“Once prosperous (gold), we forgot God and dismantled marriage (girls) and then relied upon military power rather than God’s protection to maintain peace with our enemies (guns).”

In Deuteronomy 17:14-20, Moses gave Israel three laws for her future kings. As moderns who wrongly assume the Bible is merely “propositional truth,” we not only fail to see these three laws as a continuum, and thus fail to identify them in Bible history, we also fail to interpret contemporary history in their brilliant “triune” light.

As expected, the laws themselves follow the Covenant pattern (precisely the same patterns we have been observing in Galatians), and are thus a microcosm of the entire book:

TRANSCENDENCE

Creation (Genesis – Ark of the Covenant)

This first stanza predicts the pattern of events to come, and they are “sacrificial architecture.” However, Israel was not yet humble, not yet ready for kingdom. Their sin was the same sin as that of Adam. They saw kingdom (equality with God, Phil. 2:6-7) as something to be grasped, not something to be received as a gift after being qualified through humble obedience.

The symmetry between the gift of the Land from God in line two and the king in line 6 shows that even the king was to be a gift from God, His legal representative, His “image,” authorized to carry out judgments from His great white (ivory) throne.

HIERARCHY

Division (Exodus – Veil/Circumcision)

Just as the Laws concerning Israel’s kings were decreed by God, so the act of choosing a blameless king (Hierarchy) would follow the process of sacrifice. The king would be set apart from his brothers (as a substitute/mediator) just as Israel was set apart from the nations. We can see the Ethical/Social/Physical nature of the world here as Seed/Flesh/Skin: Christ/Israel/Gentiles. Israel was a skinned sacrifice, a “peeled fruit” which carried the seed. If the king was a Gentile, there would be no Covenant Succession. This goes beyond the circumcision of the flesh to the circumcision of the heart (Leviticus 26:41). Saul was rejected because he acted like an uncircumcised Gentile king, an authority unto himself.

Notice that the king was the centre of stanza 1 as the source of Law (Day 4), but in stanza 2 the command of the Lord is at the centre. And there is no line 7, no Succession. Israel’s problem was kings who did not act like brothers, but who behaved like Pharaoh, one who did not know Joseph, Israel’s brother. This brings us to…

ETHICS

Ascension (Leviticus – Bronze Altar)

The people were not to return to Israel Ethically (in their hearts, desiring a golden calf), Socially (through intermarriage with idolaters), or Physically (which was included as part of the curses in Deuteronomy 28:68, fulfilled under Titus in AD70):

And the Lord will bring you back in ships to Egypt, a journey that I promised that you should never make again; and there you shall offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but there will be no buyer.”

Israel’s destiny was to “serve the nations” as priests (as in The Feast of Booths), not as slaves to their gods (the Book of Judges).

This explains why Egypt appears at the “Deuteronomy” step in this legal stanza, representing both the “swarms” of Day 5 and the plagues upon Pharaoh. The horses at Conquest match the ones at Division. For Joshua, they were not the chariots of Pharaoh but the chariots of the Captain of the Lords hosts.

Ascension has two stanzas, the second one presenting the Covenant scroll, although here it is not sevenfold but fivefold, which means it is not an inheritance as it is in Revelation 5, but a stone tablet.

(Leviticus – Table of Facebread)

What is interesting is that when we get to this point in the Revelation, Jesus opens His inheritance scroll to knock off Pharaoh (Herod) and claim the nations, and the four “Spirit horses” of the Gospel ride out! By chapter 19, He has multiplied horses, but they are not Egyptian ones. They are the saints as the Lord’s hosts, no longer angelic but glorified men.

Interestingly the “return” at the Levitical step of the Bronze Altar is still at the Levitical step here, which reflects the relationship between the fivefold pattern of Moses and the sevenfold pattern of Israel (see these charts from Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key for more on that. It’s amazing).

Testing (Numbers – Lampstand)

Well, that covers the “guns,” now we get to the girls and the gold. I had expected the “Guns, Girls and Gold” to be the threefold Ethics in this cycle but the horses have been connected to the Conquest of the Land, borders which God would protect. If Israel was faithful, God would keep the nations at bay and she would have no need of horses. If she was unfaithful, God would first allow the Land to be invaded, and finally the City and then the Temple destroyed.

Women and gold appear at the centre for typological reasons. Gold and fire (desire) are represented by the Lampstand. The gold represents the godly king, the Adam (who is wiser than a bronze “earthy” serpent because he is holy) and the fire his legal love for the Woman. The book of Israel’s harlotry is Numbers, the book of Testing by serpents and a serpentine king, whose false prophet caused Israel to commit adultery with idolaters.

This fivefold stanza follows the Covenant pattern, with the Transcendent Law at the beginning, an uncircumcised heart at Hierarchy, a deceived heart at Ethics, plunder (a Covenant blessing) allowed to become a plague (a Covenant curse) at Sanctions, becoming a false inheritance of earthly riches at Succession.

The word “multiply” is used repeatedly, and true “multiplication” is not supposed to come until Maturity, from the hand of God. The multiplication of guns, girls and gold (symbols all sourced in Adam’s theft of kingdom from God’s right hand) is a form of sorcery. It is an attempt to gain God’s blessings without prior obedience. That is, to gain success without following God’s directions. This is where the glorious “swarms” of Day 5 become locusts who eat the Pentecostal harvest, and the clouds of incense become clouds of sulphur.

