Monday Morning Music Ministry

6-14-21

Do you ever have the feeling that life has slipped its moorings? Not necessarily your personal life, but the world today; tradition and stability. Sanity! Do events sometime seem out of control? Or… maybe more than “sometimes”?

Do not check your personal “check engine” light. Life has slipped its moorings.

There are times we are in charge of our own fates. And many more ways in which we are not. It has always been thus, and always will be. I am not a defeatist, nor fatally pessimistic. Mathematically, we are individuals in a big world, crowded with people. If we are, in many ways, pilgrims and strangers, or a leaf in a stream, we can feel helpless… but never should feel hopeless.

We balance – or we must balance – the secular and the sacred. This world is not our home, we believe; we are only passing through. Yet, even with the Celestial City in view, the passage can be rough. We have been warned; hard times should not surprise us.

I invite us all, having framed these thoughts, to take a long look at humankind’s history, a very long overview. Civilizations and societies have had distinctive periods, and “we” have responded in very different manners to some challenges that are very similar in nature.

In primitive times, up through pre-Modern civilizations, when societies felt helpless, they turned to superstitions, or to religious hopes, and finally to reliance on the revealed God.

In subsequent Post-Modern and Enlightenment eras, societies tended to become reliant upon “progress” and science, education and literacy.

In the Post-Christian, self-oriented, nihilistic age we now endure, societies have become reliant on “self” (instinct and appetites) and chance – which really means trusting to blind luck, the inertia of daily life, seemingly confirmed by prosperity.

The next stage, whenever we slide there, cannot bring anything but unprecedented dislocation, change, and misery. And, probably, expressions of surprise from those who ought to have known better.

Anyone can reckon that in a state of such drift, something – a nation, a movement, a philosophy – will fill the void. Secularism? Communism? A revanchist and aggressive China? It will be something malign: we cannot assume, as many observers have done, that through all history’s changes, one thing that evolves positively is a steady “progress” – a march toward ever-expanding personal freedom and profitable responsibility.

This is self-swindling nonsense. Every phase of humankind’s history, whether in small primitive pods or in continent-wide empires, has revealed a common impulse whose name is Domination.

And, I suggest, stronger than the need to dominate is humankind’s ultimate need to be dominated. It is a genetic imperative, a cultural inclination, a social excuse… a choice, even if inchoate. Of course, this trait is universally and rhetorically denied.

People look toward, and for, leaders. Humans organized under caesars and kings; they needed space, and placed rulers over themselves. When restive, they reorganized as serfs and subjects, but loving to love a sovereign. The spread of churches was quickly under control of popes, bishops, and metropolitans. In Post-Modern times, organization and centralization were behind the facades of freedom and liberty. Constitutions drafted to protect citizens from government are being used to enable government intrusion and control. America, having “thrown off the yoke” of royalty, reveals in uncountable ways – celebrity mania, hero-worship, blind trust placed in the “influential” – that we are a people eager to find a boot to place upon our heads. The internet heralded unfettered freedom, but is, rather, intrusive, agencies of spying, favoring lackeys but censoring everyone else. The web and Dark State know what we think, and tell us what to desire. Things to crave. And whom to hate.

This is not moral progress; nothing at all resembling a positive evolution toward freedom and responsibility.

We must acknowledge the mechanistic truth that humankind instinctively does not seek liberty. Subconsciously, I believe we all desire to choose, if we can, whom we will serve; not really that we be free from servanthood. Whether the boot will be velvet-covered, or full of hobnails. Like infants as they grow, actually desiring discipline and direction? Yes.

We all desire a leader; and we all need a Savior. In that way humankind has not changed over the world, over the millennia.

If it were possible, in the world’s current state of moral anarchy, toxic materialism, and social anarchy, to throw this vehicle called Western Civilization in “reverse” gear, there would be a chance. It is a slim chance, of course, because the evolution-chart indicates that human beings do not usually make choices in our own self-interest. When we don’t… we invent terms and philosophies and lies to fool ourselves that we have learned lessons.

The general solution has been available for many millennia; and specifically available for 2000 years. We know that.

The God of Judgments can seem harsh (He is not, but His judgments are; your choice). And His Son, the Creator of the Universe and Savior of your soul, softly and tenderly is calling us home.

It is returning “home,” to God’s teachings and promises; and not charging off toward new promises, philosophies, and chimeras, that will have us secure in our moorings – where we, subconsciously perhaps, have always wanted to be.

“Know today whom you will serve.”

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If you can tolerate the Alberti Bass, let Will Thompson’s old musical plea, and Jesus’, touch your heart:

Click: Come Home – Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling

10-12-20
There is a bit in an old Laurel and Hardy comedy where the boys are caught in a situation, Ollie impersonating a rich guy and Stan his servant. “Call me a cab,” Ollie commands, thinking of a way they can escape.

“What?” asks the typically bewildered Stan.

“Call. Me. A. Cab,” Ollie patiently orders.

Stan says, “All right. You’re a cab!”

Fast-forward 90 years or so to this election season. In fact to many aspects of life today, and politics, and in the church. Labels have become virtually meaningless. They have not become obsolete, because everybody is quick to proudly adopt a label, or to smear someone with another label. But labels are now fungible, malleable, chameleon-like.

In the same way, statistics don’t lie; but statisticians do.

President Trump identified himself as a very stable genius, a manner of self-description people usually leave to others than themselves, and usually to posterity. Today, critics immediately challenged one, two, or all three of those words. Kamala Harris is described, by Democrat handlers, as a “moderate,” but she would have considered that an insult during the primaries. We recently were told that Antifa is not an organization but an idea… the distinction holds no difference to shop owners seeing their life-dreams torched street by street, city by city by thugs in identical costumes.
The irony is most bitter in religion of the 21st century. Joe Biden calls himself a “man of faith” (faith in what?) but bristles when priests and cardinals deny him the Eucharist because he denies Catholic Church teaching, for instance on abortion.

