. be my witnesses in Jerusalem... and to the ends of the earth" Acts 1:8
Serbisk ortodoxa kyrkan (8)
Serbisk ortodoxa kyrkan (8)
Den Serbisk ortodoxa kyrkan i Sverige står under episkopal ledning av Biskopen av Storbritannien & Skandinavien med svenskt säte i Enskede; St. Sava Church, Bagerstavagen i Enskede.
Se: >> Biskopsdömet Skandinavien och UK
Nationella ortodoxa kyrkor
Den ryska ortodoxa kyrkan är den största. Andra nationella ortodoxa kyrkor är den grekisk-ortodoxa, serbisk-ortodoxa, rumänsk-ortodoxa, bulgarisk-ortodoxa och flera andra.
Sammanlagt finns ett trettiotal ortodoxa kyrkor med cirka 150 miljoner troende. Trots olikheter utgör de en samlad enhet gentemot andra kyrkor.
Se: >> kyrkorna i Sverige & världen
Vad skiljer den ortodoxa tron från den protestantiska och den katolska?
Vem är den högsta patriark i Ortodoxa kyrkan?
Varför har de ortodoxa prästerna långt skägg?
Läs mera >> om den serbisk ortodoxa kyrkan
Den ortodoxa tron
Protestantiska, katolska och ortodoxa kyrkorna har en gemensam lärogrund i den heliga Skrift. (Bibelns Gamla Testamente och Nya Testamente.) Under historiens gång har emellertid olika tolkningar av Bibelns och kyrkohistoriens innehåll uppkommit. Fram till år 1054 var de Östliga kyrkorna och den Romersk katolska kyrkan en enhet i trosuppfattningar. Gudstjänstbruk och andra saker som t ex regler för det dagliga kristna livet var olika i väst och öst. Under mycket lång tid betydde dock inte detta så mycket att de därför betraktade sig som skilda kyrkor utan hade nattvardsgemenskap med varandra. Men från år 1054 skilde sig den Romerska kyrkan från sina kristna bröder och systrar i öst. Skiljepunkterna var i stort följande.
· Västkyrkan införde ett tillägg i den gemensamma trosbekännelsen, och Sonen¸ den s k Filioquie-läran som förändrade läran om den Helige andes utgående från Fadern, vilket är den ursprungliga kyrkans lära.
· Västkyrkan lärde att själen efter döden straffades, skulle renas från synder, som inte var förlåtna här. Detta var läran om s.k. skärselden, som ogillades av den östliga kyrkan.
· Västkyrkan ansåg att påven, biskopen av Rom hade överhöghet över alla kristna i hela världen. Detta kunde inte östliga kyrkor acceptera. I öst hävdade man att biskoparna var jämbördiga kollegor och ingen annan kunde bestämma över någon annan biskop.
· Därtill fanns olikheter i vissa kyrkobruk som hade teologisk innebörd. - i stort består dessa skillnader än i dag.
· Politiska och kulturella skiljeaktigheter medverkade till schismen. Östkyrkorna som anser sig för ortodoxa, d.v.s. rättrogna i lära och gudstjänstordningar menar att västkyrkan har med sina annorlunda, mot fornkyrkan stridande teori och praxis, skilt sig från den sanna Kyrkan.
· Protestanterna har tillkommit som protest (1500-taleet) mot Roms kyrka på flera punkter som liknar den tidigare schismen mellan Roms kyrka och de ortodoxa. Protestanterna skiljer sig i övrigt på flera punkter från de ortodoxa kyrkorna. T ex vördandet av helgon och ikoner synen på livet bortom graven; synen på prästämbetet, på bikt och kyrkans läroauktoritet m fl.
Mere Christianity Today
Mere Christianity Today
As editors of "a journal of mere Christianity," we are often asked what we mean by "mere Christianity." We got this phrase, of course, from C. S. Lewis, who picked it up from the Anglican divine Richard Baxter (d. 1691). Another way of saying "mere Christianity" is "what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all," to use the words of St. Vincent of Lerins (d. 445).
We have always maintained, as did Lewis, that this is not a lowest-common-denominator approach. It is not a political construct, listing everything everyone believes and choosing just those still agreed upon. Mere Christianity is not in flux from one generation to the next or from place to place, the denominator changing every time a doctrine is questioned and therefore insisting upon it considered "divisive."
There are clear dividing lines that separate mere Christians from those who have lost their "salt" by having either unwittingly traveled or actively paved the road to apostasy.
The Christian's Lord
It is imperative that these lines be marked and noted and that they be upheld on peril of our souls and defended unto death should it come to that. These are some of the features of "mere Christianity":
o The mere Christian acknowledges that "Jesus is Lord," and means that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of man of the four canonical gospels, and no one else, is Kyrios-his Lord and his God.
o In saying Jesus is "Lord," the mere Christian means that "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given" to Jesus Christ. By saying "all" he means all.
o The mere Christian confesses Jesus as both Lord and Christ because God the Father raised him from the dead-yes, the body was raised-after his suffering and death on the cross for our sins, in fulfillment of the Scriptures.
o The mere Christian knows God as "Father" and calls him so, because this is what Christ our Lord has taught us; it is also the utterance given to him by the Holy Spirit, to cry out "Abba, Father."
o The mere Christian believes that Christ has charged all who call him Lord to make disciples of all nations, first, by baptizing them and, second, by teaching them to observe all that he has commanded.
o The mere Christian knows that, as the sovereign and divine Lord to whom all obedience is due, Jesus Christ provided for the transmission of his commandments, which are to be obeyed.
o All that our Lord has commanded-the moral and spiritual requirements of the Christian life of discipleship-are thus given to us in the apostolic deposit of the Scriptures and may be discerned in the lives of the martyrs, confessors, saints, and fathers of the church.
o The mere Christian realizes that he has received the faith from the faithful witness of the apostles and saints of the Church. While free to innovate, following Christ, who makes all things new, he is not autonomous and free to change the faith. The faith is not determined by us; it is received and passed on as delivered.
There are many more things that can be said about mere Christianity, and this should not be read as an exhaustive definition. But at the very least, we can assert that any church or any Christian claiming the name of Christ can neither be ashamed of nor deny these claims about Jesus Christ and remain Christian. Nor can he be derelict in openly and publicly proclaiming these truths regardless of the cost. Those who refuse to speak, proclaim, and defend these truths are not faithful.
The Christian's Framework
We would find among many Christians general, indeed enthusiastic, agreement with everything I have just said. But there are other aspects of mere Christianity to which many of those people would vigorously dissent. These are sometimes doctrinal but more often moral and liturgical. Some have suggested that if we are to remain fully ecumenical, we must be willing to bracket any particular teaching or practice that certain Christians at a particular time and place might disagree on.
The mere Christian cannot do this. For example, many Christians seem either confused or culpably ignorant about abortion. Some will argue that this is a question about which sincere Christians may disagree. We believe that their desire to disagree hardly means that abortion is not a matter of mere Christianity. The sanctity of human life in the womb has been upheld by Christians from the earliest times.
The sinfulness of extra-marital sexual activity is another example. Here again some Christians propose an expansion of the moral teaching simply because so many Christians no longer live by it. Again we must say that their desire to disagree hardly means that chastity is not a matter of mere Christianity.
The biggest example, of course, is the innovation of Christian egalitarianism, including the redefinition of the family and the ordination of women. We have written a great deal on this subject and I will not go into more details here, but in this innovation we see many people who favor mere Christianity insisting that it does not include male headship, despite the hitherto universal belief in it.
The Christian's Vision
There are other false beliefs and doctrines that cloud over the moral and doctrinal landscape of the Christian mind. Average Christians in the West today find it difficult to discern many of these. We all struggle under various forms of unseen cultural accommodations that compromise our Christian integrity and obscure our sight.
For example, to what extent have we really escaped "the corruption that is in the world because of passion" (2 Peter 1:4)? The toxins of a consumerist culture have spread far and wide in our churches. None of us is perfect, and we all see through a glass darkly. Even doctrines that we formally confess might become clear to us only after years of Christian living and worship, such that we would say we didn't really understand them until that later moment of enlightenment.
This is all the more reason to hold tightly to mere Christianity as that which has been understood by everyone before us, even when our modern peers disagree. It is a reason to take the most expansive definition possible of mere Christianity, even when some points seem unenlightened or unprogressive. For only by walking by the sight of those gone before us can we escape the myopia of both modern, liberal Christianity and the secular consumerist culture in which we all live.
Mere Christianity is what has been believed by every Christian in every place at all times, and what we are sure will be seen to be mere Christianity when the fads and enthusiasms of the moment have finally run their course. On that day, we shall no longer see through a glass darkly, but face to face. Those who think themselves free to change, to relax, or to reinterpret the faith handed on to us by the Lord and his apostles will have some explaining to do.
-James M. Kushiner
for the editors Touchstone Magazine, July/August, 2001
Se och >> Läs artikeln i Touchstone Magazine
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Jim Kushiner, executive director, is happy to have this "Mere Christianity Today" editorial appear in our website, according to their given permission for publishing in M'Xp.
And from Sweden's Christianity and Mission Xp we greet and thank the Author and Touchstone's board and staff.
/DS
Trosrörelsen (7)
T R O S R Ö R E L S E N (7)
Till landets sju största samfund hör Trosrörelsen med över 30.000 medlemmar.
Livets Ords historia
Den 24 maj 1983 grundades församlingen Livets Ord i Uppsala av Ulf Ekman. Då med ett 20-tal medlemmar. Sedan starten har församlingen och dess arbete växt kraftigt. I dag samlas drygt 2000 personer en vanlig söndag förmiddag och drygt 8 000 personer kommer varje sommar till Europakonferensen.
Men historien börjar längre tillbaka än så. I början av 70-talet engagerade sig en grupp uppsalastudenter i bibelstudier och studentevangelisation. En av studenterna hette Ulf Ekman, och han blev sedermera studentpräst vid Uppsala universitet. Hans bibelstudier om tro och radikal efterföljelse av Jesus, blev allt populärare och samlade tillslut hundratals åhörare, både studenter och andra.
Biografi Ulf Ekman
Ulf Ekman är grundare av församlingen Livets Ord i Uppsala. Församlingen har idag drygt 2 000 medlemmar, driver kristen utbildning, har ett omfattande missionsarbete och ger ut böcker, kassetter och videor med undervisning om tro på flera språk. Sedan februari 2002 arbetar numera Ulf Ekman och hans fru, Birgitta, på heltid med Livets Ords internationella verksamhet. Det lokala ledarskapet för församlingen har överlämnats till pastor Robert Ekh, som har varit Ulf Ekmans högra hand sedan 1985. Det internationella arbetet kommer huvudsakligen att koncentreras på etablerandet av 15 centra på strategiska platser runt om i världen. Tanken är att dessa centra ska fungera som Livets Ord i Uppsala och utgöra baser för ledarträning, utbildning och barmhärtighetstjänst. Dessutom deltar Ulf Ekman varje år i flertaliga seminarier och ledarskapskonferenser runt om i världen.
Läs mera >> Om Ulf Ekman
Trossamfund
Livets Ord har fortsatt att växa på hemmaplan där över 2 000 medlemmar är engagerade i det mångfasetterade församlingslivet i Uppsala. Församlingen har tillsammans med andra nystartade församlingar fått samma lagliga ställning som övriga svenska trossamfund, genom att församlingens pastorer är medlemmar i trosrörelsens predikantorganisation i Norden. Organisationen startades för att förena predikanter i trosrörelsen och fick år 1995 vigselrätt av de svenska myndigheterna.
Läs mera >> om trossamfundet
Trosrörelsen
Livets Ord är en lokal församling som finns i Uppsala. Det finns flera församlingar runt om i Sverige som tillhör trosrörelsen. Man kan dock inte att säga att dessa församlingar "är Livets Ord" utan de är fristående församlingar som arbetar på sitt sätt även om vi i mångt och mycket är lika.
Som församling finns vi bara i Uppsala men vi har också startat församlingar i andra länder, huvudsakligen Ryssland och Östeuropa. I Moskva (Ryssland), Brno (Tjeckien) och i Tirana (Albanien) har vi startat bibelskolor samt församlingar och de heter Församlingen Livets Ord. Nu har församlingen i Brno samt i Bratislava (Slovakien) tagits över av inhemsk personal efter att våra missionärer åkt hem eller åkt vidare till andra missionsfält. Det är den plan vi arbetar efter i varje församling vi startar, att folket i landet tar över och driver församlingens arbete vidare.
Dessutom finns ett antal trosförsamlingar runtom i Sverige och Norden som läromässigt ligger nära oss. Dessa församlingar jobbar dock helt självständigt som fristående lokala församlingar förutom Livets Ord i Gävle och Oskarshamn dit våra pastorer reser mer regelbundet och stöttar i arbetet. Den senaste tiden har vi också startat arbeten i Jönköping, Umeå och Göteborg där vi bedriver mötesverksamhet.
Läs mera >> om Livets Ord och Trosrörelsen
Se några exempel på Trosrörelsens >> församlingar i landet
/DS
Carl Boberg Påskens fröjd
Nu jublas må i slott och koja
Och sången gå mot himlens sky,
Ty Kristus brutit dödens boja
Och gravens mörka skuggor fly.
En stor och härlig tid
Med seger, ljus och frid
Gått upp för Kristi skara;
De äro utan fara
I livet som i dödens bo,
När de på honom tro.
Ty vår uppståndne segerhjälte
Har krossat döden i dess hus.
Dess nyckel hänger vid hans bälte,
Där fram han går i påskens ljus,
Han hälsar glatt sin hjord,
Som bidar på hans ord:
Jag lever, ingen fara,
I skolen med mig vara
Först här i mödans tid,
Se´n där i Faderns frid.
Så är hans frälsningsverk fullbordat,
Den lösen godkänd, som han gav,
Och kornet, som helt kort var jordat,
Går fram med frukt ur natt och grav.
En himmelrikets vår,
Ett Andens välde står
Bland fallna mänskligheten
Med sus från evigheten.
Och i det susets spår
Hans vittneskara går.
Det dystra korset där på kullen,
Som blodbestänkt och sorgset stod,
Nu segerns tecken är på mullen,
En fristad och en ärestod.
Vem vill ej slumra där
Uti dess skugga kär,
Tills påskens klockor ringa
Och segerns sånger klinga
I kraft av Herrens ord
Kring himmel, hav och jord.
Pris vare Kristus för hans seger
I livets som i dödens tvång!
Vårt himlahopp i honom äger
En oförgänglig soluppgång.
Väl skockas molnen än,
Och vän rycks bort från vän.
Men bortom jordens öden
Och sorgerna och döden
En oförgänglig vår
Sin famn emot oss slår.
CARL BOBERG
Texten PÅSKENS FRÖJD saxad ur tidskriften Trosvittnet N:r 13, den 29 mars 1934
Mera om >> Carl Boberg
Lyssna på >> O, store Gud
Förbön (v.13)
Förbön för Den svenska kristenheten:
(v.13) FÖRSAMLINGENS OCH KYRKANS LEDARE
Uppståndne Herre, tack för ledare som vill ställa sig till förfogande i din församling.
Be om hälsa och kraft till ande, kropp och själ.
Be om vishet i olika beslut, och att deras tjänst får bära frukt som består.
Be om nåd att de får leva i daglig förnyelse genom Den helige Ande.
Livets Herre, himmelske Fader, ge ledarna en dragning till Ordet och bönen.
(v.13) FÖRSAMLINGENS OCH KYRKANS LEDARE
Uppståndne Herre, tack för ledare som vill ställa sig till förfogande i din församling.
Be om hälsa och kraft till ande, kropp och själ.
Be om vishet i olika beslut, och att deras tjänst får bära frukt som består.
Be om nåd att de får leva i daglig förnyelse genom Den helige Ande.
Livets Herre, himmelske Fader, ge ledarna en dragning till Ordet och bönen.
Protestant, Catholic, Ortodox...
THE THREE GREAT...
The Protestant, Catholic and Ortodox churches are the three great divisions in Christianity.
Kenneth Tanner - one of the staff - in the Touchstone Magazine in Chicago tells us in contact with Mission Xp:
- We're just a group of concerned traditionalist Christians from various churches who make common cause around Holy Scripture and the Ancient Creeds as we confront together the Spirit of this Age.
- We are not a church or local fellowship group. Our board, staff, and subscribers hail from all three great divisions of Christendom, as our mission statement says, and we are the only English language magazine (of which I am aware) that regularly publishes Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant Christians in one place.
The Mission STATEMENT says:
Touchstone is a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom - Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox. The mission of the journal and its publisher, the Fellowship of St. James, is to provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.
The Swedish Christianity [Christendom] has about 50-60 churches and denominations with different traditions and backgrounds in Sweden and from abroad together with the immigrant churches.
This Touchstone Magazine in Chicago has something to say also all the churches in Sweden in their way of intercommunicating and in their respect to one another - with this their arena of the three great divisions, in the Magazine Touchstone.
Have a look >> Touchstone Magazine
Daily Reflections... Exclusively published to the Touchstone website each week, these Daily Reflections are brief commentaries on the lectionary readings contained in the St James Daily Devotional. The reflections are penned by Patrick Henry Reardon, editor of the Daily Devotional Guide and a senior editor of Touchstone.
Read their >> Daily Reflection of Today
The mission of the journal and its publisher, the Fellowship of St. James, is to provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.
Another special Reading is Mere Comments - that is Touchstone´s editors on news and event of the day.
/Dag Selander
Faith... What´s that?
F A I T H & B E L I E F...
A Question and an Answer...
- What is the Christian Faith about?
- Christian Belief and Faith is:
To see and grasp the Presence of Jesus and how he is able to transform people into new life and new hope.
This is the Gospel about the Gift of Christian Faith and the Gospel of Easter Sunday.
***
READINGS FROM THE SCRIPTURES:
Now if Christ is preached that he hath been raised from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?
But if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither hath Christ been raised:
and if Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, your faith also is vain.
Yea, we are found false witnesses of God; because we witnessed of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead are not raised.
For if the dead are not raised, neither hath Christ been raised:
and if Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.
Then they also that are fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most pitiable.
But now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of them that are asleep.
For since by man `came' death, by man `came' also the resurrection of the dead.
(1 Corinthians 15:12-21)
And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the `mother' of James, and Salome, bought spices, that they might come and anoint him.
And very early on the first day of the week, they come to the tomb when the sun was risen.
And they were saying among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the tomb?
and looking up, they see that the stone is rolled back: for it was exceeding great.
And entering into the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, arrayed in a white robe; and they were amazed.
And he saith unto them, Be not amazed: ye seek Jesus, the Nazarene, who hath been crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold, the place where they laid him!
But go, tell his disciples and Peter, He goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.
And they went out, and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them: and they said nothing to any one; for they were afraid.
Now when he was risen early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.
She went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept.
And they, when they heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, disbelieved.
And after these things he was manifested in another form unto two of them, as they walked, on their way into the country.
And they went away and told it unto the rest: neither believed they them.
And afterward he was manifested unto the eleven themselves as they sat at meat; and he upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them that had seen him after he was risen.
(Mark 16:1-14)
/DS
Rödhaken & Törnekronan
Rödhaken & Törnekronan
Selma Lagerlöf berättar i sin legend "Fågel rödbröst" hur rödhaken fick sin färg.
När Kristus hängde törnbekrönt på korset drog fågeln ut en tagg ur den korsfästes panna.
Med taggen följde en droppe blod som fastnade på fågelns bröst.
En aprilnatt sneddade jag över universitetssjukhusets parkering. Jag hade sett vårt tredje barn födas… Det är nästan tre år sedan nu, men jag minns att bilen stod ensam i ett hörn av parkeringen, jag minns att den första blågrå gryningen var på väg och att det var alldeles tyst. Jag stannade vid bilen. För ett ögonblick tycktes staden hålla andan. Så ljöd några kristallklara toner ur ett träd. Det var en rödhake, hans sirliga toner väckte en annan fågel, och ytterligare en, inom en halv minut hade alla aprilmorgonens fåglar börjat sjunga; koltrast, rödvingetrast, bofink och grönfink, en kör av sköna ljud … ett orgelbrus i en kyrka.
Jag stod och höll mig i bilen. Jag visste ju att de sjöng för den nyfödda pojken därinne i det höga huset.
Skall man lära sig att känna igen en enda fågel på dess sång så rekommenderar jag rödhaken. Lättast är det just nu, de närmaste veckorna, innan så många andra fåglar börjat ta ton.
