church, Hezekiah's Tunnel

The Gently Flowing Waters of Siloam

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Isaiah compares the governance and work of the Lord in Jerusalem to the gently flowing waters of Shiloah in Isaiah 8.  Shiloah is generally recognised as being the same word that is translated Siloam or “Sent” in John 9. It is the place Jesus sent the man blind from birth to wash and come back seeing.

The gently flowing waters of Siloam refers to the ebb and flow of the waters that passed through a tunnel in the very centre of Jerusalem. This tunnel had been dug during Isaiah’s time.  An inscription has been found dating from the period which uses the same Hebrew word “ ” that Isaiah used to describe the waters flow.  The lengthy inscription explains that the tunnel was built from both ends at the same time.  One set of workmen started at the Gihon spring and the other started in the centre of Jerusalem.  The workmen met in the middle –  which wasn’t easy to do.

In the very heart of the City of God there flows a river that makes the Lord glad (Psalm 46:4).  It is a gently flowing river of healing and it needs to be directed and revealed by the work of godly men.

Our churches are places of  healing but it takes the work of godly men to reveal that.  The healing streams are there, we just need to dig and work hard together to meet in the middle so they can be revealed and everyone be refreshed.

Eschatology, good news

Conceiving the Inconceivable

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There is a story of twins talking to each other in the womb which is going about the internet in various forms.  Here is my take on it.

The babies are not far from birth and well developed but still completely ignorant of what is to come.  They cannot conceive of what they are about to experience since they have absolutely nothing in their current existence that they can relate to it.  So that is why I have called this blog “Conceiving the Inconceivable” and also because I love puns and playing with words.

The first problem you experience when you start to try and write this is that the twins don’t have words.  They are immersed in water so they cannot speak.  We know that babies in the womb can hear and respond to sounds and that the normal existence for a baby in the womb is to be on their own.  Even this is analogous to our existence now in comparison to what we will be.  Now we are profoundly disconnected from one another because of time and space.  In the next life I believe there is no time nor space in the way we understand those terms and so perfect intimacy and knowledge of one another and God is the inevitable result.

____________________

“So you still think there is some existence beyond this?”  Thomas was having his daily tete-a-tete with John.

“Undoubtedly” John replied. “Don’t you hear all those sounds and Mom’s singing?”

“Nah, that is just the vibrations of this watery world we live in.  You move around and I move around and we disturb the waters and they make noises.”

“Beautiful, coherent noises which can only point to someone greater than us.” John was in his usual philosophic mode.

“No, they happen by chance.  It is like everything else in here, it all started with us being nothing and then the fluids and all the chemicals interacted together and here we are.  You know that we evolved out of creatures which were smaller and less intelligent than we are.”  Thomas had an answer to everything and usually answers that made as little out of any idea of a Mom and Dad as he could.  “We grow up in here until we can no longer fit and then, Boom!, it all explodes and our pitiful existence comes to an end in a terrible mess.”

“I don’t believe all that dystopian future nonsense you seem to indulge in all the time.” John replied.  “For me it is obvious we are here because our Mom and Dad wanted us to be here.  They have wonderful plans for our lives after we are delivered.  Even in here I can hear their loving words and concern for us.  I have felt them on the walls of our barriers, telling me not to fear.  In Mom, we live and move and have our being.  She is love and tells me about love.”

“You can’t prove any of this,” Thomas retorted.  “It sounds great but you know that we are going to die.  You have said yourself that you believe that after delivery (as you call it) we will no longer have water to breathe in.  So what then?  All your stories are just optimistic fairy tales designed by your clever mind just to make this cramped existence more bearable.”

_________________

You can see where I am going with this.  It seems to me obvious that a thoughtful meditation on our existence before delivery can be very useful.  It is a way of helping to explain the enormous gulf in our understanding between where we are now – in time and space – and where we will be after we die (or after we are raptured) in eternity.

Eternity is not only lots more time and infinite space.  Eternity includes a different state of things altogether, as expansive and as inconceivable to us now as being able to breathe air, talk and walk is to babies in a womb.

Discipleship Series, General Principles, good news, Wisdom

Be Quiet!

