THE MESSAGE OF CHRISTMAS

In the first century AD, apostle Paul wrote with both wisdom and passion to his Galatian friends and disciples in these words:

 

When he wrote of 'turning back again to the weak and elemental things, to which you desire to be enslaved all over again', he was writing about what would eventually, in Latin, be known as religion: the act of binding up again one who had previously been set free.

My longing for all of us at this time of year - at whatever time of year really - is for three things: one, that we receive the adoption as sons that he wrote about; two, that we be known by God; and three, that we stay faithful and do not turn back again to the weak and elemental things.  So follows my seasonal message - with love.

۞

The whole point of what religionists have corrupted into Christianity and the Christian Religion – the whole point of what is celebrated at Christmas time – is that people can be in right relationship with God without keeping the ancient laws.  You do not have to be a person of the law to be a child of God.  That was the true message of Jesus and of the first disciples of Jesus.  That is the whole point of the story that is given to us in what we call the New Testament.  Testament means Covenant.  The Old Covenant meant you had to keep the law of the ancient fathers; the New Covenant means you do not.

In the Old Covenant, you demonstrated you were a person of faith by being a person of the law.  The law is not what ‘saved’ you, faith was.  But the law put limits and perimeters on behaviour in order to keep people on the right track – until the New Covenant.  The inaugurator of the New Covenant was Jesus.  That is what the religionists of Jesus’ own day did not accept; they insisted that faith had to be faith in the law to give and maintain their right relationship with God.

That is what got Jesus killed by his own religious leaders.  They could not and would not accept his central message: you can be a person of law but not a person of faith – in which case you miss the mark.  But just as clearly (in order to embrace those who do not trace their ancestry to Abraham), you can be a person of faith but not a person of law.  And for “sons of Abraham”, they had to be sure they moved their allegiance from law to faith, because it was quite evident that law is incapable of saving a person.  To Jesus, you demonstrated that you were a true person of faith by realising that the law was good but that it could not and would not deliver you to right standing before God.

The whole point of Jesus – the whole point of what we sometimes call Christmas – is that you no longer have to have religion to have God; you no longer need to keep any code of religion or law to please God.  That’s the scandal of it all that prompted the hatred.  What he asks of us all – no matter who we call our earthly father – is that we move from faith in law and religion to faith in Jesus.  Why?  To religionists and law-keepers, Jesus was a nuisance, a heretic, and an infidel (an ‘unfaithful one’); to God, Jesus was and is the ultimate man of faith.  When the religionists had Jesus killed, they thought they had won; to God, Jesus had won and his New Covenant was now in place – by faith in Jesus, you have right standing with God, and neither the law itself nor death that results from breaking the law hold any fear for people of faith.

What are popularly understood as heaven and hell are now just childish sideshows.  Faith in Jesus not only grants one right standing before God, it empowers us to actually do what the law demands without having to be a slave to it.  And that is precisely the message the religionists of Jesus’ day hated with a vengeance.  You can live a righteous and virtuous life without having to be a slave to law – any law, or religion, or creed.

If you read the story in chapter 15 of the book of Acts in the New Covenant, you will quickly see this point.  The scandal of the real message of Jesus provoked a hatred and a vengeance in the hearts of the religionists and they pursued Jesus to his death and then went after his followers until they were all gone – mostly murdered, which they saw as righteous killing.  Jesus’ disciples were doing what Jesus instructed them to do; and while they were doing it, the religionists came right into their gatherings and told the people not to believe them and insisted that they must keep the “law of Moses” (the Old Covenant mandates) in order to be right with God.

The religionists lost that battle – but they won the war.  Today, if you actually follow the message of Jesus and insist that you don’t have to keep the law – any law – in order to be right with God, you will be not just harassed, you will be ignored – the ultimate indignity.  In some parts of the world, you, like Jesus and his disciples, will be murdered.  And you don’t have to be ‘preaching’ the message; simply believing it is enough in some places to get you killed.  There is a lot at stake in moving from faith in law and religion to faith in Jesus.  And that is precisely why many choose to combine the two and corrupt and pollute the faith with all sorts of law and religion.

The world cannot tolerate free people.  Freedom is a scandal.  People do things I don’t like and that’s not right.  They should be punished for doing things I find offensive.  My religion says such-and-such is wrong, so if I have the power – or I can steal it – I can make laws to punish it so I’m not offended any more.  We don’t seem to stop and think if maybe the punishment is more offensive than the crime; if perhaps anger at being offended is more important to me than concern and love for a fellow-human.

All of this is what drove the Crusades of a thousand years ago.  Raging and raving men and women, who completely misunderstood Jesus and his story, took the law into their own hands and raped, murdered and plundered whole tracts of the world.  And they still rave and rage today.  They put their faith in law and religion and wage war on any who disagree with them.  They see themselves as Ambassadors for God – doing his job for him.  They are so important to God that God turns a blind eye to their hatred and atrocities believing, as they do, that God is on their side and “the end justifies the means”.  Or so they think.  The US has become an incestuous breeding ground for this.

