Oh, yes, it's THAT icon...
So, last night we (me, frostymook, the kids) went to see a Messianic speaker. No, it's not because I'm Messianic. Far from it. It's because I feel a need to keep tabs on these folks, to know what they're saying and teaching to certain vulnerable minds, namely one 13-year-old and one 11-year-old vulnerable mind. (For the reasons why, see this post/thread and this post/thread.) Many things that this speaker said were disturbing to varying degrees, but that isn't what I want to talk about today. I could rant about it all -- voluminously -- but I'm choosing not to do so.
There is actually one very good thing about being exposed to this stuff: It makes me think. And that thinking inevitably seems to strengthen my (non-Messianic) faith. This is probably not the affect that said Messianics would like to have on me, but hey! It works for me. I sometimes need reminders to think about this kind of stuff because I tend to become complacent, mired in daily, worldly life and concerns, not thinking about God for days at a time. So, going to these Messianic things is like a much-needed kick to the head, and in that sense attending them is a very good thing.
So, last night before falling asleep and this morning on the way to work and through the morning as I worked on mundane Accounting Stuff, I've been pondering. So, I thought I'd write down the pondering, for posterity's sake if nothing else.
The speaker last night painted a word picture that was quite effective in illustrating what these people believe in terms of the relationship between the Mosaic Law and the grace of God and how their interpretation is different from what your average garden-variety conservative Christian believes concerning those things. He compared it to a farmer working a field with a horse-powered plow, as follows:
In the case of a Torah-observant Christian (Meaning, a Christian who follows or at least attempts to follow all of the laws contained in the Pentateuch, including the dietary laws and observing the Jewish sabbath and festivals), the farmer is the Christian, the plow is the Law, and the horse is God's grace, all working in harmony and efficiently plowing the field. In other words, with the law and grace working together, the Torah-observant Christian gets the maximum amount of Christian work done. The most bang for his buck, so to speak.
In the case of a legalistic person such as an Orthodox, non-Messianic Jew, there is no horse (meaning, no grace) and one must toil at pushing the heavy plow under one's own power. Which, of course, isn't very effective.
In the case of a non-Torah observant Christian, there is no plow. You just have the horse and, again, you get no work done. You just have fun riding the horse around, I guess. *rolls eyes* I, of course, know of many non-Torah-observant Christians who have done and/or continue to do LOTS of very effective Christian work. But whatever...Er, I said I wasn't going to rant, didn't I? :)
In addition, the overall point of his 1.5-hour presentation (as has been the overall point of just about ALL of the materials I've read/viewed that were put out by these people) seemed to be that, if you are a "real, saved Christian," then you will feel a compelling need to uphold all of the Mosaic Law because it has been written on your heart by the Holy Spirit. The logical reverse of that contention (although he, like the rest of the people who believe this stuff, didn't expressly say this, lest they bring wrath down upon their heads), is of course that if you don't feel that need to uphold all of the law, then you must not be a real, saved Christian. Or at the very least such a lack of compulsion must (logically, according to their own argument) mean that you haven't "done your homework" as a Christian, that you're being perhaps willfully disobedient to God, that you've been misled by evil, Sunday-worshipping, anti-Semitic, Catholic-tainted mainstream Protestant theology (because they ALWAYS talk about Catholicism in their presentations), that you aren't reading your Bible closely enough or often enough or that you're not interpreting it in the "right" way.
I have several huge problems with this contention and its always-unspoken-but-nevertheless-unavoidable logical reverse. But, like I said, I'm not going to rant about it here... Rather, I'm going to expound on how I, personally, see the Law, from both a cultural/historical perspective and a spiritual/theological perspective. Because, like I said, the point of this thinking is not to rail against this fringe movement in the already-fringe apostolic/pentecostal Christianity so much as to solidify and expand my own relationship with the Lord which, as last night's speaker quite rightly pointed out, is the most valuable, most important, and, indeed, the only eternal thing that I possess.
So, let's go back in time a bit. The Exodus and the traditional writing-down of the Pentatech is estimated by most Biblical-scholar-types to have happened in the 1200s BC. At that time, Egypt was the most powerful civilization in the area, as it had been for 3,000 years before that. Other powers were Hatti in modern Turkey, Babylon, Crete, and the city-states of what had been and would again become Assyria. The latter had historically been vassals of Egypt, had rebelled about 25 years earlier, while Egypt was in the throes of a disastrous brush with monotheism enforced by then-pharoah Ahkenaton, and had then been bloodily reconquered by a restored-to-pantheism Egypt. The Syrian city-states were thus in tatters, politically and socially.
