Adam and Eve, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1472-1553

I must confess I have murdered dozens of people.  No this isn’t about hate in ones heart being the same as murder.  But there are countless women, some of them I don’t even know, and I have murdered their dear friend or relative.  No, I have not met most of these people and their murders were little more than a construct in the mind of said females, but it is murder just the same, or so it seems.  How have I gone on so long with impunity, you might ask.  Well I assure you there has been nothing but penalty while the actual victims are non-existant.  It generally happens that while expounding one of any number of ideas, that I am wont to expound, I make distinctions, distinctions between right and wrong, the only type I really see any point in making.  But in saying that certain things are wrong I call to the minds of these females the victims I speak of.  They have affinity for these people, even love, therefore my criticism of whatever must be incorrect.  And the fact that I attacked an action done by this other, must me that I am in fact in the wrong, evil even.  For I have killed their acquaintances with my words.  This is the nature of Eve’s deception.  God had made his law clear, for her own good, but she felt something different.  Instead of taking that word and applying it unquestioningly to her situation, she welcomed in the evil, tried it on.  She let it enchant her and she found the Word of God wanting.

Paul tells us in I Timothy 2 that it was the woman who was deceived, but today even the men are deceived.  This type of emotional situational morality, has take over our culture.  There is a sense in which this was always the case. Chesterton said that “men are men but man is a woman.”  He was trying to convey the fickle nature of mankind.  At best in scripture we are the Bride of Christ at worst the harlot of Ezekiel 16.  But I think the victory of feminism has lead to the scenario I laid out above passing for reason a logic with a lot more men than in days gone by.  I can’t tell you the number of women I know who bristle when I criticize homosexuality because the know someone who is a homosexualist. And they aren’t that bad, so homosexuality can’t be that bad.  Scripture is clear, it’s not grey at all, but they make it grey because of an emotional affinity for another person.  Christ tells us that the cost of following him might be giving up our closest family relationships.  He came to bring a sword that divides  Matthew 10:34-39.  And you don’t want to be on the wrong side for the sake of a family member.  Men are supposed to be more logical.  Our sins are generally blatant and overt.  But I see more and more in our culture that this emotional appeal works on them.  We have built whole fields of social science aimed at codifying these emotional appeals.  Granted they often attract more women but men are being sucked in more and more.  But we need to avoid Adams sin of complacency and sort this out and fight this evil.

Modern man likes to mock the stories in the Old Testament as being myth and fairytale.  Well they are.  They just happen to be true fairytales.  And if you think that is silly you don’t need to look farther than the second and third chapter.  God lays out his command plain and clear.  Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Genesis 2:16.  God was not stingy, there were thousands of trees man could eat of and only one he could not.  Now in a good fairy tale, a woman eats an apple and the whole world is destroyed.  But watch as this is played out, it is not such an unfamiliar story.  It all begins with a question “Did God really say. . .”  This is how sin always begins.  Stealing isn’t really that bad.  Adultery won’t really hurt anyone.  But today in reference to sexual sins, psychology has established a canon of such questions.  Since Freud wondered if it was all about sex, his questions opened the door to countless others.  Maybe I’m really meant to have sex with other women.  I was born a man but maybe I’m really a woman.  Then you play with the idea a little in your mind.  Society helps by throwing off any notion that anything you choose to do could possibly be wrong.  You try it out on your lips. “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes.”  Then you start to suspect that God is really out to get you.  He want’s to keep you from doing this because he knows how much fun it would be.  And all his little puritanical disciples are just out to wreck your fun too.  So, you push a little further and pursue this evil.  “and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate”  But then you feel ashamed.  Your eyes are opened. What have you done?  Then your worldly friend come along side you and assure you that you are clothed, you are fine.  That’s not your conscience bothering you, it is the social construct of those Christians out to ruin your fun.  So you march and paint rainbows, you continue your sin with the same sex or cutting off or sewing things on, you spit in the face of God.  And nothing bad happens, you don’t get struck down, everything seems fine.

Eve, Anna Lea Merritt, 1885

Then one day you look around and there are no children.  Contraceptions are strewn about everywhere.  The remains of bloody abortions are splattered in every street.  You can’t tell the men from the women from the use-to-be men and women.  The elderly die alone in their beds at a younger and younger age, with no one to care for them.  Then the dictator comes. He rules with an iron fist, now you don’t choose anything.  And, you wonder if there might not be something too that fairytale told in Genesis.

The First Mourning, William Adolphe Bouguereau, 1888

The Rich Young Man Went Away Sorrowful. James Jacques Joseph Tissot.

The story of the rich young ruler who came to Jesus is well known.  The story is recounted in Matthew 19 and Mark 10.  A wealthy young man comes up to Jesus looking for a system of morality that will get him into heaven, fire insurance as we say today.  Jesus tells him to follow the law.  The man claims to have been doing this. Jesus tells him to give up all of his money and the man walks away.  This young man just gave up the kingdom of heaven for however much money Mark 8:36.  He did not see the Kingdom of Heaven as a priceless jewel for which he would sell all Matthew 13:45,46.  According to Luke 13:16-21, this man is a fool.

