The fear of Ultimate Reconciliation

I think the fear so many feel from even looking at this subject with any sort of objectiveness is real and should be respected. I myself have read all the books about both sides (well, lots of them), been a christian for 40 yrs, gone to bible college, had the full gamut of teaching from every corner of christendom, and I can't escape a few glaring facts that refuse to go away no matter how much theology I throw at them.

The biggest one (which I posted on Facebook the other day) in a nutshell, is something along the lines of: why would God create billions of precious people in his very image, out of his heart of love, knowing full well that most of them would end up in unbearable, horrific torture for eternity with no hope of reconciliation? It not only makes no sense but makes God out to be a tyrant more cruel than any human could possibly be, let alone want to be! He has put his heart of love in each of us - we know what love is, he describes his own character in 1Cor 13. So its not only impossible to think that God would just say "oh well, you lost your chance - off to hell with you and no chance of redemption", it is incomprehensible, and loathsome on any level. We to easily fob it off by saying His ways are higher than ours and other stuff about his justice being pure etc, but how come our standards are higher than His?

So where does that leave us? I have wrestled with this for years, and my passion for Jesus has only grown as I discover more and more of his grace. As I let more of His love fill me this question becomes a bigger issue, something I can't just cover up with a bunch inconsistent scriptures. I'm not afraid to be wrong! But God gave me a brain and a heart, that I have used with as much integrity as I can muster. Something is wrong with this picture - and I think its time we stopped burying our heads in dogma and had sensible discussions knowing that we can trust Holy Spirit in each other!

Theology...

I'm not against theology, working out the nitty gritty of scriptures etc, but its only a secondary thing, its not the real issue. The entirety of the gospel is simple and it embraces the heart of a God who IS love - every part of his being is love. Jesus is the physical embodiment of that love and the more we embrace that, the more we bathe in His amazing unconditional acceptance, look into His face, lean on his breast and hear His heartbeat, see the wonders of His creation, experience His comfort in the midst of devastation - we realise that our efforts at trying to piece together who he is by scripture alone, fail miserably. Jesus said it was far better that He go so we could have the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, God IN us, creating our unity with the entire Godhead. We are privy to the heart of Father now, by the amazing redemptive work of Jesus. This alone gives us our understanding of Gods nature, our hearts witness to it, and scripture supports it, not the other way around.

Jim's heresy of the day.

2 Tim 3:16 -  "All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness". 


Which scripture was Paul referring to? Obviously not the New Testament because it didn't exist then. So he's talking to Timothy about the Old Testament. Timothy's mother was a Jew, father a Greek, but he was raised with knowledge of Jewish traditions and scripture. Paul preached to the Gentiles, Timothy was working amongst the Greeks, they had no Torah nor were they encouraged in any Jewish traditions. So all a bit odd given Paul's other statements about the law.


I did quite a dig around about the word for Scripture used here. Its a particular form that isn't used often in the Greek and basically means the entirety of all God's breathed Word - or something along those lines. Given the context of Paul's other writings and his emphatic statements about doing away with the law, the only conclusion we can make of this is he wasn't speaking about a bunch of written laws, rituals and prophecies, so much as the entirety of Jesus, the living word. Seeing as this letter is addressed directly to Timothy he would have been very aware of what Paul was saying and its implications. Of course, we mustn't forget  Paul had Timothy circumcised early in the piece, which was totally against Paul's own teachings. In studying this point, there are a few fumbling reasons put forward as to why this may have been, but we seem to forget that Paul made mistakes (gasp!) and Timothy's circumcision may have been one. 


So going back to a bigger picture, why have we included the New Testament in the same category as the Old. The Old was a strict set of written laws, codes, messages from God to a people who didn't have the indwelling Christ. They had to have it written down and preserved! The early church had no scriptures! The letters and other documents weren't regarded as Holy Scripture until many, many years later, they were just letters floating around mostly correcting churches that were going off the rails. It seems that if we were to have an infallible set of written documents that were to be taken as the literal instructions of God on how to be Christians, Jesus would have organised that before the ascension so there could be no doubt that these instructions were from him! But no, all we have is a set of hodge-podge ambiguous writings that have been tacked together and presented as the infallible Word of God.

