Comments again

Having been informed that one friend of mine tried posting a comment which did not even get to my inbox whereby I never even knew that one had been made I have removed all moderation of comments and posted a comment of my own.

So I must appeal to you all to try posting  a comment if indeed any of you think my work worthy of it

Some Observations about Worship

This is a post of mine on a website where the endless quarrel about old hymns versus contemporary choruses has recently been aired .

AS follows:

Genuine worship depends on one's own relationship with Christ. Making laws about certain styles of music will not address the issue for this is one of the heart.

We cannot conjure up "authenticity" by act of will precisely because this is a matter of the heart

Idolatry is a passion for anything at all that comes before our love of God, and if we do not love our neighbour and brethren, as shown in our spontaneous reactions ( forced works do not count as they are hypocrisy) then we do not love God (see I John) so any passion we have will by default be idolatrous .

If this is the true biblical context for the nature of idolatry ( and improper worship is idolatry) then all our efforts are yet again superficial and skirt the issue.

If we won't seek the Lord the Spirit that we be convicted of our sin and so saved from it through the cleansing that follows honest confession (again see I John) then we may as well continue as we are, give up concern for the issue, and simply give motivational seminars and concerts, which is what church is without the Holy Spirit, and be done with it l

"Hell, No!"

I am come to the conclusion that every issue in Christianity is bound by paradox. Indeed I see that paradox is God's calling card.

Some are irreconcilable to us in our present state of being: chiefly these are  the Trinity, and  the dual nature of the God Man Jesus Christ. We take these on faith for there is no alternative.

Some refuse this, and seek to reconcile the paradox, and this by denying it. Thus we get the Arians who deny the Trinity outright, or the Oneness Pentecostals, also anti trinitarians,  who make the Son everything and deny that the Father is a somehow a separate Being to whom He prayed, or  we get tritheists, though these are usually anti christians who claim tritheism as a reason for rejecting the faith altogether. Or, as regards the nature of the Son we get Nestorians versus Monophysites or the Docetists versus those who, in a crude form of  Arianism made the Son only a human hero. In every case the resolution of the paradox, in denying it, is heresy. It is better not to consider the issue than to go to heresy, but this modern man often refuses to do

The paradoxes of law and grace, those that affect christian living directly I take to be resolvable by understanding the inward nature of sin; in this and in the one other case I am considering this day in this piece of work the resolution is plainly spelled out in Scripture but it is so offensive to self righteous modern human nature that it is denied outright.

I mean the paradox of a loving God who sends sinners to eternal suffering in hell.

It is not my intention here  to justify this idea beyond the plain biblical statement of resolution herein, namely the cross of Christ. I do intend to demonstrate that it is in fact what Scripture says, and that those who twist scrpture to justify their own contention that this is not so are indulging in dishonest scholarship. Therefore I am not so much resolving the paradox  as I am seeking to establish that it is real and must be faced.

I am aware of two strands of thought, two arguments  used to deny the reality of eternal conscious torment in hell that are more substantial than the purely emotive cry that such is so monstrous that a loving God would not do such a thing. This last crie de coeur I will address  at the end of this piece.

Insofar as I have followed the writings of those who preach thus, I see them in the work of Rob Bell's "Love Wins"  and in the pdf download "Hell Know" by Dirk Waren

One strand claims that the torment is not forever and ever. and justified appeal to the Greek term αιώνας   των  αιωνων. I would demonstrate by simple exposition of other uses of this Greek phrase translated "
forever and ever"  that time of endless duration is indeed what it means. This is as far as I can see Rob Bell's line

The other claims that "death" and "destruction" mean what we as moderns take them to mean, not what the Biblical context reveals them to be and then the author proceeds to interpret  every relevant passage in scripture, and he is nothing if not dogged for Mr Waren does indeed list them all, in the light of this misconception. Therefore I would demonstrate that  the misconception of wrenching words out of their biblical context, interpreting them in a modern sense, then applying the twisted rendering to the passages from which the words were taken  is indeed the only warranted explanation for what he has done.

To work, then.