But let’s suppose this man shows up to church on a different Sunday, when the message is not about money.  On Do not Murder week, this guy is cheering in the isles.  Do not commit adultery week is fine too, “preach it brother”.  Do not steal week, “what a great illustration, I need to tell so-and-so about that. He has a little problem with this.”  All these weeks sitting in the pew, he doesn’t look like a fool.  What is wrong with Jesus? Why couldn’t he just find common ground with this guy and live happily ever after?  Why does Jesus have to be so judgemental the guy was 90% right in his theology, give him a break, no one is perfect.  Instead Jesus goes right to this man’s one weakness and exposes it.  I have see few pastors who are as to the point as Jesus.  It’s easy to address piles of legitimate sins floating around theoretically in the world, while telling yourself that you are faithful to the word, but to address the immediate sin of a people is hard.  As an old pastor once said if you are not preaching the gospel that needs to be heard by the people right now, you are not preaching the gospel.  We all need the gospel every week and every day.  We are all fools in some area or another, and the appearance of getting along is not worth the evil that sin can work.

So, seriously do you know any Deists?  Gosh I just can’t tell you the number of lives I’ve seen destroyed by Polytheism–wait that never happened.  And, I’m not talking about involving elaborate systems of rhetoric to force someone with some error into one of these categories.  Because on the face, it is silly to discuss these, these are not our problems.  Agnosticism or Atheism are very popular in the west and Pantheism in the east, but I’m talking about our church or the church at large. Not that we are without our problems, so like Jesus I would like to address a few of these.

Problem one is Scientism, it is the grandchild of Darwinism but not quite the same thing.  I’m not talking about science as a set of experiments.  It’s not about living out our Christianity in a real way on this planet.  It’s not an exercise of applied science in any give field. It is applying science to areas clearly covered by scripture.  It is allowing science to be a source of authority over scripture.  Now of course no one likes to admit that this is the case. Our hearts are deceitful, we do thing subtly.  We create complex edifices to assure ourselves that we are ok.  The fact remains we put ‘science’ over God’s word in many areas.  Ever wonder why pastors use statistics so much these days.  It’s not enough for us to hear God’s word tell us something is wrong, we need to try it a bunch and then collect statistics to see if it was really that bad.  Look at Europe they legalized everything and their murder rate is down 3.5%. And about God’s word, some parts of it have not been proved by science so we better tread lightly we don’t want to look stupid like the Church did with that whole Galileo incident.  No sir, not me, I’m an enlightened modern. . . fool.

This sin first because it is the most fundamental problem these days.  It is underlying our thinking at a fundamental level which gives rise to so many other bad ideas.  This was the battle of C. S. Lewis.  This life is a story which is why God’s word is full of stories.  We are not molecules or atoms or some other scientific explanation, we are the incarnated word of God, like all of creation.  God incarnated his law and love into a story that was Jesus the Christ, Emmanuel, God with us.  Science can do a lot of things for us, but it is no way to run your thoughts, your life or a society.  Aurthur Balfour predicted it and Hitler worked it out in real life. His crusade to assist natural selection resulted in millions of deaths.  But we do the same thing every time we put the authority of science above God’s word.  Scientific advances have given us the false impression that things will always get better, that what is new is always better.  It tells us that old book, old morality and old people are of no use.  Old people can’t do as much as young people and they are slow at computers, so let’s just kill them.  This extreme pragmatism has lead to a huge influx of euthanasia, assisted suicide, and the killing of unborn people with down syndrome and other defects.  We worship science when we corrupt the creation account and fundamentally misunderstand that story.  He created them male and female, gender is not a choice.  Marriage is a God ordained institution, it’s not a convenient social construct which can just as easily be involve two people of the same sex if it’s convenient.  Things don’t slowly morph into other things, God put them in their place, quickly and dramatically.  The same way he brought his justice and remade the world in the flood and the tower of Babel and in every life remade by the Gospel.  Our court systems are full of scientism.  Guild or innocence by a standard of God’s law are secondary to a person’s genetic propensity, mental diseases or social conditioning.  These are all the constructs of Social Science which is simply pseudo-scientific-heresy masquerading as science.  Humans are not machines, we are sinful fallen  creatures made in the image of God. Our hearts are deceitfully wicked, yet we think a series of experiments can somehow give us meaning and direction.  We are fools.

Problem two is Patriotism.  Now there is nothing wrong with loving your country or even fighting for it.  But there is a problem with putting your faith in it.  Were you scared on 9/11?   Why?  God was still ruling in heaven the same as he is every day.  If God wants to take you, what do you think the government will do about it?  Do you give thanks to the government for your personal safety and prosperity or do you praise God?  Or perhaps you just put your faith in capitalism as a system apart from any country.  That is still false worship. You are still a fool.

