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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.
How Does a Culture, Including a Christian Culture, Survive Without a Cancel Culture?
Previous Articles (One, Two, Three)
“Cancel culture” has a nice ring to it, a kind of poetic rhythm when one says the two words together. Go ahead, say them, “cancel culture.” It does now have a Wikipedia article. When I googled books with the terminology “cancel culture,” a glut of books appeared written in 2020-2021 with “Cancel Culture” in the title. I’ve not read one of them. I wanted to know how early the term appeared, because it’s been on my radar for at the most two years.
A book, Environmental Impact Assessment, written in 1979, reads:
We have come to the realization—yet again—that knowledge is power, that we need to keep building on our science and be ever mindful that a democratic society is based on genuine public engagement, not the so-called cancel culture that is denying genuine dialogue (author’s italics).
Before I graduated from high school, the quote appeared. Surprising. That’s the first and only usage I found in the twentieth century. I don’t know who popularized it. I went about trying to trace it, but I don’t know who originated the terminology. Originally, it seems, it was “call-out culture,” the idea here being that described by Adrienne Matei on November 1, 2019 in The Guardian:
The contemporary idea of a “call-out”, however, generally refers to interpersonal confrontations occurring between individuals on social media. In theory, call-outs should be very simple – someone does something wrong, people tell them, and they avoid doing it again in the future. Yet you only need to spend a short amount of time on the internet to know that call-out culture is in fact extremely divisive.
She pointed to a statement by former President Obama in an Obama Foundation Summit, which was on October 30, 2019, in which he said:
If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right, or used the wrong word or verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, because, ‘Man, you see how woke I was. I called you out.’ That’s not activism.
The rise of the term “cancel culture” seems to occur in the middle of 2020, which also happened to be right at the beginning of the Covid-19 ‘pandemic.’ Now it is well entrenched, and the earliest popular book seems to be Primal Screams, which said:
Consider an example that materialized in March 2019, captured in a New York Times piece called “Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture.” It reported the case a (sic) young black man who identified as gay and was employed as a “sensitivity reader” by various publishing houses. In that capacity, he enforced “cancel culture” (i.e., the flagging that progressive groupthink would deem unacceptable).
Wouldn’t it be an interesting job to be a “sensitivity reader”? I had never heard of it until this quote. I googled that too, and it appears a lot, 40,000 times. As a pastor, a chunk of your congregation could take that job while listening to your sermons. The New York Times article was written on March 8, 2019.
Cancel culture emerged as perhaps one of the top issues for the 2022 mid-term elections. The cancel culture tried to cancel Joe Rogan on Spotify and failed. On the other hand, Whoopi Goldberg said something offensive about the Holocaust on her show, The View, and they cancelled her for a few weeks, so she could take time to reflect on her ignorance, stupidity, or callousness. Another aspect, it seems, of cancel culture is a reaction to the unvaccinated, losing one’s job even if he has natural immunity. This relates to the trucker protest on the U.S. Canadian border, which is bigger than a vaccination issue.
During this last six months I’ve worked on a lot of writing projects and wrote almost two chapters on sanctification for our book, The Salvation That Keeps On Saving. The two chapters are “Dedication and Sanctification” and then “The Biblical Theology of Sanctification,” the latter of which I’m halfway done, the former I’ve completed. For the latter, I am looking at every use of the related Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament words for sanctification, which is almost 1,000.
You reader know that God canceled in the most severe way everyone on earth except for eight people in Genesis 6-9. He ordered the cancellation of all the Canaanites. When Israel didn’t, Israel suffered greatly for that. The Assyrians and Babylonians tried to and succeeded greatly at cancelling Israel. The Bible requires churches to cancel someone’s church membership, called by us, “church discipline.” Jesus taught that in Matthew 18:15-17 (See our book, A Pure Church).
God says in Leviticus 20:24, “But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people.” Two verses later, He continues: “And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.” It’s not just Old Testament. Jesus said in Matthew 13:49, “So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just.” Many more examples occur.