It is into that tattered land -- full of warring, bloodthirsty tribes who worshipped the equally bloodthirsty god Ba'al/Moloch, who demanded infant sacrifice -- that the Hebrews wandered in the wake of the Exodus. That was the Promised Land, but it would seem that the Hebrews had little chance of conquering it, much less of holding it. But conquer and hold it they did. For a while, at least.
In this case, I believe it was the Law, given to them by God, that held the Hebrews together and that God, of course, knew that this would be so. The Law and strict obedience to it gave the Hebrews a cohesive identity that they otherwise lacked, outside of worshipping their God who was radically different from the gods that other people of the time worshipped. And it's interesting to note that many of the Hebrew's laws are directly contradictory to the beliefs and practices of the surrounding tribes. For instance:
1) In addition to human/infant sacrifice, sanctified homosexual sex, non-marital/adulterous heterosexual sex, and incestuous sex were all a part of the various worship/fertility rites of these peoples. All of these were expressly forbidden to the post-Exodus Hebrews, often upon pain of death.
2) Witchcraft, astrology, fortune-telling, and sorcery were openly practiced and, indeed, were considered holy by these surrounding tribes. Again, this was expressly forbidden to the Hebrews, upon pain of death.
3) All of the surrounding civilizations embodied their gods in physical objects. In Egypt, for instance, a statue of Amon was not just a statue of Amon. It was Amon, to be dressed and fed and paraded about as if it itself was the god. In the Egyptian belief system, any image of a god/goddess was imbued with the spirit of that deity; it was that deity. So guess what's expressly forbidden in Hebrew law? Yup, stone idols and graven images.
4) In the surrounding cultures, a raped woman had no legal recourse and would not subsequently be touched by any man as a marriage prospect. She became a non-person, reviled. Thus, she was doomed to a life of marginal existence at best, literally scavenging to survive. Hebrew law, on the other hand, provides legal recourse for a raped woman. Namely, her rapist has to marry and provide for her for the rest of his life. To our modern sensibilities, this is repulsive and unfeminist. To a woman of the time, however, this was both revolutionary and extremely woman-friendly. And, again, completely opposite to the practices of the cultures that surrounded the Hebrews in what had been and would again be Assyria.
I could go on, but I think that's enough. Suffice it to say that I think that the law was deliberately constructed by God in such a way as to separate the Hebrews from the people around them, thus indelibly marking them as the chosen of God, the real God. This is of course not the only reason the law exists, but in a wordly, secular, cultural/historical sense, it accomplished God's purpose spectacularly (and, of course, unsurprisingly) well. It gave the Hebrews a cultural identity and that, in turn, gave them the conviction necessary to face and eventually conquer their war-torn but still far more powerful and numerous heathen neighbors. Until, of course, they irritated the neighboring Babylonians enough to actually notice them and do something about them. :)
But God is clever. The purpose of the law has a second (and far more important) aspect. The law convicts. It is impossible for a normal human being to uphold it, to meet all of God's expectations. Critics/skeptics of Christianity will automatically leap on and try to rip apart this aspect of the law. They'll say something like, "How can a loving God create and then demand that people follow a set of laws that are intrinsically impossible to uphold? That's not fair! You'll go to hell for something you can't avoid doing! God sucks!" But:
1) They're wrong because no one goes to hell for breaking any of the laws
2) They're missing the entire point.
Firstly, there is only one way to get to hell, and that is denying God in the body of His son, denying the free "Get out of hell" ticket that God offers to us all and that we all must individually choose whether or not to accept. But beyond that, for a Christian, the purpose of the law is to understand, deeply and spiritually, that from which Christ has saved us. We are no longer required to, for instance, make ritual sacrifices because Jesus, by His death, made all sacrifices for all time for all who believe on Him.
Secondly, the point that these critics are missing is that, yes, the old law is impossible to uphold...but the old law has been fulfilled. In its place is Jesus and the grace of God, which allow us to be saved by complying with one very simple request, despite the fact that we cannot uphold the law. Grace, after all, is defined as "undeserved mercy."
