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Yearly Archives: 2018
The Perversion of Justice
The Bible establishes the meaning of justice through the usage of the word, related words, and then an explanation of a justice system laid out by God for Israel. The American system of justice is based upon what the Old Testament teaches. It’s been called a Judeo-Christian ethic, ethic being a representation of what’s right. Others have argued for the same meaning from a position of natural law, asserting justice from Newton’s law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. They argued that they could justify an identical position of justice from nature, separate from the Bible, yet compatible.
God’s justice requires punishment for sin. The penalty of sin is death. Jesus paid that penalty. He died for us. Everyone deserves the penalty, because all have sinned.
The blind man wasn’t blind because of his parents (John 9:3). The children’s teeth are not set on edge because their parents ate sour grapes (Jeremiah 31:29). The curse of one generation of people are not carried on to their children (Exodus 20:5-6), even as seen in the children of the Israelites who left Egypt entered the land, when their parents did not. God argued in the last verse of Jonah (4:11) that the children of the Ninevites were not guilty of their crimes and they deserved sparing.
As examples, all whites are guilty for slavery. All men are guilty for sexual assault. All white men are guilty of about everything that is wrong.
When justice is based upon equal outcomes for everyone, then what is right is also what is judged to have the best consequences for everyone. This justifies taking something from someone to give it to someone else. Poverty proceeds from the advantage of one group or class over another. That class is punished as a group by taking from it and giving it to another.
Justice requires the same rules for everyone, a principle enshrined in English justice since the Magna Carta. It also expects impartial and equal enactment of justice, justice done in a just manner. It requires witness or corroboration of an accusation of a violation of the law. Someone cannot be convicted and punished without proof.
The terminology “kangaroo court” traces to the idea of jumping to a conclusion without proper evidence, making a large leap like a kangaroo. Convicting someone without sufficient evidence and without the presumption of innocence (impartiality) is unjust. This practice very often proceeds from the perversion of equal outcomes.
A woman is right because she’s a woman. A man is guilty because he’s a man. A person of a particular race is innocent because he’s of that particular race. Instead of individuals being judged for individual wrong, entire classes are judged, which is by nature partiality. This is not justice. It is a perversion of justice. It only gets worse from there.
Justice doesn’t deal with outcome. It deals with the act. Someone pays for something he’s done wrong and justice is done. Whether he changes or not, he deserves a penalty for his sin. When people are punished for doing wrong, it helps them understand the justice of God. They see they aren’t right with God, that He will judge them for their sins, and that they need a Savior. Consequences in the next life, the eternal, are much greater than those in the present.
When I preach the gospel, I always talk about justice. Until someone sees he is guilty of crimes against God and deserving of punishment, he won’t see his need of a Savior. The gospel is good news. The good news is that he can be saved from the penalty of sin. Someone has paid the penalty for his sin and he can be saved.
Each person is responsible for his own sins. He won’t be punished for those of his parents or for the hypothetical sins of a class to which he belongs. His own understanding of his own salvation depends on his having a right, true, and accurate comprehension of justice. The perversion of justice muddles the knowledge necessary for someone to be saved.
Church Decrease Movement (CDM): Faithful Numerical Church Decrease
Numerical growth of a church isn’t hard. Most of the people I’ve met who see swift numerical growth aren’t either smart or knowledgeable. They haven’t discovered some secret. They shouldn’t be rewarded, as they very often are. Churches with big numbers are the most emulated in the United States. Their tactics are also the most likely to be sent to foreign countries. The most notable standard for success is still size.
In every sector of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, even among unaffiliated churches, the size of the church is the most accepted and practiced criteria for success. The leaders of the largest churches get the most mention among others and have the most influence. It is easy to see. Men have a difficult time criticizing them for what they do, because they don’t want to get out of favor with them. Those churches also very often have the biggest or most buildings and the most money. Even among the conservative evangelicals, size is what is rewarded. You have to be a kind of success that even the world would say is successful. They do not, I repeat, do not promote men with small churches. A man with a small church is not a success.
