Heart of Mine

ONE DAY YOU MAY FIND TRUE LOVE THAT WILL LAST FOREVER AND EVER
TILL THEN YOU'LL SPEND A LIFETIME WISHING ONE TOGETHER
YOU NEVER THOUGHT SHE'D SAY GOODBYE
AND YOU'LL NEVER UNDERSTAND THE REASONS WHY

HEART OF MINE
HOW WILL YOU KEEP FROM DYING
STOP REMINISCING WHO IS SHE KISSING?
HEART OF MINE
OH WHAT'S THE USE IN TRYING
NO ONE CAN MEND YOU NOW

LOVE PLAYS CRUEL GAMES
YOU CAN'T BELIEVE SHE'S FOUND ANOTHER LOVER
"DOES SHE MISS ME?"
SOMETIMES YOU JUST CAN'T HELP BUT WONDER
NO, YOU CAN'T HOLD THE HANDS OF TIME
AND YOU'LL ALWAYS BE THE ONE SHE LEFT BEHIND

HEART OF MINE...

Neo-Desiderata - the new 'things to be desired' for men and women

I want to...stand up to brash, overbearing and prejudiced bullies at work or in school;

I don't want to...make up, read, listen to, re-tell, or harass others with crude or clever jokes and comments that suggest others are inferior or useless.

I want to...follow my conscience;

I want to...extend respect, reach out and help those whose path I come across, but are outside of my race, neighbourhood or familiar social circle.

I want to...be a skilled worker and gainfully employed, rather than depending mostly on a partner or any benefits;

I don't want...the pretence that I love my family more, when I'm really into the sham of self-centred, self-made personal success.

I want to...reduce the amount that I spend on or borrow for non-essentials like designer clothing, bling, prestige holidays, outings and vehicles, endless home enhancements and fake cosmetic accessories, while my extended family, the sick and frail need financial help. 

I want to...be authentic, caring and generous, not selfish.

I want to...stop my food and drink binges for good.

I want to...end my fear of giving up the material gain that boosts my acceptance and pride, as well as the admiration and popularity of friends and acquaintances.

I want to...feel loved for who I am, not what I have or can provide.

I want to...pay off my debts and save funds to help the hospitalised and terminally ill with their medical/family/financial hardships.

I want to...practice personal giving of resources and time to the hospitalised, the very young, the sick, the injured and suffering;

I don't want to...treat the mother/father of my children as an obstacle to my freedom.

I want to...stop carrying grudges over past hurts.

I want to...desire forgiveness for those who hurt me, and from those whom I've hurt, just like God desires to forgive me for hurting Him;

I don't want to...compete for my partner's attention and try so hard to keep my partner's eyes away from anyone else;

I don't want to...maintain my life partner's loyalty by constantly trying to attract his/her attention. My life partner should just love me for me.

I don't want to...be a secret domestic bully.

I want to...fight for a single lifelong loving intimacy with one person and not give in to explicit, or implicit irresponsible sexual behaviour;

I want...a permanent life partner as my friend and confidante, not someone who will either mostly ignore me when I grow old, or just wants me for sex fixes and domestic convenience.

I want to...avoid any TV and internet media that present desperate, misguided or exploited people as objects of lust, ridicule or comedy;

I don't want to...read or relay scandal and gossip about the famous.

I want to...be able to share my Internet surfing history without the shame of greed before God, or my peers and co-workers.

I don't want...my kids playing or acting out violent, or sexually explicit video content;

I want to...fight the indifference towards any programme that praises explicit violence, racism, sexist comedy, contempt for doing right and immediately change the channels.

I don't want to...let celebs, TV personalities, leisure pursuits, fan web-sites and magazines twist my views about my relationship with others, material things and the roles of men and women.

God made simple!

I worry about Marcus Borg's representation of God and it's not particularly because he suggests that the Bible is sometimes wrong. He appears to have built a perfectly sealed box that contains his neatly dovetailed theology of God's responsibilities and human rights. Where the biblical record stands outside of that box, he declares that it's wrong.

