Evil is not Omnipotent

 

Picture in your mind a Red Delicious apple.    As with others of its kind it has a dark red colour that looks fairly uniform from a distance, although when viewed close up you can see streaks of golden yellow in it.   This particular Red Delicious also has a spot of brown on it where it has been bruised.

 

While the apple you have just pictured in your mind is not real it is the image of countless such apples which are real, many of which you have seen and eaten over the years.

 

Now let us consider a few distinctions concerning any real Red Delicious apple that matches the description of the one imagined.    Of such an apple in would be true to say that it exists.   It would also be true to say that the apple is red.  The statement that the apple is red can also be worded, although it is hardly the way we ordinarily speak, that redness exists in the apple.    The apple exists, therefore, and redness exists in the apple.

 

This illustrates the philosophical distinction between things that exists in themselves, such as the apple, and things that only exist as properties of things that exist in themselves, such as redness.    This is a distinction between two different kinds of existence.   It is closely related to the distinction between that which is essential to any given thing and that which is accidental.   You can conceive of an apple without redness, such as a Granny Smith or a Golden Delicious.    You have actually seen numerous examples of apples without redness.   Redness, therefore, is not essential to the being of apples, but an accidental property of certain kinds of apples.   You can also conceive of things other than apples that are red and, presumably, unless you are colour-blind, of course, have seen things other than apples that are red.   What you have never seen is redness by itself and not in something else like an apple or wagon or crayon or fire truck.   This is because redness does not exist in itself, only in other things.    It exists, but its existence is a lesser, subordinate type of existence to that of the existence of things, such as apples, which exist in themselves.

 

I trust that you all understand the distinction between things that exist in themselves and things that exist only in other things.   Now let us consider a further distinction illustrated by our apple.

 

Part of the apple is bruised.   The bruise is manifest to the eye by the fact that where red used to be there is now brown.   Now, it is as true of the brown on the apple as it is of the red on the apple that the brownness exists in the apple and not in itself.   There is, however, an important difference between the redness and the brownness.   Neither the redness nor the brownness is essential to the apple, both are accidental, but the redness is natural.   It is the nature of a Red Delicious apple to be red and a Red Delicious apple will be red unless something happens to change the colour.   Dropping the apple on a hard floor, for example, will produce the kind of bruise that changes a part of the apple’s redness into brownness.   The brownness is not a natural part of the apple, but is the result of damage or injury to the apple and its redness.

 

You have probably figured out, even if the title of this essay had not already tipped you off, that my purpose in explaining all of this is not to make some deep, philosophical, point about apples.   Rather it is to illustrate what orthodox Christianity teaches about evil.

 

There are many people who think of good and evil as being two equal forces locked in an eternal struggle.   There are many who even think of this as being the Christian point of view.   It is not.   Indeed, to the extent that there is truth to the idea that Christians share elements of a common worldview with Jews and Muslims, an idea which is not as true as most who articulate it think, but more true than many who oppose it are willing to admit, the idea of an eternal battle between the equal forces of good and evil is the opposite of what that worldview has to say about good and evil.  This idea of good and evil being equals and even, in some versions of the notion, each requiring the other, belongs to the worldview of comic books and science fiction movies, and perhaps some Eastern religions.   It does not belong to the worldview of those who believe that there is One God, that He is omnipotent, and that He is Good.

 

In orthodox Christian doctrine evil is like the bruise on the apple.   It does not exist in itself.   God, Who exists in Himself in a way that is truer than of anything He created, because all other things that we conceive of as existing in themselves are dependent upon Him for their own lesser being as He is the Source of all Being, is Good, with a capital G.   He created all other things and pronounced them to be good.   See Genesis chapters 1-2.   After each separate act of creation God looked at what He had made and saw it to be good.   This happened on each of the six days of creation except the second, for the work of that day was one of separation rather than creation, a work which was not completed until the third day, at which point God saw it to be good, as He did the vegetation He created later on the same day.   The sixth day also has God looking at what He has made and pronouncing it good twice.   The first time is after He creates the land animals, the second time is after He creates man, which brings the Creation to a close, at which point He looks on everything He has made, the whole of Creation together, and sees that it is good.   God, Who is Good in Himself, created only good things. 

 

What then is evil and where does it come from?