Both authors concede that there is a punishment of sinners in hell. One attacks the biblical truth as to the duration of said punishment  and the other deals to the nature  of it.

These two points I take to be salient, the veritable core of the issue, and therefore I do not see the need to refute  in detail everything they have written. Brevity is the soul of wit and it is something I am learning only of late.

Rob Bell denies he is a universalist. Yet to him the ultimate destination of humans is heaven. I am hard pressed to see how this differs from Univeralism in ultimate intent, but as he knows full well that the very term is inflammatory to orthodox  Christians he will studiously avoid it.

So to him hell is a punishment of limited duration and after men have done their time they will get out and he welcomed to heaven.

The core of his argument here is the meaning of the Greek term  αιώνας   των  αιωνων

That they should be tormented day and night forever and ever, (revelation 22:10)  and here the phrase transliterated as aionas ton aionon is used, is anathema to Bell.

He maintains that the word aionas means age, not an eternity, and in this, strictly speaking, he is quite right. But he has disregarded even the immediate context of the word. Sometimes the meaning is held not in the word but the phrase. Naive literalists with no regard for context and the idiomatic structure of language will usually miss this out , but this is the case in every language.

For instance in the New Zealand idiom "to spit the dummy"   the meaning of the verb to spit is plain, but a dummy is anything from that which sits on a ventriloquist's knee to  the pacifer a baby used to suck on, and it is this which is referred to in this colourful colloquialism, for the phrase means to lose one's temper in the sense of an angry baby spitting out the dummy in infantile fury.  The meaning can not be found in the individual words Indeed the meaning can only be found in the phrase as a whole and even then in the social context from whence the idiom arose

Likewise to walk the plank is one thing but to walk the dog is quite another: the meaning is in the entire phrase.

This can be confirmed by looking at the others usages of the term forever and ever, and more specifically the Greek phrase aionas ton aionon -   αιωνας των  αιωνων .

This is where electronic concordances show themselves  immensely useful. Indeed they remove any excuse for poor scholarship being so readily available


(tbc)

God Hates Persons?

We are informed that God hates sinners.

This can be seen on any number of you tube posts.

What troubles me is the self righteousness of the assertion that if God does not hate those who claim this  then they are not sinners. This is as if the Apostle John never spoke when he said "He who claims to have no sin is a liar and the truth is not in him."

We are all sinners. If God hates sinners then God hates every one of us and we are all damned. For surely he who hates wishes the destruction or suffering of those he hates. Calvinists may assert this of God , but it is written  that God is not willing that any should perish.

But even if this is not so, and I am hard pressed to think how it could not be so, but for the sake of argument let us grant that God is willing that some perish, are we to believe that when the Holy Spirit reaches out to sinners to save any sinner that this is an act of hatred, for it must be if God hates sinners?

God hated sinners so much that He reached out to the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road that dark night, and to me also in my own smaller Damascus Road conversion  just over 36 years ago?.

Hatred?

Really?

And what of when scripture says the opposite? For it says "God  commends His love to us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us."

While we were sinners He did the ultimate act of love and died for us.  He would not die for a good man, as Paul said, but for a sinner. Yet He hates sinners, these fanatical preachers would have us believe.

God hates sin, but the classic distinction between a God who hates sin and loves sinners has been lost by naive literalists who hunt through Scripture for verses to confirm their prejudices and then wrench these passage out of context.  For context it is that often determines meaning: sometime immediate context, sometime however the context is broad.

Where did this teaching come from then if it is so false?

Among other verses pressed into service for this error is "Jacob I loved but Esau I hated"

Clearly, then, God hates persons.

And if God hates persons then surely we who are born again are to imitate God and hate persons also. This is the most chilling implication of such an idea: that religious fanatics will run riot  in hatred and call it loving God. It is as if Jesus never said of those who were murdering Him on the cross, "forgive them for they know not what they are doing."

