Does God’s Justice Make You a Victim?
While at the gym I was listening to Leviticus and knowing the book of Lamentations, something struck me at the end of Leviticus about the justice of God. The next to the last chapter, Leviticus 26:18-22, say:
18 And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.
19 And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass:
20 And your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits.
21 And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.
22 I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your high ways shall be desolate.
I mention Lamentations, because this warning was at least fulfilled at the siege of Jerusalem, chronicled in Lamentations. Here are examples from the five chapters:
1:5 Her adversaries are the chief, her enemies prosper; for the LORD hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions: her children are gone into captivity before the enemy.
1:16 For these things I weep; mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water, because the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me: my children are desolate, because the enemy prevailed.
2:11 Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city.
2:19 Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord: lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger in the top of every street.
4:4 The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth for thirst: the young children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto them.
4:10 The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people.
5:13 They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood.
Maybe nothing stands out more than consequences affecting children. God listed many in Leviticus 26. The heavens will be as iron, meaning no rain, which turns the ground to brass. Land will not bring increase. Trees do not yield fruit. Multiple plagues come. Wild beasts rob families of their domestic animals and their children.
The Lamentation quotes focus on one aspect of the judgment, what occurs to the children. All the rest are in there, bookending the list of expectations.
Why do these things occur? The people do not listen to God. They walk contrary to God. They do no obey Him.
The people are not victims. They caused this. They are responsible. The people suffer for unrighteousness.
Many times, thoughts begin with the imagination of victimhood. Before someone gets there, he should consider whether he listens to God, walks contrary to God, or does not obey Him. In Lamentations, God says through Jeremiah that He brings these consequences out of His faithfulness.
God’s justice doesn’t make you a victim.
What Is Atheism?
According to the Bible, no one is an atheist. Proverbs 14:1 reports that a fool says in his heart that there is no God, but that doesn’t mean he believes it. Romans 1:18 says he knows God and suppresses that knowledge. So atheism is not someone believing there isn’t a God. Atheism is living like there isn’t a God. Many more people do that than the typical polls show. In other words, on the atheist front, we’re in worse shape than you think.
Someone just wrote about this at the Big Think, entitled, “Atheism is not as rare or as rational as you think.” Will Gervais in the article makes at least the point in my first paragraph here, and even more. The Bible says this, so it must be true, but I find it by experience.
As I write this on a Saturday after out evangelizing for a couple of hours, I talked to an “atheist” today, who graduated from Vanderbilt, and he is affiliated with Weber State here. He announced he was not interested, because he is an atheist. He also said he did not want to argue at his door, but he did talk awhile, which is very often the case with “atheists.”
I asked the “atheist” if he thought, all this around us came about by accident. I find no one wants to say, yes, to that, because they know it isn’t true, which means they aren’t atheists. Then he said with a bit of a smirk, that after the Big Bang happened, everything came out of that.
The Big Bang is apparently a throw-down, trumping all else. In fact, a Big Bang says there is a beginning. It doesn’t help an atheist to stay that way, if he believes in a beginning. Some kind of explosion though still will not explain the amazing complexity all around. I didn’t bring that up, because I assessed that it would end the conversation. I took the tack, as I often do, that air, plants growing, all these did not come by accident, but people take these, and as Romans 1:21 says, are unthankful. These are atheists. God exists. They’re just unthankful He does.
An atheist is someone who doesn’t want a God. He has one. He just denies it. An atheist tries to block God out in part by saying he’s an atheist. He knows he’s wrong.
Gervais portrays many atheists, and it’s true, as appraising themselves as intellectually gifted individuals. Their position is intellectually bankrupt. They reject the truth based on their own lust (2 Peter 2-3).
Many atheists will say that those who carefully weigh things do it with science, all natural criteria, which is very intellectual, really Ivy League. No. The world did not appear and has not been sustained by merely natural means.