If the church, the Bible, Jesus’ teachings do not mean anything – if your opinion is superior to the Revealed Word – what is the point of adopting certain labels, claiming to be a Catholic? Some pastors deny the divinity Of Christ, and the Virgin Birth. Are their salaries the same as taking money under false pretenses?

We all evolve, change opinions, and learn. President Trump used to be accepting of abortion, as was I at one point; and a lot people I know. But science, experience, and conscience “spoke” to us. When politicians who also are aware of science, hear of experiences, and have consciences – when they switch “sides” or switch parties — they cannot fail to know where they fight life’s battles now: Who their new friends are. And what effects their defections will have. I refer to conservatives and Catholics who support the party of abortion-on-demand.

This is not in a vacuum; these new rules – or lack of rules – are a microcosm of life today. Heresy is as old as human nature; its first appearance was in the Garden.

“Relativism,” it is called: What’s OK for me is all that matters; There is no right and wrong; You are free to make up your own rules…

I wonder why many people today rebel against Christianity, democracy, capitalism, when the fruits of our civilization have advanced, refined, and are blessings to so many. To ignore our heritage, to decline to defend our values, and surrender to the enemies of our souls… seems like a crime in itself.

If America does not undergo a spiritual awakening, it does not deserve to continue as the Republic we inherited.

Returning here to the political context, and to shifting labels: Politicians and pollsters do not even know what they mean when they profile and predict about the “evangelical” community. Ah, the “faith-based.” Yes, “family values voters.” Some “evangelicals” have enormous differences between them.

Just as Jesus did not die for denominations or missions organizations or charities or movements or committees, but for individuals – you and me – so will the redemption of America not depend upon parties, movements, organizations.

America will be redeemed, revived, and resuscitated by citizens. Individuals. You and me.

If someone wants to know our label, we can use the one that was a perfect description when this noble project of a Constitutional Republic began – Citizen Patriots.
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Click: Who Am I

10-5-20

How many of our mothers tried to teach us about wise choices with that time-tested question: “I suppose if so-and-so jumped off a bridge, you would too?” Remember?

Well, either a lot of Americans don’t remember, or they are quite happy these days to follow every so-and-so and jump off bridges.

The bridge-jumpers are either self-destructive at heart, or somehow happily survive the dares and the leaps. The so-and-sos go beyond those who commit vandalism and rioting in the streets, even when as serious as arson and murder, heinous as those acts are. More consequential is the fact that these things have become normalized.

It is not so much the graffiti and burning of churches… but that few pastors and priests condemn the acts.

It is not so much the destruction of statues and looting of shops… but the fact that those acts go virtually unpunished.

It is not so much the occupation of police departments and hundreds of fires… but that officials excuse (and thereby encourage) such activities.

Since Antifa “is not an organization, but an idea,” according to a major presidential candidate, aspiring leaders virtually admit that there is no manner of countering anarchy, otherwise than gradual surrender. In the American civilization, this is not temporary insanity; it is a suicidal tendency.

Returning to our moms’ finger-wagging lecture – it was not a rhetorical question. Yes, the rioters jump off bridges. And, no matter how large or small a percentage they are of the population, America has started jumping off too. Many think they would not; but our society is doing so.

The secularized culture has not substituted new standards for traditional standards. It has substituted NO standards. The concept of standards – right and wrong; codes of conduct; Absolute Truth – is anathema. Unacceptable. Unfair. Fascistic. So we are told.

Seen in that light, the black-hooded army can operate as it pleases, and so can we… unless we object, or are harmed by, their operations. How can there be right or wrong, when you deny any value-system of standards… except by the imposition of their opinions? Lo and behold, we are face-to-face with the totalitarian impulse they claim to hate.

Very much like as in the French Revolution, when the bloodthirsty street-roaming rioters wanted to abolish even calendars and ways of telling time – not only killing middle-class people and gutting churches – the anarchists will be crushed between the really serious totalitarians from above, and the traditionalists and religious classes from below. That is in the future, surely. Sadly, but surely, to come.

The road to “No Standards” has been gradual, but the changing of opinions (once called Hypocrisy) in fact has been resolute. Views of abortion is one instance.

Respect for human life has been a mantra, as never before in political discourse, for several generations, beginning especially in the aftermath of World War II and the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights. It has been underpinning the work of many nations, many organizations, many activists. Or… it has been the window-dressing.

When abortion became a sub-set of convenience, and as Christianity and religion in general was scrubbed from society’s standard operating procedures, the relevance of someone’s conscience became something akin to arrogant bigotry.

Many societies throughout history have exercised child sacrifice and practiced infanticide. On the path to contemporary peoples’ destination of No Standards are road signs labeled “Convenience,” “Privacy,” and the new mantra, “Rights.”

Rights, of course, except for the baby. Many women (and, by the way, the legal system) regard as irrelevant the fact that men too can have anguish and bitter regrets over abortions. They have obligations when their babies are carried to term, but no role if their babies are murdered before birth.

“Murder” is a harsh term – but less so, for instance to those who currently are wishing that President Trump and his family die (a tsunami on Facebook); or that police must be murdered; or, in gated Hollywood mansions, where they make fortunes by producing movies and TV shows featuring unrelenting violence. So “murder” is a malleable term, too – another case of Standards melting into No Standards. Whatever is right for them is… right for them.