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Proverbs is one of the Bible’s Wisdom books along with Job, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs.  One of its major themes is the consequences of actions and words.  According to the bible, discipline in what we speak, how we manage what goes into our bodies and what we do with our time all matter if we want to lead a godly life.  It is the root meaning of what it means to be a disciple.

One of the great disciplines of the Christian is stillness.  “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10) is easier said than done for most of us.  It is essential though if we are to hear God.  If we don’t hear the Holy Spirit within us we cannot pray.

Inner stillness can be disturbed by many things.  What we eat can disturb our bowels  making us uncomfortable and unable to stay still.  What we have said to someone can disturb us, we may be aware that we have hurt someone with our words.  Proverbs is full of admonishments to restrain our lips (e.g. Prov. 21:23) so that our souls and lives can be preserved.

Inner turmoil is exposed as soon as we try to be still.  For that reason many people avoid trying to be still as much as possible.  Some will work all day (usually older people), others will play video games or continuously interact with their smartphones (usually younger people).  Continuously blaring music of all sorts is a very common way of avoiding being still for many of us.  Constantly having the TV on or the radio when travelling is another way of avoiding inner turmoil.

Inner turmoil can keep us awake at night.  Our aching bellies, unfulfilled desires, our troubled conscience, worries and fears are unavoidable at night when everything is quiet and still.

God’s answer to inner turmoil is for us to bring this bag of wind and tossing to His word and to be still before it.  That is why there is so much right emphasis in Christian circles on having a disciplined daily quiet time with God – usually before we do anything else in a day.  The word of God is living and active, it will cast a light over all that is going on within you and separate out what is of God and what isn’t (Hebrews 4:12).  As we are still we can pray and the Holy Spirit will teach you about how to live (John 14:26).

Be still.  Jesus commanded the wind and waves.  He can do that for you also.

Law & Grace

Works brought about by Faith

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It is absolutely crucial that we understand that our works arise from faith in the fact that we are justified by the blood of Jesus Christ and that alone.  Our works have no merit at all in relation to our legal standing before God our Father and our ability to come to Him freely.  We approach God our Father freely because of what Jesus accomplished for us on the cross.

That is basic theology.  It needs to underpin everything we think about who we are and what we do.

So, with that understanding, we read the rest of the Scriptures in a different light.  The Old Testament Law (the Torah, or first five books of the bible) are now expositions of what pleases God.  They become a place to learn how to live in a way that blesses both God and us.  The 10 commandments (Exodus 20:1-17), for instance, describe the fundamental ways in which we can please God and be a blessing to others.

All of Scripture is God breathed and useful for instruction (2 Timothy 3:16).  In Exodus 18 there is a lovely passage about Moses father-in-law Jethro.  The respect that Moses shows Jethro is an example to us all of how we should treat our elderly relatives.  Moses bowed low before Jethro and kissed him (Exodus 18:7), he showed respect and affection in equal measures.  Moses then took on Jethro’s advice without quibbling with him.  Considering that Moses was hearing directly from God and would go on to write the Torah, this was an impressive sign of his humility.  But then he was the most humble person on the face of the earth at the time (Numbers 12:3).

One of the most fundamental ways we can read the Old Testament with New Testament eyes is to understand that the law is not given as a stick to beat us with but that that stick was already used on Jesus (Col. 2:14).  The Law is now powerless in that regard. But as a way of knowing God and what He wants, the Law is crucial.  If you love God because of what He has done for you, then you will also love His Law because it shows you His heart.

General Principles, good news

The Rules of the Game

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Recently my head has been swimming with ideas about dimensions beyond the four we live in (height, length, breath and time).  No more!  I’m going to play by the rules of the game God has set up in those four dimensions.  There is where sanity lies.

So what are the rules?  This is how I understand them:

  1. We all make mistakes, fail, sin, whatever you want to call it. Perfection in this game is impossible except for Jesus.  The rule is that when you sin you confess it, receive forgiveness, get up and go again (1 John 1:5 – 10).
  2. Love is the answer to everything.  As long as we keep on loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and our neighbours as ourselves we can’t go wrong (e.g. Matthew 22:37).
  3. Love starts and ends with God and particularly with an understanding that Jesus died a horrible death on the cross for us.  Keep remembering this and it cannot but produce love in you (e.g. 1 John 4:19).
  4. God’s means for remembering is what some denominations call “Breaking of Bread” and others “Holy Communion”.  Jesus wants us to meet together with others regularly and remember what He did together (e.g. 1 Corinthians 11: 23-25).
  5. The mechanisms that God uses to enable us to please Him are grace working through our faith in Him we don’t see (see Paul’s letters to the Ephesians and Romans).  So we believe and God in response gives us a whole pile of good things we don’t deserve including peace, health and (dare I say it) wealth primarily in our relationships.  The thing is not to take them for granted, we really don’t deserve all the blessings we receive. God blesses us so we can bless others who He also loves just as much as us.
  6. Faith is a gift of God which we receive when God first intervenes in our lives and grows as we continue to let Him intervene.  Some people call the first intervention the baptism of Christ, others the baptism of the Holy Spirit, others call it being born again.  The important thing is that you have it and continue to experience the reality of God’s presence in your life since it is He (the Living Word) that creates faith in you and without faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6).  Most Christians acknowledge that they have had this encounter by being baptised in water – an outward sign of an inward reality (1 Peter 3:21).

That’s it!  Simple really.

church, General Principles, History of Faith

Forgiveness of Sins

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It is a tragedy to watch Ireland abandon centuries of Christian tradition to become a bastion of anti-christian sentiment, atheism and humanism.

I believe that the main reason that this has happened is that the majority of the people of Ireland have rightly turned with horror from the abuses of the Roman Catholic churches hierarchy which have been laid bare in these last few years like rarely before.

However, we are throwing out the divine Baby with the bathwater.  Ireland needs to return to Christ and the Word of God as it was preached by Patrick when he first arrived in this country in 430 AD and not to return to the paganism that predated him.  And for that we need to remind ourselves of some basics:

“A pope or a bishop has no more power than the humblest priest where the remission of fault is in question. And even where there is no priest, each Christian, were they a woman or a child, can do the same thing. For if a simple Christian says to you, ‘God pardons sin in the name of Jesus Christ,’ and you receive the saying with firm faith, as if God himself had spoken, you are acquitted. If you believe not that your sins are pardoned, you make your God a liar, and declare that you put greater confidence in your vain thoughts than in God and his word. Under the Old Testament neither priest, nor king, nor prophet, had power to proclaim the forgiveness of sins; but under the New Testament every believer has this power.”

(From Martin Luther @1518 AD quoted in Volume 1, Book 3, Chapter 10 of the HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION by J. H. MERLE D’AUBIGNÉ. http://www.DelmarvaPublications.com. Kindle Edition.)

The point Luther was making is that the truth that Jesus Christ was crucified so that we could know forgiveness of sins stands independently of the means by which it is delivered.  It only takes faith in the hearer of the truth itself for it to be effective – and, as Paul says in Ephesians 2, that faith is itself a gift of God.

Luther goes on to say (from the same source):

“Repent, and do all the works that you can do; but let the faith which you have in the pardon of Jesus Christ stand in the front rank, and have sole command on the field of battle.”

This is the faith Patrick taught when he first arrived in Ireland @430 AD.  It was hundreds of years later that St. Anselm and others brought the errors of the Roman churches teachings on forgiveness to Ireland and enforced them on the people by Norman arms.  It was for control then that the Pope and the Roman Catholic hierarchy took away the power to forgive sins from every believer and limited it to themselves and it is for control over naïve people that they continue to do so.

We need to stop being children in our thinking and become men in our understanding (1 Corinthians 14:20).

General Principles, good news

Easy to Understand, Hard to DO

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Jesus’ definition of a hypocrite was someone who did not practice what they taught (Matthew 23:3).  In my experience this is a surprisingly common phenomenon especially in my own life!

James also said this about the same type of thing:

22 But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves. 23 For if you listen to the word and don’t obey, it is like glancing at your face in a mirror.24 You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like. 25 But if you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free, and if you do what it says and don’t forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it. 