In his piece, Gervais uses science to show how professing atheists are stupid. Stupid is another word for “fool,” which bring us back to Psalm 14:1 again. The fool says he’s an atheist. He’s not being smart.
Since every atheist just denies God against his own knowledge, who are the real atheists? They live like God doesn’t exist. I think we could go further than that. They form a god, which allows them to live like that want. Evangelicalism is full of atheism. They deny the true God because they don’t like His requirements or expectations, which are against how they want to live. They’re worshiping themselves as Romans 1:25 says, and yet they say they worship God or follow God’s ways.
If atheism is denying the one, true God, there are far, far more atheists than any of us can give a percentage.
Flood Lore and Divine Interventionism
In 2012 David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, wrote The Rocks Don’t Lie, which he says is a geologist’s investigation of the Noahic flood. I talk about the flood at least every month, sometimes every week. It’s important enough for evangelism and apologetics to talk about all the time.
Peter in his second epistle and chapter three uses the flood as a historical argument for Divine interventionism and against uniformitarianism in a defense of the second coming of Jesus Christ. He writes in 2 Peter 3:4-6:
4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. 5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: 6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
Peter is saying that things don’t continue as they were from the beginning of creation. The world, that then was, perished, because of a worldwide flood. Ignorance is a willing ignorance, so volitional, not intellectual.
The second coming is a problem for unbelievers, because they will not get away with whatever they do. They will give an account to their Lord. They may try to explain it away with uniformitarianism (things just continue as they are without divine intervention), but the Bible (2 Peter 3:1-2) and flood history (2 Peter 3:5-7) discount their view of the world. God will intervene and He has intervened.
One bit of evidence outside the Bible for the flood people call, “flood lore.” I do not know if “lore” is the best term for it, but it refers to the flood story found in numbers of cultures.
A youtube notification sent me to a Harvard speech by David Montgomery, saying that it was seven years old. In a thirty minute drive, I listened to twenty minutes of his speech and then stopped, because I knew where he headed.
Montgomery grew up in a religious family that went to church. It sounded like a liberal church that taught the Bible was a book of moral stories. When someone asked him to come to Tibet to help with a project as the geologist, he went. While there, he saw damage from a very large flood. He knew it. He saw it was a lake made from a glacier damming up a river. A glacier does not do that well. Its poor blockage ability led to a gigantic flood.
While in Tibet, Montgomery interview the locals, who already knew about the flood and talked about it. This surprised him, because he just saw it himself. This sent him the direction of thinking about local flood lore. This stories occur all over the world. At this point, I turned off the speech. I arrived at my destination, but I didn’t want to hear any more. I knew what he was doing. You have maybe started reading a story where the ending becomes obvious and you can’t continue.
To discredit flood lore, explain each story away with an account of a local flood. Or, do that enough times to say that these individual smaller events explain the stories of the big one. They don’t, but men know how a worldwide flood hurts their world view.
Men look at the present world in a uniformitarian manner. They know things happened, but they must use a natural explanation. They say the world is billions of years old. The flood can and should change that explanation. It disturbed the crime scene, so to speak. With tremendous power, God transformed the topography of the earth. They are not seeing the same world as the one before the flood. The pressure God brought on everything in the world affected what man theorizes that he sees.
The world originating by natural causes justifies men being their own bosses. God will not intervene. He hasn’t. Yet, He has, and He will again. Peter makes that argument in 2 Peter. Flood lore agrees with this divine interventionism. Everyone will give an account to God.
Symbols and Identity
My wife and I worked hard for several months on various things without much of a break and we could get away for a day or so. Utah is a beautiful state. Little did Brigham Young know, when he said, “This is the place,” that it meant five national parks, two of which are thirty minutes apart, Arches and Canyonlands. They both deserve national park status.
Arches especially means hiking, because you’ve got to hike to see the greatest scenes. They laid these out with well done trails. My wife and I walked miles, people passing us, we passing people, people walking along side of us, and crowds of people together with us looking at amazing views.
