Indecision

False Teaching and Conspiracy Theories – The Perfect Bedfellows

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Many have died, and until a solution is found on a global scale to deal with this pandemic, many more deaths are bound to be recorded. There is uncertainty. Jobs have been lost; incomes devastated; money is harder to come by. Families are going hungry, and a passenger sitting next to you in trotro who dares to cough receives a very suspicious glare. These are the days of Covid-19. The question on almost everybody’s mind is “why Covid-19”? Why now? Why this generation? Maybe even “why me?”, as you ponder it’s impact on you personally and/or your family. It is only human to seek answers, to seek for explanations and most importantly, to feel in control of your own destiny in times of uncertainty.

Therefore, it is only human to seek to tap into these fears to portray oneself as the one with answers, the one who knows the secrets of the times. And no such people are experts at this than religious folks. Which is why our so-called “prophets”, “men of God”, “bishops” and “archbishops” are falling over each other to promote one theory or the other about the Covid-19 pandemic and what is driving it. Not only does this posturing betray their ignorance of history of the world in general and that of the faith they claim to be representatives of, but it exposes them for who they are – men deluded by their desire for power and control than by anything else. And so, we will look at some of the typical tactics adopted by power-hungry religious leaders as compared to leaders seeking to be faithful to Jesus Christ.

But before we talk about these tactics, let’s discern the 1 motivation behind these tactics.

Preachers of Comfort, Not Suffering

Throughout the history of Christianity, one of the hallmarks of false teaching has been the tendency to preach messages that make Christians seem invincible to suffering, especially if they exhibit the right levels of something religious – be it “faith” or “confession”, repentance, church attendance, giving, prayer etc. Their focus is on the individual’s own self-preservation and advancement, instead of what Jesus clearly laid down for us with his own life – suffering for one another’s advancement.

 

Instead of what Peter said – “because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps.” (1 Peter 2:21), their preaching can be summed up as “Christ suffered for you, so that if you exercise the right level of religiosity, you will not suffer”.

 

However if Jesus left us example that we should “follow in his steps”, then caring for one another – enduring some suffering for the sake of not just a fellow Christian but all of humanity – just as God cared for and therefore died for us is at the center of what it means to be a Christian.

 

This denial of suffering (not just any kind of suffering but self-sacrifice for one another) is at the heart of almost every form of heresy that the church has known for its 2000-year history. This motivation is what then informs the following tactics deployed by such confused leaders.

Make Their Members Believe this is Unprecedented

The first thing such confused leaders engage in is to make Christians believe that such epidemics and pandemics have never happened before. They do this by pretending that Christianity only began when they (or their favorite past Christian leader) began practicing Christianity. This is easy for them to do, because 99% of the time even before this pandemic, they never preached about church history and the fact that Christianity is 2000 years old, blissfully ignoring the fact their church today is just a blip on the map of the Christian spectrum.

 

But if they were not so ignorant of history, they would know that the early Church faced its fair share of pandemics, most popular of which was named after a leader of the church in the 3rd century – Cyprian of Carthage. No, Cyprian didn’t cause the pandemic, neither did he curse the Roman empire with it. The Plague of Cyprian is named after him because he lived through it and documented it. But more significantly, his leadership during this period when the Roman empire was crumbling makes naming it after him even more appropriate. To that leadership, we will return later.

 

Many more epidemics and pandemics have followed the church beyond Cyprian’s plague, such as the Bubonic Plague of the 16th century, right in the middle of the Protestant Reformation, and yet the church continues to this day.

 

But if that pandemic was too far in history for today’s “men of God” to be aware of, I would have at least expected them to be aware and learn from the most recent one in world history – the Spanish Flu of 1918. But alas, if Christianity began with the founding of the churches of these “bishops” and “men of God”, perhaps their ignorance can be excused.

Divert Attention from their Failed Teaching

Having preached comfort for so long, any self-aware follower of such preachers would immediately ask questions about what these preachers have been preaching. Why has the “devourer” devoured my job, when I expected God to protect my job because I have been paying my tithes religiously? Why has my father (or another beloved family member) died from Covid-19 or it’s complications, when I exercised faith and prayed profusely for healing? Doesn’t God “know his own” anymore? Why has God allowed this Covid-19 to bring my business to its knees, such that I can’t even feed my family 3 square meals a day?

 

In difficult times like these, preachers of comfort need a means to divert the attention of their followers from these questions, and so are quick to fall for the next most comforting thing – conspiracy theories and “end of days” prophecies. Cue the likes of Chris Oyakhilome and his love affair with 5G conspiracy theories or American evangelicals and their beloved “rapture” teachings fused with biblical misinterpretations around “666 and the mark of the beast” as exemplified by people like John Hagee.

