Jay Carper's Blog, page 24

Faith Is Like a Seed. Make It Grow.

Faith is ubiquitous in Scripture.

Faith makes us well. (Matthew 9:22 & 29, Luke 17:19, Acts 3:16, James 5:15, etc.)
Faith makes great works possible. (Matthew 17:20, Luke 17:6, Hebrews 11, etc.)
Faith inevitably leads to good works. (Acts 20:21, Romans 3:31, Hebrews 11, James 2, etc.)
Faith makes our good works effective on the spiritual plane. (Hebrews 11, James 2, etc.)
Faith is essential to our eternal salvation. (Romans 3:28, Ephesians 2:8, Hebrews 11, etc.)

Over and over, the scriptures say, “If you had faith, you would be healed.” If you had faith, big things would happen.

Clearly faith is vital. Without faith, we are powerless. Without faith, we are lost.

Yet we all struggle with insufficient faith. We believe, but, for most of us, big things aren’t happening. As the desperate father in Mark 9 said, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

Is it possible to develop faith, to start with a little and end with a lot? We know that God can simply give us greater faith–he is God, after all–but from long experience we also know that’s not how he usually operates. Yes, our faith can grow over time. Paul told the congregation at Thessalonika that he thanked God for their continually growing faith (2 Thessalonians 1:3), and Yeshua hinted at this fact when he compared faith to a seed. (Matthew 17:20) Seeds aren’t meant to be static. They were designed to sprout and grow into something much larger, which in turn produces many more seeds of its own.

The big question is how. How can we develop our faith from a mere seed to a plant? I know that this is a question that I have struggled with all of my life. Why aren’t people healed when we pray? The answer to that question can be complicated, but Scripture is very clear that, at least in part, people aren’t healed because they or the one praying for their healing have too little faith.

So how can we grow more faith?

Yeshua’s metaphor of the mustard seed implies that faith doesn’t grow only by virtue of its existence. No seed sprouts and grows without fertile soil, water, stress, and light. There are things besides faith itself, which we need to add to our little seed before it will grow to the piont of moving mountains and healing the sick.

Deep, Rich Spiritual Soil

Just as in the parable of the sower and the seed of the Gospel, the seed of faith also needs deep, healthy soil to prosper. It needs to be embedded in an environment which encourages long-term, meaningful maturity. The environment in which our faith sprout–or doesn’t sprout–includes the people, places, things, and habits with which we surround ourselvs.

We have all heard that you become like those with whom you spend the most time, and I believe it’s true.

Pessimists are like the weeds of the parable. Their constant negativity chokes the hope and life out of you until you can’t believe in that anything good could happen for you. They need love as much as anyone–more, evidently–but you can’t keep them as close friends. They will drag you down to keep company with their misery.

The proud and self-sufficient are like the rocks. On the surface, they might be very positive, but their hearts are hard. Why should they trust in God when they believe they already have all that they need. If you spend too much time with them, the seed of faith will have no opportunity to put down roots, and it will whither and die.

Maintaining and building faith requires keeping company with people of faith. Surround yourself with people who trust God. Be active in a community of faith. Be a friend to people who are where you want to be, and be careful not to speak negativity into their lives.

And not only company, but our home, work, and religious environments need to be conducive to developing faith. What kind of art hangs on your walls? What is the usual conversation like in the break room? Do your personal and spiritual habits focus on God’s faithfulness or on God’s wrath?

People like to denegrate religion, but ritual and tradition have always been very powerful instruments for building faith. Liturgy, rituals, annual observances, and the like will never save anyone. If your church teaches that they are necessary for salvation, that will tend to degrade faith. However, if they use these things to emphasize God’s dependability and mercy, they can be wonderful. The forms of traditional religion that unite people and build faith while honoring God’s commands are nearly endless. It’s important that your religion honors God by adhering to his standards, but don’t throw out all religion because some people and organizations have abused it.

If there are elements of your environment that discourage faith, consider how you can replace them with something more positive.

Good Spiritual Nourishment

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. (Romans 10:17)

The Bible is full of God promises and stories of those who trusted him and also those who didn’t trust him. Memorize God’s promises and read those stories often. They are all through the Scriptures, but especially focus on Genesis, the historical books1 the Psalms, and the Gospels2. There are also many stories of faith and miracles outside the Bible. The biographies of missionaries are especially rich nourishment in this respect.

Entertainment and education should also be designed to promote a strong faith and relationship with God. If your favorite author writes disdainfully of the miraculous and if your favorite bands mock the promises of God, how can they do anything but discourage you? It’s counter-productive to read about divine Providence in the morning and listen to someone talk about how it’s all “me, me, me” in the afternoon.

Pay attention to what’s being fed into your life, and try to filter out those inputs that aren’t helpful. Replace them with books, videos, podcasts, conversations, etc., that will encourage you and reinforce your faith.