 

The orthodox answer to the second question is “free will.”   Or, to express the concept more accurately, “moral responsibility.”   It is the ability of certain created beings, human beings and angels to be precise, to make choices for themselves for which they are accountable and for which they face consequences if they choose wrongly.   Moral responsibility is a better term for this than free will because the latter often has the connotations of something that is absolute and not subject to limitations.   Human and angelic moral responsibility is free in the sense that the decisions we make are real and not pre-programmed, but it is subject to such limitations and restraints as God in His sovereignty places on it.  

 

Human and angelical free will or moral responsibility is not evil.   Nor, for that matter, is it morally neutral.   It is itself good.    This is true in two senses.   The first, is that it is a necessary means for the end of the goodness for which men and angels were created.   Think of a person who does the right thing even though he would rather not because he has been forced to do so under duress – the existence of laws, divine and/or human, prohibiting wrongdoing and threatening the dispensation of justice to wrongdoers does not constitute duress.   Such a person does not deserve the praise for doing the right thing which somebody who deliberated on the decision and freely choose to do what is right because it is right does.   Morally responsible agency is necessary for praiseworthy moral goodness.   As a necessary means to the end of this kind of goodness it is therefore good itself.

 

There is a second way in which human and angelic moral agency is good.  It consists of the wills which God gave to men and angels.   Those wills included the capacity for weighing decisions and choosing for one’s self, but they were not created neutral.   Human and angelic wills were created with a natural inclination to choose right.   Free moral agency does not require a neutral will with a 50/50 chance of choosing right and choosing wrong.

 

This is why it is a mistake to think of Original Sin in terms of “a natural disposition to sin.”   It is rather a defect in the natural disposition to the good with which we were all created.   The thing is, when you make a wrong choice, this tends to lead to other wrong choices, which in turn lead to other wrong choices.   When our first parents sinned it became a defect in our human nature which has been passed down to us.

 

This needs to be stressed because this is the right way of thinking about evil – not as a powerful force that exists in itself, let alone one that is the equal of goodness, but as a defect in the goodness with which all beings were created.  

 

This is important to remember in times, such as these, when those bent on doing evil seem to have the upper hand.   Evil is not omnipotent.   To ascribe undefeatable power, omnipotence, to the conspiratorial forces, is to give Satan exactly what he wants the most, to be regarded as God’s equal.  Only God is omnipotent and God is good.  Do not give to Satan that which is due to God.

Modern Man Reaps the Insanity he has Sown

As Western man entered the Modern Age, he began to regard those things which had been central to his worldview but which cannot be directly perceived by the senses as being less real and therefore less important than those things which are directly available to him through the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Whereas previously he had accepted that God, as the Creator and Source of the physical world available to man through his senses, must therefore be more real and more important than that world, modern man reasoned that what is most real and important to us is that which we can observe directly and that God, if He exists at all, is out there somewhere doing His own thing and of little consequence to us. While St. Paul had traced to its inevitable terminus the route which this train of thought must travel in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans, modern man ignored his warning, jumped aboard that train nonetheless, and has been travelling it ever since.

Modern man has both gained and lost by his decision to travel this path. By concentrating his attention on the physical world he has gained sufficient knowledge of that world to manipulate it to accomplish his ends – and so has managed to prolong his life, to make his labour easier and more efficient thus increasing both his productivity and his leisure time, and to combat scarcity and sickness. These gains are not to be sneered at or lightly dismissed and the fact that they are immediately present to us and observable makes them strong evidence indeed on behalf of the project of modernity.

Now let us think about what we have just noted about the gains of modernity. If such benefits to modern man as prolonged life, better health, abundance of material goods and leisure are evidence on behalf of modernity what is it that they are testifying to on modernity’s behalf? The answer is that they are testifying to modernity’s possessing the quality of being positive, beneficial, or good. Here we encounter a dilemma. If we are required to prove modernity to be good by pointing to the evidence of how it has benefited us this means that goodness is a standard to which modernity is held accountable, which means that goodness is higher than modernity, more important, and therefore more real than modernity and all of its benefits. Yet goodness is not something that we can look upon with our eyes or hear with our ears or otherwise directly detect through our senses. We perceive it indirectly in the many ways it manifests itself in the world of the senses but we approach it directly only through the avenues of faith and reason. In other words the very fact that we find it necessary to prove modernity to be good by pointing to the ways in which it has improved and enriched our lives is a contradiction of this fundamental tenet of modernity that it is the physical world of matter and energy, that we observe through our senses, that is real and important, and that the God Who created that world and such invisible and intangible qualities as goodness itself are less real and less important.