 

Such preachers make you think that Christians have always been waiting for some beast to dish out some form of “666” mark, ignoring to tell their followers that this teaching misreading of the book of Revelation only began with the Plymouth Brethren in the 19th century, especially during World War I. Please note, for 1800 years of Christianity, most Christians didn’t give a hoot about an “Antichrist” or “the beast” or 666 and a coming end of age. Most Christians awaited Jesus’ second coming, and that was the end of the matter.

 

But when comfort Christianity fails, diversions are needed to keep church members from devouring their leadership, and so a new (or old) enemy will always be found. And most of the gullible flock are ever desirous to believe, instead of asking deep questions. After all, asking questions is equal to not having faith in these circles of Christianity.

 

Preserve the System, at the Cost of the People

And so, we come to one of the most glaring aspects of false teaching – a need to “keep the system going”, instead of pausing for reflection about the effects the pandemic is having on people. Such preachers care more about the opening of church for “normal service” than they care about the lives of people. They will present themselves as the people with “faith” who are not allowing a pandemic to tell them how to “worship their God”, and will label the wisdom of scientists as evil, in so far as it prevents their “system” from going on as usual.

 

And it is here that we look to the leadership of Cyprian of Carthage. When the Plague of Cyprian hit the Roman empires, the rich were abandoning the cities in their droves to their comfortable country homes, leaving the poor to suffer. And yet Cyprian the bishop encouraged Christians to stand their ground and rather care for the sick and dying. Whiles some of the Christians inevitably succumbed to the disease and died in the process, some also survived and became important in the care for the poor and sick in this pandemic. By this single act of leadership alone, Christianity grew massively after the pandemic subsided simply because the church, led by Cyprian and other such leaders, focused on meeting the actual needs of those affected by the pandemic, not blame games and diversionary tactics.

 

It is this kind of leadership that is required of our teachers in these times. Yes, today we have science, showing us how to avoid the coronavirus as well as ways to stop it’s spread, and we should heed that advice. But beyond that, livelihoods have been destroyed, businesses have collapsed, children are going hungry, and poverty is on the rise as a result of Covid-19. And this is happening to both churchgoers and non-churchgoers alike. We know better not to be in close contact with people without the proper precautions, but there’s so much more that can be done to help whiles the medical people do their bit.

What we Don’t Need

What we don’t need are sermons castigating people for lower church attendance and giving.

What we don’t need are 5G lies and deceit, or nonsense about “mark of the beast via vaccines”.

What we don’t need are pontifications about a coming “New World Order” or a coming “rapture”.

What we need are leaders who will remind us of that is important – what historic, faithful, and true Christianity has always focused on – the simple commands of Jesus Christ, especially his command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 22:37-20). We need leaders who will rally us around working to mitigate the impact of this pandemic on the lives of actual church members, and then beyond that, our neighbors in the public square.

In Ghana, the Covid-19 Private Sector Fund has been able to put together money to build an infectious diseases center. That is worth commending, but those are the kinds of initiatives that I can expect of private sector businessmen. Given the amounts of money that sit in the bank accounts of some of our church denominations, Ghanaian churches could easily have done this and more, especially if they put their heads together.

But I’m less worried about what we do at the national scale than I am what we do at the local church communities.

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’” (Matt 25:35-36).

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels refuse to feed people because they didn’t “go to the synagogue or temple to worship on a Sabbath”?

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels say, “you are poor because you refused to pay tithes”?

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels say, “you lost your job because you didn’t have faith”?

Can our church leaders spend less time guilting us on coming to church and spend more time being obedient to Jesus – caring for actual real needs? Can we create structures that enable us to easily detect when people are “suffering in silence” in this pandemic?

Let us remember that we are not going to be judged by how well we knew 666, or how we quickly deciphered a New World Order via so called 5G or when “rapture” and “tribulation”. We will be judged by our deeds of love for fellow human beings, and that is the end of the matter.

The Ghanaian God vs Jesus as God

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In SimplyChrist we say that we are a Jesus-centered movement. Let us be upfront by saying that we are not the only Jesus-centered movement, church or organization in Ghana. But saying that we are “Jesus-centered” can seem redundant, as many Ghanaian Christians assume that they are centred on Jesus. In addition, when we say “the Ghanaian God” we don’t mean that this is how every Ghanaian – not to talk of every Christian Ghanaian – thinks of God. We are simply saying this is the dominant way that MOST Ghanaians who are Christians think about God. So, let us help people understand what we mean by Jesus-centered, and why the difference is important.

What Did Jesus Come to Do?
It starts with answering this question well. Now the default answer you will get from many Christians in Ghana is that “Jesus came to die to save us from our sins”. Whiles we at SimplyChrist do not dispute that forgiveness of sins is one of the benefits of Jesus’s coming, we don’t think that says all there is to say about why Jesus took on flesh and dwelt amongst men – what the historic orthodox Christianity calls “the incarnation”. So, in pitting what we believe to be the “Ghanaian conception of God” with Jesus, who is God in the flesh, I’ll like this comparison to be made around 1 provocative statement by an important thinker of our time. “Jesus did not come to change God's mind about humanity. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God” – Father Richard Rohr. We do this comparison by asking 4 questions. There are more, but there’s only so much we can cover here.