Och det är något med rödhaken som talar till våra mest romantiska sidor. Till exempel vill vi gärna tro att den sjunger så vackert för att locka till sig en hona. Det är fel. När rödhaken brister ut i sin mest briljanta sång, när han sjunger som starkast och som mest virtuost, är det för att han är ursinnig. Sången är ett sätt att bevaka reviret, och när han tvingas duellera med en inkräktare tar han i ända nerifrån knäna.
Så här års, innan träden lövas, är det dessutom lätt att få syn på den. Sången leder lätt blicken till den lilla oansenligt gråa fågeln med det roströda bröstet.
-----
Texten ovan är saxad ur "En sång för en nyfödd" i Corren 19 april 2003 av Johan Sievers.
VAD PREDIKAR Rödhaken om Guds rike?
Rödhaken sjunger ut att Den svenska kristenhetens många kyrkor var för sig får och kan vara försångare. Och väcka de andra att sjunga kristallklart. Med sirliga tonslingor av toner som trillar som pärlor ur en påse likt orgelbrus.
För det andra är denna Den svenska kristenhetens rödhakesång färgad av Törekronans blod minnande om den seger som vunnits. När hon sjunger som starkast är det för att erinra om gränsen mellan Guds rike och mörkrets område; när det så är dags att duellera tar hon i ända nerifrån knäna.
Det är en del av Den svenska kristenheten - dess Rödhakesjäl. Med Himmelsk Lovprisning för Nåden. Och med Törnekronans blodröda Segersång för gränsen. Mellan Guds rikes Ljus och Fiendelandets mörker.
Må Påsken 2005 också få innebära en ny himmelsk ton från Rödhakens budskap…
/DSr
The Great Tit
The Great Tit
A witness about our heavenly Father´s Care and love I would like to share out of a special little creation, namely the Great Tit.
During the Winter and forward ahead Today I have heard this wonderful bird the Great Tit singing in a way that have reminded me of my childhood. I have felt moved back to wintertime in the North where I´m born in the county of Tanja Pärson's and Ingemar Stenmark's, Västerbotten. The Great Tit's singing its song with its character of the season between winter and springtime has been blessing me so special. This because my hard disc - my memory - is limited by a damage from the Forties [around 1940-1945]. This song has moved me mentally to a very good feeling of being on a specific place with trees, skiing and the sound from these Great Tits.
Another special experience is connected with a choice of way and a decision my wife and me had to make. We were sitting in silence in prayer. We had parked our car along the highway E6 to Norway in Huds Moar, 60 minutes north Uddevalla. During a short period of about one and a half minute we could just amazed study and admire this little Great Tit. It was as our Father with this his Great Tit said to us both: Be brave and calm because I will provide for you… And this was one of a couple of answers we needed in order to make a decision.
My witness of our Father in Heaven is that also the little Great Tit is a very good Preacher of our Father and his love and care. And in English I have picked up three P-Words preaching the message my Great Tit has for me everyday…
And the three words are: Presence, Protection and Provision. The Great Tit talks about God's Presence, His Protection and His caring Provision.
This is one of all the gifts in God's Love and Grace we have as The Swedish Christianity. And to share with people in our local invironments and globally as the Body of Christ March 2005... here and now…
/Dag Selander
DBSel@myway.com
Jonkoping, Sweden 25/03/2005
Korsets söner
***
Bönehus Norden
Korsets söner
Jessie Penn-Lewis
”För sångmästaren, till Gittit, en psalm av Koras söner.”
I en predikan förmedlade pastor C. H. Pridgeon en verkligt värdefull tolkning av de ord som återfinnes i inledningen av Psalm 84. Under det att han berörde den sjunde versen ”När de vandrar genom tåredalen gör de den rik på källor”, pekade han ut betydelsen av begreppet ”till Gittit” – i vinpressen. Psalmen skulle således kunna ha sjungits då man lät druvorna gå genom presskaren. Orden ”en psalm av Koras söner” är likaledes instruktiva därför att ordet Kora relaterar till Golgata – skalle, huvudskalleplatsen. Omvandlat till ett andligt mättat språk skulle dessa Koras söner kunna heta Korsets söner. Så har många förkunnare läst genom åren. Man kan föra samman dessa två spår och säga att psalmen är skriven att användas av korsets söner när de befinner sig i pressen borta i tåredalen.
En psalm för tåredalen! En psalm att sjunga i vinpressen. Bara korsets söner kan sjunga i vinpressen, detta därför att de känner hemligheten bakom Guds handlande – ur död springer liv fram, ur lidande kommer himmelsk glädje, ur det tillintetgjorda växer Guds fullhet. Därför ser de inte vinpressen eller korset med dess smärta så som människor i allmänhet ser dem. De ser på detta med den utblick man har från Herrens tabernakel, från Guds hjärtas helgedom och de kan sjunga i vinpressen när de ser det vin, det liv som hör Himlen till pressas fram ur dem som välsignelse till andra. De vet att han som trampade en vinpress helt ensam för deras skull är tillfreds.
En psalm att sjunga i vinpressen! Vad sjunger de? ”Hur ljuvliga är ej dina boningar, Herre Sebaot.” ”Min själ längtar och trängtar efter Herrens gårdar.” När jorden är höljd i mörkaste mörker där i vinpressen då öppnas Himlen och Gud blir allt i alla. Och de sjunger, de sjunger, dessa korsets söner om hur välsignad den är som har sin styrka i Gud, den som inget finner att stödja sig på i omständigheter eller i det jordiskas hjälpmaskineri. Hebreiskan använder ordet ”styrka”, ”uthållighet”. ”Saliga är de människor som har sin styrka i, hämtar sin uthållighet hos dig.” ”Vi räknar dem saliga, vi prisar dem saliga som håller ut” skriver aposteln Jakob. ”Ni har hört om Jobs uthållighet och sett hur Herren till slut handlade med honom. Jak 5:11.
Job kunde räknas salig därför att han hade uthållighet nog att invänta den tidpunkt då hans fångenskap ändade och Herren gav honom dubbelt åter. Herrens sluträkning betyder ett dubbelt åter för all smärta i vinpressen, och tiden i pressen är måttet dels på den kraft att hålla ut som finns att hämta för den enskilde hos Gud och dels som ett mått på detta dubbelt åter som vinpressen ger som avkastning och välsignelse till andra.
Och de sjunger, de sjunger, dessa korsets söner när de finner att deras hjärtan har blivit som vax som smälter i deras inre där mitt i pressen, Ps 22:15. Det är med dem som det var med deras Herre på korset, och i detta nedsmältande av begränsningar har deras en gång slutna och stängda hjärtan blivit som Sions vägar för andra att vandra i sitt sökande efter Gud. De är inte längre avskärmade från andras bördor och sorg, begränsade av intressegemenskaper. Deras hjärtan har vidgats och öppnats för behoven i en döende värld. Det heter: ”Om någon har denna världens goda och tillsluter sitt hjärta för sin broder, när han ser honom lida nöd, hur kan då Guds kärlek förbliva i honom?” 1 Joh 3:17.
Oh, dessa slutna, igenbommade hjärtan bland Guds folk. Oh, dessa höga murar som ingen kan ta sig över, vilka stänger inne deras kärlek och sympati. Det är värt vinpressens vånda att se druvornas höljen sargas och brista om Guds kärleks vin därmed kan frias att flöda till den värld som behöver all slags omsorg och allt Guds ord. Saliga är de vilkas håg står till dina vägar. Saliga är de i vilkas hjärtan man kan finna Sions vägar – engelsk översättning. Saliga är de vilkas hjärtan har gjorts till Guds väg till Sion för en sargad värld – vägar öppna för alla som bär på behov att gå på och färdas på bortåt till Sion, till Guds boning.
Mer än så, korsets söner kan sjunga i tåredalen, i dalen där vinpressen står, därför att de finner att den görs till en dal full av källor med livets vatten redo att ösas upp för de törstande. De har sökt med den mest uppriktiga längtan att bli till kanaler för dessa strömmar av levande vatten för andra att ta del av, och de har trott och hoppats enligt ordet i Joh 7:38, men flodbädden vilar ändå torr. Till sist uppenbarades ändå hemligheten genom Guds nåd. De fann sig en dag placerade i vinpressens dal; där begynte utflödet. Vid en tidpunkt då alla tycktes stå och trampa i Guds presskar, där öppnades en rännil med gudomlig kärlek, ren som kristall med Himlens sötma. Den sprang fram mitt ur deras hjärtan och rann hän mot alla dessa som trampade så idogt. De visste strax att de befann sig i källornas dal – mitt i Guds hjärta – detta Guds hjärta uppenbarande sig i Kristi hjärta på korset.
”Om du är Guds Son, stig då ned från korset”, skrek man, stig ner från korset. Kom ut ur vinpressen! Men, hur ska då alla dessa bli frälsta? Hur ska då Guds liv kunna förmedlas till människor? Också så måste korsets söner följa Lammet till Golgatas vinpress om något av Kristi liv ska kunna flöda till en döende värld.
Psalmisten talar om att passera genom vinpressarnas dal. Och det kan endast bli tal om att tillfälligtvis färdas igenom den dalen, att genomkorsa den tid efter annan när korsets söner söker sig vidare för att följa Lammet. Allteftersom dessa tar del av det gudomliga livet och styrkan gläds de när de återser källornas dal och räknas värdiga att trampas i pressen. Detta är Lammets glädje, hans som kunde säga till sitt lilla sällskap av bedrövade vänner: ”Min glädje ger jag er”. Detta är den glädje för vilken han kunde uthärda korset och avfärda skammen. Detta är den glädje vilken man endast kan lära känna genom att se Golgata från Guds hjärtas synpunkt, från en utsiktspunkt i Himlen.
Dessa själar som sålunda känner dalen med vinpressen som dalen med källorna, dessa går från kraft till kraft, eller som hebreiskan har det: styrka till styrka, och alla dessa träder fram inför Gud i Sion. Var och en av dem innesluts i det fördolda livet med Kristus i Gud. Dessa är de ”övervinnare” som bärs genom allt genom att våga ge upp allt. De går från kraft till kraft genom vinpressarnas dalar. De frias mer och mer från det jordiska allteftersom de förs från yttersta trångmål till delaktighet i tillgångar vilka finnes endast i Gud. De skiljs allt klarare och skarpare från sådant som världen håller högt och kärt för att bo i det himmelska tillsammans med deras Herre som har all makt och regerar över allt.
Denna likhet, denna överensstämmelse mellan korsets söners väg och Guds Son på hans väg som Lamm är Guds Andes mål och syfte. ”Ni skall få kraft att bli mina vittnen, mina martyrer.” Detta var det löfte som den uppståndne Herren gav till sina lärjungar och detta betyder att som han genom evig Ande frambar sig själv som ett offer åt Gud, så är alla hans efterföljare i behov av Guds Andes kraft för att följa honom och formas till likhet med honom, till Lammets avbild.
Tjänst och tjänande kan delas i två större avdelningar vilka följer på insikten i och upplevelse av Andens fullhet; den ena håller verk och gärningar, den andra består i att vara kanal för Guds liv till att väcka och stärka andra människor. Den ena avdelningen håller resultatinriktat verkande och görande. Den andra har sin rot i vånda och lidande. Den ena avdelningen kan kanske liknas vid Jesu liv sådant det tedde sig efter dopet i Jordan med alla under och tecken. Den andra delen följer som resultat av hans livs utgivande på Golgata.
Korset är slutpunkt i den troendes erfarenhet i fråga om att dö med Kristus i förhållande till synd och värld. Under det att denna position bibehålles genom tro och lydnad leds den kristne vidare av Anden in i en gemenskap med Kristus i hans död för att förmedla liv till andra. Detta är att vara en korsets son, som med glädje samtycker till att dela gemenskap med Herren för att hans liv i dem ska kunna springa upp som källor med liv tillgängliga för var och en som bär på behov.
Det är absolut nödvändigt att vi samarbetar med Guds Ande på varje område av det andliga livet. Det är fullt möjligt att bromsa och vända den andliga mognaden genom att söka erfarenheter som ser ut att hålla större mått av andlighet än den Paulus summerar i 2 Kor 4:10-12. Guds främsta syfte för den kristne är inte att göra honom till en kraftfull ledare men att kunna forma den förnämsta återspeglingen av Kristi karaktär – och detta kan endast verkas fram i vinpressen, i delaktighet i hans lidanden.
”Han blev korsfäst i följd av svaghet”. Herren gjorde inga under på Golgata kulle för att skaffa folkets uppmärksamhet. Men i svaghet och under tystnad, i lidande och genom ett uttömmande av sitt liv gjorde han mer för världen än när han kastade ut demoner och helade de sjuka borta i Galiléen.
Oh, att detta rena och kärleksmättade mönster må bli uppenbarat för dessa ivriga Guds barn i denna tid då man söker efter Guds bästa och ”vad Gud gör idag” – detta Guds mönster i Kristus, Lammet som övervinner mörkrets makter inte genom kämpande men genom död.
Denna klädsamma, vackra lammlikhet kommer inte att tillföras oss genom visioner av Golgata eller genom plötsliga, mystiska erfarenheter av att föras upp på korset för att där dela hans lidanden men genom att varje dag, varje timme välja Guds vilja i livets egen disciplin. Att inte ”svara emot” när anklagelserna kommer; den fördolda och stilla uppoffrandets väg undangömd för människors blickar. Detta är korsets söners sätt, framvuxet och mognande under sång i vinpressarnas dal.
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Be för var och en i auktoritetsposition; 1 Tim 2:1-4
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Artikeln ovan publicerad Långfredagen 2005-03-25 av Intercessors Network
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De sju församlingarna
DE SJU FÖRSAMLINGARNA
I den underbara berättelsen i Lukasevangeliets 24 kapitel om hur Jesus visar sig för de två Emmausvandrarna ser jag en beskrivning av sju olika attityder som finns bland våra församlingar idag.
* "Men deras ögon var slutna så att de inte kände igen honom" (vers 16)
De flesta västerländska församlingar har ingen aning om att den uppståndne Kristus är närmare varje kyrkobesökare än den människa som sitter bredvid dem. Varför? Jo, de förväntar sig inte att den uppståndne Kristus skall vara i kyrkan om söndagarna.
* "Då stannade de" (vers 17)
Många församlingar står stilla. De har stannat upp i minnen från hur det en gång var och förstår inte att Kristus lever och kallar dem ut i tjänst för
att gå ut med uppståndelsens budskap.
* "De såg bedrövade ut" (vers 17)
Att se bedrövad ut är ett tecken på besvikelse. Det kan vara besvikelse över pastorn, de äldste, eller någon eller något annat. När besvikelsen kommer in, går förväntningarna ut och inga visioner finns längre kvar, bara bedrövade ansikten.
* "Men vi hade hoppats" (vers 21)
Det här är en bättre attityd, eftersom besvikelsen talas ut och Gud kan
förvandla den när människorna ser att Kristus är nära och att han vill ta
all besvikelse och byta ut den mot en ny glädje.
* "Han förklarade för dem vad som var sagt om honom i alla Skrifterna" (vers 27)
Detta är en underbar situation för församlingen. Församlingen lyssnar inte
till vad pastorn säger, utan till Kristus själv som förklarar allt vi behöver förstå om honom.
* "De bad honom ivrigt: "Stanna kvar hos oss!" (vers 29)
Resultatet av att lyssna till vad Kristus har att säga, behöver vara en
personlig inbjudan till den uppståndne Herren att inte bara komma in i
kyrkans liv, utan också in i mitt hjärta och i ditt.
* "De bröt genast upp" (vers 33)
Det var redan mörkt och att springa tillbaka till Jerusalem skulle betyda
att springa uppför. Ändå måste de göra det, eftersom de älskade bröderna och ville trösta dem.
Denna text är verkligen ytterligare ett brev till alla våra kyrkor och församlingar idag. Den uppståndne Kristus inbjuder oss till gemenskap med sig själv. Han visar sig själv för oss genom tron. Han förklarar allt som Skrifterna säger om honom. Han kommer in i våra hjärtan när han blir inbjuden. Han bryter brödet med oss och får oss genast att ivrigt gå uppför, också i mörkret, för att styrka våra bröder och systrar i Kristus som förföljs därför att de har förstått att Jesus Kristus lever idag.
Må vår uppståndne Herre få bli till evig välsignelse även för Dig och få
fylla Dig med glädje denna påsktid!
(Psalm 21)
+ + + + + + +
Påskbetraktelsen ovan är hämtad ur Veckorapport 11-2005 och skriven av ordförande för Martyrkyrkans Vänner - MKV - som är Johan Candelin.
Postadress:
PB 182, FI-67101 Karleby, Finland
Fax +358-6-831 6495
Läs mera >> Martyrkyrkans Vänner
Israel And The Church (8)
THE MYSTERY OF ISRAEL AND THE CHURCH
by Art Katz
Chapter 8 - Israel And The Church
This cosmic drama is the setting for the Church of the Last Days. The Powers of darkness will not regard as a serious threat a local church that does not see this cosmic setting. They are the masters of deception, having a faculty for recognizing the authentic. They tremble and fear wherever they see apostolic authenticity in God's people. Wherever they see a congregation of the casual, and a conglomerate of individual entities going about their own business and their own self-will, whose government is not upon His shoulder, who do not take His Word seriously, who do not see themselves as participants in the eschatological future and are just wanting to 'get by' in a mere succession of services, these same Powers yawn and are unmoved.
Israel is God's designated test for the Church, to reveal its authenticity and the degree of the truth of its sanctification. Historically, many great saints have failed that test. Luther, the giant of the Reformation, most grievously collapsed at this test. He spent some time with three prominent Rabbis thinking naively that he would persuade them about the truths of the Reformation, and that they would recognize in the Reformation Church the revelation of the messianic faith of the God of Israel, but those Rabbis refused to be persuaded. Jews were no more impressed with Reformed Protestantism than they were with Catholicism. Jewish refutation of Luther's biblical arguments for Jesus as the Messiah, according to the fulfillment of Scripture, were, to Luther, of such a horrendous kind that they bordered on blasphemy. And, by that, Luther saw that the very presence of a Jewish or a Judaistic-rejecting body in Reformed Europe constituted a threat to the early Reformation itself. He then lapsed into a vitriolic opposition in which he produced a book called, The Lies of the Jews, which fueled, in part, the Nazi German persecution of Jews four centuries later! The Jew has ever and always been the severest test for the Church. They have always been a goad and thorn in its side because there is something about Jews in their mocking, skeptical attitude that is so galling and intimidating, especially to a self-congratulating, triumphalistic Church.
Moving the Jew to Jealousy
Where Paul says that "...salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make them [Israel] jealous" (Rom. 11:11), we need to know, as the Church, that there is something that will be required of us because of Israel's fall. From God's side, a principal purpose for our salvation is to move Jews to jealousy, and if we are not occupied with His purpose for our salvation, then we are not apostolic; we cannot say that we are authentically under His Lordship. We can have our services, our outreaches, our programs and we can bless the people, and the Lord permits us, but we should not, by that, automatically assume that we will have any part with Him in the things that pertain to His eternal purposes.
If the predominantly Gentile Church only knew that God has brought them into something exclusively reserved at first for Israel, they would have a very different attitude about what it means to be a believer. It would give the Church a certain kind of chastening and humility to see that the graciousness of God has now been made available to the Gentiles also. There is, however, a reason for that:
I say then, they did not stumble so as to fall, did they? May it never be! But by their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make them jealous (Rom. 11:11).
There is a strategy to God's bringing the Gentiles in. We Jews were broken off from our own root because of our rebellion and disobedience, and you as Gentiles were grafted in, not just to enjoy services, but to come to such a place of faith that you would exhibit what should have been our blessedness. You are in covenant relationship with our God and are grafted into His root, and therefore the sap of God should be coursing through you and exhibiting its fruits and blessings. This should be something so observable in Gentiles that it would alert unbelieving Jews to an awareness of their own God, in such a way as to move them to jealousy.
