I wanted to say a few things about Interstellar that are worth thinking about, but I don’t think the movie is necessary.  It was ok, but my purpose here is not to promote it, just critique. We should think about everything around us. So, I am going to ‘spoil’ the plot.  I happen to think that if plot giveaways ruin a book or a movie, then it wasn’t that good to begin with.  Modern movies are all about plot, instead of about the complex themes, messages or beauty of the expression.  Good art is that which can be read and reread, watched and watched again, studied.

I’m not sure if it’s the level of technology or studio competition, but movies tend to travel in packs.  This is one of the, floating around in space pack, including Oblivion or Gravity.  I don’t think the cinematography was particularly beautiful, nor the special effects unique.  But they were seamless tools in delivering the experience, which is good.  The purpose of Art being to conceal itself as Ovid said.  I found that, yes I do want to watch Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway float around in space for three hours.  It seemed like only two.  I liked the use of the robots as unremarkable square blocks, they were then not characters but merely useful computers.

The scene is earth in the near future where a form of blight, or plant infection, has killed all the food crops.  They are down to corn, and that seems to be dwindling.  Mankind has given up “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars¹. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.[2.  This reminds me of a similar quote by C. S. Lewis, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses
]” Says Coop, the hero of the movie. We are introduced to the professional government school teacher criticizing Coop for confusing his daughter with false narratives about man landing on the moon.  Those in the know, know that the space program was faked to make the Soviets waste a bunch of money, so we could win the cold war. This is a scene that takes place over and over in the real world.  The professionals know how to raise your kids better than you do, even as they lie about recent and distant history, ostensibly to promote a more better, Godless, way for mankind.  My first problem is here.  Coop is the modern American hero in many ways, not the hero of todays’ feminist tyrannical universities and culture but that of our grandparents.  He is an engineer, with dreams that exceed his grasp, he works hard and smart and takes risks, to explore the frontier, to conquer any problem with science.

But even this is a rewriting as offensive as saying the space program didn’t happen.  It didn’t just happen, and it wasn’t just an achievement of freedom or democracy or science that went to the moon.  It was the height of Christianity that went to the moon.  Just as it was Christianity that sailed the ocean in 1492.  Muhammedans didn’t discover science, they didn’t seek to set the whole world right because it was not in their religion.  Muhammed was a tribal warlord.  He told his people that god has promised him the defeat of all of his enemies in battle.  And so the people set about attacking all the other tribes.  They still do it today. And the fact that they have not been successful in battle for  a couple hundred years, has led them to teenage terrorist angst.  Something is wrong, and instead of ditching their false religion, they lash out like a rebellious teen who was never taught to properly control his urges.

Christianity on the other hand is a message of self sacrifice, leading to the total redemption of the whole earth.  We follow Christ by laying down our life for the lives of those in our midst, in our town and out on the frontier.  This is why Christians have always produced explorers and missionaries, the two were often one.  Christianity produced explorers of science, because we believe in a faithful God of fixed rules and order.  Yet he is not a standoffish God, he participates with man in bringing about his ends.  We are not fatally trapped in our position, we can make things better.  We can build and develop all for the glory of God.  Christendom lost a bit of this spirit, in the high church 15th century, but the Reformation brought about a great revival.  Every profession is good, because it is for the glory of God.  The humility required to always be embracing new technology, new ideas, is a requisite for or modern conveniences.  It takes a Christian humble people to found and build the America that even the most staunch atheist has to admit is a very comfy place.  We can’t really expect this much from Hollywood, when the Church today doesn’t even get it.  There really is no excuse it is the most obvious fact of history.  But we have been sitting in classrooms, like the one in the movie, for far too many generations. Classrooms where history is twisted to meet pragmatic, functional, darwinian ends, rather than to tell the truth of what God has done on this earth.  We want scientific robots rather than moral men with character.

Hi my name is Dr. Michael Mann, I like long walks on the ice, falsifying data and suing people who disagree with me.

But to this function, the movie actually speaks rightly.  The people content with living in the dirt, seem to have given up all hope and wait to die.  While another group of scientists, seek to save humanity, yet only for functional reasons.  They are NASA going underground to hide their research from the farmers [3. The allusion to the conflict between the passive farmer and the NASA scientist, is not meaningless.  On July 20, 1969, NASA sent the first man to the moon, a month later the hippies rolled around in the mud of Woodstock.  Ever since there has been a battle and the hippie losers of Woodstock have mostly won.  Today they are the political leaders filling Washington, the professors filling our universities, and the producers filling Hollywood.  As such we don’t rule and subdue the earth, we don’t innovate, we languish in the mud of government bureaucracy, held back by Dr. Mann and his dope-smoking band of godless environmentalists.  We don’t bravely conquer new problems that arise, we cower and hold back other nations from the progress we made, “for the earth”.  ].  The villain of the movie is Dr. Mann.  He is willing to throw out any morals, and even abandon his fellow NASA pioneers, ‘for the good of humanity’ i.e. saving his own skin.  This picture is truly hilarious.  Dr Mann, is of course a mockery of Michael Mann, global warming alarmist and creator of the computer-predicted hockey stick graph.  Those familiar with Mark Steyn know this nut is currently suing Steyn, for mocking his hockey stick.  I love how the movies sets up Dr. Mann, as a very small man, alone on his ice cube of a planet, falsifying the data he sends back to earth, claiming his planet is livable, warmer than it actually is, to save his butt.  In a bid to get them to come and save him.  He is a coward and a liar.  I am not sure how they got Matt Daemon to play Mann since he is definitely in the church of global warming.  It truly brings one great satisfaction to see Daemon mock himself and the foolishness of global warming.

Also the Nolans were careful to point out that the blight on the earth was not the result of man’s activities or waste or not listening to Algore/Mann.  It was just the earth battling or expelling mankind.  Which is a bit like reality.  The earth was cursed, whether just the earth or dirt that made Adam or the whole earth is a little unclear in Genesis.  But Christians have generally seen the earth as capable of evil. Though there is a line in the movie about how nature is not evil, the only evil is what they bring with them.  But the punishment for animals that take human life in Scripture leads me to believe that nature is corrupted.  Though we as humans do have the unique ability to disobey God, to be evil.  We are the one silent planet, the rebellious planet, in the great symphony of God’s creation.