Life is tough. Women who want to recast their biological realities are rescued by a culture whose lack of standards offers them the drugs or forgiveness and acceptance. Suddenly the culture wants us to play football without rules, yard-markers, or goalposts. Like changing the definitions of test scores so idiots can feel like geniuses; or awarding sports trophies for every participant – life might be tough, but is being made easier.

In America 2020, however, easier is getting harder every day.

There is no escaping the fact that God wrote the Ten Commandments. Not the Ten Suggestions.

The platforms of political parties… the pronouncements of cable-news pundits… the preaching of liberal pastors and priests… mean Absolutely nothing to the God of the Universe.

God’s standards do not depend on our own standards, nor lack of them. And surely He does not wait upon our opinion of His standards.

And that truth, even more than riots in the streets and loony political platforms, will shake the foundations of this Republic.

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Click: I Don’t Want To Get Adjusted

9-28-20

I am old enough to remember when every morning, in public school, we would have Bible readings. They were rotated among students who were willing to read and lead; and most of the readings were Old Testament Psalms, in deference I suppose to the Jewish kids in class.

I am old enough to remember being confused and resentful about the prohibitions, when such things became illegal.

And I am not too old to still feel sad about the “enlightened progress” achieved by that “reform.” I was not too young to realize – because I asked them, actually – if the Jewish kids minded the readings, or the once-a-week recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. No, none of them did. I even had a classmate whose family was “artsy” and forthrightly atheist. Kyra never minded, nor appeared warped by hearing Psalms read; certainly she never spray-painted graffiti on the school, or set fires in the library.

But the war against prayers and the Bible were only the early signs of America’s suicidal tendencies. I knew, despite my youth, that some adults predicted that these impulses would lead to, some day, attempts to eliminate any form of religious expression; a generation of young people rejecting traditional values; the denigration, not only of religion, but of patriotism, “family values,” mutual respect, and civility.

Will those times ever come; will those prophets ever be able to say, “I told you so”?

Oh, wait…

From people “offended” by Christmas displays in front of town halls, to objections to saying “Merry Christmas” to strangers (by the way: So what?) to arrests of Christians, and firings from jobs, many dots are being connected in many ways along the slippery slope.

This summer, committees at the Democrat National Convention made a show of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and pausing… silent… where “under God” would have been spoken. Almost every evening, for months, we have seen people on the streets of American cities and towns burning and stomping on the flag.

I call the current situation the “Purge of Allegiance.”

Disloyalty to the American flag and our larger nation and Constitution might technically be legal – sometimes I too am sick of what this society has become – but I would be willing to suffer the approbation and consequences. The street scum today might be aware of Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty or give me death.” Their version is, “Give me a sandbox to soil.”

Renouncing allegiance to one’s country is a step away from having no allegiance to a religious faith or cultural traditions at all. While you are thinking about that, anarchists are leaping to agree. Next on the downward spiral: Having no standards means just that – no standards of right and wrong. Going back to Aristotle and heretics and Relativists of recent centuries, “What’s right for me is right,” period. Anarchy.

American churches, with some exceptions, have bought into this new way of thinking. It is not new, of course – lies as old as the Garden of Eden. We are smarter than God, you see.

The American political system is surrendering to these forces in a hundred large and small ways. Patrick Henry never said, “Give me licentiousness…”

The American culture not only welcomes these awful events, but encourages them and profits from them. An actual curse of capitalism.

Let us think about what the Obama Administration ridiculed only a dozen years ago, those of us who “cling” to our guns and Bibles. While we still can. And thinking, further, about that ragged old flag and the time-honored Pledge…

How close is America becoming, at its (new) core, something that we, too, regret and despise? God forbid.

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Click: Johnny Cash’s “Ragged Old Flag”

8-3-20

My grandfather used to tell a story about an old man who went alone to church one Sunday morning when his wife was unwell.

When he returned home the wife asked her taciturn husband what the preacher’s message was about.

“Sin,” he answered.

She pressed him: “What about it, exactly?”

“He’s against it,” the husband replied.

I’m afraid that joke represents the extent of theology many Christians acknowledge. Also, I think it is similar to many citizens’ brand of patriotism.

We know what we are against; but do we know – much less fight for – what we believe in?

Most people are in the quiet center, the normal “middle,” of issues, debates, and controversies… but these times are neither quiet nor normal.

We ought to give thanks that every generation does not experience such momentous turmoil as we face today. But every once in awhile societies are surprised how suddenly the viciousness – of people, and of nature – can be unleashed.

Our current angst might have been precipitated by a pandemic, which unfortunately happens in cycles. And a history of racial injustice has precipitated periodic outbursts of resentments. But except for the coincidence of timing, it is unlikely that the current rioting, looting, and destruction directly are related to those phenomena. Or are spontaneous.

People on the nervous outskirts of these battle zones, or sitting in living rooms far away, watching war correspondents on the evenings news, wonder about the Americanized versions of Mogadishu or Kabul. They wish this mayhem to be a bizarre exception that will vanish some Monday morning. “This is awful, but what can I do about it?”

As Theodore Roosevelt said in another context, our choice is not whether to meet these challenges… but whether we meet them well or ill.

If the murderous street thugs perhaps are misguided youths who emerged like larvae from their parents’ basements around the same time… they will have to be chased, one by one, down into the parents’ basements if necessary. Lawbreaking never has been unaccompanied by penalties, whether in the Bible or in civil societies… until now, inexplicably.

Some Christians are very quick to quote Christ’s admonition to turn the other cheek when we are wronged. We may have different reactions, however, when Jesus is wronged.

The Bible tells us always to be ready to mount a good defense… and it may well be for settings beyond polite living-room discussions.

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked.” The Lord knows what is in the hearts of those who curse His name and defile His places of worship. The verse from Galatians concludes that whatever people sow, they also shall reap. That warning applies to enemies of the Cross… but also to those who are too timid to defend their faith and their God.