With our latest President the country seems to have taken a turn from this sin into the sin of Communism.  If patriotism is the Republican sin, this is the Democratic.  Obama ran as a messiah, he was going to provide everything for everyone.  He was blatantly worshiped.  Many put their faith in him.  The government is their god, it feeds and clothes them, gives them healthcare, tells them what to eat, how to be safe and even raises their kids.  Jesus told the Jews to “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s”  But my person is not Caesars, I bear the image of God I belong to him.  My family is not Caesar’s, nor is my church.  But we rendered these things to the government in countless ways.  From turning over our 5 year olds to accepting laws we should fight.  Inculcated Communism has also lead to fundamental redefinitions of property, justice and even history.  God’s repeated command not to steal assumes property ownership.  But Communist like to tell a false story about how everyone is owed equal everything and protection of property is a construct of the rich to subdue the poor.  Real justice, they say, is redistributing everything to the poor.  Or as God might say legalized theft.  The only reason there is evil in the world, says the Communist, is because of wealth inequality.  No, I’m sorry, the problem is sin, and the solution is Christ.  And anyone who puts their faith in government is a fool.

Lewis took on four perhaps I can handle just two.  But these are not categories of loving as his were.  These are two ways of viewing the love of Jesus.  The love of Jesus portrayed in the Scripture, Old and New, is one thing.  The world’s conception of that love is another thing.  Unfortunately the average Christian on the street and the average post-Christian on the street hold much the same view.  This is not to speak well of the world.  The Church has been derilect in it’s duty to preserve the world faithfully and preach it at all costs.

The mantra of our day is “how dare you judge me”.  It is all around us in every form of media and in all of our peers. This is love number one.  This is the world’s conception of the love of Jesus.  He went around just loving every sinner and speaking acceptance, tolerance and diversity.  I’m not sure why anyone would crucify this Jesus but apparently they did.  Oh, I know, it was the bigots who had to kill him because they were so judgemental.  They were Old Testament haters.  Those religious leaders and the huge mobs of people that cried for a real criminal to be freed, just as long as Jesus was killed.  They simply couldn’t handle how much he loved them and tolerated them.  This Jesus hung out with the worst people he could find. This Jesus was warmer and fuzzier than a Thomas Kinkade painting of a mountain of teddy bears.  In fact if he could be there and hug a person as they were sinning, all the better.  He taught his disciples to tell everyone that “we are sinners too and God is love so don’t fret it man”.  They passed out doobies and smoked a bowl with anyone who would.  When the disciples encountered a hater, they were told to suddenly become political and to have those people burned at the stake.  Ah what a nice Jesus.  This is hardly more absurd than what people seriously believe.  No doubt they are hesitant to say it this way, but that does not change the beliefs they act on.

Martyrdom of St Sebastian, Paolo Veronese

Of course, the love of Jesus portrayed in the Scriptures is quite different.  First I think our conception of the term sinner is a bit off.  It is almost always used in the New Testament as a bit of a joke on the religious leaders.  Christ came for the sinners, or the people who would admit their sin and fall on the mercy of Jesus.  He didn’t come for the religious leaders who didn’t consider themselves sinners.  They were the chosen  of the chosen.  The Jews of the Jews.  They had erected a system of complex but achievable rules and they followed them.  He uses the word sinners as the religious leaders would apply it.

And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners

Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, Jusepe Ribera

He isn’t suggesting that the religious leaders were not sick, but that they didn’t think they were. Obviously they were sinners in need of God’s grace but they didn’t realize it. So on the other side these people weren’t literally sinning at this moment.  Jesus didn’t travel around in an ongoing orgy.  These were people who had recognized their sin and fallen on his mercy.  Jesus didn’t seek the worst people he could find so he could exude tolerance or embrace diversity.  They sought him out for relief from their sins. So, these are the two categories, the self-righteous and the sinner.  But they are not perpetual categories.  His ministry was to call the sinners–to good works.  He made them clean and divides them from the world, or sinners.  This is the idea in Mark 14:41 and Luke 6:32.  We are all sinners by nature, yet some have accepted the grace of Christ by faith and some have not.

Sometimes the Church can look like the world, there is no pride in this.  If you profess this faith in Christ and still act like a sinner, that is a serious thing. Paul tells us to purge that evil person from the church.  I Corinthians 5:9-13  The Church should be characterized by obeying his commandments I John 2:1-6.  This is how we treat these people with love, because it’s how God told us to treat them.