Young men know that success is getting big and this is true everywhere. Something is wrong with you or you are doing something wrong if your church is small. Men know this. It then affects the way that men practice, and, therefore, believe. You are better if you are big. You are less significant and somewhat a failure if you are small. Again, men know this. This affects everything. It needs to stop. The idea needs to be torched. The truth is the truth. The truth itself is success. Conforming to it is success. We have less conforming to the truth and sadly, because conforming to the truth isn’t rewarded by the leaders in America of every segment of evangelicalism and fundamentalism.
Even among the people that would say size is not the right evaluation of success for church, they still promote size. They contradict themselves. They say that size shows superior giftedness. I’ve seen it again and again. And then the proof is in what occurs then. The men of the bigger churches are considered better. I can tell you that when my church was bigger, there was more widespread acknowledgement of my success. It couldn’t immunize me for my guilt. It couldn’t convince me that what I was doing, had been doing, was biblical. I also have known that the more popular you are, because of size, brings a kind of credibility when you say something. You can say the truth and it is ignored. You can say an untruth and it gets attention, if you have widespread influence especially because of your compromise.
People pay attention to those who have a big following, even if what they are saying is crazy. Even the more conservative evangelicals give credence to the one who has seen bigger success, very often through compromise. There are numerous examples of this. If kooks criticize them, they deal with it, because the kook has a following. If the small pastor criticizes them, they ignore it, even if it is the truth. The truth doesn’t matter. Size matters.
Do I think a movement of church decrease will occur? Churches will decrease, mainly because of apostasy, something like we see has already occurred in the United Kingdom. Much of the apostasy has already started in the United States as manifested by acceptance of same-sex marriage and then the embrace of “social justice.” Among revivalists, there is an increasing “emergent” flavor or worse. Effeminate men are rampant and not confronted. When they are confronted, those confronting are rebuked by millennial mobs, pandering parents, and clueless women.
What we need is strength. We need solid scriptural teaching. We need courage. We need men. I don’t think we’ll get it. Maybe you can prove me wrong.
Evan Roberts and the Rise of Pentecostalism in Britain, Part 16 of 22
The content of this post is now available in the study of:
1.) Evan Roberts
2.) The Welsh Revival of 1904-1905
on the faithsaves.net website. Please click on the people above to view the study. On the FaithSaves website the PDF files may be easiest to read.
You are also encouraged to learn more about Keswick theology and its errors, as well as the Biblical doctrine of salvation, at the soteriology page at Faithsaves.
Lead, Guide,and Direct: What is This?
Part One Part Two Part Three
True or not, whatever Christianity you grew up with had a lot of influence on what you believe and practice. I wasn’t taught much to anything on biblical prayer. From my memory, it wasn’t very good — a lot of “be with me,” “bless so-and-so and bless so-and-so,” “help this person or that person,” and “lead, guide, and direct.” People are usually sensitive about having their prayers criticized. It’s a good environment for a church to have prayers up for analysis. I believe a main reason for group prayer is to agree on the will of God. Agreement also assumes some disagreement.
Nonetheless, my focus here is on “lead, guide, and direct.” What does someone expect as an answer to that prayer? If someone wants God to lead him, guide him, and direct him, and maybe the varied parts of that little cliche are just synonyms, how does God do that? People say that it happens in answer to that prayer, but I never received instruction on that. It was assumed that God just did it, that someone was guided, led, and directed without explanation. Has anyone every explained it to you?
I decided to look up whether “lead, guide, and direct” was used in a book in the 19th century. Total, 15 times. I was surprised it was any, but one of the times it was a Latter Day Saint book. Once used in the 18th century.
Besides my doing this series on this subject, something got my attention this week when a hard-copy of a publication came by snail mail. This is a regular mailing. In it, the author talked about the direction of the Holy Spirit. He said it a few times in the article. That is not unusual to read from someone in fundamentalism or evangelicalism in my lifetime. I’ve often heard a sentence, such as, “We need to rely on the direction of the Holy Spirit.”
The words “direction of the Holy Spirit” I found four times in books in the 19th century. One of them was from the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ. You don’t get the exact words anywhere, but you can read the direction of the Holy Spirit in the Bible. In a book called An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, Thomas Hartwell Horne wrote:
Maintaining that the apostles were under the infallible direction of the Holy Spirit as to every religious sentiment contained in their writings, secures the same advantages as would result from supposing that every word and letter was dictated to them by his influences, without being liable to those objections which might be made against that view of the subject.
