“Hear me, all of you, and understand: There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him”  Mark 7:14

I’m sure I have said this before but by agreeing with the Pharisees on the purpose of the Old Testament, we can and do easily fall into the same sin they were guilty of.  The Old Testament was grace not a magic formula for making God happy.

Yeah so there :p !

Are the dietary laws of the Pharisees really all that strange?  I don’t think so.  Everywhere you look today someone is starting some new diet.  The literature and Facebook posts are a constant barrage of get-thin-quick schemes and exercise regimes.  People who dare to eat what has always been considered traditional food, like bread are social outcasts.  The culture of Organic-Natural-GMO-free is very similar to a cult. I think you are far more likely to be confronted by someone about your eating habits than your spiritual condition.  Or more likely in a gutless, ‘accepting’ society, you will be simply avoided and shunned.  I don’t think we have any leg to stand on in looking down on the religious leaders Jesus dealt with.

This shirt says ” I am better than you because I run, and I like abusing scripture.”

But there is a hint of reason in our quest for the perfect diet.  We understand that eating properly is a good, it is not the good but it is good.  There are benefits to putting the right things in your body.  The God of the universe obviously understands this.  He created the world, he knows it contains many perils to man.  In the beginning he put us in a safe place, the garden.  But we grasped for more than we could handle as we grasped for the fruit.  Even then God blessed his people by giving them rules on what is safe to eat, rules about cleanliness.  Seriously we are going to mock ancient Jews for believing that demons are present on your hands if you don’t wash them?  Can you think of another way to express the nature of harmful germs to an ancient people?  And so the Old Testament ceremonial laws on cleanliness also double as good rules of hygiene.  There is real external defilement.  Not washing your hands can kill you, eating shellfish can kill you, eating pork can kill you, this is a dangerous world.  The Old Testament wasn’t an arbitrary system of rules to prove how spiritual you were it was a gift from God to people without microscopes, antibiotics, refrigeration and plumbing.  We do follow most of these practices, certainly in spirit.  We go to the bathroom outside the camp (Deuteronomy 23:12,13), we wash our hands, we cook our meat properly.  But modern methods have allowed us to use pipes to take care of waste, soap instead of ceremonial water, and many ways of making meat safe while it still has the blood in it (Genesis 9:4).

The Pharisees thought the point was to prove who had the cleanest hands, when really the point was that the God of the Universe came down to bless them.  There he was standing in front of them and they are trying to prove their hands are cleaner.  What fools.  But we follow right on their footsteps by agreeing with them that the Old Testament was a bunch of rules or formulas.  Then we pride ourselves on ‘seeing’ this and look down on people who do not.  We think Jesus just brought a better set of rules and “look at me I know Jesus better than you”.  No doubt we would criticize Jesus if he stood before us today, for his strict adherence to the rules of morality, “you legalist” or for his free spirit, a “little too free don’t you think?”.  Just like the critics of Jesus day;

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon. ’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners! ’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.” Matthew 11:18,19

And so the words of Jesus are a parable.  Those with the Spirit of understanding can understand and those without will simply be lost in darkness.  The point, Jesus says, is about the source of the defilement, the evil.  It is within not without.  It’s a wonderful parallelism, which would have been beautiful poetry on the lips of our Lord.  The contrast of in and out.  It’s not that evil contained within is ok, so don’t let it out.  The point is that evil is within, it doesn’t happen by eating non-organic GMOs.

We come from a rich tradition of people who understood Jesus’ parables.  The Puritan Protestant tradition was one that chased moral purity rather than external purity.  They had a wonderful concept of virtue as a muscle that must be constantly trained and exercised.  Think about physical training and exercise today, only with your moral faculties.  It’s not just something that happens, it comes by work.  There is a sense in which what you put into your mind can contaminate you, Jesus also said ““The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness” Matthew 6:22.  So be careful what ideas you put into your mind, even more careful than you are with your calorie-counting diet.  Put his words in your heart, before the Natural News blogs or whatever other food cult publication.  God is so gracious he knows that the physical is easier for us to understand, so he uses it constantly as a metaphor for the spiritual realities.  We know about physical danger from food, or laziness, the same things apply to laziness of the soul.  We can develop a taste for junk food that makes us sick, just like we can develop a taste for sin, a tastes for bad music, bad ideas, evil movies.

Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not become partners with them; for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. Ephesians 5:6-12

So be careful about what you put into your mind, because if you think obesity is bad, you haven’t seen obesity of the heart.

Map from 1960’s edition of Puritan author John Bunyan’s, Pilgrim’s Progress. Spiral reminiscent of Dante. Life is about the journey to virtue, or death.

Dante and Virgil walk amongst the hypocrites, from Canto XXIII of ‘Inferno’ from ‘The Divine Comedy’, Amos Nattini

I have my doubts about the modern use of the word ‘hypocrisy’, “I do not think it means what you think it means”.  Jesus calls people hypocrites quite a few times, like everything he said if we want to follow his example and his wisdom we need to understand what he meant by it.  Of course we can use the word however we want but we can’t pretend to have his authority behind our use if we make up our own meaning.

I think this is a good verse to clarify the meaning a little: “So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness”  Matthew 23:28.   Hypocrisy and lawlessness are two different things.  Neither is good but in different ways.  Breaking God’s rules is not hypocrisy, it is lawless evil but not hypocrisy.  Trying to meet a high standard is not hypocrisy, Philippians 2:15 tells us our goal is to be blameless. Even trying to meet a higher standard of morality than you are able, is not hypocrisy.  We see Paul wrestling with this reality in Romans 7

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am!

This is the very idea of conscience, we know we should do something yet we don’t do it, and as a result we feel bad.  We might blush, or get queasy, this is the speaking of the conscience.  This is the reality of the war with sin, but it’s not hypocrisy.  I think a lot of people work this backwards today.  If you feel shame in anyway, it can’t be legitimate, it must be bullying by those religious types forcing their narrow theism on us.  “Judging us!”  “Hypocrites!”  “Just like the kind Jesus warned us about!”  Ah, not so fast. Oh how easy it is to twist truth into a lie.  A good conscience is proof of the work of God in your heart, Acts 24:16, Romans 2:15 and we are warned against harming the conscience of others I Corinthians 8:12.