Triumph of Faith – Christian Martyrs in the Time of Nero, 65 AD, Eugene Thirion

Of course this is a different thing from the sinner who does not claim Christ.  He is simply part of the world.  Christ had a different way of loving these people.  In John 8:48-59 the people were inquiring about who he was.  He explains it to them them and they try to stone him.  In John 10:22-39 the people ask him if he is the Christ.  He talked for a few minutes and they tried to stone him again.    Time and again the same formula occurs, a crowd follows Jesus, he talks, they pick up stones to stone him.  The way Christ loved these people was often by making them mad.  This does not sound right to us at all these days.  We have this mistaken impression that problems in the world are caused by judgemental people or lack of education.  We fancy that if only people knew enough they wouldn’t sin.  This is foolishness.  Christ was the greatest teacher every, he communicated his message effectively.  His message offends, this is the love of Christ.  That is why he warned us that if we follow him the world will treat us the same way. “Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master. ’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.”

The love of Jesus is not just an easy emotion.  It is difficult and requires much wisdom and study of scripture to apply it correctly.

There was a day when this time of year was punctuated with harvest festivals.  Many pagan rituals were motivated by bringing in a better harvest, tactics to invoke more rain or sunshine.  They built temples, they had feasts and prayers.  As pagans began to convert to Christianity, they modified these practices into events thanking God for his blessings.  People were closer to the land and they realized that without the fertility of the land we would starve.  A seed is placed in the earth and it brings forth an increase, a head of wheat which is a sheaf of multiple seeds.  When that increase was not sufficient, there was famine.  When it was sufficient or overly so, there was praise of God’s blessing.  The excess could be sold and other aspects of culture could be pursued.  In fact the name Joseph means ‘increase’.  The name has not been common since the Puritans one of their ministers, Increase Mather, comes to mind.  They understood the importance of increase, their lives depended on it. We think we have the luxury of forgetting.

We here in Bozeman should be familiar with agriculture.  This is still a largely agricultural community.  We have an agriculture college and it has may test field throughout the valley and the state.  Various hybrids are bred and tested for factors like disease resistance, bug resistance and yield.  Obviously the plants which prove most resistant to pests and which produce the most increase, are chosen and spread to the farmers.  Over the years this system as allowed modern farming to produce far more food with much less land.  This has enabled us to spend more time doing other things, like distributing porn on the internet.  Now lets suppose that instead of choosing the most productive plants we chose the least productive plants.  I know silly right?  But this is what sin does.  Sin is not logical, hmm I’ve heard that somewhere recently.  So let’s say we not only choose the plants that produce the least but we choose the plants that don’t reproduce at all.  Then we replant these plants.  And we develop a whole festival to these plants.  We might have parades as a part of these festivals.  We could call the new plants ‘diversity’ and all wear rainbow clothes and carry rainbow flags.  Um, I’m sorry did I say ‘could’?  This is homosexuality, the celebration of infertility.  The celebration of the eunuch, the steer, the capon.

Of course, our society has been celebrating infertility for years under a different name.  Long before the homosexualist had his way with society we began celebrating infertility as ‘birth control’.  Surprisingly the call of convenience was too hard to resist even by the Christian.  The Catholic church held firm, but the call of pro-death Nazi’s like Margaret Sanger was too strong for the Protestants. With Sanger’s narrative, of over population and fear that somehow we had better assist evolution, or 80 million years of progress might be stopped by the unfit races, they conquered.  After society got used to the idea of marriage as a means to pursuing sexual pleasure, Katy bar the door.  Marriages which no longer offer the same sexual stimulation they once had, were simply dissolved.  “It was no one’s fault, we grew apart”.  Marriage fell apart, commitment meant noting, it became all about pleasure, tax and medical benefits.  At this point why not include the homsexualist?  They  ‘love’ each other too, by this new definition.  Who are you to criticize their wanting to find love and then visit it in the hospital?  You backward bigoted hater!  And we didn’t have an answer because we lost the more fundamental argument a generation ago.

Part of the Beulah Land tradition.  ‘Beulah Land’ is the married, pregnant land.  Isaiah 63:3

Oh you might say, “What about the couple that can’t have kids”.  And you would probably say it whilst sticking out your tongue or with some other such snarky expression.  Well you are onto something. This is infertility.  This has been seen as a problem, the world over.  This was the charge against the witches of old.  The witches Increase Mather gets accused of trying to burn.  But this is a case of the exception proving the rule.  This is a concept we really don’t understand these days.  The fact that your mind goes to that situation is because you know it isn’t normal.  It proves what normal is by it’s peculiarity, think ‘unusual’ not ‘creepy and weird’.  Our society wants to take every deviant or strange situation and expand the norm to accommodate it.  If some new crime is purpetrated in some new way, we want to make more laws binding everyone instead of realizing this is a unique situation that needs to be fairly judged under the law and not proof the the law has failed.  If we can find a person born with both sets of genitals, we want to redefine gender, instead of realizing this is a deformity.  A case of the world not working as it ought.  The fact that some couples can’t have children, is not proof that marriage is not about children. Just like the wheat that withers and dies before it brings forth fruit, is not the wheat that should be celebrated.  That is why we mourn with those couples at their infertility.  The fact that this couple can adopt, is no reason to remake the created order and suggest that Adam and Steve can be parents because they can adopt too. It does not suggest that they are parents the same way as Adam and Eve.