Luke 11:21 – “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are undisturbed.”

Luke 22:36 – “If you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one!”

We must remember that defense is different than revenge. The Lord sanctions defense of life and family and the Word; but “vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

“Repay no one evil for evil. Respect what is honorable in the sight of all.” People sit in groups, clucking about what they disdain on the evening news. You know what you resent, what you hate. What do you support; what do you love, enough to answer the anarchists and revolutionaries in kind?

Is this too fine a “needle” to thread? Does the Bible contradict itself? Of course not; it is precise, with detailed teachings. “All scripture is given by the inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the people of God may be perfected, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (II Timothy 3: 16, 17)

And we watch – we watch – as hordes topple statues of Mary and Jesus and saints. And destroy or spray-paint the ruined statues. We see acid, urine, and feces spread over the statues. Likewise are churches defaced, looted, and set afire. Flags are burned, and Bibles too. We hear the vilest curses screeched about Jesus, not to mention George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

We watch.

Like the old man who summarized the pastor’s sermon, “We are against” these things. But… what are we to do?

Be filled with righteous anger. Do not be overwhelmed with frustrated complaints. Pray about the outrages committed against our nation. God will answer us with wisdom.

Be “equipped” – grounded in the Word of God, and in the Declaration, the Constitution, and other foundational documents of our Republic. Affirm what you are for!

“Network” – seek out others who share your feelings. Not to complain, but to plan, to anticipate, to act. Be bold, be willing to go out; consider civil disobedience.

Do these things soon. Get ready. When – not if, but when – this all comes to your neighborhood, know how you will respond. Be ye doers of the Word, and not hearers only. History is threatened. History is watching.

History is now.

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Click: Mahalia Jackson

7-27-20

By suggesting that we revisit slavery, I do not mean to try it a second time. Of course not. I do mean the topic of slavery, a hot topic in America, as slavery and its legacy were the sparks that ignited the tinder of current, prolonged, anarchic, bloody riots throughout the land.

To revisit the facts, rather, about slavery requires a simultaneous confrontation with the implications and legacy of slavery, beyond facts, statistics, and numbers. Slavery over periods of history and various cultures; reflections of human nature; what it says about us.

Every era and every society in every land is stained with slavery of some sort. In ancient Egypt, the Jews were slaves for hundreds of years. In ancient China, entire ethnic groups were assumed to be inferior and therefore destined, or doomed, to slavery. In Central and South America slaves built mighty cities and temples. In Biblical times, slaves were written about matter-of-factly, just as they were considered in Athens and ancient Rome. The Irish of the 4^th century served almost naturally as slaves to Romans in Britain. Europe itself went through periods of slavery, feudalism, serfdom – only vague distinctions to the lowly. Many Irish who emigrated to the United States traveled as indentured servants, their liberties restricted, and virtually owned by masters until they labored their way to “freedom.”

The word-association of slavery to most Americans refers to Africans. Sold and then transported, mostly as field laborers, frequently assigned new names, separated from families, and physically bound. These conditions attended many slaves in many cultures through history. The majority of Africans in the “New World” were repopulated to the Caribbean and South American, actually only a percentage to North America.

Colonists and settlers, and later planters, seldom enslaved Native Americans, but Africans were in bondage, and that is why, despite the universal, and shameful, practice of slavery, Americans of all colors today associate “slavery” with Africans.

Did all European-Americans congenitally regard Africans as sub-humans? It is not borne out by the facts. Abraham Lincoln was appalled to his core when he encountered a slave market, and said “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” The thrust of his career and life – and death – was to eradicate slavery. Slavery was a burning topic at the founding of the United States, and all but a few of the Framers knew that they were compromising with evil to let it continue for a time. In one way or another the sin of slavery was an issue at both the highest and most local levels of American society for two generations – little comfort to those who still suffered under the lash – until a war was fought to free slaves.

I am something of a Civil War buff, and in my overflowing library I have a complete run of Harper’s Weekly, the landmark newspaper through which I get a sense of everyday realities and people’s feelings. The “Revisionist” historians contend that the Civil War was an economic conflict; agrarian vs. industrial; state sovereignty vs. a national system. These facts are true but insignificant compared to the reason Northern soldiers fought. Over and over soldiers agreed that slavery needed to be abolished, and this view was held by farmers from prairies and fields, farmers who had never seen a man with black skin; and by thousands of recent immigrants from Europe, who swore opposition to slavery. They too suffered and died, for four years.

With the same determination, of course, Southern soldiers died, sometimes to uphold slavery (although few of them owned slaves, or lived much better), sometimes for a fealty to their region’s traditions. Again, however, most of the bondsmen toiled in servitude as the war ground on.

Great Britain’s end to slavery was attended by little acrimony. As in many other countries, the legacy of slavery’s end was more benign than in America. Of course economic disparities endured with almost all freed slaves around the world in every situation; but the “racial divide” as well as economic and social stratification is more pronounced in the United States than almost anywhere else.

The descendants of slaves as a lot surely are better off by many standards than 150 years ago, when emancipated. But in the 50 years since the monumental array of programs first known as the War on Poverty, the same can hardly be said. The legacy, in contemporaries’ focus – not that of Booker T Washington or Martin Luther King – is disillusionment, bitterness, and resentment. At the moments its goals seem to range from reparations to impositions of new forms of segregation and preference.

We know these things if we have televisions or see newspapers, or leave our windows open a crack. It is a condition, not a theory, that presents itself as resentments find expression in fallen statues, looted stores, obscene graffiti, attacks on police, and, sometimes, murder. Long in the making, as I have limned, the angry violence has manifested itself, to the current degree, almost overnight… and will not recede overnight.