That’s right. One of the other four were quoting Horne. The one other quote was strange, speaking about the Holy Spirit directing the priests in the tabernacle and temple, written in 1880 by Dougan Clark, a Quaker.
If you go back to the 17th century, of the only five times we read “direction of the Holy Spirit,” one is from Jonathan Edwards in his Treatise on the Religious Affections, where he said that the Psalms “were by the direction of the Holy Spirit penned for the use of the church of God in its public worship.” This is identical to Horne’s usage. Samuel Mather, son of Cotton Mather, in 1723 also writes “that not so much as one sentence is to be found in it, which was not inserted by the special direction of the Holy Spirit.”
Edwards, Horne, and Mather talk about the Holy Spirit directing the human authors in the writing of scripture. By extension, the Holy Spirit directs someone’s life who obeys scripture. This is how the Holy Spirit works — through the Word of God. The Holy Spirit is not still talking to people or giving them impressions or sensations. Scripture is sufficient.
Believers, true, genuine Christians are led by the Spirit of God, and not their flesh. Believers are led by the Spirit. The New Testament doesn’t tell believers to be led by the Holy Spirit. It says that they are. You can tell that they are by the way the Holy Spirit manifests Himself in their lives.
Just because scripture uses the terminology, led by the Spirit, doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit still talks to people. That isn’t how He directs. He directs through the already completed Word of God. Believers who “let the Word of Christ dwell in them richly” (Col 3:16) are “filled with the Spirit” (Eph 5:18).
It’s not good to replace what the Bible teaches about the Holy Spirit with something made up by a man. The Holy Spirit isn’t directing that. You’re not more spiritual because you’ve got something mysterious, which is impossible to confirm. People might think you have something, because they think they should. Nobody can question these things without –ironically — questions of his love, his desire for unity, and the power of God in his life.
Brett Kavanaugh: Alcohol and the Party Culture
Last Thursday, Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court justice nominee, said about his relationship to alcohol:
Yes we drank beer, my friends and I, boys and girls. Yes, we drank beer, I like beer, I still like beer, we drank beer. The drinking age, as I noted, was 18, so the seniors were legal, senior year in high school people were legal to drink. Yeah, we drank beer, and I said sometimes, sometimes probably had too many beers, and sometimes other people had too many beers. We drank beer, I like beer.
But Maryland’s minimum legal drinking age for beer and wine was changed to 21 from 18 in July 1982, during the summer before Kavanaugh’s senior year. It was already 21 for hard liquor. Therefore, any drinking that Kavanaugh did in the state of Maryland during high school was illegal.
Residents who had turned 18 by that time were grandfathered in and allowed to drink legally. Kavanaugh was 17 at the time.
It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink: Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted.
Two weeks of Kavanaugh’s summer calendar were titled “Beach Week.” What do kids do at beach week? Alcohol drinking ones? The party life, which includes alcohol, is what the Bible calls, “riotous living.” Paul wrote in Romans 13:13:
Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering.
One of the qualifications of a pastor is that his children are not accused of riotous living. — not him, his children — “having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly” (Titus 1:6).
The word “riot” in Titus 1:6 is translated “excess” in Ephesians 5:18, which says, “be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess.” I was reading an article recently that quoted the same verse in the ESV, that reads, “And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery.” That translation leads people astray on the meaning of the verse. It goes against the grammar.
In the grammar, the real grammar, in the wine is excess, riot, or debauchery, not the act of getting drunk or drunkenness. The ESV misleads, and I think people are glad to have it. There are five Greek words in a row — oino en ho estin asotia (noun, preposition, relative pronoun, verb, noun). Literally, they mean “wine in which is debauchery.” The relative pronoun and the noun agree. The debauchery is in the wine.
Kavanaugh isn’t a choir boy. Kavanaugh is another Roman Catholic jurist, whose alcohol doesn’t clash with his Christanity and his judgment.
I don’t trust Kavanaugh as a person. He might make conservative judgments, especially with his newfound intensity of hatred of leftist politics though.
