Does God Do Miracles Today? He Most Certainly Does!

Does God Do Miracles Today? He Most Certainly Does!

Dec 11, 2023 | The Gospel

That’s kind of a trick question because the moment you see or hear the word miracles you think of, well, miracles! You know, the stuff Jesus did in the gospels and the Apostles in Acts, mostly having to do with physical healing. This post, however, is not about those kind of miracles. I have something much more profound in mind. Do I have your curiosity yet? Well, keep reading.

The reason for this post, and it’s been brewing for a while, is a conversation I had earlier this year with some family members. They asked me if I believed God still did miracles today, and so the discussion went down the physical healing rabbit hole. In one way it’s a silly question. If God is God, then of course he can and does heal, and he does things out of the ordinary from what would happen in the regular course of events. I don’t remember exactly the way the conversation went, but any talk of miracles of a physical kind must start with a biblical, redemptive-historical perspective.

The Nature and Purpose of Biblical Miracles
Biblical miracles are not magic. Their purpose is never to display raw power but to move forward God’s redemptive purposes in history. That’s why they are so rare in biblical history, which might surprise those who’ve never read the Bible. Miracles cluster around three significant redemptive periods, each affirming the message that God works in history to save His people. The first is the Exodus, and the events surrounding it. Another six or seven hundred years would pass before miracles occur again in Israel with the rise of the first prophets, Elijah and Elisha in the 9th century BC. One might think the prophets who follow performed miracles as well, but that was not the case. Even John the Baptist, the great forerunner of the Messiah who is compared to Elijah, did not perform miracles. It seems he would be the perfect person to utilize miracles to support his message, and an invented John the Baptist likely would have, but what we read in the gospels is real history of the real Baptist—no miracles. The third cluster of miracles would surround the greatest miracle worker in biblical history, Jesus of Nazareth, and his first followers.

There was nothing in Israel’s history close to the voluminous miracles performed by Jesus and the Apostles, so we are compelled to ask why. Remember that no Jew in the first century expected anything but a super-human Messiah, but human, nonetheless. They were looking for a king like David to overthrow their latest oppressors, the Romans. Their self-conception going back to the Exodus was that Jews are not slaves or servants of any earthly power, and the indignity of their Roman conquerors was unbearable. They had no choice but to suffer, until, that is, the long-awaited Messiah came to liberate them. They weren’t interested in some itinerant Jewish preacher healing people. As popular as that made Jesus in a time before the healing arts and knowledge of our day, it wasn’t enough to prove he who he said he was. Yet, ironically, it was the miracles that gave him credibility, and most importantly authority. The latter word is critical for a discussion of miracles. We’re not discussing whether God can perform miracles or not. That is not relevant to the discussion because we all know that that’s part of God’s job description. The question given miracles were so rare in redemptive history is, what were they for, what was their purpose, and do miracles today have the same purpose.

The ultimate miracle, Jesus coming back to life after being brutally tortured and killed on a Roman cross, was what earned him the ultimate authority in the universe. He himself tells us so in the Great Commission, that “all authority in heaven and earth” had been given to him. He ascended to sit at the right hand of God to exercise that authority, but he gave that authority in his name and power to the Apostles and prophets to build the foundation of the church. As Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:

19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

The purpose of the miracles was to establish the foundation, and once it was established there was no need to continue the miracles. After the Apostles died there is no record of individuals performing such miracles in the church in the following centuries. That miracles were unique to the Apostles is also clear from reading through Acts and seeing specifically how God used Peter and Paul’s miracles to give authority to the messengers and the message. Once that authority was inscripturated there was no longer a need for specific individuals to display God’s healing power in such a way.

The purpose of this post, however, isn’t to fully argue this case but to explore miracles far greater than physical healing.

Love is the Drug I’m Thinking Of
I hope that title makes you laugh because you can hear the song in your mind as soon as you read it. That most definitely is not the love I’m thinking of. The greatest miracle, and to me one that proves without a doubt God exists, is when two sinners love one another. That is miraculous! One definition of a miracle is doing the impossible, and there is nothing more impossible than when a self-centered sinner loves another self-centered sinner. But what exactly makes this love so seemingly impossible? Well, that depends on what we mean by love.