(James 1:22-25)

So, here are some things that are easy to understand but hard to do that are challenging me lately.  Perhaps you can identify with some of them:

  1. The cure to being overweight is to eat less.  In my case, if I simply cut out eating cakes and biscuits with my teas and coffees I would do all I need (taking into account point 2 below) to get to my best weight.  The trouble is I really like cakes and biscuits with my teas and coffees.
  2. The cure for flabbiness is more exercise (and point 1 above).  In my case a few exercises every morning for about 15 mins coupled with 30 mins walk or a 20 mins cycle will do the trick.  The trouble is I don’t like going out in the rain.
  3. The cure for impure thoughts is to catch them as they appear in my mind and bring them captive to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5).
  4. The cure for poverty is to live within my income, not to spend more than I earn.  The trouble is I want the “freedom” that comes with being able to buy something when I want it.

The reality is that we are all, by nature, hypocrites to some degree or another.  We can be no other way.  Paul talks about this phenomenon in Galatians 5:17 (see also Romans 7:22, 23):

17 For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. 

He also tells us the cure:

“Walk in the Spirit and you will not fulfil the desires of the flesh.”

That is the real challenge.

General Principles, good news

Out of the same spring

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Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” 17 And Jesus said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. 18 I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.”  Then He warned the disciples that they should tell no one that He was the Christ.

21 From that time Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day. 22 Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This shall never happen to You.”23 But He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.”

Matthew 16:17-23

It seems to be in the nature of Peter that he was capable of being the very best and the very worst of men at the flick of a switch.  He walked out on the water in an unsurpassed show of faith one minute and then begins to doubt and sinks the next.  He professes that he will go to prison and death with Jesus and then soon after denies Him.  In the above passage he gets a revelation from God that Jesus says He will build His church on, and then goes on to try and prevent God working out His purposes by looking at things from a very human viewpoint.

James asks the question: “Can a spring produce both salt water and fresh?” (James 3:11).  He goes on to say that a salt spring cannot produce fresh water.  However, to take the analogy further, the Christian life seems to indicate that those who have the fresh springs of the Spirit in them are still capable of producing bitter waters at times.  Or at least Peter did in the above passage.  [Some people argue that that was before Pentecost – or even before Jesus breathed on him and the other disciples saying to receive the Holy Spirit but I don’t see that changing much in Peter’s life after Pentecost (e.g. see Galatians 2:11-14).]

So it seems we are all capable of doing this especially if we have the sudden, mercurial temperament of a Peter.  We can all say something completely in keeping with God’s will one minute and then, maybe in the same sentences, say something that in no way reflects His purposes.  It is to be noticed that, in the passage above, Peter is most wrong when he is saying something that seems most reasonable and loving from a human point of view.

As the hymn writer says: “I dare not trust the sweetest frame but wholly lean on Jesus’ Name.”

church, General Principles

Following Jesus

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“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. 25 He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26 If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also. If anyone serves Me, him My Father will honor.” John 12:24-26.

One of the noteworthy things about Jesus, as He is described in the synoptic gospels especially, is His indiscriminate healings of everyone who was sick around Him.  This was most obvious in the physical healings he did so often but Jesus also healed people from sin, guilt and shame.  He spoke words of healing that minister to us to this day and into eternity.

Healing ought to be a sign that He is in our churches also.  If Jesus is truly with us then one of the signs that this is so is that our church is a place of health and healing in all senses of that word.

General Principles, good news

Losing your life

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If you refuse to take up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of being mine. 39 If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it. Matthew 10:38,39.

Everyone lives every day in the shadow of death whether we want to acknowledge it or not.  The physical life of our body is a precarious thing.  It can dissipate easily under the influence of sickness or accident.

As a result many people spend a lot of time and energy trying to ensure it lasts just that little bit longer or isn’t taken away suddenly.  This extends to our immediate loved ones as well.  Telling people to “take care” is such a common phrase that we hardly notice it.

This is all very natural but runs counter to what Jesus tells us to do if you want to be His disciple.

It also doesn’t make sense, especially if you are a Christian who believes in the resurrection of the dead and a better life to come because of what Jesus did on the Cross for us all.  Why spend all this time and energy trying to put off the inevitable when what comes afterwards is so glorious?

However, no where in the bible does it say that it is a good thing to be reckless with your life or to take it so you can get to heaven sooner.

What Jesus does say is this:  Don’t worry about your life, how you will get your next salary, for your heavenly Father knows you need these things.  Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you as well.

25 “For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? 27 And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? 28 And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, 29 yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! 31 Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ 32 For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

34 “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will [v]care for itself. [w]Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Matthew 6:25-34

A Christian in a relationship