The first and foremost thing that distinguishes true church from any other religious body is not its preoccupation with the needs and benefits of its congregations, but its preoccupation with God's benefits. Making a demonstration to the Principalities and Powers of the air of the manifold wisdom of God is not for our benefit, but for His. The single defect at the heart of the Church today that threatens it from being the Church in the apostolic sense is that it has not taken to itself as foremost, God's purposes and God's satisfaction. The Church is still centered in itself: "Our blessing. Our benefit. What accrues to us by believing. We are saved from tribulation. We are going to heaven. Was the service good? How did you like the preaching? What did you get out of it?" Everything is predicated on us, our likes, and our satisfactions. We have brought into the Church the egocentrisms that occupied us in the world, and which now have another face: religious or spiritual, but equally egocentric. Can you see that even unconsciously and inadvertently we are deeply self-centered, and that the very air that we breathe, the self-centered wisdom of the world, has permeated even the Church? Every question, in the last analysis, is seemingly predicated on what benefit we receive. We need something to break the power of that inescapable and intrinsic orbit, and God, for that reason, has given us a mandate and a call for something beyond ourselves, namely, that a primary purpose for our being and salvation, from God's perspective, is that, as Gentiles, we might "move Israel to jealousy."
As we have said, the key to Israel is the Gentile Church. And the key to the Church is this dynamic of obligation that it would never have chosen for itself, yet that obligation is calculated to save the Church from its inveterate religious self-centeredness and spiritual egocentricity that has been the ruin of its apostolic character. In other words, were it not for that obligation, we would be inextricably and unavoidably self-centered.
Even the consciousness of this requirement is presently absent from the Church's consideration. What kind of demonstration can the Church make that will provoke Jews, who have been the historical enemies of the gospel, to the jealousy of the thing that they have despised and resisted till now? Do we have to become more charismatic or pentecostal? What does 'true church' mean? What must Jews see? What will do it? The remarkable thing is that Paul lets that statement stand: ...salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make them jealous (Rom.11:11). He gives no explanation as to what he means, or how it is to be performed. But this much we do know, the Church that can move Israel to jealousy is the same Church that can defeat the Powers of the air. Whatever is required for the one, serves also for the other. We know that there are two mysteries to be fulfilled. One is the mystery of Israel and the other is the eternal purpose of God, through the Church, of manifesting the manifold wisdom of God to the Principalities and Powers of the air (Eph. 3:10). These are two mysteries that are waiting to be fulfilled for which purpose God has "created all things." Ought that not to concern us?
Back to Beginnings
These things that we are groping for and touching cannot be obtained by only meeting on Sunday mornings with an occasional mid-week Bible study. It is clear that requirements of this kind demand a totality toward God and with those to whom we are joined. Sunday church is a convenience, but what I am suggesting is profoundly inconvenient. This is the going from house to house once again, breaking bread daily. This is working through issues, tensions, difficulties and misunderstandings, and it is amazing how easily they pop up and how quickly they can bring to nothing a relationship that has been years in the making. It requires and compels us to a daily vigilance and dependency upon God.
We cannot, from our own humanity, produce the unmistakable sincerity and authenticity that is required of us. We cannot stamp it out on the production line. We do not get it by going to a three-month discipleship school. It is, rather, a labor of love, of sacrifice and of suffering under the hand of God, and one will only get it in a prolonged period of time in a fellowship that is itself a place of suffering. Church is a suffering before it is a glory. The suffering we speak of is not from an attack that comes from without, but that which comes from within, in the misunderstandings, confusions and accusations. It is an astonishment the way people can sometimes be pressed because of the intensity of issues that arise! How could they say such things to you? Often there can be no explaining and no arbitrating; rather it is just something that needs to be borne. We have to bear each other up in our different places of maturity, self-control and understanding.
Wherever church endeavors to be true, wherever it seeks for the intensity of true relationships, face-to-face living, speaking the truth in love, correcting, reproving and exhorting one another, then there is, of necessity, likely going to be much misunderstanding amongst ourselves. We are going to have to face tensions. Tensions can so deepen that you think, "This is it. This fellowship is finished. There is no way that there could be understanding and reconciliation here." We find ourselves utterly cast upon God and His mercy. A warp comes when the Powers of darkness find opportunity to insinuate themselves in our own subjective awkwardness and inability. It is difficult to hear one another objectively. We meant one thing, but it was heard in another way. To untangle that, and to come finally to an understanding and an agreement requires a tolerance and a patience beyond one's capability. The time it takes, the anguish of it all, is a suffering. But we will not be able to move Israel to jealousy until we have broken through and beyond our own natural ability to be patient and into the divine patience that is of God.
It is easier to send monthly contribution to Jewish evangelism organizations and let them do the work of evangelism, than for the Church in every locality to take up this mandate and obligation to the Jews of its own area. This is also God's criterion of success as church; it is not whether we are pleased with the services or what we enjoy, but that whatever has been established and created is able to touch resistant Jews as well, at the same time, manifest the manifold wisdom of God to the Principalities and Powers of the air. That is why Paul cried, "Who is sufficient for these things?" We need to know our inadequacy and insufficiency, and it ought to compel us to God. It forces us to the issue of the love of God, which is no abstraction, but which grows out of the gratitude for His faithfulness, especially when we have cast ourselves upon Him again and again in crisis situations that we could never have met on the basis of our own ability or wisdom. If it were not for the issue of the Jew, we would never have had the urgency to come into this mode of being. We, as the Church, would have satisfied ourselves with something much less than that which would have glorified God, because the Church that can move Jews to jealousy is the Church that will be unto Him a glory. We would not have known that glory if we had not had this mandate of requirement toward the Jew.
For Your Sake
There is not one fellowship in a thousand that has so much as considered the fact that the criterion of its success is not what it enjoys, but its ability to move the Jews of their locality to jealousy. That criterion is hardly ever considered because we instinctively know that it is an ultimate requirement. Jews are the enemies of the gospel. It is not just that they resist the gospel or are indifferent to it, they actively oppose it. Yet Paul says that they are the enemies of the gospel, and then he tacks on, "for your sake" (Rom. 11:28a). Can you understand why this page has been ripped out of the Bible in modern times? It is as if the Church and its teachers have passed over and omitted it because it is radical in its requirement, and both Jew and Gentile have suffered immeasurably for that omission.
What does Paul mean, "for your sake"? Do we need enemies, particularly enemies like that? We are not talking about a bunch of harmless amateurs. Jews are a characteristically powerful people; they are brilliant; they are intellectual; they are authoritative. Have you ever had a confrontation with a Rabbi, or a Jewish intellectual or radical? As a former missionary to the Jews, and having been one myself for a long time, there is no more formidable 'enemy of the gospel' than the Jewish people. For the most part, we have never faced them nose-to-nose. We have never allowed ourselves to venture into a situation where we would have a door slammed in our face. We have never experienced bristling Jewish anger and indignation. We have never been cut to shreds by the cruelest words that insulted and offended human ingenuity can express! They can make you to feel like a fool, "How dare you present this message to us; we who have been on the receiving end of two thousand years of 'Christian' persecution culminating in the Holocaust! Are you going to tell us that we need your Christ?" You do not know what confrontation is until you meet such a people head-on. All of a sudden you feel like a weak little nothing; your gospel seems now so utterly vain, futile and foolish; you just want to shrivel up and blow away!
Our God is not taken by surprise by these factors, for He knows them well. In fact, He has overseen the factors that would make the Jew, especially in the Last Days, the most conspicuous and powerful opposition to Jesus Christ. That is why Paul says,
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, [Foolish though it is, intellectually speaking] for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, [and here Paul comes again] to the Jew first, and also to the Greek (Rom. 1:16).
If only we could try the gospel out on the Greeks first, and if it is successful there, then we will try it on the Jew, because they are the toughest! But no, in the wisdom of God, it is, "To the Jew first." We are not to begin where it is easiest, but where it is hardest. "Go into all the world, but begin at Jerusalem where I was crucified and where the prophets were stoned to death. Then you can go on to Samaria and all these other places, but begin with the Jew first (Acts 1:8 paraphrased)"
We signal something to the Principalities and Powers of the air when we do not take this mandate seriously. They look down and say, "You guys do not take the Lord seriously. You have not obeyed His word of command to go into all the world and to preach this gospel to every creature, beginning in Jerusalem and to the Jew first. We regard you, therefore, as lightly as you regard Him. You have not acknowledged the Lordship of His Word. You have not acknowledged the divine priority that He has given the Church towards Israel. You have done your own thing, and have nicely circumvented the most difficult requirement of all. You are cowards, afraid, and have no confidence in your own spirituality. You have taken the easy way. You have allowed the Jews to have their own existence, because their synagogues are to be found in the same communities with your churches, which is the statement that you accord to the synagogue a comparable validity of an equal kind with Christianity as being tenable, authoritative and valid."
To authenticate Judaism by honoring and respecting the synagogue and having dialogues with them, as if they constitute an equally redemptive faith, would have made Paul grieve. How could he have done that and still begin Romans chapter 9 by saying,
For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh (v. 3).
If a Christ-less Judaism were valid, why then would he have wished himself accursed?
If there is anything that makes the Church conscious of its inadequacy, it is confronting the Jew. The Jew is symbolic of the world, and the world at its most prestigious and powerful. Jews have won more Nobel prizes, more distinctions and awards in the fields of medicine, literature, culture and science, out of all proportion to their smaller number in population than any other people. They are a gifted people, but they employ their gifts, independent of God rather than for God, in the spirit of the world, and that makes them powerfully intimidating.
When God says, "To the Jew first," He knows what He is talking about. When you touch Jewish life you are touching a whole world system, a whole humanism and a whole elaborate, moral, ethical, religious and secular system that is opposed to God in every point and particular. Although it is a false light, Judaism would be worth subscribing to from a humanistic viewpoint; it has the most formidable endowments of wisdom and reason. But when God and His Christ are factored in as Living Reality, it makes that very same body of humanism inhumane in defrauding Israel and the nations of both reality and eternity.
The Fulness of the Gentiles
For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery, lest you be wise in your own estimation, that a partial hardening has happened to Israel, until... (Rom. 11:25a).
Put a circle around the word until. There is a condition, and here is the point. It is a condition that only the Church can meet. The issue of Israel becomes the issue of the Church.
...until the fulness of the Gentiles has come in (Rom. 11:25b).
When God says 'fulness,' He means the completion of all that He has intended. There is a fulness for which God waits, the "calling out of a people for His name, from among every nation" (Acts 15:14). This has always been the mission mandate of the Church. But according to Paul's letter to the Romans, the greatest incentive that God gives the Church to go into all the world and proclaim the gospel is that,
...the Deliverer will come from Zion (Rom. 11:26a).
When that mission is completed, something will happen independent of Israel's own spiritual condition. The Deliverer is released in the moment that the fulness of the Gentiles has come in. Israel is delivered, and the Deliverer takes His throne on the holy hill of Zion and rules over the nations. The world is in a hapless condition until the Lord Himself comes. Only thereafter can there be a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwells righteousness.
It is clear that this view opposes the 'pre-tribulation' rapture mentality, a mentality that sees the Church as being removed before the tribulation. It is a widely accepted doctrine, but to challenge it is to be looked upon as challenging some sacrosanct foundational doctrine of the faith. It is as if you are introducing heresy, when it is not a doctrine of the historic faith at all. Nothing, in our opinion, has more disarmed the Church of the necessity for preparation, discipleship, maturity and of being the Church that can stand in the Last Days and overcome tribulation, than the misguided confidence that it will not have to face it!
It is because of this 'pre-tribulation' rapture expectation that the Church, for the most part, is presently operating now toward Israel from the place of guilt, namely, that the Church is removed while the Jews remain to face the music. Anything that issues from the Church that has an ulterior motive, that relieves our conscience, where we operate out of guilt rather than from a priestly place, is not a an effectual place of ministry. Only priestly ministry is valid. The heart of priestly ministry is that the priest derives no advantage or benefit for himself in his priestly ministration. However, if you are operating out of guilt and a bad conscience, then you are alleviating something for yourself by being condescending to Jews.
If we, as the Church, elevate and exalt ourselves as something separate, independent or superior to the Jew, then, by that one thing, we are no longer the Church. The Church loses its character when it loses its essential humility. The Church needs to be reminded that we were grafted into their root and that we are made, by the gospel, partakers with them. The Church is not some phenomenon independent of Israel; it is the graciousness of God to allow Gentiles to come into their promise, into their hope and into their expectation, which they themselves have lost by default and no longer know. Part of our task is to remind Israel, not only verbally, but by being a demonstration of what it means to have been invited into the privileges of their 'commonwealth' (Eph. 2:12).
Moving the Jew to jealousy is a truer measure by which we should be assessing our spiritual condition. The very nature of the present Church is to be satisfied in itself. It gauges itself by itself or by others, and is happy with the measure of things that God gives, which defeats the very purpose for them being given. God calls us to ultimacy and to a purpose beyond ourselves that cannot be measured by ourselves, but only by our ability to move Jews to jealousy by the corporate word that we speak and incorporate as 'life together.'15 It can only happen with a people who have come to one mind, one heart, one understanding and one speaking. This is not an invitation to become automatons processed off the assembly line and who come in some monotonous submission to speak the same thing. It means a people, richly individualistic, formidable in themselves, alive to having the possibility of their own opinions and views but now brought by the divine process of God, which necessitates suffering through trial, to being in a complete agreement with God. And when He requires it, we can then speak a word that alone is creative and life-giving, because it is a word given in agreement with God.
Unless we are in preparation now toward that end, we need not think that it can be summoned from us when the drama of the Last Days shall come upon us suddenly. Will we have an incentive for this quality of integration, unity of life and agreement, and the depths of it? By what means shall we attain that end? One of the principal ways that a work of that depth has the greatest potential is in community, the daily life with the saints, who have taken up, consciously and willingly, their apostolic task!
by Art Katz
Chapter 8 - Israel And The Church
This cosmic drama is the setting for the Church of the Last Days. The Powers of darkness will not regard as a serious threat a local church that does not see this cosmic setting. They are the masters of deception, having a faculty for recognizing the authentic. They tremble and fear wherever they see apostolic authenticity in God's people. Wherever they see a congregation of the casual, and a conglomerate of individual entities going about their own business and their own self-will, whose government is not upon His shoulder, who do not take His Word seriously, who do not see themselves as participants in the eschatological future and are just wanting to 'get by' in a mere succession of services, these same Powers yawn and are unmoved.
Israel is God's designated test for the Church, to reveal its authenticity and the degree of the truth of its sanctification. Historically, many great saints have failed that test. Luther, the giant of the Reformation, most grievously collapsed at this test. He spent some time with three prominent Rabbis thinking naively that he would persuade them about the truths of the Reformation, and that they would recognize in the Reformation Church the revelation of the messianic faith of the God of Israel, but those Rabbis refused to be persuaded. Jews were no more impressed with Reformed Protestantism than they were with Catholicism. Jewish refutation of Luther's biblical arguments for Jesus as the Messiah, according to the fulfillment of Scripture, were, to Luther, of such a horrendous kind that they bordered on blasphemy. And, by that, Luther saw that the very presence of a Jewish or a Judaistic-rejecting body in Reformed Europe constituted a threat to the early Reformation itself. He then lapsed into a vitriolic opposition in which he produced a book called, The Lies of the Jews, which fueled, in part, the Nazi German persecution of Jews four centuries later! The Jew has ever and always been the severest test for the Church. They have always been a goad and thorn in its side because there is something about Jews in their mocking, skeptical attitude that is so galling and intimidating, especially to a self-congratulating, triumphalistic Church.
Moving the Jew to Jealousy
Where Paul says that "...salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make them [Israel] jealous" (Rom. 11:11), we need to know, as the Church, that there is something that will be required of us because of Israel's fall. From God's side, a principal purpose for our salvation is to move Jews to jealousy, and if we are not occupied with His purpose for our salvation, then we are not apostolic; we cannot say that we are authentically under His Lordship. We can have our services, our outreaches, our programs and we can bless the people, and the Lord permits us, but we should not, by that, automatically assume that we will have any part with Him in the things that pertain to His eternal purposes.
If the predominantly Gentile Church only knew that God has brought them into something exclusively reserved at first for Israel, they would have a very different attitude about what it means to be a believer. It would give the Church a certain kind of chastening and humility to see that the graciousness of God has now been made available to the Gentiles also. There is, however, a reason for that:
I say then, they did not stumble so as to fall, did they? May it never be! But by their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make them jealous (Rom. 11:11).
There is a strategy to God's bringing the Gentiles in. We Jews were broken off from our own root because of our rebellion and disobedience, and you as Gentiles were grafted in, not just to enjoy services, but to come to such a place of faith that you would exhibit what should have been our blessedness. You are in covenant relationship with our God and are grafted into His root, and therefore the sap of God should be coursing through you and exhibiting its fruits and blessings. This should be something so observable in Gentiles that it would alert unbelieving Jews to an awareness of their own God, in such a way as to move them to jealousy.
The first and foremost thing that distinguishes true church from any other religious body is not its preoccupation with the needs and benefits of its congregations, but its preoccupation with God's benefits. Making a demonstration to the Principalities and Powers of the air of the manifold wisdom of God is not for our benefit, but for His. The single defect at the heart of the Church today that threatens it from being the Church in the apostolic sense is that it has not taken to itself as foremost, God's purposes and God's satisfaction. The Church is still centered in itself: "Our blessing. Our benefit. What accrues to us by believing. We are saved from tribulation. We are going to heaven. Was the service good? How did you like the preaching? What did you get out of it?" Everything is predicated on us, our likes, and our satisfactions. We have brought into the Church the egocentrisms that occupied us in the world, and which now have another face: religious or spiritual, but equally egocentric. Can you see that even unconsciously and inadvertently we are deeply self-centered, and that the very air that we breathe, the self-centered wisdom of the world, has permeated even the Church? Every question, in the last analysis, is seemingly predicated on what benefit we receive. We need something to break the power of that inescapable and intrinsic orbit, and God, for that reason, has given us a mandate and a call for something beyond ourselves, namely, that a primary purpose for our being and salvation, from God's perspective, is that, as Gentiles, we might "move Israel to jealousy."
As we have said, the key to Israel is the Gentile Church. And the key to the Church is this dynamic of obligation that it would never have chosen for itself, yet that obligation is calculated to save the Church from its inveterate religious self-centeredness and spiritual egocentricity that has been the ruin of its apostolic character. In other words, were it not for that obligation, we would be inextricably and unavoidably self-centered.
Even the consciousness of this requirement is presently absent from the Church's consideration. What kind of demonstration can the Church make that will provoke Jews, who have been the historical enemies of the gospel, to the jealousy of the thing that they have despised and resisted till now? Do we have to become more charismatic or pentecostal? What does 'true church' mean? What must Jews see? What will do it? The remarkable thing is that Paul lets that statement stand: ...salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make them jealous (Rom.11:11). He gives no explanation as to what he means, or how it is to be performed. But this much we do know, the Church that can move Israel to jealousy is the same Church that can defeat the Powers of the air. Whatever is required for the one, serves also for the other. We know that there are two mysteries to be fulfilled. One is the mystery of Israel and the other is the eternal purpose of God, through the Church, of manifesting the manifold wisdom of God to the Principalities and Powers of the air (Eph. 3:10). These are two mysteries that are waiting to be fulfilled for which purpose God has "created all things." Ought that not to concern us?
Back to Beginnings
These things that we are groping for and touching cannot be obtained by only meeting on Sunday mornings with an occasional mid-week Bible study. It is clear that requirements of this kind demand a totality toward God and with those to whom we are joined. Sunday church is a convenience, but what I am suggesting is profoundly inconvenient. This is the going from house to house once again, breaking bread daily. This is working through issues, tensions, difficulties and misunderstandings, and it is amazing how easily they pop up and how quickly they can bring to nothing a relationship that has been years in the making. It requires and compels us to a daily vigilance and dependency upon God.
We cannot, from our own humanity, produce the unmistakable sincerity and authenticity that is required of us. We cannot stamp it out on the production line. We do not get it by going to a three-month discipleship school. It is, rather, a labor of love, of sacrifice and of suffering under the hand of God, and one will only get it in a prolonged period of time in a fellowship that is itself a place of suffering. Church is a suffering before it is a glory. The suffering we speak of is not from an attack that comes from without, but that which comes from within, in the misunderstandings, confusions and accusations. It is an astonishment the way people can sometimes be pressed because of the intensity of issues that arise! How could they say such things to you? Often there can be no explaining and no arbitrating; rather it is just something that needs to be borne. We have to bear each other up in our different places of maturity, self-control and understanding.