What is the Nature of God?
What Jesus shows us – God is love. Not God is loving, or God is love and … (put in anything you want here). Jesus shows that at the core of what God is, God is eternal love. Which is why even though the Trinity is never mentioned in the Bible, the only way that the leaders of the church could make sense of what the early disciples taught and wrote about God AFTER JESUS CAME (not before, but after) was to speak of God as subsisting in 3 persons, forever giving and sharing love with each other and yet existing as one. Almost everything about this comparison we are making here is hinged on understanding the depth of how different this way of thinking about God is. No religion before or after has centred its understanding of God in this way. Not even Judaism, the precursor to Christianity. Note, I didn’t start by saying “God is Trinity”. I said, “God is love”. It is the latter that explains the former.

What the Ghanaian God shows us – The Ghanaian God is a single, all-powerful being. Here the starting point is about how powerful and unique this god is over everything in the world.
Because the starting point is “power”, the God that results becomes increasingly unlike Jesus the more you pay attention, something that you will realize as we go along. Note that this is also the same view that most Hebrews of the Old Testament had about Yahweh, which is why the Old Testament is written the way it is. And while many of the nations that surrounded the Hebrew people believed in more than one god, they also tended to speak of their gods in the same “power” language. They just had more gods, whiles the Hebrew people largely believed in only one god. But the differences between their conceptions are very few. Now whiles Jesus does reveal God to be all-powerful, he dwells more on the love of God than on his power. It will become evident why he dwells less on God’s power as we go along.

Who are We Humans?
What Jesus shows us – The reason why the incarnation is so critical to understanding Jesus becomes evident at this point. God entered this world as a fully human being not just because he needed to die (which is the default answer I get when I talk to many Christians), but because the only way God can show us who we really are meant to be is to become one of us. All humans (no exceptions by gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, social class, spirituality etc) are created as image-bearers – that is, we are God’s representatives on this earth, caring for it in the same loving way that Father, Son and Holy Spirit care for each other. We are not powerless robots whom God remotely controls, but neither are we free to come up with our own purpose of existence. And so, God becomes human to show us what he is like – a God defined by love, and what we are to be like – a people defined by love.

When we are acting in love towards one another and creation, we are allowing the Holy Spirit (the 3 rd person of the Trinity) to lead us according to the Model Human (Jesus the 2 nd person of the Trinity) to the pleasure of the Father (the 1 st person of the Trinity). Without this understanding of our human identity, we become slaves to sin and death. What the Ghanaian God shows us – The Ghanaian God reveals to us that humans are simply spiritual beings with a human body. We are here to seek the best opportunities for the advancement of our individual selves, and God is there to help us to achieve those self- made goals. These goals may be couched religiously – we need to build God a new house (despite the obvious fact that he doesn’t live in houses); or they may be social in nature – without God, my marriage will be a failure. To the Ghanaian God, humans define their purpose, and then find a God that will support that agenda (or a “powerful” preacher who says he knows how to get God to support that agenda). Our spiritual goal then is to seek a level of “spiritual holiness/faith/righteousness/you name it” that will enable us to get God to easily do what we want. What are the Limits of God’s Care?

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Jesus of the Gospels 2: His Parables

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One of the most recognizable and yet probably most misunderstood tools of Jesus Christ’s ministry was his use of parables. These were stories he told as he went from town to town, and some of them he definitely told more than once as we mentioned in the previous post on the life of a typical prophet of his day.

The fact that most of these parables had some moral underpinning seemed to have led people to simply label Jesus a “universal teacher” of timeless truths. Much as we like to find nice teaching themes from these parables for our Sunday sermons, we may be surprised that a large chunk of the parable (but not all of them) were meant not as stories of morality, but rather stories of judgment on Israel for its failure to be the light onto the world that Yawheh had called it to be, and also a means to tell Israel that he now was the means of the fulfillment of that responsibility.

Israel As a Light Onto The World

One of the callings that Israel knew and believed of itself was that God had called it to be the light onto the world. This is captured mainly by the prophet Isaiah, and was very dominant in the mindset of Jews at the time of Jesus

“Yea, He saith, ‘It is too light a thing for you to be My servant, to establish the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the scions of Israel, and I shall submit you as a light unto the nations, to be My salvation until the end of the earth’ (Isaiah, 49:6)

“I the LORD have called unto you in righteousness, and have taken hold of your hand, and submitted you as the people’s covenant, as a light unto the nations” (Isaiah, 42:6)

“And unto your light, nations shall walk, and kings unto the brightness of your rising” (Isaiah, 60:3)

This is clearly the context within which Jesus was speaking in Mt 5:14-16. Jesus Christ was not referring to the people as individuals standing before him when he spoke in the famous “Sermon on the Mount” about their light not shining for the world to see. He was talking to them as a corporate, as Israel. Our tendency to read everything with individualistic eyes (and the lack of a different word for plural “you” in English) means we’ve taken Jesus wrongly to mean Kofi as an individual is supposed to be the light of the world. But alas, the man had bigger fish to fry.