The love of God in Christ has nothing to do with what our secular world means by love because that love is driven by feelings, and biblical love is not. Worldly love is easy because it is oriented to the fulfillment of self, while biblical love is self-sacrificial. And to add biblical insult to injury, biblical love is a command and we love others in obedience to God like it or not. As Christians we don’t have a choice. In Romans 13 , Paul says it is a debt we owe, and that to God. We can see the difference in the Greek word most often used for love in the New Testament, agape-ἀγάπη, or love which centers in moral preference. That simply means right action for the good of the other. Because it is fundamentally a choice, biblical love is a verb, a word that expresses an action, an occurrence, or a state of being. The feeling is ultimately irrelevant. In fact, true love happens when we don’t feel like it and don’t want to do it. I have a couple stories from my past about how I learned that the hard way.

When I was in college I was involved in a Christian campus ministry. One Saturday we went to a swap meet to try to sell stuff and share the gospel. When I was ready to go back to school at the end of the day, the head of the ministry, an older guy probably in his thirties at the time, said he wanted to go back with me. I didn’t realize he had an ulterior motive—my sanctification. Mike was a guy who could be blunt and had eyes that looked right through you. He could be intimidating. Pulling no punches he comes right out and says, “You’re not a very nice person to be around. You always want people to think like you, and you make them feel bad if they don’t.” And words so related. I was devastated. That night back in the dorm I experienced what is called a dark night of the soul. I told God not only can I not love people; I also don’t want to! At that moment this Christianity thing felt impossible, and I didn’t think I could do it. Thankfully, that was a Saturday, and the next morning I went to church. Whether it was in the sermon or a verse I read, God said something along the lines of, Of course, you can’t do it, but I can do it through you! I remember an instant change from despair to hope.

The next lesson came after I’d graduated from seminary and was working at a small Christian liberal arts college in their communications department. I was 28 at the time, and worked with a young lady who was terribly annoying. At some point I started complaining to God, well, it was more like whining. I’d had several jobs previously where I worked with women who were annoying, and I asked God why yet again I have to work with another person who is so annoying. As the saying goes, if you don’t want to know, don’t ask. And I could swear I heard a voice say out loud, “To teach you how to love her, ya moron!” Well, maybe not the last part, but it would have been fitting. Of course that is what love is for. It doesn’t have much value when we love people who are easy to love. I’m not sure those people exist, but you get the idea.

I’ve used this story many times over the years telling friends and family what they don’t want to hear. Not one ever said, thank you for sharing that. I can’t wait to love! One especially precious moment happened when I told this to a young family member as he was dealing with another difficult relative. He was lying on the floor on his back, and he started shaking his head saying over and over, no, no, no! Basically just like me, I don’t want to! Well, I told him, if you’re a follower of Christ you don’t have a choice. It is important to understand, though, that this kind of divine love is not demeaning; we don’t become doormats, but it allows us to have relationships that flourish in a way they never could when self is the central focus of our lives. It is impossible love made possible, and it transforms lives wherever it goes.

The Radical Death-Life in Christ
The main reason I wrote this post now was because of recently reading Romans 8. Paul explains how there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life has set us free from the law of sin and death. He goes on to explain what it means to share in Christ’s death to sin because we no longer live according to the flesh but to the Spirit. Here is how this works:

5 Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. 6 The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace.

In the past I related passages like this to morality, but never connected it to love. If you think about it, though, what our flesh desires, the sin principle that lives in us, desires our self-fulfillment. It’s all about me! That is why it always leads to death, and not life and peace. When Jesus commanded us to love our enemies, he showed us what that meant by dying for we who were his enemies. He also said following him in his example would be equally as difficult:

23 And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. 24 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

I want to suggest for your consideration that this has far more to do with loving other sinners than it has to do with being a good moral person, as important as that is. Sin is ultimately relational, first with God, then us, then others.  In Romans 12:1 Paul tells us because of God’s mercy to us, we are to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, which is holy and pleasing to God. And he adds something amazing. Doing this is our reasonable, rational, logical service or worship of God. It makes total sense logically in light of everything He has done for us in Christ. We are then compelled to love others. And when you read verse 2 you will see he will tell us how we are to do it, even if much of the time we’re not quite sure. Paul tells us, though, we can “test and approve” what that is.

