Being Stainless

The wage of the righteous leads to life, the gain of the wicked to sin. -- Proverbs 10:16

As we so often say, guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  It is not what we have or do not have, what we do or don’t do that makes us righteous.  Jesus might have had this or similar sayings in mind when He said:  The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.

What is in our hearts, regardless of our external circumstances, determines the kind of people we are, and the kind of people we are will create meaningfulness or meaninglessness in our lives.  It does not matter if a person sweeps the street or rules the world, what we do passes while what we are becomes our eternal destiny.  One who is good will not consistently do evil.  Our outward behavior flows from who we are.

Our films, part of our national mythology, show both tragedy and triumph.  We love the movies where the poor kid overcomes obstacles to become successful, rich and famous.  A fairly recent example might be The Pursuit of Happyness.  In that film we see a man with a success mindset who was determined not to be trapped in hopelessness and lack.  Other films depict the downward side of the spiral where some measure of success leads, not to happiness and fulfillment, but to tragedy, broken relationships, addictions, and destruction – Goodfellas comes to mind. 

Lord Acton said that power tends to corrupt.  I would be foolish to disagree with a wise man, but I think wealth and power expose what lies at the center of a life.  If there is corruption, riches and influence may make it manifest.  Conversely, if one has a good heart, having resources will enable that goodness to express itself.  

It's hard to live without oxygen, but even something so essential can be dangerous in high concentrations.  Bare steel is prone to rust on exposure, but alloy in the right elements, like chromium, and it becomes much less vulnerable.  Faith, hope, and love are among the elements my heart needs that it might be impervious to the corrosive influence of the world and the things of the world.

Stop Putting Me On

But that is not the way you learned Christ! — assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.  — Ephesians 4:20-24

What does it mean to "put off your old self"?  We may call it the old man, the carnal nature, the adamic nature, the flesh, but the simplest description is just self — me.  We are born into the world with a self.  We are not blank slates.  Anyone who has a child, or more than one, will tell you they are born being different.  Self is not personality though the two are related.  The persona is our mask, our inter-face as opposed to our intra-face.  It is the template or the jig on which we build our relationships with others.  Self will be seen — or at least glimpsed from time to time through that template.  Some of us are simple and our interface reflects largely and accurately the underlying self.  Others of us, either because we are fearful of exposing our nature or perhaps because of the circumstances of our upbringing, have a mask that exposes much less of that nature. 

Religions and philosophies have long recognized that self is somehow at the root of many of our problems.  Though a Christian, I am rather sympathetic toward Zen, and I think zazen meditation can be practiced  by Christians without conflict.  I am not sure where this quote came from, but I like it:  To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.  I suspect generally that what most Zen practitioners are forgetting is a version of the persona rather than the actual self, but the point is still to perceive and experience as directly as possible the pure reality around us.  What the truly enlightened will realize is that self cannot be overcome by self. 

The key to understanding and ultimately freeing ourselves from self's bondage is to realize it is "corrupt through deceitful desires".  We are unable to see things clearly.  Our perception is clouded and corroded to the point that we misunderstand, misjudge, and miss the mark.  So much that we see in the world is deception.  People are drawn into all kinds of suffering because they are deceived.  The old nature has no resistance to corruption.  Let's go back to the Old Testament for an illustration: 

King Solomon made 200 large shields of beaten gold; 600 shekels of gold went into each shield. And he made 300 shields of beaten gold; three minas of gold went into each shield. And the king put them in the House of the Forest of Lebanon. ... In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem.  He took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king's house. He took away everything. He also took away all the shields of gold that Solomon had made, and King Rehoboam made in their place shields of bronze, and committed them to the hands of the officers of the guard, who kept the door of the king's house.  (1 Kings 10:16-17, 14:25-27)

Gold is, of course, incorruptible.  Bronze, while quite strong and initially as shining and bright as gold, develops, over time, a patina of corrosion.  To keep the shields of Rehoboam looking like gold required a great deal of work, a lot of burnishing and polishing.   In the same way, the flesh is resilient and tough.  It, too, can be shined up to look pretty good, but it lacks the value, quality, and incorruptible nature of gold.  The bronze shields were a counterfeit of the gold shields.  Rehoboam, through disobedience, lost a great treasure to Shishak — as king of Egypt, a type of Satan.  To avoid being embarrassed by such a loss, he took what he had and made something that served the purpose and "looked just as good" as the shields he had lost. 