It never seems to occur to them that if God is God, he can and will do what needs to be done, without our interference.  They think they have to help God out.  They misread the Old Covenant scriptures that describe the battles and wars of history as giving them permission to carry on with those same battles and wars; without ever stopping to ask if the history might have been written to prevent further atrocities rather to encourage and empower them.

The entire New Covenant story in the second part of the bible demonstrates what happens to those who love and live the freedom of Jesus’ message.  And the majority of the hatred and vengeance comes from the hearts of people whose only aim in life seems to be to take over from God in ordering ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ and determining who goes there.

I am deeply, deeply ashamed of the Crusades.  The scriptures have a saying that goes, “The name of God is blasphemed because of them/you” – because of the arrogant and presumptuous religionists and people of the law who obviously know more and better than God, and who feel the need to act when God seems to be far away and inactive in protecting their interests.

Why are we so outraged when the shoe is on the other foot?  Why are we so angry when we reap what we have sown – especially when our faith teaches us that that is a central principle of life: you reap what you sow?  Is it because we think we are so right, and more important, and more righteous, and ‘on God’s side’?  What if God doesn’t have a side but instead looks into our hearts to see what is there.  Perhaps he sees what Jesus saw in the hearts of some of the religionists and lawyers of his day: he called them “whitewashed tombs”; nicely painted on the outside but full of death and corruption on the inside.

As far as I am concerned, our “way of life” is not worth protecting when it is like what Jesus described: a whitewashed tomb.  God sees the heart; and when the heart is corrupt – because of religion or law or the lack of either – we can make no special claim to God because of our history or our polity.  We all reap what we sow.  Sowing rapacious capitalism and so-called democracy – and the religion that supports it – will come back to haunt us, if it hasn’t already.  At its core is a rampant superiority complex, and we need to get down off our high horse and think again about our unmitigated hubris or we will die by that with which we killed others: swords, guns, bombs, disease, famine and bitter hatred.

We are so hell-bent on demanding that God is on our side that we fail to see that God’s concern is who is on his side; who is more interested in being right with Him than in being faithful to some law or religious code.  It seems to me that God is more interested in our having a personal relationship with him than a relationship with an ancient book purportedly about him.  What most people don’t seem to get is that that is entirely possible.  We don’t need a book or a law code or a religion or people acting as go-betweens.  That is the message of the New Covenant; that is the message of what happened at what we call ‘the first Christmas’.

 

Best wishes,

Kevin.

MY CONTENTION (8)

Reconciled Justified and Free

Excerpt from Wesley's grand hymn 'Amazing Grace'

Now concerning the message of Paul I alluded to earlier, it is probably worthwhile reading his letters to the Galatians and the Romans, if not the book of Acts with his letters interspersed as I indicated earlier.  Paul seems to me to have three major themes as under.

The human dilemma, as I call it, is primarily three issues: hostility, guilt, bondage.  We are, in our unredeemed state, hostile to God, guilty before God and in bondage to our situation – unable to free ourselves from it.

According to Paul, turning our hearts and attitudes towards God, fully trusting in Jesus for our acceptance in His presence and dying to self and the pursuits of the kingdom of man are how we are extricated from our dilemma.  But – as Paul knew full well – these are only possible because of the mercy and grace of God whose pleasure is to have us with him in full relationship as His children.

What the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus mean (in combination) is that God’s righteous demands are met by His gracious decree and, by fully trusting Jesus, we are reconciled (addressing the hostility), forgiven and justified (addressing the guilt) and made fully free (addressing the bondage).

Freedom in Christ is thus a major and central theme in “the faith once for all handed down to the saints” and, therefore, Pauls message.  In Paul’s and Jesus’ day, the Jews were stuck in the old covenant relationship they had with God under Abraham, Moses and David and the law that applied to that.  God’s new administration began with His full acceptance of the life and ministry of Jesus (as I pointed to earlier) and this is the new covenant.

In this new covenant, there is no distinction between Jews and others, male and female, slave or free-man.  But it was this that the Jewish religious leaders of the era could not and would not accept.  Hence the record of persecution we read in the book of Acts; and hence the violent deaths of not just Jesus but almost all of the original apostles and the lifetime persecution of many of the first disciples.

People – whether Jew or Gentile, man or woman, from whatever station or profession or occupation in life – who were once in bondage and unable to extricate themselves from it, have been set free in and through Jesus Christ to be all they were created to be by God the Father.  The Father welcomes all as children of God.  Unfortunately, freedom in Christ is despised and ridiculed and the children of God are pursued as criminals.  They disperse throughout the world, sharing the good news of the freedom they have in Christ.  Yet all the while – and continuing to this day – the religionists stay their course of ‘creeping in unnoticed’ and ‘turning the grace of God into acts of wanton violence’, in part by denying and legislating against that freedom.