In the case of Saul, (1 Sam. 14) Borg suggests that since God, by reason of love, is incapable of wholesale extermination Himself, He could not have commanded Saul to slay the Amalekites, especially as it involved the slaughter of innocent babies. Yet, most of the Old Testament presents the God who exterminates individuals, whole societies and civilisations by various means, including war, famine and natural disasters. Even the reasons seem weak, e.g. punishing by death an attempt to steady a cart carrying the emblems of His presence among His people. Soldiers are burned to death for merely carrying out their orders to capture Elijah. The treacherous schemers who conspired to have Daniel executed, are not punished alone, but with their whole families. The prophets regularly make these events instructive by declaring that what is suffered is not a mere coincidence, but an act of retribution commanded by God.

Should we believe that major disasters involving the indiscriminate loss of life are beyond the purview of an omniscient God? Is it not within His power to devise an ingenious form of suffering (if the theology box allows for it) that magically spares innocent, promising young lives? Oh, and old, frail ones too? Certainly, if I had everything that God has at His disposal, I would...In fact, God should...and if not, He, or those who present Him otherwise are wrong.

The Old Testament writers grapple with uncomfortable ideas about God, including the fact that suffering is not just permitted, but ultimately executed by exclusive divine prerogative. God doesn't give us easy answers to His exercise of prerogative. Theology can't successfully merge God's declaration that He runs the entire universe with the reality that, in many cases, severe suffering, brutality and ruin affects innocent lives. Yet, the OT prophets do move us away from the capriciousness of heathen gods.

My mind can't be privy to most of God's reasoning. If I was, I'd be God and I would magically make everyone good and drop a really big book from the sky called 'God made simple' instead!

‘It’s another grey area!’

Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”
‘But He turned and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me Satan thou art an offence (σκάνδαλον) unto me for thou savourest not the things that be of God but those that be of men’ (Matt. 16:22,23)

Of course, this probably wasn’t what Anglican Mainstream had in mind when they used the word ‘scandal’ in the context of their quoted response to the 2005 pastoral statement on Civil Partnerships. Nevertheless, the meaning of the word, scandal has changed considerably from its Greek root. A far cry from the idea of public disgrace is a word originally describing the small twig covered with bait that collapses under pressure to close a trap, thereby restraining or killing the unwitting prey. Peter’s misleading advice would be a collapsing twig, if relied upon during the onslaught of Christ’s necessary suffering as the rejected Messiah, the Lamb of God. It would thwart His prophetic role in delivering our salvation and the conclusive indictment on the guilt of that, or all other societies that superficially embrace the rule of God. The church should remember that even to this day.

The cross itself was to Jews a σκάνδαλον (1 Cor. 1:23), repulsive to those who superficially could not see God’s salvation behind its indelible mark of divinely imposed shame. The σκάνδαλον is merely the inadvertent trigger of a moral calamity, but it is connected to the trap of discouraging adherence to God’s scripturally revealed purpose. By this means, it causes actual harm to the mission of the church. In spite of Peter’s best intentions, Jesus knew that paying attention to ‘the things of men’ was a diversion from His priorities which, if it continued, would jeopardise the primary mission of the Messiah as revealed in scripture. What things divert us from our scripturally revealed priorities in life?

Christ indicated that these triggers of moral calamity are impossible to prevent, but those causing them reap divine rejection: ‘Woe unto the world because of offences (σκανδάλων)! for it is necessary that offences (σκανδάλα) come; but woe to that man by whom the offence (σκανδάλων) comes.’ (Matt. 18:7)

For Christ, even in the twilight of the widespread defection from God, His commitment to His scriptural purpose remained ‘black and white’. He was following the ‘Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow’ (Jas 1:17)

Yes, Isaiah predicted the era of grace and yet he declared, ‘To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn’ (Is. 8:20)

So, morality, sexual or otherwise, is not as grey as it seems.