But the Interstellar replacement for the cold hard scientific religion of existing to exist, isn’t much deeper than the pop song version of ‘love’.  Love which seems to be the emotion of liking someone, crosses all galaxies and dimensions. I’m not sure how you live in a purely physical world lacking anything metaphysical, with no God, and still have a love that trancends, but that seems to be the new goal, to create that world.  And so the film leaves me with the feeling that all is not quite right, in this imaginary world.  Having travelled into the worlds created by the classics of Christendom, I was left with a strange taste in my mouth. I even find the Matrix more satisfying.  If the best we can do is this lame version of love, I’m not celebrating.  We can do much better, humanity has, and our culture has been systematically throwing out all those lessons, all that Christianity, rather than building on it.

Many recent apocalyptic movies portray a notion that is quite common today, that we must leave this earth and find another home.  Because we are going to destroy this planet or because it’s part of evolution.  This even seems to be the motivation of NASA these days, to colonize Mars.  This is all crazy.  There is some of this in the movie but it comes closer to reality than other movies.  Humanity is saved, rather than just moving to another planet, they move to small earths or space stations around the same sun.  But it still lacks the imagery of Scripture, it is this earth that man is called to rule.  Sure we can destroy some things, but it is arrogance to assume we can destroy the earth.  We are not a virus who sailed across the Atlantic to destroy the native perfection.  Our promise in Scripture has always been a glorified earth where Christ reigns.  The future for Christians it to bring about a renewal of every corner of this broken earth. And so Christians have done this, so successfully that most people take all these blessing for granted.  Now they have started in criticizing the past for not being as good as what Christianity did.  Of course there is nothing wrong with exploring the moon, or mars. And so in the movie both happen, the people of earth are saved and an outpost is set up on a far away planet.  But living by the false narratives, the false religions of scientism, or insipid ‘love’, is going to be about as successful as those tribal Muhammedans.

Why go to the moon or spread the gospel when you can have an orgy in the mud?

1. I think the endless wondering is because we have been set adrift from our Christian heritage. We content ourselves with movies composed of explosions and fights, but no content.  We content ourselves with entertainment rather than a quest for a better, more Christian world. We content ourself with lame stories, when Christendom has given us so many wonderful moral stories.  The Medieval man knew his place, on Earth, center stage in the drama of God.  Man the height of creation, but also the center of sin.  Today, we just float around in postmodern hyper-individual, confusion. [↩]

We in Montana know something about being occupied by a foreign government.  We are a conservative Republican state with a Democrat governor.  Oh sure he pretends he’s from Montana and has our best interest at heart.  But confiscatory taxes keep rising, and freedoms keep shrinking. The reality is that he is stuck between following orders from Rome, um, I mean Washington, and trying to still maintain favor with the people.  It seems that there are daily reminders as life continues to grow worse and worse, that we are not truly free.  Large bureaucracies thousands of miles away tell us what we can do with our land, our children and even our churches.  We have seen deliverers before.  There was Reagan only a few decades ago, who rescued us from Jimmy Herod Carter.  But soon the tyranny returned under another name.  If only someone would come and rescue us.  And so was the situation at the time Jesus walked this earth.  The Herods, ruled like the Clintons and the list of mysterious dead enemies was about the same length.  Unlike the Obama’s, Herod would never tell your kids what to eat, or which doctor you could see.  In the recent election many people put their hope in Republican, politicians.  Oh, “Steve Daines, random business man, with no personality, tepid faith and an unremarkable record, is the Messiah!”  I think I heard them chant.

Added to this the Jewish people, were only a people because they were united by a promise.  A promise of a Messiah, who would rescue them from bondage.  Who would come and destroy the unfaithful, those outside the family of God.  Their Ronald Reagan was Judas Maccabees (Ironic that another Judas would be forever remembered as the betrayer.).  He had thrown off the Selucid rulers, and won the right to freely practice temple worship, for the nation of Israel.  It is for this temple rededication, that the eight candles of Hanukkah burn (Again, ironic that Jesus destroyed that temple when he returned again in 70A.D.).  Judas had done his great work only about 200 years prior.  Which is similar to how we remember the exploits of George Washington.  Well unless we went to Government school, in which case we remember some Indian tribe that the Indians, I mean, native people don’t even remember, when they–native.

Then John the Baptist bursts on the scene.  Followed shortly by Jesus.  He seemed to fit all the qualifications for the Messiah, and then some.  I was struck by the phrase in Mark 7:37 “He has done all things well; he even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”. . .”let’s bag him.”  This is the guy let’s make him king.  John 6:14,15 “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!”  Let’s send this guy to Washington he will fix everything.  “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” As Barack the Obama might say.  Politics these days have extended a little beyond everyday needs, as some insane politicians promise to stop global warming and bring back extinct species from the dead.  Yet Jesus had something better in mind.  He was going to not only conquer Herod and the Roman Empire, he was here to conquer death.  Man’s final enemy.  “O death, where is your sting?”  And no this is not accomplished by sequestering CO2 emissions or colonizing Mars, it’s done by dying.

Repeatedly Jesus told people, whom he had healed, not to tell anyone, because the mob was waiting at almost any time to seize him and make him king.  This was the political reality.  In reading through Mark you can’t help but notice the repeated statement.  They weren’t allowed to tell the story, because they didn’t know the whole story.  They just knew about magnanimous healings, or provided food. And that part of the story they misunderstood, they only saw the perfect earthly, political savior.  But the story continued, this Messiah, went to Jerusalem, like a conquering king.  The people cheered, this was their savior.  And then he was killed.  What a downer.  Everyone fled, even his disciples.  What the heck is going on?  This can’t be right, and we get to follow Peter as he misunderstands it too. What a contrast, after just proclaiming Jesus as the Christ, he proves he doesn’t know what the Christ was to be.  Jesus rebukes him “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the plan of God, but on the plan of men.(Mark 8:33)”  This guy was the savior of the world.  “Truly this man was the Son of God.”  It took a Gentile soldier to say it.  He died all right, but then he rose from the dead.  He appeared to hundreds of people, it was beyond a doubt.  The story was now complete, and so Mark tells it. He dramatically ends his gospel of the lion, no longer with, “don’t tell anyone” but with “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.”