Spiritual Stress

Yes, stress. Just like children, all plants need some kind of stress to mature and produce good fruit. Some plants need a touch of frost. Some need a hard freeze. Some plants need a strong wind to scatter seeds and some need to be eaten. Almost all plants need pruning in order to reach their greatest heights and productivity.

Your faith will never grow if it is never put to the test. How do you learn to trust someone if you never need to trust them. You start by acting as if you have faith, whether or not you do. You make yourself vulnerable and take a chance.

Take risks. Get banged up a little. If nothing else, you’ll toughen up a bit and gain some life experience.

Shining Spiritual Light

In Yeshua was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:4-5)

Faith isn’t the belief that God exists. Faith is the belief that God is who he says he is, that he keeps his promises, that he loves you and will never abandon you. Faith is another word for trust.

How do you learn to trust a friend, your husband, your wife? Through experience. You trust a good friend because he has been there for you in the past. He stood by your side when everyone else disappeared. If you want to trust God more, then you need to spend more time with him. Set some time aside every day to read your Bible, to pray, and to listen.

Your prayers don’t have to be limited to any particular format. Kneel and pray aloud if that works for you. Or sit in a comfortable chair and sip your morning coffee. Go for a walk. Dance. Whatever language allows you to speak most freely is fine because God speaks that language too.

Corporate worship is also important. Liturgical and informal prayer, singing of hymns, blowing shofars, dancing, waiving banners, pilgrimages… Like intimacy in a marriage and shared experiences with friends, all of these things create mental and spiritual reactions in us that draw us closer to God, that strengthen our emotional ties to the one being worshipped. (And be careful that your worship is directed upward and not to a performer on stage or to an experience.)

Getting to know God isn’t limited to the proverbial prayer closet and time spent focusing vertically. We can also gain a deeper knowledge of God by focusing laterally, toward the people around us.

The King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:40)

Everyone around you–young and old, sick and healthy, good and bad–bears the image of God, and they are all the focus of God’s loving attention. If you want to know God better, go find someone with a need that you can meet and then meet it. Pay attention to the things that God pays attention to. Be kind. Be generous. Love your neighbor, and not just your wealthy and nice smelling neighbors. In showing love to people who desparately need it, you will learn something of God’s heart, of the love and the pain that God feels for each one of us, and God himself will draw nearer to you.

It’s not enough to let God’s love illuminate you, because you weren’t designed just to be a solar collector. You were designed to take the spiritual light of Yeshua and turn it into fruit full of good works meant to feed God’s people. If you want more faith, then you need to be the instrument through which God answers the faith of others.

Faith is a living, growing thing. It requires attention, care, and feeding. It needs a healthy environment in which to take root. It needs a constant stream of reinforcement and encouragement. It needs exercise. Most of all, faith depends on an ever-growing relationship with the King in whom we have faith and with his people for whom we ARE faith.

Gardens don’t spontaneously spring up from the ground. They take planning, deliberate action, and hard work. Even Eden needed a gardener.

When I sit down to write, I usually have an idea of what I intend to communicate, but sometimes God leads me in a direction I wasn’t expecting. This is one of those times, and this is a message I needed to hear. Using this structure of a seed needing good soil, nourishment, stress, and light, I’m going to develop a faith-growing plan for myself and my family.

I encourage you to do the same.

Evaluate your current environment and your life’s inputs and identify those things that would tend to discourage faith. Don’t try to fix everything right away. Remember that God told Israel only to drive the Canaanites out of the land as they were ready to advance and occupy it. Instead, remove a negative influence and replace it with a positive one. Then another. Have a plan with a definite goal in mind, and don’t be afraid to alter the plan as you go and circumstances require. As long as you continue to move forward, your faith will too.

 

1 Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings, 1-2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.

2 Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts.

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Remember These Five Things

Everybody knows that Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, but it seems that few people know why (see here) and fewer still know the real meaning behind the day.

The primary source passages for the day are Leviticus 23:23-25 and Numbers 29:1-6.

“Speak to the people of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, on the first of the month, you shall observe a solemn rest, a memorial of trumpets, a holy convocation. You shall not do any servile work, and you shall present a fire offering to the LORD.” (Leviticus 23:24-25)

Like God’s other Appointed Times (moedim in Hebrew), Yom Teruah is to be a special day of rest, what’s commonly called a High Sabbath, and of sacrifices at the Temple. Most people understand the idea of a sabbath. You take a day off from work for resting and worship. Likewise with the sacrifices. Although the exact procedure and the purpose is a bit of a mystery, most people at least have some idea of what they are.

The thing that makes Yom Teruah different from all other moedim is the “memorial of trumpets”. The Hebrew word for trumpet in this passage is teruah, which more literally means “shouting”, but often means blowing trumpets or generally just making a lot of noise. Based on other passages and tradition, it is always translated as trumpets in relation to Yom Teruah. Specifically, these are to be the kind of trumpets that are called shofars and are made from the horns of clean animals like a ram.