About that "fulfilled" thing... The Messianics seem to have become rather fixated on Matthew 5:17-18. ("Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.") They assert that this passage means that Jesus didn't do away with ("destroy") the Mosaic Law and so that means that it is still in full effect. But what it really says -- and this is blatantly obvious if you read the whole thing -- is that Jesus came to fulfill the law, in the sense of fulfilling or paying off a debt. Until Jesus came, following the law was the only way for humans to work toward paying off their debt to God. But when you pay off a debt (or, in this case, when someone else pays it off for you), it is paid off forever. No one can ever force you to pay more. In other words, Jesus came and was sacrificed in order to fulfill forever and in full the debt that mankind had owed to God since the Fall. He says, plainly, in verse 18 up there, that the law could not be changed until it was fulfilled. Jesus fulfilled the old law, as He said, and a new covenant was made with God. That covenant is still in force, for all who believe in Jesus as Lord, Savior, and Son of God, today. That covenant is that which is outlined in the New Testament, mostly by Jesus Himself during His lifetime and ministry, not the Pentateuch.
And there is yet another aspect of the Mosaic Law: It makes one realize that, by themselves and through their own efforts, no matter how strict and laborious, one cannot attain salvation by oneself because, to paraphrase Romans, we all fall far short of God's expectations. So the only way to be saved is not by following laws, not by "being good," but to reach out to Him and accept that which He freely offers all of us. So much easier than obsessing over a bunch of laws, eh?
In other news, George has left the building. I thought she had left over the weekend because she wasn't in the bathroom, but just today I found her trying to hide in a crack between the baseboard and the wall in the hallway. The crack was a bit small for her, so she was pretty visible, and I feared that someone would kill her. Plus, she's better off outside. Wolf spiders really aren't meant to be indoors. So, I captured her in my paper clip dispenser again, and put her outside. There is a small, lovely, shady, arbor-covered rock garden in the front of my building, with small fountains for water and lots of ivy and ground cover, so I put her up there, amongst the ground cover, where she promptly took off like a shot. :) I'm sure she will be happy and healthy there, although I'll miss seeing her.
And I think she is gravid, as her abdomen was a bit bigger than it was last time I saw her. She will probably be creating her egg sac in just a little while, which she will carry around with her until the babies hatch. The babies will then hitch a ride on her back for a few days before dispersing. Too bad I won't be able to appropriate a couple of her babies, but it's probably better this way. I don't have anything to feed spiderlings that small, anyway...
There is actually one very good thing about being exposed to this stuff: It makes me think. And that thinking inevitably seems to strengthen my (non-Messianic) faith. This is probably not the affect that said Messianics would like to have on me, but hey! It works for me. I sometimes need reminders to think about this kind of stuff because I tend to become complacent, mired in daily, worldly life and concerns, not thinking about God for days at a time. So, going to these Messianic things is like a much-needed kick to the head, and in that sense attending them is a very good thing.
So, last night before falling asleep and this morning on the way to work and through the morning as I worked on mundane Accounting Stuff, I've been pondering. So, I thought I'd write down the pondering, for posterity's sake if nothing else.
The speaker last night painted a word picture that was quite effective in illustrating what these people believe in terms of the relationship between the Mosaic Law and the grace of God and how their interpretation is different from what your average garden-variety conservative Christian believes concerning those things. He compared it to a farmer working a field with a horse-powered plow, as follows:
In the case of a Torah-observant Christian (Meaning, a Christian who follows or at least attempts to follow all of the laws contained in the Pentateuch, including the dietary laws and observing the Jewish sabbath and festivals), the farmer is the Christian, the plow is the Law, and the horse is God's grace, all working in harmony and efficiently plowing the field. In other words, with the law and grace working together, the Torah-observant Christian gets the maximum amount of Christian work done. The most bang for his buck, so to speak.
In the case of a legalistic person such as an Orthodox, non-Messianic Jew, there is no horse (meaning, no grace) and one must toil at pushing the heavy plow under one's own power. Which, of course, isn't very effective.