Christ Enthroned. Surrounded by the four Gospels., Stained Glass, Christ Church Cathedral. Oxford, England.

You have to make sure you tell the whole story.  Jesus tells people to consider the cost, before you decide to follow him.  You don’t just latch on to the healing or the free food, it’s not about receiving.  It’s about giving, giving your entire life.  He who would gain his life must lose it.  Do you want to enter the Kingdom and take your place beside your King?  Then you must live selflessly. And so the early Church did just that.  They cared for one another, and the poor, and the widows, and the sick.  And they conquered Rome.   Then they conquered the world.  Yet somehow we forget all this and put our faith in politicians.  We like having important things happen miles away, then we don’t have any responsibility, yet we can still complain all the time.  “It’s not my fault, I voted for the other guy.”  But it is our fault, especially the Church.  We are the light of the world.  We should know how this works.

We haven’t been living selflessly.  We climb over each other like rats trying to get as much as we can.  Then when one of the rats gets to the top we send him to Washington as if that is going to fix anything.  We throw away children when it is convenient.  We feed our pleasures, sexual, culinary, monetary, influential, and then wonder why God does not bless our nation.  We are worse off than the people who didn’t know better.  II Peter 2:21.  We must fall on our faces and repent, and go a different way, the way of self sacrifice.  Leaders are not the ones who scramble to the top by riding the wave of State surplus, and mediocre tech money to notoriety.  Leaders are the ones who would rather do something else but are called upon to do their duty, to serve.  The ideal king in Scripture is the one who sacrifices for his people.  He is not a dictator.  He is Jesus.

The only notable thing about Europe these days is that Christians used to live there.  “You didn’t build that,” we might say.  And the same thing is becoming true in America.  So with the great joy at rediscovering the forgotten treasures they left behind, there is also the weight of sadness that it was so easily cast aside.  Fortunately those great men built such a rich and durable culture, it has taken us a long time to destroy it.  It is never to late to repent.  Like Josiah rediscovering the scrolls of the law, there was great joy, but the king tore his clothes, because he knew they deserved judgement for their apostasy.  But they reformed nonetheless knowing that our God is compassionate.  So it should be with us.

Bramer_Leonaert_The_Scribe_Shaphan_Reading_The_Book_Of_Law_To_King_Josiah

Oh we live in a time of so much opportunity.  I can do my work all day and have people read the great classics of Christendom to me, all for free.  So I was blown away this week as I began to listen to the Count of Monte Cristo.  If you have heard of the book at all you were probably taught that it is all about revenge, this is the overwhelming theme of all the movies I have seen (Interesting that the actor who plays the count in the latest movie also played Christ in the Passion).  Wikipedia and other sources only speak of revenge.  Woe to the men who perpetrate this lie, they will receive their millstones (Matthew 18:6).

The New Testament brings about great changes in God’s relationship with his people.  One of these is in the area of the arts.  In the Old Testament many of the arts represented paganism and were forbidden.  “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” –Exodus 20:4.  Art, was idols.  We do see Solomon adorning his temple with cherubs, pomegranets, and palms.  So it was with their literature, which centered mostly around commenting on the law, or poems of praise.  So it was with the art of Christendom, but in a different way.  The floors of churches were now covered with mosaics of animals, while the synagogue had featured only geometric patterns.  Christianity took the implements of paganism, and baptized them for the glory of God.  It was a tremendous victory.  And it extended to all the arts.

Jesus unlocked a different way of looking at the Old Testament.  He read the same words as the Jewish people had done, but he read them differently, he fulfilled them to the letter but in a way no one had expected.  This shift or double meaning, opened up a whole new world of literature.  No longer did Christians merely comment on the Law of God, they mimicked it.  As with the parables of Jesus, stories could teach, they could also hide.  The truth of the Old Testament had been hidden.  Jesus revealed it by writing the new story of his life to fulfill it, to change the meaning.  It is no wonder that the Church began to have  an affinity for allegory.  The New Testament writers followed the lead of Jesus and began finding rich comparisons in the stories of the Old Testament.  Sure they were the actual historical accounts of what happened to the great patriarchs but they were also images, themes that could be applied today.  And so they applied them.  Rich art traditions formed around these characters and those of the New Testament, literature, art, sculpture, architecture, music.

One of the most popular books of all time, second only to the Bible, is Pilgrim’s Progress.  A blatant allegory written by the vibrant Puritan, John Bunyan.   But many men wove the themes of their Faith into more subtle tapestries.  These threads connected from work to work, building and building, and then the weaving went dormant as the modern age set fire to the past with it’s coal furnaces of industry.  I discovered this week the Count of Monte Cristo, as Jesus the Christ.  The Count of the Mountain of Christ, it should be obvious.  And so it was after less than a quarter of the book.  The blind can see only revenge in the book, just as they think Christianity is only about rules and a cruel judgemental God.

The words of the Gospel are, true, they should not be changed or twisted.  But they are not dead.  As they create new stories in the lives of each saint, they can also create rich stories in the minds of great writers, sub-creators, as Tolkien calls them.  The Gospel can be told in new and creative ways, as the arts are explored, and discovered.  These other worlds can knock down our biases and give us perspective on our world. What a wonderful world has been given to us.

It really would not do justice to try to summarize the rich story, read it, listen to it for yourself.  But, it is so incredible having the Gospel story retold, as if it were the first time.  Far better than a hundred sermons.  Each man is judged, but it is not revenge, each chooses his path himself, just as on this earth.  The treatment of Edmund is either rewarded or punished, just as the treatment of our Lord.  No cup of water given to his disciples, for his sake, will be forgotten (Mark 9:41).  Each story of each man is a gambit, they are given even another chance.  They could repent, and be blessed or heap judgement upon themselves.  We often forget the end of the gospel, the return of our Lord.  But that is the gospel too.  It is the Justice, which we, the faithful servants of Jesus, thirst for (Matthew 5:6).  And the Christ will come and set it all right.  Our sense of justice is not misplaced it is only not yet realized.  But it shall be one day.  The Count will return.  The Innocent shall be set free, and blessed to party with the count in his bejeweled luxury.  The guilty shall be left to destroy themselves, in utter darkness.