Wherever church endeavors to be true, wherever it seeks for the intensity of true relationships, face-to-face living, speaking the truth in love, correcting, reproving and exhorting one another, then there is, of necessity, likely going to be much misunderstanding amongst ourselves. We are going to have to face tensions. Tensions can so deepen that you think, "This is it. This fellowship is finished. There is no way that there could be understanding and reconciliation here." We find ourselves utterly cast upon God and His mercy. A warp comes when the Powers of darkness find opportunity to insinuate themselves in our own subjective awkwardness and inability. It is difficult to hear one another objectively. We meant one thing, but it was heard in another way. To untangle that, and to come finally to an understanding and an agreement requires a tolerance and a patience beyond one's capability. The time it takes, the anguish of it all, is a suffering. But we will not be able to move Israel to jealousy until we have broken through and beyond our own natural ability to be patient and into the divine patience that is of God.
It is easier to send monthly contribution to Jewish evangelism organizations and let them do the work of evangelism, than for the Church in every locality to take up this mandate and obligation to the Jews of its own area. This is also God's criterion of success as church; it is not whether we are pleased with the services or what we enjoy, but that whatever has been established and created is able to touch resistant Jews as well, at the same time, manifest the manifold wisdom of God to the Principalities and Powers of the air. That is why Paul cried, "Who is sufficient for these things?" We need to know our inadequacy and insufficiency, and it ought to compel us to God. It forces us to the issue of the love of God, which is no abstraction, but which grows out of the gratitude for His faithfulness, especially when we have cast ourselves upon Him again and again in crisis situations that we could never have met on the basis of our own ability or wisdom. If it were not for the issue of the Jew, we would never have had the urgency to come into this mode of being. We, as the Church, would have satisfied ourselves with something much less than that which would have glorified God, because the Church that can move Jews to jealousy is the Church that will be unto Him a glory. We would not have known that glory if we had not had this mandate of requirement toward the Jew.
For Your Sake
There is not one fellowship in a thousand that has so much as considered the fact that the criterion of its success is not what it enjoys, but its ability to move the Jews of their locality to jealousy. That criterion is hardly ever considered because we instinctively know that it is an ultimate requirement. Jews are the enemies of the gospel. It is not just that they resist the gospel or are indifferent to it, they actively oppose it. Yet Paul says that they are the enemies of the gospel, and then he tacks on, "for your sake" (Rom. 11:28a). Can you understand why this page has been ripped out of the Bible in modern times? It is as if the Church and its teachers have passed over and omitted it because it is radical in its requirement, and both Jew and Gentile have suffered immeasurably for that omission.
What does Paul mean, "for your sake"? Do we need enemies, particularly enemies like that? We are not talking about a bunch of harmless amateurs. Jews are a characteristically powerful people; they are brilliant; they are intellectual; they are authoritative. Have you ever had a confrontation with a Rabbi, or a Jewish intellectual or radical? As a former missionary to the Jews, and having been one myself for a long time, there is no more formidable 'enemy of the gospel' than the Jewish people. For the most part, we have never faced them nose-to-nose. We have never allowed ourselves to venture into a situation where we would have a door slammed in our face. We have never experienced bristling Jewish anger and indignation. We have never been cut to shreds by the cruelest words that insulted and offended human ingenuity can express! They can make you to feel like a fool, "How dare you present this message to us; we who have been on the receiving end of two thousand years of 'Christian' persecution culminating in the Holocaust! Are you going to tell us that we need your Christ?" You do not know what confrontation is until you meet such a people head-on. All of a sudden you feel like a weak little nothing; your gospel seems now so utterly vain, futile and foolish; you just want to shrivel up and blow away!
Our God is not taken by surprise by these factors, for He knows them well. In fact, He has overseen the factors that would make the Jew, especially in the Last Days, the most conspicuous and powerful opposition to Jesus Christ. That is why Paul says,
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, [Foolish though it is, intellectually speaking] for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, [and here Paul comes again] to the Jew first, and also to the Greek (Rom. 1:16).
If only we could try the gospel out on the Greeks first, and if it is successful there, then we will try it on the Jew, because they are the toughest! But no, in the wisdom of God, it is, "To the Jew first." We are not to begin where it is easiest, but where it is hardest. "Go into all the world, but begin at Jerusalem where I was crucified and where the prophets were stoned to death. Then you can go on to Samaria and all these other places, but begin with the Jew first (Acts 1:8 paraphrased)"
We signal something to the Principalities and Powers of the air when we do not take this mandate seriously. They look down and say, "You guys do not take the Lord seriously. You have not obeyed His word of command to go into all the world and to preach this gospel to every creature, beginning in Jerusalem and to the Jew first. We regard you, therefore, as lightly as you regard Him. You have not acknowledged the Lordship of His Word. You have not acknowledged the divine priority that He has given the Church towards Israel. You have done your own thing, and have nicely circumvented the most difficult requirement of all. You are cowards, afraid, and have no confidence in your own spirituality. You have taken the easy way. You have allowed the Jews to have their own existence, because their synagogues are to be found in the same communities with your churches, which is the statement that you accord to the synagogue a comparable validity of an equal kind with Christianity as being tenable, authoritative and valid."
To authenticate Judaism by honoring and respecting the synagogue and having dialogues with them, as if they constitute an equally redemptive faith, would have made Paul grieve. How could he have done that and still begin Romans chapter 9 by saying,
For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh (v. 3).
If a Christ-less Judaism were valid, why then would he have wished himself accursed?
If there is anything that makes the Church conscious of its inadequacy, it is confronting the Jew. The Jew is symbolic of the world, and the world at its most prestigious and powerful. Jews have won more Nobel prizes, more distinctions and awards in the fields of medicine, literature, culture and science, out of all proportion to their smaller number in population than any other people. They are a gifted people, but they employ their gifts, independent of God rather than for God, in the spirit of the world, and that makes them powerfully intimidating.
When God says, "To the Jew first," He knows what He is talking about. When you touch Jewish life you are touching a whole world system, a whole humanism and a whole elaborate, moral, ethical, religious and secular system that is opposed to God in every point and particular. Although it is a false light, Judaism would be worth subscribing to from a humanistic viewpoint; it has the most formidable endowments of wisdom and reason. But when God and His Christ are factored in as Living Reality, it makes that very same body of humanism inhumane in defrauding Israel and the nations of both reality and eternity.
The Fulness of the Gentiles
For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery, lest you be wise in your own estimation, that a partial hardening has happened to Israel, until... (Rom. 11:25a).
Put a circle around the word until. There is a condition, and here is the point. It is a condition that only the Church can meet. The issue of Israel becomes the issue of the Church.
...until the fulness of the Gentiles has come in (Rom. 11:25b).
When God says 'fulness,' He means the completion of all that He has intended. There is a fulness for which God waits, the "calling out of a people for His name, from among every nation" (Acts 15:14). This has always been the mission mandate of the Church. But according to Paul's letter to the Romans, the greatest incentive that God gives the Church to go into all the world and proclaim the gospel is that,
...the Deliverer will come from Zion (Rom. 11:26a).
When that mission is completed, something will happen independent of Israel's own spiritual condition. The Deliverer is released in the moment that the fulness of the Gentiles has come in. Israel is delivered, and the Deliverer takes His throne on the holy hill of Zion and rules over the nations. The world is in a hapless condition until the Lord Himself comes. Only thereafter can there be a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwells righteousness.
It is clear that this view opposes the 'pre-tribulation' rapture mentality, a mentality that sees the Church as being removed before the tribulation. It is a widely accepted doctrine, but to challenge it is to be looked upon as challenging some sacrosanct foundational doctrine of the faith. It is as if you are introducing heresy, when it is not a doctrine of the historic faith at all. Nothing, in our opinion, has more disarmed the Church of the necessity for preparation, discipleship, maturity and of being the Church that can stand in the Last Days and overcome tribulation, than the misguided confidence that it will not have to face it!
It is because of this 'pre-tribulation' rapture expectation that the Church, for the most part, is presently operating now toward Israel from the place of guilt, namely, that the Church is removed while the Jews remain to face the music. Anything that issues from the Church that has an ulterior motive, that relieves our conscience, where we operate out of guilt rather than from a priestly place, is not a an effectual place of ministry. Only priestly ministry is valid. The heart of priestly ministry is that the priest derives no advantage or benefit for himself in his priestly ministration. However, if you are operating out of guilt and a bad conscience, then you are alleviating something for yourself by being condescending to Jews.
If we, as the Church, elevate and exalt ourselves as something separate, independent or superior to the Jew, then, by that one thing, we are no longer the Church. The Church loses its character when it loses its essential humility. The Church needs to be reminded that we were grafted into their root and that we are made, by the gospel, partakers with them. The Church is not some phenomenon independent of Israel; it is the graciousness of God to allow Gentiles to come into their promise, into their hope and into their expectation, which they themselves have lost by default and no longer know. Part of our task is to remind Israel, not only verbally, but by being a demonstration of what it means to have been invited into the privileges of their 'commonwealth' (Eph. 2:12).
Moving the Jew to jealousy is a truer measure by which we should be assessing our spiritual condition. The very nature of the present Church is to be satisfied in itself. It gauges itself by itself or by others, and is happy with the measure of things that God gives, which defeats the very purpose for them being given. God calls us to ultimacy and to a purpose beyond ourselves that cannot be measured by ourselves, but only by our ability to move Jews to jealousy by the corporate word that we speak and incorporate as 'life together.'15 It can only happen with a people who have come to one mind, one heart, one understanding and one speaking. This is not an invitation to become automatons processed off the assembly line and who come in some monotonous submission to speak the same thing. It means a people, richly individualistic, formidable in themselves, alive to having the possibility of their own opinions and views but now brought by the divine process of God, which necessitates suffering through trial, to being in a complete agreement with God. And when He requires it, we can then speak a word that alone is creative and life-giving, because it is a word given in agreement with God.
Unless we are in preparation now toward that end, we need not think that it can be summoned from us when the drama of the Last Days shall come upon us suddenly. Will we have an incentive for this quality of integration, unity of life and agreement, and the depths of it? By what means shall we attain that end? One of the principal ways that a work of that depth has the greatest potential is in community, the daily life with the saints, who have taken up, consciously and willingly, their apostolic task!
Varför kommer inte tonåringar?
VARFÖR KOMMER INTE TONÅRINGAR PÅ SÖNDAGAR?
av BRIAN MANN
Efter flera års ungdomsarbete har jag märkt någonting. (Kanske du har märkt det också.) När jag går i kyrkan på söndagarna, ser jag inga tonåringar där. Jag ser familjer med barnvagnar och gamla människor. Jag tittar på lekande barn och fikar med studerande från universitetet. Men jag ser sällan tonåringar. Jag har märkt samma fenomen i stora och små församlingar - över Nordamerika och i Europa. Även församlingar med dynamiskt ungdomsarbete verkar ha samma problem - nästan inga tonåringar på söndagsgudstjänsten. Vad är det för fel? Varför kommer de inte? Och bryr vi oss?
Som ungdomsledare i vår lokala församling, ägnar min hustru och jag mycket av vår tid till tonåringars behov. Vi försöker vara bra på att lyssna, vara relevanta lärare och goda vänner till dem. Vi lägger tid till att organisera tonårsgruppen som vi hoppas tjänar deras specifika behov. Och vi får se spännande tillväxt i deras liv. Ibland är det frestande att tro att endast vi har redskapen för att nå den här generationen. Och det är frestande för församlingen att lämna ungdomsarbetet helt till oss. Vi är trots allt ungdomsledarna. Så länge det finns plats för tonåringarna att umgås på helgen då slutar församlingens ansvar… eller?
Mike Yaconelli, en veteran-ungdomspastor i Kalifornien och grundaren av Youth Specialites.com skriver:
"Ungdomsgrupper är bra. Men det finns något bättre. Det heter kyrkan. Inte ungdomsförsamlingen eller "nutids"-församlingen. Bara normala, långtråkiga, vanliga, vardagliga församlingen. Där är platsen där människor som inte känner varandra får lära känna varandra. Där är platsen där vi åldras tillsammans. Och det visar sig att åldras tillsammans är bästa sättet för att riktig tillväxt ska ske i tonåringars liv. Att åldras tillsammans är bästa sättet att lära av varandra vad lärjungskap betyder i vardagslivet."
Så varför kommer så få tonåringar till församlingen på söndagar? Tror de att musiken är för gammalmodig? Tror de att gudstjänsten är seg och tråkig? Givetvis. Men ledan är oftast inte en tillräckligt stark anledning att inte komma. För många tonåringar känns det helt enkelt som att de hör hemma där. Känslan av gemenskap är jätteviktig för den unga generationen. Medan föregående generationer föredrog att vara individualister, är tonåringar idag mycket mer grupp-orienterade. Och i en värld där de känner sig mer och mer isolerade, söker de efter en plats där de kan uppleva gemenskap.
I 1 Kor. 12:27, säger Paulus att "ni utgör alla tillsammans Kristi kropp, och var och en av er är en särskild och nödvändigt del av den."
Och hur ser Kristi kropp ut? Människor som går genom alla livets skeden tillsammans - tonårstiden, äktenskapet, föräldraskapet, ålderdomen, och till slut döden. Och hela tiden lär vi oss hur vi får bli liksom Kristus - tillsammans. Det är inte bara någon idyllisk vision. Det är Bibelns definition av församlingen - inklusive tonåringar.
Behovet att nå denna generation är helt avgörande.
Församlingen formligen tynar bort utan tonåringarna. Men acceptera inte den konventionella uppfattningen att bara ungdomsledare kan nå tonåringar !!!
Det är helt enkelt inte sant.
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Tonåringarna behöver församlingen - och församlingen behöver tonåringarna!
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Ta initiativ att bekanta dig med några av dem och engagera dig i deras liv. Låt dem veta att de tillhör din församling. (Denna generationen värdesätter relationer - så låt dig inte avskräckas.)
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Lyssna på dem och skratta med dem.
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När de kommer, låt dem ha ett inflytande i era gudstjänster. (Kanske kommer du att bli angenämt förvånad.)
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Och först och främst, dela livet med dem vecka för vecka - och kanske du får se Kristi kropp börja växa och frodas.
Bild: BRIAN MANN
Läs mera om >> Brian & Andrea Mann i Sverige
Artikeln hämtad från OM:s tidning OMEGA Nr 1/2005
Why don´t Teens come?
WHY DON'T TEENAGERS COME ON SUNDAYS?
BRIAN MANN
After several years of youth ministry, I've begun to notice something. (Maybe you've noticed it too.) When I go to church on Sundays, I don't see teenagers there. I do see families with baby strollers and elderly people. I watch small children playing and have coffee with university students. But I rarely ever see teenagers. I've noticed a similar phenomenon in large churches and small ones - across North America and in Europe. Even churches with dynamic youth ministries seem to be missing teenagers in their Sunday worship services. What's the problem? Where are the teenagers? Why aren't they coming? And do we care?
As youth workers in our local church, my wife and I dedicate much of our week to the needs of teenagers. We try to be good listeners, relevant teachers, and good friends. We spend time planning youth events we hope will minister to their specific needs. And we get to see exciting growth in their lives. Sometimes, it's tempting for us to think that we alone have the tools to reach this generation. And it's tempting for our church to leave the job of youth work entirely to us. After all, we're the youth leaders. As long as there's some place for teenagers to go on the weekend, then the church's responsibility ends there, right?
Mike Yaconelli, a veteran youth pastor in California and founder of Youth Specialties.com once wrote, "Youth groups are good. But there's something better. It's called church. Not youth church, or contemporary church. Just plain old boring, ordinary church. The place where people who don't know each other get to know each other. It's the place we grow old together. And it turns out that growing old together is still the best way to bring true growth to the lives of teenagers. Growing old together is where we teach (and learn from) each other what discipleship means in the everyday world."
So why are there so few teenagers at your church on Sundays? Do they think the music is too old? Do they think the service is slow and boring? Of course they do. But boredom usually isn't a big enough reason to stay away. For many teenagers, they simply feel like they don't belong there. A sense of community is such a high value to this young generation. Whereas previous generations preferred to be their own individuals, teenagers today are far more group-minded. And in a world where they feel more and more isolated, they are constantly searching for a place they can experience a sense of belonging.
In 1 Corinthians 12:27, Paul says "now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it." And what does the body of Christ look like? People who walk through all stages of life together - teenage years, marriage, children, getting old, and finally dying. And all the while learning how to become more like Christ - together. This isn't just some idyllic picture, it's the biblical definition of the church - teenagers included.
The need to reach this generation is crucial. The church as we know it is literally fading away without them. But please don't settle for the conventional wisdom that only youth workers can effectively reach teenagers. It's simply not true. Teenagers need your church - and your church needs teenagers! Take the initiative to get to know a few and get involved in their lives. Let them know that they belong in your church. (Their generation values relationships - so there's no need to be intimidated.) Listen to them and laugh with them. Once they come, let them be an influence in your worship services. (You'll probably be pleasantly surprised.) And above all, share life with them week after week and you might notice the body of Christ beginning to grow and thrive.
Brian MannHave a look >> MannsInSweden
The Article above from OM´s News and Prayer Paper OMEGA Sweden 2005/1
Read about >> Operation Mission SWEDEN
The Chosen People by Katz/Cohen (2/2)
The Chosen People: Chosen for What? (2/2)
Examining the Jewish Predicament in an Increasingly Hostile World
by A.Katz and C. Cohen
Part 2
Our Rejection of God
If Scripture authenticates itself in the heart of every reader who loves and respects truth, must not our history as Jews reveal the tragic story of so cataclysmic a forfeiture as the rejection of God?
How far will this yet continuing rejection pursue us as misfortune, as the baleful reports of grisly tragedies in Israel, and rising anti-Semitism among the nations, now suggest? Losing our covenant consciousness as a people has not relieved us of its responsibilities, or its stated penalties. Moses included us, as with all previous generations of Jews, at Mt. Sinai:
Now not with you alone am I making this covenant and this oath [i.e., its blessings in obedience and its curses in failure], but both with those who stand here with us today in the presence of the Lord our God and with those who are not here with us today… (Deuteronomy 29:14-15).
According to Scripture, God yet waits for a future recognition from us that will come in the Last Days when we will rightly view our calamities in this covenantal context:
So it shall be when all of these things have come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind in all nations where the Lord your God has banished you, and you return to the Lord your God and obey Him with all your heart and soul according to all that I command you today, you and your sons, then the Lord your God will restore you from captivity, and have compassion upon you, and…will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, in order that you may live (Deuteronomy 30:1-3a, 6).
God's rejection of us can be remedied only by our return to Him.
It is apparent, considering our present condition, that this "circumcision" of our hearts is yet future. What is not apparent to us, and far removed from our secular consciousness, is the recognition of this word as actually being God's word. It shows that our disasters issue from a rejection of God, remedied only by our return to Him in genuine repentance! To this, virtually all the prophets testify:
For I will be like a lion to Ephraim, and like a young lion to the house of Judah. I, even I, will tear to pieces and go away, I will carry away, and there will be none to deliver. I will go and return to My place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face; in their affliction they will earnestly seek Me (Hosea 5:14-15).
In the light of our predicament, are we now willing to look at that single most riveting Messianic prophecy, which gives every appearance of being rabbinically excluded, for obvious reasons, from all synagogue Haftorah readings: Isaiah 52:13-53:1-12? Should we not read it as if our life depended upon it?
Here are the words of the Prophet Isaiah:
Behold, My servant will prosper, he will be high and lifted up, and greatly exalted. Just as many were astonished at you, so his appearance was marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men. Thus he will sprinkle many nations, kings will shut their mouths on account of him; for what had not been told them they will see, and what they had not heard they will understand.
Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground; he has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to him. He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised, and we did not esteem him.
Surely our griefs he himself bore, and our sorrows he carried; yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was pierced through for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon him, and by his scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him.
He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away, and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due? His grave was assigned with wicked men, yet he was with a rich man in his death, because he had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his mouth.
But the Lord was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief; if he would render himself as a guilt offering, he will see his offspring, he will prolong his days, and the good pleasure of the Lord will prosper in his hand. As a result of the anguish of his soul, he will see it and be satisfied; by his knowledge the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many, as he will bear their iniquities. Therefore, I will allot him a portion with the great, and he will divide the booty with the strong; because he poured out Himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet He himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors (Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12).
Of whom does this speak?
Jewish authorities have insisted that it describes the redemptive suffering of the Jewish nation itself. Certainly it is suggestive of much of our historical experience, and perhaps more ominously, that which is yet to come. But who is the "he" who is despised and forsaken of men, and the "we" who have hid our faces from him? Who is the "he" who bore "our" griefs, who was pierced through for "our" transgressions, crushed for "our" iniquities? Are we not the sheep who have gone astray, turning every one to our own way? Has not the Lord caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him?