In Adam, humanity lost the intimate connection with the Father also through disobedience.  Like Rehoboam, we were plundered by Satan.  From the Fall until the Cross, most of us had little choice except to rely on the self, to do the best we could with what we had, to brush and polish the tarnished face of our old nature and make it as acceptable as we could.  The Law gave us the means to keep our shields bright and strong, but what God wanted was for us to have a new and incorruptible nature.  The death of Christ and the shedding of His blood provided us with a new covenant.  The Cross offered us a way to set aside self and take up a new nature, that of Christ Himself. 

The beauty of this new self is that the world is unable to tarnish it.  Those "deceitful desires" that assail us can longer cause corruption.  Instead of being confused, accused, and harassed, our minds are renewed and refreshed, able to perceive clearly.  Now, like those golden shields of Solomon, we reflect back to God His glory, undiminished and unclouded by the corrosion and dust of the world. 

In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one — Ephesian 6:16

Offensive Christianity

Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.  There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.  But before all this they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name's sake.  This will be your opportunity to bear witness. — Luke 21:10-13

As in the parallel passage in Matthew 24, the Disciples have asked Jesus about His statement concerning the destruction of Herod's Temple.  The Lord predicts the siege of Jerusalem in 66 to 70 AD and speaks of the calamities surrounding it.  Those who hear the word, though, have always understood that Jesus was seeing beyond the single event and prophesying both of a greater eschatological truth and of a reality that believers in all times and places can comprehend. 

Wars and rumors of wars, natural disasters, and epidemics are the things that keep the evening news on the air selling soap.  Somewhere on this slightly egg-shaped planet today somebody is going to die in a conflict.  Accidents and disasters will take place, but life will go on.  People have not changed all that much due to civilization and Western culture.  We have not really gotten used to it.  We are still playing with the same basic equipment that ushered in the Old Stone Age.  Fears still motivate us.  We are still looking over our shoulders for Smilodon, and we get frightened by Smiling Shem or Fundy Frank or some other bogey of the modern age.  The manipulators like that; it makes us easier to drive into the corral.

Jesus says that, in the times before Jerusalem was surrounded and thrown down, His followers would be rounded up, imprisoned, and persecuted.  "But before all this they will lay hands on you."  This has been the pattern ever since.  Christianity must be silenced, driven underground, diluted or tainted in some way before evil can run its course.  At the very least, the salt must lose its savor and become good for nothing except to be discarded.  As long as Christians are pure salt and light in a society, tyranny and violence, dishonesty and vice are held in check.  The professors can re-write history all they want, but they cannot change the truth.  No nation with a strong Christian base is going to fall victim to internal corruption.  At worst it will do as America did in 1860 and cleanse itself of a corrosive evil, bathed in its own blood. 

They don't lock us up in America these days.  They don't have to.  They corrupt us with fame and money.  They encourage our greed with tax-exempt status — as long as we are willing to play their game.  They segregate us and tell us to keep our religion in our churches, that we can do whatever we want behind closed doors.   You can let your little light shine, so long as you keep it covered with this government-approved bucket.   Preachers don't go to jail in America for preaching the gospel; they are imprisoned for tax evasion.  Gangsters can beat a murder rap, but nobody beats the IRS. 

There does need to be a separation of church and state.   The state needs to get out of the church, which is exactly what the sometimes-agnostic, sometimes-deist, sometimes-unitarian Jefferson meant when he coined the phrase in his letter to the Danbury Baptists.  Churches need to take to heart the admonition of Solzhenitsyn with regard to government:  "Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them."  Christians should not be beholden to the state nor obedient to the state.  Rejecting the state is harder to do when you have been living at least partially off taxpayer beneficence for a hundred years. 

Wait, did he say that Christians should not obey the state?  Yes, I did.  Does anybody think that the Body of Christ is not more righteous — at least in theory — than any government anywhere, any time in history?   Are our standards not higher and purer and truer than anything a bunch of bought-off legislators, bureaucrats, corrupt lawyers, and political hacks would impose?  Grow up!  Do I or does any other Christian need a state law to tell us that certain things are wrong — that it is wrong to hurt or to deceive others, to satisfy our own greed and lust at the expense of another, to enrich ourselves by impoverishing someone else?  Hell, no.  We are guilty of turning our consciences over to the government, of substituting legality for morality.  I don't need a government to outlaw what the Bible tells me is wrong or to force me to do what the Bible says is right.   

As it stands, the church has marginalized itself, becoming enamored of worldly success and acceptance.  We trade in the same corrupting values as the non-believer.  We have watered down the wine to make it acceptable to children, which would not be quite so bad if we hadn't gone and developed such a taste for it as adults.  We can't handle anything stronger any more.  We might get out of hand, upset the status quo.  As Hank lamented about a different kind of wine, nobody wants to get drunk and get loud.  We don't want a Holy Ghost that really emboldens us, that makes others uncomfortable.  He's the Comforter all right, but He only comforts us after we have been shaken by the relentless terror of the truth.  Our God is a consuming fire.  If He ain't freaked you out, you ain't seen Him.