So what is a memorial of trumpets? What are we supposed to remember? All of the moedim memorialize something. Passover recalls the plague of the firstborn in Egypt and how God spared those in houses marked by the blood of the lamb. Unleavened Bread recalls the hasty exit the Hebrews made from Egypt after the plague. Shavuot memorializes the giving of the Covenant at Sinai. And so on.

But… trumpets?

Again, what are we supposed to remember by blowing shofars? The Bible doesn’t specifically say, unless…unless it’s the trumpets themselves that we are to memorialize, more specifically, the sound of the trumpets. Okay, but does that really get us any closer to understanding the point?

It should help to look at how trumpets and horns appear in other places in Scripture.

In Genesis 22:13, God provided a ram caught in a thicket by its horns that Abraham could use as a burnt offering instead of his son, Isaac. Rabbinic tradition says that this happened on the date of Yom Teruah.
As battle cries, to signal attack, or to celebrate victory. (Numbers 31:6, Joshua 6, etc.)
To call the people to gather or to signal the moving of the camp in the wilderness. (Numbers 10:3,5)
To announce the arrival of a king or the Ark of the Covenant. (Numbers 23:21, 1 Samuel 4:5-6, Matthew 24:29-51, etc.)
To announce the arrival, descent, or descent of God. (Psalm 47:5, 1 Thessalonians 4:16, etc.)
The voice of God. (Exodus 19:16,19, Numbers 23:21, etc.)

This last one is what I find most interesting. God’s voice sounds like a shofar! What is it about God’s voice that we should remember?

God created the world and everything in it with his voice. Jewish tradition says that Yom Teruah is the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve, who were the first things that God didn’t create by speaking them into existence. Instead, they were formed by his hands and filled with his breath. (Kind of like a shofar. Hmm…) They weren’t present to witness God creating with his voice, so he had to give them a day, Yom Teruah, to look back at what they couldn’t otherwise see.

God gave the Sinai Covenant and the Torah with his voice. Certainly remembering the covenant and keeping its terms is very important. Another tradition says that, if the Israelites had been able to stand the direct communication with God at Sinai, they would have received the Law written on their hearts at that moment. Since they could not, God gave a special day to make sure they continued to look back at that moment. Jeremiah 31:31-34 says that one of the defining features of the New Covenant is the Law written on hearts instead of stone, so that Yom Teruah also calls Israel to remember that day, which has been promised and paid for, but not yet fully delivered.

Yeshua’s return will be announced by a great shofar. The arrival of a king is announced by a shofar. How much more so, the arrival of the King of Kings? This could very well be the voice of God himself, a great battle cry from heaven calling his people to assemble and announcing the beginning of the Day of the Lord.

What then does Yom Teruah memorialize through the blowing of trumpets?

The shofar on Yom Teruah calls us to repentance, to hear and obey the Voice of God.

Remember the Creator who spoke the universe into existence. Remember the substitution of the ram for Isaac and the Lamb for all of us. Remember the Covenant. Remember the commandments. Remember the King, who was, who is, and who is to come.

The Lamb’s Book of Life will not remain open forever. Repent from all transgression of the Law, for the Kingdom of Heaven is now, and the King has promised to return.

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The One Thing that Really Matters

Circumcision in itself is nothing, just another bit of body modification. It’s irrelevant to your salvation. Neither ritual conversion to Judaism nor ritual rejection of Judaism has any impact whatsoever on who you are in God’s Kingdom. These are merely works, whether good or bad, and, by themselves, works can never save you.

What you do cannot define who you are. Rather what you do is determined by who you are.

This is the true meaning behind Yeshua’s words when he said, “It isn’t what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out of him.” (Matthew 15:11) What comes out of a man isn’t limited to words and waste products, but also includes all the things that a man does. So that what a man does is determined by what is in his heart. The evil that is within comes out as deeds. So if a man, whose faith is in God, commits some infraction through ignorance, accident, or momentary weakness, this cannot condemn him.

Likewise, a man, whose faith is in himself, can do every action that the Law requires and still not be saved in the end. He can be circumcised, eat vegan so that he never risks eating anything unclean, give a double tithe, and volunteer every spare minute to the poor, yet still be condemned to eternal destruction because his faith is not in the Creator.

Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but keeping the commandments of God. (1 Corinthians 7:19) And “keeping the commandments” includes the most important commandment of all: You will love Adonai your Elohim with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” (Deutereonomy 6:4-5)

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The Two Trees of Moses

Ecclesiastes 12:13 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.

Psalm 111:10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever!

Proverbs 3:18 Wisdom is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called blessed.

God placed two distinct trees in the Garden of Eden and told Adam that he could eat of one–the Tree of Life–but not the other–the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. You know the story. Adam ate from the wrong tree and died spiritually, condemning all mankind with him. He was exiled from the Garden.

God’s Law (aka Torah) also is a tree of life. Moses said that those who keep it will live and those who do not will be cursed. In Deuteronomy 29:18-20, he described a man who chose the other tree, who said, “I know better than God what is good for me. I don’t need a book to tell me what is good and evil, and I will be blessed despite my flagrant disregard of Torah.” Moses said, “God will not overlook his transgressions. God’s anger and jealousy will smolder against him, and all the curses of the Torah will settle on him, and God will blot out his name from under heaven.”