Chesterton said “but the man who treats every human inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a hypocrite about his own inconsistencies.”  And so this is the place of the modern man.  Many try to look consistent by trying to throw out every standard of right and wrong; who are they to judge?  But they just undercut their argument because they do judge the Christian.  They hold the Christian to an impossible standard.  This is in fact real hypocrisy, that is, holding someone else to a different standard that you hold yourself.  They think they can justify it because they don’t ever judge anyone and they are just holding the Christian to their own standard, really they are just boring old hypocrites.

Look at the one situation in Mark where Jesus called the religious leaders hypocrites.  In chapter 7 the religious leaders come down from Jerusalem to judge.  What a contrast to the God of heaven to who came down to earth to die.  Anyway they come up and criticize Jesus and his disciples for not following the hand washing procedure correctly.  Now there is nothing wrong with the ceremonial cleansing laws in the Old Testament.  Many of the things that qualified you for ceremonial cleanness, also made for good hygiene, which was not as well understood as it is today.  It was a blessing by God to his people who didn’t have microscopes.  He made the world and he gave his people rules so that they could prosper.  There is also nothing wrong with making up rituals, or even making up rituals to help you avoid sin.  Jesus tells us sin is serious and “if your hand causes you to masturbate, cut it off”(Mark 9:43).  Jesus then accuses them of leaving the commands of men to follow the commands of God.  This is a sin, this is lawlessness as mentioned above, but it is not hypocrisy.  The hypocrisy is that these men come to question Jesus about his following of the law while they don’t even try to follow the law.  The hypocrisy is not about the relationship between the religious leaders and the Law or God.  The hypocrisy is about their relationship with their fellow Jews and Jesus.  As in Matthew 6:2, 6:5, 6:16, the hypocrite does everything in the sight of others so that he can look down on them, it is a form of ridicule for not following God’s law but really they are the ones not following the law.  Exhibiting fake adherence to the commands while accusing others for their adherence is hypocrisy.

I think getting this right is very important.  Because the world tries to throw our standards back in our face as proof of our hypocrisy, when really it is only proof of theirs.  Our failures are actually proof of the truth of our faith.  We can’t do it on our own, we need the grace of God, it is not we who do the work of the Church but Christ who works in us.  They reject the Law as a burden, a mere system of rules, because the do not see the grace in it to guide man into proper living.  God is no hypocrite, he held his son to the same standard he holds every man to.  When he judges he understands the real temptation of sin.

So, don’t let the world redefine the Gospel for us.  They don’t know what hypocrisy is because they are blind.  It is our job to show them the light.

I think it is unfortunate that a reading of Jesus’ first miracle evokes a conversation about the evils of drinking.  I have heard all of these excuses before.  Of course it was alcoholic wine and I’m sure people got drunk.  It was a party what do people do at parties?  They don’t drink grape juice unless they are modern prudes who still manage to miss the point of this event.  And who cares if they got drunk?  Every grape anyone has ever gotten drunk on  was a gift from the father above, so why not the grapes in this new creation?  I am not condoning drunkenness just this drunken hermeneutic.  I hope someday for a world where every sermon on the miracles of Jesus feeding the five thousand will be about gluttony.

There is so much more in the passage.  John starts out “in the beginning”  does this remind you of anything?  In case you missed it, keep going.  He continues the story vs. 29 “the next day”, vs. 35 “the next day”, vs. 43 “the next day”, 2:1 “On the third day”.  Wait a minute, seven days? And, the seventh day is the third day?  Does this remind you of anything?  It should.  Jesus is recreating the world and on the seventh day he goes to a party.  But it’s not just any party it’s a marriage feast, on the third day.  In fact there were seven feasts in the Jewish calendar. After the work on the cross is done Jesus rose the third day to be joined to his bride the church.  Jesus spoke of himself as being anointed for burial (Mark 14:8) and the bridegroom celebrating (Matthew 9:15) with his friends.  The actions of Jesus were not just random they had rich deliberate purpose.  Interesting these connected in my mind and apparently this passage mirrors Mary’s anointing of Jesus in the chiasm of the book of John, according to Peter Leithart.  Jesus turns the funeral into a wedding.

Another important element is the jars.  They were not just random jars.  They were jars for the Jewish rights of purification.  He takes the ritual water and turns it into wine.  You know this had to make the Pharisees mad.  And Jesus is smirking to himself as he turns their dead ritual into an implement for the celebration.  And this use was more sacred than what they were going to use it for.  This is the God of the Universe come to earth and taking joy in a wedding feast, that had come to the end of it’s merriment.  So he keeps the feast going.  They are content with their ritual and he is trying to show them something better.  As C. S. Lewis said;

“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.”

The disciples got it, well after his death they got it.  Right before he held up the wine at another feast, for passover.  Again he resets the rules as he recreates the world.  From now on when you have a feast when you have bread and wine, remember me, remember my body and my blood.  Soon after you see people getting drunk at this feast( I Corinthians 11:21).  They seem to have taken it a little too far.  But the connection is made, this was a feast a celebration, not a boring dry ritual.  And the wine was real, not some grape juice concentrate, paste, whatever.  It was wine it really did “gladden the heart of man” “and bread to strengthen man’s heart” Psalm 104:15.

