Spirituality Column #728

October 27, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Knowing What Isn’t So

By Bob Walters

“… you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.” – John 7:52, Pharisees rebuking Nicodemus for daring to remind them that their law applies to Jesus, too.

You have to be careful about what you say to whom these days.

Whether politics or pandemics, economics or environment, gender or justice, patriotism or wokeness, religion or the Supreme Court, which lives matter or which lives don’t, public discourse is an endless minefield of truth-or-dare when we open our mouth or hit “send” on a post.  Then as now, it was the same risky idea for Nicodemus.

Unwelcome opinions guarantee a dangerous swim in roiling, unknown waters.

If there is no other lesson from the Bible – although I assure you there are many – it is that as much as humanity has “progressed” in the past 2,000 years, mankind is still basically the same. Technology is amazing; man’s proclivity to deceive is mystifying.

Nicodemus … I just love Nicodemus.  I ache for Nicodemus.  I think he truly “got it” – after a time – that Jesus was exactly who He said He was, acted like He was, and represented what He was – the Son of God, the promised Messiah, the saving Christ.

Nicodemus sensed that perhaps the prevailing Pharisaic narrative on this “Galilean” speaking so much distasteful opinion just might have an “in” on divine truth.

Jesus indeed was the fulfillment of God’s prophetic promise to reign in the whole world, over all people, through the Jewish nation and out into all the earth.  Just like the Pharisees mistakenly thought the Messiah would be a conquering soldier to kill the Romans and make the Jews the world’s most power nation, today we think Jesus came to solve our problems, heal our ills, give us stuff, free-pass our sins, and save us into heaven because by golly, we are that important.  And we ARE that important.

But not like we think. Turns out, in capital-T Truth, God’s glory is that important.

It was to the curious, highly-educated, surprise visitor Nicodemus the Pharisee, in the deep of night, that Jesus privately said the words we now know as John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”  Nicodemus had ears but didn’t hear.

The Pharisees had their narrative on Jesus almost exactly backwards.  It was Jesus’s truth that would truly fulfill the Law and save all who believe.  But it was their own destructive Pharisaical narrative they obeyed.  They were in gravest error.

John 7:52 (top) offers a seemingly minor point about Galilee, but it’s an egregious error similar to the many public narrative lies we are fed today.  In the temple the Pharisees “knew” a narrative that wasn’t so: that Jesus came from Galilee.  In truth, as prophecy said and they should have known, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. 

It was truth they ignored; a detail left unchecked.  The pious Pharisees were so darkened by their self-serving narrative that they missed God’s true light of the world.

Jesus came to initiate God’s Kingdom on earth; to fulfil the God-promised, prophetic purpose to bring the Jewish nation and all humanity back into His glory by the work, obedience, and covering of their sin by Jesus. The Messiah God, it turns out, was a loving, humble, servant of others; not a strong-armed tyrant or marauding earthly king.

The lesson is that the truth may not come from where – or be what – we expect.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) encourages all to vote with discernment.  Amen.

 Spirituality Column #727

October 20, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Spirit with a Capital S

By Bob Walters

On a recent, breezy evening at an outdoor celebration, I met a devout man of another faith and engaged in a leisurely and thoroughly enjoyable conversation.

Without argument, suspicion, or disagreement, we discovered much about each other’s lives, families, professions, confessions, and priorities, and encouraged each other in our separate but sincere and life-defining faiths.  Laying aside – ignoring, really – any hint of doctrinal testing or competition for God’s larger favor, we spoke as men and brothers seeking only friendship while sharing mutual respect.  Truly a conversation to reflect on. 

How rare.  What a joy. 

Our chief point of agreement, exposed mid-conversation, was how faith means nothing if it doesn’t first inspire us to love, serve, and generally get along with and nurture our fellow human beings.  God is honored when our relationships reflect freedom, joy, and responsibility, not control, fear, and irresponsibility. 

Much of society seems to have lost especially that part about responsibility.  And a large swath of many different religions, sects, denominations, etc., have redefined freedom as “doing what I want” and “demanding what I get for free.”  This first priority of using and defending freedom to honor God is lost on a secular world of physical desires, human lusts, power plays, fear of death, and contrived spirituality (small “s”).

Freedom is an act of our own will, yes, but it is will freely bestowed by the true God.  We have to aspire to freedom: to seek it, discipline ourselves for it, and prioritize our desires to nurture, share, and respect freedom.  Passive human acceptance of the self-centered but self-defeating ill-behavior of others is not freedom; it is enablement, and never brings joy. 

Happiness and pleasure, maybe; or quite possibly misery and despair.  Not joy.

The default, natural posture of our fallen humanity is to be taken care of, as we are taken care of as young children.  The importance of parents – the moral guideline of raising children – is to instill the desire for freedom, to teach responsibility, to seek the creative and the kind.  It works well in America.  Throughout the Bible we learn, from God’s view, “what works best” for linking God’s true Spirit with man’s God-installed will.

And that is called “God’s love.”  God sent Jesus Christ to be sure we knew that. 