It is interesting that these five lines also echo the architectural progression of the Ten Words (above, beside, below):

How beautiful is that? Silver always seems to turn up at that point. It is the point where the Bride is either redeemed or sold, harking back to Adam’s failure to protect Eve, to Abraham’s purchase from Ephron for Sarah’s burial, and also Achan’s theft of gold, silver and a robe.

Maturity (Deuteronomy – Incense: Legal Witness)

James Jordan notes that the reason the wisdom literature is so mysterious to us is that we have not had the books of Moses and Samuel drummed into us. The kings of Israel had to copy out the Law for themselves, which I had never noticed before. For instance, Jordan sees Ecclesiastes as a mediation on the Feast of Booths. [2]

What is really excellent here is that Maturity is the “Deuteronomy” step, which means “Second Law,” because Moses repeated the Law to a new generation. It was the macrocosm of the second set of tablets given to old Israel after her golden calf sin at Sinai. Not only this but the phrase “a copy of this law” appears at the centre. The king was to be a son of God, an image of the Father. His obedience was to be a sign of the goodness of God: Israel’s God not only spoke (unlike idols), He was worthy to be obeyed.

I love the fact that Maturity concerns “legal witness,” and here the king shows his submission to God through his submission to Levitical priests. As the king watched over Israel (as her shepherd), so God watched over the king through his priestly angels “filled with eyes.”

SANCTIONS

Conquest (Joshua – Mediators)

This is the “Day 6″ of the cycle, and the theme is Adam in the Garden of God, humbling himself that he might be given kingdom, the second tree, as a gift, and therefore have God’s complete blessing to subdue the Land, instead of the partial one which Adam received. The fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, appears at the center of numerous Covenant cycles, sometimes as “trembling.” Instead, Adam feared a lesser authority. Jordan observes that Solomon, with his interest in studying nature, “naming biology,” is presented as a greater Adam.

SUCCESSION

Glorification (Judges – Representing God to the Nations)

Finally, we come to Covenant Succession, the inheritance of the faithful man. This one is explained by my subheadings, but I would also note that the “right hand or left” is a reference to Kingdom and Priesthood, both of which are under the authority of the Prophet. It is at this step (Maturity) that Moses sits on a rock and Aaron (Priest) and Hur (of Judah: King) hold up his arms. All three were there at Ascension, but not yet united (separate elements, stoicheia). At Maturity, Priest, King and Prophet are one (a holy hybrid, the High Priest) [3]. Hence, Ehud’s faithful left-handed stabbing of Eglon was a priestly act, not a kingly one.

History:

In his downfall, Solomon actually reversed the order of the three Laws, which began a process of “de-Creation.” He amassed 666 talents of gold so that silver became commonplace (hence the symbols 666 and “wisdom” are used to signify the temple-building Herods in the Revelation), he took many idolatrous wives, and then became a trader in Egyptian horses. His fall was Ethical, Social, then Physical, as the Land was taken away.

Application:

We can apply this to modern Western Culture. Faithfulness to God brought global conquest, faithfulness in marriage, then prosperity and great wisdom (science). Once prosperous (gold), we forgot God and dismantled marriage (girls) and then relied upon military power rather than God’s protection to maintain peace with our enemies (guns).

As one commentator said today, regarding the possibility of another brutal intervention into a brutal civil war in the Middle East, instead of sending soldiers we ought to be sending missionaries. Instead of sending a swarm of sulphuric locusts, we should be sending heavenly birds and schools of fish.
___________________________________
[1] See Esther and the Ten Words.
[2] See How To Read the Bible.
[3] See Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key for more on this fascinating subject of “holy mixtures”.

1 John 5: 1-12   |   Sermon Notes   |   17 June 2012

Introduction

Jewish Christians were first opposed by unbelieving Jews, then by Jews who said they believed. Members of this latter group are called “Judaizers,” and they were the false teachers whom the apostles condemn in their letters.

Not only did these men pervert the gospel by including adherence to the Law of Moses, they also failed to keep the commandments of Jesus. This was Pharisaism dressed up in Christianity, the old leaven carried into the new age. The Pharisees loved to control people, while they failed to control themselves. This is the context of John’s letters to Jewish Christians: despite their profession, these men would be exposed by their lack of of certain things in their character.

1    Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well.

• The first “child” we love is Jesus. The Jews claimed, and still claim, that they love God, but hate Jesus. John says this is impossible. One cannot love Japan and show disrespect to a Japanese ambassador. Jesus was sent by the Father, and did only what the Father asked Him to do. He spoke the Father’s words. To reject Jesus is to reject the Father — and to replace Him with an idol of our own making.
• First century Judaism became a “doctrine of devils,” and it remains demonic today. In Galatians, Paul refers to it as witchcraft. Judaism is rebellion against Christ and is thus rebellion against the very God of the Jews. (However, when they convert, Jews usually become remarkable Christians.)

2    This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands.

• And if we love the firstborn, we will love God’s other children, whether we actually like them or not. And if we don’t, the Spirit will be calling us to do so. True Christians know how much they have been forgiven and will be forgiving. Those who refuse, and continually harden their hearts, are most likely not born again.

3    In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome,

• Christians keep God’s commands not because they are terrified of God, but because they both love and fear Him as a father. We fear discipline from God, but we also come to understand how much we hurt Him when we sin, and what it cost Him to cover that sin in Christ.

4    for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith.

• What does this mean? It means that any pain can be born if there is a great reward to be had on the other side of it. A mother endures childbirth for the sake of a child. Jesus bore the cross for the sake of plundering the devil’s house of its captives.