Continue in My Word

Christ asked, ‘Who do men say that I the Son of Man am?’ (Matt. 16:15) There were numerous opinions doing the rounds about Jesus’ origin. The answers ranged from a prophet to a genuine descendant of King David. When Simon was challenged his answer was inspired, ‘You are the Anointed One, the Son of the living God.’ He discovered Jesus to be (as we do) the rightful heir to the throne of Israel, the King of the eternal heaven and earth restored under God; the Messiah: uniquely endorsed by every true prophet, by signs, wonders and His ultimate resurrection through the Holy Spirit.

In spite of teachings that contemporaries found unpalatable and incompatible with their world view, Peter held on. He declared ‘Lord to whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life.’ (John 6:68)

‘If you hold to my teaching, then are you my disciples’ (John 8:31)

Christ’s Great Commission of discipleship (Matt. 28:19) is undergirded by holding to Christ’s teachings in the face of modern distortions and hostile traditions and cultural norms from all quarters. We need to maintain a consistent thoughtful challenge to a spiritually reckless society in church, at work and at home. For instance, Christ opposed form and ritual when it became repetitive, obstructive and unhelpful to ordinary outsiders and externalised. He challenged self-promoting civic-mindedness. He challenged the cultural distractions that drew inordinate time and attention away from thoughtful reflection upon God. The scripture was His defence against error.

An angry exchange with the Pharisees followed his display of God’s amnesty towards the publicly shamed adulteress.

In that exchange, Jesus also explained what freedom really is, ‘Every who sins is a slave to sin, Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.’ (John 8:34, 35). Sin is enslavement, dragging us back to the imprisonment of our senses and short-term satisfaction. Under the power of sin, we cannot choose, for it is not so much self-rule, as addiction and self-delusion. Freedom is to escape the slavery of sin, rather than accept deception. There’s no middle ground, we either surrender to God’s yearning for our exclusive devotion, or await dispossession after a life enslaved to the double-minded pursuit of worldly advancement (i.e. Mammon). Neither permits a rival. Since Christ is the eternal Son, He can share His permanent status in God’s household, ending the perpetual empty cycle of earthly accumulation and the distortions caused by godless policies, attractions and notions at every turn, however strongly-held.

So, our Great Commission is really to expose the deceits of our era with gospel truth before our society completely disintegrates. It’s a call to declare to the world, by judicious word and example, the completeness of Jesus as the cure for our futile man-made distractions: the credit-crazed retail madness, the domestic property shrine-building, the techno-latry, the constant binges on food and alcohol and the lure of irresponsible relationships. It is not simply to win converts at truth’s expense.

It is to follow Christ in climbing His mountain of progressive freedom from worldly accumulation, self-promotion and distraction. So, wherever we are now, however far from the summit, however fearful of that path, let’s promise to keep hold of each other’s hands and start that journey today.

For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. (2 Cor. 4:6)

Not by the will of man

Imagine yourself to be a zealous Hebrew. You’ve memorized much of the Torah. It’s pronouncements against wrongdoing have stirred up a deep sense of outrage over constant injustices and the irreverence towards God in your society. You see the weak trampled upon and the poor exploited. Is nothing sacred anymore? You realise that even the tribal leaders are turning a blind eye to moral disintegration and brutality. As in today’s society, some are even worshipping worldly ideals (idols) and consulting thoroughly misguided spiritual leaders. Old habits, especially bad ones, die hard.

You’ve not been sleeping well: you have a recurring nightmare that the hostile border skirmishes with a neighbouring race will escalate into all-out war. In each vision, your people are ravaged by massacres, famine and disease. You see them colonised by that same heathen nation. It seems to be an omen of impending punishment for defection from God. So you decide to ask for an audience with the elders. You are going to warn them, speaking up for justice and speaking up for God.

In preparation for your meeting the council of elders, you spend time meditating upon the Torah and you come across these words:

‘But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded him to say, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, must be put to death…If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him.’ (Deut. 18:20,22).

No other religion in the world has held its spokesmen to a higher penalty for the mistaken predictions. That’s why Jesus’ total fulfilment of these true prophecies about the Messiah is so crucial.