“Oh but it’s working out in Europe, neener-neener.”  Oh really?  Well, it’s working out just like the wheat.  Most of Europe is committing cultural suicide.  Their birthrates are falling to the point that their population halves every generation.  This doesn’t sound fine to me.   Celebrate unfruitfulness and you will become unfruitful.  By this we can see that the commands of God are not just about advancing in heaven or the afterlife.  They work here too.  They are for our own good, now.  We disobey them at our own peril.

Oh the stupid things we have done, trying to be different than the Catholics.

The little story at the end of Mark 1, in which Christ heals a leper, is very simple.  Our suffering brings us to God, he pours out blessing, then we forsake him.  That could be the end of the post.  But, of course, our sinful hearts like to make things complicated.  I suppose we could blame the devil, he certainly doesn’t help simplify things, but we can do plenty on our own.  So evil complicating hearts often require complicated solutions.  We need to always be sorting out the new lies piled on top of old truths.  We need to refresh the stories.

A stained glass window depicting Jesus curing the leper, Church of Christ the Consoler, Skelton Cum Newby, North Yorkshire

This man has been brought to Jesus by his suffering.  There is no reason to assume it was not genuine.  The language is all about cleanliness and invokes our hearts to the Levitical reality that this man does not have access to the temple. So Jesus was moved and healed him.  The man runs away and forgets Jesus.  It is a timeless tale.  Repeated over and over in Scripture.  It is the story of Israel and it is our story.  It’s the story of creation, man was placed in a a perfect garden everything was available to him except for one tree.  He didn’t appreciate the blessing, he forgot God, he ate the fruit.  One of the most stark examples of this is the people of Israel in Exodus 32.  The Lord heard the cry of his people suffering in Egypt Exodus 3:7-10  So he freed them from their Egyptian oppression, by a series of miraculous plagues.  Then he led them through the sea and they watched as Pharaoh’s entire army was drowned, while they were saved.  Yet they think Moses might be taking a little too long on the mountain and decide it’s time for a new god. Then they rewrite history and attribute everything good to this golden calf that they watched Aaron make.  “And they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt’ ” vs. 4.  Seriously people?  Of course we never do anything like this.  We don’t ever attribute blessed historical events to persons other than god?  I know I’ve never heard anyone attribute our blessings to deists, or technology, or  French or Enlightenment philosophers.  No, we all get that the unprecedented blessing enjoyed by this country are all from God.  And we appreciate them every day.  Unfortunately you get the point.  We are so forgetful of our blessing we assume that they are normal.  We allow our blessing to be referred to as racial or imperial theft because we forget that this is not normal.  Poverty and despair are normal on this planet.  And why are they normal?  Because when we are freed from poverty we forget God.  Beware of taking our blessed position for granted and writing God out of our history and writing our arrogant selves in.

Jesus healing the Leper. Codex de Predis, Turin Italy, 15th Century

Our Heavenly Father is trying to bless us and we don’t let him, we forget him and choose our own way.  We see this at the end of this episode, leading into the next episode.  The healed man incites a riot that crowds the streets of those small ancient towns to the point that the sick and injured get trampled trying to get to Jesus.  They can’t get to him.  They must be lowered through the roof.  It is an interesting literary reversal.  Lepers were cast outside the city for their uncleanness.  Jesus takes the place of the unclean and is cast outside the city.  He tells the ex-leper to go inside the city, though the priests were to come outside the city.  I doubt they could be bothered.

This is a great instance of Christ fulfilling the Law and not abolishing it.  He tells the man to go the the temple and follow the Law of Moses, so that he may be a testimony to the priests of Jesus.  This is a common theme in the New Testament.  The religious teachers think they are sons of Moses, but they prove by their misapplication of the law that they are sons of Belial.  Jesus by fulfilling the law to the letter and applying it to real life proves he is the true son of Moses.  And even this law was not about judgement or creating a social hierarchy, as our modern humanist history tell the story.  The law protected people from contagious disease.  It also protected people from being falsely excluded from society.  The priest had to make a determination after patiently waiting.  As we see the law was in harmony with Jesus’ healing, it made provision for people being cured.  The Law was grace.

Jesus healing a leper. From 15th Century gradual.

There was a huge lottery payout recently.   Huge, because lots of people donated money to the cause by buying tickets.  “A tax for people who can’t do math.” as Doug Wilson says.  But they don’t see it that way, they see it as a chance to strike it rich with very little effort.  But what happens to people who strike it rich?  In Florida there is a counseling center for such people called The Sudden Money Institute.  Because the reality is that people who get rich quick destroy their lives.  When need is no longer a factor, immorality runs rampant, unchecked we forget God.  This is the story of the leper. This is why God allows suffering and hardship.  It is his blessing, preventing us from destroying ourselves.

