Jesus

And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ. (Gal. 4:6-7)

Whenever someone states that Jesus was a “radical”, my eyes roll. How convenient to paint Him as such when it suits the cause. Yes, He was a radical departure from the perceived norms. But, no, I personally don’t think He was a “radical” if by that we mean that He was an extremist or that He started some kind of social and moral reforms. Jesus was a normal man in an abnormal world and the world couldn’t stand it. His righteousness reflected on their turpitude. He was the only truly normal man who ever lived, and in that sense perhaps He might be termed a “radical”.

But when most people talk about a “radical”, they mean someone on the extreme end of a linear graph. In today’s world, ideas and postures are usually connected to “left/right” or “liberal/conservative” thinking. Self-identified “liberals” and “conservatives” insist that Jesus was one of their own, favoring government sponsored social programs or enforced moral behavior. In first-century Palestine, neither Sadducees nor Pharisees claimed Him. He was, frankly, a lot of trouble.

Years ago when first considering where Jesus fell in the scheme of things, I realized that He didn’t fall in the continuum.  He was a radically different kind of man — not a new kind of idealist. He didn’t promote a point of view that could be apprehended on the “dog run” of human reason. We are told that He spoke with authority and not as the scribes. His radicality was a matter of the creation He belonged to, not a school of thought.

We may call His way the “middle way” because it often fell midway between factions, yet it was not compromise for the sake of uniting opposite views. It was not even exactly what we call a “moderate” point of view because it ran totally off the continuum of “less and more” or “right and left”. Had it been about compromise it might have afforded some safety, yet it is not altogether without risk, misunderstanding or controversy:

Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by. (John 8:59)

Mark 12 contains two main accounts where Jesus turns the questions of the Pharisees and the Sadducees upside down. In both instances, they plan to trap Him in a game of logic. The Pharisees bring up a matter of taxes, and the Sadducees bring up a matter of marriage and divorce in the resurrection. This passage was not written to illustrate the cleverness and genius of Jesus against those who play mind games. It was written to show the qualitative difference between the mind of God and the carnal mind.

Jesus did not have the carnal mind of mankind. He had the God-mind of a new kind of creature. Consequently, He saw through His spiritual understanding rather than through a fragmentation of reality. (See “Living By His Words“) Paul, in the course of writing his epistle to the Galatians, touched on the mind that was in Jesus. When all is said and done, the point of Galatians is not really about our choice to observe customs and habits but whether the Law can do anything new in us. It cannot, and so Paul defaults to the power of the Cross to reduce us to ashes and then to resurrect us as new creatures.

But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. (Gal. 6:14-15)

Although Paul speaks here of circumcision and uncircumcision, this has less to do with the particulars of the Jewish/Gentile divide in the church and more to do with our status as new creatures in Christ. Finally, we begin to understand the reason for Jesus’ “radical” point of view. He was not of the old creation but of the new. He derived His understanding directly from the Father.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned. … For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Cor. 2:14-16)

[excerpt from Andrew Murray]

The blood of Jesus is the greatest mystery of eternity, the deepest mystery of the divine wisdom. Let us not imagine that we can easily grasp its meaning. God thought 4,000 years necessary to prepare men for it, and we also must take time, if we are to gain a knowledge of the power of the blood.

Even taking time is of no avail, unless there is definite taking of sacrificial trouble. Sacrificial blood always meant the offering of a life. The Israelite could not obtain blood for the pardon of his sin, unless the life of something that belonged to him was offered in sacrifice. The Lord Jesus did not offer up His own life, and shed His blood to .spare us from the sacrifice of our lives. No, indeed but to make the sacrifice of our lives possible and desirable.

The hidden value of His blood is the spirit of self-sacrifice, and where the blood really touches the heart, it works out in that heart, a like spirit of self-sacrifice. We learn to give up ourselves and our lives, so as to press into the full power of that new life, which the blood. has provided.

We give our time in order that we may become acquainted with these things by God’s Word. We separate ourselves from sin and worldly-mindedness, and self-will, that the power of the blood may not be hindered, for it is just these things that the blood seeks to remove.