The Trip to Europe Continued (Eighteenth Post In Total)
One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelve Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen Seventeen
On June 13, 2018, my wife, two youngest daughters, and I arose and walked the 7 or 8 minutes to the Mestre, Italy train station to catch ours to Rome. We left around 9am for about a 1pm arrival. We got back to our house fairly early the night before and our train wasn’t leaving that early. We could look out the window to see what Italy offered by train between Venice and Rome. The route moves through Tuscany, which is considered one of the most beautiful areas in Italy.
Tuscany was nice, but for what I saw from the train, it looked a bit like parts of California that are equally beautiful. I live about 30 minutes from Napa Valley, which has a similar terrain, maybe even nicer in certain ways. Of course, we were on a train, which limits what you can see. We saw it — nothing outstanding. The train went right through Florence. If we would could have stopped there and spent a day, I’d have more to write here.
Rome doesn’t have a great public transportation system, compared to London, Venice, and later Paris. We didn’t have many options to get to our room. We got off at Roma Termini and had to figure out the public transportation system. We live in a metropolitan area, so catching busses and trains is normal to us, but Europe is different and every big city in Europe is different, especially in different countries. We took a bus that let us out still pretty far to walk with our luggage on narrow, rugged walkways and heavy traffic.
I know you can tell this by looking at a map, but Rome is an entirely different area in Italy. The area is much different than Northern Italy, as are the people. The people from both places will tell you that. It’s similar in that way to the United States in the sense that you’ve got regions with a lot of variation, even in the same state. California is vastly different both in people and topography in various regions.
What sticks out in Rome right away is that you are in a major metropolitan area, but you are also in an amazing historical and archaeological location. It’s both. There isn’t anything like that in the United States. I have never been to anywhere in the world like that. I would think Athens is and perhaps a few more locations such as that. We stayed in an apartment on the eighth floor about a thirty minute walk from the Coliseum. We had to wait for our hostess to arrive. Rome was warm, so we found a little shade and waited. While we did, one of my daughters and I fond the nearest grocery store to get a few things we knew we’d need while we were in Rome. There they also did not know English. You can do enough to do business and it gives you sympathy for people in the United States who don’t know your language. Italy is not a third world country. You can get what you want or need there.
Only three people could go up in the little old school elevator, so I waited with a daughter downstairs for it to go up and down. The hostess, who was a native of Rome, gave us some tips, showed us everything, and left. We got settled in and freshened up.
Something I haven’t mentioned was that in two different places we took the key with us and had to send it back. The first was the very first place we stayed and we sent it right away in London. It worked out fine. I will say that we also sent some postcards from London back to the United States, one of which arrived three months later. Disappointing.
Mailing the key was an adventure. I found a post office about three blocks away and went in and asked if I could get an envelope and send the keys. He didn’t know English. He was able barely to explain that I needed to get my own envelope. I tried about three different places, and one of them said the tobacco shop. The tobacco shop. If you grow up like I did, you don’t go into a tobacco shop. However, in Italy the tobacco shop is the Italian version of a convenience store and it is the place you get your public transportation tickets. That was good to find out almost right away. They’re all over the place. They had the envelope I would need, so I went back to the post office, addressed the envelope to the Venice host’s parents, and finally it all worked. He got the key over a week later.
Our goal for the late afternoon and evening was to go to the heart of Rome and go on a walk starting at Campo de Fiori. First, we would eat in the late afternoon. I can’t remember the name of the restaurant, although I could look it up. It was one little room with very cramped small wooden tables. We liked it. It was a good start to the food of Rome for us. It was near the famous statue Pasquino, which is along the walk, and we would get started once we were finished eating.
I’ll return next week, Lord-willing, to describe that night and the next . At some other time in some other post, I’ll talk about mid-week services this week and the next. We went the first and second midweek in London and Ripon. It wasn’t too hard to find a place to attend in England, even if we had to go a little bit out of our way. We were glad to do it. It’s a major part of our trip. We decided in advance before our trip, not because of time, but because we decided we could not do better than meeting on our own, something I would have never done until a few years ago. I’m convinced in rare instances, it’s the best thing to do.