So, when we interact with someone who absolutely drives us up the wall, that is when the loving rubber meets the road. It applies to the mildly annoying people as well. That’s when we must take up our cross die to our flesh and ask ourselves, or better the Lord, how in the world do I love this person! And also repent that we just don’t want to. Then get on with it. Just remember it will not be easy. That is how you know it is true love.

 

Notable Quotation-J. Gresham Machen

Notable Quotation-J. Gresham Machen

Dec 9, 2023 | Notable Quotations

We have provided technical education (but) . . . . is also the moral interests of mankind; and without cultivation of these moral interests a technically trained man is only given more power to do harm. By this purely secular, non-moral, and non-religious training we produce not a real human being but a horrible Frankenstein.

 —J. Gresham Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State

 Twenty years later after an Austrian Frankenstein started a global conflagration, C.S. Lewis would call them men without chests, and the end result, The Abolution of Man. After a hundred years of progressive secular education our colleges and universities are filled with these Frankensteins today.

 

Calvin and the Three Uses of the Law

Calvin and the Three Uses of the Law

Dec 7, 2023 | Theology, Uncategorized

In the last year I’ve come into a new understanding and appreciation of God’s law, and it’s been a thrilling journey. Up until August of last year when I had what I call an eschatological awakening, I looked at God’s law much the way almost all Evangelical Christians do. It was kind of an Old Testament thing, whereas Jesus came in a sense to supersede the law so we would no longer be condemned by not fulfilling it. It’s not that I thought God’s law was irrelevant, but I didn’t think of it much at all. It did its job bringing me to Christ, and now I live by grace and the Holy Spirit guided by God’s word. This, however, is only one aspect or use of the law as I’ll explore below. For example, one passage among many that gave me this impression is in Romans 3. Paul seems to imply God’s law is no longer necessary, although I would never have said that:

21 But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

Reformed theology had given me an appreciation of God’s law. I knew it reflected God’s character, who he is, and it is as perfect as he is. I’d read Psalm 119 many times in my Christian life, the longest chapter in the Bible, and every verse but two mentions some variation of the greatness of God’s law. I believed it all, but nonetheless, God’s law was never a focus for me. Now it is—all the time.

I was prompted to write this because I recently went to the Baptist church my son attended (he’s since gotten married and now lives across the state), and the pastor made a statement that made me cringe. He said, “The Ten Commandments are not your friend.” I screamed out in my mind, you are wrong! He then went on to contrast the law with being under grace, as if they are mutually exclusive. He doesn’t seem to realize that God’s law has more than the one use of condemning sinners and driving them to Christ. We might think this is some esoteric theological debate like scholastic theologians in the Middle Ages arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but for me it changed my perspective on everything. It was like watching food coloring drop into a glass of water—soon it changed the color of everything.

Calvin and The Three Uses of The Law
Not long ago I learned this idea came from John Calvin, and I recently came across his explanation of it in the preface to his commentary on the book of Isaiah:

Now, the law consists of chiefly three parts: first, the doctrine of life; secondly threatening and promises; thirdly, the covenant of grace, which, being founded on Christ, contains within itself all the special promises.

The three are numbered differently and described in various ways, which I will do below, but all three are relevant for all time until Christ returns. Here is how Calvin describes the perpetual relevance of God’s law:

To make this matter still more clear, we must go a little farther back, to the law itself, which the Lord prescribed as a perpetual rule for the Church, to be always in the hands of men, and to be observed in every succeeding age.

So contrary to the pastor mentioned above, the Ten Commandments (the law) is indeed our friend, and our guide for life. We’ll go through each use and see what the implications are for us and our world.

Instead of the narrow view I used to have, I now realized Christ’s mission affects not only how we live, but how we see the church’s mission in this fallen world. Negatively, the purpose of the gospel is not only to go to heaven when we die and achieve personal holiness. That is an entirely too constricted understanding of the Christian faith, as if it’s implications were solely personal. Not only are the implications societal, impacting every area of life in which people interact, but that is the purpose for which Jesus came when he accomplished redemption. He came to save and transform the entire world, not just us! Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” for a reason. He gave the Apostles the Great Commission to disciple the nations because he expected that to get done. An accurate understanding of God’s law will help us to obediently contribute to Christ’s mission.