• So, the faith spoken of is faith in the promise God makes of what is on the other side of suffering. We take His word for it and endure until what we heard becomes visible to our eyes. Overcoming the world means not believing what the world says, and not believing our eyes. Faith looks at ruins and sees a new house based on the blueprint in the promises of God.

5    Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.

• Our faith is based on the fact that Jesus overcame the world. Christians persevere, even when threatened with death, because Jesus, as the Son of God, overcame death.
• The period between AD30 and 70 was characterized by the rivalry between the testimony of Jesus and the testimony of the Jewish rulers. Would it be the Temple or the Church which survived the tribulation? Only one of them “overcame.” Likewise, only the true believers persevered to the end.

6    This is the one who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.

• This point is where I twigged that in this passage John is working his way very subtly through the Ten Commandments. John is up to “false witness.” Two or three witnesses were required for God to make a judgment. Remember the witnesses against Cain? And Sodom? And the false witnesses brought to testify against Jesus? Here we have the water and the blood as witnesses, and the third witness is the Spirit, who unites the water and the blood. But why is it water and blood?
• Water and blood are both liquids required for life. One comes out of the body and one goes into the body. The Jews were the blood, the circumcision, the genealogy of Christ, the Land rising out of the water. The Gentiles were the water, the baptism, the office of Christ, brought into the household of faith in the first century to bring new life to the Old Covenant body. The body of Christ is one new man, made up of Jew and Gentile, blood and water.
• Jew and Gentile had been separated in Abraham as “Land and Sea.” [1] Water and blood poured out of Jesus’ body when He was speared. Being separate, they were two witnesses that He was dead. But they were reunited in His resurrection body. The old division was torn down. The last sacrificial blood was shed, and now there is only “office.” Genealogy no longer matters. Baptism wipes out all heredity and confers basic Christian office upon all believers.
• Why it is not “blood and water”? The water ended Jesus’ perfect life and began His earthly ministry. The blood completed that ministry. So it’s:
  Circumcision (blood) > Baptism (water); Atonement (blood) > Ascension (water)

7    For there are three that testify:
8    the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.

• Unlike the witnesses against Jesus, the witness of Jesus’ baptism and Jesus’ death both corroborate the story of His identity. Not only did the Spirit testify at His baptism, it testified at His resurrection. He came up out of the water, then came up out of the Land.
• The process is actually blood to water: Circumcision to baptism, death to resurrection. But it is the baptism and death in the centre here that John has in mind. If Jesus was only baptized but not resurrected, He would have been a false teacher.

9    We accept human testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son.

• The Spirit not only witnessed to Jesus’ sonship in history, His testimony continues in us now.

10    Whoever believes in the Son of God accepts this testimony. Whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because they have not believed the testimony God has given about his Son.

• Christians believe the Spirit’s legal witness, and that is why Christians gather as further witnesses, even though we are not eyewitnesses.

11    And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.

• Our very life is a testimony to the truth of the Gospel, because the Spirit is making us like Jesus. And now God says of us, as He did of Jesus, that we are “beloved sons.”

12    Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.

• Here we have the inside/outside of the new household of God. Only those inside Christ, inside the ark, inside the passover household, are safe.

The Ten Commandments in 1 John 5:1-12

1. Worshipping the True God
2. Responding faithfully to the New Covenant Oath — Jesus’ name
3. Overcoming the world brings Sabbath rest
4. Honouring father and mother (God and church) because Jesus is the Son of God
5. Water and blood testify to the murder of Jesus
6. The Spirit of Jesus is not “strange fire,” or spiritual adultery
7. The Spirit unites water and blood into Kingdom (Adam believed a lie and stole kingdom)
8. We accept God’s testimony, in the cursing and blessing of His Son
9. Eternal life is a new house
10. Whoever believes is in that new house [2]

_________________________________

[1] See Cosmic Language.
[2] I follow the ancient Jewish “scroll” division of the Ten Words, followed by St. Augustine, because it fits the Bible Matrix. See Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key, chapter 4, “God-In-A-Box.”

Art: Land, Sea Alchemy by Lisette, Textile Seahorse

Don Carson on the Church in Britain

This kind of thoughtful analysis is just one of the many reasons why Don Carson is such a blessing to the church, and one of the many reasons why he will be remembered when the impact of other – perhaps noisier – men has faded.

Here’s one particularly striking extract:

“We must not equate courage with success, or even youth with success … I have spent too much time in places like Japan, or in parts of the Muslim world, where courage is not measured on the world stage, where a single convert is reckoned a mighty trophy of grace.

I am grateful beyond words for the multiplication of churches in Acts 29, but I am no less grateful for Baptist ministers like my Dad, men who labored very hard and saw very little fruit for decades in French Canada, many of whom went to prison …

Just as the widow who gave her mite may be reckoned to have given more than many multi-millionaires, so, I suspect, some ministers in Japan, or Yorkshire, will receive greater praise on that last day than those who served faithfully in a corner of the world where there was more fruit.”

When it comes to the miraculous spiritual gifts, I’m a bit of a hybrid.

After my conversion as a teenager, I desperately wanted to be able to speak in tongues, like some other Christians I knew. For some reason, the Anglicans and Presbyterians I knew didn’t, or couldn’t. And neither could I.