The Septuagint (LXX) Chronology in Genesis 5 and 11: Corrupt and Indefensible
Only the divinely authorized writers were uniquely and infallibly moved by the Holy Spirit, not scribes who translated, (re)copied, and/or transmitted the biblical text after it reached its final, canonical form. The Bible never promises the infallible transmission (copying) of Scripture in any single textual tradition (117)
The Oracle of Delphi, Preaching, Power, and Sensing God
In upper central Greece along the slope of Mount Parnassus resided the ancient city of Delphi. The ancient Greeks considered Delphi to be the center of the world, the world personified by the mother earth goddess, Gaia, and Delphi her navel. Delphi comes from a Greek root, which means “womb.”
The story was that Zeus had found the origination of the earth at Delphi by sending out two eagles to search. Later, Apollo, the brother of twin sister Artemis (Diana) and the son of Zeus, the Greek god, slew Python or Drako, a serpent that protected the navel of Gaia. The legend was that the Pythia was the original priestess in the worship of Gaia. When Apollo slew Python, its body fell into a fissure at Delphi, releasing fumes that intoxicated Pythia, sending her into a trance and allowing Apollo to possess her spirit. Then she prophesied, becoming his oracle.
The Greek author Plutarch, who himself became an actual priest at Delphi in the first century A.D., wrote about the oracle of Delphi and described how a woman would enter a small chamber in Apollo’s temple and inhale sweet-smelling vapors (“pneuma”) from a fissure in the mountain before entering a state in which she would provide responses to seekers’ inquiries posed to her mediated by priests, who interpreted her pronouncements.
Delphi is 123 miles away from Corinth. It doesn’t look very far on a map. Today it’s about a three hour drive around the Gulf of Corinth. In ancient times, people travelled great distances to ask the Pythia questions. In 1 Corinthians 12-14 Paul confronts a case of paganism mixing with true doctrine, dealing with ecstatic utterances interpreted as divine revelation, often the more extreme the more likely its credibility (1 Cor 12:1-3), unknown languages (1 Cor 14:1-27), and female prophetesses and their asking the questions rather than being asked them (1 Cor 14:34-35).
Earlier in 1 Corinthians (1:18, 21), Paul said “it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” “Preaching” (kerugmatos) isn’t a style of speech, oozing with feeling and stylistic dynamics, but the content of the proclamation, and this is how the word was used in ancient literature. In 2:1-5 he goes further to emphasize the effect wasn’t in the excellence of the speaking that he did, excellence being the superiority of the person, but in the message, the testimony of God. He spoke the words “which the Holy Ghost” had taught him, or with him as an apostle, in other words, he spoke scripture.
Of all the mentions of “the power of God” in scripture (13 of them and all in the New Testament), five are in 1 and 2 Corinthians. The power of God rests in the Word of God, not in some means of a human intermediary channeling power akin to a Delphic oracle. In another mention, Paul says the gospel is the power of God (Rom 1:16), again emphasizing the message, not the oracle.
When the said power stands in the message, the substance of the preaching, God gets the glory or that “no flesh should glory in God’s presence” (1 Cor 1:29). God’s presence is in the preached Word of God. Later Peter says that God is glorified when a man speaks “as the oracles of God” (1 Pet 4:10-11), which is scripture. You know it is the Spirit of God when it is the Word of God, this being how someone knows God’s presence.
The oracular or ecstatic speech that accentuates the experiential, the euphoria of style, glorifies man. It is not what God has chosen to confound the wisdom of this world. Anyone who hears a “powerful” speech by a dynamic orator could glorify the speaking of that man, but that isn’t how God chooses to persuade men. It makes sense to men, but it isn’t what God uses. When I write this, I’m not saying that a speaker attempts to be as dry and monotone in speech as possible. I’m saying the emphasis is not on human means to sway. Powerful preaching isn’t related to technique, strategy, gesticulation, raving, or passion. It’s not a Billy Sunday pose or the visage and voice of a Billy Graham.
Through history, oracular religion, hearing voices, and then ecstatic speech are all manifestations of paganism. Mormon doctrine says that Joseph Smith was an oracle, given the translation of the Book of Mormon. Part of the doctrine of Roman Catholicism is visions and apparitions. For instance, Teresa of Avila, a Catholic “saint,” in the sixteenth century was a Spanish Catholic mystic and in her own book about herself, she wrote (Life, p. 27): “being at prayer, I saw, or rather (for I saw nothing, either with the eyes of the body or with those of the soul) I felt my Savior near me and I saw that it was he who spoke to me.” She also wrote: “I have rarely beheld the Devil in any form, but he has often appeared to me without one, as is the case in intellectual visions, when as I have said, the soul clearly perceives someone present, although it does not perceive it in any form.” I’ve heard others tell me in many instances one or the other of these experiences Teresa testified to having.
