Why can't we get it right?

I'm still working on how we are supposed to view scripture and utilise it. If you've been following my blogs you'll notice its been something of a theme lately.

So what's wrong with the bible, you may ask? Nothing at all! Its totally inspired by God and preserved for us as a reference - everything God intended for us to have as a written record is in it! No problem there.

But here's the problem, as I have expressed from different angles before. If God wanted pure unified doctrines and theologies that would have held His church together, to stand in unity, grow into full maturity etc, how come  he didn't spell it out in black and white, unambiguously, no room for interpretation. Well, you may say, the original languages have changed and we don't know a lot of the original context - all that sort of stuff. But didn't God know that? Didn't he realise that over 2000 years language and culture would change so radically that we would loose the plot? Why didn't He take that into account? After all, He is sovereign, and nothing is impossible for Him.

But wait - there's more! Even in the first church, they couldn't get it right. All Paul's letters are addressing various errors, and there were divisions from the word go. So if all the New Testament is so perfect, what are we missing?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm still saying its completely inspired by God and is exactly what He wanted to be recorded for us. But if we keep struggling to agree on so much stuff (and that's big issues, not just little things that don't matter) we have to start thinking that maybe this is what God planned all along. Maybe he actually didn't want a completely unambiguous set of instructions that we could hold up, and no one could possibly misinterpret. He could have done that if He wanted - He's God!

Maybe He left us this jumble of documents in the hope that we would rely on Him for truth, and maybe we could rely on each other. Maybe His plan is that we trust Holy Spirit in each other. And maybe, just maybe, He's not that fussed if our doctrines are wrong. He could be interested in relationship above all else. Maybe all He is really interested about is Love, after all, that's what He is. Perhaps He purposely allowed the confusion and errors and arguments so we could see that its not about following a set of instructions, that its all about Him. Our restored relationship. About Jesus and what He did to reconcile all mankind.

Maybe the whole purpose of the bible is to bring us to the end of ourselves, so that we just fall into His arms and let His love envelop us and reveal the unbelievable unity we now have with Him, even better than Adam and Eve had!

And maybe when we read it from that perspective we will see His words in a whole new light. God in us, united by the presence of Holy Spirit in every one of us, filling us with His love.

Maybe I'm a dreamer, but who gave us the capacity to dream?
(I'll keep expanding on this theme as its probably the core issue for many of us now, as we argue things like the validity of scripture and battle with fundamentalism.)

The Armour

A slightly different look at the Armour of God mentioned in Eph 6:10-17.


I have always been led to believe that the armour of God was something we put on as we blasted out into warfare waving our swords ready to put the enemy to flight. It was good discipline to consciously put the armour on every morning, memorise the passage and be ready to fight the enemy! My zeal was, of course, well meant, but lacked a little depth and context.

So what is it really?

Belt, body armour, shoes, shield, helmet - all passive stuff, part of resisting as Paul says in the previous verses. And those shoes - the Gospel of peace, not what I'd call fighting boots! All the pieces form something that protects us, allowing us to stand, not run around fighting.

So what about "taking the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God"? Jesus is the Word of God! The sword is Jesus. We don't wield Jesus, flinging Him around like a weapon. The Greek word for "take" actually means "receive, accept, welcome". What a difference! The actual fight is His job, we just accept His victory and stand firm, rest in that place with our feet firmly planted in the gospel of peace. Nothing can touch us with that armour on! Sure you can go into lots of detail about each piece of armour if you want, but its all very simple - truth, righteousness, peace, faith, the assurance of salvation, and Jesus doing all the fighting.

Our instruction is simply to take it, that's all! Pick it up and put it on. Not hard, and its right there ready for us, we don't have to run around looking for it because our relationship with Father allows us free access to it - He's holding it out for us ready to slip it on. And once we've put it on we can rest knowing that the enemy can't touch us and Jesus is doing all the hard work! Now we can get on with the important stuff without having to worry about that pesky devil!

Good Exegesis!

Gods plan for the world is much bigger than our opinions over a few scriptures. If scriptures were so indisputable and all that was required was "good exegesis" then I think all of our woes should have been well and truly sorted by now. You'd kinda think that after 2000 years we could get our theology right!
But it just keeps getting worse - more divisions, doctrines and theologies than ever before - and more theologians who have the best texts than ever before - and still a bigger mess than we could imagine!
So study is not the answer, endlessly digging up scripture is not the answer. The more we bury our heads in endless studies of the scriptures, the more we end up like the Pharisees.
Its heart, its relationship, its allowing the Holy Spirit to renew our minds to the incredible unity that Jesus enabled. Its letting him be Daddy, knowing that we ARE new creations and he will never leave us. Its relationship - from beginning to end, nothing more, nothing less. He has planned it all from the beginning. He created every single person for relationship and He will not loose even one. I can trust Holy Spirit in me, and being created in his image means all the basics of our personality/character/makeup are like his. The bits that are "greater than our ways" are things like, how He keeps everything going, how He pulls it all together and makes all things work together for good. His character, however, is firmly imprinted deep in our hearts, sometimes tainted, but always the desire of dreams.