My brother getting in on the wedding feast at Cana. Paolo Veronese, c. 1563,

I am becoming increasingly concerned about the growing obsession with getting your children into some sort of an institution as soon as possible.  They call these institutions, day care, or preschool, or head-start.  But I believe them to be quite sinister.  I am at a bit of a disadvantage here, I am not a parent and so the most common sentiment these days that you must “walk a mile in someones’ shoes” in order to speak to someone is wholly ineffectual in my case.  That other great modern motivator, statistics, is also something I could care less for.  In fact that type of systematizing is part of, if not the main problem.  Is your child a statistic? The institution thinks so. My aversion to this practice is not based on these but on my love for the successes of the past.  A past I know perhaps better than the present in some respects.  A knowledge which makes new problems appear more stark, than to those who find them common.  Perhaps then,  my distance from the situation is a bit of an advantage.  I spend my time reading rather than changing diapers, though I am not unfamiliar with their changing nor afraid.  I have plenty of experience borrowing the children of others, as well as thorough memories of my own childhood.  I have spent a great deal of this time in the study of education, in the footsteps of my parents.  I am actually the impetus for the creation of Petra Academy.  I was there the first day, I worked hard to keep it alive and I was there on the last.  Oh sure the corpse still walks about, reinvigorated by the Frankenstein of capitalist interests, but the heart and humanity are gone.  Which is an apt description of modern education.

I think there are two main reasons people are so eager to sign up little Johnny for some sort of ’school’, as soon as they can.  First of all raising children is difficult, and relentless, a job is quantifiable and finite.  That is to say they do it for convenience, although there might be an element of fear in it, that element is also present in the second reason, a real desire to do what is best for Johnny.  I don’t really think the first needs much rebuff.  It should be obvious that if your only motive is to dump your children off on someone else so you can be free to make and spend money, you are a bad lazy parent.  But, I’m sure there are a lot of parents like this.  People these days are all too happy to have someone else do everything for them.  They want to live in dormitories(condos) so they have no responsibility to the land.  They want other people to pay all their bills and do all their thinking for them.  So of course they want someone else to raise their children.  They are all to happy to take advantage of before and after school programs, and weekend and summer programs and food stamps and welfare and unemployment and on and on.  The statistics as well as the anecdotes on this one are clear.  In short they want to be slaves, but more on this later.

The second group of people truly want what is best for their child.  I didn’t really believe this was that big of a group until recently.  Many of my friends began expressing this frantic attempt to sort out where little Johnny would go to preschool at age 3 or 4.  I thought I still  had a year or two to weigh in on the conversation with my two cents.  But then it hit, all too real.

Jesus and Paul both refer to sin as slavery (John 8:34, Romans 7).  We are not free to make the correct decisions because we are bound by sin to always make the wrong one.  The light of God’s word in our lives frees us up to be able to choose the good.  I hope that my words here can do the same.  Because the situation is very similar; we have all been educated in a system, and getting beyond it and choosing something different is difficult.  Being able to go beyond the default is freedom.  I don’t want you to do things my way, I want you to be able to do them your way.

The main motivator for people who want the best for their child is peer pressure.  It’s in all the movies; the stunning rich and famous characters portrayed on the silver screen always get their kids into the best preschools.  And those actors in real life do the same thing.   All the hip psychology books and magazines tell parents they have to get their kids into school ASAP.  They often do it by ridiculously negative stereotypes of the sinister homeschooler.  You know the characterization, the only thing thicker than his glasses is his obnoxiously awkward personality.  Her frumpy clothes are designed to express no personality while still setting her off enough to be ridiculed by all.  The greatest sin of the parent is inadequate socialization, socialization, socialization!!!  And so parents flee to the nearest government certified program to cure Johnny of all that ails him.  But this has been the trend now for the last hundred years.  First we added Kindergarten and then we kept adding more sub-grades.  How has this been working out for us?  I actually have seen plenty of statistics on this.  Not only do most Americans think the school system is bad, but they have thought so for decades.  All these reforms geared towards earlier and earlier education have only made things worse.  Test scores, continue to fall as the rest of the world passes us by.  So we extend education on the other end, many people now go to college for seven to ten years.  All this has done is prolong adolescense into the mid thirties.  It seems to me that instead of starting education sooner, we need to end it earlier.  Children growing up in these institutions never know a time without the herd.  They become less able to act or think independently.  They never develop individual skills or individual character, apart from the mass.  And so, they are actually less socially adjusted, well depending on the society.  They are perfect for despotism, that is slavery.  So I think it is clear this isn’t working, why should we keep trusting these people?

Which brings us to the next point, just who are these people?  Another motivator is the notion that education must be done by professionals.  Just what exactly are the qualifications for these professionals?  Most people probably know more about their babysitter than they do about the person who spends eight hours a day doing god knows what to their children.  All these certifications and degrees are handed out by the government, which most people distrust.  As Christians, we should pay a little more attention to scriptures like Psalm 1 that warn of sitting in the seat of the scoffer.  And these teaching degrees almost guarantee that your child’s teacher has sat under many scoffers.  You have probably been to college, you know what a godless evil place it is.  Even the best Christian schools get most of their curriculum from the world with a few Bible classes tacked on, that is the reality.  Education degrees didn’t exist 50 years ago.  Schools just made them up. They made up the whole ‘profession’.  They take a bunch of godless general education classes that used to mean something but everyone has long since forgotten what.  They add on some methods classes with big text books by social psychologist descended from the German ‘thinkers’ responsible for the holocaust.  Throw in a couple hundred thousand dollars and bang you are a teacher.  Seriously, your child is better off at home with you.  This notion of professionalism is sick anti-Christian evil.  This is simply the worship of science trying to take over the government of the family established by God.  All the worst Presidents we have had were the most ‘educated’.  Professional dictators tried to treat mankind like a science experiment time and again Hitler, Stalin, Mao and millions died every time.  As G. K. Chesterton said in his wonderful book Orthodoxy,

“In short, the orthodox faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves–the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.  This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.”