Read:  http://www.amazon.com/Count-Monte-Cristo-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140449264/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414862143&sr=1-1&keywords=count+of+monte+cristo

Listen:  https://librivox.org/the-count-of-monte-cristo-version-3-by-alexandre-dumas/

And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother. ’” And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing:go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.  Mark 10:17-22

We find it strange that a man could stand before Jesus and tell him that he had kept the entire law.  But we could do the same.  It is completely possible for someone to stand before a judge and say they have committed no crime.  The Old Testament Law did not demand perfection, in fact it assumed imperfection Matthew 19:8.  People sin, but there was a remedy, you pay a penalty, or give your life, or offer a sacrifice, or move to a city of refuge.  This is justice.

Allegory of Wisdom and Justice. Herman Kaulbach. 1888. Oil on Canvas.

Today no one knows what justice is.  There is a term ‘social justice’ going around that sounds very good, but it is not justice, it’s really just marxism.  In addition we have convinced ourselves that because vengance belongs to God, that justice does too.  We think that exercising justice is somehow mean and unloving.  Our eschatology has us convinced that things will only get worse and we shouldn’t expect the world to live up to any standard, so we almost glory in the lack of justice.  In short, we have a big, mess starting with the unbiblical Church.

Like most of our problems these days, this one is self inflicted.  Christianity developed a very complex understanding of justice and how to apply it, but we just threw it out.  As C. S. Lewis said, if you are going the wrong way then the first steps of progress are to regress.  The solution is to go back and pick up where they went wrong.

Of course the church should be an instrument of justice.  From Matthew 18 we learn that the recourse of the church is excommunication.  It is a type of death, for what part of the body can live without the body?  This is Church Justice, which should be carefully deliberated.  The procedure is laid out, and the goal is to gain a brother.  The goal is to prevent sin.  The decisions, the judgements, of the church aren’t just some game we play here until heaven.  What is bound on earth is bound in heaven vs. 18:18.  What we do here matters eternally.

And it is not just issues of blatant sin and excommunication that the Church is to deal with.  Paul criticizes the people of Corinth for taking their cases before the civil magistrate.  The Church has the wisdom of God and you are letting the world decide?  I Corinthians 6.  Ideally even if you have something against someone, just drop it, but we know that doesn’t always work. We are sinful, we get into disputes and they should be resolved before the church.

But there is more.  In Romans 13 God tells us he appointed the civil magistrates to stem evil as well.  The state is his minister for justice.  Not because they are of the world but because they are a government appointed by God.  It’s not some secular operation that Christians are not allowed to participate in.  It is an institution like the familiy that God has set up for the good of humanity, even unsaved humanity, it is a blessing.  We are part of the family of God does that mean we can’t have families on this earth? We have one foot in heaven and one in earth.  And when Christians do participate in government all the better.  If secular, idol-worshipping states do his will, how much more Christian states, or states made up of lots of Christians?

We have a silly idea that the world is just going to sin and our job is to just get people saved.  It’s all or nothing.

Understand this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.  –I Timothy 1:9-11

It is the, fool, the one who rejects god that must be governed by the law.  The Christian, should govern himself.  It is the world which is held in check by the government.

In the New Testament you have a new thing?  We see the beginning of the Church.  A small persecuted Church is different from a large group of Christians governing themselves, with no secular power.  And given the mission of the Church to preach to all peoples, this was bound to happen.  This was a good thing.  And so Christians had to figure out how to run a state like Christians.  The Gospel speaks to this, as it does all things and generations of Christians struggled to work it out.  Of course it wasn’t perfect.  But we in America stand on the shoulders of these great men who did figure out a lot of things, things we choose to forget.  We chose to throw it away for silly ideas, which are clearly not working.

We often speak of things as a ‘language’ besides our common tongue.  Computer languages, or coding, or languages of love or art or design.  But unfortunately in the dismal state of our education we often miss the basics of actual language.  Our spoken or written language is capable of a lot more than many people are aware of.  Language can be like a code where there is extra meaning than what you see on the surface.  Language can say half a dozen things with a single line, all legitimate and all intended.  Those who speak or write language may even convey more meaning than they intended.  Not just by making errors but by communicating rightly.  Borrowed phrases may have more meaning than they even knew.  There may be more senses than they were aware of when they used a single sense, and yet the unintended adds richness, which is legitimate.

We are all moderns in our way of speech.  We were all raised under modernism, despite the rebellion of post-modernism in some areas.  Modernism was born as a result of science, or the worship of science.  We began to appreciate what disciplined, careful, technical study could bring us, fabulous machines that could make life on this earth easier.  So, we began treating everything like a machine, persons, groups of people, social relationships, religion, and language.  C. S. Lewis always makes a connection between magic and science.  Because really the desire is the same.  The old magicians wanted to control this world just like the modern scientists.  By doing this we thought we were doing something better.  But like all false worship it leads to disaster.  Christendom forgot it’s worship of Jesus the Word, and began to worship it’s own achievements, and whatever ‘worked’ now became good.  We thought that language that was more and more technical and more and more precise was better, it works in the lab.  Unfortunately we are not machines, fortunately we are not machines.

While the goal of most pre-modern education was to teach people how to read, today we don’t know how to read.  We were taught a strange combination of finding whatever we want in the text and being nit pickers about spelling and grammar.  But we are missing out on all the fun, we are missing out on all the meaning.  The nature of language is poetic.  Words are not words, they are symbols for words.  The word ‘house’ is not a house, it is a metaphor, those five roman characters conjure up meaning.  The images brought to the mind of every person may  be different but each is still be the literal meaning of house.  But each connection is a metaphor, that’s just how it works.  We don’t really know how, and inquisitions into it have tended to actually make us know less.  This is deconstruction.

Texts may be like computer code in the way they create images in the minds of the hearers.  We are very ill trained in understanding current texts.  Old, or ancient readings in reading texts require even more work and practice.  The most honest approach is to try to put ourselves in the place of the hearers.  It requires great imagination, or charity to see the world as they did.  Humbly removing our selves from the equation.  When you practice doing this, and really love it, it really opens things up in an incredible way.  So many levels, so much meaning.