Faith is the trip-wire for understanding God’s intentions.  The purpose of God’s will that we learn in and through Jesus Christ is not only to find comfort and confidence in the truth and proven existence of God, but to dedicate our energies and purpose, with obedience and responsibility – and Spirit – to spending our freedom on God’s glory.

I hope I see my new friend again sometime.  Due to geography, jobs, and relational degrees of separation, our paths would not naturally cross.  And, it is unlikely our families would worship together, but that’s OK.  I deeply thank God for the lesson of how close we can be to, and to love, all God’s people; there is no one He didn’t create.

In this season of wide civic dissension, it was a joyful reminder of God’s grace.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is cheerier talking about Jesus than about politics.

Spirituality Column #726

October 13, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Sailing the Ocean Blue

By Bob Walters

In terms of the biggest of big, divine pictures – humanity’s relationship with God – I like to joke (and oversimplify) that the Bible’s Old Testament tells us the problem, and the New Testament tells us the fix.

Or: In the Old we see what doesn’t work; in the New we see what does work.

Let’s quickly define a couple of terms.  The “problem,” you likely guessed, is sin.  True, but “sin” isn’t isolated to our bad behaviors; sin defeats our ability to glorify God.  That’s the real problem.  So, the point is hardly just “my sin;” the point is that we’ve allowed Satan to interrupt the central purpose of created human life: to glorify God.

The “fix,” as you also likely figured out, is Jesus Christ.  For God’s Kingdom to be initiated on earth among the sinful generations, God – because of His foreknowledge and perfect righteousness – had to “fix” the “problem” of our sin.  Enter Jesus, who in His death defeated our “death” by covering our sins with His blood and that “worked” because Jesus is God.

Voila, or, voici le fixe! God’s righteousness rescues us from death and restores us lovingly to His Kingdom by covering our sins.  Jesus is Lord, we are loved, and God is glorified by our belief that Jesus is who He said He is, the Son of God.

Simple enough, right?  All is forgiven.  Really.  Done deal.  Pray continually.

Now, let’s look at one specific thing in the Old Testament that, while smaller than all humanity’s relationship with God, was a huge mistake the Jews made regarding their relationship with the One True God who chose them as His people.

God was Lord; He had bestowed on Israel judges, but the Jews wanted an earthly king.  Here the Creator of All Things chose them as His avenue to establishing His eternal kingdom on earth, and they said, “Great, but we want our own King.  Could we have one please?”  You can read all about it in the Bible’s 1^st and 2^nd Samuel.

What that showed was – and is – fallen humanity’s reluctance to accept God as “King.” So, we make our own kings and, through all human history, the “king” thing – whether Jewish, Christian, secular, pharaohs, or whatever – never really worked great as it related to human freedom.  Earthly kings tend to take control, not give freedom.

Jesus’s death “freed” us from our sins and, in that freedom within God’s kingdom and the shelter of Jesus identifiable through our faith in Christ, are unleashed our creativity, responsibility, aspirations, love, and imago dei (“image of God”) born in each human soul glorifying God.  We live this life, thanks to Jesus, equipped with the truth of the divine God, not an earthly king.  God’s glory is eternal and His alone.

Believe it or not, this all came to me as I was thinking about Columbus Day.  We have mostly lost the federal holiday (except closing the post office and banks) – and vilified Christopher Columbus – because of contemporary, politically correct, diversity and identity politics-generated earthly sensitivities about whether Europeans should have even settled America and Columbus’s later rumored dalliance in the slave trade.

In 1492 Columbus, an Italian Christian, “sailed the ocean blue” west across the Atlantic Ocean on a mission funded by Christians – King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.  Their treasury had just become healthy after winning Spain’s war against the invading Moors (Muslims), and upon his second asking bestowed Columbus with funds to seek new trade routes to India and spread Christianity to whomever he encountered.

That was the horizon-chasing, seafaring Italian’s mission: discovery, trade, and – key point – to be a witness for Christianity to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).   

At that time and before, every continent and most cultures on earth held, traded, or sold human slaves in some fashion.  Earthly kings were fine with it.  Few if any had stepped up and forcefully said, “This is wrong.”  Not the famous kings, queens, great empires, military powers, and significantly – you never hear this – not the church.

Slavery as a practice continued throughout the first millennium and a half of the Christian era.  Neither Rome nor Constantinople ended it, and throughout the Bible there are many forms of slavery that were accepted as normal practice.  People commonly were cast or sold themselves into slavery to resolve debts or gain work. War prisoners often became slaves.  Even the Apostle Paul was a “slave of Christ.”  We find it impolite to say “slave,” but in Paul’s sense each of us is a slave to, or servant of, that which we most love and freely dedicate our lives; the purpose that brings joy and peace.

But there is a very, very, biblically wrong slavery, and that is the kind we’re talking about that happened in Africa with the trans-Atlantic (to the Americas) and trans-Saharan (to the middle east) trade.  One African tribe would capture another African tribe and sell them to foreign slave traders for profit.  That type of slavery, wherever it happens, deeply angers God and we see that in the Old Testament in Amos 1:6:

“I will not turn my back on my wrath, because [Gaza] took captive whole communities and sold them to Edom. I will send fire up the walls of Gaza that will consume her fortresses.”