You don’t need professionals.  I think the fact that a school like Petra now has a daycare also adds clout to the issue.  But perhaps if you considered the motives you would not be so romanced.  The purpose of a moral Godly school is to act ‘loco parentis’ that is the school is an extension of the parent.  Historically Classical education began somewhere between age six to nine.  This is how nearly all of the founding fathers were educated.  They carved the most advanced civilization the world has ever seen out of a wilderness.  At the time of the founding literacy was near universal, which included Latin.  Men like Peyton Randolph, John Jay, and John Adams will blow you away.  An institution cannot do what you can in the home, in those early formative years.  But Petra like many schools built a big expensive building, and they need to pay for it.  Some people have invested big money and they want a self sustaining business, which means screw loco parentis, screw the heart of Classical education.  Daycare means more money with limited expenses, no hundred dollar textbooks here.  Parents met with the demands of an oppressive government are all to happy to drop their four-year-old off with their six-year-old at school so they can go earn more money.  In addition the thinking is that if you get started at a younger age you will continue with the school K-12.  They bribe you with square footage and student to teacher ratios instead of the tried and true Classical education of Christendom. What noble motives.

 I would ask you well meaning parents who want to hurriedly get your child into an institution as soon as can be, what is the purpose of education?  I think the question reveals a lot.  It goes back to the slavery issue; Are we to be cogs in a social machine? Is the purpose of education to make good little worker bees?   Or, is there something more?  I think there is, the men of old thought so too.  Do we want our children to get a good job or have good character?  As C. S. Lewis says in Our English Syllabus

“Vocational training, on the other hand prepares the pupil not for leisure, but for work; it aims at making not a good man but a good banker, a good electrician a good scavenger, or a good surgeon.  You see at once that education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves.”

Education should liberate.  That is the whole idea of medieval classical liberal education.  Sure we still have some of the vestiges of that system left, but they are quickly fading.  You hear people complain all the time in college about “why do I have to take this class, I will never use it”.  Oh that evil word ‘use’ as if we were magicians conjuring so many spells, which is not far off from the modern ideas of science.  Those classes were there to give you a broad base to build on for a lifetime of learning.  A liberal education is one that equips us to tackle any obstacle.  It frees us to exercise our humanity in any number of outlets.  As Christians we should understand that the purpose of education is to build moral men.  As C. S. Lewis says in The Abolition of Man, ‘men with chests’.  That is men who can use their minds to govern their appetites.  The chest unites the head with the stomach, the seat of desire, to create complete men.  We don’t want men who are all brains and no action, or men who are all impulse.  But modern industrial men had other designs.  They wanted a populace just literate enough to work in their factories and buy all their wares like mindless drones.  So men like Henry Ford and John Dewey, set about changing education.  And they have all but succeeded.  This is the difficult part, because how are we to teach a liberty to our children that we don’t even know?  Giving your children to the government at a younger and younger age is not the answer.  Let your child have a few years of freedom to interact with the real world on his own, so that later he can remember a time before he was institutionalized.

We are not fatalists, we are Christians who believe in the blood of the Lamb, repentance is possible.  And there are so many resources available.  Medieval man sorted out all of these problems before the darkness of modernity began throwing out everything traditional and Biblical.  Oh sure we have powerful cell phones in our pockets, but we are less able to choose the good than men were hundreds of years ago.  What does it profit a man if he gains power over all the integrated circuits but loses his own soul?  I would start with reading Dorothy Sayers Essay, click the quote above.

Then read The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis, it’s a little more difficult, but there are plenty of explanations available online.

Other Reading:

Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, Douglas Wilson

The Well Trained Mind, Susan Wise Bauer

A Students’ Guide to Liberal Learning, James V. Schall

Association of Classical Christian Schools Lectures

Logos Press

Veritas Press

Now you have more tools, you have more freedom, go and give your children even more!

So Grace Bible took a turn for the better last week.  The policy of the church has always been all-I-need-is-my-Bible, gospel gospel gospel.  Which becomes narrower with each repetition. In it’s quest to ensure that nothing interferes with the Gospel they have advocated a Gospel that doesn’t interfere with much of anything.  It has become a private things that we talk about on Sunday but does’t really flesh out into much of our lives.  The practical outworking of this gospel is basically only seen in saving souls, getting butts in the seats I like to say.  And it’s not just one Church in the Gallatin Valley.  This has been the trend, this is American Evangelism, it’s in the title.  Ever since the masses were caught up in the Second Great Awakening and all the camp revivals, which emphasized the saving of souls in dramatic emotional performances, this has defined American Christianity.

It carries down to this day as Franklin Graham, takes over for his father in their well orchestrated mass alter calls.  Men like D. L. Moody set the tone in their Bible Bible Bible schools.  He tells the story of a man who died unsaved after listening to one of his sermons, or something.  Then he vows to never preach again without an invitation and or the gospel.  I may have this story completely wrong, but the point is this has been the trend.  But then the revival is over, the tents are folded up, sunday comes to a close.  We go back to real life none the different.  It’s that mile wide inch deep faith.  It finally fell apart in the 60’s.  A whole generation had been completely unequipped to handle the realities of life with a faith that didn’t answer any of life’s question.  “Because I said so”  or “because the Bible says so” hardly made a dent in the growing humanist ideologies.  The faith of their parents seemed fake, so they started their own camp meetings, like Woodstock.  They had revival services at their universities complaining about war or their underwear, hell bent on destroying everything their parents had loved.  I think we can concluded that this was a disaster, yet the narrow butt-saving gospel kept being preached.

But as I said there was a turn.  Jesus spent a lot of his time just healing.  It’s right there in Mark 6.  It’s wasn’t conditional on hearing his gospel presentation, the gospel presentation was the healing.  He was remaking the earth, as far as the curse was found.  If there was something wrong, he was fixing it, this was his job, this is our job.  The gospel applies to everything, not just fire insurance, every area of life.  This is the Protestant dignity given back to work.  It’s not just the ‘holy’ professions like monk, priest, or cardinal that are doing the kingdom work, it is every profession.  The shoe maker and the blacksmith each bring heaven to this earth by doing their work to the glory of God.  By applying the gospel to their trades in the sight of all men.