Now I know you are looking around for the biggest stones you can find to throw at me... but those documents were inspired by God! Each was to a specific audience - a church in trouble or need, a struggling leader, a group of people in a region needing encouragement, whatever... Were they written to us? Of course not! Are they inspired by God? Yes! Can we learn from them? Yes! Can we apply every little thing in them for our lives? No! So what de we do with all this? Horror of horrors - we have to have a personal relationship with God, our loving Father, with his son Jesus who by his Holy Spirit lives inside us in all his power and glory. He has to be intimately involved with our very being, all that we are and do. He is our Word, our wonderful living Word. The Scriptures should just support what Holy Spirit is already doing in us. If we are constantly walking in greater revelation of God in us we are less and less likely to even be sin conscious, less needy of being propped up by an instruction manual - of being less dependant on trying to figure out which particular scripture fits our particular need at any given moment - of finding a promise to hang on to - because the living Word is IN us already.

Just remember those poor old gentile christians wandering around with no scriptures to guide  them, and some of those Jewish christians berated by Paul for telling others they had to live by the Torah. It seems that the last thing Paul wanted was a bunch of scripture fanatics wandering the countryside!


You may have noticed I've been on about all this for a while now.  The reason is obvious (to me). Our current understanding of all these things just doesn't work. We happily say if we know enough scripture and understand it all, everything will all fall into place - but it doesn't - it just gets worse! More doctrines, more denominations, more splits, more discord, hatred, lies, envy, pride, you name it. And we keep blaming each other's interpretation of scripture - when will we see that this will never stop until WE stop and realise there's something wrong with this picture?! 


Could it be that scripture was never meant to be used like this???

Words for Thought

I posted this in Facebook but thought I might put it here as well for the odd passerby!

So Jesus rose from the dead, the disciples split up and spread the gospel with amazing passion, Paul got zapped, and things got even more outrageous - spreading like wildfire for years with no written doctrines, handbooks, tracts, Torah, just a simple powerful gospel that was the love of a passionate Father wanting to pour that love out on his children.

So they started to get the odd letter tossed around when one of the apostles found something not going to plan. We really aren't too sure about what they were responding to, we can only surmise that from the letters themselves. There were some accounts of Jesus life from a few different viewpoints floating around. Some of the letters were details on the work of Jesus and all its implications. All had a purpose and an intended audience, but they were all over the place. No one used them as doctrinal statements, but over time they began to be venerated until a couple of hundred years later it was decided for the sake of unification and sorting out who was in and who was out, as well as defining orthodoxy, the church fathers of the day decided to pick the best of them and bundle them up together.

So the first church had no bible. Some of the Jewish converts still liked their Torah, but nothing at all for those Gentiles. Seems they had to rely on the Holy Spirit. Maybe they knew something we didn't? Maybe there was a depth to their faith that we have lost? Maybe the whole revelation of Jesus death and resurrection, unity with God and trusting that relationship was all they needed - gulp! treading in thin ice here!

Of course our wonderful Father inspired those amazing documents we now have - they contain descriptions of the depth of his passion and how that was made real in us. But maybe he never intended them to come first? Maybe they were meant to be supportive to the life of the indwelling Christ, the words that confirmed what we should already know in our hearts, the touchstone of the simple truths of the gospel.Is it possible we've got it round the wrong way? Could it be we are trying to figure out this awesome life in Him by a handful of letters rather than using those letters to bear witness to the Holy Spirit in us? Maybe we are so scared of the personal responsibility that would bring, that it outweighs the freedom? And possibly we just can't handle the thought that its not our problem to "guard the faith" - maybe God can do that better without our help?

Hmmm, can't help wondering...

A prophesy?

It is with much fear and trepidation that I dare to call this a prophesy. I have never had the guts to put something in this form before, but it is what I feel Father is saying. I make no claim to being a prophet, it just seemed right to express it as if it was Father's heart. 

You've longed for a revival.
You've hungered for more of me and seen the pain in yourselves and my creation.
The cry for holiness and justice.
The outpourings of my spirit in past times creates a yearning for my presence and power.
To see broken hearts mended, lost ones found, repentance, remorse
Miracles and healing, passion for my word and truth, the glory!

But its not coming on your terms, my reformation is coming instead.
It has started in sparks everywhere, no one person, no one movement,
Fires beginning to spread from one end of creation to the other
But not revival fires, they are freedom and passion fires!
Love fires, a declaration of my heart and passion for you
A new light that shakes each of my children to the core
A reformation of my life in you, of our unity, of your identity
Its a quiet fire that is my doing, born only of my desire for you
Nothing you have done could bring it, nothing you could pray will release it
I will open eyes to plainly see what has been hidden
To see the simplicity and power
To experience freedom unimaginable
To know love indescribable
It doesn't look like revival, it looks like division
It doesn't sound like the roaring of holy fire from heaven
It sounds like the whisper of my breath as I draw close
It is radical, bringing you back to the roots
Back to the childlikeness that sees my kingdom
That sees my love

No, there will be no revival
But the world will be changed by my heart
One person at a time.