These subjective experiences are supposed to mark supernatural intervention. At the beginning of Acts, Luke wrote to Theophilus that Christianity came with infallible proofs. These were supernatural proofs that God was involved with what was occurring in the story of Luke and Acts in fulfillment of prophecies. Everything and everyone that is going to say it is God or of God must give some kind of supernatural basis that would at least seem to evidence God. In your own Christian life, you want to know that it is real, that it is of God or God working, a true relationship with God. Many, maybe even a majority, of those who claim to be something Christian look to their own personal experiences to confirm that what they have is of God.
The early motto of Apple, used in marketing, was “Think Different.” In the authorized biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, he was quoted as saying:
Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.
Psychedelic drugs, Jobs said, made him think different, altered his consciousness enough to get a different look at the world. I’ve heard several advocate the same since I’ve lived in California. It reminds me of the fumes inhaled by the Pythia before she offered her insight to a visiting inquisitor. This information that apparently comes from outside the body seems elevated to what someone learns with a natural method.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series of books, also subjected himself to Victorian spiritualism. He believed in it. He believed God sent solace to those bereaved after the death of a family member, using mystical means. Clairvoyance is the ability to see what isn’t physically present, clairaudience is the ability to hear spirit’s voice or thoughts, and clairsentience is the ability to sense what a spirit wants to communicate or to feel sensations from a spirit. The Bible and historic Christianity has rejected these experiences as not of God. They are either someone deceived, someone lying, or a demon.
I’ve heard lots of different personal, subjective happenings to validate someone is operating under the jurisdiction or within the working of God, not unlike the visions and apparitions of Roman Catholicism. It’s heavy in the Charismatic movement, but it’s now maybe just as prevalent among evangelicals of different stripes, who would say they are non-Charismatic. Some are revivalists, and even those who deny revivalism still have some kind of mysticism in their professing Christianity. They say they sense God or feel the Spirit of God. These sensations in almost every case are not verifiable.
We have a completed and sufficient Word of God. It is not to be added to or taken away from. This is how God speaks today. There are experiences that believers have outside of the Bible, but the Bible is the final and infallible authority for the validity of those experiences. They are judged by the Bible, proven by scripture, or tested by the Word of God.
For instance, fruit of the Spirit shows up in the life of a believer yielded to the Spirit of God, which is to be obedient to scripture. Love shows up. That’s an experience. Patience shows up. That’s an experience. These are all defined by scripture. They can be judged by believers according to the Word of God. This is how God wants us to live.
On the other hand, men move outside of the Word of God into their own experiences as validation. This is not living by faith, but by sight. It doesn’t please God. It doesn’t bring glory to God. Many bad practices, against or outside of scripture, are justified by extra-scriptural mystical experiences. False doctrine is taught and confirmed by sensations attributed to God by someone without any biblical means of verification.
Perhaps worse, the voices or calls or feelings explained above devalue scripture, and very often are elevated above scripture. They are viewed as a superior form of relationship with God, more personal than the Bible. Many of those who claim these experiences see themselves as having a higher form of spirituality, or even something of the power of God, not possessed by those who depend only on scripture. Those with just scripture are thought or said to be missing something, a kind of spiritual have-not. All of this is ripe for compounding deceit.
Concocted Christianity
When I was young in a small Indiana farming community, off and on we owned various black and white televisions and sometimes watched Wide World of Sports on Saturday with host Jim McKay. Then I first saw the Harlem Globetrotters play, Meadowlark Lemon and Curly Neal. They always played the New Jersey Generals, and won every time. It wasn’t real. Everyone knew it. They defied the rules of basketball, the audience played along, and everyone knew, they knew, that what they were doing and we were watching was concocted. Very little was at stake. It was all just fun.
We shouldn’t take the Globetrotter approach and use it on Christianity. Maybe for some basketball is sacrosanct, not to be touched with such profanity as the Globetrotters. It doesn’t matter to me. However, Christianity is and should be sacred. It can’t be modulated or modified or adapted for whatever purpose. And yet it has been and it is. And different explanations are given for why it is appropriate, even though it isn’t. The contention of this piece is that very little genuine Christianity exists anymore. It’s been given the Globetrotter treatment.