I want to take this moment to announce a trigger warning. Trigger warning to women. I’m preparing to talk about women wearing skirts or dresses. In all of those hours, besides my wife, I never saw another skirt. Not a single other woman in the entire time we were at those two national parks did I see a woman in a skirt or a dress.
I did see many women in skin tight leggings or pants. Loose ones too. The temperatures were cool, so there weren’t so many shorts, but there were even some of those worn only by women, none by men.
A big occurrence this Sunday night before my wife and I left on our trip was the Academy Awards in Hollywood. My phone notified me that Will Smith punched Chris Rock. It came with an unedited video.
The comedian Chris Rock, who apparently hosted the show, added an ad lib joke about Smith’s wife, Jada, an actress sitting with Will Smith, who suffers from a hair loss disease. She’s essentially bald, and Rock sarcastically joked about her upcoming appearance in G. I. Jane, making fun of her hairless state. Some might call this joke, tasteless, because it made fun of a woman’s medical condition over which she has no control. In other words, it’s not funny to joke about that, or it shouldn’t be. It’s off limits.
Whether you think it was right for Smith to walk to slap Rock onstage in what some might think a chivalrous manner, it’s an issue of women’s hair length. Someone in Hollywood slapped someone else for making fun of a woman’s hair length. Being called a “G. I. Jane” was insulting. None of this means anything if hair length on a woman isn’t a symbol of identity, like a skirt or dress is a symbol of identity.
The Bible mentions visible symbols as they relate to identity. People know they matter. It’s why you see a transgender “woman,” biological male, wearing a dress. The dress is a symbol, as is hair. “Look at me, I’m a woman.”
The girl, who wants to be a boy or thinks of herself as a boy, wants to get rid of her breasts. Or she prevents them with hormone blockers. The boy, who wants to be a girl or thinks of himself as a girl, wants those breasts. Breasts are symbols, even if they don’t function except as a symbol. The Bible treats any kind of reversal of these symbols as an abomination and against nature. It’s also the view held by professing Christians through their entire history until very recently, and one never rescinded by God.
The symbols that speak of identity are not arbitrary symbols. They aren’t a social construct. They are the “laws of nature and nature’s God” of the Declaration of Independence. Writing about this in 1762, Abraham Williams of Boston said:
The law of nature (or those rules of behavior which the Nature God has given men, . . . fit and necessary to the welfare of mankind) is the law and will of the God of nature, which all men are obliged to obey. . . . The law of nature, which is the Constitution of the God of nature, is universally obliging. It varies not with men’s humors or interests, but is immutable as the relations of things.
Rebellion against the laws of nature is rebellion against God in a fundamental or root manner. The person violating these laws involves himself in a personal offense against the nature of God. In many of these instances, especially the ones I’m describing, they become an abomination to Him. You can deny that, but you’ll still face God.
Our world reacts to symbols. The Swastika. The Hammer and Sickle. The Gay Flag. Men wearing skirts. The symbols mark identity in an elemental way.
The downfall on identity began first with the abdication and then the repudiation of symbols. Identity confusion and chaos starts with renouncing the symbols. If you think they’re meaningless, then why do they trigger such strong reactions?
John MacArthur: A Conservative Evangelical Preaches on Separation
A sermon popped up in the notifications on my phone late last week and it said, “Come Out from Their Midst and Be Ye Separate (2 Corinthians 6:14-18)” by John MacArthur. Apparently it was something preached earlier in March at his Shepherd’s Conference, but only posted three days before. I was very surprised to see the text and especially the title with the word “separate” in it.
In the Long Prayer of Jesus to His Father in John 17, Has “Of The World” Become Meaningless?
The model prayer of Matthew 6 and Luke 11, Jesus didn’t pray. He was teaching His disciples how to pray. Certain few times the New Testament records that He spoke to His Father, He didn’t ask for anything. He prays for one thing in John 12:28, “Father, glorify thy name.”