Having read your front page story pushing for a new city ordinance,  I was appalled. Not necessarily by the subject of the ordinance but by the abuse of the English language. Condensing a broad diverse language into two categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is alarming.  Apparently ‘discrimination’ has been put into the bad category and ‘equality’ into the good.  If every word simply becomes either an insult or a compliment where will we be?  We will have no means of expressing anything.  Discrimination refers to ones ability to determine difference between things. I think this is a handy word to have around.  Supporters of the ordinance think so too.  They discriminate between two groups; traditional morality and a minority of mental genders, type of sin practiced, or type-of-below-the-waist-surgery-had.  Which brings to mind another useful word, ‘hypocrite’. 

Currently, a person is free to protect himself and his children from behaviors that most of humanity does and has considered evil.  They call this the “suffering” of people who have suddenly decided that biology is a choice and who think temptation is an unequivocal call of nature. But, they simply want to switch the group who suffers. Since these new groups are a clear minority, this would only result in more suffering. You don’t change laws that make it difficult for the sexually perverse, into laws that make it difficult for traditional families and call it “good for family.”  Laws discriminate.   Apparently these words now have complex definitions dependent on who uses them. Their man-made ‘equality’ is better than God’s. This requires as much verbal surgery as the two women pretending to be parents or the man who thinks god gave him the wrong sex toys. 

These hypocrites should move back to where their new language is spoken or learn our language.

I think it’s easy for Christians to forget what the gospel is all about.  Even pastors do it, as they seek to make personal applications from the weeks passage to convict all those people sitting in the pews.  But this is not the Good News.  The Good News is that the God of the Universe remade the world so that we are no longer at odds with him.  He repaired the rift created by the fall of Adam. He relived the history of Israel, but he was successful. And as a result we are all his heirs.  We inherit the land, we inherit the earth.

It is so true that we become like that which we worship.  Our heroes or ideals, are goals, whether we notice it or not.  By forgetting the rich stories of the Old Testament the church today has made a sort of ideal out of the New Testament situation.  This was the century of the infant Church.  This was a specific time and it was not our time.  Things were changing and a new thing was beginning.  Persecution was rampant and it didn’t look good for the future of the Church.  But this was not our goal.  Jesus and his apostles acknowledged that these difficult times would come.  But the idea he put into our head was one of victory.  This was to be our goal.  We will move mountains, ever knee will bow.  He conquered Rome in such a fundamental way that no one could have conceived of, The Byzantine Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, British Empire and American Empire.  Every wave of pagan tribe was converted, God’s blessings and prosperity flowed.

Kingdom of Heaven, Evelyn de Morgan, c. 1878. Hint: You read it from bottom to top.

Reading the beginning of Mark should just blow us away.  God’s prophets have been silent 400 years and then suddenly John and the Jesus burst on to the scene and start conquering.  He walks through the familiar history of the Jews.  He passes through the seavs. 9-11, but when he comes out there is no golden calf Exodus 32, he remains faithful.  He is tempted in the wilderness vs. 12,13, but he does not grumble and complain Exodus 16:2, he does not doubt that his father will provide, he is victorious.  Then he enters the land vs. 14.  There is no doubt here, there are no lukewarm victories.  Every one of his enemies is put to shame.  False teacher are left speechless.  Disease and illness are cured.  Demons are cast out.  This isn’t the story that should make you feel bad about your sins.  From what I can tell most people feel plenty bad about their sins.   We all screw up everything–a lot.  But people do commit wrongs against us that we don’t deserve.  Despite the fact that we still sin, injustices are done.  Evil people do us harm and the ‘authorities’ often look the other way, for one reason or another.  But the Gospel tells us that all this will be made right.  Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness–they shall be satisfied.

I think Christians have almost become comfortable wallowing in their sins.  It seems humble and it is about the only thing the world will let us do these days.  If we lift our heads up, even a little, they are quick to silence us with the wag of their fingers.  “You wouldn’t want us to call you judgemental, would you?  Hmmm?”  “No mas’a. Please I’ll be a good little slave.”  But we have the Gospel people!  While we should serve our fellow man, we don’t take our orders from him.  The world does not get to set the parameters for our faith. Neither should this idol of the 1st Century.  Just because our situation does not meet the exact situation seen in the New Testament does not mean something is wrong.  God put his people in all sorts of situations all throughout the Old Testament and he showed them, he showed us, how to behave.