Proverbs 14:12 There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.

Choosing to keep Torah is choosing to submit to God and acknowledge his lordship and superior understanding. Rejecting Torah is claiming to be greater than God or, at the very least, to be equal. This was the same temptation Satan used to persuade Eve in the Garden.

If obedience to God’s Law brings life, as God and his prophets clearly stated many times in Scripture, why then was Israel rejected? Why were they scattered and persecuted as if they had not obeyed?

Paul wrote that Israel followed after “a law of righteousness” in their Zeal for God, but they never attained it. (Romans 9:31) They didn’t really submit themselves to God because they didn’t really have faith in him. The had faith in themselves and submitted to a law mostly created by men. They said, in effect, “If obedience is good, greater obedience must be better,” and added a host of rules on top of God’s commands.

Legalism replaces God’s Law with man’s, while licentiousness ignores God’s Law. Reject both. Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.

The Jewish teachers rejected the essence of Torah, and chose love of knowledge and tradition over love of God and man. In trying to gain life, they rejected it in favor of self, and they lost both. They failed to see that, although Torah can enhance one’s life in the here and now, its ultimate end is the salvation of the soul. “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness for everyone who believes.”

The story isn’t over, yet, though. We have all been redeemed from Adam’s sin if we repent. Just so, God promised to restore Israel and punish those who persecute her. As Israel repents and elevates her love and fear of God over her love of tradition, she is even now being regathered from her long exile.

Deuteronomy 30:1-6 And it shall be when all these things have come on you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and when you shall call them to mind among all the nations where YHWH your God has driven you, and shall return to YHWH your God and shall obey His voice according to all that I command you today, you and your sons, with all your heart, and with all your soul, then YHWH your God will turn your captivity. And He will have compassion on you, and will return and gather you from all the nations where YHWH your God has scattered you….And YHWH your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your seed, to love YHWH your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live.

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On Becoming Great

Deuteronomy 26:19 And to make thee high above all nations which he hath made, in praise, and in name, and in honour; and that thou mayest be an holy people unto the LORD thy God, as he hath spoken.

Yeshua said that anyone who failed to keep Torah and taught others to do likewise would be called the lowest in the Kingdom of Heaven. I have actually seen people argue that, because he also said that the last will be first and the first will be last, then this means that those who teach that the Law has been abolished will in reality be the greatest in Heaven.

Wow. Self-serving rationalization at its finest.

Yeshua did say that the last will be first and the first will be last, but one can clearly see his intended meaning from the context: He who surrenders earthly status in order to serve God will have great status in Heaven. (See Mark 9:33-37.)

Do you want to be great in God’s eyes? To be called great in Heaven? Then be a servant here on earth. How does one serve on earth? By obeying God’s commandments. As Yeshua said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”

These are God’s commandments as expressed in the Torah and the Prophets:

Leviticus 19:17-19 Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him. (18) Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD. (19) Ye shall keep my statutes…

Deuteronomy 6:5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

Matthew 22:35-40 Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, (36) Master, which is the great commandment in the law? (37) Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. (38) This is the first and great commandment. (39) And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. (40) On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

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The Great, Invisible Sin of Our Time

God gave Israel a system for handling difficult criminal cases. They were to take the case before the priests and the national judge and, once a ruling had been made, it was to be obeyed with no questions asked.

The man who acts presumptuously by not obeying the priest who stands to minister there before the LORD your God, or the judge, that man shall die. So you shall purge the evil from Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:12)

God didn’t say, “If the judge’s character is unimpeachable and the priest’s theology is impeccable.” We know from the Biblical histories that the priests and judges weren’t always as pure as the driven snow. Gideon, Samson, Eli… They were a very mixed bag of nuts.

John Chrysostom was the archbishop of Constantinople at the beginning of the 5th century, about one hundred years after the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. He is respected in many Christian circles as a great teacher and theologian. I haven’t read all of his writing, but I’ve read enough to know that he had some really good things to say.

He wrote some really rotten things too.

For example, he wrote extensively about what a “poor and miserable” people the Jews are, and not in the sense that they are broke and unhappy. He meant that they are evil, wicked people who deserve nothing but death and abuse at the hands of every good Christian.

No Jew adores God! Who says so? The Son of God says so. For he said: “If you were to know my Father, you would also know me. But you neither know me nor do you know my Father”. Could I produce a witness more trustworthy than the Son of God? -John Chrysostom, Against the Jews, “Homily 1”

In this work, he falsely stated that the synagogues were full of homosexuality and licentiousness, and were the houses of demons. He misquoted scriptures that contain indictments of a subset of Jewish leadership and even some that were directed at unbelieving and rebellious gentiles and he applied them to all Jews everywhere. He slandered all of the Apostles and the first Christians, since they were all Jews.