Therefore it was in Israel that salvation to the world was to be found (Jn 4:22). It was in them that the world’s hope rested. It was in them that the nations may see light. But here was a people darkened rather, having returned from exile with the prophecies of Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah etc constantly replaying in their heads about how God was going to re-establish his kingdom and judge all their enemies, yet continuously living under the yoke of the Roman empire’s hardship. Coupled with extreme economic situations, injustice and gross inequality reigned between the rich and the poor. As for the temple and its priest, there wasn’t much to be said for a priesthood which was more interested in tithing and taxing the people, than in ways of ensuring justice and mercy among God’s own people (hmm, doesn’t this sound familiar?). The fact that the high priest was appointed via politicking and bribery and not from the descendants of Aaron anymore was even more depressing. In the midst of all this were those who believed God will save Israel if the “righteous ones” bunched together and fought the enemy by the sword, and so there was a lot of tension, banditry and violence underneath the supposed calm of the day.

Enter Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ enters the fray, declaring that indeed the kingdom of God that was prophesied by the prophets has indeed arrived, but in a shape and form that was different from what they expected. He declared that it had arrived in and through him i.e. he was their Messiah, and yet he sought to expand the beneficiaries of that kingdom to include all those that society had cast away in addition e.g. those considered “sinners” like the gentiles (Mt 7:25-30) and even their Roman centurions that suppress Israel (Lk 7:1-10), the sick, tax collectors (Zacchaeus in Lk 19:1-10) , those considered poor and enslaved by poverty (Mt 18:21-35) and so on. Alongside declaring that the kingdom of God had come, he also declared that Israel had failed in its job to be the light to the world (and in whom salvation should have been found) and therefore he himself was taking up the vocation of Israel.

But he couldn’t tell this bitter truth to the Israelites straight in the face, or else his ministry would not have even lasted the 3 years that it did before he’d have gotten stoned or arrested somehow. So he had to employ parables as a means of disguising his message, so that it’s only upon further reflection would you have understood what he actually meant, by which time he’d probably moved to the next town. They were his way of planting unknown seeds in the mind of the Jewish people, until he is vindicated and those who had heard him see the wisdom and truth of it. And this is why he ended some of his sayings (not only parables) with “He who has an ear, let him hear” and why he says to his disciples

“The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them … This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand” (Mt 13:11-13)

Oh this subversive king of ours.

To Some Parables

Note that most of such “subversive” parables began with “the kingdom of God/heaven is like …” . This should tell us that he was talking about something specific, not giving nice stories of “motivational speaking” or moralistic teaching.

So let’s look at some of the parables and see what we will find.

The Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Yeast (Mt 13:31-35; Mk 4:30-32; Lk 3:18-21)

Jesus likens his kingdom to that of a mustard seed. Though it is small, it will grow and spread across the world, and all men and women will benefit from it (signified by birds perching on its branches). Again he likens it to the yeast, where only a small amount is able to work itself into the dough unnoticed, until it takes over. In the above, Christ is showing how his kingdom will slowly but surely spread through Israel and across the world, and become a light to the world that Israel had failed to achieve.

The Parable of the Lost Son (aka the Prodigal Son) (Lk 15:11-32)

This is one of the most popular parables in Christendom, typically used to show how the God loves us in that even in our sins he’s waiting to receive us into his kingdom. Well that is all nice and good, and an appropriate use of the parable. However, I suggest to you that that’s not what the Jews would have heard Jesus talking about. Since the Reformation, our eyes have been accustomed to only see the gospel to be about how God forgives us of our sins so we can go to heaven, but that’s only half the pie (and not derived from a Jewish worldview but from a Gentile one). Could it be then that in this parable, the elder son is Israel, and the younger son is the Gentiles, and that Jesus Christ is talking about how God was willing to make the Gentiles acceptable in his kingdom so that both Jews and Gentiles may benefit from the promises of Abraham as God planned? I’ll leave you to think a bit more about this one yourself.

The Parable of the Wedding Banquet (Mt 22:1-14)

Again he starts off with “the kingdom of heaven is like …” here, and tells his story of the banquet. Knowing their belief in the kingdom to come, the Jews would hear Jesus saying that God was having a party for his son (the Messiah), and had sent out invitations to “those who had been invited to the banquet” i.e. Israel and its leaders. When Israel rejects it, Jesus shows how God intends to punish them for the disobedience and wickedness to him and his servants he has sent by his statement in verse 7 (which NT scholars point to as the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, and which “rapture” fanatics cannot simply accept in good conscience). The banquet is then open to everyone (including all the misfits as discussed before above), and yet God again filters that as well by those who are “properly dressed”.