My purpose in “revisiting slavery” is not to roll out a history lesson; and as I said not to entertain an idea to return to its evil horrors. Of course not.

But I implore you to realize that slavery has not disappeared from this earth. There are more slaves today, studies say, than at any time in history. There are white slaves (prostitutes), sex slaves, child slaves. Arabs are involved in trafficking Africans. I was involved 20 years ago with the work of International Justice Mission, which fought slavery, mostly of children, in India – everything from sex to cigarette manufacturing. Just this month, leaked drone videos of Uighurs in China – rounded up by the thousands to work in fields and factories – in bondage. Slaves.

Finally, please consider the slave drivers, the masters, those who enable the system. It is you and me.

When you buy a range of products – we cannot hide behind ignorance – we often subsidize slave labor. What has made Walmart the biggest retailer in the country, and Apple the richest corporation, is products made cheaply in China and other Pacific and Latin countries; also along the Indian rim and in Africa. Shoes, shirts, electronics – you know.

Think of complicated ear bugs or calculators that sell for two dollars, or ten dollars; think of the many components, the plastics and wires, the making of them, the packaging, the shipping to the US, the distribution from ports to warehouses, the stocking of store shelves – and everyone making a profit along the way. You know that the women and children working 12-hour days back in those factories, “earning” perhaps 20 cents a day… are slaves by another name.

We are all complicit. Many people, confronted with these truths, hide behind excuses that “they probably are better off now than when…” No, that does not cut it. That is what Northern factory workers and purchasers of clothes said before the Civil War. “Oh, they are better off than in Africa.” Slavery is slavery is still is slavery.

American workers lost jobs because of foreign competition, and went to the Walmarts across the landscape for cheap goods – made by the foreigners who took their jobs. Suicidal insanity.

I am not arguing for a kinder sympathy for those who once profited from blatant field-slavery. No; of course not.

But I am arguing that we wake up to slavery in the world today. All of us. And whether tempted by radical politics, or deciding to tear down statues and destroy shops and set fire to police stations – let us instead direct our energies to eradicating modern-day slavery.

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Click: Softly and Tenderly

7-20-20

Do you notice in your Bible – the King James Version and some other versions — that words in the middle of sentences sometimes are italicized? Do you wonder why?

I love study Bibles, and profit from them. I believe that John Calvin’s Geneva Bible was the first to feature footnotes, reference notes, parallel verses, and explanations. It is possible that many Bible readers get lost in that frenzied information, and do not notice or wonder about randomly italicized words.

When I want only to read my Bible, to absorb its narrative and, yes, meaning, I open the “clean” Bible – Scripture as literature – that reads like a novel. No superscripts, no footnotes, no parallel accounts. The Word of God, after all. I recommend this: there are passages I read hundreds of times in the past that somehow seem new.

Back to italics. This is not a grammar lesson, but it is interesting to note that occasionally translators, hewing so strictly to original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts, came to places where sentences threatened confusion. So names, places, adverbs were supplied for clarity. They indicated those by italics. Occasionally, words or phrases were italicized for emphasis – dramatic or theological intensity.

And then there are words, especially those of Jesus, where He is quoted or cited as speaking in the present tense. Present tense for events hundreds of years ago?

Revealed truth is true, whether 2000 years ago or today. Words of Jesus, if applicable today, are often printed in the present tense. If this is good grammar, it is better theology. King James’s translators used “historical present tense,” especially from the Greek texts; the Catholics’ Douay-Rheims Bible employs italics similarly. The New American Standard Bible uses asterisks, by the way.

A big deal, or scholarly nit-picking? A hint: it’s a big deal, because Jesus speaks to us today. God is from Everlasting to Everlasting; and Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Note “is” and not “was.”)

We should always remember that whatever we read of Jesus’s wisdom and teaching, He speaks to us, today, as much as to the people around Him. Even on the cross, when He asked the Father to forgive “them,” I believe He meant us too… because our sins sent Him to die. When He looked down from the agony, I believe He looked into our eyes, not only of the people gathered there. “When He was on the cross, I was on His mind,” the song says; and that is not time-travel, but rather the ever-present incarnate Savior’s love.

All of this has come to mind as I think on Scripture’s accounts of times when Jesus wept. The most famous passage, “Jesus wept” (probably because of the trivia question, as the shortest verse in the Bible), before the grave of Lazarus whom He was about to raise from the dead. Weeping, perhaps, touched by Mary and Martha’s grief. But another time is particularly poignant:

As He approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, “If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side, and level you, and your children within, to the ground; and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not know the time of your visitation.

Yes. Jesus grieved for unbelief in the Holy City. Yes, He prophesied the imminent invasion and destruction of the city and its temple. Yes, He looked upon people who knew the Truth but rejected it. This scene is cited in Luke, chapter 19. Earlier, in chapter 13, we hear Him say:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate…

We live in a new dispensation; the Old Testament promises have been fulfilled… but its commands and warnings are still in the present tense. The United States might or might not be the New Jerusalem… but America as a Christian nation is Jesus’s place today as was Jerusalem then. Or… was His place.

As our continent was visited, explored, and colonized, it was also, from the first settlers, claimed for the cause of Christ. By planted flags, by prayers. By promises. Natives were evangelized. The Declaration of Independence, which still inspires people around the world, knelt before the Creator. Governments, including the Constitutional Republic we still live under, were careful to acknowledge God and organize under Biblical principles.

Today newcomers and new thinkers deny and insult these traditions, these pledges. The sacrifices of generations, the hopes of millions, destroyed as we said recently by the “foes of our own households.” They invent new “rights” to shred the heritage of the greatest nation in history. In the twinkling of an eye, America has gone from barely being aware of subversives and malcontents here and there… to being overwhelmed by anarchists, thugs, arsonists, looters, vandals, and murderers.