Alphabet soup

Maybe the bible is like a bowl of alphabet soup.

Lots of letters that you can spend hours arranging into words and trying to make into something meaningful. Like kids we could have fun and discover many interesting things. We could keep playing with that bowl of soup, day after day, trying to find more and more different words. We could start to grow up and forget it was fun and still keep pushing those letters around. The soup could get really old and mouldy, but we might still be tempted to try for a few more things, or just keep arranging those same old ones we like to find every day. Of course, the soup would be pretty disgusting and we might not be able to see any letters for all the mould and yucky stuff!

Or we could just eat the soup when it was fresh and nourishing, the whole lot, yum! All those letters floating around and we could smile and laugh at the words that form, but the soup is too good to sit around for long. Just eat it up!

And tomorrow we can have another big bowl, made fresh for us with lots of lovely letters ready to have fun with! Yay Dad - more soup please!!

Just Jesus

I've been thinking a lot lately, and more so after some comments today, what a complicated mess we have made the gospel, what a horrible burden of half truths and complicated theolgies that all contradict each other. A huge quagmire of methods, principles, doctrines, and of course every one is right ;-)
But if a child can't understand it, its just all crap!! You can read the bible like its an intruction manual and study every little nuance of Greek and Hebrew, but so what?! It was never meant to be an instruction manual on how to "do christianity".

It took many years for me to realise that its just Jesus, Jesus plus nothing. Father's unbelievably outrageous love for us that defies all logic and cuts through all theology. I don't care if I never hear another doctrinal statement in my life. I have the complete life of the truine Godhead living in my right now. He loves me to bits and never lets me forget it. The more I realise that the more that love just comes out of me, I can't help it. And it doesn't matter what doctrines I believe or don't believe because I can trust Him in me, I can trust Him with every thought that runs through my tired brain.

God IS love, nothing else, it all comes from there. I am finally realising what it is to truly love God, because he is loving me first. I will only operate from that place now, even if I stumble because my mind is still being renewed, I will not take my eyes and heart off Him. I won't look to doctrines and principles and fads for help. Just Him, Jesus plus nothing!!

Certainty

Sometimes, day light, every day
Sometimes, night light, every night
Death and taxes, for certain.
The beat runs its own beat
Pulsing its own rhythms
I'm running out of sync, stepping on bar lines
  loosing melody, slipping in harmony
Oh but life-beat is certain, deep-beat pounds
  love-beat at the heart, my heart takes on the heart beat
Internal synchronisation, locked in time codes
  Rhythms fall in surprising places, new rhythms
Is certainty the pulse never ending?
  is certainty the love-beat never ending?
So I run in counter rhythms, counter melodies
  free and in time, just in time, but never late, never early
Certain is the joy, certain is the freedom
  certain is my harmony, perfect harmonies in three parts plus one
dancing and intertwining, moving through and around
    melodies in melodies bouncing from beat to beat
      Oh I'm complete,
        Certainty, sweet certainty.

There is no need to put on an act!

There is no need to put on an act, the Christian lifestyle is not a choice, it is a spiritual orientation, so to speak; it is precipitated automatically by the indwelling Christ, or it is not even real. For the soul abiding in Christ, it is as simple as putting one foot in front of the other. This is either the natural outcome of a real relationship or it is the manufactured facade of self-righteousness. The lies fall away and the clarity emerges as we grow in grace and as a result, all things are pure, the Christian lives rightly because that is such an attractive opportunity, people are perceived as that precious, and the hoped for outcome is yearned for by an involuntary hunger. It is such an automatic fruit that it is not even an issue. ~Bob Greaves

The Scriptures

This is a copy of a post on Harvest Now by Steve Hill
I was going to write something similar as a follow up to my last post Trees and Forests, but this really captured it for me. No point in reinventing the wheel!


The Scriptures
Mar 3, 2011 at 17:20
Category: Centering on Christ
Steve Hill


Friends, It is common for many to refer to the Bible as "The Word of God". However, this is not how the Master identifies it. In John 5:39- 40 Jesus confronts the religious scholars of His day, "You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you might have life."

In the scriptures the designation "The Word of God" applies only to the Living Word, Jesus. This same Jesus declares that the purpose of the scriptures is to testify of Him and that it is entirely possible to study them and miss Him. If we make the Scriptures "The Word of God" rather than Jesus, we have created an idol. Your faith is not to primarily be in the scripture, your faith is to be in Jesus. That is why Jesus opened the understanding of the disciples so that they could see all that was written in "the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms" concerning Himself (Luke 24:44- 45). The primary purpose of the scriptures is to create a history and a context in which Jesus can be clearly seen. The scriptures are not the Word of God. The scriptures testify to the Word of God.