Chrysostom wasn’t the only venerated Christian teacher to spew such un-Christlike garbage. Martin Luther wrote this gem of libelous absurdity:

The sun never did shine on a more bloodthirsty and revengeful people as they, who imagine to be the people of God, and who desire to and think they must murder and crush the heathen. -Martin Luther, “The Jews and Their Lies”

I find it very difficult to believe that it is possible to love God and hate the Jews (as a people, not any specific sect or individuals) at the same time, and I will be very surprised to see either Chrysostom or Luther after the resurrection.

Fortunately for them, I don’t get to make those decisions.

I can’t see inside of anyone’s soul. To be perfectly honest, I don’t even think I have a very good view of my own. How could I hope to judge someone else? For all I know, John Chrysostom is one of God’s cherished favorites.

Speaking of a “man after God’s own heart”, what about King David? He was an adulterer, a murderer, and an idolater, yet clearly still a great man of God. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners, and despite their frequent efforts to suppress or abolish the abominable institution, they didn’t hold their professions of human equality and God-given rights quite highly enough to do all that was necessary to secure the same rights for all Americans. Nonetheless, I believe them to have been great men.

How can we reconcile the evident greatness of the prominent men and women of history with their equally obvious moral flaws?

It seems to me that the first thing to do is to look in the mirror.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got more than my share of flaws. I’m ashamed of some things I’ve done, and I suspect there are other things in my life that I ought to be ashamed of if only I knew about them.

Many of the glaring sins of our forebears weren’t so glaring to them. Every house in David’s day had its household gods, and his was no different. His wife, Michal, used one to trick Saul’s men into thinking David was ill and asleep in bed. Washington and Jefferson thought they were doing everything reasonably within their power to end slavery, although from the twenty-first century it appears that they could have done so much more if they had truly believed their own rhetoric. Martin Luther was only echoing the predominant view of Jews among his countrymen. He had been steeped in lies about the Jews his entire life. These men were all products of their time and cultures, just as we are.

That doesn’t excuse anything they did. Chattel slavery, antisemitism, and idolatry were still sins against God–right is right and wrong is wrong no matter the cultural context–but those things were ubiquitous elements of the time. It’s hard for a fish to see the water in which it swims.

The bad news is that you and I are fish too. In two hundred years, our descendants will be saying the same kinds of things about us. Every day, we need to be looking in the mirror and asking God to reveal our slavery, our idolatry, our antisemitism to us. What is the great, glaring sin to which we have been blinded by air travel, fully stocked grocery stores, and the World Wide Web.

Is it something so obvious as abortion or homosexuality? No, good people with a solid biblical foundation can easily see the evil in those things. The great invisible sin of our age is something that most people don’t even notice and about which only a few people feel a little uneasy.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23)

I can’t tell you what our great sin is because I don’t know. But I can tell you that destroying the public symbols of our history, the writings, the names, and the images of great men and women who were also guilty of some great, invisible sin of their own, really accomplishes only one thing. It lets us pretend that we are better than they were.

And maybe that’s our sin.

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Two Mountains over the Jordan

The Hebrews spent forty years in the wilderness getting to know God and their place in relationship to him. Sometimes they did things his way and things went well. Sometimes they tried it their own way and it went poorly, but eventually they made it through, which means that, on the whole, they must have done more right than wrong along the way.

They fought the Amalekites. They fought Kings Og & Sihon. They won great victories and vanquished wicked peoples who were much stronger than they, at least from the world’s perspective. Finally arriving at the Jordan River, they paused to take stock. It was the moment they had been waiting for the day they walked out of Egypt. Everything had been building to this moment.

After summarizing their long trek, Moses pointed to the two mountains, Gerizim and Ebal, and said to them “These two mountains represent the two paths you can take once you’ve crossed over. Things are going to go well for you over there if you obey God’s commandments, or they’re going to go very poorly if you don’t. The choice is yours.”

I can almost hear what they were thinking.

“Hold on. Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute. I thought all the hard stuff was on this side of the Jordan. Isn’t it supposed to be easier on the other side?”

Anyone who has lived very long should understand that’s not how life works. There are easy moments and hard ones, but there is no “easy” stage of life. There is no point at which we can say, “I’ve arrived. I can stop trying now.” But don’t we always seem to slip back into that same assumption that it’s going to get easier once we get past this next challenge? Okay, maybe the next one. The one after that?

The Promised Land was just on the other side of the Jordan, but the Promised Land was never intended to be a place of eternal harps and cotton candy clouds. God intends for the Promised Land to be hard work.

For you are to cross over the Jordan to go in to take possession of the land that the LORD your God is giving you. And when you possess it and live in it, you shall be careful to do all the statutes and the rules that I am setting before you today. (Deuteronomy 11:31-32)

The Jordan didn’t mark the boundary between difficult and easy. It was more like the boundary between practice and execution, between rehearsal and performance. The Promised Land was where the real fighting was to take place and the biggest fight that the Hebrews would face wouldn’t be against the Canaanites. It would be against themselves and their own inclination to forget God’s commandments.