Do consider that this prophecy was written seven centuries before the advent of the Galilean, Jesus of Nazareth, and even before the formation of the Roman Empire, whose distinctive execution through crucifixion this sufferer is evidently bearing (a look at Psalm 22 confirms this). Surely, in Isaiah 53, it could not be said of us Jews that we "…had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his [our] mouth," since it was because of "the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due" (v.8). Note the genius of the inspired Scriptures in that both the Prophets and the Psalms so plainly declare this event centuries before its time.
…when Thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall My Righteous Servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities…because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isaiah 53.10b-12).
He "shall be satisfied" evidently signals this servant's life-after-death continuation! Indeed, everything hinges upon the resurrection of this Suffering Servant.
However unfamiliar this is to us, it is nevertheless, not "Christian," or gentile per se, but indisputably and Hebraically Biblical!
The logic of what we have been saying so far brings us now to a place considered 'out of bounds' for us as Jews.
Could our difficulty be, not the consideration of what we think to be an alien, novel and "goyish" New Testament, but our failure to perceive what had preceded it, what had actually been foretold in our own Hebrew Scriptures? Having failed in the first, a failure that yet prevails, must we not necessarily fail in the other? The unbroken continuum of the two Testaments is lost to us because we have not adequately embraced the first!
Are we not still refusing, now as then, even to consider the exhortation of the despised Galilean to his rejecting contemporaries to search the Jewish Scriptures, of which he himself said, "it is these that bear witness of me" (John 5:39)? He declared that if we had believed Moses, we would believe him, for Moses wrote of him (John 5:46). Could it be that our mounting tzuris (trouble) is again a consequence of that very same stubborn inconsideration?
How may we now be better able to consider the unfamiliar opening statement of the Gospel of John:
For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus [the] Messiah (Christ in Greek, Y'Shua Ha Mashiach in Hebrew) (chap. 1:17).
Could it be that the Law's demands, requiring our complete observance, and by that very process, is intended to bring us before God in an acknowledged, broken dependency? This recognition would necessarily then precede the enablement given by the same God as a "gift" (grace) to those few who seriously seek righteousness with God through the Law, but necessarily fail to obtain it. Therefore the New Testament says,
He came to his own, and those who were his own did not receive him. But as many as received him, to them he gave the right [authority] to become children [sons] of God, even to those who believe in his name (John 1:11-12).
Paul, the Jewish apostle, brilliantly explicates the connection between the Law given through Moses and the grace that came through Jesus, in his Letter to the Romans,
…in order that the requirement of the Law [Torah] might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh [a rules-guided, human determination to fulfill divine commandments], but according to the Spirit…and those who are in the flesh cannot please God (Romans 8:4, 8).
For Paul, as for Jesus, the Law is holy and is not to be abrogated or annulled. Rather, Jesus says,
Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill (Matthew. 5:17).
Unhappily, much of historic Christianity has lost, rejected, or never understood, its continuity with its Hebrew roots. This, tragically, has served to discourage us as Jews from even considering the place of Jesus in our Jewish heritage.
What we would suggest now, though it flies in the face of our deepest Jewish prejudices, is that though the Church that historically bears his name has shamefully misrepresented him, the issue of this "messianic pretender" is, more than we are presently able to realize, the very issue of God. Life and death decided by one's own disposition toward him!
Never has so much hung, then, on the recognition of a single person!
The recognition of these truths, as well as their fulfillment to us, waits upon a bestowal of God's Spirit, Ruach, promised to us by the Prophets-the very medium of Divine revelation and empowerment for which our scholarly and rabbinical elites are an inadequate substitute! Therefore, Jesus mystified a sincerely inquiring Nicodemus, "a ruler of the Jews," when he said, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water [the Word of God] and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, but that which is born of the Spirit is spirit… You are Israel's teacher," said Jesus, "and do you not understand these things?" (John 3:5-6, 10).
Likewise, Jesus astonished the congregation at his own synagogue in Nazareth by reading the appointed text for that Shabbat from Isaiah 61:1,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He anointed me to preach the gospel [good news] to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18-19).
And he, astonishingly concluded by saying, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (v.21). With this, he proclaimed the very inauguration and authorization of his messianic call!
Consider, if you will, that if it is true, as he himself consistently affirmed, that he was "sent of the Father," what must the consequence of his rejection be to a people who persist in rejecting him, as those to whom he was especially sent? What a slight to the Father whose voice, according to the record, came from heaven over the transfigured Messiah, "This is My beloved Son…hear ye him" (Matthew 17:5b). For what reason do we disclaim this account? Can this be a fulfillment of the inspired warning foretold us by Moses:
The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him…and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And it shall come about that whosoever shall not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require it of him (Deuteronomy 18:15,18b-19)?
What blessed provision have we also spurned in persisting in that same refusal to consider him who said, "I came that they might have life, and might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10b)
What true Pesach (Passover) can we have if he is, as John the Baptist proclaimed by the banks of the Jordan River, "Behold the [Paschal] Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29b). Could John have been considering that:
…the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement (Leviticus 17:11).
If there is no blood shed to atone for our sins, what valid Yom Kippur, required by the Law, remains to us after the destruction of the Temple, Priesthood, and Sacrifices?
This being so, can rabbinically determined "mitzvot," fasting, and a day's Yom Kippur synagogue attendance, be an acceptable substitute in the sight of God? Or are these merely expediencies, conceived by well-meaning men, upon the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, which seemed to offer coherence and continuation for a now dispersed nation? In this, they also avoided the only other option, already chosen by tens of thousands of Jews, who understood the sacrificial death of Yeshua Ha Mashiach (Jesus the Christ) as God's once-and-for-all Yom Kippur. These same alternatives confront us today!
Jesus grieved, both as Messiah and Prophet, foreseeing the consequences that would befall us in our rejection of him. He foresaw prophetically not only the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the nation, but also the tragic events that would pursue us into the Diaspora.
And when he [Jesus] approached, he saw the city [Jerusalem] and wept over it, saying,
If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes…and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation (Luke 19: 41-42, 44b).
This was the historical and critical point of disjuncture and departure from Biblical, Messianic Judaism.
Either the crucified Messiah was the once-and-for-all Atonement to which the Biblical sacrifices had pointed, and for which purpose he said he had come, or the Jewish nation is left with the cruel dilemma of the Mosaic requirement rendered inoperable by the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the priesthood. This continues as an unresolved issue to this day.
Surely, then, the Jesus who warned of our being liable for every idle word we speak would not lightly exclaim,
…for unless you believe that I AM He, you shall die in your sins [i.e., without necessary atonement] (John 8:24b).
Foreseeing the unspeakable anguish of such loss, as well as the prospect of terror of an endless torment, the divinely instructed apostle Paul proclaims,
The wages of sin is death [eternal and irremediable separation from God], but the free gift of God is eternal life in Yeshua Ha Mashiach Adonoi [Jesus the Christ, our Lord] (Romans 6:23).
Why, dear reader, if you have patiently borne with us thus far, should you not consider these things? What perceivable error do you find to justify rejecting them? However relativistic one's mindset, can God in His divine prerogative not insist upon a scandal of particularity centering in this One? What if that same One specifically fulfills the over 300 prophecies that speak of His birth, its time and location (Micah 5:2), and His suffering, rejection, death and resurrection (Isaiah 53), and His yet future and imminent return when, "…they will look upon me whom they have pierced" (Zechariah 12:10b)? And learn that "the wounds between Your hands" were "those with which I was wounded in the house of My friends" (Zechariah 13:6b)?
The New Testament confirms these prophetic themes when it declares,
…these [things] have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name (John: 20:31).
Yes, we know that "Judaism does not believe" that God has a Son. But with all due respect, may we ask, what is this Judaism? Is it some sacrosanct entity greater than God, or rather, a compendium of rabbinical opinion framed for two thousand years in conscious opposition to, and repudiation of, the messianic claims of Jesus? Let us be sure we do not invoke "Judaism" to sidestep our obligation as menschen (responsible individuals) to consider issues of truth for which we are eternally liable.
Are we so persuaded that our traditions' concept of God apprehends the full richness of biblical monotheism? What of a possible composite tri-unity, whose definition by men, must always be less than its ineffable glory? Might God not be One [Echad], even as we are, made in His image-body, soul and spirit-and yet be One?
Many of us who are formed in the Jewish tradition will have to consider the words of Him who was also the author of the renowned Sermon on the Mount: "Don't you know me…even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father…and I and the Father are One" (John 14:9). He spoke repeatedly of having come from the Father, and that "He should depart out of this world to the Father…that He had come forth from God, and was going back to God" (John 13:1b, 3f). Ought this not to give one, as it has us, sufficient reason to re-examine one's conception of God?
Without question, if these things are true, it will turn one's world upside down. All our trusted categories, will necessarily be challenged. Except we be willing to bear that consequence, how shall our allegiance be ultimately tested in the foremost commandment to "love the Lord, our God, with all our heart, soul, mind and strength"?
Will you yourself not ask the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob about the crucial claims Jesus made for himself? Will you not choose to rise above that instinctive, historically-conditioned enmity to His name should they prove true? Scripture soberly informs us, "There is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12b). Will you not trust and test the Word of God by acting upon it?
For as the Scripture says,
Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek [Gentile]: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him (Romans 10:11-12 AV).
Even the famous "doubting" Thomas, who said, "Unless I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the place of His nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe" (John 20:25b), upon seeing the resurrected Christ, let out the astonished gasp, "My Lord and my God!" (v.28b)! Jesus, forsaking a once-and-for-all opportunity to squelch a preposterous and blasphemous exaggeration, acknowledged it as being perfectly appropriate to Himself, adding, "Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed" (John 20:29b).
Someone wrote, "The climax of sin is that it crucified Jesus." Think on it. We, a people, who have but a scant consciousness of sin (what need for atonement then?) ought to ponder that God, knowing how sin disguises itself, became Himself our victim, in order to reveal, as nothing else could, the inexorable truth of our condition! Is it not significant and revealing that the best of Roman Law, coupled with the best of Jewish piety, put to a cruel death the long-awaited object of our faith? Tragically, not only were we too blind to recognize Him, but as a nation were sufficiently offended and threatened by Him, making His removal by death a necessity! As the Scripture says, "Like one from whom men hide their faces He was despised, and we esteemed Him not" (Isaiah 53:3).
What person or nation can be absolved from such sin as this? If this be so, what passage of time can in any way mitigate our personal and corporate guilt? Our defiant declaration, "His [Jesus'] blood be on us and on our children" (Matthew 27:25), has haunted us throughout our history more than we can know.
If He be the Son of God, "very God and very Man," as ancient creeds declare, we have committed an appalling sin. Not the sin of a failed moment's error, mind you, but rather the summation of all sin, chronic and ages old, and repeated again in a Judaism that, to this day, prefers the rulings of a rabbinical "elite," and of "ideas comfortably usable in modernity." Against this, ironically, stands the timeless Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4-6 that either defrocks Jesus as ultimate blasphemer, or shows Him to be the very One for whom, in the wisdom of God, the ancient creed was given! As our painful history testifies only too well, "Be assured your sins will find you out." (Numbers 32:23).
Have we been the "Cain" to this "Abel"-moved to murderous envy of a "Son" of the Father more virtuous than we, whose greater, altogether righteous sacrifice, accepted by the Father, leaves our own sacrifice unaccepted and unacceptable? (Genesis 4). Ours, the inept product of our own sweat and industry; His, the ultimate, acceptable blood-sacrifice, satisfying the Holiness of God, which cannot be placated for the terror of sin by anything mankind can humanly or religiously provide!
Have we, like Cain, become fugitives and vagabonds in the earth, hidden from the face of God, marked, but all too often not spared? The comparison is altogether too close to be comfortable! Ought we not be stricken with sorrow, seeing our likeness to that first murderer? May we not bear, ever so remotely, any resemblance to Cain's penalty! Better yet, "Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered [saved]" (Joel 2:32a).
But what does it say? The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that is, the word of faith which we are preaching, that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved (Romans 10:8-10).
Thus, the Apostle Paul, Hebrew of the Hebrews, did not forsake his Jewishness. Nor do we, in proclaiming the good news of our Messiah,
For it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek (Romans 1:16b AV).
A Prayer:
Lord, grant mercy to me, the reader in this once-and-for-all moment. You know well how every power in the world, the flesh and the devil have conspired against You. Grant me, in this moment, a respite from all that has barred us, as Jews, from calling upon Your Name. Give me some measure of the same humility that You Yourself bore nakedly in that public shame on the Cross. Thank You for making this crisis of decision possible for me. In Yeshua's holy, and till now, untried name, I ask it. Save me. Amen.
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Encourage your friends to partake in intercession and tell them about the possibility to link up to Intercessors Network.
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Give the king knowledge of Your way of judging, O God
and the spirit of your righteousness to the king's son to control his actions.
Psalms 72:1 Amplified version.
*******************************
PRIORITY NUMBER ONE:
PRAY FOR MEN IN AUTHORITY, 1 TIM 2:1-4
Lars Widerberg
Intercessors Network
Storskiftesgatan 87
S-58334 Linkoping, Sweden
Intercessors.Network@Comhem.se
Phone + Fax: +46 13 213630
Examining the Jewish Predicament in an Increasingly Hostile World
by A.Katz and C. Cohen
Part 2
Our Rejection of God
If Scripture authenticates itself in the heart of every reader who loves and respects truth, must not our history as Jews reveal the tragic story of so cataclysmic a forfeiture as the rejection of God?
How far will this yet continuing rejection pursue us as misfortune, as the baleful reports of grisly tragedies in Israel, and rising anti-Semitism among the nations, now suggest? Losing our covenant consciousness as a people has not relieved us of its responsibilities, or its stated penalties. Moses included us, as with all previous generations of Jews, at Mt. Sinai:
Now not with you alone am I making this covenant and this oath [i.e., its blessings in obedience and its curses in failure], but both with those who stand here with us today in the presence of the Lord our God and with those who are not here with us today… (Deuteronomy 29:14-15).
According to Scripture, God yet waits for a future recognition from us that will come in the Last Days when we will rightly view our calamities in this covenantal context:
So it shall be when all of these things have come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind in all nations where the Lord your God has banished you, and you return to the Lord your God and obey Him with all your heart and soul according to all that I command you today, you and your sons, then the Lord your God will restore you from captivity, and have compassion upon you, and…will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, in order that you may live (Deuteronomy 30:1-3a, 6).
God's rejection of us can be remedied only by our return to Him.
It is apparent, considering our present condition, that this "circumcision" of our hearts is yet future. What is not apparent to us, and far removed from our secular consciousness, is the recognition of this word as actually being God's word. It shows that our disasters issue from a rejection of God, remedied only by our return to Him in genuine repentance! To this, virtually all the prophets testify:
For I will be like a lion to Ephraim, and like a young lion to the house of Judah. I, even I, will tear to pieces and go away, I will carry away, and there will be none to deliver. I will go and return to My place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face; in their affliction they will earnestly seek Me (Hosea 5:14-15).
In the light of our predicament, are we now willing to look at that single most riveting Messianic prophecy, which gives every appearance of being rabbinically excluded, for obvious reasons, from all synagogue Haftorah readings: Isaiah 52:13-53:1-12? Should we not read it as if our life depended upon it?
Here are the words of the Prophet Isaiah:
Behold, My servant will prosper, he will be high and lifted up, and greatly exalted. Just as many were astonished at you, so his appearance was marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men. Thus he will sprinkle many nations, kings will shut their mouths on account of him; for what had not been told them they will see, and what they had not heard they will understand.
Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground; he has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to him. He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised, and we did not esteem him.
Surely our griefs he himself bore, and our sorrows he carried; yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was pierced through for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon him, and by his scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him.
He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away, and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due? His grave was assigned with wicked men, yet he was with a rich man in his death, because he had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his mouth.
But the Lord was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief; if he would render himself as a guilt offering, he will see his offspring, he will prolong his days, and the good pleasure of the Lord will prosper in his hand. As a result of the anguish of his soul, he will see it and be satisfied; by his knowledge the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many, as he will bear their iniquities. Therefore, I will allot him a portion with the great, and he will divide the booty with the strong; because he poured out Himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet He himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors (Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12).
Of whom does this speak?
Jewish authorities have insisted that it describes the redemptive suffering of the Jewish nation itself. Certainly it is suggestive of much of our historical experience, and perhaps more ominously, that which is yet to come. But who is the "he" who is despised and forsaken of men, and the "we" who have hid our faces from him? Who is the "he" who bore "our" griefs, who was pierced through for "our" transgressions, crushed for "our" iniquities? Are we not the sheep who have gone astray, turning every one to our own way? Has not the Lord caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him?
Do consider that this prophecy was written seven centuries before the advent of the Galilean, Jesus of Nazareth, and even before the formation of the Roman Empire, whose distinctive execution through crucifixion this sufferer is evidently bearing (a look at Psalm 22 confirms this). Surely, in Isaiah 53, it could not be said of us Jews that we "…had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his [our] mouth," since it was because of "the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due" (v.8). Note the genius of the inspired Scriptures in that both the Prophets and the Psalms so plainly declare this event centuries before its time.
…when Thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall My Righteous Servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities…because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors (Isaiah 53.10b-12).
He "shall be satisfied" evidently signals this servant's life-after-death continuation! Indeed, everything hinges upon the resurrection of this Suffering Servant.
However unfamiliar this is to us, it is nevertheless, not "Christian," or gentile per se, but indisputably and Hebraically Biblical!
The logic of what we have been saying so far brings us now to a place considered 'out of bounds' for us as Jews.
Could our difficulty be, not the consideration of what we think to be an alien, novel and "goyish" New Testament, but our failure to perceive what had preceded it, what had actually been foretold in our own Hebrew Scriptures? Having failed in the first, a failure that yet prevails, must we not necessarily fail in the other? The unbroken continuum of the two Testaments is lost to us because we have not adequately embraced the first!
Are we not still refusing, now as then, even to consider the exhortation of the despised Galilean to his rejecting contemporaries to search the Jewish Scriptures, of which he himself said, "it is these that bear witness of me" (John 5:39)? He declared that if we had believed Moses, we would believe him, for Moses wrote of him (John 5:46). Could it be that our mounting tzuris (trouble) is again a consequence of that very same stubborn inconsideration?
How may we now be better able to consider the unfamiliar opening statement of the Gospel of John:
For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus [the] Messiah (Christ in Greek, Y'Shua Ha Mashiach in Hebrew) (chap. 1:17).
Could it be that the Law's demands, requiring our complete observance, and by that very process, is intended to bring us before God in an acknowledged, broken dependency? This recognition would necessarily then precede the enablement given by the same God as a "gift" (grace) to those few who seriously seek righteousness with God through the Law, but necessarily fail to obtain it. Therefore the New Testament says,
He came to his own, and those who were his own did not receive him. But as many as received him, to them he gave the right [authority] to become children [sons] of God, even to those who believe in his name (John 1:11-12).
Paul, the Jewish apostle, brilliantly explicates the connection between the Law given through Moses and the grace that came through Jesus, in his Letter to the Romans,
…in order that the requirement of the Law [Torah] might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh [a rules-guided, human determination to fulfill divine commandments], but according to the Spirit…and those who are in the flesh cannot please God (Romans 8:4, 8).
For Paul, as for Jesus, the Law is holy and is not to be abrogated or annulled. Rather, Jesus says,
Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill (Matthew. 5:17).
Unhappily, much of historic Christianity has lost, rejected, or never understood, its continuity with its Hebrew roots. This, tragically, has served to discourage us as Jews from even considering the place of Jesus in our Jewish heritage.
What we would suggest now, though it flies in the face of our deepest Jewish prejudices, is that though the Church that historically bears his name has shamefully misrepresented him, the issue of this "messianic pretender" is, more than we are presently able to realize, the very issue of God. Life and death decided by one's own disposition toward him!
Never has so much hung, then, on the recognition of a single person!
The recognition of these truths, as well as their fulfillment to us, waits upon a bestowal of God's Spirit, Ruach, promised to us by the Prophets-the very medium of Divine revelation and empowerment for which our scholarly and rabbinical elites are an inadequate substitute! Therefore, Jesus mystified a sincerely inquiring Nicodemus, "a ruler of the Jews," when he said, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water [the Word of God] and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, but that which is born of the Spirit is spirit… You are Israel's teacher," said Jesus, "and do you not understand these things?" (John 3:5-6, 10).
Likewise, Jesus astonished the congregation at his own synagogue in Nazareth by reading the appointed text for that Shabbat from Isaiah 61:1,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He anointed me to preach the gospel [good news] to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18-19).
