Healing: Making Excuses

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

I'm continuing to meditate on our brother Tim's series "To Live Is Christ."  As he writes there,
healing all comes down to "God's word and God's will:" and Tim powerfully affirms that God says
He desires to heal, and will.

Read here.

We probably all have people we're praying healing for: so this is God's good news to us !...if we
will receive it.

What's painfully clear is that we often choose not to receive it.  The first response of those who
hear that good news... including ourselves...is that it's "TOO good to believe."

I find it interesting that we justify our unbelief as "religious:" that if we are not healed it shows
that healing is not "God's will."  The scriptures Tim posted, showing what God says about that,
should emphatically convince us otherwise.

But most interesting is that our "religious" excuse lays claim to the greatest truth of "I AM"...
His absolute sovereignty.  We pride ourselves that our belief in God's sovereignty is so great
we can even forgive Him not doing what He says He wills to, and promises to.  Proud to show
our great love for Him, we want to give God an excuse for not healing.

Does "absolute sovereignty" mean God can choose to not heal ?  Of course.  But He says He
chooses to.

And let's be honest about our excuse.  We don't actually make it to forgive God (could anything
be more perverse than the idea we should, or have standing to, forgive God !?!?); we're actually
trying to excuse ourselves our unbelief.

Will we receive what our sovereign King wills and promises, when we entrench ourselves in a
dishonest (not to say "blasphemous") excuse for our lack of faith in Him ?

A father brought his demon-possessed son to Jesus, and the boy began "terrible convulsions"
in Jesus' Presence.  The father begged Jesus, "...if You can do anything, take pity on us and
help us !"

Jesus said, " 'If you can ?'  All things are possible to him who believes."  Perhaps our first prayer
for healing must be as honest and desperate as the father's plea to Jesus:  "Immediately the boy’s
father cried out and said, 'I do believe; help Thou my unbelief !'..."  (Mark 9:17-27)

That seems the first prayer we should pray for healing.  But we can't pray it until we stop deceiving
ourselves about our own unbelief.


                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

Politics Is Not Really ABOUT Politics

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

This post is titled with an observation by our brother Tim (Onesimus) in Australia.  His blog-posts are consistently insightful and informative: but his above observation is the wisest word I've heard about the relation of politics and Christianity, in my 45 years of observing and pondering their interaction in America.

Yesterday Tim posted the negative comments of a reader who had unsubscribed because his posts were "...very political and you are not even American."  (Tim does often comment on the incredible spiritual blindness of American Christians toward their politics: but also about Middle Eastern Christianity and its refugees, Australian news and politics, art, Muslim conversions to Christianity, and much else).

He responded with three points he considers paramount in how Christians look at politics.  Those points seem to me spot-on: and the embodiment of exactly what he means, that "politics is not really ABOUT politics."

Tim's full post is at https://onesimusfiles.wordpress.com/  His viewpoints are always worth hearing (even if he is not American).
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"...politics cannot be used to address spiritual realities. For example, righteousness cannot be legislated or enforced, because the lawmakers and enforcers are no less fallible than those they seek to control – even IF those lawmakers and enforcers were religiously devout...

"True justice and righteousness will only ever come through Government on this earth after the return of Jesus, when he reigns over the nations during thousand years commonly known as 'the millennium.'

"Secondly political realities can and MUST be addressed according to the Spirit and not according to national self-interest. The follower of Jesus should be set apart from political rhetoric and partisan allegiances. As believers we need to stand as a CONTRAST to the world’s political expediencies, by representing what serves God and His Kingdom, not being swayed by patriotic fervour, or what we are told are the nation’s interests.

"Our nation’s interests rarely (if ever) reflect God’s interests – and yet, contrarily, God’s interests ALWAYS reflect the best (eternal) interests of the people in ALL nations, not only those where we live.

"Thirdly, our own attitudes and actions should always be informed by truth, an understanding of God’s character and with an eye on God’s overall purposes."
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Tim's closing paragraph also seemed to me exactly relevant to the way American Christianity was seduced by "conservatives," on the basis of their alleged "pro-life" agenda:

"It is easy to be distracted by single issue agendas – even worthy issues can draw us away from the 'bigger picture.' By focusing on the rightness of that one issue, we can find ourselves being blinded to the wrongness of the larger political agenda being presented. Beautiful gift wrapping can easily disguise a sealed box filled with stinking garbage."

AMEN !  and AMEN !!

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

"Post-Truth"

Looking back over my recent blog-posts, I notice I somehow deleted one of the most important.

Earlier this month, brother Tim called my attention to the fact that the prestigious Oxford Dictionary of the English Language had picked "post-truth" as its 2016 "Word of the Year."