In the case of a non-Torah observant Christian, there is no plow. You just have the horse and, again, you get no work done. You just have fun riding the horse around, I guess. *rolls eyes* I, of course, know of many non-Torah-observant Christians who have done and/or continue to do LOTS of very effective Christian work. But whatever...Er, I said I wasn't going to rant, didn't I? :)
In addition, the overall point of his 1.5-hour presentation (as has been the overall point of just about ALL of the materials I've read/viewed that were put out by these people) seemed to be that, if you are a "real, saved Christian," then you will feel a compelling need to uphold all of the Mosaic Law because it has been written on your heart by the Holy Spirit. The logical reverse of that contention (although he, like the rest of the people who believe this stuff, didn't expressly say this, lest they bring wrath down upon their heads), is of course that if you don't feel that need to uphold all of the law, then you must not be a real, saved Christian. Or at the very least such a lack of compulsion must (logically, according to their own argument) mean that you haven't "done your homework" as a Christian, that you're being perhaps willfully disobedient to God, that you've been misled by evil, Sunday-worshipping, anti-Semitic, Catholic-tainted mainstream Protestant theology (because they ALWAYS talk about Catholicism in their presentations), that you aren't reading your Bible closely enough or often enough or that you're not interpreting it in the "right" way.
I have several huge problems with this contention and its always-unspoken-but-nevertheless-unavoidable logical reverse. But, like I said, I'm not going to rant about it here... Rather, I'm going to expound on how I, personally, see the Law, from both a cultural/historical perspective and a spiritual/theological perspective. Because, like I said, the point of this thinking is not to rail against this fringe movement in the already-fringe apostolic/pentecostal Christianity so much as to solidify and expand my own relationship with the Lord which, as last night's speaker quite rightly pointed out, is the most valuable, most important, and, indeed, the only eternal thing that I possess.
So, let's go back in time a bit. The Exodus and the traditional writing-down of the Pentatech is estimated by most Biblical-scholar-types to have happened in the 1200s BC. At that time, Egypt was the most powerful civilization in the area, as it had been for 3,000 years before that. Other powers were Hatti in modern Turkey, Babylon, Crete, and the city-states of what had been and would again become Assyria. The latter had historically been vassals of Egypt, had rebelled about 25 years earlier, while Egypt was in the throes of a disastrous brush with monotheism enforced by then-pharoah Ahkenaton, and had then been bloodily reconquered by a restored-to-pantheism Egypt. The Syrian city-states were thus in tatters, politically and socially.
It is into that tattered land -- full of warring, bloodthirsty tribes who worshipped the equally bloodthirsty god Ba'al/Moloch, who demanded infant sacrifice -- that the Hebrews wandered in the wake of the Exodus. That was the Promised Land, but it would seem that the Hebrews had little chance of conquering it, much less of holding it. But conquer and hold it they did. For a while, at least.
In this case, I believe it was the Law, given to them by God, that held the Hebrews together and that God, of course, knew that this would be so. The Law and strict obedience to it gave the Hebrews a cohesive identity that they otherwise lacked, outside of worshipping their God who was radically different from the gods that other people of the time worshipped. And it's interesting to note that many of the Hebrew's laws are directly contradictory to the beliefs and practices of the surrounding tribes. For instance:
1) In addition to human/infant sacrifice, sanctified homosexual sex, non-marital/adulterous heterosexual sex, and incestuous sex were all a part of the various worship/fertility rites of these peoples. All of these were expressly forbidden to the post-Exodus Hebrews, often upon pain of death.
2) Witchcraft, astrology, fortune-telling, and sorcery were openly practiced and, indeed, were considered holy by these surrounding tribes. Again, this was expressly forbidden to the Hebrews, upon pain of death.
3) All of the surrounding civilizations embodied their gods in physical objects. In Egypt, for instance, a statue of Amon was not just a statue of Amon. It was Amon, to be dressed and fed and paraded about as if it itself was the god. In the Egyptian belief system, any image of a god/goddess was imbued with the spirit of that deity; it was that deity. So guess what's expressly forbidden in Hebrew law? Yup, stone idols and graven images.
4) In the surrounding cultures, a raped woman had no legal recourse and would not subsequently be touched by any man as a marriage prospect. She became a non-person, reviled. Thus, she was doomed to a life of marginal existence at best, literally scavenging to survive. Hebrew law, on the other hand, provides legal recourse for a raped woman. Namely, her rapist has to marry and provide for her for the rest of his life. To our modern sensibilities, this is repulsive and unfeminist. To a woman of the time, however, this was both revolutionary and extremely woman-friendly. And, again, completely opposite to the practices of the cultures that surrounded the Hebrews in what had been and would again be Assyria.