And he, astonishingly concluded by saying, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (v.21). With this, he proclaimed the very inauguration and authorization of his messianic call!
Consider, if you will, that if it is true, as he himself consistently affirmed, that he was "sent of the Father," what must the consequence of his rejection be to a people who persist in rejecting him, as those to whom he was especially sent? What a slight to the Father whose voice, according to the record, came from heaven over the transfigured Messiah, "This is My beloved Son…hear ye him" (Matthew 17:5b). For what reason do we disclaim this account? Can this be a fulfillment of the inspired warning foretold us by Moses:
The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him…and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And it shall come about that whosoever shall not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require it of him (Deuteronomy 18:15,18b-19)?
What blessed provision have we also spurned in persisting in that same refusal to consider him who said, "I came that they might have life, and might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10b)
What true Pesach (Passover) can we have if he is, as John the Baptist proclaimed by the banks of the Jordan River, "Behold the [Paschal] Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29b). Could John have been considering that:
…the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement (Leviticus 17:11).
If there is no blood shed to atone for our sins, what valid Yom Kippur, required by the Law, remains to us after the destruction of the Temple, Priesthood, and Sacrifices?
This being so, can rabbinically determined "mitzvot," fasting, and a day's Yom Kippur synagogue attendance, be an acceptable substitute in the sight of God? Or are these merely expediencies, conceived by well-meaning men, upon the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, which seemed to offer coherence and continuation for a now dispersed nation? In this, they also avoided the only other option, already chosen by tens of thousands of Jews, who understood the sacrificial death of Yeshua Ha Mashiach (Jesus the Christ) as God's once-and-for-all Yom Kippur. These same alternatives confront us today!
Jesus grieved, both as Messiah and Prophet, foreseeing the consequences that would befall us in our rejection of him. He foresaw prophetically not only the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the nation, but also the tragic events that would pursue us into the Diaspora.
And when he [Jesus] approached, he saw the city [Jerusalem] and wept over it, saying,
If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes…and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation (Luke 19: 41-42, 44b).
This was the historical and critical point of disjuncture and departure from Biblical, Messianic Judaism.
Either the crucified Messiah was the once-and-for-all Atonement to which the Biblical sacrifices had pointed, and for which purpose he said he had come, or the Jewish nation is left with the cruel dilemma of the Mosaic requirement rendered inoperable by the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the priesthood. This continues as an unresolved issue to this day.
Surely, then, the Jesus who warned of our being liable for every idle word we speak would not lightly exclaim,
…for unless you believe that I AM He, you shall die in your sins [i.e., without necessary atonement] (John 8:24b).
Foreseeing the unspeakable anguish of such loss, as well as the prospect of terror of an endless torment, the divinely instructed apostle Paul proclaims,
The wages of sin is death [eternal and irremediable separation from God], but the free gift of God is eternal life in Yeshua Ha Mashiach Adonoi [Jesus the Christ, our Lord] (Romans 6:23).
Why, dear reader, if you have patiently borne with us thus far, should you not consider these things? What perceivable error do you find to justify rejecting them? However relativistic one's mindset, can God in His divine prerogative not insist upon a scandal of particularity centering in this One? What if that same One specifically fulfills the over 300 prophecies that speak of His birth, its time and location (Micah 5:2), and His suffering, rejection, death and resurrection (Isaiah 53), and His yet future and imminent return when, "…they will look upon me whom they have pierced" (Zechariah 12:10b)? And learn that "the wounds between Your hands" were "those with which I was wounded in the house of My friends" (Zechariah 13:6b)?
The New Testament confirms these prophetic themes when it declares,
…these [things] have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name (John: 20:31).
Yes, we know that "Judaism does not believe" that God has a Son. But with all due respect, may we ask, what is this Judaism? Is it some sacrosanct entity greater than God, or rather, a compendium of rabbinical opinion framed for two thousand years in conscious opposition to, and repudiation of, the messianic claims of Jesus? Let us be sure we do not invoke "Judaism" to sidestep our obligation as menschen (responsible individuals) to consider issues of truth for which we are eternally liable.
Are we so persuaded that our traditions' concept of God apprehends the full richness of biblical monotheism? What of a possible composite tri-unity, whose definition by men, must always be less than its ineffable glory? Might God not be One [Echad], even as we are, made in His image-body, soul and spirit-and yet be One?
Many of us who are formed in the Jewish tradition will have to consider the words of Him who was also the author of the renowned Sermon on the Mount: "Don't you know me…even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father…and I and the Father are One" (John 14:9). He spoke repeatedly of having come from the Father, and that "He should depart out of this world to the Father…that He had come forth from God, and was going back to God" (John 13:1b, 3f). Ought this not to give one, as it has us, sufficient reason to re-examine one's conception of God?
Without question, if these things are true, it will turn one's world upside down. All our trusted categories, will necessarily be challenged. Except we be willing to bear that consequence, how shall our allegiance be ultimately tested in the foremost commandment to "love the Lord, our God, with all our heart, soul, mind and strength"?
Will you yourself not ask the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob about the crucial claims Jesus made for himself? Will you not choose to rise above that instinctive, historically-conditioned enmity to His name should they prove true? Scripture soberly informs us, "There is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12b). Will you not trust and test the Word of God by acting upon it?
For as the Scripture says,
Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek [Gentile]: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him (Romans 10:11-12 AV).
Even the famous "doubting" Thomas, who said, "Unless I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the place of His nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe" (John 20:25b), upon seeing the resurrected Christ, let out the astonished gasp, "My Lord and my God!" (v.28b)! Jesus, forsaking a once-and-for-all opportunity to squelch a preposterous and blasphemous exaggeration, acknowledged it as being perfectly appropriate to Himself, adding, "Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed" (John 20:29b).
Someone wrote, "The climax of sin is that it crucified Jesus." Think on it. We, a people, who have but a scant consciousness of sin (what need for atonement then?) ought to ponder that God, knowing how sin disguises itself, became Himself our victim, in order to reveal, as nothing else could, the inexorable truth of our condition! Is it not significant and revealing that the best of Roman Law, coupled with the best of Jewish piety, put to a cruel death the long-awaited object of our faith? Tragically, not only were we too blind to recognize Him, but as a nation were sufficiently offended and threatened by Him, making His removal by death a necessity! As the Scripture says, "Like one from whom men hide their faces He was despised, and we esteemed Him not" (Isaiah 53:3).
What person or nation can be absolved from such sin as this? If this be so, what passage of time can in any way mitigate our personal and corporate guilt? Our defiant declaration, "His [Jesus'] blood be on us and on our children" (Matthew 27:25), has haunted us throughout our history more than we can know.
If He be the Son of God, "very God and very Man," as ancient creeds declare, we have committed an appalling sin. Not the sin of a failed moment's error, mind you, but rather the summation of all sin, chronic and ages old, and repeated again in a Judaism that, to this day, prefers the rulings of a rabbinical "elite," and of "ideas comfortably usable in modernity." Against this, ironically, stands the timeless Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4-6 that either defrocks Jesus as ultimate blasphemer, or shows Him to be the very One for whom, in the wisdom of God, the ancient creed was given! As our painful history testifies only too well, "Be assured your sins will find you out." (Numbers 32:23).
Have we been the "Cain" to this "Abel"-moved to murderous envy of a "Son" of the Father more virtuous than we, whose greater, altogether righteous sacrifice, accepted by the Father, leaves our own sacrifice unaccepted and unacceptable? (Genesis 4). Ours, the inept product of our own sweat and industry; His, the ultimate, acceptable blood-sacrifice, satisfying the Holiness of God, which cannot be placated for the terror of sin by anything mankind can humanly or religiously provide!
Have we, like Cain, become fugitives and vagabonds in the earth, hidden from the face of God, marked, but all too often not spared? The comparison is altogether too close to be comfortable! Ought we not be stricken with sorrow, seeing our likeness to that first murderer? May we not bear, ever so remotely, any resemblance to Cain's penalty! Better yet, "Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered [saved]" (Joel 2:32a).
But what does it say? The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that is, the word of faith which we are preaching, that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved (Romans 10:8-10).
Thus, the Apostle Paul, Hebrew of the Hebrews, did not forsake his Jewishness. Nor do we, in proclaiming the good news of our Messiah,
For it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek (Romans 1:16b AV).
A Prayer:
Lord, grant mercy to me, the reader in this once-and-for-all moment. You know well how every power in the world, the flesh and the devil have conspired against You. Grant me, in this moment, a respite from all that has barred us, as Jews, from calling upon Your Name. Give me some measure of the same humility that You Yourself bore nakedly in that public shame on the Cross. Thank You for making this crisis of decision possible for me. In Yeshua's holy, and till now, untried name, I ask it. Save me. Amen.
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Give the king knowledge of Your way of judging, O God
and the spirit of your righteousness to the king's son to control his actions.
Psalms 72:1 Amplified version.
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PRIORITY NUMBER ONE:
PRAY FOR MEN IN AUTHORITY, 1 TIM 2:1-4
Lars Widerberg
Intercessors Network
Storskiftesgatan 87
S-58334 Linkoping, Sweden
Intercessors.Network@Comhem.se
Phone + Fax: +46 13 213630
The Chosen People by Katz/Cohen (1/2)
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The Chosen People: Chosen for What? (1/2)
Examining the Jewish Predicament in an Increasingly Hostile World
by A.Katz and C. Cohen
As Jews, one thing that makes us recoil is being called "chosen." It is something like the involuntary shudder that comes with the screech of chalk on a blackboard. After all, what has being chosen ever meant to us but trouble?
Better that the term had never been coined for all the good it has done us! Where does it come from anyway? Can't we be left alone to live like other people without the ominous overtones that have always dogged us? Chosen for what? Why give to those who instinctively don't like us yet further provocation and pretext for bitterness?
Perhaps you yourself, dear reader, are so reflecting even now. The litany of daily disasters with reports of suicide bombings and the increase of anti-Semitic episodes virtually everywhere in the world give us a heightened sense of dread. What will the end of all this be? Is this what it means to be a Jew? How long before we will be fearing for our children, or ourselves, that we will be singled out as Jews in the streets of America's cities and suburbs?
Already, Jewish leaders in England, France and Germany are exhorting their communities to learn another language, pack their bags and prepare to move again! Is the answer to be more assertive, more insistent on our rights as citizens, demanding that public officials guarantee our safety? Or is it to be found in supporting Jewish organizations monitoring the activity of hate groups, who have access to policy makers in government and influence in the media?
In former times of distress, our more religious kinsmen would sigh, "When Messiah comes…" How plaintive, if not pathetic, to make that an appeal now! That frail expectation saved no one in the Holocaust? how much less now? Can even the Chasidim, who daily gather up into plastic bags the body parts and grisly, severed members of nail-torn bomb victims, sustain such a hope? What real defense do we have when America's proudest commercial towers and, indeed, the very Pentagon itself are not exempt from attack? This vitriolic hatred, infecting even children, at first against "Zionists," and now Jews in every place, threatens us all.
Chosen indeed! If there is a God, where is He now?
From the vantage point of our historic and present Jewish life, the evidence of a living God does seem painfully sparse. If there is such a God, how are we to interpret or understand His apparent, palpable absence? Perhaps from a biblical perspective, one might even suggest that He has a controversy with us, or has withdrawn His Presence, in proportion to our own indifference and alienation from Him. This is a supposition which the Scriptures, of which we have characteristically little knowledge or interest, seem to suggest.
The very first chapter of the Book of Proverbs sends the chilling message that "because we refused the call of wisdom, she will even laugh at our calamity and mock when dread comes upon us like a storm;" and it will be too late because: "they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord…But he who listens to me [wisdom] shall live securely, and shall be at ease from the dread of evil" (v.20-33).
By and large, are we not Torah indifferent, preferring to bury ourselves in literature of entirely other kinds, as in the copious folds of a Sunday Times and the like-all of which uniformly espouse views antagonistic to faith? The very idea of divine authorship, that is, Scripture actually inspired by God, is contrary and offensive to our incredulous, secular minds. We instantly, matter-of-factly and self-evidently dismiss it out of hand-no discussion necessary.
Though the Hebrew prophets proclaimed "Thus saith the Lord," and Isaiah announced, in commencing his book, "The vision which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem," we are persuaded, together with our more liberal rabbis, that such are altogether stylistic devices and quaint rhetoric peculiar to the Bible as literature.
A remarkably candid statement about this unbelief to which we have come is found in a recent article by conservative rabbi and scholar, Alan J.Yuter, Etz Hayim?-Torah For Our Times: Conservative Judaism's Spiritual Response to Judaism's Canon (Midstream, May/June 2002). Etz Hayim is the recently published Torah commentary by a panel of the best scholars and rabbis of Conservative Judaism. Yuter describes Etz Hayim as:
The most ambitious non-Orthodox Jewish Bible Commentary ever written for synagogue use in the history of Jewry, but framed in a modern world view that appropriates ancient ideas that are comfortably usable in modernity (p.21).
In commending this new work, Yuter informs us,
As modernists who reject pre-modern dogma, Conservative Judaism assumes that the Torah's human language can, by definition, be no more than the work of human beings…creating stories that make religious statements. For Etz Hayim, the Torah is not history but pious, inspirational fiction…God as the hero of Scripture and as a mental and literary construct…God is no more than the power within us that makes for good, salvation, and redemption. There is thus a theological disconnect between the God of Hebrew Scripture, who "appears" as a real being in the Scriptural text, and the God idea of Etz Hayim's elite community (p.19 Emphasis and italics ours, here and throughout).
He goes on to say,
For… Conservative Judaism, holiness and sanctification are a mental mood and not the consequence of obeying the Divine command…Etz Hayim exhibits intellectual integrity, but without the religious faith that the classical tradition mandates…The Torah informs but does not command the autonomous moral conscience of the modern liberal Jew…Its religion is not the religion of the Talmud or Bible, but a modern world view that appropriates ancient ideas that are comfortably usable in modernity (p.20, 21).
Evidently, autonomous man, in his mood and disposition, considers himself to be the measure of all things. This asserts the God of Israel to be a figment of Man's imagination! It portrays the giants of our heritage as mere victims of delusion. What is staggering here is the "up-front" boldness, nay even a boasting, of these views. This is a proud, even arrogant, assertion of the primacy of man over God; of the superiority of an elite council of scholars whose intuited inspiration determines for us what is "comfortably usable" in modernity! As any even superficial assessment of Scripture will indicate-from the call of Abraham, the epochal suffering of Moses, to the Prophets and the Psalmists-not comfort, but obedience, if not sacrifice, has been the enduring motif of Biblical faith!
By making Man supreme, have we not laid ourselves open to assault on every side for the forfeiture of just that faith, inviting the very penalties of covenantal disobedience for which we were forewarned through Moses and the Prophets? How can we demand the protection of society from the anti-Semitic attacks that our own unbelief may have occasioned? Are we so thoroughly secularized as to be unable to see in our increasing calamities a divine cause? Can we not consider the fact that anti-Semitism pre-dates Christianity, and has haunted us in every place and time and nation as being perhaps the consequence of covenantal defection? Is it, in fact, the very evidence of that defection?
As Jews, the Chosen of God, the recipients of the tablets of the Law on Mt. Sinai, the descendants of the Patriarchs and heirs of the Prophets, should we not reasonably look first for an explanation for our distresses in a failed relationship with the God of our Fathers, before considering secular, social or political causes?
Are we aware of Moses' warnings in the book of Deuteronomy (31:29; 32:18 and following) in regard to covenantal failure? If we will not heed God's Word, must we not learn and be instructed, if it be true, through our bitter experience? As abiding as our distresses are, so evidently are the reality of God and the application of His word! What is this "modernity" to which all things must be submitted but the very golden calf of idolatry that has been our undoing from the very inception of our history as a people? Not only do we bow to it, but more so, are its creators and promulgators, corrupting others even as we ourselves are corrupted. Is this not perversely contradicting our call to be a "kingdom of priests" (Exodus 19:6) and a "light to the nations" (Isaiah 42:6)?
Every analysis and critique of "the Jewish predicament" will fall short if it does not factor in this inescapable call to the nations. Our purpose from the beginning was to be a witness of the One, True, Living God and Creator King to all the nations, and in all the nations. Ought we not to suffer proportionate retribution from that God for our willful failure?
If the biblical principle, "As the priests, so also the people" is valid, can't we then say, as Israel goes, so go the nations? Is it for our failure as a priestly nation that some measure of resentment, even unconsciously, is kindled against us among the nations? Only a biblically-formed mind could conceivably think this way! Contrary and offensive though it might be to our norms of thought, could such a view be closer to God's? Could we be held liable for our failure to align our thoughts with His? As we read in Isaiah 55,
For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the Lord (v.8).
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts (v.9).
Our unbelief reiterates to the world the mocking taunt of Satan in the Garden of Eden: "Hath God really said?"
If denying His truth distorts reality, perverts life and damages all the processes of living, what judgment could issue from a God, so misrepresented, upon that nation privileged to make Him known? Certainly, God's continuing controversy with us, the Jewish people, is an index and a piece of His larger contention with all mankind; but the wider conflict likely awaits resolution first between God and "Israel, His son, His firstborn" (Exodus 4:22).
Can it be that our 'effectual atheism,' reflected in a liberally-oriented Judaism, springs from the absence of an actual experience of God by the Spirit? Or that our inability to experience God is, in itself, a judgment of God? A condition held for so long that it is now considered normative?
Those who reduce God to a "concept," have no God personally whom they can seek. One experience of God, as God, dissolves all our doubts! How shall we ever be able to understand, as did the Patriarchs and Prophets of our own faith, that which alone has rightly driven our entire Hebrew past: the actual, experiential knowledge of God as God?
What alternative, then, in its absence, but to reduce the God, who is Israel's glory, to no more than primitive anthropomorphisms, syncretism, and the influence of "other Near Eastern mythologies!" The passage of a people in flight from pursuing Egyptians, through a Red Sea opened by God, becomes the mere confluence of a movement of tides! Miracles are "explained," and predictive prophecy, robbed of its revelatory power, is dismissed through ingenious alterations in time-line dating!
If we are offended by the super-natural, how then can God be God?
Hadn't we better confront these issues on this side of eternity rather than on the other? Will we learn too late our God-rejecting error, when it will be unalterably fixed-eternally and without remedy? How shall we not be unspeakably ashamed for the triviality of a lifestyle that pores over stocks and bonds, or their equivalent, but omits the question of God Himself? For, as the Scriptures say,
The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts. His ways are always grievous… (Psalm 10:4-5a).
Such a disposition renders God a negligible object, making the knowledge of Him irrelevant.
The problem is pride, the unduly exalted opinion of one's self!
A scholar of an earlier generation superbly comments on the above verses,
…[pride] is therefore impatient of a rival, hates a superior, and cannot endure a master. In proportion as it prevails in the heart, it makes us wish to see nothing above us, to acknowledge no law but our own wills, to follow no rule but our own inclinations. Thus it led Satan to rebel against his Creator, and our first parents to desire to be as gods. Since such are the effects of pride, such a Being as God, One who is infinitely powerful, just and holy, who can neither be resisted, deceived or deluded, who disposes according to his own sovereign pleasure, of all creatures and events, and who, in an especial manner, hates pride, and is determined to abase and punish it.
[Toward] such a Being, pride can contemplate only with a feeling of dread, aversion and abhorrence. It must look upon Him as its natural enemy…These truths torture the proud, unhumbled hearts of the wicked, and hence they hate that knowledge of God which teaches these truths, and will not seek it. On the contrary, they wish to remain ignorant of such a Being, and to banish all thoughts of Him from their minds. With this view they neglect, pervert, or explain away those passages of revelation which describes God's true character, and endeavor to believe that He is altogether such a one as themselves.
This commentator continues,
He [the unhumbled] never takes God or His will into consideration or consultation, to square and frame all accordingly, but proceeds and goes on in all as if there were no God to be consulted…no more than if He were no God; the thought of Him and His will sway him not. Such a God is not of their counsel, is not in the plot; nor is God in their purposes or advising; they do all without Him…all their thought is, that there is no God…[and] seeing there is no God or power above them to take notice of it, to regard or requite them, therefore they may be bold to go on.
Hence, what issues from such an individual-and he is legion-is the inevitable contagion affecting all his conduct and life as the Scripture says, "His ways are always grievous."
