Tag: christianity
Let’s Talk Prophecy and End Times
The parts of the bible which deal with “end times” prophecies are something I’ve always shied away from dealing with directly. Studying and researching those parts of scripture can be very entertaining, but it’s a dangerous past time. Nearly everyone who gives it a go winds up lost and led astray. And sadly, some of these people have managed to warp many people’s entire understanding of Christianity.
Part of the problem is a pervasive, fundamental misunderstanding of what prophecy is and what it does. In the bible, a prophet doesn’t predict the far-off future. Instead, their gift is an ability to see and explain the reality of what they see happening all around them. These are the people who have heard the voices of those who are being silenced. They see through the agreed upon lies and narratives for why things are the way they are. They are able to look at their present with spiritual eyes and recognize what others are blind to. Further, they understand God and his ways well enough to easily see where it’s all heading.
Which is not to say that they have nothing at all to say about the future. The ancient Hebrews viewed time as circular. What has happened before, will happened again. When a prophet shares a vision, it is a symbolic description of what they see happening in the spiritual realm. It’s purpose is to illuminate of the archetypal patterns at work in their world. That way, when a time cycles back and a time such as the prophet’s comes around again, we might better understand the spiritual reality of what we are seeing.
This is why, bible prophecies which clearly refer to a specific person or set of events in the past continue to inform us about what we see going on around us today. For example, the whore of Babylon in Revelation obviously refers to the Roman Empire. And also bears a striking resemblance to the corrupt Roman Catholic Church of the late middle ages. And is arguably a good illustration of a certain super power at work in the world today. It’s an archetype of empire at work in the world. So long as empires which rely on violence, greed, fear, idolatry and control continue to arise, the whore of Babylon will also continue to arise. Continue reading “Let’s Talk Prophecy and End Times”
Some Afternoon Encouragement
If you are feeling poor, worn out, full of grief, weak, despairing at the state of the world, hungry for change, wishing you could make things better, and you are misunderstood and rejected today, Jesus says that you’re doing it right.
He says that the people who are sitting pretty, enjoying the rewards of a comfortable life now are already enjoying their passing rewards.
But you will hold heaven in your hands. You will be comforted. You will rule over the earth. You will be satisfied with what you see there. It’s abundance will be yours to enjoy. Your mistakes will be long forgotten and irrelevant. People will look at you and say, “look! There’s one of God’s children! Can’t you see the family resemblance?”
I know – trust me I know – that at the moment, Jesus’ words may feel empty and hollow. You may hear them and think, “sure, who I am going to believe? Jesus or my lying eyes?” Continue reading “Some Afternoon Encouragement”
When the Cost is Too High
I knew a Christian man who had an employee who did something dumb and illegal without his knowledge. She was caught and arrested at his place of business. The woman had small children at home, a drug addicted ex and her kids would end up in foster care if she went to jail. He had seen what can happen to kids in foster care up close and was sick at the thought of them going through that because of something foolish their mother did. So he prayed over it and decided to take the fall for her. He told the police that the crime was his doing. He plead guilty to an offense he did not commit for the sake of her and her children.
Guess what happened next? Well, I met the woman involved and she had stayed out of legal trouble and was grateful for what this man had done for her. So that was good. And he got involved in a ministry helping people coming out of prison put themselves on the straight an narrow. Which was good. But really, the decision to do something heroic for someone else destroyed this man’s life.
He lost his business, of course. His reputation was trash. Twice he was run out of towns where he tried to restart his business after people found out about his criminal record. He had a hard time even getting employees because all it took was a google search to turn up his past. People would leave reviews for his business online warning others to stay away from this sick criminal, complete with links to the state’s database of criminal records. A couple of individuals took it upon themselves to stalk and harass him to the point of having to get the police involved.
He told me privately that if he had it to do all over again, he wouldn’t have protected his employee. The price had been unbearably high and had negatively affected many other people he cared about. He took some comfort in helping others, but the truth was that all the good which had come out of his action benefited others at his expense. Perhaps there was a great reward for him in the afterlife, but he had to get through the rest of this life first.
This man’s story is pretty extreme, but it illustrates an uncomfortable fact about following Jesus and/or going above and beyond to do the right thing. You see, we all want to think that when we stick our necks out to do something good, the heavens should break open for us and blessings, rewards and praise should shower down upon us. But the truth is that it’s more likely that the world will crush you instead. Continue reading “When the Cost is Too High”
My Talented Readers: Jason Silver
I have a confession to make. Sometimes I spy on y’all. It’s true. If you comment or like things I write or interact with me a lot on facebook, I might go poking around the internet a bit to find out more about you. And then I report my findings to the NSA. OK, I’m totally lying about that last part. I don’t even know … Continue reading My Talented Readers: Jason Silver
You Can’t Fight Reality Forever
Is the church dead? No. But plenty of people seem to be preparing the obituaries, going over which funeral plans are most suitable for everyone and making the funeral arrangements for that inevitable day. Inside Christian circles, the pessimism over the prospects for the church is palpable. There’s a real sense among many that some threshold has been crossed and that it’s all down hill from here.
There are a few die hards who are still trying to “take the culture back for Christ”, but increasingly there’s a recognition that the church went to war and lost. Even the dominionist movement, which has gained some footholds in state politics, seems to exist purely for the purpose of alienating everyone else. Their time will pass, once they’ve done enough damage that even the call the “take the culture back” isn’t enough to garner votes from nostalgic and frightened Christians.
Now, I do not share this very pessimistic view of the direction Christianity is heading. In fact, I’m rather enthused about the future of the church. But I understand the defeatism which is being driven by the realization that the church went to war and lost. Badly. On every issue which the church decided to take a stand, they lost. Not only did the wider culture not embrace the church’s positions, the things which the church felt important enough to declare war over are the very reasons people give for leaving the church. And let’s face it, that kind of rejection stings.