Actually the only words that scripture records God writing directly are the ten commandments. The testimony about the rest? " All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction and for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete and thoroughly equipped for every good work." (II Timothy 3:16).

Now here it can get technical but "by inspiration of God" is a very different reality than "by the finger of God". For example, under inspiration the gospel writers wrote four very different accounts of the life of Jesus. Those accounts highlight their different personalities, educational backgrounds, life experiences and writing styles. Yet we do not say one or the other was more inspired. The Word had become flesh in them and was expressed through them. God did not posses them. God did not control their pens. God inspired them. They testified to Jesus.

If we understand that the scriptures are primarily about bearing testimony to Jesus (even as we are to be primarily about bearing testimony to Jesus!) that changes how we read them. The scriptures were not intended to present a rational system about God but a relational story about Jesus. Rational systems are rationally determined which leaves the mind in control. That is why we can argue systems of theology forever- they are controlled by our minds. A reality controlled by my mind makes my mind god. Not a good story.

Relationships are morally determined, that is, they are determined by our choices to love and serve. The purpose of the scripture is to introduce us to Jesus so that we might know and love Him and in so doing love and serve one another. If we love Him, we obey Him. That is a good story. It leaves Jesus as God. There is no true knowledge of Jesus without relational obedience to Him.

If we talk about the scriptures as the Word of God there seems to be a tendency to take little bits and pieces, cut and paste them and declare that little bit to be "the Word of God". That way lies deception. There are enough bits that you can make the scriptures say almost anything you want. Your favourite little bit is not "the Word of God" . It is a portion of the scriptures that testify of Jesus. It only has meaning in the whole of the scriptures and ultimately only has meaning in relation to the revelation of Jesus.

Sand is little bits that have broken off the mountain and washed to the sea. To build upon sand it to build upon bits of the scripture broken from their place in the Rock. If we wish to build upon the Rock and know that our house will stand, we must build upon the Rock who is Christ Jesus.

When Jesus opened the disciples minds to understand all in the law, prophets and psalms concerning Himself there was, of course, no New Testament. Once portions that would become the New Testament began to circulate around Paul spoke to Timothy about studying to show your self "approved unto God" by "rightly dividing the word of truth" (II Timothy 2:15). There can be discussion about what this means but it seems to me that the most important division is between Old Covenant and New, Law and Grace, the nation of Israel and the Body of Christ. Many of the present errors of doctrine and practice amongst believers come from taking Old Covenant practices and teachings and dragging them into the New where they replace grace and the life of Jesus. What do I mean?

Tithing taken out of its Old Covenant context and applied as "the Word of God" for today. Giving 10% in order to be blessed makes God a miserly book keeper rather than a generous Father. But how does tithing speak of Jesus and His kingdom? If you actually study the three tithes of the Old Covenant and the other financial laws around them, it becomes clear that the focus was not just on provision for the priest and temple but on social justice for the nation and the care of the poor. Jesus came to set the captives free not put a legalistic financial burden upon them and then tell the poor they are cursed if they do not tithe.

Worship in the Old Covenant had its 24/7 practice and its experience of God who came and went from the tabernacle or the temple. When we drag that practice into the New Covenant we have people shouting at the ceiling for hours and asking God to come down and touch them and send revival. That is totally destructive of New Testament reality which is "Christ in you the hope of Glory". Such practice makes mockery of the words of Jesus who said that He had given us all authority and that we were to go and make disciples of the nations. Jesus cannot come down. He is already in your if you are HIs. Jesus will not send revival. He has sent you. Such 24/7 shouting and crying matches are manifest rebellion against the words of the Master. They are traditions that make his words of no effect.

What does Old Covenant worship teaching and practice show us about Jesus? It shows us a contrast. As was prophesied in the Old Covenant, God no longer dwells in temples made with hands but in His people. When God

dwells in His people, they never thirst again- they have nothing to cry out for. Their task is to take water to those who do not have it. When God dwells in His people, they have His indwelling presence to take to the world.

We could go on but, please, let us stop using the phrase "The Word of God" for the scriptures. Let us stop using bits and pieces of the scriptures as "The Word of God". Those bits and pieces are sand. Let us know that the scriptures testify of Jesus and that testimony is divided into two Covenants. Let us divide the two correctly. Let us discern what is Old Covenant practice and terminology and let that speak to us of Jesus. It is there to reveal Jesus, not for us to practice. The One who is the fulfillment has come!

Let us understand clearly that there is no life in the scriptures but that they testify of Jesus who does give life.

He is the only Word of God.