He is love, first and foremost, and he has made sure we understand love. Its indelibly stamped on our hearts, every single one of us. WE understand justice, he put it in us, and he gave us wonderful enquiring minds that can explore the depths of all He has put before us. He left things hidden for us to explore, ever unfolding the life before us. He gave us logic and deduction, the ability to philosophy and dream. He gave us Jesus, who became the centre of all our dealings with God, past present and future, gave us a new spirit, so that ALL shall be reconciled, and he came to dwell in us and us in Him - in all his fullness! His love NEVER fails, NEVER gives up, neither in this age or the age to come, and finally He shall destroy death itself.

He is wonderful beyond our wildest dreams, He brings hope to the hopeless, that need suffer no longer. Salvation is now, and through all ages, through trials and sufferings, pride and pain, until all that is not of Him is burnt away and we see Him for who He is and every knee will gladly bow and every tongue gladly confess He is Lord - and we will walk in perfect unity with Him into eternity!

Amen, Maranatha!! (Our Lord come - our Lord has come!)

What’s in a WORD?

For years the law demolished us

Our heart and soul our simple trust

With no accountability

It ruled in its verbosity

Twisted WORD misunderstood

And good turns evil and evil good

Using “submission” (a voluntary state of meekness)

As enslaver’s chain

And “accountability” (to be an open book)

For personal reign

WORDsmiths groan in painful measure

As the WORD is robbed of intrinsic treasure

And the sweetest SPIRIT is quenched once more

While HE THE WORD waits at the door

For if in wresting it was defiled

Let it now be reconciled

Let ears be opened and HIS heart be heard

And let us now redeem the WORD

Harrison  Burns

(Turn of the century Christian poet)

The Victorious Cross

A great quote from Joel Adifon ~

The more we grow in the ways of the LORD, the greater the possibility for us become dangerous threats to the agenda of the kingdom of darkness.
Desperate to stop us from attaining the full stature of Christ, the enemy will do everything he possibly can to focus our attention on new teachings and take our eyes off of the Teacher.
As great as miracles, signs, and wonders are, they are not the Gospel.
The enemy loves watching Christians spend hours of their lives reading dozens of testimonies, watching street healing videos, going to signs and wonders conferences, and trying to live vicariously via their favorite pastors, teachers, evangelists, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I love hearing and reading about what God has done.
I think solid teaching on healing in the Kingdom is definitely important for feeding one's spirit man with faith.
I love watching videos on believers taking the power of God to the marketplace.
BUT...
...Papa, has been rocking me lately and bringing me back to the Source of all of these things.
The Source of power is not the latest video, mp3 teaching, or conference.
The Source is the Gospel and the Gospel is summed up in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ.
We should be glorying in nothing other than the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
If any other thing besides the Cross becomes the focal point of the messages we preach, we're missing something.
Come on Church! :)
Let's not have a been there done that attitude with the Cross, as if it's some elementary teaching that is only for baby Christians.
The Victorious Cross of Jesus Christ is the source and summit of the Christian life.
It was never meant to be Christianity 101.
Preach the Healer and healings will manifest.
Preach the Deliverer and demons will be scattered.
Preach the One who sanctifies and holiness will be a natural fruit.
Preach the Lover of souls and people will be saved.
It's all His work! :)
We're just hanging on for the ride.

Saving the Lost

So...
if we really, really believed, that humanity's last hope for redemption is this life and that most will be lost to eternal hell, and we claim to know how Father weeps for the lost and the pain he feels for every one of them breaks his heart, what on earth are we sitting around for, wasting time studying endless doctrines, going to meetings, partying, and even working or going to school for that matter! There are billions needing to know the gospel right now, every second we waste thousands are dropping off into hell - lost forever! This is horrible beyond comprehension, and WE are their only hope! Common, how can you live with yourselves knowing that every second, we are braking Daddy's heart and allowing people to completely unwittingly walk straight into eternal torture!!

Its an unbelievably hard job and the whole burden is on US, its as if every second that passes we personally have "hit the big red button" that sends another one down the chute.

And worse still, poor old God is sitting there utterly helpless, in tears, unable to even give us enough help to do the job, because its our job, and the Holy Spirit is too flat out to get to everyone in time. Yes, of course Jesus died to set us free from sin, but unfortunately it wasn't really that effective, it only works for a few lucky enough to hear about it in time... and oh, there goes another one. Was that my fault? Will I be held accountable for everyone? And what on earth will happen when I finally stand before Him? "Well Jim, you didn't try hard enough and 4,675,237 souls are now being tortured for eternity because of you! But that's okay, because you are saved, and you can spend the rest of eternity with me living happily ever after, and we won't even think about those poor souls any more because that would just spoil all the fun!"

Is this too silly? Really?...

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...