Over the last few years, copious pixels have been used analyzing and lamenting the reasons for the church’s impotence in the face of the freight train of cultural change. Some have traced the beginning of the end all the way back to the Enlightenment. Or Constantine. Or the hippies and women in pants.
So what happened, really? It seems to me that the answer is pretty simple: reality.
For much of human history, our understanding of reality was pretty limited. The sun circled the earth. God or gods controlled the weather. Sicknesses were demons or curses or God’s vengeance. Counting and measuring were for economic transactions, not studying. In this environment, one of the purposes of religion was to explain a reality which was otherwise unexplainable. Part of the power held by Christianity was that, in addition to being a spiritual path, it provided narratives and explanations for reality that worked well enough to be plausible.
Along came the Enlightenment and with it the rise of Empiricism. (Empiricism being the idea that knowledge is gained by observing and measuring what can be experienced through our senses. As opposed to rationalism which favors using logic in order to construct an understanding of reality.) Basically, we went from learning about the world by thinking about how things might work or should work to observing how they actually do work.
This shift in our approach to understanding the world frequently had an unsettling result; it turns out that the world didn’t work very much at all the way we thought it did. And not only that, we could prove it. Conjecture and supernaturalism were no longer realistic methods of explaining the world around us. And unlike religious or philosophical ideas which could be rejected or accepted based on our own judgment (or the judgment of authorities), rejecting the findings of empiricism meant rejecting proven reality. Continue reading “You Can’t Fight Reality Forever”
Sticky post
The New Reformation
It occurred to me this morning that perhaps Christianity has been going through a Tower of Babel experience. If you recall your kiddie bible stories, the tower of Babel tells us why there are many languages and peoples. If you don’t recall the details, after the flood, all the men got together to build a great tower. They were able to do this because they had … Continue reading The New Reformation
Fighting God
If you are a Christian who takes the bible seriously, there will often come a point where you feel hamstrung by the bible. You may be inclined to, say, allow women into ministry or accept gay marriage or get a tattoo. But there are those bible verses which clearly speak against them. So, out of obedience to God, you accept that God works in mysterious ways, his ways are always good and some things are just beyond us.
In response to your faithfulness, other people get mad at you and call you sexist or homophobic or legalistic or whatever. And depending on how well you know Jesus, you either humbly take it in stride or you fight back. (You have to know Jesus really, really well to be capable of taking it all in stride, btw.) After a while you can end up feeling like you’re standing on the razor’s edge between being faithful and being a loving, decent person.
But Jesus said that the truth would set us free and standing on a razor’s edge doesn’t leave much room for freedom, does it? Somehow, simply being faithful to scripture has left you standing on one spot, unable to move, exposed to the world’s wrath and struggling against your own weaknesses. It doesn’t feel much like freedom.
The problem is a problem which God has been dealing with since time immemorial. The problem is with us and lies at the very heart of our relationship with God, self and other.
You see, God loves humanity. He’s on our side. We, however, struggle to love ourselves and each other. And the only way we can comprehend God’s love for humanity is if it is foreign and strange. If God loves humanity, he must not love the same way that we love, because there’s no way God can look at us with all our sin and failure and be happy with us. So we’re not too surprised when God tells us to do things which don’t make sense; we’re really not capable of understanding God’s love, after all.
Great, you say. That may well be true, but what does that have to do with the uncomfortable position Christians often find themselves in when following the bible? Well, let I explain. Continue reading “Fighting God”
Why the Cross Pleased God
So, I got a comment today on my engagingly titled post “Did God Really Demand the Death of His Son as a Sacrifice for Sin?” I was going to answer it in a comment, but I realized that most of y’all would never see it there. And sometimes the best conversations take place in the comments section. Especially when there’s a question from someone who thinks I’m wrong.
My blog posts purposely distill a lot of background information into a hopefully interesting, informative and sometimes challenging post. So I can’t cover everything, but I promise that if you have a question, I have an answer. It may not always be the right answer. But I do have an answer. I have been called Hermoine Granger more than a few times over the years. (I am very grateful to the Harry Potter books for giving us a nicer way to call someone a bossy know-it-all, btw.)
So here’s the comment:
I loved reading your article and it does make a lot of sense. However, Isa 53:10 says, But the Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief; If he would render himself as a guilt offering..(NAS)
So, I think that the theological stand point that is argued against in your article is actually derived from the Word of God. This has been a point of inner controversy to me as well?? Why would a loving God send His Son to be beaten to a pulp in order to satisfy justice for the sins of humanity, if the sinner will just believe in Jesus? That would be like punishing the good kid in the class in front of everyone to justify the rest of the bad kids who acted up in class and then telling them, if they only believe that the good kid got punished for their misbehavior; their deeds would be forgiven?
Believe me when I tell you how I have struggled with this as a Christian..
For those following along at home, Isaiah 10:53 says:
But the LORD was pleased
To crush Him, putting Him to grief;
If He would render Himself as a guilt offering
We can easily read this as saying that God was pleased to allow these things to happen because through the work of the cross, his children (us) would be returned to him. Continue reading “Why the Cross Pleased God”
A Prayer for Easter Morning
Father God, We come to you today as a family of the broken, the humbled, the weak and the victorious. We have walked down dark paths and through dark places. We have been wounded, we have been lost and we have been foolish. Yet no matter how hopeless or empty our spirit’s dwelling places have been, Easter morning is always there speaking victory to us. … Continue reading A Prayer for Easter Morning
The Upside Down World 