Profane
Reading through the Bible for my second time this year, I arrived at Leviticus again and the word “profane” stood out to me. It is found 26 times in the Old Testament of the King James Version and seven in the New. Fifteen of those total times are in Leviticus.
In eighteenth century English dictionaries, to profane something is to violate something sacred. The Universal English Dictionary in 1706 defines “profane”:
Ungodly, unholy, irreligious, wicked; unhallowed, common, ordinary: It is often opposed to sacred.
The Hebrew word, translated “profane,” also many times means and is translated “to bore or to pierce.” Something is added that is not natural to a thing when it is pierced. It is violated. I like to use the analogy of a dirty dish placed with the clean dishes.
Here are the fifteen usages of the English word “profane” in Leviticus, all found in five of the chapters.
Leviticus 18:21, And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.
Leviticus 19:12, And ye shall not swear by my name falsely, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.
Leviticus 20:3, And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name.
Leviticus 21:4, But he shall not defile himself, being a chief man among his people, to profane himself.
6, They shall be holy unto their God, and not profane the name of their God: for the offerings of the LORD made by fire, and the bread of their God, they do offer: therefore they shall be holy.
7, They shall not take a wife that is a whore, or profane; neither shall they take a woman put away from her husband: for he is holy unto his God.
9, And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.
12, Neither shall he go out of the sanctuary, nor profane the sanctuary of his God; for the crown of the anointing oil of his God is upon him: I am the LORD.
14, A widow, or a divorced woman, or profane, or an harlot, these shall he not take: but he shall take a virgin of his own people to wife.
15, Neither shall he profane his seed among his people: for I the LORD do sanctify him.
23 Only he shall not go in unto the vail, nor come nigh unto the altar, because he hath a blemish; that he profane not my sanctuaries: for I the LORD do sanctify them.
Leviticus 22:2, Speak unto Aaron and to his sons, that they separate themselves from the holy things of the children of Israel, and that they profane not my holy name in those things which they hallow unto me: I am the LORD.
9, They shall therefore keep mine ordinance, lest they bear sin for it, and die therefore, if they profane it: I the LORD do sanctify them.
15, And they shall not profane the holy things of the children of Israel, which they offer unto the LORD.
32, Neither shall ye profane my holy name; but I will be hallowed among the children of Israel: I am the LORD which hallow you.
Profane, you can see, is an adjective, noun, or verb. As a verb, the Hebrew word (chalal) means, “to be commonly used.” The Hebrew word is also translated in the King James Version, “pollute” (Numbers 18:32). An understanding of “profane” must be taken in contrast to sacred, hallowed, or holy.
Something sacred is kept separate, not mixed with the common. By mixing it with the common, it is profaned or becomes profane, which is the opposite of holy. By adding something common to something sacred, the sacred is profaned. It is no longer hallowed or kept separate. The common is something not sacred, so it is of a different nature than the sacred or the holy. For something to remain holy, it must be kept distinct, and a difference must be kept between the holy and the profane in order to keep sanctified that what is holy. This is especially in important in worship and Leviticus is a guidebook for worship.
To keep something hallowed that is sacred, one must understand it’s nature. What makes it holy? What is this act, thing, or person in its essence? Then only something of that essence or of the same kind can be associated with it, brought into contact with it, or linked with it or correlated to it. It’s worth reading all the usages above from Leviticus.
The first usage in Leviticus of “profane” reads, “neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God.” It does not explain what that is. It assumes the reader knows what that is.
“The name of God” is who God is. It’s what characterizes Him in His Person and Work. To profane His name is to associate or correlate with Him something that is contrary to His nature. It disrespects Him. It dishonors Him. It mischaracterizes Him, and this is very serious to do to God, so God adds, “I am the LORD.” John Gill writes about this: “I [am] the Lord; who would avenge such a profanation of his name.” God isn’t going to allow someone to keep profaning His name.