The Parable of the Tenants (Mt 21:33-45; Mk 12:1-12; Lk 20:9-19)

This is probably the most provocative of all parables and most plain of all Jesus Christ’s parables he spoke to the people. The books of the prophets was replete with so many symbolic pictures of Israel as a vineyard (Ps 80:8–16, Isa 5:1–7, Jer 2:21, Ezek 15:1–8, 17:5–10, 19:10–14, and Hos 10:1). It was bound to be obvious this time round that the “tenants” was a reference to the priest and Pharisees, the messengers were the prophets of Israel, the son was himself and the coming judgment of the “landowner” aka God was what happened to them “in this generation” (Mt 23:34) i.e the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.

More than Meets the Eye

Nicholas Thomas Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God has this to say about Jesus’s parables.

“The parables, therefore, are not simply ‘teaching’, with each parable making one and only one moral or ‘religions’ point. Such a theory is totally anachronistic … The parables were therefore essentially secretive. Jesus was not a ‘universal teacher’ of timeless truths, but the starter of a movement which was to grow like an unobserved seed turning into a plant before anyone realized.” (N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God)

And of the more overt Parable of the Tenants, this is what he says

“The parable which breaks this rule is Mt 21:33-46, but Jesus told it plainly because the time had come to abandon the earlier secrecy and force a showdown. Historically speaking, the parable belongs precisely with the action in the Temple, the moment when Jesus at last acted in a way that the authorities could not ignore.” (N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God).

Therefore the parables was the means by which Jesus Christ both declared the arrival of the kingdom of God, and in addition made known the fact that in him was salvation now to be found, and not in Israel. This meant that he was replacing the position of Israel as the giver of light and telling them that loyalty to the old symbols that held Israel together (cleanliness and food laws, the Temple and its priests, the Torah etc) were no longer the basis on which one will be considered fit to inherit the kingdom any longer. And therefore when Jesus says in John 15 that he is the true vine, he is being clear in stating that the old vine (i.e. Israel) is no longer “true”, and that in him only can the Jews (and by extension the world) find their expected salvation, not in the “old vine” of Israel.

It was all subversion, subversion, subversion. But the parables was the means by which he could say what he wanted to a hostile people, and still be able to get away with it until people REALLY stopped to think further.

Rediscovering His Parables

Again, this theme of analysis doesn’t apply to each and every parable, but does indeed apply to a large majority. But  Jesus continues to amaze me as I rediscover the tools of his trade, but more importantly as I also discover my own (and I’m sure many people’s) ignorance of what these “nice” stories were all about. NT Wright himself quoted a friend thus,

“As an American friend of mine put it, most Western churchgoers treat the gospels as the optional chips and dip at the start of the evening. They are the cocktail nibbles. Only after that do we sit down at table for the red meat of Pauline theology”

Indeed our inordinate attention to Paul’s letters (which were written to explain some angles of the gospel, but not to state the gospel message itself) has blinded us to a lot. Mathew, Mark, Luke and John is where the real meat is. Let’s not drown the monumental impact of Jesus’s life, message and his kingdom with our haste to preach a Jesus that is acceptable to everyone (and that can be used to support every “personal” individualistic worldview agenda).

The man had bigger fish to fry, and his parables were his fishing line to catch the fish “who had ears to hear”, who will follow him into the deepest of waters without fear in launching his kingdom, which had come, and yet was not yet fully revealed.

Your God is Too Small – A New Creation

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I’ve heard this statement “Your God is too small” used in certain Christian circles to denote a certain lack of faith in God’s ability to do supposedly mighty things for a person. I find that quite an interesting statement, but even more so very applicable to my current post (and a few others to come with it soon). So I’ll appropriate that title, but for a different purpose and we’ll see why as we go along.

 

In recent times I’ve downloaded and installed a new version of a certain Android bible (YouVersion), which comes with the latest NIV (2011) version. Suffice it to say that the name of that app itself is subject to questioning, but I digress. Interestingly I came across one of the all-time favorite passages of Christendom – 2 Cor 5:17. The 1984 version of the NIV (which is the widely known version) puts it this way).

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come”

And yet the modern translation says this

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come; The old has gone, the new is here!”

Now for those who are about to charge the writers of NIV 2011 with changing the word of God, heresy, blasphemy, unfaithfulness to scripture and many other such accusations, I will gladly ask you to find out how Bibles are translated, and how versions of Bibles are updated over time. And for those who judge every other bible by the standard of the King James Version, you will find that “God does not speak King James”, as my friend Kwame Antwi-Boasiako puts it. Such a discourse will take another post altogether, one which someday will be put together.