The Three Uses of The Law Distinguished
Since they come in no particular order, let’s start with the use we’re most familiar with:

1. The Law Condemns Us – One of the purposes of the law is to condemn sinners. Some have called this the law as a mirror because when we see ourselves in it, it is not a pretty sight. In fact, the closer and longer we gaze into this mirror, the worse we look. Most of us don’t feel so bad about ourselves when we compare ourselves to other sinners, and we often feel quite superior to those wretches. When we look at God’s perfect law, by contrast, we can’t feel superior to anyone. That’s the point. Paul’s two great letters regarding the essence of salvation, Romans and Galatians, have over 50 and almost 30 references to the law in them, and most are in reference to this first use. The law is meant to show us our inadequacy, and highlight our need for a Savior who fulfilled the law in our place. The danger, as Paul indicates more than once, is thinking that if we obey the law we will gain acceptance before God, that the law becomes a means to save ourselves. I won’t spend anymore time on this use because it’s one all Evangelical Christians are familiar with. Unfortunately, we tend to think it’s the only use.

2. The Law Restrains Evil – This is the civil use of the law necessary for civilizations to exist, and where I will spend the most time because it’s the most contentious. The law in the civil realm has no power to make bad people good, but keeps them from fulfilling their evil desires on innocent people. This use is where we Reformed types get into a bit of a tussle. It gets bloody sometimes, and I’m in the distinctly minority position, for now (that’s called positive thinkin’!). Those who are not Reformed tend to think we are absolutely nuts, even dangerous.

Natural Law/Common Grace verses God’s Revealed Law-Word
The primary distinction in our understanding of the law comes between Old Testament Israel and the New Covenant Church. Most Christians believe that God’s civil law to Isarel was abrogated when Israel ceased to exist and Jesus ushered in a new kingdom. I do not believe that because God’s law and the gospel are not in any way at odds. It is always and everywhere for all time a reflection of His being, and He calls all to obedience to it if they are to experience His blessing and true human flourishing. If they don’t, the results will always be bad. On societal law we keep the badness to a minimum through the common law, which developed over a thousand years going back to King Alfred the Great of England in the 9th century. King Alfred based his law on the Ten Commandments.

Most Christians and conservatives, by contrast, believe we can have a basically secular society, and natural law or common grace is enough to keep society’s dark impulses in check. This doesn’t work because God’s revelation, and thus the knowledge of how fallen human beings are to live in harmony with other sinners, is not limited to creation. God has also revealed His will in his word, the Bible, and in Christ. Jesus commanded discipling the nations to include, “teaching them to obey everything” he commanded them. This means a nation if it is to be obedient to God and experience his blessings, it must be affirmingly a Christian nation. America was founded as a Christian nation, and that is how Americans saw themselves until well into the 20th century. The Supreme Court affirmed as much in 1892 in a case providentially titled, Church of the Holy Trinity v. The United States:

These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.

Today, most Christians, let alone non-Christians, would accuse me of trying to make America into a theocracy, apparently a scary proposition. In their minds when they see or use that word, they don’t see what it means, a society ruled by God, but the Christendom of Medieval Roman Catholicism and the Spanish Inquisition, or the Salem witch-trials, or in a modern fictional horror story, The Handmaiden’s Tale. In other words theocracy equals tyranny. R.J. Rushdoony counters these spurious claims:

Theocracy is falsely assumed to be a take-over of government, imposing biblical law on an unwilling society. This presupposes statism which is the opposite of theocracy. Because modern people only understand power as government, they assume that’s what we want.

Those who misunderstand theocracy think secularism is the only means to liberty, except the evidence doesn’t back that up. All we need is to open our eyes. Secular societies inevitably lead to tyranny exactly because of what Rushdoony said. Modern people think government is sovereign, and the individual and the family is limited. Christianity and God’s law, by contrast, sees government as limited, and the individual and family as sovereign. We either bow down to power, or we bow down to Christ. There are no other options on a societal level.

The key words Rushdoony uses are “imposing” and “unwilling.” All secularists, be they religious or not, believe if we bring Christianity and God’s law into the public square, we will be “imposing” our faith and it’s moral values on others. Believing this, skeptics of an ignorant type make the statement, “You can’t legislate morality,” which is like saying, you can’t cook food; food is what you cook, as morality is what you legislate. The only issue is whose morality, and from whence it comes. As we see clearly, the secular leftist state is tyrannically imposing its morality, the latest example being transgenderism enforced by the state. Talk about “imposing” law on an “unwilling” society! Few people in Western societies are secular progressive absolutist woke leftists who believe sex is merely a social construct changeable at will, yet the woke have no problem imposing their policies on an unwilling society. That’s the way it works—no neutrality, God’s law, or man’s.