“He taught as one with authority.”  Paul tells us in Philippians 2 where he got his authority:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father

He was exalted by his humility, King over all.  But it’s not a wallowing defeatist humility it’s a real throne that really conquered.  And not just conquering, but ruling.  The connotation of authority in scripture is often one of the righteous judge.  He sits before his people like Solomon and decides cases.  He judges right from wrong, punishing the wrong and rewarding he who has been wronged.  So Jesus clearly has the authority.  But do we?  I think so, we are the children of the king.  We are his inheritance, and we shall inherit the earth, we shall judge the angels.  In the early part of Mark the ability of Jesus to cast out demons is a sign of his authority.  But Jesus rebukes his disciples for their inability to cast out demons Matthew 17:14-21.  They should have had the authority but their faith was week. Verse 21 seems to indicate that the only way to remedy this lack of faith, was for them to fast and pray more.  Christ had authority and he used it he judged rightly. Do we?  Or do we sit by lazily and wait for things to fall apart so our situation will look more like the 1st Century?  Things will fall apart if the Church does not judge rightly I Corinthians 6:1-11, but that is not the plan.

Further Painting Info Here

New Saint Andrews Letter Here

I am just not convinced that the popular story of apartheid is right. I mean it is coming from people who get every other story wrong. People who’s overall view of the world over time is wrong. I wasn’t around for it, and it will take some digging to get to the pre-civil rights BS version of history.

But I have a thought; What is so bad about segregation?  There have been numerous studies that show people are more comfortable living with people who are like them.  Diversity for it’s own sake generally doesn’t work.  But, I think of all the group projects I was forced to participate in throughout my schooling. There were always weak links in those groups that were frustrating. Sometimes I would just do my best and we would carry them. But often it was so annoying and pointless and I would just do nothing so everyone would get a bad grade. Yeah it is the same problem with all collectivism. I think separation is good. The weak can’t hide behind the strong and they are forced to push themselves. And the strong are more free to enjoy the fruits of their labor and therefore be more productive.  The inevitable result is the trickle down of this fruit from the top, as well as many direct benefit by sale, example or gifts.

So think of segregation in this country. You separate the rich from the poor. So you keep the poor from using the busses of the rich. Why don’t the poor have busses? The common line is that the rich exploited the poor to make the busses so they are really their busses. But this is a lie. The fact is if you trace it back it is the story of two cultures. Western Christendom took the land they were given and they made everything you see here. Then they went to other places where that was not the case. They fostered the same systems there. Since the colonialism story is a fog of secular lies, think modern day oil. Middle Eastern nations had the oil, but no use for it or means of extracting it. Well occasionally they might burn a Christian when some floated to the surface, but I digress. Then the west comes along and made use of the oil and lots of them rich. But there again, many of those people are still poor. Did we create those poor by making use of that oil? Did we exploit them? This is the income gap the President and all his communist buddies are always talking about. I submit that those people are what they are because of the god they follow. They follow a backwards, sexual deviant, blood thirsty, warlord,w bent on taking over the world via war, named Muhammed. I suppose we follow the son of God who told us to take over the world with the Gospel.

I think separation is the story of creation. “God separated” is repeated over and over in the creation account. He separated so that those things could come back together and have a relationship. He separated the man into man and woman so they could relate to one another. I suppose man should blame all his problems on woman stealing from him and exploiting him. The fact is that separation is freedom, it’s an opportunity to exercise your will over yourself and circumstances. If you manage it poorly you can’t blame those who managed it well for excluding you. Basically that is just an admission that you can’t manage yourself and that you want to be a slave.

I know I’m behind the times but I finally saw this Elysium thing.  This movie should really be called Hypocritium.  Holy cow what a hatchet job of reality.   So the main character is a Christ figure who is a combination of Jesus and the thieves on the cross.  Turning Damon into a daemon perhaps.  Ok people can change, I’ll give them that.  But we are supposed to allow a world full of the most amazing technology and yet sometimes a pallet gets stuck in  future robot machine—thing.  They can rewire your brain but sometimes people get mistaken for a cart full of pigs.  But don’t worry Hollywood is not done rewiring your brain.

This thing is tapped right into your brain, just like Hollywood. It makes it easier for you to absorb all the Marxism.

Strangely this world does not take much imagination, and it certainly doesn’t require an elitist space station.  This is currently an apt description of Southern California  You literally have the greatest wealth of the world in Hollywood, surrounded by the third world city of LA.  Matt Daemon and the makers of this movie literally live on Elysium.  They literally depend on a servant class to wait on them, while making a movie about America keeping out the poor of the world.  This is a common scenario with the Elite Left. They don’t want to interact with or pay for middle class workers, so they maintain an underground third world class to wait on them.  Which is why the NY and DC suburbs are second only to California in percentage of illegal immigrants.  But this is not the first time Hollywood or the Left tell the story wrong.  That is their job.  Daemon’s film Promised Land gets it just as backwards.  Supposedly big oil companies move into a small town to destroy it, but Daemon is there to save the day.  Well this actually happened too, it’s called Williston North Dakota.  And an oil boom there has created thousands of jobs and new millionaires every day.  Meanwhile Daemon and Hollywood are the ones destroying middle America with his constant mockery of ‘hicks from the south’, ‘religious Bible thumpers’,  small business, strong father figures and everything else that is the Marxist agenda.