We surrender ourselves wholly to God in prayer and faith, so as not to think our own thoughts, and not to hold our own lives as a prize, but as possessing nothing save what He bestows. Then He reveals to us the glorious and blessed life which has been prepared for us by the blood. …

It is by this confident trust in Him that the blessing obtained by the blood becomes ours. We must never, in thought, separate the blood from the High Priest who shed it, and ever lives to apply it.

He who once gave His blood for us, will, oh I so surely, every moment, impart its efficacy. Trust Him to do this. Trust Him to open your eyes, and to give you a deeper spiritual insight. Trust Him to teach you to think about the blood as God thinks about it. Trust Him to impart to you, and to make effective in you, all that He enables you to see.

Trust Him above all, in the power of His eternal High Priesthood, to work out in you, unceasingly, the full merits of His blood, so that your whole life may be an uninterrupted abiding in the sanctuary of God’s presence.

Believer, you who have come to the knowledge of the precious blood, hearken to the invitation of your Lord. Come nearer. Let Him teach you; let Him bless you. Let Him cause His blood to become to you spirit, and life, and power, and truth.

Begin now, at once, to open your soul in faith, to receive the full, mighty, heavenly effects of the precious blood, in a more glorious manner than you have ever experienced. He Himself will work these things out in your life.

I wonder what causes us to all have different emphases in callings. We were discussing that on a forum this evening. One person named several people driven by different passions and how it colors our views on everything: one obsesses with unity in the Body, another talks about deception in the church, still another writes and publishes books about kingdom life. I’m obsessed with strengthening our hearts and souls. I wondered about the catalysts that led us to this point. Perhaps the others will share their stories soon.

I was thinking about this icon I have of Jesus, the Good Shepherd. He has a lamb around his neck and every time I look at it I think, “There’s me, broken and too screwed up to walk.” I always remember the story of the lamb who runs off and the Good Shepherd brings it back, breaks its legs and keeps the lamb near Him till it heals. Afterwards it never runs off again.

When I was seventeen I met a young man who prophesied over me, telling the story of the Good Shepherd and the runaway lamb. He told me all about my past, present and future and every last bit of it was true. I can’t look at the lamb around Jesus’ neck in the icon without imagining it’s a portrait of me. Like all true obsessionists, I want everyone to be like me. Evangelists want everyone to be evangelists, teachers want everyone to study root words, and I want everyone to be lambs.

I found some old paper my mother had for years. It has a faded outline of Jesus, the Good Shepherd on it. She used it like stationery and sometimes we kids colored it in. They say if you surround a child with pictures, it influences that child. (I heard of a mother once who had pictures of the sea around her house and all her boys became sailors!)

I think of when my kids were small and I was lying in bed in agony, near death and worried they’d be left with no parent — surprised to find a soul really could hurt worse than a body. And, as people say, what happens in your life determines your ministry. Some people believe that if you are gifted in areas of mercy, you will be concerned about people’s emotions and their health. But I was always more concerned about their souls. I would have traded my life to have my soul healed.

I remember my mother sending me every morning to the bus stop crying. She used to pray over me every morning and one day she told me, “It’s always right to pray for mercy.” That’s the most important theological concept my mother ever taught me. I must have been in my late 20s then, right after I started to recover. I started camping in His mercy.

I suppose there are different emphases for good reason. But for me, I just couldn’t make it anymore. People could take their miracle prayers and it did people like me no good, because we just wanted our souls repaired. I did not need a pair of shoes two years after I’d lost my feet. (But I also suppose that my feelings on this point resulted from the humanism in Christian doctrine that had let me down so — one thing that the sermon “Ten Shekels and a Shirt” revealed to me. It makes perfect sense in the aftermath that a little leaven abounds to immense evil, but God will still use it for good in the end, i.e.. ruining some of us for this world.)

The result from having humanism stomped out of me was that I quit praying prayers to make God do my will on earth. When I experienced my own shocking spiritual death, I knew I needed a God bigger than circumstances. I met a transcendant Jesus one night — the one who “was dead and now liveth” and realized just how eternally real He is. I needed a God who could walk through a concentration camp with me….because everything else can be lost and because I am a broken doll.