But indeed I smiled when I saw this. Here was one of those passages which had been one of the foremost evangelistic tools of Protestantism, being shown in a different but extremely important perspective. Not that the previous translation was incompatible with Jesus’s sayings or Paul’s teachings, but because the now corrected construction points to one of the points that is missing in Christendom today. And I will illustrate why with this short scenario.

We read a passage at church the other day, and I asked a question about that passage, answers to which showed` the problem. Jesus was speaking to his disciples, and he made this statement to them.

“I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:27).

The question then logically arose how it is possible that Peter, Andrew et al will not die before the kingdom of God comes. Are they still alive today? Did Jesus Christ mean what he was saying or was he smoking something we haven’t heard of yet? Or was there some “spiritual” meaning to what he said?

Try as my brothers at church did, many gave all sorts of theories, from the absurd to the plausible but unlikely. And I know that if I asked many contemporary Christians the same question, I will get the same kind of answers from them. But everyone excluded the 1 possibility:

THAT THE KINGDOM OF GOD HAD ALREADY BEGUN

No, there is no “spiritual” meaning to it; neither was Jesus smoking the pot when he said this. Peter doesn’t need to be alive and waiting 2000 years and more to be part of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God was inaugurated by Jesus’s presence on this earth, and he said this so many times it is surprising that so many people (including myself for a long time) haven’t noticed (Matt 12:28; Lk 4:18-21; Lk 17:20-21).

Jesus’s breaking into this world signified that God has begun changing the world and that man and women are being called into his kingdom to work with him against the kingdoms of this world. Jesus came to lay claim to the whole world as his, and to point out to the world that God had anointed him king of this world, and that everyone needed to submit to him to be a part of his kingdom (Col 1:15-20). And he showed us how – not in overthrowing the world with violence and guns (whether automatic, semi-automatic or non-automatic), but with deeds that speak of the character of their king. The point about the kingdom of God that many Christians miss is that it CANNOT work using the methods of the world, or else it will be defeated by the corrupting influence of the world. It must work with the methods of its king, who lays his life down for others, who calls the leaders to be servants, who is good news to the poor, who challenges the status quo and its comfort zones (including the religious elite), who feeds the flock before feeding himself (and not fleecing them rather – as is the dominant case both politically and religiously).

So therefore the newer translation of 1 Corinthians 5:17 makes a lot of sense to me. For if Jesus’s breaking into this world signifies a changed world then indeed when a person is in Christ, he is not just a new creation, but CREATION HAS BECOME NEW TO HIM. They now live by a new set of rules, serves a different king and belong to a different people. The world is no longer the same to them, because of the following below.

  1. He answers to a new king
  2. He belongs to a new people
  3. He is a new person.

The order is important. The gospel was always about the kingship of Jesus and not about salvation from sin, though it included it. If you doubt it, take the time to read and digest properly all the sermons preached by both Paul and Peter in the book of Acts (2:14-36; 10:34-43; 13:16-40; 17:22-31). To help you navigate this course better, you can look up New Testament scholars like Scott McKnight’s “The King Jesus Gospel”, or NT Wright’s “How God became King”.

Secondly, the gospel called us to be included amongst the people of God by repentance and baptism, and to live with those people who by the Spirit of God in them are fulfilling their King’s purpose and mission. And as we work with these people and we obey our king and his Spirit’s leading, we are further transformed both as a people, and as individuals.

But today the gospel has been turned upside down. Everything is now centered on the number 3 person in the order above. Everything is about how Jesus will solve “my problems”, how he will “make me rich and prosperous”. The number 1 thing that enabled sin to enter the world today – the sin of not submitting to God, but putting ourselves in the center of everything – is the same thing that our gospel has become about. Me.

And when I meet Christians who think Jesus is all about a “personal relationship”, the phrase that comes into my head most often is the title of this post – your God is too small. Your God isn’t the Jewish Messiah – king of this world, who demands that mankind abandon the ways of this world in pursuit of him, who requires that mankind learn to live in peace and in submission and servitude to one another for the purpose of his kingdom, who requires a change in the deepest of hearts of each individual person. No, your god is a genie in a bottle, and when you feel low or your next bout of narcissism shows up, you rub the bottle with some “prayers and tongues, with plenty ‘overcoming’ faith”, say what you want him to do for you, and go about your business, paying no heed to the kingdom of God, which is indeed amongst us, but hidden from our eyes.

This discourse is not over yet, and in my next post we will take a historical look at how the gospel of Jesus changed (or our God became smaller) through the course of history through a better look at the popular Christian creeds.

Joy to the World

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“… the Lord is come, let earth receive the king.”