Surprising? Yes, many of us are shell-shocked. But… on one hand there should be no surprise, because America has methodically shackled religious liberty; removed God from classrooms and the public square; encouraged the promiscuous use of drugs and alcohol; allowed free expression of pornography and sedition; and promoted sexual deviance, abortion, marital abuse and dissolution, child and spousal exploitation.

But more surprising is that religious traditionalists and Christian patriots have allowed this to happen. As a rule they – we, excuse me – are merely sitting back and complaining to each other. This makes us as guilty for the destruction of all that America was, and could be.

One more Bible verse, from Hosea chapter 8: They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

This is not only a warning to our enemies in the streets. It is a grim promise from God. Past and present.

Meanwhile, Jesus weeps.

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Click: Jesus, Take a Hold

7-13-20

The tenth chapter of Matthew is one of the hardest chapters in the Bible. Not hard to understand, at all. No, it has the hardest truths, hardest warnings, and hardest of challenges – commands, really – as anywhere in Scripture.

It contains the words of Jesus, start to finish.

This is not the moony-faced Jesus of paintings on Sunday-school lessons or church bulletins or calendars. The chapter quotes the Jesus we saw in flashes like overturning the tables of money-changers in the Temple courtyard; or when he rebuked people. Just as God the Father in the Old Testament would show Himself sometimes as a God of jealousy and vengeance, so Jesus was sometimes “hard.”

When children need correction, we discipline them. When God sees sin, He hates its presence and routs it out. When Jesus perceived lack of faith, He sternly confronted His followers with… the Truth.

The Lord disciplines the ones He loves, and chastises every child whom He receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as children. For what child is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not His (Hebrews 12: 6-8).

Most of Matthew 10 is teachings and warnings, a battle plan for His warriors. The chapter names the disciples; directs who should be first given the Good News; and promises spiritual gifts of healing power.

Significantly, He says if people are not receptive to the Message, to “shake the dust from your feet and move on”! For such people and such communities, He said, what befell Sodom and Gomorrah would be better than the fates they deserve. Hard-sounding, but in our times there will be an urgency preceding Judgment; and some people will have stiff necks, hard hearts and stopped ears, will reject the Truth no matter what we do.

Jesus promises here that if we are in jeopardy in perilous times, the Holy Spirit will give us wisdom to answer, and power to withstand. This is the chapter where He reminds us that if a sparrow cannot fall without the Father seeing, how much more will He care for us? God knows the number of hairs on our heads, and will provide.

But then… get ready for the Hard Gospel. Not warnings, but marching orders into the midst of oppressors. Difficult Times, Persecution, Trials.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law…. He that loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me: and he that loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he that takes not his cross, and follows after Me, is not worthy of Me. He that finds his life shall lose it: and he that loses his life for My sake shall find it.

Thus saith the Lord.

I regret to say that many of our churches today, filled with Sharing the peace, and “Smile like you mean it” mantras, and happy music performances with PowerPoint projections of springtime fields, and more smiley faces on banners than crosses on the walls… they only preach half the Gospel. Or less.

They don’t know the Jesus of Matthew 10.

How many of us do? “Weren’t those warnings only for the early Church?” No. “Didn’t Jesus give these words as fall-backs for occasional crises they faced?” No, He spoke in the future tense. “Weren’t those words just for End Times?”

We are living in End Times. His words are for today.

Christians are under persecution in America, in the West. Not only in Communist and other oppressive regimes – where, despite persecution, individuals and communities of faith are thriving. But believers in the United States are being crushed from two sides: an Establishment that uses the power of the State to suppress rights, remove Bibles from schools, Jesus from the public square, references to faith from daily life, except, virtually, in secret. Where saying “God bless you” is proscribed, and statues of Jesus are defaced and toppled. Also squeezed, now, by common rabble, from below.

It is times like these that Jesus told us to be ready for… and how to be ready… and what to expect.

We should expect – no, we are seeing it now, aren’t we? – our neighbors and our children turning against us. The “world” defining us in libelous terms… and that we suddenly face life-choices that we never dreamed of; and with life-altering consequences. But Jesus here tells us, in effect, to preempt these attacks. Not only be ready for it, but proactively act it before it kills us.

For our sake. For His sake.

Choices are seldom easy. I guess that’s why they are “choices” and not slam-dunks. The “hardest” part of all the warnings and commands of Jesus in this passage is verse 36, right in the middle. It is hard to hear… but we see – especially in these very days – in the news and on the streets:

A man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

We need to understand that those rebels, the “protesters,” anarchists-with-initials, the vandals and arsonists and looters and murderers, the cop-killers… we need to understand who they are. They not a foreign army; they are not romantic revolutionaries; they are not philosophers with agendas for utopias; they are not lovers of anything but selves; they are haters. They hate the nation and our heritage. They hate themselves and the society that bred them. They hate the Revealed Word of God and they hate you.

And where did they come from? Jesus called them out already. “Foes of our own household.” They are perverted versions of ourselves. They grew from the soil of our increasingly secular, self-absorbed, prosperous, liberal and “accepting” culture.

We ignore the foes of our own household at our peril. What has happened lately is only a little foretaste. We cannot let it – and them – roll over us. We can continue to fool ourselves about where we were until recently in America, that we had “found” lives of comfort and security.

Just remember that Jesus said that those who find such lives… will lose them.

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Click: I’m America

7-6-20

Another thought? Gee, haven’t we discussed it enough with the protests and riots?Haven’t we put it into context with all the rules about confronting the virus? Isn’t the Fourth of July over? Are we going to debate these things endlessly? Don’t we have freedom? Didn’t we end slavery?