Though it goes down as easy as soma, or whatever they were dispensing, the biggest pill to swallow is the absurd scenario that we find at the beginning of the movie.  Supposedly the wealthy of the world exploited the masses of humanity to create a floating space station with advanced technology that can heal every person, yet they have killed every animal and basically destroyed the planet.  That’s what capitalist do, don’t cha know?  Despite the fact that these people have their pie, or that thing,  in the sky, they still want to believe the economic pie is fixed.  If someone gets a piece of pie that means someone else goes without.  Get a new schtick people.  This is just marxist revisionist history set in the future.

The Vision of Aeneas in the Elysian Fields, Sebastiano Conca, c.1740

The movie portrays a bunch of aid ships waiting in the wings and only withheld because the wealthy are evil. They like to portray their Romans as reserving their roads and aqueducts just for the special people. Even the opulent Ancient Greeks didn’t have audacity to suggest that Elysium was without it’s Fields, a place of fruitful labor.  The reality is not that America or the west hordes the wealth of the world, earned on the backs of the poor, but that they created this unprecedented wealth by unbound human labor.  We made the pie bigger, a lot bigger and we share more of that wealth than any nation in history, well except for the elitist leftists.  I believe Obama/Biden’s total contribution to charity are like $400 bucks a year.  The problem has been our inability to lift up the third world from what was always the norm on this planet.  The problem is sin.  We could feed the world, there is enough food on the planet, but evil warlords empowered by evil people prevent it from going where it needs to go. Evil politicians elected by evil people stop it before it’s even produced.  Corrupt people who will not govern themselves force strict governments ,like the tyranny portrayed on earth in the movie, to rule them.  The dictator comes after the rebellion not before.  Think Napoleon and the French Revolution.  Think Hitler and the godless Germans. It’s a timeless story, God blesses us, prosperity ensues, we leave God, sin becomes rampant, God cracks down.  There was an empire which reserved it’s roads for the elite it was called the Soviet Union, which is the real future of Hollywood theory.

This movie really has it all—all wrong.  The hero is trying to be a good person but society and poverty force him back to a a life of crime.  Occasionally we, in the real world, are joined by members of Hollywood.  Robert Downey Jr. found out the hard way that  this is not what causes crime. “I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t.”

Pie in the Sky.   Part of it is missing because the evil Capitalists took it.

The reality of immigration in this country is not one rogue ship crashing into a mansion.  It’s an entire rogue nation looking for the easy way out by attacking another nation.  It’s rogue politicians seeking an uninformed underclass, whose votes they can buy with middle class money.  This is not theory, this is what actually happened to conservative, productive, California.  The last round of immigration reform in 1986 created the current mess.  Uninformed illegal immigrants were given free stuff in exchange for voting Democrat.  In exchange the Democrats created an unsustainable bloated government  to suck on the wealth of California.  And the destruction is evident before our very eyes, as municipality after municipality fails.  Funny you can’t pay unproductive people forever.  America welcomes more immigrants than the rest of the world. But you can’t have everyone on top going to college and pushing paper  and everyone on the bottom living on welfare.  Someone has to make things.  Someone has to produce.

This type of advanced healthcare system does not happen in the face of rampant evil elite rule.  Look around  Obama is elite rule and he has gotten his way.  His healthcare plan is working great. He has hired thousands of busy body bureauracrats at the top, to reduce production in the name of safety or the environment or reparations.  He has created thousands of dependents on the bottom who siphon off of the labor of others, via food stamps, and welfare programs.  They produce nothing but they line their pockets on the backs of the middle class.  Innovation is stifled by red tape, legal risk and shakedowns.  Elysium is never built, there is no one to build it. It is Obama offering you a pain bill rather than the surgery.

But Hollywood spins a great yarn.  They have wrapped their Marxism in romantic emotional appeals.  Which can be difficult for us to sort out, we are creatures of story. And, the Left has figured that out, while Christians twiddle their thumbs and look for verses in the New Testament that talk about culture.  The gospel was meant to be good news, but the world has heard another story.  Our story has become old and boring, we have stopped practicing the art of telling it.  They rewrite the past on the silver screen and manufacture candidates in the present.  All the while they are like a tragic Greek prophecy. Everything they do to prevent the problem actually creates it.  That’s what happens when you set your sights on fallen man rather than the living God. The best the world has to look forward to is perfect healthcare, but we look forward to a world without sin. You become like what you worship, so don’t worship hypocrites.

Future Reading: The Fiction of G. K. Chesterton, Phantastes George MacDonald

The Waters of Lethe and the Plain of Elysium, by John Stanhope (1829-1908)