Acts needs to be interpreted in context. The signs Luke recorded for us were for the blessing or cursing of unbelieving Jews. They were a warning that the end was near. It was the end of the “Abrahamic rift,” so a reversal of Babel. Sign language at the beginning, sign language at the end, and the Word in between. Despite the signs, many of them hardened their hearts like Pharaoh (Romans 9).

What we do see today is miracles at the frontiers. Christianity is booming in many countries today, even Muslim ones, mostly due to miraculous signs and dreams. I have a friend who was a missionary in the Pacific, and definitely not into the gifts. He witnessed some amazing things, and said that even though it was his own ministry, he just felt like a spectator. He was on a gospel frontier.

We in the West are not at the frontier. We have the Word of God and in many cases we reject it. If we do see any miraculous signs, it is because our leaders are Pharaoh and Herod. The glory is departing. The frontier is crossing us. The miracles we see today are the counterfeits of Jannes and Jambres. We demand a sign and the antichrists make fire fall from heaven. But these manufactured signs signify not the beginning for our culture, but the end, as they did in Egypt, and in Herod’s Egypt in the first century.

See also End of the Abrahamic Rift, Three Babylons, Bloody Throne, Bloody Frontiers and That Which Is Perfect.

Van Gogh’s work has been regarded by some as “hallucinatory,” however his letters show that few artists were as intelligent and rational. His work was not the product of his dark times but of his struggle against them.

“I am feeling well just now… I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible—and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger and makes haste in what he does.” [1]

William Cowper, who battled debilitating and often life-threatening depression throughout his life, and yet was the author of many famous Christian hymns and poems, was the same. John Piper writes:

“I live with an almost constant awareness of the breach between the low intensity of my own passion and the staggering realities of the universe around me, heaven, hell, creation, eternity, life, God. Everybody (whether they know it or not) tries to close this breach—between the weakness of our emotions and the wonder of the World. Some of us do it with poetry.

William Cowper did it with poetry. I think I know what he means, for example, when he writes a poem about his mother’s portrait long after her death and says,

And, while that face renews my filial grief,
Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief.

There is a deep release and a relief that comes when we find a way of seeing and saying some precious or stunning reality that comes a little closer to closing the breach between what we’ve glimpsed with our mind and what we’ve grasped with our heart.

It shouldn’t be surprising that probably over 300 pages of the Bible was written as poetry. Because the aim of the Bible is to build a bridge between the deadness of the human heart and the living reality of God.” [2]

I want to relate this to every Christian life. This fruitfulness from the darkness is a process that belongs to every child of God. At the very heart of it is the tension caused by challenges to unseen truth by an unbelieving world, and the desire for vindication and rest. This is one of the processes inherent in Covenant history, and an understanding of it helps us to persevere in the truth, even in the darkest times. The New Covenant is no exception. [3]

God calls a man
…..Separates him for duty
……….Gives him the rules
…..Tells him the consequences of his performance
Arranges for the next tour of duty

Of course, this is Ray Sutton’s 5 point Covenant pattern, and I maintain that it becomes 7 point when “played out” on the stage of history:

Creation: God’s call and anointing
…..Division: The man is sent to work

and this is where the distress of the Covenant comes in. The central point is split into three—LAW/LAW/LAW:

……….Ascension: He receives the Covenant Law (as above)
……………Testing: He is challenged by a false Law

This is where the rubber meets the road. It is the Starry Night of Day 4, the saints in the wilderness. Will we be rulers, or will we be ruled? Will we be filled with the law as burning bushes (Lampstands) like Daniel and his friends, or will we be incinerated like the sons of Aaron?

The test is that the world suddenly doesn’t seem to correspond to what God said. We can only see so far, and Satan and those who follow him maintain that what is beyond our sight is not what God said (which is also why evolution is not science but philosophy). How many Christians feel that God has abandoned them, or betrayed them, or failed to reward them for their faithfulness so far? The challenge is to understand that God is qualifying you for more responsibility, more servant-kingship, and of course, more glory.

God’s Word often seems to contradict reality. Imagine being instructed to build a very large boat on dry land, and to put up with the jeers and taunts of the scientists and philosophers of the day. Imagine being instructed to tell the rulers of Judah to submit to the king of Babylon. Imagine being a Pharisee instructed to eat with Gentiles, and form new Jew-Gentile synagogues across the empire. Imagine being instructed to tell the King of the Jews that it is, in fact, You Who are the true King of the Jews. Both Jesus and Paul were thought to be mad. Do you know that feeling? [4]

Of course, vindication came, in torrents, in every one of these situations. The Book of Hebrews is a plea to Christian Jews to hold out, to persevere with this “new Covenant,” despite the fact that the Herods were still building monuments of white stone and gold all over the Land (including the Temple) and Christians were being persecuted and slaughtered across the empire. The words of Jesus certainly didn’t correspond with reality, did they? But the elect, as Daniel predicted, shined like stars. They believed the Word spoken, saw the fulfilment of the promises by faith, although they were far off and not yet seen. Faith is not blind. It is long-sighted.

Faith is also attractive, especially when it rides against the zeitgeist. It is very striking for people today to come across Christians who not only know what they believe, but are also not idiots. I teach the Bible to high school students, and the testimony of someone who believes it from cover to cover stays with them forever. I know, because the Bible was taught to me by people just like that. Brave testimony, under distress, is the heart of the New Covenant.

……….Maturity: He repeats the Law, warns the Bride,
……….and there is great plunder

After obedience at Testing, there are always plagues and plunder. That’s what we see in Exodus. That’s what we see in the ministry of the Apostles and the Reformers and the great missionaries (and not-so-great).