How can we lose with a God that big? Everything in the world becomes inverted. Strong is weak and weak is strong. And so I took to becoming more and more enveloped, even buried in this God. I don’t trust that my world won’t turn upside down again but I can trust the Good Shepherd to go through the chaos with me. I can’t hang onto myself and certainly proved my sanity isn’t limitless. I need a God who can hang onto me. And with every trial that tests me on this, I gain strength and understanding that can, hopefully, be given away freely.

And that’s my story. Maybe everyone else has a story, too, about why they are who they are today. I don’t know…It’s not my only story and it’s not all I believe, but it’s my main story on earth. It’s my theme, I guess you could say.

I’d like to share a sermon by Paris Reidhead, “Ten Shekels and a Shirt“, that I didn’t quite understand the first time I saw it posted somewhere. Perhaps it was the terms in which it was addressed by the poster that threw me. I had almost the impression that if we don’t all do some amazing thing like sell ourselves into lifetime slavery as some of the early Moravians did, we have not truly given ourselves over to the Lord.

Now you can imagine what thoughts were turning over in my mind at the trajectory of what would happen if every Christian believer in the world went on a works-based frenzy and did this. I wondered what would happen to families and children if we all threw ourselves simultaneously into some machinery that crushed out our lives and that of our posterity? What would happen to the whole world, in fact? Thankfully, God is more practical than this. He doesn’t send us willy-nilly to the ovens.

But I think the real point to the sermon is why do we do anything that we do? Is it for God or for ourselves that we do it? Reidhead tears the mask off of humanism in our works, even the works of the missionary on the field, evangelism, charities and other good works. I thought to post this after finding the Cross missing from the words of many well-intentioned people who are leading others straight out of the faith and hindering those who would enter. If it’s true that wolves don’t stick around too long when the emphasis is on the Cross in our lives, the blood of Jesus and the like, then — by George — let’s talk about these things all the time!

The Cross has much more application to our lives than sitting around in a doorway of hope. It’s about the path beyond, too. If I muse a bit much on meditation for some tastes, then let me add that meditation is listening to God and learning His ways. It’s what you do when you ponder your Path. It has no lasting benefit except for those who know the Cross! How can you know His ways if you don’t know His Cross? How can you obey Him in anything else if you won’t obey His Cross?

Sometimes I think of the Path of God as a river with people camped to the right and to the left of it. On one side of the river are those trying to save the lost through the preaching of repentance and remission of sins. On the other side are the folks who want to show the entire world the love of God through many channels, keeping in mind that it is the love of God that leads us to repentance. Both have access to the same river and are able to have communion with one another, though they may look a bit cross-eyed across the river sometimes at one another.

Then there are the fringes camped so far out there that they have cut themselves off from the stream. There is no life in their words and they water no one. The one group preaches such a stringent hell-fire and damnation message that it seems no one can be saved. For these legalists, salvation is about pulling your butt out of the fire. On the opposite side are teachers against the necessity of the work of the Cross in a personal way. They declare that the Cross is no longer important in a practical way for whatever reason they dream up — there are many variations on this thinking. Salvation for them is about making humanity happy.

Somewhere in the middle is the “now, but not yet” bunch who believe the kingdom of God is in us but does not yet have full expression in the earth. (I would be in this group.) And I tend to favor floating in the river, which is why I catch it from both camps on either side. It’s also why I favor a contemplative experience of God but won’t join causes like “Make Poverty History” and things like that. In the first instance, you have nothing to contemplate if you don’t have the Cross. In the second, you can’t make poverty history unless you can change the hearts of evil humanity — how are you going to do that without a Cross?

So while two camps eye each other suspiciously across the river, they both dip into the same stream of life. They will see eye-to-eye on a few things, namely the Cross, the Blood of Christ, repentance, and knowing God as indispensable. The fringes cannot give a cup of water to the thirsty — they have none to give, having placed themselves too far from the Source. Both of them are humanistic, the goal being to save humanity for its own sake and happiness, inasmuch as they can discern what it needs to be saved from.