The dilemma that you now face is one that every true prophet of Jehovah has faced. Are the visions and nightmares from yourself, or God? How do you speak forth that message when that transcendentally pure God, who has promised to demonstrate His power in the universe by predicting the fate of civilisations, has also pronounced the death penalty on those who misrepresent Him. One mistake and you’re toast.

The scriptures are a record of Israel’s history and the messages of those prophets who stood the test of time. It was not merely enough to produce a vague long-range forecast of how history would unfold. In the short-term, prophets predicted events that could be verified by their contemporaries and they had to do so with unerring accuracy. The biblical record that we now have is of those prophets whose words survived under that constant threat of the death penalty.

Micaiah was such a prophet. He declared God’s word to Ahab, the heretic king of Israel, who had forged an alliance with Jehoshaphat, the King of Judah, to fight the Arameans in the battle of Ramoth-Gilead. (1 Kings 22)

Before the battle, Ahab consulted prophets loyal to him and they emphatically claimed that God would prosper his forces in battle. Even today, we find that our spiritual leaders infuse their speeches with political partisanship, sexually deviant ethics and misguided nationalist zeal, rather than divine insight. In spite of our society’s godless backdrop of irreverence and mindless overindulgence, they say, ‘we’re fine, we’ll do well and God will bless our exploits everywhere’. False prophets!

Quite sensibly, Jehoshaphat wanted to consult a genuine prophet beforehand, so reluctantly, Ahab summoned Micaiah. After being warned en route to predict victory, Micaiah sarcastically chimed in initially with the false prophets. He then declared the horrible truth of God’s judgment, Ahab’s inexorable deception by lying spirits:

Then Micaiah answered, “I saw all Israel scattered on the hills like sheep without a shepherd, and the Lord said, ‘These people have no master. Let each one go home in peace.’ The king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, “Didn’t I tell you that he never prophesies anything good about me, but only bad?”

Micaiah continued, “Therefore hear the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on his throne with all the host of heaven standing around him on his right and on his left. And the Lord said, ‘Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and going to his death there?’

“One suggested this, and another that. Finally, a spirit came forward, stood before the Lord and said, ‘I will entice him.’ “‘By what means?’ the Lord asked.

“‘I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouths of all his prophets,’ he said.

“‘You will succeed in enticing him,’ said the Lord. ‘Go and do it.’

“So now the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouths of all these prophets of yours. The Lord has decreed disaster for you.” (1 Kings 22:17 – 23)

Given the dire consequences of false prophecy, Micaiah endorsed the prediction with his life:

Micaiah declared, “If you ever return safely, the Lord has not spoken through me.” Then he added, “Mark my words, all you people!”

In the description of the ensuing battle, Ahab tried to escape his fate by disguising himself, while insisting that Jehoshaphat wore his regalia. The king of Aram’s chief strategy was to target Ahab for assassination. So, initially, the Aramean charioteers pursued Jehoshaphat in his regal attire, mistaking him for Ahab. Eventually, they gave up chase realising their mistake…

So, it might be nice to end this story now, asking you to discover for yourself whether Ahab escaped in disguise and then had Micaiah executed on his return.

Let’s just say that’s why Peter declared: ‘For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.’ (2 Peter 1:21) Remember that when you read your Bible.

SPOILER ALERT:

‘But someone drew his bow at random and hit the king of Israel between the sections of his armour. The king told his chariot driver, “Wheel around and get me out of the fighting. I’ve been wounded.” All day long the battle raged, and the king was propped up in his chariot facing the Arameans. The blood from his wound ran onto the floor of the chariot, and that evening he died.’ (1 Kings 22:34,35)

Why fight God or His word, when He can bend any chain of innumerable random events, even altering the flight of a stray arrow, if necessary, to defeat the shrewdness of His enemies?

‘The just shall live by faith’

In Romans 1, Paul emphasizes why he is not ashamed of the gospel. It contains the revealed path to righteousness from God’s standpoint. It’s the one and only means by which God can get us on the right side of His perfect justice and thereby bless us eternally.