I was so struck by the larger picture of chapters six, seven and eight of Mark’s gospel.  The Disciples have been in our shoes.  Before they were the foundation stones, upon which the whole church is build (Ephesians 2:20), they were clueless.  They portray themselves as clueless often, leading further credence to the truth of their story. Those blunt words which Jesus often uttered, he says again in Mark 8: 21 “You still don’t understand?”  These are words not even allowed between teacher and student these days, but Jesus the great teacher found them appropriate.  And he was right, he did get through to them.  After the resurrection, they put it all together.  We can see it in the way Mark put his gospel together.  It might not be the exact order of events with every minute detail of everything Jesus did or said. But it is a path for others to follow, bread crumbs.

Jesus sends out the disciples in 6:7 and he tells them not to take any bread.  They made a huge raucous, even King Herod heard about it.  Then they find themselves in the country with thousands of people and no food.  Jesus leads his flocks to green grass and feeds them, bread, with twelve baskets left over.  Bread for the twelve tribes, he is here to feed Israel.   Then he gets into a fight with the religious leaders who think his disciples are eating their bread incorrectly.  Jesus rebukes them “What goes into a man is not what defiles him but what comes from his heart is what defiles him.”  We are working on a different level here, and his disciples still don’t get it.  But he keeps working on them.  Then a gentile woman comes to him begging for crumbs, begging for her daughter to be healed.  Jesus heals her daughter.  Then again he and his disciples were out in the wilderness with a great crowd and no food. Jesus again feeds them, bread, this time with seven baskets left over.  A number or a sign of completeness, he had fed the Gentiles, as the woman requested, he fed the whole world in completeness.  Then the stark contrast as the religious leaders beg for a sign.  He has given them more signs than they could possibly understand.  They are blind, their sin has blinded them, to the bread of life standing before them.  And the poor disciples don’t demand a sign they don’t even seem to know they should be looking for one. “We don’t have any bread” never have truer words been spoken, they don’t have any bread even though he is right there.   After all that, a conversation on another topic spurs them to worry about bread!  They have all the bread they could ever wish for, did they miss the signs too?  They have the bread of life.  They don’t need to worry about their physical well being. Who cares?  All they need is Jesus.  They don’t need the rules of the Pharisees or the diligent preparation of packing a lunch, they need Jesus.  This man recreates with his hands and they are afraid of going hungry.  Worse they are afraid he is worried about going hungry and upset at them for not being prepared.  They are prepared, they have Jesus.  Again Jesus is more concerned about them, than himself.  He teaches them,  ever so bluntly “Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember”.  Jesus recaps the story, Mark learned well.

Do we learn?  It is easy to get caught up in the details, focusing on how Jesus changed dietary laws, focusing on how bad the Pharisees were, focusing on how incredible Jesus’ miracles were.  But the point is we need Jesus.  He is the bread of life and we can trust him to provide for our needs.  He offers the bread of his very Words.  They remake what is wrong with the world.  They help us to do the same.  We ignore them at our own peril.  And ignoring them is very easy to do. Jesus wanted to teach them to be careful about the Pharisees, they are still stuck back on square one, trusting Jesus.  We can do the same thing focusing on all the false teachers instead of clinging to the bread of life.  Rely on Jesus and then you can work your way up to diciphering false teachers.

So many movies so little time, so I only went to one.  And even going late I was treated to so many previews as to forget what movie I actually went to.  Let’s see, maybe you can help me.  One movie was about the redemption of a small part of God’s earth.  It involved reconciliation with family, a willingness to repent and go a different way.  It involved reconciliation with one’s community, coming to love all the things that pride had led you to hate.  It was about facing difficulties, that you turned tail and ran away from in the past.  It was about swallowing your pride and entering a place of brokenness.  Brokenness discovered in the pursuit of justice, and debts paid, instead of the pursuit of money.  Justice was served, the debt was paid and a small corner of this world and a man’s soul were redeemed.  It was not perfect, but the common man was vindicated in his humble position, and loved.

The other movie was, about a fantastic escape from the problems of this world.  Certain special people are whisked away from all that ails them only to leave total disaster in their wake.  Responsibility was shunned on a huge scale and every thread of the civil fabric was torn.  But who cares if everything burns, I’m going on eternal vacation.  But one man, will maintain sanity, and save the world, or at least a few people. So, some people manage to stave off immediate destruction, but thousands more die horrible deaths.  All in vivid fake violence, with slow-mos and everything.

It is amazing how un-Christian Christians can be.  The themes of the gospel are blatant in one movie and completely absent from the other, yet it is praised as being a breakthrough Christian movie.  Gosh we are dumb.  And I love that word, ‘without speech’.  God created by speech, and we show ignorance in silence.  And it’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven”.  Which movie sounds like that?  Jesus says “the meek shall inherit the earth”. So does that mean the scorched earth after everyone is taken away and burned up?  And how meek is it to latch on to this type of doctrine?  Sounds very pretentious to me?  Thank you Lord I am going to be taken up on high so I don’t have to deal with this rabble on this cursed rock.  Oh yeah and matter is also bad, floating in heaven good.  Because no one ever called that a heresy before.  It wasn’t like that was exactly what Plato and his followers believed for 2400 years.  And I’m really apt to devote my life to bringing his will on this earth when I have a magic pass to exempt me from any consequences and it’s all going to burn anyway.  Do not be deceived, we reap what we sow.  If you throw a bar from a lamppost into the narnian soil you reap a lamppost.  What is bound on earth is bound in heaven.  What we do here matters.

But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. -II Peter 3:7

The image of the Earth being burned is not the fire of total destruction, it is the fire of testing the fire of a smelter. The gold and silver will pass the test of fire and be made into crowns for our glory.  The chaff shall burn.

Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.  -I Corinthians 3: 12-15

His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.  -Luke 3:17

Our task is not to hasten the destruction, or advocate the destruction of everything as a sign of eschatological progress. We ought to be holy and godly and the new earth will come.

Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. – II Peter 3:10-13

As you probably already know I am against the modern judge-not movement, I say go for The Judge.