Before Columbus’s memory fully goes over infamy’s horizon, let’s look at what happened scarcely 200 years after his first journey in the wild and wide-open land that was called the New World.  The earthly kings were an ocean away, and the ensuing settlers brought with them the hope of religious and specifically Christian freedom.

How was slavery “abolished”?  It is astounding what God can use and what He can do when earthly kings get out of the way and people with faith in Jesus Christ work in faith to recognize God’s will and nurture God’s kingdom. Even if it takes a while.

The first salvo came from the early American Quakers who penned “The 1688 Germantown Petition against Slavery.”  There were no monarchs in America, and over the next 100 years the lifeforce of human equality and the Holy Spirit began to take hold here in revival and awakenings.  The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution came into being.  Monarchial England soon bought into abolition thanks to William Wilberforce.  In another 100 years, a civil war in America had been fought and won.  While many problems were not solved, the righteousness of God and the faith of free Christians fueled the abolition of slavery.  Reviled Columbus had opened the door.

All of this Christian work and fruit, crazily, happened even as the ascendant and then dominant Western philosophy was the Enlightenment’s quasi-Christian, secular humanist agnosticism.  Go figure.  Today I lament the apathy and ill-intent of education that has led culture-wide to disappearing general knowledge of and dying appreciation for both U.S. history and Christianity.  It is a fascinating, enriching legacy we are losing.

Columbus wasn’t perfect but I am deeply thankful for the broken road that led to the American opportunities and freedom we enjoy.  Even as a citizen of heaven, I pray for our earthly nation to revere its foundation a lot more and shun Jesus a lot less. 

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that earthly kings are never the answer because their human fallenness is always a problem.  The fix, always, is Jesus.

Spirituality Column #725

October 6, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Pray Some More

By Bob Walters

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.” – Romans 15:13

NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt wasn’t quite the same guy away from the race track that his competition persona – “The Intimidator” – suggests.

I didn’t know him well, but, having worked in and around NASCAR (as a sportswriter and then public relations rep) back in the 1980s and 1990s, I knew Dale well enough to like him.  As long as he wasn’t in or near his race car, Dale, in my experience, was funny, charming, polite, considerate with a good dose of mischievousness, and sedately wise in a special, good ol’ southern boy kind of way.

I bring this up because though seven-time champion Dale always seemed to be in trouble with other competitors or NASCAR officials for his daring and aggressive – many would say thrilling – driving, he knew when to stop worrying about a problem when the past was past.  “I want to move on,” I heard him say in an interview one time, grinning, “but people will say, ‘No, let’s go back and worry about this some more.’”

I bring this up in a column about Christian life and faith because right now, today, the world presents all of us with a circuit-breaking overload of issues, dangers, politics, and woes.  We are enduring national storms that shake foundations set in sand and rattle even the ones set in rock.  We are constantly, personally reminded of and coached to dwell in the morass of culture, media, academia, and politics that refuses to look forward in faith-driven hope.  It instead grips tightly to political outrage, demeaning identities, perceived injustices, jealousies, grudges, and human slights of every kind.

Harbored rancor creates a cesspool I do not want to visit, inhabit, nurture, or inflict on anyone else.  Whether reaching back two days, two decades, or 200 years, today’s dominant forces of secular information distribution are tuned to fear and control, not solutions and freedoms.  That shifting sand of constant wrong-footedness-by-design and relational turmoil is Satan’s quicksand and freedom’s demise.  Problems abound.

“Let’s worry about this some more.”  How about if we examine a better way?

The better way is God’s hope, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the witness of Jesus Christ.  What did Jesus witness to?  The truth, love, and permanence of God.  What can we do with that in our lives?  Live in joy and peace.  How do we do that? 

There was a great example of it in Washington D.C. last weekend: Prayer.

It was right there at national ground zero, amid the perpetual daily upheavals, fears, and insecurities of public problems, prevarications, and riots.  It was amid disturbing, changing-every-day discussions of political and cultural turmoil.  As a nation suddenly perched on a sandbar of ill-intentions, mistrust, and contention flailing against temporal despair of its own making, there appeared the picture of the rock-solid big fix.

Fifty-thousand faithful, peaceful, sincere Kingdom warriors marched with love and without hate in Christian prayer for things they know to be true.  Prayer in Jesus’s name has the mysterious strength of both unending permanence and constant renewal.  Prayer for our nation and our leaders is our first privilege and duty, not our last hope and desperation.  Joy and peace, belief and power … all attach real hope to prayer.  

Those folks were tapping not only into two thousand years of Christian faith but the stable whole and truth of the eternal trinity and tactile here-and-now of God’s glory.

Don’t be intimidated by earthly problems.  Pray some more; and worry less.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wept when Earnhardt died at Daytona in 2001.