How about you? Are you willing to submit to God for the sake of the plunder? For the New Covenant missionary, the plunder is people, even if he doesn’t live to see the result (like Jim Elliot). I read about a missionary who spent seven long years evangelising some remote tribes and died without seeing a single convert. But those who followed after him reaped the harvest. Unlike discipling your own children, teaching the Bible to other people’s kids seems fruitless at times, because the seed takes a while to germinate. We have faith that it will sprout and that God will give the increase. Many Australians trace their conversion back to Sunday School or SRE (Bible teaching in public schools).

Faith is like time travel. In the midst of suffering, abandonment or persecution, we travel back in time to remember God’s faithfulness in the past, in our life, in the biographies of saints, and in the Bible. And we jump ahead in our head and hearts to the Conquest and Glorification that God has promised for the elect. The Psalmists did this (in both directions), and so did Christ and the Apostles. God is consistently faithful, regardless of how things might feel right now. How can we be trained to judge if there is no tension, no true and false witnesses presenting evidence? The question is, will you turn to other, short-term gods to ease the pain? [5] Or will you persevere and produce the abundant fruitfulness possible only through this process of pruning? Jesus said that if we judge ourselves, we will not be judged.

He shall see the labour of His soul, and be satisfied. Isaiah 53:11

Van Gogh sold only one painting, and died by suicide in poverty. William Cowper had the loving ministry of John Newton, and His God, watching over him. Imagine if Van Gogh and Cowper could see how their labours, the fruits of lives spent suffering in the dark, have been a blessing for hundreds of years to millions of people.

Faith, the substance of things not seen, is like time travel. By your obedience to the Word, and your fearless witness, you are a memorial to something that hasn’t even happened yet, and something that happened long ago. Like Noah, like Jesus, you are the incarnation of the past and a window on the future. Faith is the domain of the prophet, and in the New Covenant, all God’s people are prophets who know the end from the beginning.

So stick with it. Stand. Perseverance is just about everything. And vindication will come.
________________________________
[1] Quoted in Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical.
[2] Listen to or read the transcript of Piper’s wonderful biographical sermon here. See also Seeing In The Dark.
[3] See A Lamentable Life.
[4] See Mercury Rising.
[5] See What Comes Out.

After a friend pointed out that New Orleans and Haiti are big on voodoo, I read this insightful piece from Rich Bledsoe. It is reproduced here with his permission:

I may have said this before, but it is very illuminating, and given the circumstance in Haiti, is worth saying again. Ray Bakke is the man that my doctoral program was initially built around, and he is the most traveled man I know, and one of the most interestingly, vastly read. In the last regard, he always reminded me of Rushdoony. You could hardly believe all of the arcane books that he had at finger tip in his memory that he had read on this or that subject. He used to lecture while walking down the street in some foreign city with you, and you did not want to miss a word.

He said somewhere, on one of my trips with him, that Haiti and New Orleans had some commonalities. Both were French colonies that were colonized after the French Revolution (unlike say, Canada). Bakke said that in multitudes of countries that had been colonies, the subsequent infrastructure, educational system, hospital and medical development, and leadership development, were all begun by the missionaries. French colonies had none of these developments, because there were no French missionaries. Fascinating insight, and I have never heard anyone else say such a thing.

It is perfectly clear that if Katrina had hit almost any other city in America (say Houston), it would have been cleaned up and recovered in three or four years.

If Bakke is right (and it is perectly coherent to me), it says a lot about a little yeast in a country and a few mustard seeds. What is invisible at the time makes all the difference in 150 years.

by Bojidar Marinov

“Europeans are eager to hear answers, and when Christian leaders declare they have the answers, people flock to hear them…”

The spiritual condition of Europe has been the focus of attention for American Christians and conservatives for quite a while. The twentieth century did in practice what the Enlightenment thinkers had imagined in theory: The complete removal of Christianity from public life. Christianity has retreated, even from those countries that a century ago were vocally Christian in their public policies. The two world wars helped for short revivals of spiritual activities, and the Cold War—and its end—contributed somewhat for a renewed interest in Europe’s Christian history. But in general, Europe has been on the road to thorough secularism, rejecting Christianity as a moral paradigm, silencing its politicians and public figures who dare speak in the name of the Christian religion, and ridiculing Christianity as a backward religion of her savage past. And with the rise of Islam and the impotence of the European nations to stop its tide, the future looks bleak.

Missionaries working in Europe send back discouraging reports of governments creating obstacles to preaching the Gospel in what was just recently considered part of the “free world.” Even if they don’t have obstacles, the Europeans themselves are militantly opposed to being evangelized; and the government of the largest European nation—Germany—is on a frantic crusade to obliterate homeschooling and the “alternative lifestyles” that go with it (read Christianity). In France some cities have regulations that ban Protestant churches from owning buildings near public schools, while having no similar limitations for strip clubs or alcohol stores. And just recently the highest court in Europe acted to ban Christian symbols in the schools in Italy.

————————————————————————————————-

What kind of Christianity is Europe reacting against? Is it the real Christianity,
as revealed by the Bible, or is it something else?