On the cross in Luke 23:34, Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them.” He prayed three times in the Garden of Gethsemane in Matthew 26, two of which He requested essentially the same thing, and the third time it says he prayed the same thing as the first two. In verse 39, He prayed, “Not as I wilt, but as thou wilt,” regarding His suffering and death, and then in verse 42, “Thy will be done,” which was about the same thing.We know Jesus prayed other times, but those passages don’t tell us what He prayed. John 17 most represents what Jesus prays, because it contains more that He prayed than all the other places combined. I will focus on one point of His requests in the chapter, which were not many, but of all of those prayers, He uses the words, “of the world,” seven times.
14 I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. 15 I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. 16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
17 Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. 18 As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world. 19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth. 20 Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word.
15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 17 And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.
They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.
For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.
How Even Apparently Conservative Evangelicals Justify Disobedience to Scripture as a Deconstruction
Today churches have gone “woke.” Many accept critical race theory and same sex relations. Before contemplating those extremes, we might consider something short of that and what leads to it.
A man I know well pastors in the same city as a conservative evangelical does, and the two discussed separation. The conservative evangelical church accepts membership of many and widely varied doctrinal and practical positions. Everyone is worldly also to sundry degrees, many very much so.
The conservative evangelical graduated from Masters Seminary and in general follows its way of thinking and operation. In a conversation, the man who I know well mentioned to the conservative evangelical 1 Timothy 1:3:
As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine.
Paul besought Timothy to charge the pastors at Ephesus that they “teach no other doctrine.” That’s very clear. “Teach no other doctrine” is one Greek word, heterodidaskaleo. This matches up with what Paul also said in 1 Timothy 6:3-5:
If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness . . . . from such withdraw thyself.
Here’s what the conservative evangelical, who went to Masters Seminary, said: “We teach that “doctrine” there [in 1 Timothy 1:3] is [or means] ‘the gospel.'”
This is the kind of dealing with scripture or teaching that justifies disobedience to scripture. Is “doctrine” “the gospel” in 1 Timothy 1:3 and in 1 Timothy 6:3-5 among other verses of scripture? Of course not. Still, that’s how conservative evangelicals will go ahead and understand “doctrine.” “Doctrine” refers only to “the gospel” in that passage.
Calling “doctrine” “the gospel” is a type of deconstruction. Rather than a verse asserting absolute truth, a person assigns a meaning that he conceives at that moment in time. In Is There Meaning in this Text? Kevin J. Vanhoozer writes (pp. 21-22) about the deconstruction of the postmodernist Derrida, the one most associated with it:
The belief that one has reached the single correct Meaning (or God, or “Truth”) provides a wonderful excuse for damning those with whom one disagrees as either “fools” or “heretics.” . . . Neither Priests, who supposedly speak for God, nor Philosophers, who supposedly speak for Reason, should be trusted; this “logocentric” claim to speak from a privileged perspective (e.g., Reason, the Word of God) is a bluff that must be called, or better, “deconstructed.”
A teacher or preacher may dismantle Christianity by deconstructing the language. Christianity is based upon language, the language of the Bible. Rather than say you don’t believe the Bible, you can just deny a “single correct meaning.”
Deconstructing the biblical text allows and even instructs men not to believe and obey the Bible. They not only disobey, but they disobey while thinking they’re obeying, because of the deconstruction of the language of scripture. A church can grow in numbers from the welcome of plenteous and diverse disobedience, while still labeling it obedience. It doesn’t fool God now or ever.