But if we are all protestants here then we know that some bible verses are not to be taken literally. After all we all flatly deny that "this is my body" means that we are eating Christ in the communion service. The passage is a metaphor for intimate relational communion, and to take it in such a naively  literalistic fashion is to miss the point of it completely. Indeed the forlorn queues of Church members lining up like cars as a gas station to take their weekly shot of bread and wine demonstrate that all intimacy and relationship is shown to be lost by this doctrine.

Are there any passages where context shows that  hate is used metaphorically, or as hyperbole?

Yes indeed there is  "unless any man hate his father, mother even his own life he cannot be my disciple," Jesus said. But are we therefore to break the 5th commandment on principle and literally hate our parents? Of course not. The meaning here is that our love for Him should be so deep that our love for any other, which is indeed commanded of us, is to be almost as hate by comparison. This is what hyperbole is, a literary exaggeration to make a point.

And Hebrew is full of such devices.

Failing to notice these is a species of word twisting which likely, to try and put the best construction on  their motivation for such things,  emerged from  a pious but misguided determination to avoid word twisting by ignoring such things as the style and mechanical workings, so to speak, of a language.

So what in fact does "Jacob I loved" actually mean? Does a non literal interpretation do violence to the meaning of the thing?

I take it that "Esau I hated is a hyperbole for "Esau I strongly disapproved of."

There is no violence to meaning here, though naive literalists may demur, as the change is subtle but of immensely significant import, because if God does hate persons then the Scripture "he is no respecter of persons" is false. This would mean that God plays favourites, is not impartial and so is no just Judge.

So does God only love those who He knows will respond to Him? Well, firstly no Calvinist can take this line for they hold that Grace is irresistible- if God speaks to anyone then they will respond. End of story. Incidentally I mention Calvinism as to my knowledge the notion that God hates persons is a Calvinist doctrine, but I will take correction on this if proffered.

So God loves those who respond to Him?  Then he clearly only sent His son for the elect, flatly and blasphemously denying the meaning of the most famous verse in Scripture John 3:16 - "For God so loved the world that He sent his only begotten Son that whosoever believe should not perish but have eternal life."

Some may cite John 14:21 -23 which implies when lifted out of context that God only loves those who obey Him and love Him first. But this cannot be the case, for elsewhere it says "we love as He first loved us."  Indeed, if we are carnal, have minds set on the flesh and so cannot submit, it can be no other way. We will love because He first loved us and only because He first loved us, or we remain dead in sin and carnality. But  then as we love him as a result of this He will manifest his love even further, a kind of virtuous cycle moving us from glory to glory as we are transformed by the renewing of our minds through one on one tutelage in personal relationship with the Holy Spirit as his disciples.

So, as God is love, He must necessarily love all without favouritism. or His love is only human and so is not agape.

Therefore God does not hate persons, for all the Hebraic metaphor which states when misread that He does.

And what is the significance of this?

If they preach a God who hates person they themselves are of little faith. They may likely never have  tasted the goodness of the Lord for themselves so are in no position to preach when they do not believe.

Moreover if some people decide that such as God as they preach is a monster, as indeed He would be if this doctrine were true, and so reject Him, who will God work his  vengeance on but the preacher who encouraged this rejection  of the gospel?  This is why it is written "let not many become teachers lest we incur as stricter judgement."

That God is love is scriptural. It is indeed the primary core of Who and What God the Almighty, the Holy and Terrible, is. That this term must be explained in order to expose the abuse which is easy believism and other such indulgent presumptions  and to place it properly with His wrath  where the carnal mind will choose one or  the other to their destruction, this is of course, is axiomatic.

But such abuses are not countered by embracing the opposite error, namely that God hates persons.

Let the Paul Washers and the David  Platts of the church repent of preaching this that they cease encouraging the rejection of the faith by others, and that they also may rediscover the goodness of the Lord  for themselves. For they  have forsaken this if they ever knew it in the first place, and in their denial, based on their own hatred and rage they  preach a God much like themselves, namely of God who hates persons

Talent and Torment

Alas we see with the death of Robin Williams, whose most impressive work to me was "Dead Poets Society" and "Hook"; we see  that torment and talent go together, as if torment were the motivating factor. If this is true I would rather he was a happy man still alive who we had never heard of as he never had the motivation to go into the arts; and if my move to true happiness means that I never compose a note or write a creative word again then i will gladly embrace that.