I think we often misunderstand the “cup of water” statement of Jesus (Mark 9:41).  We take it as a call to worship the poor.  Really it’s saying that anyone who does any tiny thing for a Christian because he is a Christian, will not lose his reward.  But what about getting saved?

Or, I think of Jesus stopping to condemn a fig tree that is unfruitful (Mark 11).  Of course it is a rich metaphor, he is the gardener etc, but the fact is he stopped to kill a tree.  He is the gardner, and being a gardner and tending to a tree is part of the gospel, it is part of making earth like heaven, of reversing the curse.  No doubt the disciples want him to get on with the work of throwing off the Romans, and we want him to get on with saving some people.  But he is doing quite well fixing one tree.

And so the masses flocked to him, to have things made right.  Today the masses flock to America for healing of every kind.  This was the vision of those Protestants who wished to build a city on a hill, in the sight of the world.  And so they did, they sailed over on a ship to rule and subdue a new land.  They converted the savages that they could, and died by the thousands, from starvation, winter, invasion, and wild animals.  They established a land like the world has never seen, it wasn’t about saving people, in fact they had left millions of people who needed saving.  They simply applied the gospel to agriculture, ship building, trapping, government, military and education and the world has noticed.  Today they come to us for just a corner of the American Dream.  But we have lost our way in the main.  We forgot what the gospel was, we let the world redefine it for us, and they are all to happy with a private faith that has no place in the public sphere.

It’s interesting to note as we currently deal with an immigration problem, that Jesus didn’t heal everyone.  He often retreated to pray, or speak to his disciples.  Every entity person or government has limits.  We should know our limits or we become ineffectual to everyone.  Historically there were long periods where immigration was all but cut off in this country.  That was wise.  Water it down too much and it is no good to anyone.

But he healed indiscriminately? I know it seemed odd to our pastor and many others.  But is it really that hard to believe that Jesus would pour out blessings on even the unsaved?  It’s really just an encore of what he did in the first creation.  Every breath used to curse God was given to man by God himself.  Every fist raised to God in anger was given to him by God.  God crated a world where man can take the blessings of creation and use them against the creator.  This is the overflowing bounty of God, and Jesus repeated it when he walked this earth.  It’s not just a narrow pragmatic mission to get everyone saved, it’s a beautiful frivolous party hosted by the God of the Universe.  And the people too dumb to see it will get their wish and not be invited back.  But it shouldn’t be those in the church, we should be partying every day and gospeling everything.  Step one is admitting you have a problem, check.

It’s back to school time.  Which means big decisions, or non-decisions for parents.  How do I educate my child, or who is going to babysit them while I do more important things?  The reality is, if you don’t make the tough decision, someone else will.  On this planet the default position is evil.

My first day of Government Kindergarten. Shortly to be followed by first curse words, first pornography and first punch in the face and constant lies about my Creator.

As a Christian in this world we are told that we war against principalities and powers (Ephesians 6:12), that is philosophies or ideas that are contrary to the Kingdom of Heaven.  It has been noted that there are two different ways of doing this.  You can reproduce yourself sexually by having children or by spreading Christianity through evangelism.  Initially there was a huge influx of Christians as evangelism spread through the Roman Empire. Later after the early stages were worked out, after Christendom defeated Rome with humble service, a respect for life, the poor and care of the helpless and elderly, Christendom realized the importance of reproducing yourself through large families.

Today this is not the case as birthrates in the west are barely at replacement.  But the principalities and powers have figured it out.  Muhammedan children are almost 100% Muhammedan, culturally, religiously and philosophically and they have a lot of kids.  They either directly or indirectly support those men you see on TV with the explosive vests.  They reproduce sexually and their easy, tribal, heaven-will-fulfill-all-your-lusts religion allows them to reproduce through evangelism.

In this country the rise of anti-Christian, Atheism or Agnosticism is unquestionable.  But these are the people who support abortion, homosexuality and unmarried promiscuity, so how are they reproducing?  If they do happen to have a kid they kill it before it is born, so how can they be growing?  It’s easy they convert your kids.  Christians seem all to happy oblige them.  They put in all those years of hard work and then just hand their children over to these people.  The three main handovers take place in Kindergarten, in 9th Grade, and in College.  Most Christian parents just go with the flow and hand over their children in Kintergarten.  Many parents believe that their children are fine after jr. high, a few less parents hold out until College.  But the statistics are clear, there are sharp spikes at each of these times of Children outright rejecting their faith.  This is not to mention the vast majority who do not, yet have taken in the religion of these principalities and powers in all but name.  And then Christian parents shrug and say “oh well”, “you never know”, “I did my best”.

It’s tragic, it pains me greatly every time I see pictures of sweet little children full of so much promise, full of the faith of their parents, sent off to be destroyed.  When will they first be exposed to the foul language?  When will they first be exposed to drugs?  When will they first be exposed to pornography?  Not to mention the physical violence and the mental violence of the lying ideologies of the world.  I can tell you the first time will be before they are ready, just like the Man and the Woman in the garden grasping for what they can’t handle instead of wisely waiting for God’s timetable.  Cursed above all men are you who allow it to happen! (Matthew 18:6)

This isn’t our best, this is being lazy.  I know education is expensive, I know the peer pressure from friends and family is difficult.  I know that humbly admitting that you didn’t turn out fine and that you want something better for your child is tough.  I know the boats, ATVs and vacations are appealing.  But what should be more appealing is a future where our Children can claim more of this Earth for the Kingdom.  Where, Christendom continues it’s march across the globe, curing disease, and hunger as far as the curse is found.   It’s that stanza from Joy to the World that we always leave out:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.