And that, my friends, is the meaning and definition of ‘religion’: the act of binding up again otherwise freed people.  Unfortunately, the religionists have fully taken over and claimed for their religion many of the ideas and words of the new covenant gospel of Jesus and Paul.  Today, what ‘the Church’ says is way more important than what Jesus and Paul did and taught.  And when there is a clash of ideas – as with William Tyndale and his English translation of the New Testament – religion and church close ranks and silence those who seek to “contend for the faith once for all handed down to the saints” as Jude wrote.

Today, I contend as Jude urged and Paul lived.  Religion and church have completely turned things on their head.  White is black and black is white; freedom is bondage and bondage is freedom; religion is good when it is (by definition) bondage; church is good when it is (by definition) stuck in the old covenant.

Is it any wonder that, on the one hand, it has no answers for a fragmenting world and, on the other hand, it stands in complete denial of its original DNA.  If we want “the faith once for all handed down to the saints”, we will not find it in religion and church – these abandoned it just under two thousand years ago, for the ‘mess of pottage’ that is the Christianity that followed.

And likewise, it is not found in books; it is found in a one-on-one, face-to-face, fully mutually beneficial relationship with God the Father through Jesus Christ our Lord with no human intermediaries, go-betweens or mediators – something religion and church struggle to understand or come to terms with.

Anyone who stands with Jesus, Jude and Paul (and all the others of course) will be silenced one way or another.  It is so today; it is as it has always been; it is as it always will be in the kingdom of man.  But let me remind you of some words of Jesus.  Please, I urge you, read John 15:18-27.  Here is the first part of it: “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated me before you.  If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world but I chose you out of the world, on account of this, the world hates you.  Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’  If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they kept my word, they will keep yours also.  But they will do all these things against you on account of my name, because they have not known the One who sent me….”

What troubles me most I think is that, for all the so-called Christian shouting about the inspiration and authority of the bible, it is the bible – or certain parts of it – that the religionists are ignoring.  I trace this back to the unmistakable human trait we call hubris.  We have misread our sovereign human will as the right to be impudent, arrogant, selfish and grasping – all things that are often seen by us as virtues, not vices.

The Church takes to itself a perceived right to be an authority and impose its will on gullible humans – all religions do it.  The Church puts personal ‘health, wealth and happiness’ front and centre of its game plan – all religions do that too, even if it is in the form of some martyrdom complex.

The Church grabs for everything it can get by way of worldly advantage, whether in the form of toleration by the authorities, tax concessions or ready permits to do things Jesus and Paul stood firmly against – like owning property and erecting buildings.  We fail to notice the gospel teaching that 1) God no longer dwells in temples made with human hands; and 2) our bodies are the temple of God in the new covenant, and together, what the new testament writers called ekklesia (not church) is Christ’s body on earth.

The Church thinks it is (and claims for itself) the new testament ideas of ekklesia and “the body of Christ” – simply because somebody, a few hundred years ago, said it is so.  And the human bias kicks in: never let the truth get in the way of a good story.  Consequently people have been murdered (William Tyndale for example) because they protested that such a claim is not only preposterous, it is patently false – linguistically, rationally, and theologically.  How can the body of Christ (the ekklesia) be made up of corrupted members and members who do today exactly what the Pharisees did to Jesus and Paul and the first disciples?  Is the body of Christ anti-Christ?  Can it be – linguistically, logically, theologically?

Nothing in the new testament can lead us to the presumption that we humans get to decide who is in with God and who is not.  And there is nothing in there that allows us to rewrite what it takes for us humans to become children of God.  Yet we have been led to believe that if we hook into the Church and the ‘Christian Religion’, we have our fire insurance and God has to accept us no matter what.  That is complete and utter bunkum.  To become part of the family of God, we get there as Jesus did – by death and resurrection.  Only for us, because Jesus’ death was a one-off sacrifice for all, for all time, our death is death to self and the kingdom of man; and our resurrection is the dawn of a new life lived for the household of God and the freedom of the good news of Jesus.  [See Romans 6]

>>  END OF SERIES  <<

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The Faith Once Delivered...
 

As so often happens for me when I write, I end up back at the beginning.  Whenever I talk like this to people – even people who have been in church all their lives – they don’t recognise what I am saying as an old or historic idea but more as some revolutionary concept nobody’s ever told them about before.  That’s probably because they haven’t.

As I said at the beginning, it is my contention that Australia has yet to see, hear and experience a full and unadulterated presentation of the good news of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ, of freedom in Christ – and of the revelation of ekklesia and the new covenant as delivered to apostle Paul.

And since, in our New Testament, there is no actual mention of either ‘church’ or ‘religion’, this presentation of the good news of Jesus must be without church and without religion.  We have corrupted the original message in the same way as Luke described in Acts 15, insisting that the law of Moses must be kept and that the structures and institutions of religion must be accommodated.  Nonsense and double nonsense!  Such insistence is the “wanton violence” (licentiousness or lasciviousness in some translations) Jude was talking about.