I could go on, but I think that's enough. Suffice it to say that I think that the law was deliberately constructed by God in such a way as to separate the Hebrews from the people around them, thus indelibly marking them as the chosen of God, the real God. This is of course not the only reason the law exists, but in a wordly, secular, cultural/historical sense, it accomplished God's purpose spectacularly (and, of course, unsurprisingly) well. It gave the Hebrews a cultural identity and that, in turn, gave them the conviction necessary to face and eventually conquer their war-torn but still far more powerful and numerous heathen neighbors. Until, of course, they irritated the neighboring Babylonians enough to actually notice them and do something about them. :)
But God is clever. The purpose of the law has a second (and far more important) aspect. The law convicts. It is impossible for a normal human being to uphold it, to meet all of God's expectations. Critics/skeptics of Christianity will automatically leap on and try to rip apart this aspect of the law. They'll say something like, "How can a loving God create and then demand that people follow a set of laws that are intrinsically impossible to uphold? That's not fair! You'll go to hell for something you can't avoid doing! God sucks!" But:
1) They're wrong because no one goes to hell for breaking any of the laws
2) They're missing the entire point.
Firstly, there is only one way to get to hell, and that is denying God in the body of His son, denying the free "Get out of hell" ticket that God offers to us all and that we all must individually choose whether or not to accept. But beyond that, for a Christian, the purpose of the law is to understand, deeply and spiritually, that from which Christ has saved us. We are no longer required to, for instance, make ritual sacrifices because Jesus, by His death, made all sacrifices for all time for all who believe on Him.
Secondly, the point that these critics are missing is that, yes, the old law is impossible to uphold...but the old law has been fulfilled. In its place is Jesus and the grace of God, which allow us to be saved by complying with one very simple request, despite the fact that we cannot uphold the law. Grace, after all, is defined as "undeserved mercy."
About that "fulfilled" thing... The Messianics seem to have become rather fixated on Matthew 5:17-18. ("Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.") They assert that this passage means that Jesus didn't do away with ("destroy") the Mosaic Law and so that means that it is still in full effect. But what it really says -- and this is blatantly obvious if you read the whole thing -- is that Jesus came to fulfill the law, in the sense of fulfilling or paying off a debt. Until Jesus came, following the law was the only way for humans to work toward paying off their debt to God. But when you pay off a debt (or, in this case, when someone else pays it off for you), it is paid off forever. No one can ever force you to pay more. In other words, Jesus came and was sacrificed in order to fulfill forever and in full the debt that mankind had owed to God since the Fall. He says, plainly, in verse 18 up there, that the law could not be changed until it was fulfilled. Jesus fulfilled the old law, as He said, and a new covenant was made with God. That covenant is still in force, for all who believe in Jesus as Lord, Savior, and Son of God, today. That covenant is that which is outlined in the New Testament, mostly by Jesus Himself during His lifetime and ministry, not the Pentateuch.
And there is yet another aspect of the Mosaic Law: It makes one realize that, by themselves and through their own efforts, no matter how strict and laborious, one cannot attain salvation by oneself because, to paraphrase Romans, we all fall far short of God's expectations. So the only way to be saved is not by following laws, not by "being good," but to reach out to Him and accept that which He freely offers all of us. So much easier than obsessing over a bunch of laws, eh?
In other news, George has left the building. I thought she had left over the weekend because she wasn't in the bathroom, but just today I found her trying to hide in a crack between the baseboard and the wall in the hallway. The crack was a bit small for her, so she was pretty visible, and I feared that someone would kill her. Plus, she's better off outside. Wolf spiders really aren't meant to be indoors. So, I captured her in my paper clip dispenser again, and put her outside. There is a small, lovely, shady, arbor-covered rock garden in the front of my building, with small fountains for water and lots of ivy and ground cover, so I put her up there, amongst the ground cover, where she promptly took off like a shot. :) I'm sure she will be happy and healthy there, although I'll miss seeing her.
And I think she is gravid, as her abdomen was a bit bigger than it was last time I saw her. She will probably be creating her egg sac in just a little while, which she will carry around with her until the babies hatch. The babies will then hitch a ride on her back for a few days before dispersing. Too bad I won't be able to appropriate a couple of her babies, but it's probably better this way. I don't have anything to feed spiderlings that small, anyway...