It is astounding that this must be said, it seems so obvious.  It’s all in Psalm 1, or Jesus (Luke 6:40) a student is not unlike his teacher.  Every religious group throughout time has started schools to train up people in their faith.  The public schools in this country started as a response to the growing number of Catholic schools.  The majority of the country was Protestant so the public schools were Protestant Christian schools.  But of course they became watered down, it was no surprise.  There is no such thing as democratic schools, which honor the name of Jesus.  Men like R. L. Dabney predicted, in On a Secular Education: “All prayers, catechisms, and Bibles will ultimately be driven out of the schools.” Today we don’t even know what catechisms are and Bibles and Prayer were gone long ago. The belief that education is neutral, and non-religious is nothing more than Agnosticism, that is the un-Christian belief that we can’t know anything about God.  Education is religious, how can it not be?  It matters to every subject if Jesus is Lord.  Science would not exist without the Christian understanding that God created this world and that it operates by his consistent faithfulness, ordered by the standard of his character.  History is the story of how he works mercifully on this earth.  Literature is the use of the Word, which John tells us is Jesus the Christ.  Math is the use of numbers to express the ordered world that God created.  Philosophers have often marveled at how it is possible that we can come up with formulas for this world and they actually work, as Einstein said “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”

Tyrannies don’t take easily to being destroyed, whether it is the Roman Empire or the modern educational machine.  Educating your child yourself is expensive, we are essentially paying for it twice.  Once through the immoral confiscation of property taxes and a second time as you pay a private school or buy materials yourself.  But what is more expensive is the cost of throwing away civilization and the promise of tomorrow for the comforts of today.  There is big money in education.  The teachers unions are one of the biggest unions, they take in millions of dollars and hire tons of lobbyists to maintain their monopoly on education.  Ladder climbing, even at the local level, would make Wall Street fat-cats blush.  The Department of Education does not educate one person, it is government for the sake of government.  You might think that it’s ok because your child’s teacher or principal is a Christian.  With all this money comes strings, strings that bind the Christian in the system to act like a non-Christian.  I can tell you countless stories.  It’s a sinking ship, we need to flee, let it sink and force the world to come to us to do things right.  This is the way the world has always worked.

Changing things will be difficult.  It will take time.  It will take sacrifice.  Like all things good.  This is what the founders realized as the tyranny of George III began to come down on the Colonies.  Those men pledged their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor.  Today we don’t really need to go so far.  We might pledge our speed boats, tropical vacations and dream home, but it’s not really that bad.  The hardest part is the humility, going against the flow, repenting and going the other direction.  We still enjoy the benefits of their Christian labor, we have it very good.  But the future will not be so bright if we continue to hand our children over to the principalities and powers.

It’s easier than ever these days, there are so many good resources.

Still not Convinced?:

Excused Absence, Douglas Wilson

None Dare Call it Education, John Stormer

The Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto

Curriculum:

Logos Press

Veritas Press

I wish I could recommend any local schools but I really can’t.  I hear there is a Classical Conversation co-op and other such things.  But the principalities and powers have won this one.

The modern obsession with categorization and organization can be unfortunate when studying the Bible.  While chapter and verse notation is useful for quotation, it often emphasizes the separation of little pieces.  As if each verse were so many colored legos that we were free to arrange in any order we see fit.  We love those little headings because they help us contain the stories of scripture.  But we need to let the stories speak as stories.

Peter Walks on Water, Philipp Otto, c. 1806

My last post was  in response to a sermon on the ‘feeding of the five thousand’.  But it cut off the end of the story.  There was one line that was missing as Mark laid out the Messiah portrayed in Psalm 23.

“He leads me beside still waters. ”

And so Jesus did, eventually.  The disciples are caught in rough waters, and Jesus walks by and they fear him.  Jesus had just been demonstrating that he is the shepherd, the Messiah.  I get the idea that they were supposed to recognize him and follow him to still waters.  Peter seems to have gotten it, but even his faith faltered. but  These were his closest sheep, yet they did not recognize him. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” John 10:27.  But they didn’t know him, instead they were terrified.  The last phrase of the story gives us the answer.  “for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened”  Not only did they not understand or appreciate the symbolism of Jesus’ feeding the people, of his being the shepherd, but it made them mad.  “The same sun that melts the wax hardens the clay,” as Spurgeon said.  And so the grace poured out on the people, hardened the disciples hearts.  Maybe they were tired, and wanted a break and then Jesus goes and starts up again with the feeding and healing.  It’s obvious that they were expecting a conquering messiah as most of the Jews were.  They thought they were going to be at the center of the action when Jesus began his plans to overthrow Rome, and they were, but they didn’t understand the way he would do it.  They were stuck passing out bread.

I think it’s easy to confuse the empirical nature of Jesus’ miracles to the contextual nature.  Today we see through the eyes of philosophers like Lock and Hume who emphasized knowledge that we gain through experience, this is the empirical, knowledge learned by what we receive from our five senses.  The Christian view of the world led to the advent of science, but then things got out of control as we began to worship science.  Sure we can benefit a lot by the ordered observation of this world, but there is other knowledge that comes by reasoning or straight from God as revealed in the Scripture.  Obviously the acts of Jesus were amazing.  They could dazzle all of the senses.  But what was more important was the way in which Jesus was connecting those actions with the text of the Old Testament.  The disciples didn’t get this. They thought they understood that text and thought they had observed the man who should fulfill those texts, but he wasn’t doing it the way they wanted and so their hearts were hardened.

Obviously this caused tension, which might be why Jesus sends them out in the boat alone, while he went up on a mountain to pray for them.  But he didn’t give up on them, he performed another shocking miracle to bring them back to reality.  He is the true shepherd, he led them when they strayed and gave them the sustaining truth that they needed.  Peter is the first to be reconciled and so he jumps out of the boat to meet his shepherd.

Jesus planned this out as our heavenly father plans out all of our lives.  Our circumstances are the teaching we need to hear.  By it we learn patience, humility, grace, love for our fellow man and many other things.  God has us always in a living metaphor, if only we have the faith to see it.