I want to loudly and repeatedly echo the words of Jude that I referred to at the beginning.  I have made every effort, over and over again, arguing for this message for most of my adult life, and I appeal yet again:

Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints.  For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into wanton violence and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

Religion and its institutions will do all within their power – as did the Pharisees in the first century – to make it appear that I and people like me are the ones who have “crept in unnoticed”; ungodly persons, marked out for condemnation.  Isn’t it strange how white has become black and black white?  ‘Wanton violence’ [probably a reference to the imposition of circumcision onto non-Jewish disciples as in Acts 15] was, to the apostles, the Pharisees trying to impose the Law of Moses on Jesus’ disciples; ‘wanton violence’ now is disciples of today strongly contending for the good news of Jesus – of freedom in Christ as first delivered to the apostles – against the religious fortresses and control centres – or so it seems.

The perpetrators of today’s ‘wanton violence’ as discussed by Jude are the fortresses of church and religion.  They represent the ‘ungodly persons who are turning the grace of God into wanton violence and denying our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.’  And they are marked for condemnation because of that final idea in Jude’s description: they deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.  But you watch: as always, it will be me and others like me who are called infidels and terrorists, not the actual unfaithful ones inflicting terror on people.

¤

That said, let’s move on to the subject of the “the faith once for all handed down to the saints” Jude was writing about.  What is this?  Apostle Paul is perhaps the quintessential ‘contender for the faith’.  Let me reiterate a little from the beginning of this series.  According to Ephesians, this ‘handing down’ was to apostle Paul: “the stewardship of God’s grace which was given to me for you [Gentiles]; that by revelation there was made known to me the mystery...” (3:2-3)  And the ‘mystery’ is not some weird invention of Paul himself but “the mystery of Christ, which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.” (3:5).

One of the things I have found most helpful is to read the book of Acts and then, at the point where each fits, read the Epistles in their context.  For example, at the point of reading about the establishment of the ekklesia in the Province of Galatia, read Paul’s letter to the Galatians and so on.

When I did that, I found that Paul didn’t go round blowing his own trumpet, so to speak, but committed his whole being to contending for and defending the good news of Jesus in its rawest form.  A modern analogy might be seen in the organic food or ancient grains movements.  Paul’s message was to the corrupting and polluting effects of the ‘certain persons who crept in unawares’ what organic food is to the mass food market, or what ancient grains are to the mass grain markets and products we live with today.  On the one hand, free of pesticides, dangerous chemicals and DNA modification; on the other hand, tracing its DNA uncontaminated back to its original source.

And who better to trace our 21^st century message back to than Jesus in the gospels and Paul in his original mission and teachings?  Church and religion has its own version of these teachings and writings, but, when examined closely, they share little in common with the original message and, in addition, are polluted with both dangerous ‘chemicals’ and DNA modifications.

Much of today’s preaching is obsessed with what happens when you die: are you going to heaven or to hell?  But you won’t find this obsession in Jesus whose message was about the daily experience of the kingdom of God now, over against the corrupt and corrupting influences of the kingdom of man – money, power, earthly possessions.  Yet listen to much of today’s preaching and it is about those very things.  The ‘blessing of God’ is seen in commercial, social or political success – as defined by the gurus of the kingdom of man.  If you have these things, that’s God’s blessing and you are obviously on the right track.  Be without these things and you are obviously ‘out of the will of God’ and in need of adjusting your priorities.  That is how capitalism has become almost synonymous with modern Christianity.  But you won’t find any of that in Jesus – unless, of course, you filter all of Jesus through a capitalism or right-wing political grid – or you apply your personal biases to Jesus’ life and teaching.

Turning to Paul, I find he had three major recurring themes in his preaching, teaching and writing.  He understood the message of the gospel of the new covenant to be about 1) hostility in relation to God – transformed by reconciliation in and through Jesus; 2) guilt before God – transformed by forgiveness in and through Jesus; 3) bondage to sin and corruption – transformed by freedom in and through Jesus.  Study all the “theological” words Paul used and you will find they have direct blood-lines to these three central themes.

In this series, I will deal only in brief with these expressions of ‘the faith once for all handed down to the saints’ because I have written of them in greater detail elsewhere – readily available along with this series.  I have written at length about “The Kingdom of God” which, for cultural reasons, I refer to as “The Household of God”.  And I have also written at length about “This Good News” – the good news of Jesus and Paul as we see it in the bible’s second testament.

As for the restorative message of Jesus, he lived and taught that peace with God – true fellowship with God the Father – does not come via the law of Moses or any other religious pursuits but via full and complete acceptance of Him as Messiah (for the Jews) and Lord (for the non-Jews).  It may sound a little odd, but I find reading the Old Testament book of Job one of the most helpful guides here.  Church and religion will always and forever adopt the view of the so-called Job’s comforters who insisted then and still insist today that if Job was suffering, he must have been doing something wrong – something offensive to God.  He himself was even close to being persuaded to this idea.