Editions of the King James Version and the Criticism of Not Updating It
I’m sure someone has made this argument, even though I haven’t heard it. Someone might call the five previous editions of the King James Version an argument for another update. Four editions followed the original 1611. Why no sixth edition? Why did we stop at 1769, the date of the last edition, what is called the Blayney Edition?Benjamin Blayney, English Hebraist, updated the King James Version. Dot Wordsworth in The Spectator wrote (based on his reading of Gordon Campbell’s Bible: The Story of the King James Version):
Dr Blayney made thousands of changes to the text of 1611. In vocabulary he incorporated amendments from another version from 1743, for example, fourscore changed to eightieth, neesed to sneezed, and the archaic crudled to curdled. In grammar he changed, among other things, number, so that ‘the names of other gods’ became ‘the name of other gods’; and tenses, so ‘he calleth unto him the twelve and began’ changed to ‘he called unto him the twelve, and began’. There were changes in spelling, in punctuation, and in the choice of words to italicise (which had been intended to indicate words not literally present in the original languages).
By the mid-18th century the wide variation in the various modernized printed texts of the Authorized Version, combined with the notorious accumulation of misprints, had reached the proportion of a scandal, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge both sought to produce an updated standard text. First of the two was the Cambridge edition of 1760, the culmination of 20 years’ work by Francis Sawyer Parris, who died in May of that year. This 1760 edition was reprinted without change in 1762 and in John Baskerville’s fine folio edition of 1763. This was effectively superseded by the 1769 Oxford edition, edited by Benjamin Blayney, though with comparatively few changes from Parris’s edition; but which became the Oxford standard text, and is reproduced almost unchanged in most current printings. Parris and Blayney sought consistently to remove those elements of the 1611 and subsequent editions that they believed were due to the vagaries of printers, while incorporating most of the revised readings of the Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638, and each also introducing a few improved readings of their own. They undertook the mammoth task of standardizing the wide variation in punctuation and spelling of the original, making many thousands of minor changes to the text. In addition, Blayney and Parris thoroughly revised and greatly extended the italicization of “supplied” words not found in the original languages by cross-checking against the presumed source texts. . . . Altogether, the standardization of spelling and punctuation caused Blayney’s 1769 text to differ from the 1611 text in around 24,000 places.
[1611] 1. Though I speake with the tongues of men & of Angels, and haue not charity, I am become as sounding brasse or a tinkling cymbal. 2 And though I haue the gift of prophesie, and vnderstand all mysteries and all knowledge: and though I haue all faith, so that I could remooue mountaines, and haue no charitie, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestowe all my goods to feede the poore, and though I giue my body to bee burned, and haue not charitie, it profiteth me nothing.[1769] 1. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
[NASV] 1 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
WHY NOT FURTHER UPDATES TO THE KING JAMES VERSION?
1. The 1769 Blayney Edition Is Good
2. Change Is Worse Than Possible Improvements
3. King James Version Churches Don’t Want the Update
4. An Update Is Far From a Priority
TO BE AN UPDATE, WHAT WOULD NEED TO HAPPEN?
1. King James Version Churches Would Want an Update
2. King James Version Churches Would Unify For an Update
3. King James Version Churches Would Provide the Good, Qualified Men from their Midst, Who Could Work Together to Accomplish an Update
4. King James Version Churches Would Approve of the Update
5. The Updated King James Version Would Become the King James Version for King James Version Churches
Mark Ward: KJVO “Sinful Anger,” the “Evasion” of the Confessional Bibliologians, and Success
Mark Ward wrote, Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, which I read. He’s taken on a goal of dissuading people from the King James Version to use a modern version of the Bible. He also has a podcast to which someone alerted me when he mentioned Thomas Ross and me. I checked back again there this last week and he did one called, “Is My Work Working?” In it, he said he received three types of reactions to his work.
KJV “SINFUL ANGER”
Ward said he received more than 100 times praise than anything else. The next most reaction he said was “sinful anger” from KJV Onlyists. Last, he received the least, helpful criticism from opposition.
Critical text proponents very often use KJVO behavior as an argument. It does not add or take away from Ward’s position. Ward reads his examples of “sinful anger,” and well more than half didn’t sound angry to me. They disagreed with him.