I choose to make the river the priority, in case you ever wondered at the lack of moral causes and organizations showcased on this site. I choose my battles carefully, shaking hands on both sides of the river with those who do feel called to tackle some issues in this world. Though there must be scant benefit to these things, I prefer the option of doing all to the glory of God. I believe that Reidhead summed it up in the middle of his sermon: “Didn’t God intend to make man happy? Yes. But as a by-product, and not a prime-product.”

A growing trend in the churches of the Western World deeply troubles me. Call it apostasy, call it “doctrines of demons”, call it humanism and it is all one and the same boiling cauldron of lawlessness. The worldly church loves with an unholy love stripped of all righteousness and justice and calls it “the love of God”. They teach their fellows that there is no difference between the repentant and the [willful] sinner, that all may participate in the celebratory victory of Jesus Christ.

To that, I raise the question: How can you enter resurrection if you’ve never passed through death? How can you have forgiveness if you’ve never had repentance? For if you don’t have those things first, you have no right to drink of the cup of Christ. “But, but, but…..,” protest the rising voices. “You are unloving.” But I reflect on this:

Jhn 13:35 By this shall all [men] know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

“One to another” in the context here does not refer to everyone in the world, but to disciples. And my objection is that these love everyone except the Lord’s disciples. Nor can they love the disciples unless they first subvert them into lovers of the world. In fact, they persecute the disciples, wearing them down if possible to bring them into submission to their humanistic gospel.

There is a naive idea that we ought to fellowship with any and all believers, even if they bring uncleanness into the equation. This is spiritual harlotry. The spirit is seductive and will suck the unaware into academic circular discussions and spiritual filth that will militate against their own souls. How can light have fellowship with darkness, righteousness with unrighteousness? Some, bless their hearts, want to dialogue with these firebrands, in hopes of bringing them back.

And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all [men], apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth; [2 Tim 2:24-25]

If, on the other hand, we are dealing with those who think themselves to be mature teachers and will not regard sound doctrine, we have advice from the first century church:

…but if the teacher himself turn and teach another doctrine with a view to subvert you, hearken not to him; [The Didache, 11:2]

Timothy continues in this vein:

…in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves … Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. [2 Tim 3:1-7]

We are there. I have seen it with my own eyes. I have tasted and handled. I believe we are living in the days of a ripened humanism.

…humanism is a philosophical statement that declares the end of all being is the happiness of man. The reason for existence is man’s happiness. Now according to humanism, salvation is simply a matter of getting all the happiness you can out of life. [Paris Reidhead, "Ten Shekels and a Shirt", sermon]

Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth [John16:13]. Not one person I have ever heard argue for the humanistic gospel has testified of being apprehended by God, brought to his knees in repentance, and radically transformed from a state of death and sin into a state of life. They read books, gather speakers and teachers; they swim in suppositions about things that may or may not be and declare them as fact. They posture and they strut, but not one ever speaks of the ongoing reality of the Cross or the power of the blood of Jesus in his own soul! Nor do they open the way that others may access the Door of the Kingdom.

I’m afraid that it’s become so subtle that it goes everywhere. What is it? In essence it’s this! That this philosophical postulate that the end of all being is the happiness of man, has been sort of covered over with evangelical terms and Biblical doctrine until God reigns in heaven for the happiness of man, Jesus Christ was incarnate for the happiness of man, all the angels exist in the…, Everything is for the happiness of man! AND I SUBMIT TO YOU THAT THIS IS UNCHRISTIAN !!! Isn’t man happy? Didn’t God intend to make man happy? Yes. But as a by-product and not a prime-product! [Reidhead]

The humanistic gospel is the most self-righteous and self-serving gospel I have ever heard. It is the gospel of “niceness” rather than love and salvation. Its adherents compass land and sea to make one proselyte and then make him twice the child of hell as themselves [Mat. 23:15]. The worst humanists are the ones who call themselves believers. Flee this pollution!