The difference is God’s law is the “law of liberty” (James 1:25, 2:12). When Jesus proclaimed “liberty to the captives” in Luke 4:18 quoting Isaiah 61:1, he wasn’t proclaiming liberty from the law of God, but the liberty coming from obedience to it. As the Apostle Paul states in I Timothy 1, “the law is good if used properly,” and it “conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God.” It will be either God’s law or the will to power of paganism. Liberty was established in Christian Western civilization because Christians affirmed God’s laws as normative for the nations. It’s either God and liberty, or secularism and tyranny or anarchy, the logical conclusion of man’s law without God.

Secularism is a jealous god, and it will have no other gods before it which is why a proper understanding of theocracy is so important. Christians must understand something the Christians of the first three centuries of the church understood all too well: “Jesus Christ is Lord” is a political statement. If they refused to confess Caesar as Lord they were seen by the Roman state as a threat to its absolute power. This is exactly where we are in the twenty-first century West. It is Jesus as Lord, or the state as Lord. My goal is to persuade Christians to simply be open to the concept of the law of God in Christ as the only Christian option against secular totalitarianism.

3. The Law is our Moral Guide – Finally, because we are saved by grace doesn’t mean we become antinomians, or against law. We do not use our liberty in Christ, as Paul argues in Romans 6, to go against God’s law, i.e., sin; the reality is exactly the opposite. When our hearts are transformed from spiritual stone to flesh ( Ezk. 36:26), we go from being God’s enemies (Rom. 5:10, Col. 1:21), his implacable foes, to his beloved children. The transformation includes our affections. We now want to obey and please him, and are distressed when we don’t. His law is our delight, holiness our aspiration, and our chief desire in life is to please Him. What ties God’s law together is the beautiful bow of love, as Jesus taught us, the greatest commandment.

 

Uninvented: John Chapters 5 and 6-Lord, Lunatic, or Liar

Uninvented: John Chapters 5 and 6-Lord, Lunatic, or Liar

Dec 4, 2023 | Uninvented

When I read these chapters recently I couldn’t get over how bizarre they were. There are many things Jesus says and does that are unexplainable unless he was who he said he was: the divine Son of God, the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, and Savior of the world. More than the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), John’s gospel captures Jesus saying things that are especially difficult for the skeptic who tries to explain away Jesus as just some kind of good moral teacher. That is not an option. Yet for hundreds of years that is exactly what non-Christians of every stripe have declared Jesus to be. Rejecting the Jesus of the gospels, however, and replacing him with some other Jesus has been going on a lot longer than that.

Even though they reject him as Lord and Savior, everyone wants a piece of Jesus. We can go as far back as Mohammed in the 7th century rejecting the Triune God and turning Jesus into a great prophet. At some point Eastern religions embraced him as some wise moral shaman. When the Enlightenment came on the scene in the 17th century the divine nature of Scripture was rejected, so Jesus had to be explained as something other than what the New Testament declares him to be. Yeah, let’s go with a good moral teacher, that’s it! There was no explaining away the historical person, so they had to get rid of him in some other way.

When we talk about Jesus, we must go back to one of the most effective arguments for his divinity, the classic trilemma. Either Jesus was Lord, God incarnate in human flesh, or he was a lunatic or a liar. There is no Jesus as a good moral teacher option. Good moral teachers do not say the things he said. Scottish minister John Duncan (1796-1870) seems to have been the first to apply the term “trilemma” to this argument when he observed: “Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or he was himself deluded and self-deceived, or he was divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable.” As often phrased, Jesus is either Lord, lunatic, or liar. As you develop your apologetics skills this is an indispensable one to have in your tool belt. When you use examples from the gospels it’s impossible for anyone to counter. Some people may contend Jesus didn’t say such things, but rather, those who wrote the gospels put these strange sayings in Jesus’ mouth. That’s even more impossible to believe than Jesus having actually said them. Who makes up stuff like this? And where did they get these ideas? What he says sounds strange to us now, but to first century Jews they were not only inconceivable but blasphemous. It’s far easier to believe Jesus was who he said he was, Lord God and Savior of the world.