Once their enemies were mostly defeated, Israel lost their focus and drifted into complacency and idolatry. They took possession of the land, but they forgot the most important part of living in it: keeping God’s Law. To obey is to choose Mount Gerizim and life as God intends it to be, while to ignore God’s Law is ultimately to choose Mount Ebal and death.

We cross Jordan Rivers all the time in our lives. The cycle of leaving Egypt, wandering in the Wilderness, fighting giants, and crossing into the Promised Land happens over and over for everyone. When you graduate from school, get married, have children, get that promotion…these are all Jordan Crossings. At every stage of life we face the same challenges: a struggle to achieve freedom, a period of wandering and discovery, hard battles, breakthroughs and victories, and then slowly we drift back into the chains of drudgery, of spent energy and forgotten dreams.

It’s going to happen. You will forget your purpose. You will get stuck in a rut. You will backslide. Don’t beat yourself up about it too much. Thank God that he is a long suffering and forgiving God and that he sent Yeshua to take away the curse of eternal death that disobedience merits!

Having crossed the Jordan, don’t give up. Take possession of the Promised Land that God has given you, whatever it is in your life right now. Maybe it’s a great career, a ministry, or a profound new friendship. But whatever it is, don’t stop at taking possession. Don’t ever think that possession is the end goal.

And when the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, you shall set the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal. Are they not beyond the Jordan…? (Deuteronomy 11:29-30a)

Crossing the Jordan is just the beginning. The greatest opportunities for blessing and curses aren’t behind, but still ahead of you. Keep moving, and be careful to follow God’s instructions as you do. Choose to live in your Promised Land. Make it bloom and produce one hundred fold, because God isn’t giving it to you solely for your enjoyment. He is giving it to you so that you can do something with it to glorify him, to lift up his son, Yeshua, and to edify his Kingdom.

Over there, across the Jordan, putting your Promised Land to work is where God intends for you to be. It’s the place where you will be the most effective for the Kingdom. But only if you are faithful and keep your eyes on him.

Do you ever wonder why churches don't teach what the Bible actually says?

We call ourselves Christians, so why don't we live as Christ lived?

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Questioning Traditions

Traditions are wonderful and powerful forces for creating and reinforcing the bonds of family, community, and nation. Shared experiences even bind together generations separated by centuries. For example, people have been singing hymns at church and synagogue for thousands of years. If you were to travel back in time to a first century congregation, the shared traditions of singing hymns and reading and studying the Scriptures would unite you with those ancient believers in a meaningful way despite the vast linguistic and cultural differences.

Traditions inform our language by filling our words and expressions with meaning. One or two words between two people with a shared culture might contain unspoken volumes. Weddings. Independence Day. Thanksgiving dinner. Christmas sweaters. Merit badges. I know what images these words invoke in the minds of most readers because I see them in my own mind, while they might be meaningless to a Hindu in Jaipur.

Not every tradition is good. Some traditions are tainted by origins in idolatry; others require active participation in sin. Jeremiah prophetically quoted future gentiles turning to God’s truth:

Our fathers have inherited nothing but lies, worthless things in which there is no profit. (Jeremiah 16:19)

But I love tradition! We all have traditions we love dearly. And tradition…it loves us too, so much that it doesn’t want to let go. The very qualities that give tradition so much community reinforcing power, also give it claws that grip deeply.

When confronting the Pharisees and Scribes concerning man-made traditions that caused people to break God’s commandments, Yeshua said:

Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. (Mark 7:6-8)

Men who spent their entire lives studying God’s Law couldn’t bring themselves to give up traditions that violated it. For the most part they couldn’t even see that there was a problem. Traditions can become so much a part of who we are that they become semi-invisible.

Even so, we do have to try to see them. When we stand before Yeshua one day, we don’t want to hear the same words he spoke to the Pharisees.

Yeshua gave his life so that we wouldn’t be condemned for our imperfections, but he didn’t give his life so that we could ignore God’s Law either. Fortunately, we don’t have to empty out every room and shine a light into every corner of our lives today. What we need right now is a desire to find and remove the things in our lives that are displeasing to God. The actual removal will take time and we have to be okay with that, both in ourselves and in others.

I recommend asking yourself a few simple questions to determine if any tradition or habit or activity is something you need to stop:

1. Does this activity cause you to break one or more of God’s instructions? If yes, stop. If no, carry on.

2. Does this activity prevent you from keeping one or more of God’s instructions? If yes, stop. If no, carry on.

3. If possible, place the activity into the context of a marriage with God as the husband and you as the wife. Would this activity be appropriate in that context? Would it please your husband? If no, stop. If yes, carry on.

4. Does this activity make you uneasy? If yes, go back to question 1. If no, enjoy!

Finally, don’t panic. God doesn’t expect you to do everything perfectly from day one.

Or ever.