My observation is that critical text advocates do not have better conduct. They disagree in a harsh manner and with ridicule. Ward himself uses more subtle mockery, sometimes in sarcastic tones. It just shouldn’t come as a point of argument. Many in the comment section of his podcast use sinful anger. Ward does not correct them or point out their sinful anger. It seems like Ward likes it when it points the other direction.
In these moments, Ward talks about his own anger. He finds it difficult not to be angry with these men. Why even mention it? Just don’t talk about it at all. Deal with the issue at hand. I’m not justifying actions of Ruckmanite types. They’re wrong too. Both sides are wrong. This is an actual argument though of critical text supporters — how they are treated. It comes up again and again, because they bring it up.
“EVASION” OF THE CONFESSIONAL BIBLIOLOGIANS
Ward says that few to almost none answer a main argument of his book, which he’s developed further since it’s publication. They don’t concede to his “false friends” with appropriate seriousness. He says they don’t think about false friends. He provides now 50 examples of these that appear many times in the King James Version. He includes the confessional bibliologians in this, which would be someone who believes in the superiority of the Textus Receptus of the New Testament. Their position might be perfect preservationism, Textus Receptus, confessional bibliology, or ecclesiastical text. He used the confessional title, referring to men like Jeff Riddle.
I’ve answered him in depth. Ward is just wrong. Hopefully calling him wrong isn’t considered sinful anger. “He said I was wrong!!” King James Version supporters all over buy Bible For Today’s Defined King James Version. It provides the meaning of those words in the margin. Lists of these from King James Version proponents are all over the internet, and books have been written by KJV authors (the one linked published in 1994) on the subject.
Ward says that every time he brings that up to Textus Receptus men, they sweep it away like it doesn’t matter, then turn the conversation to textual criticism. That’s a very simplistic way of himself swatting away the Textus Receptus advocate. They turn to textual criticism because the critical text and the Textus Receptus are 7% different. Many words differ. That matters more. It also denies the biblical doctrine of preservation.
The members of churches where men preach the KJV hear words explained. Sure, some KJV churches rarely preach the Bible. Talk about that. Where men preach expositional sermons from the KJV, relying on study of the original languages, they explain words to their people. They care. I have been one of those and the KJV doesn’t hurt our church in any way. Personally I read the KJV Bible twice last year and this year I’m on pace for one Old Testament and two New Testament.
SUCCESS
Is success how much praise one receives for what he does? Is that the measurement? That is a very dangerous standard of success. That is what Ward uses as his standard in his video. In Jeremiah 45:5, God told Baruch: “And seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not.” We don’t succeed when we receive praise. We succeed when we are faithful to what God said, whether we’re praised or not. Seeking for praise is discouraged in scripture. Many faithful Bible preachers received far more harsh treatment than Ward. It’s not even close.
True success is finding what God says and doing it. It’s not success to turn a church away from the King James Version to a modern version, even if Ward supports that outcome.
The Seriousness of Religious Authority As Illustrated by Russia and Ukraine
Some reading may have heard that the Russia invasion of Ukraine relates to the religion in these two countries. They might consider it a religious war. I will go back to give perspective on this issue and then dovetail with something from the last few days.
No one has more authority than God. In fact, God possesses all authority and any group has authority only because of God. To say that you have authority means that you function for God and even speak for God. People who want to stay in good standing with God will do what God’s authority says. It’s like God telling them. Disobeying this authority, since it is from God, is disobeying God. This could also relate to someone’s eternal destiny, this often going along with the authority claim.
The true church authorized by Jesus Christ, the only church, is local only. Jesus started it in Jerusalem in the first century during His earthly life as seen in Matthew 16:18 and 18:15-17. The New Testament book of Acts records that first church reproduced other assemblies with scripture as their sole authority. The Lord Jesus Christ gave the true church authority, autonomy, with Him as the Head of each true church (Eph 1:22, 5:23, Col 1:18).