It is unfortunate that pastors always make a big deal about counting people in the Bible.  Oh, they only counted the men, those evil mysoginist cavemen.  But we enlighted futurists count everyone.  We think because someone in China can build cool technology that we are so much better than people in the past.  Meanwhile the social decay around us in every form would lead an honest person to conclude that we have no idea what we are doing and will very shortly wipe ourselves out.

Before modern times, households (Attempting to number families today involves complex calculus, because the families we do have are divided and split and made-up and now you can ‘marry’ your gay cat or even yourself.) or fighting men were numbered and not people.  What business is it of the government how many children or even wives you have?  But today we are fine allowing the government in to do whatever it want’s in our houses, in fact every area of our actual houses is mandated by the government.  And for all the good it has done houses are built worse and worse every year.  And so are social structures.  But we moderns are so much more precise.  And so we have things like the metric system which are very helpful when one wants to quickly measure a room.  Oh it’s 500 centimeters, thanks. I’ll just step it off with my foot here.  Now obviously there are uses for the metric system, like in a lab, but do we really want to turn our families and our governments into a science experiment?  Apparently so, because that is just what we have done.  To the detriment of both.  We now have almost no idea how to raise children or organize governments, problems our forefathers had thoroughly figured out.  Or I should say, they followed the wisdom God laid out for them in scripture.

God set up three realms of government on this earth the family, the church and the state.  In an ideal situation, which is almost what we had at the founding of this country, the church is made up of families and the state is made up of churches.  Fathers are the head of the home, elders and pastors are the head of the church, and monarchs or councils were the head of the state.   This is federalism.  Larger governments made up of smaller governments.   Wisdom led founders to follow this scheme in the arrangement of the state.  The United States Governments was made up of, surprise surprise, united states.  Each state was made up of smaller entities like counties or townships and cities and boroughs.  Most things are decided at the local level and issues that involve more than one locality are dealt with at a higher level. So, most of the power was local.  We see this laid out in Exocus 18 as Jethro advises Moses.  We even see it in Mark 12:17, render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and to God the things which are God’s.  Taxes are Caesars, your children are not.  Military service might be Caesars, church doctrine is not.  Paul discusses these layers in his criticism of the Corinthians in chapter 6, don’t go to the state for matters that you should be able to figure out.  Yet he submitted to the charges against him by Rome.  We can see the pattern in the early church at the council in Acts 15.  For the most part matters were handled in the home unless an appeal to the church was necessary.  And larger problems might require all the churches getting together to decide.

But today we have idealized the individual.  We all have our rights, or so we think.  We misunderstood the concept of ‘equal before the law’, and turned it into ‘the same in every way’.  But the right to vote is not the same as the right to a fair trial.  Voting is not an inalienable right, if it were you would get to vote when you were born.  Voting is about the smaller governments, the families, choosing representatives to represent them in the larger layers of federalism.  So the heads of those families voted.  Single women, you are not a family.  A family is that thing you left when you cut your hair, pierced your face and stomped off to your career in Advanced Feminist Literature of Pre-America  Minorities.  But all this civil rights chatter, which is more about the triumph of tyranny than any one’s rights, has led to every one demanding the right to mess up our republic.  How has it worked out for us?  Well it can all be summed up by Paul’s words to Timothy, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”  In just the last election, Democrats successfully deceived women into believing that the Republicans were waging a “war on women”.  And what we got as a result is less women working, and less work for their husbands and children as well. Not to mention furthering an actual war, or jihad on women in the Middle East.   Such tactics in the past brought us Bill Clinton who single handedly destroyed the lives of countless women, personally, and millions more with the example of his public immorality.  Women vote badly,  in particular single women. Their voting has led the there almost not being any households anymore.  Men no longer do the honorable thing and marry women, no they just sleep with them when the can and take off when any responsibility comes.  Almost fifty percent of first children are born to single mothers.  We are the ones who hate women?

And since women now have all this power, passive though it may be, all of culture is altered.  Politicians, marketers, universities, the media must all be driven by what women want.  And what do women want?  Haha if even they knew.  They want to drug boys for being boys, and ensure that men don’t happen, or so it seems.  And so men don’t happen.  They are leaving colleges in droves, they are leaving the workforce in droves, they are leaving leadership in droves.  Which is why we read things like “the gay lesbian freak show mayor of Houston subpoenas pastor’s sermons”.  This is why we have countless laws about the safety of everything, rules and rules and rules, sounds a lot like your mother, hmm.  Women were created to rule with an iron fist–in the home.  Because this is what children need. This is the most beautiful thing in the world, woman saved by childbearing.  But when she leaves the home

Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it. -G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World

It is difficult to quote a small section of Chesterton because he is making points within points, all of which are very good.  In his day, feminism was newer, or as new as it could be, the battle has always been waged but never so much ground conceded.  There was a discussion about the woman’s right to work in the factory down the road, as some sort of liberation:

But meanwhile do not talk to me about the poor chain-makers on Cradley Heath. I know all about them and what they are doing. They are engaged in a very wide-spread and flourishing industry of the present age. They are making chains.

And so slavery. For you see, following the rules prescribed by scripture, is liberation.  If it sounds weird it is only our lack of faith speaking.  Or for a people as blessed as we are, with unparalleled access to history, lack of research.  God’s rules actually work.  This is what Chesterton wants this is what I want.  This is the God of the universe desiring his children to accept his blessings rather than playing in the mud.  If you want freedom follow the crazy men foolish enough to dress up and paint their faces for battle, and fight for it, as they fight their wives in the paradox of marriage.  If you like tyranny put all the single women in charge and the men will be happy to play video games and take soma I mean Ritalin.  It’s easy to count 5000 testicles their live in girl friends have them all nicely organized in cute little decorative boxes. Meanwhile her boyfriend got 5000 points at Slaughter the Zombies VII.

From what I can tell Kanye West got into the fame, I mean music business, the same way the mafia get into the ‘protection’ business.  “I’m the one telling you how it is, or else”.  That or it is something about the sheer force of charm.  He clearly has no talent by any objective standard.  Which is the real issue.  Today art is defined by whatever ‘artists’ decide to do.  Once you get the label, you are in and what you do is art.  This view stands in stark contrast to the rich tradition imparted to us in the West.  This tradition was sharply cut off by Modernism.  The remnants lingered for a while and now under postmodernism, whatever anyone wants to do is accepted, but we do still have people at the top, who serve or represent a large number of people with their ‘art’.  Based on consensus this is the new model.  Kanye is king.