Paul backs this up with a supportive quote from Habakkuk. The prophecy assured Jews, dispossessed for their defection from the Old Covenant, that there would be a complete amnesty for a remnant. Those that God would declare JUST, i.e. under amnesty, He would miraculously deliver from captivity. The remnant would be characterised by their response and submission to His prophetic direction at that time, not by trying to maintain careful temple observances dating back to Moses (since that would be impossible in Babylon).

So, they would survive captivity as a chastened, humbled minority without the observances of the Law, anticipating God’s eventual deliverance: ‘the just shall live by faith’ (Hab. 2:4). Paul is saying that we can no more rely upon a return to ritualized observances to survive beyond this coming retribution than Habakkuk's Jewish remnant could. We will survive (as they did) by depending upon and responding to the higher challenge of immediate and prophetic direction provided by the Holy Spirit. Outnumbered and at odds with the whole world, but it’s the only way out.

Therefore Paul sets about explaining the outworking of universal retribution upon an ungrateful human race. This is why both the Jew and Greek find themselves in the same position: guilty before God and in need of the gospel. This view also explains Paul’s later castigation in Romans 2 of anyone who tried to damn his Gentile converts by moralizing over rituals. While he may have had his own era in mind, the scale of his declaration regarding God’s retribution towards man’s unyielding contempt is universal: ‘The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness’ (Romans 1:18)

This outpouring of God’s indignation is a current, rather than future process of supreme, inescapable justice. It ‘is being revealed from heaven’: RIGHT NOW, current and inexorable. The scope of condemnation is universal, ‘against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men’.

THANK GOD WE NOW HAVE CHRIST, for without Him, we are marked men and women, aggravating our desperate guilt.

‘For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen’. (Romans 1:20 – 26)

Far from being overwhelmed with gratitude toward the transcendent eternal God who orchestrates all of His creation in congruous order for our providence, mankind wilfully degrades this naturally revealed truth with recklessly arrogant supposition. We have replaced sincere heartfelt devotion to God with a servile fear of the transient powers of nature as self-sustaining deities, even portraying them as supernaturally empowered humans and animals. Look at how steroid-loaded ‘comic-book’ super-nature dominates every aspect of popular culture. We even invest grotesque, feeble, unworthy and contradictory worldly ideals, values and pursuits with divine greatness. We re-direct supreme devotion towards them. The guilt is self-evident.

God is presented as delivering mankind over to this wilful rejection of natural revelation. He does not resist our distortions forever. Without saving grace, the retribution is that we eventually become helpless hostages to this distortion of His natural revealed purposes, even in our sexual desires.

This is important because it explains God’s justice in relinquishing the majority of mankind to the blind debasement of natural order. it was mankind’s prideful self-deception that began the whole  descent into idolatry. Through the abandonment of our revealed purpose, man embraced sense-worship. God justly let them have their way, only to face the eventual penalty.

Paul says that the result of this patent disregard for the conventional purpose of sex is disease and ruin:

‘Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.’ (vs. 27)

It would therefore distort the whole thrust of Romans 1 and 2 to limit the biblical description of how normative sexual expression was abandoned, as some liberal writers have done. Rather than relating to very specific types of violent, forced sexual activity, the resultant depravity plainly refers to homosexual acts, whether consensual or otherwise. Yet, as sinners, we have all participated in the terrible progression towards this result. We were all co-conspirators. In order to resonate with his audience, Paul describes the acts as unconventional: ‘para physis’ – beside nature, thereby reversing the familiar charge of his critics that his gospel ‘set forth customs (ethe) which it is not lawful for us to receive, or to observe, being Romans’ (Acts 16:21)

Paul is mapping out the guilt of all mankind and the consequences of this path that discards God: the complete degeneration of God’s purpose for humanity: ‘Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.’ (Romans 1:32) Mankind finally challenges God to all-out war by encouraging the final overthrow of conscience and divine government. This is why we all deserve death, both Jew and Gentile. It’s also why we all need Christ.

In our collective shame, we still cannot boast privilege and preference. As spiritual beggars before Christ, the only cure for us all (Jew, Greek, or otherwise) is to embrace the only amnesty of God by reliance upon the generous, eternal promises of His gospel.