The Bizarre Jesus
Of any person in recorded history, Jesus would be the most difficult to invent, by far, specifically because what he said was so bizarre. Nobody expected Israel’s long-awaited Messiah would say such outlandish things. Israel’s Messiah would be an exalted, anointed king like David, not Jesus. We could pick almost any chapter in John, but chapters 5 and 6 are especially strange. The gospels are primarily Jesus picking fights with the Jewish religious leaders and using those encounters to teach the world who he is and what he came to do. He says things that are so scandalous he consistently infuriates them. Eventually it gets him killed. In John 5, Jesus is in Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals, and he’s giving the Jewish leaders fits, specifically because he’s healing on the Sabbath, a no-no. And as John says, “he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” Let’s look at some of the assertions Jesus makes about himself, and remember the Trilemma as you read.

“Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. 20 For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed. 21 For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. 22 Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, 23 that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him. 

24 “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. 25 Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. 26 For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. 27 And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.

28 “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice 29 and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned.

All those who want the good moral teacher Jesus, or like Muslims, want the great prophet Jesus, have to ignore entire passages like this. Think about what he is saying here. This carpenter from Galilee (to Hillary Clinton he would be a “deplorable”) is claiming to be the Living God, Yahweh, Israel’s covenant Almighty God. No wonder he confused everyone he encountered. Then he goes and gets killed on a Roman cross, end of story—he was both a lunatic and a liar! Jews could come to no other conclusion. Then he rose from the dead. Over time the first Christians realized, because Jesus told them (Luke 24), that the entire Old Testament was about him, and then in due course it all made perfect sense.

The Bread of Life
To ratchet up the bizarreness, In John 6, Jesus says some things that are even more strange. He tells his disciples, and anyone else who would listen, that he is bread and wine, and they are supposed to eat and drink him! On the bizarre scale that’s about ten million. And just to emphasize the strangeness, he says his flesh is “real food.” So Jesus is promoting cannibalism? Imagine, someone doesn’t know anything about the Bible, never read any of it, and only vaguely that Christianity is a religion. Let’s say you give them this passage to read. Try to further imagine what they would think as they read it.

 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. 50 But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” 

52 Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

53 Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

Which is it? Lord, lunatic, or liar? Does a good moral teacher say things like this? We cannot ask that question enough.

Those who want a piece of Jesus completely ignore passages like John 5 and 6. For that matter, they ignore the entire gospel of John. It is the most in your face Jesus-is-God gospel, by far. When we come to it, we have to make a choice, and if we’re honest we will—for non-Christians it is inevitably the trilemma.

Jesus put the question of his identity to his followers. We read this in Matthew 16, Mark 8, and Luke 9. In the Matthew passage Jesus askes his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” Then after they give him some answers, he asks the most important question in the history of the world: “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Everything in life and history, and eternity, turns on this question, and the answer to it.

 

David Mamet Thinks Jesus was an Anti-Semite

David Mamet Thinks Jesus was an Anti-Semite

Nov 30, 2023 | Western Civilization

In the response to the horrific invasion of Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7, antisemitism has been much in the news. It’s been an eye opening experience for many who consider themselves liberals and of the left to see the blatant Jew Hatred of their fellow leftists. One of those who used to be of the left but woke up some time ago is the great playwright, filmmaker and author, David Mamet, himself a Jew. In fact, back in 2008 he wrote a piece called, “Why I am no longer a brain dead liberal.” He is now a consistent critic of all things left and Democrat, so this recent piece by him didn’t surprise me: “How the Democrats betrayed the Jews,”  In it he laments how Jews can so consistently vote for a party that hates them. That, thankfully, is slowly changing, the shock of October 7 increasing the pace.