We have taken the liberty of inserting these lengthy quotes because they are so rare. Our own age is steeped in unbelief, so normative and unquestioned, as to taint the very air we breathe. To "seek after God" has rarely been commended to us. Indeed, who could do so? It would imply that there is a God who could be found, and who, being a Person, desires to be sought! Such a conviction would be enough to dismiss such an individual from polite society as clearly out of touch with "reality."
Yet, is this not the very neglect of God that Israel's own prophets have always protested to an unwilling nation? The covenant given at Mount Sinai, from which we have shrunk, is no icy piece of contractual formalism, but a covenant framed in love by the God who brought us out of Egypt, desiring to have us for His own:
Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, "This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: 'You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation'" (Exodus 19:3-6 NIV).
Pause for a moment and ponder this promise. By its very nature, it requires a vital knowledge and love of God to keep it, which is why He needs to be continually sought! Psalms 25:14 makes it clear that the fear of the Lord is the condition for having the covenant revealed to us. How great our need for the "new" or everlasting covenant spoken of in Jeremiah 31:31-33 and Ezekiel 36:26-a covenant promising "a new heart" and "a new spirit;" a covenant under which God declares that He will write His law on our hearts!
As our distresses mount, how much more should we seriously ponder the word of God in the Psalms, where we are told that:
The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you (Psalm 9:9-10 NIV).
At the time that this is written, Israelis are building a wall of separation between themselves and the Palestinian population, penalizing entire families of suicide bombers, re-establishing tight Israeli Defense Force governance over the territories in a powerful and dangerous military build-up. May we suggest that perhaps we, as a nation, ought instead to consider GOD?
To "know His name" is not a technical formula. It is to experience God in His essential attributes, an intimacy only available to those who seek Him! Can it be that the frustrating helplessness of a besieged Israel is the urgent wake-up call of God to an essentially God-rejecting nation?-who, according to His promise, will not forsake those who put their trust in Him.
However horrific the means, can our increasing predicament be understood as a mercy to save us from yet worse catastrophe?
As the Scripture has already informed us, the same writer tells us that when every other appeal fails, God's severity is yet His love!
If we read this verse [Psalm 9:10] literally, there is, no doubt, a glorious fullness of assurance in the names of God…The Lord may hide His face for a season from His people, but He never has utterly, finally, really, or angrily, forsaken them that seek him.
Lest we assume that personal, ethical morality can substitute for a relationship with God, this writer terrifyingly makes clear:
The moral who are not devout, the honest who are not prayerful, the benevolent who are not believing, the amiable who are not converted, these must all have their portion with the openly wicked in the hell which is prepared for the devil and his angels…The forgetters of God are far more numerous than the profane or profligate, and according to the very forceful expression in the Hebrew, the nethermost hell will be the place into which all of them shall be hurled headlong.
"The wicked will return to Sheol [hell], even all the nations who forget God," declares Psalm 9:17. As our writer concludes,
Forgetfulness seems a small sin, but it brings eternal wrath upon the man who lives and dies in it.
Such a willful forgetfulness is, as the Psalm says, wicked,
…for where the God of heaven is not, the lord of hell is reigning and raging; and if God not be in our thoughts, our thoughts will bring us to perdition.
The same "wicked," according to verse 3 of Psalm 10, bless "the covetous, whom the Lord abhors." And covetousness, this root of idolatry, which the tenth commandment condemns, serves to dull the conscience against God. At its heart lies the desire for riches and material acquisition, the desire to unduly possess and to obtain. Every reasonable observer of contemporary Jewish life will acknowledge that this is more descriptive of us than the desire for God-and has even become our distinctive. Indeed, truth to tell, it is likely its substitute or alternative!
The Chosen People: Chosen for What? (1/2)
Examining the Jewish Predicament in an Increasingly Hostile World
by A.Katz and C. Cohen
As Jews, one thing that makes us recoil is being called "chosen." It is something like the involuntary shudder that comes with the screech of chalk on a blackboard. After all, what has being chosen ever meant to us but trouble?
Better that the term had never been coined for all the good it has done us! Where does it come from anyway? Can't we be left alone to live like other people without the ominous overtones that have always dogged us? Chosen for what? Why give to those who instinctively don't like us yet further provocation and pretext for bitterness?
Perhaps you yourself, dear reader, are so reflecting even now. The litany of daily disasters with reports of suicide bombings and the increase of anti-Semitic episodes virtually everywhere in the world give us a heightened sense of dread. What will the end of all this be? Is this what it means to be a Jew? How long before we will be fearing for our children, or ourselves, that we will be singled out as Jews in the streets of America's cities and suburbs?
Already, Jewish leaders in England, France and Germany are exhorting their communities to learn another language, pack their bags and prepare to move again! Is the answer to be more assertive, more insistent on our rights as citizens, demanding that public officials guarantee our safety? Or is it to be found in supporting Jewish organizations monitoring the activity of hate groups, who have access to policy makers in government and influence in the media?
In former times of distress, our more religious kinsmen would sigh, "When Messiah comes…" How plaintive, if not pathetic, to make that an appeal now! That frail expectation saved no one in the Holocaust? how much less now? Can even the Chasidim, who daily gather up into plastic bags the body parts and grisly, severed members of nail-torn bomb victims, sustain such a hope? What real defense do we have when America's proudest commercial towers and, indeed, the very Pentagon itself are not exempt from attack? This vitriolic hatred, infecting even children, at first against "Zionists," and now Jews in every place, threatens us all.
Chosen indeed! If there is a God, where is He now?
From the vantage point of our historic and present Jewish life, the evidence of a living God does seem painfully sparse. If there is such a God, how are we to interpret or understand His apparent, palpable absence? Perhaps from a biblical perspective, one might even suggest that He has a controversy with us, or has withdrawn His Presence, in proportion to our own indifference and alienation from Him. This is a supposition which the Scriptures, of which we have characteristically little knowledge or interest, seem to suggest.
The very first chapter of the Book of Proverbs sends the chilling message that "because we refused the call of wisdom, she will even laugh at our calamity and mock when dread comes upon us like a storm;" and it will be too late because: "they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord…But he who listens to me [wisdom] shall live securely, and shall be at ease from the dread of evil" (v.20-33).
By and large, are we not Torah indifferent, preferring to bury ourselves in literature of entirely other kinds, as in the copious folds of a Sunday Times and the like-all of which uniformly espouse views antagonistic to faith? The very idea of divine authorship, that is, Scripture actually inspired by God, is contrary and offensive to our incredulous, secular minds. We instantly, matter-of-factly and self-evidently dismiss it out of hand-no discussion necessary.
Though the Hebrew prophets proclaimed "Thus saith the Lord," and Isaiah announced, in commencing his book, "The vision which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem," we are persuaded, together with our more liberal rabbis, that such are altogether stylistic devices and quaint rhetoric peculiar to the Bible as literature.
A remarkably candid statement about this unbelief to which we have come is found in a recent article by conservative rabbi and scholar, Alan J.Yuter, Etz Hayim?-Torah For Our Times: Conservative Judaism's Spiritual Response to Judaism's Canon (Midstream, May/June 2002). Etz Hayim is the recently published Torah commentary by a panel of the best scholars and rabbis of Conservative Judaism. Yuter describes Etz Hayim as:
The most ambitious non-Orthodox Jewish Bible Commentary ever written for synagogue use in the history of Jewry, but framed in a modern world view that appropriates ancient ideas that are comfortably usable in modernity (p.21).
In commending this new work, Yuter informs us,
As modernists who reject pre-modern dogma, Conservative Judaism assumes that the Torah's human language can, by definition, be no more than the work of human beings…creating stories that make religious statements. For Etz Hayim, the Torah is not history but pious, inspirational fiction…God as the hero of Scripture and as a mental and literary construct…God is no more than the power within us that makes for good, salvation, and redemption. There is thus a theological disconnect between the God of Hebrew Scripture, who "appears" as a real being in the Scriptural text, and the God idea of Etz Hayim's elite community (p.19 Emphasis and italics ours, here and throughout).
He goes on to say,
For… Conservative Judaism, holiness and sanctification are a mental mood and not the consequence of obeying the Divine command…Etz Hayim exhibits intellectual integrity, but without the religious faith that the classical tradition mandates…The Torah informs but does not command the autonomous moral conscience of the modern liberal Jew…Its religion is not the religion of the Talmud or Bible, but a modern world view that appropriates ancient ideas that are comfortably usable in modernity (p.20, 21).
Evidently, autonomous man, in his mood and disposition, considers himself to be the measure of all things. This asserts the God of Israel to be a figment of Man's imagination! It portrays the giants of our heritage as mere victims of delusion. What is staggering here is the "up-front" boldness, nay even a boasting, of these views. This is a proud, even arrogant, assertion of the primacy of man over God; of the superiority of an elite council of scholars whose intuited inspiration determines for us what is "comfortably usable" in modernity! As any even superficial assessment of Scripture will indicate-from the call of Abraham, the epochal suffering of Moses, to the Prophets and the Psalmists-not comfort, but obedience, if not sacrifice, has been the enduring motif of Biblical faith!
By making Man supreme, have we not laid ourselves open to assault on every side for the forfeiture of just that faith, inviting the very penalties of covenantal disobedience for which we were forewarned through Moses and the Prophets? How can we demand the protection of society from the anti-Semitic attacks that our own unbelief may have occasioned? Are we so thoroughly secularized as to be unable to see in our increasing calamities a divine cause? Can we not consider the fact that anti-Semitism pre-dates Christianity, and has haunted us in every place and time and nation as being perhaps the consequence of covenantal defection? Is it, in fact, the very evidence of that defection?
As Jews, the Chosen of God, the recipients of the tablets of the Law on Mt. Sinai, the descendants of the Patriarchs and heirs of the Prophets, should we not reasonably look first for an explanation for our distresses in a failed relationship with the God of our Fathers, before considering secular, social or political causes?
Are we aware of Moses' warnings in the book of Deuteronomy (31:29; 32:18 and following) in regard to covenantal failure? If we will not heed God's Word, must we not learn and be instructed, if it be true, through our bitter experience? As abiding as our distresses are, so evidently are the reality of God and the application of His word! What is this "modernity" to which all things must be submitted but the very golden calf of idolatry that has been our undoing from the very inception of our history as a people? Not only do we bow to it, but more so, are its creators and promulgators, corrupting others even as we ourselves are corrupted. Is this not perversely contradicting our call to be a "kingdom of priests" (Exodus 19:6) and a "light to the nations" (Isaiah 42:6)?
Every analysis and critique of "the Jewish predicament" will fall short if it does not factor in this inescapable call to the nations. Our purpose from the beginning was to be a witness of the One, True, Living God and Creator King to all the nations, and in all the nations. Ought we not to suffer proportionate retribution from that God for our willful failure?
If the biblical principle, "As the priests, so also the people" is valid, can't we then say, as Israel goes, so go the nations? Is it for our failure as a priestly nation that some measure of resentment, even unconsciously, is kindled against us among the nations? Only a biblically-formed mind could conceivably think this way! Contrary and offensive though it might be to our norms of thought, could such a view be closer to God's? Could we be held liable for our failure to align our thoughts with His? As we read in Isaiah 55,
For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the Lord (v.8).
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts (v.9).
Our unbelief reiterates to the world the mocking taunt of Satan in the Garden of Eden: "Hath God really said?"
If denying His truth distorts reality, perverts life and damages all the processes of living, what judgment could issue from a God, so misrepresented, upon that nation privileged to make Him known? Certainly, God's continuing controversy with us, the Jewish people, is an index and a piece of His larger contention with all mankind; but the wider conflict likely awaits resolution first between God and "Israel, His son, His firstborn" (Exodus 4:22).
Can it be that our 'effectual atheism,' reflected in a liberally-oriented Judaism, springs from the absence of an actual experience of God by the Spirit? Or that our inability to experience God is, in itself, a judgment of God? A condition held for so long that it is now considered normative?
Those who reduce God to a "concept," have no God personally whom they can seek. One experience of God, as God, dissolves all our doubts! How shall we ever be able to understand, as did the Patriarchs and Prophets of our own faith, that which alone has rightly driven our entire Hebrew past: the actual, experiential knowledge of God as God?
What alternative, then, in its absence, but to reduce the God, who is Israel's glory, to no more than primitive anthropomorphisms, syncretism, and the influence of "other Near Eastern mythologies!" The passage of a people in flight from pursuing Egyptians, through a Red Sea opened by God, becomes the mere confluence of a movement of tides! Miracles are "explained," and predictive prophecy, robbed of its revelatory power, is dismissed through ingenious alterations in time-line dating!
If we are offended by the super-natural, how then can God be God?
Hadn't we better confront these issues on this side of eternity rather than on the other? Will we learn too late our God-rejecting error, when it will be unalterably fixed-eternally and without remedy? How shall we not be unspeakably ashamed for the triviality of a lifestyle that pores over stocks and bonds, or their equivalent, but omits the question of God Himself? For, as the Scriptures say,
The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts. His ways are always grievous… (Psalm 10:4-5a).
Such a disposition renders God a negligible object, making the knowledge of Him irrelevant.
The problem is pride, the unduly exalted opinion of one's self!
A scholar of an earlier generation superbly comments on the above verses,
…[pride] is therefore impatient of a rival, hates a superior, and cannot endure a master. In proportion as it prevails in the heart, it makes us wish to see nothing above us, to acknowledge no law but our own wills, to follow no rule but our own inclinations. Thus it led Satan to rebel against his Creator, and our first parents to desire to be as gods. Since such are the effects of pride, such a Being as God, One who is infinitely powerful, just and holy, who can neither be resisted, deceived or deluded, who disposes according to his own sovereign pleasure, of all creatures and events, and who, in an especial manner, hates pride, and is determined to abase and punish it.
[Toward] such a Being, pride can contemplate only with a feeling of dread, aversion and abhorrence. It must look upon Him as its natural enemy…These truths torture the proud, unhumbled hearts of the wicked, and hence they hate that knowledge of God which teaches these truths, and will not seek it. On the contrary, they wish to remain ignorant of such a Being, and to banish all thoughts of Him from their minds. With this view they neglect, pervert, or explain away those passages of revelation which describes God's true character, and endeavor to believe that He is altogether such a one as themselves.
This commentator continues,
He [the unhumbled] never takes God or His will into consideration or consultation, to square and frame all accordingly, but proceeds and goes on in all as if there were no God to be consulted…no more than if He were no God; the thought of Him and His will sway him not. Such a God is not of their counsel, is not in the plot; nor is God in their purposes or advising; they do all without Him…all their thought is, that there is no God…[and] seeing there is no God or power above them to take notice of it, to regard or requite them, therefore they may be bold to go on.
Hence, what issues from such an individual-and he is legion-is the inevitable contagion affecting all his conduct and life as the Scripture says, "His ways are always grievous."
We have taken the liberty of inserting these lengthy quotes because they are so rare. Our own age is steeped in unbelief, so normative and unquestioned, as to taint the very air we breathe. To "seek after God" has rarely been commended to us. Indeed, who could do so? It would imply that there is a God who could be found, and who, being a Person, desires to be sought! Such a conviction would be enough to dismiss such an individual from polite society as clearly out of touch with "reality."
Yet, is this not the very neglect of God that Israel's own prophets have always protested to an unwilling nation? The covenant given at Mount Sinai, from which we have shrunk, is no icy piece of contractual formalism, but a covenant framed in love by the God who brought us out of Egypt, desiring to have us for His own:
Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, "This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: 'You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation'" (Exodus 19:3-6 NIV).
Pause for a moment and ponder this promise. By its very nature, it requires a vital knowledge and love of God to keep it, which is why He needs to be continually sought! Psalms 25:14 makes it clear that the fear of the Lord is the condition for having the covenant revealed to us. How great our need for the "new" or everlasting covenant spoken of in Jeremiah 31:31-33 and Ezekiel 36:26-a covenant promising "a new heart" and "a new spirit;" a covenant under which God declares that He will write His law on our hearts!
As our distresses mount, how much more should we seriously ponder the word of God in the Psalms, where we are told that:
The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you (Psalm 9:9-10 NIV).
At the time that this is written, Israelis are building a wall of separation between themselves and the Palestinian population, penalizing entire families of suicide bombers, re-establishing tight Israeli Defense Force governance over the territories in a powerful and dangerous military build-up. May we suggest that perhaps we, as a nation, ought instead to consider GOD?
To "know His name" is not a technical formula. It is to experience God in His essential attributes, an intimacy only available to those who seek Him! Can it be that the frustrating helplessness of a besieged Israel is the urgent wake-up call of God to an essentially God-rejecting nation?-who, according to His promise, will not forsake those who put their trust in Him.
However horrific the means, can our increasing predicament be understood as a mercy to save us from yet worse catastrophe?
As the Scripture has already informed us, the same writer tells us that when every other appeal fails, God's severity is yet His love!
If we read this verse [Psalm 9:10] literally, there is, no doubt, a glorious fullness of assurance in the names of God…The Lord may hide His face for a season from His people, but He never has utterly, finally, really, or angrily, forsaken them that seek him.
Lest we assume that personal, ethical morality can substitute for a relationship with God, this writer terrifyingly makes clear:
The moral who are not devout, the honest who are not prayerful, the benevolent who are not believing, the amiable who are not converted, these must all have their portion with the openly wicked in the hell which is prepared for the devil and his angels…The forgetters of God are far more numerous than the profane or profligate, and according to the very forceful expression in the Hebrew, the nethermost hell will be the place into which all of them shall be hurled headlong.
"The wicked will return to Sheol [hell], even all the nations who forget God," declares Psalm 9:17. As our writer concludes,
Forgetfulness seems a small sin, but it brings eternal wrath upon the man who lives and dies in it.
Such a willful forgetfulness is, as the Psalm says, wicked,
…for where the God of heaven is not, the lord of hell is reigning and raging; and if God not be in our thoughts, our thoughts will bring us to perdition.
The same "wicked," according to verse 3 of Psalm 10, bless "the covetous, whom the Lord abhors." And covetousness, this root of idolatry, which the tenth commandment condemns, serves to dull the conscience against God. At its heart lies the desire for riches and material acquisition, the desire to unduly possess and to obtain. Every reasonable observer of contemporary Jewish life will acknowledge that this is more descriptive of us than the desire for God-and has even become our distinctive. Indeed, truth to tell, it is likely its substitute or alternative!
Svanar på taket...
Svanar på taket... Eller tomtar på loftet?
Fundera kring detta elektroniska brev nedan som kom nyligen:
- Avsändaren bor inte vid Hornborgarsjön...
- Hon har heller inga tomtar på loftet...
- Klockan var 22.13...
Så här löd mejlets text:
Hej mamma och pappa!
Har precis stängt av TV.n. Jag blev lite skraj för jag hörde att det klampade på taket, fast det lät också som det var i källaren. Sune är nu och hjälper pappa Gustav, så jag hade ingen vuxen att prata med och dörren var inte låst. Sen hörde jag en massa skränande svanar. Jag tror att svanarna pausade på vårat tak efter en lång flygtur. Under två dagar har barnen och jag sett svanar flyga förbi. Våren är nog här!
Kram dotter Erika
Vad kan detta säga i M'Xp´s tema 'Den svenska kristenheten'???
REFLEKTERA kring följande svarsförslag:
I Guds rike är ALLT möjligt - också i, med och genom Den svenska kristenhetens församling...
I Guds rike är det nu vårens tid, när också de stora fåglarna överraskar de små, så som de stora kyrkorna de mindre, typ/Svenska kyrkan och Serbisk ortodoxa kyrkan i förhållande till Vineyard och Lutherska Bekännelsekyrkan...
I Guds rike är det aldrig för sent för Den svenska kristenheten även om klockan skulle vara 22.13 eller 5 i 12...
/Dag JustNu
Syrisk ortodoxa kyrkan, Serbisk orto...
DEN SVENSKA KRISTENHETEN
Syrisk ortodoxa kyrkan, Serbisk orto...
Mission Xp [M'Xp] adresserar hela Den svenska kristenheten, och har inlett en enkel genomgång av presentationerna av alla kyrkor och samfund.
De på denna website inlagda kyrkorna är hittills [2005-03-22]:
· Pingströrelsen
· Katolska kyrkan
· Svenska Missionskyrkan
· Svenska kyrkan
· Evangeliska Frikyrkan
· Syrisk Ortodoxa kyrkan
På tur att presenteras vidare är: Serbisk Ortodoxa kyrkan, Svenska Baptistsamfundet, Grekisk Ortodoxa kyrkan, Svenska Alliansmissionen, Makedoniska Ortodoxa kyrkan, Trosrörelsen, Frälsningsarmén, Armeniska apostoliska kyrkan, Etiopiska ortodoxa kyrkan, Österns Assyriska kyrka m.fl.