‘F’ is for Fool.  I was going to photoshop this and then I found an actual picture.

Edmund Burke lays out the traditional view in his excellent book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.  Which is what he did, he made an inquiry as why things were the way they were.  Another famous work, by Adam Smith had a similar title, which we often forget, as we turn it into his belief or a perscription rather than an observation; An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.  So they made observations and commented on them.  This was the status quo of the day.  A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Pop Culture, I believe was exhausted in the short paragraph above.  Seriously, who is writing treatises on this mess that will last more than 200 years?  No one.  I hope this post doesn’t last more than a few years and is replaced by something better, by people who write longer sentences containing deeper thoughts.  But for now, we have Kanye.

At this point I really just want to recommend Burke’s book and stop writing.  But most people won’t get around to it.  And I don’t really feel like a review.

Burke took for granted that there was an objective standard for beauty present, to some degree, in all people, because that’s what everyone thought at the time.  Truth was something fixed.  That’s why science was born out of the Christian West, because Christians believed that God was faithful, and operated his world consistently.  Therefore we could observe those operations, systematically and Science was born.  Today we have come unhinged from this basic assumption.  Today truth is in the eye of the beholder, so of course beauty is.  Oh the Medievals had such a beautiful idea that creation of any art was simply a discovery.  Modern science has ‘discovered’ much the same thing as they experiment with music.  Infants who should have a clear objective palate, respond consistently to different types of music.  C. S. Lewis, a pre-Modern to the death, explored the idea of sehnsucht, that is joy.  The type of joy we are brought to by an experience that is so close to heaven, it is as if heaven is pushing into our world and we get a small taste.  A taste that leaves us hungry and longing for more.  And since God made a world where our longings can be met, with the correct cautions observed, there must be a heaven to satisfy these sorts of longing. God made us, he made this world, we bear the image of God, is it really so far fetched to think that there are inherent good and bad types of art to speak to that humanity?  Christians should believe in objective truth.  Of course man has rebelled, and created his own version of truth.  Lots of people believe it and it seems legitimate.  But Paul says the wisdom of man is foolishness, to God.  And the same goes for the tastes of man.  It’s not hard to see that a people unable to tell the difference between male and female would have a hard time telling the difference between good and bad art.

It is a fact that large numbers of people on this earth developed a taste for human flesh.  Large numbers of people so alter their standards of right and wrong that they no longer have any problem with the evil they do.  It seems normal, and they have a taste for that which is totally forbidden by the word of God.  These sort of people seem to end up destroying themselves with no supernatural intervention necessary, but before they do, they operate with bad taste.  And we all can do this to varying degrees with anything.  Just because you like something or something makes you feel a certain way is no basis for beauty.  You may have been badly trained.  Your tastes may be off.  I am certain that the tastes of our culture are off.  Look around, we exemplify the worst most immoral behavior as defined by the the objective standard of Scripture.  Why should we produce or appreciate true beauty?  Even in the church, we certainly don’t ask these questions anymore.  Taste is up to you, you have a right to do whatever you want.  It’s all about you, and if people don’t realize how wonderful you are, go to another church.   But we don’t have to wander in the dark.  There are many examples of peoples who were in tune with what Scripture said about everything.  They produced much fruit, they produced us, then we threw it all away.  The Medievals are a great example or the Puritans.  We need to get our tastes back on the right track.  We need to do more philosophical inquiring.

That’s enough chattering, go read Burke’s book and throw eggs at Kanye if you ever get the chance.

It’s not surprising that people are often making comparisons between our culture and that of the Ancient Romans.  Our culture was so heavily based on the Greek and Roman world, then baptized by Christianity, that even despite our best efforts to throw away the past there are many connections still present.  Most Universities still have some shreds of a well balanced curriculum in place.  You know those classes everyone is always complaining about because they will never ‘use’ them in the ‘real world’.  Well these people don’t know much about any world real or not.  A major theme in the comparisons is that of their decline.  The parallels are uncanny.  And it’s not just Rome the formula for a people in decline has been followed many times before.  People forget God, become obsessed with sports and sex.  Which results in unwanted children who are sacrificed on alters or disposed of in abortion clinics.  I have heard it since I was a child that the obsession with violence on TV was just like that of the Romans in the Colosseum.  But was it really?

One major difference I see is that we live in light of what the Romans did.  We have learned something from them, or half learned it.  It is not entirely our fault, our culture has taken up the narrative of liars like Gibbon to the point that we don’t even know there is another side.  But what is there we respond too.  We see what they did and try to avoid it, or part of it.  Often our learning just takes the form of avoiding the symptoms.  As if a completely morally corrupt people could have been spared if only they had stopped going to the Colosseum.  No the fact is they went to the Colosseum and did everything they did because they were morally corrupt.  We are like the small child who has been told of the consequences of eating too many cookies and then stubbornly denies that they are in fact sick after having eaten said cookies.  We want to spit in the face of God but we think we have figured out a way to avoid the consequences this time. Oh we kill our babies in a special clinic behind closed doors, by trained ‘professionals’, so that makes it ok.

Violence isn’t really that pervasive in our culture, incorrect violence animated by evil hearts is too pervasive.  Most times and places were far more violent than America today.  Oh so we have depictions of wars on TV, most men through history actually participated in fighting of some kind.  It was a kill or be killed world, even for the civilized Greeks and Romans.  The violent hand of justice was regularly exercised, and rightly so, in every town square.  Those people planted hemp to execute wise justice, we plant it to feed or foolishness.  They were more violent we are more immoral.