The Church's ineffectiveness against spiritual death and corruption is evident all around us.  Secular American society is rapidly decaying.  Every one of the Seven Deadly Sins has so permeated the thinking of the nation that it is easily deceived and led astray.  When people turn from the truth, the links of the chain are forged, grace is set aside, and the key passes to fate: 

The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.  Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false,  in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.  (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12)

We will not like how this ends, though it is not the End of All Things.  Any little, old antichrist — and there are many, will do to bring about the fall of a city, a state, a culture, or a civilization.  All that has to happen is for Christ and His people to be pushed aside, for His truth to be rejected and ignored — before all this.     

Of Arugula and Kings

The almighty, living God turned to Gabriel and spoke thusly. “Go, take these two portions of My being. There are two destinies waiting. To each of them give one portion of Myself.”

Carrying two glowing, pulsating lights of Life, Gabriel opened the door into the realm between two universes and disappeared. He had stepped into the Mall of Unborn Destinies.

“I have here two portions of the nature of God. The first is the very cloth of His nature. When wrapped around you, it clothes you with the breath of God. As water surrounds one who is within the sea, so does His very breath envelop you. With this, the wind that clothes, you will have His power – power to subdue armies, shame the enemies of God and accomplish His work on the earth. Here is the power of God as a gift. Here is the immersion into the Spirit.”

A destiny stepped forward: “This portion of God is for me.”

“True,” replied the angel. “And remember, whoever receives such a great portion of power as this is will surely be known by many. Ere your earthly pilgrimage is done, your true character will be known; yea, even revealed, by means of this power. Such is the destiny of all who wear and wield this portion, for it touches only the outward man, affecting the inner man not one whit. Outward power will always unveil the inner resources, or the lack thereof.”

The first destined one received and stepped back.

Gabriel spoke again.

“I have here the second of two elements of the Living God. This is not a gift but an inheritance. A gift is worn on the outer man; an inheritance is planted deep inside – like a seed. Yet, even though it is such a small planting, this planting grows and, in time, fills all the inner man.”

Another destiny stepped forward. “I believe this element is to be mine for my earthly pilgrimage.”

“True,” responded the angel again. “I must tell you that what has been given you is a glorious thing – the only element in the universe known to God or angels that can change the human heart. Yet, even this very element of God cannot accomplish its task nor can it grow and fill your entire being unless it be compounded well. It must be mixed lavishly with pain, sorrow, and crushing.”

The second destined one received and stepped back.

Beside Gabriel sat the angel Recorder. He dutifully entered into his ledger the record of the two destinies.

“And who shall these destinies become after they go through the door to the visible universe?” asked Recorder.

Replied Gabriel softly, “Each, in his time, shall be king.”

-- From the Prologue to A Tale of Three Kings by Gene Edwards



I don’t know when Edwards wrote his little book. The copyright on my edition is 1980 and I first ran across it in the early ‘90’s. He could have used a better editor (pot, meet kettle), but, all its faults aside, it is an interesting work. Edwards wrote it in response to abuses of power in authoritarian evangelical churches. It tells the story of Saul and David, then David and his son Absalom as a way of illustrating how to properly respond to abusive pastors and church leaders, church splits, and Christian-on-Christian bashing.

For some reason I could not find listed my favorite response to abusive authority: grab ‘em by the tie and slam them against the wall while foaming at the mouth and screaming assorted profanities and vulgarities. This is possibly because – though it is extremely effective, at least until the cops handcuff you – a minimum sixteen-inch bicep is usually required, depending, of course, on the size of the authority to be elevated.

People who “do the Lord’s work” have a tendency let it go to their heads. Though there are innumerable servants of God who are humble and self-sacrificing, too many in positions of authority think they have a right to dominate and control while making unreasonable demands on the time and resources of others.

Notice what Edwards says: power unveils. That is not limited to the spiritual realm – or maybe I should say the spiritual realm is not limited to church. Just look at the vast majority of politicians and others with political power. The smugness of power can go from the presidency right down to the dog-catcher. Pick any ten police officers and you’ll find at least one who just can’t keep from showing people who the man really is. Pick any ten U.S. Senators and you will find ten like that.

I still say McCain will win, and win more electoral votes than Bush did in 2004. I predict that Obama will not get 49% of the popular vote. I’m calling it 51 to 48.5 for McCain, with Bob Barr getting most of the remainder. However, if I am wrong (for an exhaustive list of things about which I have been wrong, contact my wife), and Obama does receive the mantle of power, we will see a lot of “unveiling” in a hurry.