Well, no; yes; no; yes… not so fast!!!

Whatever views have been weaponized in these recent controversies – offensive and defensive – at the end of the day it is a good thing that citizens consider the value of freedom. Even if opponents characterize each other as using freedom to destroy, or freedom to suppress (the middle ground of debates has been abandoned), freedom is the essential matter at hand.

For those us who might confuse the terms – most of all us, at times – and to save yourself from registering for three or four college courses, a problem with contemporary society is that we have lost the distinction between freedom and liberty. Basically, freedom is an internal matter of the mind, a gift from God that is a matter of the heart. We are free from… fill in the blank; sin, for instance. And we are free to… fill in the blank; worship, assemble, speak, and publish, for instance.

Liberties are what we do with freedom. The Enlightenment thinker Rousseau mistakenly thought that freedoms were bestowed by the state (and not by God) and ten years after his death, the French Revolution erupted, defacing monuments and churches, massacring and beheading people. Significantly, the Revolution’s slogan was “Liberty (not Freedom), Equality, Fraternity.”

The Bill of Rights – the first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution – carefully recognized and guaranteed freedoms in America. Since then, and no doubt into the future, liberties have been debated, granted, modified, withdrawn. When slaves were freed, they became at liberty – subject to further efforts and guarantees – to exercise that freedom.

It is a distinction with an enormous and consequential difference. In times like these crazy days, we are reminded that Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots every generation. How that blood is shed, or for what causes, are dispositive questions we ask of Mr Jefferson, yet the willingness to rebel ought to be cherished.

Whether Christians and patriots are as willing to fight for things they believe in, as nihilists are willing to fight for things they don’t believe in, is the question that confronts history right now.

Who the Son sets free is free indeed.

John 8:36 records that promise. It is one of those wonderful Bible verses that is short in words but unlimited in meaning. Simple but profound. Every word should be parsed. “Who”? – a notice to all, without restriction. “Sets free” – as we discussed, all manner of things we might be free from… and we can joyfully consider all we are freed to! “Indeed” – God puts a period on the sentence; an emphasis; a promise of totality; no reservation.

“Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, free at last!” Dr King said. Carefully. Free… to enjoy liberties. History is littered with societies that have confused liberty with license.

Jefferson, seduced somewhat by some of Europe’s philosophers, did insert “liberty” in the Declaration of Independence’s famous passage, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Brilliantly crafted needle-threading: Rights including liberty are secured by governments supported by the people… in order to guarantee God-given rights… fulfilling Natural Law… and our Creator’s will.

And “Equality,” unlike a mere slogan and goal of the French Revolution, is addressed as something that is.

Next – as it always has been – is the question of what a free people will do with their liberty.

We know what anarchists, subversives, and nihilists do with it. What will Christian patriots do?

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Click: I’m Free

6-29-20

After many statues have been yanked down, marble figures broken, bronze artwork twisted, heads of memorialized people broken off, bodies and pedestals spray-painted with obscene words and Communist slogans…

And after so many windows broken it looks like memorials to Kristallnacht; after streets and stores and buildings covered with obscenities and slogans; random cars laid waste by clubs and tire irons; mothers and children terrorized; fires set in stores and dumpsters…

And after sections of cities have been occupied, stores looted of TVs and apparel in the name of civil rights for a dead man, after grocery stores and toy stores, many started by black people struggling to make a living…

And after police are told not to counter the anarchy, after police are killed, and after officials from the White House down to local mayors talk tough – or don’t – and the jungle is thereby encouraged to spread its savagery…

WHAT IF –

What if the Theodore Roosevelt statue at the museum is the next to go?

What if the next target is the Lincoln Memorial, slogans spray-painted all around, paint splashed on the Great Emancipator?

What if the Washington Monument is next, obscenities around the base, and then, maybe by drones, the top of the monument felled?

What if Mount Rushmore is defaced from the top, paint and acid dribbling down over the “evil” faces?

What if the House and Senate are shot up, rushing guards; if the Library of Congress is set afire? What is that long-feared attack on Times Square finally happens? What if the Statue of Liberty is the target by planes or drones, and explosions and fires in its base? What if headstones and memorials are defaced at Arlington National Cemetery?

What if… the targets shift to your town, your city hall, your police station, your schools, the car in your driveway, your front windows…

What if the nihilists continue to deface and burn churches, from across the street from the White House to… your neighborhood?

Or…

WHAT IF –

Those in “authority” sweep the “zones” and arrest the vandals? What if they look at news footage and video tapes and know who to prosecute? What if people who destroy public property pay for their destruction? What if the Department of Justice files amicus briefs on behalf of shop owners, business people, small entrepreneurs, and average citizens, against mayors and governors who prevented law enforcement, and aided and abetted the destroyers?

Further, what if police were allowed to be police again? What if police funding were restored and increased? What if deluded citizens stopped defunding and started defending?

What if Christian “leaders” stopped making excuses for savagery in the streets, and in their basements? What if Christian worshipers started to find preachers who started reading the Bible instead of Marx, who would look for lost souls instead of hiding criminals?

What if God would (in effect) apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah, in any event I mean give America one more chance?

WHAT IF –

America doesn’t deserve it?

In fact, we don’t. We have, as God spoke in II Chronicles, turned away and forsaken My statutes and My commandments which I have set before you; and served other gods, and worshiped them… And God would uproot them from My land which I have given them… And as for this house [which we may see as America, once dedicated to Him] which is exalted, everyone who passes by it will be astonished and say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land and this house?’ Then they will answer, ‘Because they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, who… embraced other gods, and worshiped them and served them; therefore He has brought all this calamity on them.

