Jesus Did Not Condone Evil

Therefore, whatever you want others to do for you, do the same for them – this is the Law and the Prophets – Matthew 7:12

Christianity is a lot easier to grasp than some would have us think, especially those who profit from keeping us confused and warring with and among ourselves.  The kingdom of God is within you, Jesus said.  Treat others as you would have them treat you.  Don’t start trouble you can’t finish. 

OK, that last one is my interpretation of “turn the other cheek” and “go the extra mile”.  I cannot bring myself to accept pacifism.  I have no desire to be an aggressor or to bully and intimidate other people.  My natural man’s non-aggression view is summarized well by a quote from The Shootist – “I won’t be wronged.  I won’t be insulted.  I won’t be laid a-hand on.  I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.”  

Yet, I believe Jesus does expect and even require me to accept wrongs and insults.  He certainly accepted and endured undeserved abuse and suffering for my sake.  We have all treated someone unfairly at some point so it behooves us to endure, overlook, and forgive wrongs done to us when it is a matter of personal loss or humiliation. 

Conversely, I am certain the virtue of longsuffering does not mean refusing to resist those who would harm your family or deprive others of the right to life or liberty.  I come back to Romans 12, where Paul tells us to detest evil but not to repay evil for evil or seek our own vengeance.  He says, though, we are not to be overcome or conquered by evil.  Instead we are to conquer evil with good.  To me, that means protecting those for whom I am responsible, stopping those who would do wrong, and resisting those who would intimidate, manipulate, and dominate.  

**I know it has been a couple of months since I have been here.  There is a lot going on.  Maybe it will get better.

Middling

Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, Look, here it is! or There! for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.  -- Luke 17:20-21

How critical can a preposition be?  It seems rather important here.  Various translations may tell us that the kingdom is within us or among us.  The most literal seems to be that given in the ESV “in the midst of you,” which remains slightly ambiguous.

If the kingdom is among us, the emphasis would fall on community and our relationships one with another.  Most of our concern would be focused on dealing with all around us in a righteous and loving way.  We would do our best to put the needs of others before our own and follow the Golden Rule:  whatever we others to do for us, we will do the same for them.

If the kingdom, though, is within us, we would before all other things attempt to have Christ indwelling us as individuals in mystical union.  We would try to live right and always do the right thing so as to not grieve the Holy Spirit, for everything would depend upon Him and His presence in our lives. 

Fortunately, we do not need to worry about which reading is correct.  In essence both views are correct.  Some of us are inclined to a mystical approach, others to the expression of love in word and deed.  So long as our motivation is communion with God and citizenship in the kingdom, the end will be the same.  Christ will indwell Martha when she is working and Mary when she is listening.   Jesus did not chide Martha because she was trying to feed everyone and get everything in line but only because she allowed herself to be distracted from Him.  Now the Spirit may fully inhabit our lives and possess our attention and devotion while we go about doing our work and taking care of the needs of others.

It certainly doesn’t hurt to retreat once in a while and be refreshed – just you and the Lord, but He is always in our midst.

The Blood of the Cross

The Lord Jesus had to bring to naught the power of sin.  He could do this only in His own person.  Therefore He came in the closest possible likeness of sinful flesh; in the weakness of flesh; with the fullest capacity to be tempted as we are.  From His baptism with the Holy Spirit, and the temptation of Satan which followed, up to the fearful soul agony in Gethsemane, and the offering of Himself on the cross, His life was a ceaseless strife against self-will and self-honour; against the temptations of the flesh, and of the world, to reach His goal – the setting up of His kingdom – by fleshly or worldly means.  Every day He had to take up and carry His Cross, that is, to lose His own life and will, by going out of Himself and doing, and speaking nothing, save what He had seen or heard from the Father.  