————————————————————————————————-

No wonder American Christians consider Europe a “lost continent,” and conservative talk shows use words like “hopeless” and “dark” when they discuss the future of Europe. Christianity seems to be pushed out of Europe, and with it goes the great civilization that it created. Even with the victories of American Christianity and conservatism in the last years, it seems we are going to remain a lonely island of active traditional Christianity, supported from abroad only by the young emerging Christian communities in Africa and Asia—vigorous and strong, but lacking the experience and the resources to be of too much help in the next century or so.

To put it in big fancy words, the global megatrends look bad. If we lose Europe, we lose the enormous resource base built up by the Christian forefathers of today’s Europeans. And they surely didn’t build it up to be used against Christ and His Gospel.

But this feeling of hopelessness fails to make a very important distinction; it fails to ask the question: What kind of Christianity is Europe reacting against?Is it the real Christianity, as revealed by the Bible, or is it something else?

The picture I painted of Europe above is accurate enough, and yet, it misses some very specific examples that seem to run contrary to the general trend. They are not numerous, and they certainly can’t be taken to be indicative of some deep change in the European mentality and culture. But they are instructive enough to give us the clue as to what we as Christians have been missing in our efforts to evangelize Europe.

In 2005, the German Protestant Convention in Hannover attracted a record crowd of over 400,000 people, most of them young people. The Convention poster said, Gut wenn du eine Antwort weisst (“It’s good to have an answer.”) The Convention President Eckardt Nagel proposed the event “take a stand against society’s current depression and pessimism.” Europe has never seen such a crowd for many years, not even at a political rally.

The largest single congregation in Europe—more than 25,000 members—is the Pentecostal-charismatic church Embassy of God of the Nigerian-born pastor Sunday Adelaja . . . in Ukraine! The Pentecostal-Charismatic movement in Eastern Europe flourished for a few short years after the fall of Communism only to lose momentum in the late 1990s and practically come to a stall after 2000. Not so with Adelaja’s church. His church keeps growing; it has dozens of ministries—from helping families to Christian business clubs and debt relief funds—and mission churches in almost every country in Europe and Central Asia. Sunday Adelaja says about himself: “I don’t preach a gospel of salvation, but the Gospel of the Kingdom.” (You can find his views here.)

Pope John Paul II broke the unpopularity of the Roman Catholic Church after WWII and gathered crowds that few popes before him had gathered. He did it by putting an end to the official neutrality of his church in cultural matters, boldly preaching and teaching on issues like communism, abortion, international relations, dictatorships, etc. Suddenly the Roman Catholic Church was again relevant to the world without being a puppet in the hands of political dictators, as it was during the WWII.

In Poland, the Roman Catholic Church is as strong as it’s ever been. It is also the only church in Europe that openly opposed Communism, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall opposes abortion and government policies harmful to the traditional family. No other nation in Europe has priests that are as vocal on social and political issues as those in Poland.

The Reformed Hungarian Church in Transylvania has grown in numbers and influence so much after the fall of the Ceausescu regime that currently there is no village in Transylvania, however small it is, without a church. The Reformed seminary in Cluj trains hundreds of future Reformed pastors, and rather than receiving American missionaries, Transylvania sends pastors and missionaries to the Hungarian communities in the United States. The Reformed Hungarian Church has never been a “religious” institution in its limited American sense: It has always been a covenant community, viewing as its legitimate sphere of action every aspect of human life and society.

Milan and its university have traditionally been the political and intellectual stronghold of the Italian Communist Party. And yet in the 1990s, a new movement of Catholic economic thinkers in the tradition of Lord Acton has emerged in Milan and elsewhere in Northern Italy. These economists go to the Bible looking for foundations for their economic theories. Their popularity is increasing and many politicians in Italy and other countries base their political programs on their proposals.

There are thousands of smaller examples and testimonies that, beneath the surface, show that Europe is not spiritually dead. As a matter of fact, one can safely conclude that, contrary to the American perspective of Europe, the Old World is eagerly waiting and longing for its adoption back in Christendom and grasps every opportunity to do so.

The question then is this: How can we reconcile these examples with the trends we see in general? Are the Europeans schizophrenic, do they want and reject the same thing at the same time? Or is there something more than what is seen, something that God wants to teach us about Europe, history, and the Gospel we proclaim?

No, Europeans are not schizophrenic about their attitude to Christianity. On the contrary, they are more consistent than the average American. They don’t reject and want the same thing at the same time. The truth is, what Europeans reject and what they want are two different kinds of Christianity, and the European culture is much more aware of the difference than the American culture.

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So next time your church is considering sending a missionary to Europe… ask him if he knows what the Bible says about taxes, economics, political representation, freedom, entrepreneurship, business relations, international relations…

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The Christianity the Europeans mock and reject is the limited pietistic Christianity preached by liberal European professors and fundamentalist American missionaries (yes, these two groups are in a sense allies on “mission field Europe”). They know it is a Christianity that is weak and has no real answers to real problems. That Christianity speaks only on issues peripheral to the culture, and therefore Europeans relegate it to the periphery of their society. They call it “sectarianism” but not in the American sense of the word. “Sectarianism” in Europe means a cult that makes its members withdraw from society into a dream world of mystical false piety. And indeed, both the liberal intellectuals’ and the fundamentalist missionaries’ version of Christianity does exactly that. It never addresses the issues of the day; it never gives solutions; it never challenges the principalities and powers; and it lives in its own dream world, irrelevant and unrealistic. Europe will never accept that kind of Christianity, even if we flood the continent with missionaries.