Modern Jews are mostly white, so in the perverse universe of wokeness where oppressor and oppressed dominate their worldview, of course Jews are no better than Christians. You’ll see in these leftists diatribes that Jews are accused of being “colonizers,” the worst thing white people can be. It was, after all, white Christian men from England who colonized indigenous people throughout the world, including the most heinous of all, America. This was known as the British Empire which gets top billing on the woke Marxist Hall of Shame. The Jews in 1948 were added to that wall when they founded the nation-state of Israel. Prior to that they were an oppressed people, so considered good. After all, a genocidal maniac named Adolf Hitler tried to wipe the entire race off the face of the earth. That’s gotta be worth a few oppressed points. But they blew it when they entered what was called Palestine and occupied it, dispossessing the Palestinian people. Before the woke mind-virus infected the entirety of elite leftist opinion, Jews had their sympathy, but that started to change with the cultural devastation brought to us by the 1960s.

Mamet’s Slander Against Christians
The reason I’m writing about this here, and Mamet’s take on it, is not because of these slanders against the Jews, but because of Mamet’s slander against Christians. As I’ll show, it is an understandable slander, but a slander, nonetheless. He is speaking specifically of “the West’s oldest, most reliable, and most permissible sick entertainment: the call for Jewish extinction.” He blames “the West,” but while there is plenty of blame to go around there, “the call for Jewish extinction” goes back much further, as I’m sure he knows. But it is the West and Christianity here who get the blame, and in that he is not completely wrong. In fact, Jew hatred has been a staple of Western Christian history, but in no sense did Christians “call for Jewish extinction.” I haven’t studied this in any depth, so I could be wrong, but I doubt it. Even Martin Luther who could easily be labeled an antisemite would never have imagined let alone desired a “final solution.”

Mamet states that this call for “Jewish extinction” goes back to the words of Jesus:

It began with the fall of the Jewish state in 77 CE (i.e., AD). Afterwards, we find the Christian libel that the Jews killed Christ, the medieval information that we slay Christian children to bake their blood into matzoh, that we were the cause of the Second World War; and, currently, that we exist to murder Moslems.

It’s all one horrific attack, and its earliest recorded instance is John 8:44 (of the Jews): “You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the Beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Christianity came into being with the destruction of the Jewish State — the adherents were Jews whose Temple and culture had been destroyed.

As he rightly says, the first Christians were Jews, so it makes little sense antisemitism as we know it today originated with them. But what about his assertion that Jesus’ statement about the Jews was the “earliest recorded instance” of this Jew hatred? I’m pretty sure I’m on safe ground when I say that Mamet’s understanding of orthodox Christian theology is limited. He certainly knows the Bible, but more like a shallow creek than the ocean it is.

If you do a Bible word search, it’s interesting to see the word Jew begin to show up around the time of the Babylonian exile (c. 580 BC), while prior they were called Hebrews. The reason is because during the exile they came to be known as the people from Judea, hence Jews. The first reference to a Hebrew as a Jew is in Jeremiah 32:12, but in Jeremiah 34:9 we see Hebrew and Jew used in the same sentence indicating a time of flux in how a people describe themselves:

everyone should set free his Hebrew slaves, male and female, so that no one should enslave a Jew, his brother.

Jeremiah lived from approximately 650 to 570. The Lord kept him in Jerusalem as a prophet to the kings of Judah, while the younger fellow prophet Ezekiel became part of the exiled Jewish community in Babylon. The context of this verse is King Zedekiah declaring all Hebrew slaves are to be free while the Babylonian armies are fighting against Jerusalem and other Judean towns. I’m guessing the Babylonians coined the word as they slowly took over the land of the Jews.

The History of Jewish Persecution
The desire for Jewish (i.e., Hebrew) extinction goes back well before the time of Christ. While we can’t say the Egyptians wanted to rid the world of Hebrews because they needed slaves, the Exodus could have easily led to mass slaughter (i.e., genocide) if God had not ordained their miraculous escape. In a universe without God, I can easily imagine Pharoah so furious he would want to rid the world of the Hebrew people; he’d find another people to build the pyramids. The slaughter of people was common in the ancient world, but kings and armies were more interested in keeping people alive to turn into slaves than killing them all. Free labor was necessary for an ambitious king to build an empire. The very first true antisemitism comes after the Babylonian captivity when the now Jews were back in Israel, over 400 years before Jesus was born.