But, despite repeatedly being urged to ‘confess’ ‘hidden’ sins, Job insisted he was not guilty and there has to be some other explanation.  Losing pretty much everything of value to this life – except his own life itself – he argued and argued with both his ‘friends’ and with God.  In the end, he had to put his hand over his mouth and silence himself in the face of the wisdom and power of God and admit that acceptance with God is not about personal morality or keeping some law (civil or religious) but about trusting fully in God and surrendering up the perceived right to determine salvation or lack of it – either in ourselves or in others.

John records of Jesus (John 1:11-13) that “He came to his own people and those who were his own did not receive him; but as many as did receive him, to them he gave the right to become children of God – to those who believed in his name – who [by means of this faith] were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”

We don’t get to determine what makes any of us acceptable to God – not even by insistence on a bible reference – because the thoughts and ways of God are way beyond us; and because it never has been and never will be our place to make determinations about who is in with God and who is not.  We make ourselves enemies with God when we take this power to ourselves.  And, yet again, much of this comes from our petty insistence that it is all about going to heaven or hell when you die.

God has made it abundantly clear that it is not by law or any religious pursuit that we attain the ‘right to become children of God’.  And, likewise, it is not up to any man – clergy or otherwise – to give us or to strip us of that right.  Living faith in Jesus is the measure.  As far as God is concerned (and Peter preached this in his classic address recorded in Acts 2) “God has made this same Jesus whom you [Jews] have crucified both Lord and Christ.”  And Paul reiterated this later in the introduction to his letter to the Romans: “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, and set apart for the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy scriptures, regarding His son, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.”

God is fully and completely satisfied with the finished work of His son Jesus who is, at God’s will, both Christ (Messiah for the Jews) and Lord of all.  That being so, full faith in Jesus is what it takes to attain the right to become children of God, not pursuit of some ‘slippery pig’ of religion, priest, pastor or church.

 

>>  NEXT:  Reconciled Justified and Free

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But it's all coming apart!

Freedom in Christ means that any human being can find their origin, purpose and destiny, and live a full and abundant life, fully immersed in all that Jesus has accomplished for us.  But...

 

And this is the third ‘but’: it’s all coming apart.  And it is no wonder, since it is now and always has been, an illusion; a dose of opium so we don’t have to think about things too much or so we can escape the madness all around us.  So let me express this ‘but’ as a “what if” scenario: what if all the religious ideas of heaven and hell (and their numerous variations) and what happens to us when we die, are all wrong?

It seems to me that this lies at the crux – the nub – of all our religion.  And our central problem – our central mania – is hubris: actions of excessive pride and self-confidence.  We know it all and we must be in control – of both this life and what we perceive follows this life when we die.  All manner of theories that we are prepared to die and to kill for have taken over our collective consciousness and driven us to maniacally evangelise the world with our pet theories.  “Listen to me, I’m telling you the truth, do this and you will burn in hell; do that and you will go to heaven or paradise or to a better reincarnation.”

I learned a long time ago that the relationship God wants us to have with Him is a living and present relationship that is about life now; any life beyond that – which we know almost nothing about – is coincidental.  I learned to stop focusing on what happens when I die and focus fully on what happens while I’m alive as I live as a son of God my Father (as He promised in Jesus) and as a living continuation of my elder brother Jesus, in this life, here and now.  Look at this idea we seem to have either neglected, forgotten or never understood: “For both He who sanctifies [Jesus] and those who are sanctified are all from one Father; for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brothers.” (Hebrews 2:11)

Freedom isn’t ours simply because we want it – as much religion encourages us to believe – but it is a gift of God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) when in repentance and faith, we lay down our lives so we can take them up again as sons and daughters of God.  Religion tells you otherwise, but Jesus and his disciples and apostles surely are the ones we ought to be consulting, not some go-between in the form of a priest or mediator.  And this is especially applicable to Christians since it’s a part of the bible so many have come to reverence and even worship.

Our bibles say quite explicitly and quite clearly “there is one mediator between God and man: the man Christ Jesus; who gave himself as a ransom for all, the testimony at the proper time.” [Paul to his disciple Timothy in his first letter, chapter 2]  Yet we insist that we will burn if we get too close to God, so we need another mediator in the form of a go-between like a priest.  Our idea seems to be, ‘I’m not good enough or ‘holy’ enough to be in the presence of God, so I seek a hired holy-man to do that bit for me, on my behalf’.  In this view, God must communicate with me only via the go-between, a position that God Himself explicitly counters in the scriptures.  Sadly, the priests and pastors are more than happy to go along with this separation of people into clergy and laity; holy and earthly; sacred and secular.

Jesus himself went further.  Referring to the Scribes and Pharisees of his day, Jesus had this to say in Matthew 23:

They love the place of honor at banquets and the chief seats in the synagogues, and respectful greetings in the market places, and being called Rabbi by men.  But do not be called Rabbi; for One is your Teacher, and you are all brothers.  Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven.  Do not be called leaders; for One is your Leader, that is, Christ.  But the greatest among you shall be your servant.  Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.