In the rare cases when Europeans embrace Christianity, it is a relevant, practical, bold, shameless Christianity that never flinches from applying the truths of the Bible to the issues of the day. It is the Christianity of Augustine and Athanasius, of Isidore and Charlemagne, the Christianity of the Reformers and of the Reformed missionaries of the 18th century, the Christianity of the Puritans and the Founders of the United States of America. Europeans are eager to hear answers, and when Christian leaders declare they have the answers, people flock to hear them, as in the examples above. Europeans have had enough of atheism, liberalism, and socialism to know perfectly well that they provide no answers. It takes only a little effort to make them turn to Christianity . . . if only we give them Christianity that has answers! Europeans are not dumb, they like America, they like what America has to offer, and most of them understand that America was based on our Christian faith—and Europeans want The Real Thing.

But so far we as American Christians have been offering to our European brethren only a fake, limited, pietistic, existentialist Christianity. Our missionaries have been unwilling to proclaim the crown rights of Jesus Christ over every area of life. And then those same missionaries have been sending back discouraging reports of the spiritual hardness of the European societies. Europeans are not stupid.

So next time your church is considering sending a missionary to Europe, take the time to examine the applicant. Ask him about his understanding ofcomprehensive Biblical worldview. Ask him how and what he intends to preach and teach. Ask him if he knows the issues of the day in the nation he is going to work in and whether he knows the Biblical solutions to those issues. Ask him if he knows what the Bible says about taxes, economics, political representation, freedom, entrepreneurship, business relations, international relations, etc. Ask him to write a short essay on a practical topic: “What the Bible says about healthcare,” for example.

If the missionary tells you he is only going to “save souls, plant churches, and preach the Gospel,” advise him to stay home. He is heading to disaster, and his life and work are going to be a disappointment. Europe has been known for the last 50 years to be the “graveyard of missionaries,” and it is not Europe’s fault. Europeans are not fools, and they will not suffer fools. Europe wants The Real Thing. She wants the real Gospel, and she wants it badly. And we’d better act on it.

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Not being from an oral communication/event-oriented culture, my recollection of the details of the following account might be a bit fluffy. But the story is true nonetheless.

Decades ago, my pastor and his wife worked in Papua New Guinea for what was then known as Gospel Recordings (now known as Global Recordings). They have many stories of their own and I hope to share some of those, but this one was related by one of their colleagues, who was translating the Gospel of Matthew into one of the local dialects. He left out the genealogy in Matthew 1 because he didn’t think it was relevant.

With the help of the locals, he completed his translation and it was read to the entire tribe. They weren’t very impressed. They asked if there was any more, to which he replied that there was a genealogy at the beginning. They requested to hear it. He read it to them. Their reply?

“Ah, now we know this story to be true.”

…..He is set apart and slain (Veil/Light-filled Cloud/Passover)

……….He is “resurrected” as food for others before God
……….(Altar & Table/Land/Firstfruits)

……………His witness to the Law fills others (Lampstand/Lights/Pentecost)

……….They grow into an army (Incense/Light-filled Clouds/Trumpets)

…..They are “resurrected” to inherit the Gentile lands
…..(High Priest/Mediators/Atonement)

God fills the new united kingdom (Shekinah/Global Light/Tabernacles)

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See Big Government for how the whole Bible follows this pattern as God’s mission.

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or The Root of Democracy is the Spirit of Christ

An excerpt from Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power by David Aikman, Chapter 13: “Artists, Writers and Academics.”

This post is dedicated to the memory of the false premise of Christopher Hitchens.

The late 1980s in China was a heady period of pushing the limits on many fronts, especially in culture and law, and in this environment of creativity and new ideas, a daring, six-part documentary was aired on national television in the spring of 1988. River Elegy was co-produced by Yan Zhiming, a prominent documentary producer,and its theme was that popylar symbols of China’s historic greatness, such as the Great Wall and the Yangzee River, should be regarded as emblems of captivity and restriction. River Elegy argued that they had hindered China from access to the great progress and discoveries taking place in other parts of the world, expecially in the West. The final episode of the series, “Ocean Blue,” shows the Yellow River emptying itelf into the Pacific as an emblem of China engaging with the outside world openly and confidently. “The dream of River Elegy,” Yuan wrote later, “was born out of concern and hope for China.”

That sentiment wasn’t shared by many of the old reactionaries still powerful in the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army. While students, intellectuals, and many others hailed River Elegy for pointing to the new, more open, pro-Western direction China should be taking, old-guard revolutionaries were outraged, accusing Yuan of “vilifying the Chinese people and the symbols of the Yellow River and the Great Wall.” When the authorities after the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen massacre began looking around for people to blame for the weeks of student-led pro-democracy protects, Yuan Zhiming was one obvious target. But he succeeded in eluding a national search, escaping finally to the United States. At Princeton University, to which many reform-minded Chinese intellectuals flocked, he encountered a group of committed Chinese Christians who were pro-democratic but who did not believe that democracy, in and of itself, would solve all of China’s problems.

Neither Yuan nor his collaborators on River Elegy had ever been to the West before fleeing China. On his arrival in 1989, Yuan was shocked and disillusioned; he heard about crime, suicide, homelessness, declining moral standards, and family breakdown. Yuan began to read the Bible, became friends with many Chinese Christians, and was baptized in April 1992. He then decided to deepen his knowledge of his new faith by attending the Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, where he studied Christianity in greater detail during the 1990s.