So goes the Christmas carol we were taught in nursery school. And we sung it with all our feeble hearts and fumbling lips, looking forward to the Christmas gifts our parents will be buying us – the new shoes, clothes and fancy spectacles and cap. Alas, those were the days. But do we stop to ponder deeper into the Christmas story and imbibe its significance for not only our lives, but for the world at large? Today I intend to recap the Christmas story with a bit of New Testament historical background, and draw out implications for us of the birth of this Jesus. Fair warning that this post will be long, so have patience for it, for the story of Jesus’ birth, though simple, is actually quite a multi-layered one worth pondering deeply.

The story of Christmas is rooted in the story of Israel, and we must always attempt to tell it from that perspective. So here goes. Please note my usage of certain bolded words. They will come in handy in this and other posts.

2000 years before Jesus Christ, God called a certain man called Abram from amongst his family in Ur to a place called Canaan. He changed this man’s name to Abraham and gave him a promise.

“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; … and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen 12:2-3 NIV)

This promise Abraham diligently transmits to his children, who end up being exiled in Egypt for 470 years because of initial worldwide hunger and now forced into slavery. God however, miraculously leads them through Moses out of Egypt in triumphant fashion back to their own land. Now they have their land back, Torah is given to them as a way of life, and the tabernacle/temple is built for God to come and dwell in and supposedly never leave. They demand a king, and God gives them Saul and then David. God makes a promise to David.

 “When your days are over and you rest with you fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom … Your house and your kingdom shall endure before me forever, your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam 7:12-16 NIV).

Having received this prophecy, David himself prays in Ps 72 about that son of his thus (a Messianic Psalm – one which the Jews always looked to when thinking of the promised Son of David).

“He will judge your people in righteousness, your afflicted ones with justice … He will defend the afflicted among the people and save the children of the needy; he will crush the oppressor. He will endure as long as the sun … The kings of Tarshish and distant shores will bring tribute to him … All kings will bow down to him … All nations will be blessed through him, and they will call him blessed” (Ps 72:2-17)

From the above, one can see what this promised king is to do; by bringing hope to the afflicted, to the hopeless and needy; by subduing all kingdoms under him; and by being the means through which God’s promise to Abraham will be fulfilled in this world.

Well unfortunately, David’s throne did not last forever, and those who came after him increasingly departed from God’s ways. Finally, despite all the warnings of prophets like Jeremiah, they are uprooted and exiled for a second time in their history – this time forcefully – by the Babylonians.

For the next 250 years, they are separated from their land and the temple. The only thing that they still had was Torah, and they began to take it quite seriously as the only means of reconnecting with their God and their lost heritage. Prophets like Daniel, Isaiah and Ezekiel remind them of God’s promises to them and their forefathers, and expand those promises by giving further prophecies concerning a certain son of David will be the one to bring their deliverance forever.

They are released from exile and allowed to go back to their land. With much joy and hard work, they build a new temple, though not as resplendent and beautiful as Solomon’s temple (The history of Jews after this second temple was built is what is referred to as “2nd Temple Judaism”). Yet, they still feel like they are in exile, for though they live on their own land, they are being ruled remotely, first by the Persians who set them free, then by Alexandria and his protégés after him including the Ptolemys from Egypt, and then the Seleucids from Syria, and finally by Rome. They had a little bit of joy when Judas Maccabeus led a revolt to overthrow the Seleucid emperor Antiochus Epiphanes (who was receiving bribes from the highest bidder to appoint them High Priest of the Jewish temple), leading to the declaration of Hanukkah as a new Jewish festival. And yet soon enough the Romans came with their crushing military might, and they were back to square one.

For the next 300 years after returning from exile in Babylon, the question plaguing the people of Israel is when God will honor his promises of blessings to their fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? When is he going to send that son of David to fulfill that promise of a kingdom that will last forever? What were they doing wrong that God was taking so long? In the meantime, while they waited for God to come and save them, their lifestyles were also being challenged by introduction of Greek culture which had dominated the world since Alexander’s conquests in a process called Hellenization (just like American culture is dominating our world today). This they felt was an affront to their Jewish ways of life, enshrined in Torah. To most Jews, Hellenization was a serious threat, and probably one of the reasons why God had not yet sent his salvation because of all these and other sins of the nation Israel.

No wonder then that most Jews believed in the message of one of the dominant groups of their time, the Pharisees. The Pharisees insisted that the faithful keeping of Torah will cause God to finally bring salvation to Israel. This is why the Pharisees were so worried about the keeping of Torah and guarding against Hellenization – unlike what Reformed theology has taught us since the 17th century; it was not that they felt keeping Torah will guarantee their ticket to heaven or make them personally “righteous”. It was about keeping it so God will look with mercy upon them and send his salvation to the nation Israel, and also that the individuals that kept Torah will then be mercifully received into the coming kingdom. No, they were not busy thinking of how to go to heaven as individuals, they were busy debating the nitty-gritty of how heaven may come to earth. One other question that was asked back then is “how will our forefathers who have waited for so long for this coming kingdom benefit from it?” The answer was resurrection; that all faithful Israel will resurrect with the coming of the Son of David to also partake of this wonderful kingdom.