Mark doesn’t get much style credit amongst Hebrew scholars, his gospel is often seen as simple and basic.  But the fact is that the nature of the Hebrew language and the pre-modern culture means that even the most basic is very rich for our pallet.  This is the case with Mark's telling of the feeding of the five thousand.  Oddly it was pointed out that the people sat down on green grass as if Mark were concerned about which season it was.  Really he is tying us into the rich literary tradition of the Old Testament concerning the Messiah.  The first clue was the the phrase “they were like sheep without a shepherd”.    I was even shocked at how simple it was when I was reminded of the Psalm 23.  Jesus is proving he is the messiah by this pastorale scene:

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”  And so the people did not want, he provided their needs
“He makes me to lie down in green pastures.”  There it is, and Mark got it he led them to green grass.

And having these connections we can bring in the following verses.

“He leads me beside still waters. 
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake”

Back in Mark “This is a lonely place and the hour is now late.” brings us to the next section of the Psalm

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me” 

And then the part of the message that really made the religious leaders mad.  They were supposed to be the shepherds of Israel but they had been unfaithful.  And so the people were lost.  This is why every action of Jesus stung them to the core.   This is why they plotted to murder him after everything he did.

“You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil”

And Mark tells us that there were 12 baskets of food left over.

“my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.”

Truly this is the Lord here on Earth.  You can see the joy of Mark as he makes these connections, after the resurrection.  We don’t often make these connections because we have become less poetic and more scientific in our thinking.  This is modernism.  We like to break everything into pieces instead of putting them together.  We dissect and deconstruct everything instead of connecting words in poetic ways.  As Lewis said to see through everything is not to see anything.  But poetry and its connections, and even fantasy, make us see the world more clearly.  This is the beginning of wisdom (step two is application).

An even more powerful incitement of the Pharisees is found in Ezekiel 34.  “Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?. . .No longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, that they may not be food for them. . .I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. There they shall lie down in good grazing land, and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them in justice”

There is even a hint of the salvation of the nations, the Gentiles, “And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries,” .

Now as the Church we are the sheep, the followers of the Good Shepherd.  But we are also the hope of the world, the light of the world, in a sense shepherds to the lost.  Today most of the attacks agains the Pharisees are true of the Church.  We have been more concerned about ourselves and our comfort than about caring for others.  We pride ourselves on having the truth and lament the world falling apart.  Instead of realizing that their wandering is our fault.  They are sheep without a shepherd we have a shepherd we should be pointing people to him, instead of mocking them.

Lambert Lombard (1505-1566)
The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes
Oil on panel

I just saw this article, one of many, that I didn’t even read, but a trend that I have observed first hand. This is basic selfishness. “I have my career and my life and I don’t want a husband or children messing it up”. Even people with children often view them as an accessory or compulsory social admittance. This is really messed up.

It’s easy to mock culture and rebel against traditions, but it’s quite difficult to develop and sustain moral culture or even civilization. We are born into a culture of rebellion and so things continue to deteriorate. But the old timers understood the importance of training your daughters to be mothers. It takes work and we can see the results of not doing this work or “leaving it up to them to decide”.  It’s the same gambit offered to Eve as if adding another possibility was somehow would empower her, when it only offered death in disguise.

What’s so important about motherhood? Well aside from the personal benefits of all such difficult endeavors, such as character building and a sense of accomplishment, you have demographics.  Mark Steyn has been a proponent of the importance of demographics for a while now.  The theme runs through his two latest books and many articles, such as this one.  We fight many battles as humans and a few more as Christians.  That is the nature of living in a fallen world and our responsibility to spread the gospel to all people and all areas of their life.  There are two ways you can do this by reproducing through evangelism and by having children.

As humans we fight the elements, disease, other people, and our own human sinfulness.  As Christians we fight against principalities and powers and the Muhammedans.  The latter we have been fighting for 1300 years with about the same results.  It’s easier to understand the importance of having many children when you and 101 other people have just sailed over from England to the wilderness and people are dying from disease and starvation and winter and Indians.  In addition there was a much greater understanding of the bigger picture back then.  People did things to ensure that their children lived in a more stable, more law abiding country.  Things like, I don’t know, pledge your life your fortune and your sacred honor as you sign a letter telling the King of England you want a divorce.  It’s a basic fact that you can’t prepare a better place for your prosperity if you don’t have any.  I think the reason we don’t think about the future is the same reason women prefer dogs, that is, selfishness.  We want what we want right now and don’t consider the consequences, because we are just like children.

But the consequences of reality are such that if you and all the people around you don’t have children then soon there are no more people.   Except that there are other people who understand this and they are having tons of kids.  Eventually they win.  They win militarily, ideologically and religiously.  The powers and principalities and powers win. We as Christians are supposed to spread the gospel to all peoples of the earth.  In addition we are still bound by the covenants of Adam and Noah to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.  Jesus has saved us unto good works, he has conquered sin and freed us so that we can live on this earth as it was meant to be. One day our labor will determine our jobs in the new earth (Matthew 25:14-30).  God is glorified when good works are done on earth.  Being fruitful and multiplying and being good stewards of the earth are some of those good works.  Now God obviously can and does do whatever he wants with history.  But he could have just saved everyone or lined up everyone in the world and given them a choice between a relationship with him or rebellion, but he didn’t.  He built twelve men who built the Church who spread and spread.  He left it up to us to be and spread the Church.  Why let it fall apart when we have established it in any area?  Why let the minions of Satan reclaim ground because we were too lazy to have children and too dumb to plan for the future?

Because Muhammed did plan.  He saw the rise of Christianity and he took it and twisted it for his own purposes.  He created a tribal religion that appealed to the Arab people and appeals to what is basest in man, with plenty of rules to keep them busy.  Do you want to escape your poor humble life?  Join my tribe, Allah has promised me victory over all the tribes of the Earth.  He created a culture that glorified having children and all but guaranteed that they would follow the heresy of their parents.  Today 90 some odd percent of Muslim children become Muslims, while Christians hand half of their offspring over to the Atheists every generation.  The Christian populations of Europe halve every generation.  That means there is one grand child for every four grandparents.  Where as the Muslims are multiplying six fold.   The United States has just hit the tipping point.  Our birthrate is just at replacement.  Now I am not saying that every person in America is a true Christian, but they are Culturally, which is very important.  They don’t go on jihad, behead people who disagree with them nor kick dogs.  That is they are living on this earth and doing a heck of a lot more of what God intended for man before the fall than the Muhammedans are.  That is a good.  Sure it’s not as good as if they were solid Biblical Christians but it is better than the alternative.  Looking at the demographics it’s not hard to see what is going to happen shortly.