… But His supreme power to remove guilt and the curse did not lie merely in the fact that He endured so much pain and suffering of death, but that He endured it all in willing obedience to the Father, for the maintenance and glorification of His righteousness.  It was this disposition of self-sacrifice, of bearing the Cross willingly, which bestowed on the Cross its power.  – Andrew Murray from The Blood of the Cross (Christian Literature Crusade, 1968 edition, pp. 27-28)

It is a sad day.  We learn that Britain’s Iron Lady – the last of the Triumvirate of the 1980s, has passed on to her reward.  On perhaps a smaller stage, Friday night, Rick Warren’s youngest son, Matthew, committed suicide at age 27.  I have very little direct knowledge about what Rick Warren believes, having never read any of his books or heard him speak.  He has always elicited a surge of utter indifference in me.  However, even if I hated him and thought him the worst heretic in history, I would grieve with him and his family today.  As Someone said, So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

I think sometimes that I have it rough.  And maybe I do.  Sometimes.  Jesus never got a day off.  Not His whole life.  Every morning when He woke up, He faced the same set of tugs and impulses that you and I face.  Probably He often heard a voice saying, “You know You don’t have to put up with all this.”  There had to be times when He was thinking, “If Peter goes off just one more time …”, when He wanted to grab some smug Pharisee by the throat.  OK, maybe not.  Maybe that’s just me. 

But what He did want to do in His love and compassion was to give a broken people the Messiah they thought they had been promised, to give them a King and a throne forever, and to do it right then and there without the pain, suffering, and death of the Cross.  It wasn’t just Himself that He would have spared.  He could have saved His people from loss, terror, destruction, and exile – except that it would not have worked.  All that had to go on the Cross.  To say that it is beyond my understanding doesn’t even come close.  It is beyond my misunderstanding and the most fantastic reaches of human imagination.

While we live in this world, we are offered the same choice Christ had.  We can live our lives to ourselves.  A little better, we can live it to our families, our clan, our community, our church, maybe our nation.  We can really expand out and live for humanity.  I have always found it odd, though, that those most dedicated to the cause of humanity are frequently the ones most willing, and even happy, to kill humans in the process.   Be that as it may, while we may call the last more noble than the first, our only true choice is between the flesh and the spirit.  Are we going to live for and to the flesh, or are we going to live for and to God the Father?  By going to the Cross, Christ broke the chains that held us in bondage to the flesh.  He made the right choice, and, by doing so, by living His entire life in obedience, He made it possible for us to follow Him in that choice.  

We like to tell ourselves that technological advances are the same as human improvement.  We like to think that better drugs and a better understanding of genetics, not to mention Science!  are making or will make us better people.  We prefer to ignore the evidence that technology has always been a way to further destruction, to deliver death wholesale, to build better traps and shackles.  The flesh always ends the same way, in bondage and madness, violence and blood and horror. 

There is, in the end, only our way or God’s way. 

 

Fairness Left Behind

A non-post but I wanted to call attention to the American Thinker which has an informative article by J.R. Dunn concerning the left's feedback loop of information between the Net and the major media outlets.

Dunn sort of tongue-in-cheek suggests that one way to thwart the national media in this would be "...feeding deliberately false information with the intention of later exposure...".

Of course, conservatives and libertarians are unlikely to do this, for the same reason that McCain and other Republicans tend to "reach across the aisle", while Democrats tend to shove you down the stairs. The collectivists talks about fairness and fair play, but individualists really believe in and practice fair play. We live by the Golden Rule as Jesus gave it: Therefore, whatever you want others to do for you, do also the same for them (Matthew 7:12).

I want other people to mostly leave me alone, so I leave other people alone. I want them to stay out of my business, so I stay out of theirs. I want other people to treat me fairly, so I treat them fairly.

The godless left -- and they are godless -- the godless left has their own version which goes something like: Take advantage of the inherent fairness of those who believe in the Golden Rule every chance you get, and mock them as suckers afterward. That may not be the exact phrasing from Marx 7:11, but it's close enough.

Our problem is simply that, though those on the left accuse us of all kinds of evil -- you know, like making laws that cause half the black male population to wind up in prison at one time or another or being greedy business people interested only in profit -- we are actually the ones with a functioning moral compass, as a general rule. I think we will have trouble playing the same dirty tricks with information technology and the Web that leftists do for that reason, but also because we do not view politics in the same way. To us, politics is a necessary evil, and we don't expect the government to do anything for us. We want a negative: for government intrusiveness and power to reduced to the greatest extent possible.

For the left, politics is life, even religion. It is the means of forcing others to bow to their demands and give them what they want. They are dangerous because they do not see an external standard of right and wrong. Their only standards are internal or the result of "consensus". Thus, they have no qualms about trampling individual rights for the sake of a false god they call the Greater Good.

We can never stoop to their level of lying and deceiving for political gain -- not for long anyway. They will continue to attack good people with false accusations, and we will continue to speak the truth. At least until they declare truth to be hate speech.