Of course there were those who were more interested in keeping the status quo, and one of such groups was the Sadducees. They were the priests who run the temple with the head of their council being the High Priest. Israel was supposed to be ruled by 2 authorities – a king and a high priest. In times where their conquerors didn’t appoint a king, they gave all political power to the high priest and his council. And so, they were the real power brokers of their time, and were less interested in the faithful keeping of Torah etc., but more interested in just making sure the sacrifices went on as usual, the tithes were received as usual (so they could benefit from it, unsurprisingly) and the bribes were paid as usual to convince a Seleucid or Roman governor to appoint them/keep them as high priest for all its benefits. Obviously you can understand why your average Jew was fonder of a Pharisee than a Sadducee, as a careful reading of the Gospels will show. And as usual you can see the similarities between them and today’s dominant Christian “clergy”. Interestingly because of their past evils of causing the death of others who challenged their power, the Sadducees did not believe in resurrection.

Then there was the third stream, who felt that God was not going to come down from heaven with his own sword to come and remove the Romans. Just as Judas Maccabeus was successful with removing at one time the Seleucids by the use of violence, they must arm themselves and fight the oppressor. At least they respected the Pharisees, but the Sadducees they loathed and there were many murders of Sadducees, Roman soldiers stationed in Jerusalem and generally caused much violence. They were the Boko Haram of their time we may say. There were many such groups, with different names. From Zealots, to Sicarii they flourished in the dark. Barabbas was one of them (he wasn’t just a thief/rioter but more of a coup maker), as was the disciple Simon the Zealot (incorrectly interpreted as Simon the Canaanite in some bibles), who may/may not have recanted his violence to follow Jesus.

 

The Birth of Jesus

Enter the birth of Jesus Christ. Mary is confronted by an angel with the following news

“But the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end’” (Lk 1:30-33 NIV)

Mary being a proper Jew will know immediately how significant this message was. God was fulfilling his promises to exiled Israel; the king of the world was coming. He will wipe away all their sins of unfaithfulness to God, and he will restore Israel to the status of the capital of the world, and the Jews will be the “chilling brothers” in that kingdom. And the poor and broken hearted will find joy at last. The weight of being the carrier of this wonderful child was definitely heavy on her and she expresses it in Lk 1:46-56. This was joy to the world indeed.

Being a proper Jew, King Herod hearing about the son of God/David being born is an immediate challenge to him. Not because he will simply provide forgiveness of sins and carry us all to heaven as our modern gospel preachers from DL Moody to Billy Graham have over-simplified it to a fault for us, but because his coming signals an end to the reign of every king and every kingdom, even more so to a Jewish king. No wonder he will have all babies less than 3 years old in Bethlehem killed. This is indeed joy to the world, but not to him.

Even more dramatic is the fact that whoever is the son of God/David or the Messiah is actually supposed to be greater than any world power. Therefore Jesus being proclaimed the son of David simply means that Jesus is Lord, not the Roman Emperor, something which was scandalous at the time and has severe implications for all political power today. The reason Jews call Jesus “Lord” is not because he is merely their “Lord and Personal savior” – another questionable phrase in Christendom – but because he is the supreme emperor of both the visible and invisible world. He is Lord over both the Ghanaian and the American president, and just like any political figure, he demands our obedience in totality. Devout loyalty to any political institution is pure idolatry.

And yet his ways are different. He refuses to keep his Kingdom limited to the Jews only, contrary to the wishes of the Pharisees. He refuses to Lord it over his people, contrary to the Sadducees and their modern day descendants. And he refuses to establish his kingdom by violence, seriously disappointing the Zealots. He is king, yet on his own terms and through his own means of love and self-sacrifice.

 

Conclusion

And so, just as the world gets excited that Prince William’s wife is pregnant and about to give birth, Christmas is the time to remember when the king of the world left his throne in heaven, and was born into this fallen world; to walk amongst men and experience their suffering, and yet to bring them out of the deception of this world into one of love and care for one another and for care for his creation.

Chrismas is time when those of us who believe in him must make sure we practicalize his mission – to bring hope to the hopeless, joy to the broken-hearted and declare his kingship over all kings. As he stated clearly in Lk 4:18, his kingdom has already began and his good news is to the poor, to the brokenhearted, to the captives, to the blind and to the bruised. To the mentally oppressed, who can only resort to taking out guns and shooting 26 people and themselves, we must realize we have good news to spread; we have a king to declare and a kingdom to both express today and work towards in future. To the proud and haughty, we must remind that there is a king who calls them to do their part in bringing peace; justice and constant social and economic improvement (note I didn’t say equality). For the king of the world demands it, and he waits patiently to exert his judgment in due cause, when both the quick and the dead are brought before him.

JOY TO THE WORLD INDEED, FOR THE LORD IS COME.