There will always be another dustbunny to sweep up, a stain to scrub out. In this life you will never be perfect. Fortunately, God is willing and eager to forgive those who approach him with a right heart, which means a desire to do the right thing even if we can’t always tell what that is.

Understand that God knows you. He knows what’s in your mind and in your heart. On one hand, this understanding ought to have us quaking in our boots. God is privy to every dark thought we entertain. But on the other hand, nobody is any different, and if an evil inclination was a barrier to God’s love, then we would all be lost. This was the very reason that Yeshua shed his blood. It covers over our flaws and washes away our sins so that we can approach God without fear of condemnation so long as we are committed to working out our salvation through continual improvements in our behavior and thoughts.

Cleaning the inherited lies from the dark recesses of life’s closets is important–it’s commanded–but having faith in God’s mercy to overlook the flaws that we have been unable (but not unwilling!) to address is even more important.

Start somewhere because starting everywhere isn’t possible and starting nowhere means we have no faith at all. Don’t get too uptight about all the places you haven’t cleaned yet. Knowing that there is more work to be done is one way that we know we’re on the right track. When you think you’ve got your house completely in order, then you can really start to panic.

Do you ever wonder why churches don't teach what the Bible actually says?

We call ourselves Christians, so why don't we live as Christ lived?

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Faith and a Punch in the Mouth

When some people prepare for a road trip, they spend weeks planning, packing, and making checklists. Other people throw some clothes in a backpack and hit the road without so much as a route mapped out in advance. Based on my own experience, I know which one I’d bet on reaching their destination and having more fun while there, but to each his own.

Of course, some journeys require more planning than others. There’s going to the grocery store and then there’s going off to college. Unfortunately, sometimes we don’t know which is which and sometimes there’s just no time for thorough planning.

The Hebrews spent a lot of time moving from place to place in the wilderness. They spent very little time preparing for each move, but those moves didn’t require or allow extensive planning. Is the cloud moving? Then it’s time to go. But on either side of their wilderness journeys there were two moves that were of a very different sort.

God gave them one day to get ready to leave Egypt and had them prepare by asking their Egyptian neighbors for silver and gold. God told Moses to tell the people, “Go ask your neighbors for money. God is sending one more plague tonight, and Pharaoh’s going to let us go in the morning.” They didn’t have years to save their pennies or to collect survival gear. They didn’t have weeks to pack up for the movers. They had one day.

Which was more than Yeshua gave to his disciples one time:

And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff–no bread, no bag, no money in their belts–but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics. And he said to them, “Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you depart from there. And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” (Mark 6:7-11 ESV)

Just like with the Hebrews many centuries before, Yeshua wanted to teach his disciples to trust in Providence. When God tells you to go, he will also provide the means. When the “what” is certain, but the “how” seems unimaginable, trust God to provide the means or an alternate route.

God provides. To reinforce that point to the Hebrews, he led them to a dead end, trapped between the sea and Pharaoh’s chariots. Failure appeared certain, yet he made another way. God parted the sea and brought it back together again to drown Israel’s enemies.

Once in the Wilderness, God transformed them from bitter, defeated, and dependent slaves into a cohesive nation with a powerful faith in him. He spent forty years preparing them for their next mission, the conquest of the Promised Land.

If you’ve lived long enough, you’ve learned that no amount of planning can ever account for every possible eventuality. Stuff happens. Roads fork. Children. As Mike Tyson says, “Everybody has a plan ’til they get punched in the mouth.”

At some point, you have to move from planning to execution. You have to stop training, contemplating, brainstorming and start storming castles.

You have been traveling around this mountain country long enough. Turn northward. (Deuteronomy 2:3 ESV)

After an entire generation had died in the wilderness, it was finally time to stop moving from one campsite to another. It was time for Israel to turn north toward Canaan and start confronting the peoples whom God said had lost all claim to the land.

They had the Torah and the Ark of the Covenant. They had the priesthood and new, aggressive set of leaders. They were hardened and free, no longer thinking like slaves. The Hebrews were as prepared as they could ever be and nation after nation fell before them.

And then they came to Jericho.

They looked at each other and asked, “Now what?” It seemed that nothing they had experienced had prepared them for the impregnable walls and well trained soldiers of Jericho.

But that wasn’t quite true. It was true that their swords, slings, and arrows were no more effective than feathers against that wall, but all of their weapons and tactics were the least of their tools. They had one weapon that was mightier than all the armies that have ever existed: faith.

Faith brings obedience and obedience brings victory.

When no weapon was of any use, they obeyed God. They marched, blew trumpets, marched some more, and then shouted for all they were worth. Against all reasonable expectations, Jericho’s walls collapsed before the weight of their faith and the city was theirs.

Planning and preparation is important–nothing about any of these stories should lead you to believe that God doesn’t want you to prepare for life or ministry–but planning isn’t everything. Eventually you have to stop circling the mountain and turn northward.