Do we take any notice?  Not much.  But we do insist (another example of our hubris) that we know it all and we know what’s best for us.  We call a man Pope, Papa, Holy Father when our true Holy Father is God Himself.  We call a local priest Father in direct disobedience to Jesus yet still call ourselves Christians.  We call ‘pastors’ the equivalent of Jewish rabbis (teachers) and leaders (fully in the face of Jesus saying not to) while insisting we are doing nothing wrong.

It’s quite clear to me we couldn’t care much less for either Jesus or his first apostles.  We care little for the bible we claim to revere when it says something we don’t like or something contrary to our favoured view.  We care little for God our Father who, our entire lives, has been trying to get our attention long enough for us to realise our folly – to no avail.  Yet as soon as something goes badly wrong, we’re on the horn yelling at God or cursing Jesus for not doing what we expected them to do.  There’s that hubris again.

Another principle from the New Testament says you reap what you sow.  The explanation for most of what happens in our daily lives as humans here on earth is this principle.  Apostle Paul wrote it in his letter to the Galatians in the first century AD: “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.  For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.”  Mock and reject all you like; you will reap what you sow – mocking and rejection.

We don’t have to believe any of it.  God is not – as many humans are and have been – holding a sword to our throats with the threat, ‘believe or die’.  That is one of man’s favourite concepts of God, formulated to excuse our hubris.  The truth is, God is a Father, doing what good fathers do: urging and pleading but not breaching the sovereignty He has planted in us by overriding our will.  That’s why, in that earlier paragraph I noted the theologians’ point that the good news of freedom in Christ brings us to the situation where the new life in Christ means liberty from the dominion of corrupt desires, so that we do by the free impulse of the soul what the will of God requires.  We are one with Him; in tune with Him.

 

Even as a human father, my relationship with my daughters means that, at times, they intuitively know my will and, “by free impulse of the soul” do my will without even realising that’s what’s happening.  And at no point in their adult lives have I sought to impose my will on theirs.  I respect their own sovereignty as created human beings too much for that.  It’s all in the relationship – that particular and unique relationship of Father.  And the profound beauty of the Father God relationship is: 1) it never dies – that’s one of the main reasons we don’t need a go-between; and 2) it does not in any way depend on our having a good earthly father relationship – in fact, God makes a particular point of being father to the fatherless.

Let me say it again: it’s all in the relationship.  I love the printed T-short that says, “No Religion; Just a Relationship”.  O how I wish we could all be brave enough to give away our opium of religion and replace it with the pure mountain air of a one-on-one, face-to-face relationship with God our Father in Jesus Christ by the power and wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

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Freedom

 

The second ‘but’ is the word freedom itself.  Since what we’re talking about here is the good news of Jesus and the life and times of Jesus and his apostles, the word we’re looking for is the Greek one – from the New Testament.  In English, we have a couple of medical terms that help us: eleutherophilia – meaning a love of freedodm; eleutherophobia – meaning a fear of freedom; eleutheromania – meaning an intense and irresistible desire for freedom.  The root of them all is eleutheria, the New Testament Greek word for freedom.

To ancient Greeks, this ‘freedom’ was a natural law: a proper state of being, the aberration of which is slavery or bondage.  It refers to the power of self-determination; exemption from arbitrary or despotic control.  However, it was not, in that era, universally available but the possession of a select few in a class of their own, for whom it means the possession of particular privileges.  At its root, it carries the idea that a person or thing is “free” when it can and does perform in the manner and for the purpose for which it was made.  A train is not free to act as a fishing boat but to run on fixed tracks; and a human being is not free when constrained under the control or bondage of another.

The good news of Jesus (and its apostolic heralding) sees it as the natural state of being for all who are in Christ – restored and reconciled to God.  Paul expressed it to the Corinthians this way: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” (2 Cor. 3:17)  Paul appears to take the view that, in Christ, we humans can now live and operate according to the purpose for which we were created by God – a condition constrained by the disease of sin and by the futile efforts of law in our unredeemed state.

However, as with all words, we must resist the temptation to apply all our meanings of our English word freedom onto this Greek word and its common use in the time the apostles would have used it.  One of the main objections people have to the concept of freedom is that it appears to imply no restraint – and certainly that is a useful understanding of the idea.  But it is perhaps not the best one to understand its meaning as the apostles intended.

One of the best apostolic quotes to use to get a handle on freedom comes from Paul’s letter to the Galatians 5:1 – “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.”  As a matter of interest, the phrase “be subject again to a yoke of slavery” is a perfect rendition of the word ‘religion’ as we discussed earlier.

What is the nature and substance of the freedom for which Jesus Christ has set us free?  New Testament Greek scholars (Thayer and Strong for example) give us this insight: a) liberty to do or to omit things having no relation to salvation; b) liberty from the yoke of the Mosaic law; c) liberty from Jewish errors so blinding the mental vision that it does not discern the majesty of Christ; d) liberty from the dominion of corrupt desires, so that we do by the free impulse of the soul what the will of God requires.

