifix and an almost prayer to whatever gods, but the only god Daemon worships is Science. He prays to Science, does the sacraments of Science (math), and Science saves him, so. . . so he can teach a class on how great man is, I guess. Go Science! Who needs God?

This story is the modern story, the atheist story, it bears more similarities to Verne’s The Mysterious Island than to Daniel Defoe’s work. An Island where the mysteries can all be explained by science. Crusoe’s story is exactly the opposite. The stories of 13th to 19th century seafaring exploration, are Christian stories. Oh sure the Vikings may have discovered North America hundreds of years before Columbus, but who cares? He changed the world. He changed the world for His God. The evidence from his diary is quite clear; he believed he was on a mission from God. It was the great commission that spurred him to take such a risk and sail beyond the map.

The first great task given to Man on this earth was to rule and subdue it and fill it with people. To turn the garden into a city. But rather than filling the earth and building a heavenly Jerusalem they holed up and build Babel. So God intervened and sent them again to their task. He appointed a special people, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They were to be a priestly people spreading God’s blessing to all the earth. Instead they holed up in another city Jerusalem, on the Temple Mount, their robbers den. They thought it was the Heavenly Jerusalem, but again they only created another Babel.

Then Jesus stepped on the scene. He condemned this city and again set his people, now the Church to their task, spreading the Gospel to all the world. It is no accident that he chose fishermen. The people of Israel saw themselves as people of the covenant, the deed to the Land. They were not a seafaring people, they were people of the Land. What’s out there? We are the chosen people, we don’t even need a rapture, we just sit back comfy and watch the world burn, comfy in the promises of God. But the new commission, demanded sea exploration. His disciples were fishers of men, on the sea, which was always associated with the Gentiles. And so that mission extended to the great explorers who carried the Gospel to the far reaches of this earth via the vast oceans.

This was the sea Robinson Crusoe sailed on. Of course the mission was not without it’s faults, as anything good. He found himself on a slave ship sailing to his plantation, when God reached down and crashed his ship on a desert island. Again the hand of God sets man on the correct path. Through this testing Crusoe, studies the Bible he finds amongst the wreckage and becomes a true Christian. He now has hope and a purpose. Not merely to survive and prove the veracity of the human will, nor to vindicate Science. He turns his wilderness his garden, into a city. Then he goes into the world and spreads the Gospel to the savage, whose new name is Friday. This is life on a desert Island, the life missing from Ridley Scott’s Martian soil.

Crusoe’s story is a microcosm of the great expansion of Western Civilization as it spread that civilization to the savages of the world. It wasn’t always pretty, many of them rebelled rejecting Jesus and his saving grace they chose to remain in darkness. Oh to our shame how we romanticize them today. And out of this fulfillment to fill, multiply, spread, rule, subdue, and preach came the very science which modern man now worships.

In the movie the whole world is united in rescuing this astronaut. The utopia portrayed is astoundingly naieve. Crowds gather in the streets to watch on giant screens as the astronaut is reconnected with his companions and brought back to earth. The reality is that the worship of Science separates people more than it ever brings them together. We each think we are the Daemon superman who can control every aspect of creation with our mastery of Science, we don’t need other people or God. Besides why gather in the streets to watch something that I can watch by myself on my iPhone? Large groups of godless people are more likely to burn and destroy than they are to cheer for a lost astronaut. Or perhaps they will be blown to bits by terrorists. Which brings us to the reality of paganism. Like the cannibals on Crusoe’s island, or the Muhammedan terrorists, life outside of Christianity is death. Kill or be killed, the rule by force. There is no democracy, or civilization and especially no science. There is tribal warfare and the worship of death.

The rule of the game, created by God, goes like this: you become like what you worship. A people with no god and no purpose don’t take risks, what’s the point? If you just worship man, then Darwin was correct, it’s about evolution and things happening by chance, just randomly getting better. We exist to exist. Then Hitler was right we should help evolution along by killing undesirables so that the more advanced man can continue to evolve. And then the point of space travel is simply to perpetuate ourselves for the sake of perpetuating ourselves. Oh and because we are destroying the planet with cars. Which is only bad because our priests, the scientists, and their computer models say it will stop things going on as they supposedly always have.

On the other hand the worship of the true God, led us to explore the seas. Jesus told us to go into all the world, so we did. The God of scripture is constant and faithful, he told us he speaks to us in nature, so we decided to study his faithfulness and we called it the scientific method. He taught us to live at peace with one another and so we had time for science and the arts and literature. Christians took the culture of paganism and baptized it and created the beautiful Medieval model of the cosmos. Rich themes of Mars and Venus and Apollo. Which we still use today though we have forgotten their meaning. Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to the moon. On Christmas Eve 1968 the astronauts aboard could not help but feel closer to God as they saw what no man had ever seen. Their earth from the moon. They read from Genesis “In the Beginning God created the heavens and the Earth. . .” They proclaimed the Word of God from the heavens. Later in Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin took communion on the surface of the moon. This is the reality of men when confronted with awe inspiring beauty of space travel. This is what men do when confronted with their own insignificance, and the possibility of imminent death. You don’t play around with the worship of man, and his abilities, you fall on your face as Crusoe did, you repent of what you have done and you give your life to the service of Jesus the Christ. You join his mission, and you rush out to tell others to proclaim the glory of his work from distant mountains or distant planets. Ridley Scotts Martian is simply a cold dead rock, he is nothing but a pirate pillaging Christianity to make his story watchable, while giving men another excuse to ignore Jesus the Christ, and focus on themselves.