I’m going to select a few of the above examples to give the sense or understanding of “profane.” Leviticus 21:12 says, “Neither shall he go out of the sanctuary, nor profane the sanctuary of his God.” To profane the sanctuary is to make it common. It’s a sacred place and it is treated as a common place, not unique to God. This is not just profaning God, but profaning God’s sanctuary, something closely associated with God.
Leviticus 22:1-2 say,
1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 2 Speak unto Aaron and to his sons, that they separate themselves from the holy things of the children of Israel, and that they profane not my holy name in those things which they hallow unto me: I am the LORD.
Those who had become common and, therefore, not holy, were not qualified to offer holy sacrifices. God would be profaned by the unholy offering the holy. The person himself could profane God and the worship of God and the thing offered could be profaned so as to profane God and the worship of Him. Common things, which are unholy, are to be kept out of worship. They may not even be evil — they’re just common. Something is made common when it is not treated in a unique or sacred manner, but is treated like everything else.
How people understand God in their imagination comes in a major way through association. Not only does God take offense at it, because it disrespects Him, but it also gives people as much as anything a wrong view of God. Someone will have a lesser view of God, a diminished understanding of Him, and that will affect a person’s life. He may not believe in the true God or live in accordance with the true God.
As much as anything today as an application of profane is the mixture in worship in the contemporary churches what is common with what it holy. Professing churches give God profane worship and they profane God. They give Him something worldly, lustful, and distorted so as to blaspheme God. The people then become like their worship. They themselves are profane and this just results in even further profanity of God and of their lives. The world doesn’t know God because of the correlation of the common or the profane with God in professing churches. The people of these professing churches are made common and profane as they blaspheme God with their profanity.
Leviticus 10:8-11 and Its Conformity to the Two Wine View
It’s obvious in scripture that some wine is permissible to drink and other is not. This relates to alcohol. Scripture prohibits alcohol (Proverbs 23:29-35). However, all wine and strong drink is prohibited to the priesthood in the performance of their duties. I’m reading through the Bible twice this year and moving through it the first time, I arrived at Leviticus 10:8-11 earlier this week:
8 And the LORD spake unto Aaron, saying, 9 Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou, nor thy sons with thee, when ye go into the tabernacle of the congregation, lest ye die: it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations: 10 And that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean; 11 And that ye may teach the children of Israel all the statutes which the LORD hath spoken unto them by the hand of Moses.
It was so important for Aaron and his sons not to be under the influence of alcohol that they were to take extra precautions by refraining from any wine or strong drink. What does drinking any alcohol do? If they were to be drinking alcohol of any amount, it would threaten their ability to do their job as a priest.
The drinking of alcohol could result in the execution of the priest by God like Nadab and Abihu were killed by God earlier in the chapter. God commands Aaron and his sons not to drink wine or strong drink, so that they would not be punished with death by God Himself. Leon Hyatt writes in his commentary on Leviticus:
Obeying this command would assure that they would not die for performing their duties incorrectly, but that assurance definitely implies that they would die if they disobeyed the command. The same stern penalty would result from disobedience to this command as from any other deviation from the instructions of Jehovah to the priests.
Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness!
Nothing has more power to blur the sharpness of moral and religious insight than even a small amount of alcohol. God must be worshipped with clear brain and naturally beating heart. Not the fumes of wine, in which there lurks almost necessarily the tendency to ‘excess,’ but the being ‘filled with the Spirit’ supplies the only legitimate stimulus to devotion. Besides the personal reason for abstinence, there was another,-namely, that only so could the priests teach the people ‘the statutes’ of Jehovah. Lips stained from the wine-cup would not be fit to speak holy words. Words spoken by such would carry no power. God’s servants can never impress on the sluggish conscience of society their solemn messages from God, unless they are conspicuously free from self-indulgence, and show by their example the gulf, wide as between heaven and hell, which parts cleanness from uncleanness. Our lives must witness to the eternal distinction between good and evil, if we are to draw men to ‘abhor that which is evil, and cleave to that which is good.’
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