And d) above is central and pivotal to the good news of freedom in Christ.  One of the most important things to understand about Jesus, his gospel and the life and ministry of the first apostles is that freedom in Christ is not simply a lifestyle choice by people seeking their own good pleasure or good fortune.  To them, freedom in Christ comes as a result of laying down one’s life in the cause of Christ, in repentance and faith, and, in the words of both Jesus and his apostles, being born again as a gift from God the Father by the will and power of the Holy Spirit, into a brother relationship with Jesus, where God the Father names us among His sons.

This process – all an initiative and act of the grace of God – enables and equips one to, as point d) above says, “do by the free impulse of the soul what the will of God requires.”  Paul wrote to the Romans, “... sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.  What then?  Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?  May it never be!”  Law is not our Master, Jesus is.  Consistent with that, he wrote to the Corinthians, “All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.  All things are lawful, but not all things edify.”  In Christ, we are not under law – any law.  But that does not excuse lawlessness; the same freedom in Christ also gives us the capacity, as I said, to “do by free impulse of the soul what the will of God requires.”  In our unredeemed state, we do not possess that free impulse; in Christ, we do – as a result of the gracious gift of God’s Spirit.

In Christ in this way, we are not under any obligation (another meaning of the Greek word eleutheria) to keep any other law in order to please and satisfy God our Father.  This is the fundamental reason they sought to kill Jesus, and ultimately succeeded.  It is also the reason for the continual persecution of Paul and his teams throughout their lives.  It is what lies behind the recorded incident in Acts 15 of the eleutherophobiacs (Pharisees and their adherents) trying unsuccessfully to bring Jesus’ disciples back under the law of Moses.

And so-called church history is riddled with the holes of an unrelenting stream of bullets from a continually firing machine gun that refuses to permit the freedom in Christ of those who opt to lay down their lives for Christ and, as the New Testament says, “worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” (See John’s gospel chapter 4.)  In Jesus’ day, they were fanatics and radicals worthy of internment or death – and little has changed to this day.  As Karl Marx suggested years ago, religion is the sop we take to immunise ourselves against the reality of freedom in Christ; it is the illusion of godliness we take on board so we can delude ourselves that we have the ‘benefits’ of having a right relationship with God without actually having the relationship we think we have.

And now, at this point in history, religion is the preferred way and freedom in Christ is decried, persecuted and lampooned – as it has been from the beginning.

But now it’s all coming apart and the opportunity for the truth to be inserted into the dialogue is imminent and pressing.

 

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What Have We Missed Out On?

So, in all of this, what have we missed out on?  Well, it’s not so much what we’ve missed out on as what we’ve failed to see and understand and apprehend – because it has been hidden, corrupted and campaigned against.  And if it can be reduced to a single word, that word is freedom: freedom in Christ; freedom from and freedom to, both in such abundance that any – repeat any – human being can find their origin, purpose and destiny, and live a full and abundant life fully immersed in all that Jesus has accomplished for us.

BUT – there’s always a but, or two or three.

We first have to understand that religion is the direct opposite of that freedom.  To get at the nub of this matter, we need to consider three issues: the original/literal meaning of the term and it’s etymology; it’s dictionary meaning; it’s current contextual meaning.

Religion is an old Latin word made up of three parts; a root, a prefix and a suffix.  Thus re-lig-ion.  The root is lig meaning to bind up or a bondage; the prefix re means back or again; the suffix ion means the act of.  It’s literal meaning then is ‘the act of binding up again’ – implying that a thing or a person was once bound up, has been freed and is bound up again.  The use of this word is traceable back to a time in history – and in particular ‘church’ history – considered by some as the “Late Latin” era: 200 to 550 AD.

In this period, a deal was struck between the so-called ‘church Fathers’ and Roman Emperor Constantine to accept “Christianity” as a legitimate social force and institution and permit the ownership of land and property and the construction of houses of worship.  In the lead-up to this agreement, the profound freedom discovered and experienced by those who chose to follow Jesus Christ as their Lord and Master was a real problem to the political and ecclesiastical authorities of the day.  Not least of the problems was their insistence that they had no king but Jesus.  The agreement struck was that, in return for the right to official recognition, the right to own property and the right to build places of worship, the church Fathers would bring the “rabble” into line by curbing and restricting the freedom of Christians and subjugating them to the Emperor’s authority by bringing them under the authority of an equivalent to the Emperor – one who would be known as a Bishop, and later Arch-Bishop or “ruling” Bishop.  In other words, a description of what transpired was “the act of binding up again” otherwise free people: in Late Latin, religion.

Many people today do not know that the word cathedral means the “home” or site of the Bishop’s throne.  Over time, cathedrals and the institutions and authority structures they represent legitimised the impositions and the destruction of the freedom in Christ the Apostle Paul was at pains to emphasise right up to his death prior to the end of the first century AD.  How familiar it seems to us today – with so many freedoms being compromised in the name of “national security”.  A sanitisation process akin to money laundering turns freedoms into crimes and crimes against humanity into a new definition of ‘freedom’.  White becomes black and black becomes white.