A true church has authority. It is serious enough that Jesus says the church looses and binds (Matthew 16:9, 18:18). It makes authoritative declarations as to whether someone is in the church or out. If someone is loosed, the true church regards him as unsaved. When the church sends someone out of the church, 1 Corinthians 5 says the church delivers this person unto Satan (5:5). These are true or real occurrences. They aren’t games being played. It’s very serious.
HISTORY
In the fourth century AD a counterfeit church arose in Rome. It claimed Christ’s authority through a bogus declaration of Petrine successionism (Petrine Theory). This spurious organization with the influence of Roman Emperor Constantine turned the church into a state church, the Roman Catholic Church, Catholic meaning universal. One could place the date at 313AD with the Edict of Milan, 325 with the Council of Nicea, 337 with the baptism of Constantine, or 380 with the Edict of Thessalonica. This institution, which preached a false gospel, claimed an authority it did not possess.
Nevertheless, for purposes of rule, Constantine split the empire into East and West in 330AD and the empire divided after the death of Theodosius I in 395AD. Roman Catholicism was still unified until it split into two in 1054, the Great Schism. The Orthodox Church (called Eastern Orthodox) formed from the division. The schism much related to authority, as the Eastern Church rejected the infallibility and unique authority of the Pope.
The authority of Eastern Orthodoxy describes itself a fellowship of self-headed churches, the term “autocephalous.” Orthodox churches recognize the preeminence of Constantinople, called the primacy of the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. This means Constantinople is a first among equals. The Orthodox hold that God’s authority passes down directly to Orthodox bishops and clergy through the laying on of hands. They consider this apostolic succession and each Orthodox. Each bishop has a territory, called a “see,” that he governs.
Roman Catholicism invented its own authority by procuring a non-existent apostleship. Eastern Orthodox then appropriated it as its own. It’s difficult to estimate, but stats say 1.3 billion Roman Catholics and 220 million Orthodox in the world, top two of Christendom in numbers. Neither of them possess authority. When they talk about authority, it’s not true. They say they have it. They don’t. Yet, if a religious organization says it is from God, we shouldn’t be surprised when it acts like it has authority.
Of all the autocephalous churches of the Orthodox by far the largest is the Russian Orthodox with over 100 million. It is known as the Moscow Patriarchate. This Orthodox church started when the early, original Russian prince, Vladimir I, was baptized by the Patriarchy of Constantinople in 988. The center of Russian Orthodoxy was Kyiv. It remained under Constantinople authority until 1488, when it moved to Kyiv as an autocephalous church. The Russian Orthodox Church relocated then to Moscow in 1686 when the region of Kyiv came under authority of the Tsars there.
I zoom forward to the period after the Soviet Union. The atheistic Soviet Empire swallowed religions. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church emerged again. Alexy Ridiger first became Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1990. This continued under Patriarch Kirill in 2009, who remains in that position.
CONSIDERING AMILLENNIALISM
Not only did and does the Roman Catholic Church not have authority, but it operates with a corrupt system of interpretation of scripture. The Eastern Orthodox and its autocephalous churches continued that system of allegorization or spiritualization of the Bible. These denominations within Christendom rationalized themselves with an eschatological and ecclesiological program called amillennialism.
According to amillennialism, the kingdom of God exists on earth in the present age in a universal church, a kind of spiritualized nation Israel. In the Old Testament passages about Israel, someone can read in the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Church. With amillennialism a nation can function like one that authoritatively enforces the precepts of the Bible as seen through the lens of church authority. This explains a Christian holy war fought on behalf of the church.
Amillennialism says there is no literal millennium where Christ comes to rule for a thousands years on the earth. The “a” of amillennialism means “no,” as in “no millennium.” This view allowed for a state church that functioned like a kingdom.