But today we live in a world where it is easy to pretend that death does not exist, even the murder of your own child.  This won’t prevent us from following the path to destruction that Rome followed.  Nor will suppressing violent video games.   In fact I believe these are symptoms of another moral fault, cowardice.  It’s having someone else execute violence for us.  Since Victorian England, the west has so tried to sanitize everything and prevent any harsh reality from creeping into corrupt our children that we have become a people of wimps.  The old Christendom in Europe is far worse, but America is not far behind.  There are daily stories about the harsh realities of bullying.  Seriously?  Try having the people in the next village regularly raid your village?  Try experiencing hordes of Moorish Muhammedans invading your entire continent for 300 years.  We can’t keep score in sports for fear of hurting someone’s feelings.  Teachers are told to use purple pens because red is too offensive. There are daily stories about children being punished for holding their finger up like a gun. And on and on the coddling goes, as does the march of evil, because these people certainly aren’t being equipped to stand up and do anything about it.

The apostle amongst the ruins. Panini.

I had to learn this lesson, and I think too late.  I grew up in a culture where passivity was thought to be morality.  Isn’t it more humble?  No, it’s just a good way to have good taken over by the natural course of things which is evil.  It’s a good way to ensure that His will does not happen on earth as it is in heaven. And evangelical Left Behind theology also contributes to it.  Why fight to make anything more true, good or beautiful, when it is all going to burn anyway?  In fact let’s light the fire so Jesus will come back sooner.  That actually sounds like every praise song I have ever heard.

I had a bit of an advantage because I was always strange and grew to not really care what people thought of me, in the constant barrage of criticism.  Courage get’s easier every time you exercise it.  And boy do we need that today.  We Christians stand on the truth of God, and as we act on it despite the bullying from the world, we become more faithful.  The solution is not an end of violence or, closing our borders, or civic education, or not being up in all the conspiracy theories.  The only solution is repentance.  That other stuff is just the means that God uses to allow stiff necked people to wipe themselves off the earth.  It is a little different every time, but it is a lot the same.

A Christian perspective on the fall of Rome might paint the picture a little differently.  The Church out Romand the Romans.  The Romans couldn’t compete with real civic virtue as practiced by Jesus the Christ working in his body the Church.  Christians really ministered to the poor, sick, and abandoned children.  They really were ideal citizens, the highest Roman virtue.  And the old world of Rome just looked like a joke, in light of the new world of the Gospel light shining on every area of life.  We need to get out there and shine that light again, instead of just trying to avoid the symptoms, or sitting back and waiting for the escape hatch of the fictitious rapture.

Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.  -Jesus the Christ.

Here we go again, time to pull out the God card.  You know, when Jesus says something that seems strange or does something you don’t want to do because you are chicken, you just write it off to him being God.  “Oh well he could do it, he was God.”  But if you do it you are evil and unloving.  Jesus just walked around with his future glasses on, looking in people’s hearts and knowing what they were going to do, then he played the part accordingly.  It was all a sort of perpetual déjà vu, or like the latest Tom Cruise action-movie version of Groundhog’s Day.  We do the same thing with the apostle’s interpretation of the Old Testament.  “Oh well they could take verses out of context they had magical Holy Spirit powers”.  But if we do exegesis like that, we need to be branded with the scarlet letter ‘A’ for Allegorizer so we don’t hurt anyone.

Striking image album cover from KingsX.

But I think this undermines the humanity of Jesus.  We worked this out at Nicaea, seventeen hundred years ago, Jesus is fully man.  Hebrews 4:15 tells us: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”  Luke 2:52 tells us “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.”  It’s the whole point, he didn’t cheat and maintain perfection by on his God powers, or his sinless sacrifice would have meant nothing.  He was a man he did man things.  He grew in wisdom and then he exercised his wisdom.  And we should seek to emulate him.

In this situation, and also with the rich young ruler which is the antithesis in many ways, we can’t just assume that Jesus  was reading everyone’s mind and heart and playing a game for our benefit.  Jesus had hundreds of these conversations.  The nature and fact that these events are recorded for us is for out benefit, but as the events happened there is no reason to assume any God card.  Jesus was often surprised by peoples belief or unbelief (Mark 6:6, Matthew 8:5-10).  Proverbs contains much wisdom, which was available to Jesus as it is to us.  In beautiful parallelism:

Whoever corrects a scoffer gets himself abuse,
and he who reproves a wicked man incurs injury.
Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you;
reprove a wise man, and he will love you.
Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser;
teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning

And so you see these both played out in the conversations with the rich young ruler and the Syrophoenician woman, respectively.  These aren’t just catch phrases, you need both halves.  Jesus’ correction reveals their character– to these people, to the apostles and to us.  There is no magic here, we can do the same today.  I know we don’t like conflict these days, we take any conflict as a sign that we are acting in sin.  But conflict is inevitable when people are at war with God.  Bringing that to light is not sin, it can be a valuable tool, in evaluating people.  It can be valuable in revealing people’s character to themselves.  We are told to bring people into shalom, peace, with God not to make shalom with everyone at every cost.

I think this fear comes from overreacting to the ‘vengance is mine’ verse (Romans 12:19).  We think any act of judgement is reserved for God in the end.  But value judgements are not vengance, they are wise.  And Matthew 18:18 makes it clear, judgements we make on earth are binding in heaven.  It is good to set things aright on earth, even though it is not the final righting that will take place in heaven.  In reality we have veered into shirking our duty because we are too cowardly to step up and make the difficult call.  But we can and should, Jesus shows us how, Proverbs gives us the tools.  This is our job, his will on earth as it is in heaven.

A good teacher is one who doesn’t do for his students what they can do for themselves.  He puts truth one step away from his pupils and then gives them the choice to take that step or not.  This is the purpose of the parable, the truth is there for the taking.  There is no guarantee (oh how the Socialists hate that!), the outcome is only as good as the person’s choice.  This is the purpose of Jesus calling this woman a dog. When Jesus pokes you, some women pushed back, and some men walked away.  The same applies today.  There is a sense in which every situation we find ourselves in is of this nature.  Our circumstances are given to us to build and reveal character.  He disciplines those whom he loves he tests men like he tested Job.  He wants us to succeed so he can show us off.  And the wise man knows how to play this game as well.  Like Solomon’s call to divide the baby, we don’t need divine knowledge of people’s hearts we just need to know how to reveal those hearts.

And oh how beautiful the humble heart.  She turns the phrase back to him “yes Lord I am a dog, a dog who just wants some crumbs.”  She passed the test.