I have been accused of selfishness for giving up the music profession in which I played  double bass over some thirty years.

My response is unprintable here, suffice to say I can only feel sorry for those whose lives are so empty that they need entertainment and so react when one like me decided it was not worth the effort, and who also suspects that such efforts may indeed be incompatible with real joy.

And by joy i do not mean the manic high that produced Beethoven's 9th, but something devoid of emotional violence, like my own delight as birdsong (so different from the ecstasies of music) and in the sunrise.
Keep your passion. I chose peace and real delight. And in Christ this is becoming a reality that is increasingly imminent.

What? No comments?

Has anyone tried to comment but still been unable to? Or has no one thought my stuff worthy of comment?

If the former then clearly something is wrong. That being so message me through  google plus or youtube where I am known as strefanasha  to inform me of this and I will at least know why I am being  greeted with a deafening silence.

But not being a tech head I cannot promise to fix it

Meditation on a Famous Name

This is an appetizer as to why I hold that  C S Lewis, well beloved by christians the world over, is in fact in disastrous error when it came to christian living.


More may follow, God permitting



MEDITATION ON A FAMOUS NAME

CS  [Clive Staples] is well named


He would call CLEAVE-ing to christ
That CLEAVE -ing of will from feeling
He did in fear of his own heart

Thus was he STAPLE-d to Law
With twin spikes
Of fear - which is unbelief
And self righteousness
Driven through his own soul

This leaven of pharisees,
Might be a STAPLE of many
But is no
Heavenly Food

For the GREAT - est DIVORCE
Was not that he wrote about
Rather it was that he practised,
And has enjoined upon us,

As This PILGRIM, though reborn
Has REGRESS - ed to the
Errors of his youth
Claptrap in
Puritania

His Hoof might not
Be CLOVEN
But his doctrine served
Him whose was,
For which Father of Lies
Was it who first said
In Heavenly clime
Let's Pretend?

For Tho he would be
King of his flesh
in domination
Of repression,
He was in
Such dishonesty
No CLOVIS (whence the name LEWIS)
The frank

O Jack!
Why sought you not Jesus
earlier instead
of later

Only one Joy
might you have lost
not both,
And a GRIEF might have
Been OBSERVED
Rather than a
Despair publicized.

O what a pity
You sought
Christ-i-an -it-y,
Instead of the Christ
YES,
HIM!

The Lepers

Once upon a time there was a leper's dungeon, but the doors were never locked and
the inmates could come and go as they pleased, though as no one outside the dungeon
was willing to have them in their company most stayed in the dungeon, but not all, as
sometimes some left it for brief periods.

Some of these who left came back and started telling the others how they had been
healed of their leprosy. But their skin was still white and cankered, full of running
sores and their hands had missing fingers and the like; not to mention the stench which spoke
more powerfully than their appearance, so that even in the dark no one could be
fooled by vain talk.. Eventually the lepers simply learned to look at the man rather
than his words, and so ignored this kind of talk, for it was endless talk, as if these
preaching lepers were trying to convince themselves of something that was simply not
true anyway. . .

But then one fine day one of the older members of the group, who was well known to
them all, returned to the dungeon after one of his periodic ventures out into the world.

His skin was a pure as a newborn child's and he did not need to say a word.

A cry of amazement arose from the lepers, and soon they asked him how he was
healed.

So he spoke briefly and effectively, and those who accepted his word (some obstinate
few insisted he never was a leper at all, but these were known to be deluded fools by
all the others) followed him out of the dungeon and were themselves cured . . . . .

The man who was really cured had something more substantial to say than the others
who merely claimed to be healed, but it was briefer and to the point and his life
matched his words. His own condition was the best defense of his utterance.

As it is written, about a Man wiser than all of us: you know them by their fruits

The Joy of Freedom, a parody poem

This is a poem which is a parody in the original sense of the word, namely a work based on another work . The other work is a poem by militant atheist Robert Ingersoll; and to make clear the sense of what I am replying to, given that this poet is not greatly known nowadays, I present his work beneath my own.