That is what ‘religion’ in its original form represented.  However, if you look up a dictionary or hold a public forum with a panel of society’s leaders today, you’ll get a very different picture.  This is the evolution of the sanitisation process legitimising the destruction of the freedom in Christ that the true gospel of Jesus – the one true faith which was, according to the epistle of Jude, “once for all handed down to the saints” (1:3) via Apostle Paul – delivered to those who staked their lives on Jesus Christ their Lord and Master.

There is an Old Testament story analogous to this sad theme of history.  In Genesis 25:29-34, Esau sells his birthright for a bowl of lentils or some rough equivalent to his scheming brother Jacob.  Esau’s attitude was ‘I am about to die, what good is a birthright to me’.

Wikipedia notes the meaning of the AV Bible English phrase “mess of pottage” which Esau traded his birthright for in this way: “A mess of pottage is something immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely more valuable”.

That definition aptly fits the debauching of the freedom in Christ that happened long ago basically terminating the blood-line and DNA of the true gospel of Jesus and the first apostles soon after they were dead and gone.

But we do need to understand that this was not some surprise, unexpected circumstance or happening.  The entire ministry of Jesus and those first apostles was plagued by the pressure for this debauchery imposed by the religious and political establishment of the day.  From the very outset, both Jesus and Paul were persecuted for the ‘scandal’ of the freedom the good news of Jesus brought to people’s lives.

Our present day dictionary definitions and socio-political interpretations have all taken on board the sanitisation process described earlier, leading to the situation where religion is viewed and accepted as a positive force for the good and the betterment of individuals and societies globally.  When evidence appears of the opposite, every effort is made to placate offenders and excuse their behaviour – whether malicious or not – on the basis of ‘It’s our religion, we’re entitled to it.’

Is it legitimate for our dictionaries and our social, political and legal mores to be tilted permanently and irrevocably in favour of a deliberately twisted and distorted word?  Can we justifiably continue the delusion of bondage being used to justify itself – in the name of political expedience?

Many today refuse to look at or think about anything Karl Marx said, but we would all be better off if we paid a bit of attention to some of his words.  Sometimes people argue against all official ‘religion’ on the basis of a supposed quote from Karl Marx that goes something like this: “Religion is the opiate of the masses”.  But, as usual, this is poor translation and a cut-down version of Marx.

In 1844, the introduction to Marx’ work critiquing G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was published and it contained this paragraph:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

Note the sentence, “It is the opium of the people”.  In the midst of distress and difficulty, people turn to religion.  According to Marx, religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of the heartless world and soul of the soulless situation – all probably true, and certainly that’s the positive spin most put on it today.  To Marx, in this, it works like opium giving a feeling of disconnection from oppression, from the heartless world and from soulless situations and connecting to a much better place.  However, to Marx, if people want real happiness, they need to abandon religion because it is an illusory happiness.  Further, he says, if people want to abandon their illusions about their human condition, they need to abandon religion because religion is a “condition which needs illusions”.  Religion mitigates against being fully human, fully alive because it is in part about disconnecting from everyday reality.

I’m with Marx.  I sometimes find it useful to consider this analogy: you want the latest model of your favourite car but you can’t afford it so you settle for a tiny pedal car scale model of it instead.  Religion, to me, is the pretend, scale-model look-alike of the real thing.  And to me, the real thing is faith.  Hence, as with Marx ‘if you want true happiness, you have to abandon illusory happiness and the pursuit of it’; religion is pretend or faux faith and it requires illusion to sustain it.  Furthermore, religion cannot deliver you to faith since it is going in the opposite direction; it is the reverse boat gear.  Therefore religion is, to me, the antithesis of faith.

The Late Latin word ‘religion’ has never been translated into English – how very convenient!  It is a Latin word, appearing in a Greek New Testament, and simply transliterated (from its Latin form) into English.  The New Testament apostles and writers used the Greek word threskeia to represent the idea behind the only time the word ‘religion’ is used in our English New Testaments and it has only tenuous links to the meaning we attribute to the word today.

The word ‘religion’ should never have been used in our English bibles since the word is more correctly translated as one of several words for ‘worship’.  Although using a slightly older from of English, Ellicott’s commentary for English readers on James 1:27 says:

It will be observed that by religion here is meant religious service. No one word can express this obvious interpretation of the original, taken as it must be in completion of the verse before; and certainly “religion” in its ordinary sense will not convey the right idea. Real worship, we may say, pure and undefiled, beheld and acknowledged as such in the presence of God, even the Father—mark the tender pathos of His divine relationship—is this: to visit the fatherless (or orphans) and widows in their distress and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

What we now see as “charity” the first apostles saw as ‘pure and undefiled worship’; what we now call “religion” had an equivalent for them in either paganism or in Jewish culture.  Religion is the antithesis of both faith and worship for true disciples of Jesus.

That’s the first ‘but’ out of the way.

 

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