Interesting that the west is the first place that dogs were more than street vermin.  In the east they are wild scavengers that are the targets of kicks and rocks.  But Christians began cultivating wolves, ruling and subduing the earth, and now we have an amazing assortment of dogs for many purposes today.  So if you really love dogs you will have children and raise them up to be Christians, then dogs and all of this wonderful civilization will be possible in the future.  The alternative is love of self and love of Jihad.

I was surprised at the portrayal of John the Baptist as some sort of loser in his day.  Also I was surprised at the pastor painting this picture of a loving family who had no idea how their son would turn out.  I don’t think it’s all that difficult, even for the world, to understand that someone with a wildly successful ministry, beheaded by the whim of a drunk king is not a loser.  Also, I have no problem with trying to relate the people of scripture in what they were going through.  But these people were not clueless and disappointed at how things turned out.  They were far too wise for that, they were far wiser than we are.

First of all, John was not a loser.  He was a super star.  People flocked to the desert to see him. Everyone knew his name, including the King.  People even mistook Jesus for John the Baptist (Matthew 16:13,14).  People love fame today, almost more than anything from what I can tell.  Some people are famous for being famous.  People will subject themselves to almost any form of torture to appear on TV.  And even committing grievous crimes is not outside the realm of possibility for someone who really wants to be famous.  Shoot a bunch of people or commit suicide and you will be famous.  I’m assuming it was the same back then.  Herod put on shining armor and told all the people to look at him.  Rulers built statues of themselves and held them up for the people to worship.  John had this kind of notariety, and he was a faithful servant of God.  He was so famous that the Queen and her Daughter couldn’t find anything in the whole world that they wanted more than him dead.  Now even secular historians have to admit that people singled out for death by the royalty are significant.

In this and many situations we don’t have to wait for eternity to resolve who was right and who was wrong.  The church made many such errors in the past as they executed people whom they later had to recognize as saints.  Now I’m not for worshiping saints, but there are worse things and the point is that these martyrs had to be dealt with because their lives bore real fruit, and the church couldn’t ignore it.  Things were rightly judged on this side of eternity.  That is the case with John the Baptist.  As I mentioned before choosing the drunk king and his incestuous marriage to his brothers wife or the prophet of God is not that difficult.  We shouldn’t really be concerned if the world gets it, but even they could tell the difference between someone killed fighting for what was right, faithfully doing his job (more on this later) and some dumb actor who kills himself.  And the Church should certainly be able to figure it out on this side of heaven, they always did in the past.  In a post Jesus world, the power of martyrdom is almost unavoidable.  I was reminded of this passage from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

 About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr. Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.

This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one. The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree. It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it. The Christian feeling evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far. The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence. Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren’s. I am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was it so fierce?

The world gets this.  I think of the last Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises.  At the beginning he fought because he didn’t care, he was suicidal.  Later he learned to give himself for others, as a martyr.

I think the Church does a little too much of this waiting around for eternity and not deciding anything stuff.  It’s cowardice.  Jesus tells us that what we bind on earth is bound in heaven (Matthew 18:18), with regard to church discipline.  What we do here matters and we can judge rightly, we have the tools.  Rulers of old were commended for judging rightly.  We are not to sue our brother because we, the Church of the all knowing God, keepers of the scripture, His very word, should be able to resolve conflicts between people in our midst better than the world (I Corinthians 6:1-8).  We are the light of the world, not the lawyers of America and it’s judges who can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman or the difference between marriage and homosexual perversion.  Knowing scripture is great but being able to apply it to every situation in life is the real definition of wisdom.  It’s an applied science, not just a theory.

Secondly, the life of John the Baptist was not just a random shot in the dark.  From the beginning the story is all too familiar.  An old couple that can’t have children, suddenly is visited by an angel.  Hmm does this remind you of any other Biblical stories?  It should.  How about Abraham and Sarah?  Ruth and Naomi?  Hannah?  Barren women suddenly having children, is a sure sign that God is doing something.  Not to mention the first chapter of Luke laying out the circumstances of John’s birth.  These were not random people they were faithful Jews in every sense of the word.  They got it.  The same can be said of Mary and Joseph.  The song of Mary is all the proof you need.  It is very complex, and a reflection of the song of Hannah (I Samuel 2).  They understood how God works.

It was even obvious that he would be a prophet (Luke 1:16).  And as the faithful of Israel, they were looking for just such a prophet.  And it was no secret what Israel did to the prophets, they stoned them (Luke 13:34).  But like the Catholic saints, the people of Israel eventually figured out that the dead prophet was truly sent of God and their works were preserved in the Old Testament. And his job was also no secret.  The rise of the prophets in the Old Testament came with the system of kings.  Before the Kings you had Judges.  Then Kings came on the scene and God’s method of communicating his will to the King was through prophets.  They often performed allegorical acts or condemned the actions of a king directly.  So, it was completely appropriate for John to criticize Herod for taking his brother’s wife.  And it was, completely predictable that he would be killed.

John was the last of the Prophets, just like Samuel was the last judge and the first prophet to the kings.  Both represent a change.  The change was brought about by the faithful prayers of a woman, Hannah, Elizabeth and Mary, each a woman who was saved by childbirth (I Timothy 2:15) and who saved her people.  Rather than blaming the leaders for their problems they raised faithful children with their prayers and remade the world.  Rather than wallowing in depression, or getting a dog, they followed the Word of God and brought blessings to all.