Several of my recent blogs talk about the issues of a "post-truth" world.  Lacking the initial blog about the meaning of that term my comments may lack the necessary context: so I post it here again.

The Oxford folks define "post-truth" as

"relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."

They note that the word is virtually always used in a political context: and that its sudden prominence in 2016 was a result of the U.K.'s Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election.

 The Oxford Dictionary website has additional information and reflection on "post-truth," and on any other question you can possibly think of about the English language .

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016

The Spirit of Reality

The blog-post by our Australian brother Tim about "post-truth" Christianity, which I re-posted a couple weeks ago, included a particularly striking insight

"It’s sad fact that many (even professing Christians) really have no love of the truth, preferring to mould a more appealing (to them) version of 'reality' to live by."

His linkage of "truth" and "reality" is spot-on.

We know there's a profound sense in which "truth" and "reality" are somehow the same kind of thing: though we can't easily say how that's so.  "Reality is the manifestation of truth" is the working definition I've come to: though I'm certain there's a lot more to that equation than my formulation takes into account (or that limited human understanding can take into account).

Another way of putting it might be that "reality" and "truth" are both what really and truly IS.  And that makes both, to my understanding, theological quantities, since God IS "I AM THAT I AM."  Theologians who have opined that God is "Ultimate Reality" are probably close to the mark.

Jesus' Own Person seems to bear out that equation.  He used God's Own Name when He revealed His Being is exactly Truth: "I AM...The Truth" (John 14:6).  Jesus is the Word (Logos) of God through Whom "...all things were made," and without Whom "...nothing was made that has been made" (John 1:3).  "Truth" and "reality," including the physical reality of creation, are joined in Who Jesus IS.

The confirmatory "flip-side" is that the enemy, rebel against All that God IS and does, is, in Jesus' words, "the father of lies" (John 8:44).  From the first time we meet him in scripture, he is working to deceive human beings by questioning God's Truth ("Has God really said . . .?", my emphasis) and denying the reality God made ("You surely will not die . . .", my emphasis).

The enemy has not changed his tactics.  They still work.  Even though, as Tim notes, refusal to love truth necessarily means relinquishing reality as well...and forces people to invent their own.

I find it interesting that the political faction Christians have followed for 40 years is the premier anti-Truth and anti-reality voice in America.

Like all political factions, it's always "spun" truth to achieve electoral success (the only "good" political factions serve): though rather more outrageously than other factions.  But the surprising election of its "post-truth" candidate this year has hugely confirmed that faction in the "wisdom" of post-truth politics: that truth doesn't really matter for electoral success.

It's no accident that the same faction also champions various kinds of reality-denial.  One major example is that "climate-change denial" is a virtual litmus-test for members of that faction, a legacy of their demi-god founder, Ronald Reagan.  Other varieties of reality-denial, including some very "fringe" ones (white-supremacy, for example), also make that faction their ideological home.

Tim's observation that "truth" and "reality" are linked seems sound theological insight: both are established by God, in His Own Being.

It should tell us something that American Christians have followed factionalists whose spirit is contempt for truth, and denial of reality: the same sins Adam and Eve fell for.  To those with spiritual eyes to see, that faction...and the Christians who do its will...abundantly show their spiritual patrimony.

May deceived Christians repent !  May God destroy those who deceive His people !!

Amen.
 

O.K., I Get It Now

Our beloved brother Tim in Australia does a blog, "Onesimus Files" (https://onesimusfiles.wordpress.com/). His is the only blog I read almost-daily. In the comments there of Tim and others, I frequently hear something God's saying.

But it sometimes takes me a while to get what God's saying. I tend to expect that truth is complex, and I over-think things.

When God is saying something simple, I often miss it. And truth is usually simple.

That was the case with a simple comment Tim made recently, in a discussion of America's current politics: "It's not really about politics."

It took a while for that simple truth to sink in, and open to my understanding.

I finally get it. Nothing that human beings do is really only about what humans do. Humans are spiritual beings, and the things we do are . . . not "ultimately," at the end: but FIRST and ALWAYS . . . spiritual acts.

That seems to me what Jesus is saying in Luke 12:54-6, when He tells us to "analyze" appearances. "This present time" cannot be understood by those who only look at appearances.

We have a wide choice of "commentators"...political and religious...eager to explain to us what's "really" going on. We constantly hear them analyze every event in terms of all the demographic "appearances" they (and we) believe determine people's political thoughts and actions: age, sex, race, political orientation and religion (often the same thing), by region, by educational and income levels, sexual orientation, occupation.

What Jesus is saying in this time . . . has always been saying . . . is that politics is not really about politics. Politics must be, and can ONLY be, understood in spiritual terms.