With the Globetrotters, the referees didn’t do their job on purpose, so they were also in on the concoction, turning basketball into something different in nature. All the props were there to give the impression of basketball. The Globetrotters were concocted. Christianity has its referees on earth, the ones supposed to be responsible for keeping it real and true and pure, not making a joke of it and not allowing it to go astray. The rule book is the Bible, it’s plain, and it’s simple. Christianity’s referees have been on the concoction too. Most of Christianity is some concoction now.
There is a lot at stake with Christianity being a concoction. It relates to this life, but also the next. God isn’t pleased. That’s very bad — very, very bad — but it doesn’t stop there. If it isn’t real and true and pure, people will go to Hell, separated from God forever. It should matter to the referees. The pastors, the major leaders in Christianity, should be about keeping Christianity according to the Bible.
Concocted Christianity isn’t Christianity. It is concocted to look like it is, using some of the same terms and relying on the same rule book. The concoction gives the impression or an attempt is made to give the impression that it is Christianity. For most, it’s good enough. It doesn’t have to be the same, just good enough. It fools people, but it will never fool God. He authored Christianity, knows every difference, and isn’t fooled for one moment.
How is a new Christianity concocted? Christianity departs from scripture. You could say, churches depart from scripture. Scripture clashes with the world. If a person, a family, or a church believes and practices the Bible, they’re going to clash with the world. Rather than clash with the world, if an individual, family or church change Christianity closer to the world, to what the world is and does, which will mean departing from scripture, it will clash less with the world or not at all.
The way Christianity functions, according to scripture, which is the only Christianity, not a concoction, is not complicated. It’s clear and simple. The problem is that it clashes with the world. The referees need to keep it in line, but they haven’t. If they say, let’s conform to scripture and clash, it appears they will shrink in numbers and they do. They concoct a new Christianity that doesn’t clash and waylays shrinking. It is akin to the people walking away from Jesus in John 6 and Jesus saying, “Stop, I’ll concoct something different, more in line with what you want, please stay.”
The world mobilizes an array of forces against Christianity. Whatever Satan has in the world system, he uses. Bringing down Christianity is all he has left. He won’t fully accomplish it, but he and the world system do a lot to get as far as possible in this endeavor. It has worked very, very well. Based on most measurements, Satan has succeeded and is growing more and further in that success.
Christianity is about God, but man wants to serve himself. This is the sphere or realm where the departure from scripture occurs. Individuals, families, and the church consider what man wants, what they want, more than what God wants. Romans 1 calls it worshiping and serving the creature rather than the Creator.
A new Christianity is concocted. What characterizes it is lust. It’s not sacred any longer, profaned by what pleases men, which again is lust. The lust itself, the feelings that arise out of lust, are very often confused as something spiritual, and, therefore, of God. The church becomes more and more like the world and less like God, fully deceived that it is about God.
God Himself isn’t good enough for people, so the Christianity concocted conforms God to what people do want for themselves. The God they want is more like a genie in a bottle, who is there for them to give them their wishes. The message fits what they want out of life. Worship itself is determined by what gives them the feeling they want. The concocted Christianity grows, which is said to testify of divine provision, the approval of God. The feelings are said to be caused by God. Receiving what they want is called blessing.
God is Who He is. Concocted Christianity has a different god, one who approves of what its participants need him to approve. He takes what they give him, even if he doesn’t really. God isn’t whoever we imagine him to be. When concocted Christianity forms its own god, he isn’t God. The Globetrotters isn’t basketball. The god of concocted Christianity isn’t god.
The concocted Christianity has causes used to vindicate it. Certainty is pride, so it fights pride and justifies doubt. It battles division with toleration. It cares more except with sentimentalism, not the deferred gratification of eternal reward. Scripture is used conveniently and flexibly to rule out what they dislike and advocate what they love.