An inquisition that tortures or puts to death heretics also comes from authority allowed by an amillennial eschatology. The church does the work of God by punishing sinners and implementing what God said.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
In 2018 the Patriarch of Constantinople, the foremost of the autocephalous churches, gave autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox. This formed a Ukrainian Orthodox Church, taking the jurisdiction of the Ukraine, the region of original Russia and the initial Russian Orthodox Church from the Patriarch of Moscow. Not all of the Orthodox Churches operate under the authority of the Ukrainian Patriarch but under the Moscow Patriarch, who now is Patriarch Kirill.
The Associated Press reported that just this week Kirill came out in support of the invasion of Ukraine by saying the following:
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, leader of Russia’s dominant religious group, has sent his strongest signal yet justifying his country’s invasion of Ukraine — describing the conflict as part of a struggle against sin and pressure from liberal foreigners to hold “gay parades” as the price of admission to their ranks.
Kirill, a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had already refrained from criticizing the Russian invasion – alienating many in the Ukrainian Orthodox churches who had previously stayed loyal to the Moscow patriarch during a schism in their country. Several of these former loyalists are now snubbing Kirill in their public prayers, with some demanding independence from the Moscow church even as their country’s political independence is imperiled.
Kirill, in a sermon delivered Sunday before the start of Orthodox Lent, echoed Putin’s unfounded claims that Ukraine was engaged in the “extermination” of Russian loyalists in Donbas, the breakaway eastern region of Ukraine held since 2014 by two Russian-backed separatist groups. [He] focused virtually all of his talk about the war on Donbas — with no mention of Russia’s widespread invasion and its bombardment of civilian targets.
Kirill on Sunday depicted the war in spiritual terms.
“We have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance,” he said.
He contended that some of the Donbas separatists were suffering for their “fundamental rejection of the so-called values that are offered today by those who claim world power.”
He claimed that this unnamed world power is posing a “test for the loyalty” of countries by demanding they hold gay pride parades to join a global club of nations with its own ideas of freedom and “excess consumption.”
God holds all authority. When He looked down on Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, he saw the corrupt lifestyles. This included homosexual or same sex activity. God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Within the nation Israel, God expected punishment of death upon such behavior in Leviticus 18 and 20.
The fall of communism in Russia left a vacuum of authority the Russian Orthodox Church filled. Putin had become antagonistic to communism. The Russian Orthodox Church filled that void in harmony with his nationalistic thinking. This mirrors such a historical figure as Henry VIII in England in his role in the Anglican Church. He put many opponents to death. This arose from a belief held called “the divine right of Kings.” Henry was also the head of the state church in England, which like the Russian Orthodox, borrowed from the amillennialism of Roman Catholicism.
Putin may rationalize his acts according to an Eastern worldview. He sees the corruption, decline, and decay of the West. The West in hypocritic fashion commits its own barbaric acts by murdering its own children through abortion. Putin sees a Ukraine following in the trajectory of the West with its gay parades and then its separation from the state religion of Russia. Kirill expresses this. Many Russians still dwell in the Ukraine both ethnically but also religiously. They still submit to the Moscow Patriarchy.
I’m not saying I support Putin’s position, just that this is a matter of authority. God is still on the throne. He’s not ruling through the Russian Orthodox, but its strong adherents at least admit that God rules in some manner. They follow a historical position without a biblical basis. This is not inferior to those who do not give acquiescence in any way to God’s authority, even if they see themselves as having superior values.
RECOGNITION OF AUTHORITY
God reigns. Authority exists. The United States and Western nations reject Divine authority. They face consequences for their rebellion.
The Orthodox do not possess genuine Divine authority, but many of them recognize it exists. Indications of belief in Divine authority appear all over historical monuments of the United States. It is seen in the founding documents. Statements like “In God we trust” evince these foundations. Even if a nation stops acknowledging the authority of God, it is still subject to His reign.
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