Hur många kyrkorna är kan man ta del av på Sveriges Kristna Råds website, där antalet uppgår till c:a 50. Och SCB har en del statistik att ge.
Presentationen fortsätter alltså och M'Xp önskar hela Den svenska kristenheten en fortsatt välsignad vecka, var man än må befinna sig i sin kyrkliga kalender…
/DSr
Syrisk ortodoxa kyrkan, Serbisk orto...
Mission Xp [M'Xp] adresserar hela Den svenska kristenheten, och har inlett en enkel genomgång av presentationerna av alla kyrkor och samfund.
De på denna website inlagda kyrkorna är hittills [2005-03-22]:
· Pingströrelsen
· Katolska kyrkan
· Svenska Missionskyrkan
· Svenska kyrkan
· Evangeliska Frikyrkan
· Syrisk Ortodoxa kyrkan
På tur att presenteras vidare är: Serbisk Ortodoxa kyrkan, Svenska Baptistsamfundet, Grekisk Ortodoxa kyrkan, Svenska Alliansmissionen, Makedoniska Ortodoxa kyrkan, Trosrörelsen, Frälsningsarmén, Armeniska apostoliska kyrkan, Etiopiska ortodoxa kyrkan, Österns Assyriska kyrka m.fl.
Hur många kyrkorna är kan man ta del av på Sveriges Kristna Råds website, där antalet uppgår till c:a 50. Och SCB har en del statistik att ge.
Presentationen fortsätter alltså och M'Xp önskar hela Den svenska kristenheten en fortsatt välsignad vecka, var man än må befinna sig i sin kyrkliga kalender…
/DSr
Syrisk Ortodoxa kyrkan (6)
Syrisk Ortodoxa kyrkan
Syrisk Ortodoxa kyrkan är representerad i Sverige sedan 1967, och har 18 lokala församlingar i Sverige samt ett ungdomsförbund som bildades 1996. Syrisk Ortodoxa kyrkan är representerad i flertalet europeiska, asiatiska, nordamerikanska och latinamerikanska länder, samt i Australien.
Missions- och utvecklingssamarbete bedrivs av de lokala församlingarna i de länder och orter där kyrkans medlemmar finns. Kyrkans hjälparbete riktar sig främst till föräldralösa barn, nödställda änkor, äldre personer, skolor, kloster samt till uppstart av hantverks- och utbildningsverkstäder.
Syrisk-ortodoxa kyrkan är medlemskyrka i Sveriges Kristna Råd från starten i december 1992 och som trossamfund sedan mitten av 1970-talet.
Internationellt leds Syrisk-ortodoxa kyrkan från Damaskus av Syrisk-ortodoxa patriarkatet med patriarken HH Ignatius Zakka I Iwas, Patriark av Antiokia och hela Östern. Kyrkan har idag genom utvandring från Mellanöstern förgreningar i många länder i Europa, Nordamerika, Sydamerika, Asien och Australien. Denna globala kyrka, som internationellt och ekumeniskt är känd som den syrisk-ortodoxa kyrkan med anspråk på att vara grundad i Antiokia år 37 e Kr, styrs av patriarken och den heliga synoden enligt kyrkans kanoniska lag.
I Sverige etablerades den syrisk-ortodoxa kyrkan i samband med invandringen av syrisk-ortodoxa kristna från framför allt östra Turkiet, Libanon och Syrien. På grund av spänningar som uppstått inom kyrkan i Sverige accepterade patriarken 1994 att kyrkan i Sverige delades i två administrationer: Syrisk-ortodoxa ärkestiftet och Syrisk-ortodoxa patriarkaliska ställföreträdarskapet, vardera under ledning av ärkebiskop Julius Abdulahad Shabo respektive ärkebiskop Benyamin Atas. Samtidigt markerades att dessa parallella administrationer inom samma geografiska område båda tillhör Syrisk-ortodoxa kyrkan och tillsammans utgör Syrisk-ortodoxa kyrkan i Sverige.
Läs mera i SKR >> Sveriges Kristna Råd
Efraim Syriern
Under påsktiden firas Efraims högtidsdag. Länken nedan har en artikel om helgonet, dess liv och verk. Han kallas Efraim Syriern tack vare sitt ursprung och är en sådan viktig personlighet inom den syrisk ortodoxa kyrkan att han fått namnet "Den Helige Andes harpa" och det med all rätt, för ingen skald kommer i närheten av detta helgons kristna författarskap.
Efraim med tillnamnet Syriern (Mor Afrem Suryoyo) föddes år 303 i Nsibis, Tur 'Abdin.
Läs mera >> Efraim Syriern
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Läs mera >> Missionsrådet och om Syrisk Ortodoxa kyrkans ungdom >> SOKU
Evangeliska Frikyrkan (5)
EVANGELISKA FRIKYRKAN (5)
Missionen i centrum
Evangeliska Frikyrkan bildades 1 januari, 1997 men vår historia börjar redan på 1800-talet. Det första baptistiska dopet skedde 1848. Baptistiskt dop innebär att man inte döper barn utan de som själva är gamla nog att säga själva att de vill bli döpta. Några år senare bildades Svenska Baptistsamfundet som sedan delas i fler samfund av olika anledningar. 1872 bildas Fribaptistsamfundet, 1888 Helgelseförbundet och 1892 Örebromissionen. Fram till 1937 var Örebromissionen en rörelse inom Svenska Baptistsamfundet. Alla tre rörelser prioriterar utlandsmission och sänder ut sina första utlandsarbetare redan på 1800-talet.
Mera om >> EFK:s historia
Visionen
Följande tio värderingar är vägledande för hur vi genomför vårt arbete: Evangelikal tro - Vi måste vara relevanta för församlingarna och samhället. Evangelikal tro förmedlas på ett nutida sätt.
Enhet - För Guds rikes skull försöker vi alltid samverka med andra kristna.
Tjänande - Gud använder oss i vår svaghet och kallar oss till tjänst för andra människor, särskilt de utsatta och förtryckta.
Klimat - Ett bra arbetsklimat skapas genom förtroendefulla relationer och medveten konflikthantering.
Team - För bästa resultat prioriterar vi teamarbete. Detta förutsätter stor öppenhet och delaktighet.
Gåvor - Så långt som möjligt utför vi vårt arbete utifrån personliga gåvor.
Förlåtelse - De effektivaste medlen till att upprätthålla en öppen och kärleksfull atmosfär är ärlighet och förlåtelse.
Växer i gudsrelationen - Tillväxt i alla avseenden är ett grundläggande mål för vårt ledarskap.
Föredöme - Vår tro och våra liv ska kunna tjäna som förebild för andra.
Läs mera om >> EFK:s Vision
För ytterligare studium:
Läs mera på Evangeliska Frikyrkans >> HEMSIDA
Joh 13 Walk n' Talk
'Den svenska kristenheten' har Skriftens förordningar i kallelse och uppdrag
som stadgar bl.a. kärlek - faktiskt juridiskt bindande enl § 13:34-35 Johannes
Walk n' Talk - En av Mina favoriter!
Det är underbart med mänskor som gör det de säger…
Det är frustrerande med mänskor som snackar men inget gör…
Det är frustrerande med mänskor som snackar men inget gör…
Prat men ingen verkstad - det är man inte nöjd med.
Nöjda är vi när talet konkretiseras med action.
Nöjda är vi när talet konkretiseras med action.
Ord utan handling är som en älv utan vatten.
Handling konkretiserande ord är som soluppgång.
Handling konkretiserande ord är som soluppgång.
Talking without Walking - gör ingen glad, bara trött.
Walk and Talk - det är som med Ordets görare - välsignelse.
Walk and Talk - det är som med Ordets görare - välsignelse.
Blåmesen invid talgbollen - den sjunger.
Koltrasten sjunger Palmsöndags afton - om inte, ingen koltrast.
Koltrasten sjunger Palmsöndags afton - om inte, ingen koltrast.
Kvinnan ser så ilsket på mig - hon går på höger, jag på vänster.
Varför ser hon så argt på mig - jag har ju inte gjort henne nåt illa.
Varför ser hon så argt på mig - jag har ju inte gjort henne nåt illa.
Vi möttes i dag - hon och jag - på en gångväg för gångare och cyklister…
Hon ser mig fortsätta gå till vänster, så hon svänger ut en aning…
Hon ser mig fortsätta gå till vänster, så hon svänger ut en aning…
Och blänger på mig, tänker nog "Dessa människor till män, en till..."
Men jag rår ju inte för att trafikförordningen stadgar om rätt och fel sida.
Men jag rår ju inte för att trafikförordningen stadgar om rätt och fel sida.
Walk n´Talk - En av Mina favoriter!
Walk AND Talk
'Den svenska kristenheten' har Skriftens förordningar i kallelse & uppdrag
som stadgar bl.a. kärlek, faktiskt juridiskt bindande, enl § 13:34-35 Johannes:
som stadgar bl.a. kärlek, faktiskt juridiskt bindande, enl § 13:34-35 Johannes:
Ett nytt bud ger jag er, att ni skall älska varandra.
Så som jag har älskat er skall också ni älska varandra.
Så som jag har älskat er skall också ni älska varandra.
Om ni har kärlek till varandra,
skall alla förstå att ni är mina lärjungar.
skall alla förstå att ni är mina lärjungar.
/Dag JustNu
Böneupprop församlingen Kazakstan
Bild: Vinter i Almaty Foto: Emanuel Henrysson, emnia.com
Böneupprop:
Församlingen trängd i Kazakstan
16 mars 2005
Från Intercessors Network och Lars Widerberg kom ett böneupprop.
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KAZAKSTAN FAKTA
Låt oss först endast kort påminna oss om Kazakstan något lite… landet är geografiskt större än vi vanligtvis tänker på…
Summan av följande länders yta: Danmark, Finland, Polen, Nederländerna, Belgien, Tyskland, Frankrike, Spanien, Portugal, Grekland och Italien, är densamma som den yta Kazakstan har, vilken är 2.717.300 km2 och nästan lika stort som Europa.
Folkmängd: 17,2 miljoner
Läs mera om Kazakstan i >> UTRIKESPOLITISKA INSTITUTET
/DSr
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Bönehus Norden
Böneupprop:
Församlingen trängd i Kazakstan
Från ansvariga kristna ledare i Kazakstan har jag fått veta att det är ett stort krisläge för det kristna arbetet i landet. För andra gången på två år har politiska grupper påverkade av muslimerna och de ortodoxa kristna genom lobbying fått igenom kristendomsfientliga lagförslag för presidentens underskrift. Förra gången sprack det på att president Nazarbayev vägrade skriva under.
Det nuvarande förslaget har som förevändning kampen mot terrorismen men motståndet mot de kristna församlingarna lyser igenom. I korta drag innehåller förslaget att kristen verksamhet på ganska lösa grunder kan stängas, litteratur och video kan beslagtas. Särskilt de oregistrerade verksamheterna drabbas hårt: Den som tar initiativ till oregistrerad kristen verksamhet ska drabbas av böter på tre till fyra skapliga månadslöner direkt, och den som går till en sån sammankomst får böter på en dryg månadslön.
Flera av församlingarna och pastorerna i Kazakstan har utlyst extra bönemöten och fasta för den här situationen. Det gäller den här veckan och någon eller ett par veckor framåt. Låt oss själva delta i bönen och också be andra göra det! Låt oss be att lagförslaget faller också denna gång!
Hälsningar från IH,
Pastor och deltidsmissionär i öst
The Swedish Christianity Prayer Request
Picture: Wilderness of Judah
SWEDEN PRAYER REQUEST
The Swedish Christianity needs prayer and intercessory by all friends within Sweden and by all friends from Abroad.
This website has a vision shared by all Christians in all churches and denominations, but written as a text reminder from what the Lord has given us as a juridical imposition in John 13 when Christ Jesus says:
A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another
Our reminding vision text >> About Mission Xp, its vision and purpose
This Prayer Request is sent to all global friends who have heard - and not heard - about The Swedish Christianity and its need to come closer the LORD himself and to one another as churches in its rich and manifold variety. The Christianity in Sweden consists of about 50-60 different churches and denominations - with all its own.
In the Body of Christ in our nation Sweden we have our special history. We have our different traditions from North to South. And we have received many brothers and sisters coming into our nation with their customs and traditions in their churches from east, south and west. All these immigrants have been such a blessing for us in Sweden.
Why this Prayer Request for The Swedish Christianity? There are, for sure, a lot of answers that different folks could give, but here are some thoughts:
We - like all nations´ churches - are called to go in global Mission of spreading the Gospel of the Kingdom together with other global churches to the ends of the earth.
For this old and wellknown job we need a new vision, we need a new will, we need a new will to go, and we need new power. You see that the need is the Lord Himself and his Holy Presence, Provision, Protection by His Spirit.
And, as you know, it is only by prayer we can get from the Lord what we need. We have been needy for years but the need of power, action, will and vision is greater than ever in our Entire and beloved Swedish Christianity. The need is to come closer the LORD himself and to one another as churches in its rich, wonderful and manifold variety.
Reed more >> Christian Council of Sweden - Churches Together
Mission Xp
/Dag Selander ed.
Svenska kyrkan (4)
Bild: Uppsala domkyrka
S V E N S K A K Y R K A N
Svenska kyrkan är min kyrka.
Här har jag min historia sedan 1940.
Här är jag prästvigd i Strängnäs domkyrka den 23 maj 1968.
Här har jag arbetat som präst i tre decennier.
Här har jag haft förmånen att få vara med om många välsignade möten med många människor som lärt och inspirerat mig. Varje kristtrogen tackar Herren Gud för all den nåd som hemkyrka och samfund fått förmedla, så gör givetvis även jag.
Svenska kyrkan står nu i tur att presenteras. Som den artige värd M'Xp är har de tre största kyrkorna [Pingstvännerna, Katolska kyrkan och Svenska Missionskyrkan] fått gå före.
Här nedan ges ett utdrag från Svenska kyrkans officiella hemsidan:
Svenska kyrkan i korthet
Svenska kyrkan har rum för alla, för den sökande och tvivlande som för den trosvisse, för den som hunnit kortare likaväl som för den som hunnit längre på trons väg. Kyrkan är en plats för gudstjänster, möten och samtal. Kyrkan finns till hands vid de högtidliga tillfällena i livet, men har också på olika sätt betydelse för våra vardagliga behov av eftertanke, stillhet och omsorg. Kyrkans sätt att vara kyrka har förändrats genom dess tusenåriga historia, men uppgiften har alltid varit densamma - att vara en plats för möten mellan människor och mellan människor och Gud.
Svenska kyrkan är en evangelisk-luthersk, öppen, demokratisk folkkyrka, dit alla är välkomna att vara med, ta initiativ och dela ansvar. Mer än sju av tio svenskar är medlemmar i Svenska kyrkan, vilket gör den till Sveriges största medlemsorganisation.
Församlingsarbetet är grunden
Svenska kyrkans grundläggande arbete utförs i de ca 2 200 församlingarna runtom i landet. Församlingens kärna är att fira gudstjänst, bedriva undervisning samt utöva diakoni och mission. Dessa uppgifter uttrycks på en mängd olika sätt: nattvardsmässor, symöten, prova-på-körer och konfirmandläger varvas med föredrag, babysång, aktionsgrupper och hembesök. Varje församling är självbestämmande och dess verksamhet utgår från medlemmarnas behov och förutsättningar. I varje församling finns en kyrkoherde, som tillsammans med det demokratiskt valda kyrkorådet ansvarar för församlingens arbete.
Stiften stödjer församlingarna
Svenska kyrkans församlingar delas in i tretton stift. Stiftens huvuduppgift är att ge råd och stöd till församlingarna, se till att deras verksamhet följer kyrkoordningen (Svenska kyrkans regelverk), samt erbjuda fortbildning för de anställda. Dessutom förvaltar stiften Svenska kyrkans jord- och skogsbestånd och en stor del av kyrkans övriga ekonomiska tillgångar.
Varje stift leds av en biskop. Biskopen viger präster och diakoner till tjänst i kyrkan, följer dem i deras uppdrag och gör personliga besök i stiftets församlingar. Stiftets högsta beslutande organ är det demokratiskt valda stiftsfullmäktige. Stiftsfullmäktige utser i sin tur en stiftsstyrelse, som är stiftets verkställande organ.
Nationella nivån för det gemensamma
Svenska kyrkans nationella nivå ansvarar för de frågor som är gemensamma för hela Svenska kyrkan. Dit hör t.ex. kyrkliga utbildningar, ekumeniska relationer, samordning av den internationella verksamheten, informationsarbete och kulturfrågor. Dessutom skall Svenska kyrkans nationella nivå fungera som kyrkans röst i det offentliga samtalet, såväl i Sverige som internationellt.
Den nationella nivåns arbete styrs av Svenska kyrkans högsta beslutande organ, Kyrkomötet och Kyrkostyrelsen, och utförs till största delen i kyrkokansliet i Uppsala. Där finns ca 250 anställda, som leds av Svenska kyrkans tf generalsekreterare Lars Friedner. Utöver dessa finns lika många anställda som arbetar för Svenska kyrkan utomlands. I kyrkokansliet finns också ärkebiskopen och hans närmaste medarbetare. Ärkebiskop KG Hammar är Svenska kyrkans främste företrädare.
Del av den världsvida kyrkan
Svenska kyrkan är också en del av den världsvida kyrkan och har långa och djupa relationer till kyrkor i alla världsdelar. Genom Svenska kyrkans mission (SKM), Lutherhjälpen och EFS Utland samarbetar Svenska kyrkan för rättvisa, fred, försoning och en hållbar utveckling. Svenska kyrkan i utlandet finns på mer än 40 platser i världen och är till för alla svenskar som befinner sig utomlands.
Svenska kyrkan är rikstäckande och har cirka 7,4 miljoner medlemmar. Under ett år firas i Svenska kyrkan 350 000 gudstjänster och dessutom samlas man till drygt 135 000 dop, vigslar, begravningar och konfirmationsgudstjänster. Ca 140 miljoner kronor samlas in genom kollekter varje år och dessa utgör ändå bara en del av församlingarnas och stiftens totala insamlade medel. Det finns ungefär 60 000 förtroendevalda och ca 22 000 anställda i Svenska kyrkan. Vid sidan av dessa finns några hundratusen som engagerar sig ideellt i Svenska kyrkans arbete. Enbart körverksamheten omfattar 100 000 personer. Såväl siffror som verksamhet visar att Svenska kyrkan är en folkkyrka, som kan jämföras med få andra organisationer i Sverige.
Se: Svenska kyrkans officiella hemsida under rubriken >> FAKTA Om Svenska kyrkan
Läs mera om Svenska kyrkan >> Wikipedia Encyklopedi
/Dag Selander VDM
Koltrastens Gudsrikesteologi
Koltrasten sjunger i dag. Det är torsdag. 17 mars och klockan är 17.25. Den sitter rätt högt upp i sin sångposition. Sjunger så ljuvt den nu kan i fasen mellan vinter och vår. Men ändå med lite staccato sjunger den så ljuvligt som bara den ankommande våren kan få den till. Snön smälter till smärre vårvattensjöar i parken.
Enligt min exegesornitologiska gudsrikesteologi är koltrastens sång idag en sång till hela Den svenska kristenheten. Varför? - Jo, därför att koltrasten är ju Sveriges nationalfågel.
Den sjunger de första tonerna på det partitur som innebär en ny vår i svensk kristenhet.
Nya toner i en ny samvaro bröder och systrar emellan alltifrån Ale - Övertorneå. Nya toner i angeliska tonarter mellan Anglikaner - Österns Assyriska kyrka. I en vårens tid av Herrens nåd som utgjutes över Den svenska kristenheten och därmed hela Sverige…
Låt oss därför lyssna oss fram under dagar som kommer, lyssna förstås inte bara till tonerna av sångnäbbarna, utan i djupast andliga mening i den riktning som vi ju alla längtar efter...
Med Franciskus och alla andra sånghörsamma må vi lyssna till allt vad Anden säger till sin kyrka och församling idag, till hela Den svenska kristenheten - till och med genom den lilla koltrasten klockan 17.25 i dag - och allt framgent de närmaste månaderna…
Läs mera om >> KOLTRASTEN som den beskrivs av SOF/Sveriges ornitologiska förening
En verkligt festlig beskrivning finns att se och höra på en rolig koltrastajt >> "Koltrasten... kolis..."
/DS
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