When God told the Hebrews to ask their neighbors for traveling money, when he told them not to fear Pharaoh, when he told them to move from camp to camp, and when he told them to march around Jericho he was preparing them by building their faith in him. Without faith, all of our plans and maps will come to nothing. Whatever we might accomplish in life, wherever we think we have gone, without faith in God and the obedience that inevitably follows it, it will all turn to dust before the end.

On that day, when everyone and everything is getting punched in the mouth, only those things solidly built on a foundation of faith and obedience to God will survive.

God Is Faithful to the Faithful

Have I mentioned that I love chiasms? (Technically, I think it’s supposed to be chiasmi, but you know what? I’m sticking with chiasms.)

I do. I love chiasms and I have another one for you. This one is in Psalm 66, which begins and ends with praise to God and a call to the nations to worship the God of Israel, but is centered on the trials and restoration of Israel.

Hard times come and go for everyone and sometimes it seems like there’s more coming than going. I don’t know what is happening in your life or what trials you have faced or might be facing now or in the future. I won’t pretend that I understand your suffering or that I’ve been there. Chances are very good that I haven’t. Overall, my life has been pretty good. I have been fortunate in having been spared most of the horrible things that many people must endure. I pray that God is merciful to you, that your burdens are as easy as they can be and still accomplish God’s purposes.

“God’s purposes? You mean God is doing this to me?”

Probably, yes. Again, I won’t pretend to know everything. Maybe the things you have endured are strictly from the Adversary and not from God at all, but the weight of Scripture is on God causing your suffering.

Many people are under the false impression that God never does anything bad to anyone or that he only did that in the Old Testament. Unfortunately, there are a large number of examples in both Testaments of God inflicting suffering on both the wicked and the righteous, and, as he told Malachi, “I am YHVH. I change not.”

Psalm 66 says

For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried. You brought us into the net; you laid a crushing burden on our backs; you let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance. (Psalms 66:10-12 ESV)

Clearly God inflicted great hardships on Israel. Enslavement in Egypt, oppression by the Philistines and others, conquest by Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and Rome…all brought on Israel by God. The Scriptures and the ancient sages of both Judaism and Christianity are agreed on that point.

Each person suffers for different reasons at different times. Some are wounded and sick so that God can be glorified through their healing. Others, as the Psalmist points out, are afflicted so that they will be refined. And still others so that their lives may become catalysts for the salvation of many more.

Although all peoples have suffered, because of the Scriptures and the scholarly traditions of Jewish culture, we have a more thorough record of the trials of Israel and the Jews than of any other people. Whether they have suffered more or less than others, I can’t say, but after all that they have endured, it is truly remarkable that they still exist as a people at all.

For almost 2000 years they were homeless sojourners all over the world in lands where they were alternately blessed and cursed by their hosts. They have been subjected to genocide after genocide, purge after purge, and yet they persist long after the Philistines, Hittites, and Midianites have vanished from all but stone and parchment.

Because God is faithful.

God promised Israel–the physical descendants of Jacob, not anything called the Church–that he would always preserve a remnant of them for his own purposes. He made covenants with Jacob, Moses, and Pinchas (among others), that their descendants would always be a people before God, and that all the fires, nets, and burdens of the ages could not eradicate them, but would refine them like silver in a crucible.

As we who have submitted ourselves to Messiah Yeshua are grafted into the tree of Israel, we become joint heirs of the promises and prophecies it contains, both good and bad. Refinement by fire is part of being Israel. If we are to be citizens of the Kingdom, then we must be willing to bear our crosses alongside Yeshua, whatever crosses God might have in store for us.

Remember that Yeshua said it was not the Romans or the Jews who crucified him, but he gave up his life willingly according to God’s will. And we know that, just like the suffering recounted by the Psalmist, his suffering was for the good of the whole world. His shed blood opened the way to our adoption into the House of Israel. Without his suffering we would be lost, and without our own suffering, we would remain impure, incomplete and incapable of fulfilling the role that God has for us to play in his great plan.

The chiastic pattern in Psalm 66 tells us what God wants us to do with our suffering: he wants us to praise him, to trust him, to tell the world about his great deeds and how he is faithful to bring those who trust in him through any trial, no matter how severe.

God’s plan might be impossible for us to see from where we stand, but the essence of faithfulness is trusting in him despite whatever evil happens in the world around us, to us or to others. The faithful are preserved, while those who cling to their sin are burned off like dross and cast aside.

If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly God has listened; he has attended to the voice of my prayer. (Psalms 66:18-19 ESV)

Keep the faith, because God’s purpose is not to destroy his people, but to refine them. Recall what Paul wrote to Timothy:

The saying is trustworthy, for: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful [to the faithful, according to his word]– for he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2:11-13 ESV)

And what Yeshua said to the disciples:

But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. (Matthew 24:13 KJV)

Suffering must come, but those who reject God because of it will in turn be rejected by him. Those who endure, however, will be restored in mercy and rewarded appropriately. Stand tall or fall on your face before the almighty, whichever seems right to your circumstances. You are in good company.