That is to say I go first. Had I done it otherwise some might think I was advocating his thought, and as you will see from my poetic response this is far from the case

THE JOY OF FREEDOM

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural -- that all the ghosts and gods are
myths

There entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the
feeling, the terror of

Slavery

The walls of my prison rose higher and thicker

Such light as lit my dungeon extinguished, and the bolts bars and manacles became steel
    where erstwhile iron  had sufficed

I was no longer a person, a child or a son

There was for me no purpose in all the wide world - not even in infinite space. I was
    bound

Devoid of meaning, my  expression and thought worthless

Devoid of ideal, mine or others’

Devoid of life, and love thereby rendered vacuous

Devoid of purpose, my faculties twisting in the wind

Devoid of fuel for imagination, save nightmares of emptiness

Devoid of reason, no purpose to guess, dream or hope

Devoid of a standard for determination  that stood as valid

Devoid of a reason to reject any ignorance and evil, a gull

for all the “rational” books murderers have produced

and all the barbarous legends of the present.

A dupe of politicians and journalists   

A dupe of the “humanist” and the “activist”

A dupe for crimes denied and unholy lies of secular men

Enslaved to fear of worldly pain without respite save death

Enslaved to the winged monsters of propaganda

Enslaved to theories, causes and movements

For the first time I truly knew my imprisonment.

There was no space in all my realms of thought,

no realms even - no heaven, no earth neither under the earth

wherein  dead  fancy could spread her tattered wings. 

No purpose for my limbs - therefore self made chains.

No rest for my back

No warmth for heart nor body

No companions, only frown and threat

No road nor footsteps, nor means to chose them

No inner  liberty from tyrants’ demand that  I bow, cringe, crawl and flatter

I was enslaved. I cringed in terror, in despair rejecting the only world I would conceive of

And my heart was filled with bitterness, with resentment, and

went out in condemnation to all the fools and fighters

who threw away an empty life for an empty liberty

of futile hand and spinning brain   

for  restless work and groundless thought

to those who lived as wild  dogs, fighting like them   
   
dying like them

being murdered by them

or tortured by them   

vain martyrs

to  all the naive, who rejected every knowledge that they were evil like the rest of us

denying any true freedom by their logic if not intent, who lived and died for nothing,
    enslaving us to emptiness

I threw down the torch they had, brand of darkness,
    it was but their burning flesh, a tyranny they would  impose in face of that they
opposed

for a light that had never existed was no enemy to all powerful darkness

    Stephen Meikle (1958 - )

THE JOY OF FREEDOM

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural -- that all the ghosts and gods are
myths

There entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the
feeling, the joy of

Freedom.

The walls of my prison crumbled and fell.

The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, bars and the manacles became dust.

I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave.

There was for me no master in all the wide world -- not even in infinite space. I was Free.

Free to think, to express my thoughts

Free to live to my own ideal

Free to live for myself, and those I loved

Free to use my faculties, all my senses

Free to spread imaginations wings

Free to investigate, to guess and dream, and hope

Free to judge and determine for myself

Free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired"

books that savages have produced, and all

the barbarous legends of the past.

Free from popes and priests

Free from all the "called" and the "set apart"

Free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies

Free from the fear of eternal pain

Free from the winged monsters of the night

Free from devils, ghosts and gods

For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all

the realms of my thought -- no air,

no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings.

No chains for my limbs

No lashes for my back

No fires for my flesh

No masters frown or threat

No following another's steps

No need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words.

I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.

And my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and

went out in love to all the heroes,

and the thinkers who gave their lives for the Liberty of hand

and brain,

For the freedom of labor and thought

To those who fell on the fierce fields of war, to those who died in

dungeons with chains

To those who proudly mounted scaffolds stairs

To those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn

To those by fire consumed

To all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and

deeds have given freedom to the sons (and daughters ) of men (and women ).

And I vowed to grasp the torch that they held, and hold it high,

that light might conquer darkness still."

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833 --1899)