If you go back to the Bible word search for Jews, you’ll notice in Esther the word Jew appears almost 50 times, in Nehemiah 10, and Ezra 6. The Jews, no longer called Hebrews, and primarily speaking the Aramaic of Babylon instead of Hebrew, are back in Israel. These three Old Testament saints lived in the mid-400s, approximately 483-425. When the Jews were first allowed to go back to Jerusalem, the first thing they wanted to do was rebuild the temple, which covers approximately 538-516. So by the time these three historical books were written, the Jews were fairly well established back in their homeland. The story, if you’re not familiar with it, is a simple one. A young Jewish women, Esther, becomes queen of Persia. The second in command to the king, Haman, hates the Jews and lies about them to the king because Mordecai, who raised Esther, would not bow down to him. His response is the first instance in history of a “final solution”:

5 When Haman saw that Mordecai would not kneel down or pay him honor, he was enraged. 6 Yet having learned who Mordecai’s people were, he scorned the idea of killing only Mordecai. Instead Haman looked for a way to destroy all Mordecai’s people, the Jews, throughout the whole kingdom of Xerxes.

Haman’s plot is exposed because of Esther, and Haman is hanged on the gallows he intended for Mordecai. This is the only book in the Bible God is not mentioned, but his sovereign providence in protecting His people against a Jew hater is everywhere.

The Jews of Jesus’ Time
The Jews had a tough time of it for the next 400 years, oppressed by various kingdoms except for a brief period in the second century under the Maccabees. Judaism changed a lot in that time specifically with the development of the Jewish professional class of religious leaders, priests, Pharisees, Sadducees; they were the religious establishment of the first century. As Jesus shows, these men became the enemies of true religion, setting themselves up as a class superior to average people, not to mention “sinners.” They thought and taught that acceptance before God could be earned by a righteous life, but one dictated by their customs and rules, not God’s law and word. This infuriated Jesus because it turned God’s covenant promises upside down. It was to them all outward performance of arbitrary rules that had nothing to do with mercy and grace, or obeying the greatest commandment to love God with all your being. They also rejected the Messiah, God’s true answer for sin, something Jews had been expecting for 400 years.

It was these Jews who Jesus was picking fights with throughout his ministry, not Jews as a class of people or race. It was these same Jews who fought against the Apostles until 70 AD when Rome destroyed the temple and Jerusalem with it. There is nothing antisemitic about early Christianity because the first 10 or 20 years before Paul began his outreach to Gentiles, all Christians were Jews, and thought of themselves as Jews. In fact, you can see in Acts the reluctance of the first Jewish Christians to embrace Gentile Christians. We see this clearly in Acts 10 when Peter has a vision of God telling him nothing is unclean He has declared clean. Then the Roman Centurion, Cornilious, shows up at the door, and he and the Gentiles (non-Jews) with him received the visible sign of the Holy Spirit as the first Jewish Christians did at Pentecost. Peter and the other Jews were shocked. Even after this it was difficult for them to accept Gentiles as part of the New Covenant community as we see in Acts 15 at the Jerusalem council. Paul’s call to be the Apostle to the Gentiles, and obedience in carrying it out in spite of persistent opposition from the Jews, changed all that.

Romans 9-11-All Israel Will Be Saved
To answer Mamet directly, Jesus’s condemnation of the Jews in John 8 is not the beginning of antisemitism in the West. Just because Christians, or those claiming to be Christians, perverted Christ’s words and the gospel and turned it into Jew hatred doesn’t mean Christianity is the cause. The worst calumny of these Christians, or so called Christians, is saying it was Jews who killed Christ. Whoever God in his sovereign providence used to accomplish that horrific event, it was our sin that crucified Christ. We are the guilty ones, not Jews, or Romans for that matter. God loved us when we were his enemies, and was willing to lay down his life for us to pay the penalty for our sin and reconcile us to God. I would suggest that our attitude toward the Jewish people be that of the Apostle Paul.

Mamet should spend some time in Romans 9-11 and carefully consider Paul’s words and argument. If he did, he would find that antisemitism is the very last thing you can infer or deduce from Christianity rightly understood. Here is how Paul introduces his argument:

 2 I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, 4 the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. 5 Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised! Amen.

For Paul, the tragedy of the Jews, his people, rejecting the Messiah is so great he would give his own eternal destiny for it. Christians owe a massive debt of gratitude to our Jewish brothers in faith whose eyes have yet to be open to their Messiah. It is clear reading these chapters that God’s plans very much include the Jewish people, and we should pray for them and their safety. According to Paul, their salvation is in God’s plans.