Many Christians know, and quote, over and over, an earlier passage in II Chronicles: If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

That is a very big if in there. What if God really wanted Solomon to beware – and for us to be warned – what calamity we may bring up ourselves?

How many ways we have strayed from Him!!!

What if He is a God of justice?

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Please view the music video this week. It is the instrumental version of achingly beautiful Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott (“Have mercy Lord, My God, for the sake of my tears”) by Johann Sebastian Bach. The violinist, Lisa Batiashvili, speaks before her performance about the street violence and downed airplanes, everything in between, in her homeland. The audience, Dutch people on their boats in Amsterdam Harbor, share the intensity of the sacred music.

The words in Bach’s full version ask God for mercy and plead for His forgiveness –
Have mercy, my God, for the sake of my tears!
See here, before you, heart and eyes weep bitterly.
Have mercy, my God.

Click: Have Mercy, For the Sake Of My Tears.

6-22-20

Pick and choose. It should be the new motto of the United States, surely more appropriate than e pluribus unum – “out of many, one.”

In fact we have become a culture that can be described as “out of many: many more.” No more unity. Only a push for uniformity.

It explains the New Abnormal for every totalitarian, from news anchors to street thugs: reliance on lies, half-truths, and intimidation. “Never mind what I told you,” W C Fields once barked at a caddy; “You do what I tell you!”

So the rest of the population, the vast majority, obeys or shuts up. Looting, vandalism, destruction, attacks, theft, and murder… most Americans watch on TV as if the events are parts of a bad cop show. What can we do? Change the (virtual) channel, is peoples’ mindset.

What Americans mostly do is what every decaying society throughout history has done. We pick and choose. We might express solidarity, or sign petitions, or express concern, unless “there, by the grace of God, go I.” Unless it is our shop being stripped bare; our neighborhood being terrorized; our friends or our police being murdered.

We pick and choose our outrage; pick and choose our sympathy. We have picked, and have chosen, to be blind fools.

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Pearl Harbor came quickly upon most citizens. And like on that morning, we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of a world war. Or the Second American Revolution? The pandemic, whether really random or orchestrated, muddies that calculation. But as urban rioting and destruction by strangely similar black-clad shock troops appear in cities of the world that never heard of George Floyd – or otherwise have little contact with black lives – “World War” is the apt description.

The utter outrage of public streets taken over; of public art being wantonly vandalized and ruined; of police being proscribed, attacked, and killed; of officials condoning and encouraging such savagery; all on top of occasional video-looped bad police actions – is nothing but nihilism. Definition: deadly anarchy aimed not at racism but at you and me; at the American Republic; at Western Civilization.

The battle theaters in this Third World War are not randomly chosen, and certainly are not spontaneous. We see the same black costumes, the same tactics, the same bundles of bricks.

And the same willing dupes at the fringes of rallies, in parades, occasionally pushed into the crossfire. Well-meaning moms and kids. Nature abhors a vacuum, so when when supine leaders accommodate, the radical Left provides leaders. When police are silenced, the radical Left provides street thugs. When small business owners – tragically, many of them black entrepreneurs – lose their life’s dreams, the radical Left provides a new socialist-style economy.

These templates, by the way, were outlined in the handbook Rules For Radicals by Saul Alinsky, two of whose students were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

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Christianity has become a Pick and Choose religion in America. Perhaps consumerism and national wealth has encouraged flaccid faith, the abandonment of Biblical standards. After all, who needs God when we have Social Security and Medicare, and TV comedies or music on hand-helds 24/7, and 12-step programs for everything? Not to mention drugs and booze and…

Welcome to America, 2020. And for many of those who still attend church, many denominations are Pick and Choose too. Biblical truths are bent, or ignored. Doctrine is regarded as mistaken or outdated. God’s words about morality and responsibility are, well… you Pick and Choose what’s “right” for yourself. Honk if you love Jesus.

Of course, a god who allows such “beliefs” is not a God at all. Suddenly, the God of our fathers has changed from “the Great I AM” into “the Great I MIGHT.”

I drag the Lord into this because He should be at the center of all our discussions, decisions, and values; as natural as the breaths we draw. But… we are, instead, suffocating as a nation these days, not healthily breathing.

Every day of the spreading stain of anarchy and nihilism might mean a year or so of restoration. Streets can be cleaned; windows replaced; graffiti sand-blasted. The replacement of statues would be decades of sickening, useless debates, and probably futile. Warped views of society – especially the perceptions of youngsters – might be irretrievable.

Perpetrators are likely never to face justice, despite starring on news videos. The American public, stretched thin from the plague and the anarchy, will have extra tax burdens from the clean-ups. Rather, this nightmare will likely continue, with more defecation, more defaced statues, more cultural heritage obliterated from national life – worse than when Stalin merely airbrushed his enemies out of photographs.

The prime offenders are the conspiratorial black-clad thugs, of course. I do not blame police (I mean for their lack of riot response); if my son were a cop I would advise him against suiting up for what has become a daily suicide mission. But the guiltiest parties are these: those who have choreographed these events, whether directed and funded by Soros or others; and elected officials in America. National “leaders” rattle swords, but their inaction invites more thuggery. And local “leaders” have been radical moles waiting for these opportunities, or hiding behind radical slogans because they are moral cowards.

In any event this national disgrace will outlive burned police stations, ruined public art, and broken businesses and life-dreams. As I said, this is a stain that spreads easily and in every direction. And will be hard to wash out.

It is coming to your neighborhood. Your city hall, your public library, your local shops. Maybe your home’s windows and front doors and parked cars. The choice of responding will be one more case of picking and choosing: Accommodation with cowardice and surrender; or committed, righteous, action — physical and spiritual.

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Click: A New Birth of Freedom