One other major way concocted Christianity attempts to exonerate itself is by saying that it doesn’t ruin major doctrines. At worst, it is claimed that it changes smaller or small ones and the application of cultural issues, keeping most of the framework intact for the most part, which they might also argue is all that should be expected. However, doctrines really do change, including their so-called major doctrines. Another Christianity is not concocted without doctrines being affected. People have a different take, a distorted perspective, on what scripture is, on who God is, on what salvation is, on what true worship is, what church is, what Christian living is, and more. Everything changes and everything has changed.
When the adherents of concocted Christianity compare it to the real thing, they can’t recognize it. The referees, those governing concocted Christianity, tell them Christianity isn’t what’s real. It’s extreme, even hyper — “just keep walking, you’ll be fine.” It looks false to them. It looks too certain, too intolerant, and too strict. They want the safe feeling they get from concocted Christianity, even if it isn’t Christianity. It’s a false sense of security, like the fish swimming in the dragnet, unaware of danger.
One other factor for not knowing that professing Christians are in a concocted Christianity is that they have stopped comparing their concocted Christianity to scripture. They think they’re comparing it to something authoritative and it rings true, but very often it’s just a feeling that they have and then the conjectures of leaders, who have stake in their participants not knowing. Very often it’s just the blind leading the blind. A lot of people are on this road, so they also say, there are so many people who agree with me, so they rely on a new norm that’s not acceptable to God, but they assume it is, because of the numbers they think they see on their side.
When we watch the Globetrotters, we know it’s concocted. That’s how easy it is to judge concocted Christianity. Concocted Christianity is a placebo against the worst possible ills. Even worse it inoculates against the real thing.
The Trip to Europe Continued (Seventeenth Post In Total)
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Venice has a permanent population of 55,000 and 20 million visitors a year. At most moments, far more tourists dwell there than permanent inhabitants. It’s not really built for the number of people who are normally there. I’m glad to say we missed the high point. There were crowds, but it didn’t seem that cramped on June 11 and 12, Monday and Tuesday, 2018. For as many people as there were there and in some locations, especially San Marcos square, you can still find an entirely empty walkway or even piazza, even feel all alone. I understand those who say that every corner you turn in Venice is another surprise. Nothing is normal there.
It was impossible to get up to speed on every place we went on this trip ahead of time. It was enough, really, to plan it and pull it off. I did reading, one travel book and a few essays. Something you can do, so as perhaps not to stress about this before your trip, is to understand that you can read about the place you visited afterwards. Get up to speed later. You can savor your trip then.
Everywhere you look in Venice, at least for me, you want to know more. There are too many things to look at to know everything that you’re seeing. For a day and a half, essentially we just enjoyed Venice. Our host was Venetian. He knew a lot from a Venetian perspective, but even so we couldn’t learn it all.
Venice is full of art. It was our first major art experience on the trip. When it comes to art, I still don’t know most of what I’m seeing, and what it means. It’s usually religious though, Roman Catholic, from the same era, old, done by very skilled painters and sculptors.
On Tuesday, June 12, we rose late after the early a.m. arrival the night before. We replayed the previous day’s travel: train, vaporetto down the grand canal, except exited a few piers early to walk a short cut to St. Mark’s Basilica in San Marcos square. We had prepaid tickets. We missed a long, long line with a very busy square.
In the U.K. we toured several cathedrals. We added two more in Italy. St Mark’s was laid out like everything else. It seemed like something to visit. It’s number one on most lists, but I didn’t have a good impression. It was dark, hot, and crowded. There was really little to see. We didn’t stay long. It was sort of, been there, done that. We decided not to attempt to go up the tower, and just make our way back to the train, slowly walking Venice.
Nothing is like the Italian coffee experience. The U.K. had its tea. Starbucks founder learned coffee from Italy, but Italian coffee is still its own thing. Part of it is the service, which brings an experience. We sat at a restaurant right next to the Grand Canal and the Rialto Bridge. We went with sharing four different desserts and then coffee. This is the way to make your way through Venice.We stopped at an Italian leather shop and bought my mom some Italian leather gloves. The Italians have a unique take on leather, hence Italian leather. Every breath in one of these shops is that rich leather scent, nothing like it.
We decided to leave Venice in time to go into Mestre to an Italian restaurant owned by a friend of our host. We ate outdoors traditional Italian pasta and it was terrific. We got home at a good hour for a regular night sleep. We would be leaving between 8 and 9 a.m. the next morning by train to Rome.
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