Yuan never doubted that China, for its own basic health, must sooner or later become democratic. But based partly on what he saw in the United States, Yuan also came to believe that a successful democracy in any country had to be constructed on more than tried and true institutions. “If a person lacks a firm and overcoming faith,” he wrote later, “he or she is easily tossed around on the sea of life. No democracy can be built on this.” He admitted, however, that many of his fellow dissidents, including those who had worked with him on River Elegy, didn’t share this perspective.

Democracy is not merely an institution nor simply a concept, but a profound structure of faith. At times I have called this to the attention of my friends in the democracy movement who have been in America for quite some time, but continue to lack a deep understanding of democracy. I told them that just because they have read Montesquieu and Locke and have seen an American presidential election, it does not mean that they have found the fountain of democracy. The root of democracy is the spirit of Christ.

In retrospect, as Yuan told British journalist Ian Buruma, he thought that River Elegy was superficial because it left out “the most important thing, the core of Western civilisation, which is Christianity. Without that, you cannot have democracy or human rights.”

While many Chinese dissidents would disagree, the idea became more and more powerful in Yuan Zhiming’s mind. He set out to produce a new TV documentary, in many ways even more ambitious than River Elegy. This was a multi-part series that aired for the first time in Taiwan in 2000 and was spread throughout China and Southeast Asia in VCD format. The English title, China’s Confession, doesn’t do justice to the Chinese name Shen Zhou, which is an ancient name for China, approximately “Land of God” or “God’s country.” Yuan — whose seminary research focussed on connections between the dao of Chinese philosopher Lao Zi’s boo, the Dao De Jing, and the Biblical sense of God, the Holy Spirit, or Christ — interprets the whole of Chinese history as a tragic letdown from a previous era when, he says, the Chinese worshipped God (shangdi in Chinese) and sought to live moral lives. The narrative of China’s Confession tells us:

This was the ancient land of God where people believed in God, feared heaven, obeyed the Tao (i.e., the dao of Daoism), and worshipped God… Our ancestors held firm their belief, which is: the justice of God will prevail, nothing could escape the sight of God, and sinners will receive their punishment. This belief is the moral power o promoting the good and discarding the wrong. it is the moral cornerstone of an ideal universal society. It is the dream of Confucius.

According to Yuan’s view of Chinese history, the real downturn in the behaviour of Chinese toward one another occurred about 2,500 years ago, when China was plunged into a turbulent era of internal regional warfare called the “Spring and Autumn” period (770-476 BC).

Leaving aside the historical validity of Yuan’s argument that the Chinese worshipped God at the origins of their civilisation and lived in an upright moral universe, China’s Confession attempts to account for the fact that despite China’s cultural early greatness, God’s revelation of Himself as recorded in the Bible took place in the Middle East, not in China. Like many Chinese intellectuals, Yuan sought a moral historiography of China that suggested God hadn’t simply bypassed Chinese civilisation. According to Yuan, God did actually set the moral foundation in China for what could have been a righteous and benevolent civilisation.

Well financed by overseas Chinese Christian backers, Yuan used dramatic excerpts from several historical dramas about ancient China to illustrate his point. He flew in one of Beijing’s top TV documentary narrators for several days to help out. Toward the end of the documentary, there is news footage of Chairman Mao at different stages of the revolution, including the fanatical Red Guard idolatry of him in 1966. Aired on TV across Southeast Asia as well as Taiwan, China’s Confession is unlikely to be released legally in China in the near future. But China’s Confession has been shown secretly to Christian groups all over China. Those Chinese Christians I spoke to were full of praise for what Yuan was trying to do. They said they knew a number of peole who had become Christian after watching the documentary. Yuan is also an accomplished preacher; tapes and videos of his sermons are in wide circulation across China and are enthusiastically received.

Yuan’s objective is very ambitious. “Our goal,” he explained in his modest home in Petaluma, California, “is to change the perception of China by the Chinese. If you go to any city and ask the average person, 99 percent of the people don’t understand Christianity. They don’t even know what the question is. Some people in China don’t even know that there are Christians in China.”

To counter this lacuna in basic knowledge, Yuan in 2001 embarked on an even more ambitious documentary a multi-part series on Christianity in China. Making many secret trips in and out of China that year, Yuan took his film crew to Christian communities the length and breadth of China. At one point, early in 2002, they filmed a Christian rock concert in the city of Daqing, close to the Russian border. Having a total of some four hundred hours of interview and narrative film, Yuan’s latest project is called The Cross. It seeks to explain to ordinary Chinese what major contributions Christians have made to Chinese life in the past century or more. He said in 2002, “We want to let government leaders see the movie. The most important thing is to make people realise that Christianity is related to Chinese culture. It is not a Western religion. The main purpose is to tell the Chinese people that the God of the Bible is the God of the Chinese people.” Yuan would like to have the English-language version of The Cross shown on American TV.

The Cross was released in both the United States and China in October 2003 and immediately achieved what Yuan had hoped: it attracted the attention of the Chinese authorities. The State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) showed the documentary to several of it high-ranking officials, and also distributed it throughout the country to lower-ranking officials in charge of religious work with orders that everyone watch it. The intent was to put them on alert to the alarming trend of the spread of Christianity throughout the country and society. According to one Three-Self [government approved] pastor, however, some low-level Communist Party cadres who watched The Cross were perplexed. “This is a bad thing?” he quoted some as asking in response to the stories of repentant criminals, healed marriages, honest businessmen and well-behaved teenagers as a result of conversion to Christian faith.

David Aikman is a former Beijing Bureau Chief for Time Magazine.