What this tells us is that although we have obtained real, tangible, benefits from modernity, benefits which must not be casually waved aside as if they are nothing, these benefits do not prove the ideas that comprise the foundation of modernity to be true. Truth is another one of those invisible and intangible qualities like goodness, which can be approached through faith and reason, but only perceived indirectly. While modern man talks much about truth, professes a high regard for it, and claims to possess it in greater quantities than men in previous eras, he has altered and reduced its meaning, almost beyond recognition, in accordance with his new understanding of what is real and important. To modern man, “truth” is merely the quality of accurately describing in our speech, what happens in what modern man considers to be the real world, the physical world. While modern man may have more facts at his disposal than ever before, he has lost the larger part of the very meaning of truth itself, and so truth must be marked down on the loss side of the ledger of modernity. In this we see that the losses of modernity, must not be lightly dismissed either. This is a sobering thought when we consider that if we have lost the concept of truth in its fuller sense, we may very well have to count among the losses of modernity the information and standards we need in order to properly weigh the gains against the losses and to determine whether the former are worth the price of the latter.

The end of the modernity project all along has been the subjection of reality to the will of man in a universe where man has usurped the place of God. The elements of the physical world are directly available to man – therefore, since man has declared himself to be the centre of everything, they are the most real and the most important. The elements of the physical world are themselves ranked in importance according to their utility, i.e., how useful they are to man and we now concentrate our intellectual activity in the accumulation of the knowledge and the development of techniques which maximize that usefulness. Man used to find meaning in life, existence, and the world around him by searching and striving for goodness, truth, and beauty, (1) which were what they were in themselves and were regarded as being more real and important than the physical, visible, and tangible elements of reality. Modern man, rather than searching for meaning, projects it upon the world around him, by, for example, creating and choosing values rather than cultivating virtues.

It is illuminating to consider the way in which modern or postmodern man has now moved beyond treating the invisible and intangible as less real and important than the physical and observable and is now treating elements of physical reality in the same way. The obvious example of this is sex.

Sex is very much an observable, physical, element of reality. It is a trait that human beings share with many other living creatures, plant and animal. We come in two kinds, male and female, each with a distinctive physiognomy, each of which produces its own gamete which must unite with that of the other for reproduction to take place. With some animals, male and female come together only for short periods, at certain seasons, to reproduce. With human beings, however, male and female couple with each other for the long term, and all human societies and cultures have ceremonies in which this coupling is formally recognized, establishing unions that come with responsibilities and rights. In part this is because human children are born helpless and dependent, a condition in which they remain for a long period of time, making a long term partnership between their mother and father the optimal way of ensuring that they are raised to maturity. In part it is because we are self-aware individuals and as such we form intellectual and emotional bonds with the other self-aware individuals with whom we mate, thus elevating the sexual union to something that transcends the merely physical.

Sex is such an obvious part of the reality we know that it would seem incredible that anyone could think of it in the way so many modern minds think of beauty, as something that has no meaning or existence, except that which we choose to endow it with ourselves. Yet that is exactly the way some people appear to be thinking of it!

Suppose that someone you know was to come home one evening, announce that he is a chicken, move out into the chicken coop, make himself a nest, and sit there trying to lay an egg. Would you try to get him psychiatric help? Or would you say that if he considers himself to be a chicken that must be what he is, condemn everyone who does not accept his avian self-assessment as being bigoted, and head out to the coop every morning in search of eggs?

I think it is safe to say that most, if not all, of us would consider the first to be the sane and rational option. A man is not a chicken nor by any act of the will, no matter how forceful and inventive, can he make himself into a chicken. Yet today, if a boy announces that he is a girl, or a girl that she is a boy, there are many who would say that the rest of us are under some sort of moral obligation to go along with this. Three years ago, the Ontario legislature passed Bill 33 or “Toby’s Act”, which amended the provincial Human Rights Act to protect people from being discriminated against on the grounds of their “gender identity” or “gender expression”. Protecting people from discrimination on the grounds of “gender identity” or “gender expression” is euphemistic language for telling everybody else that if a man says he is a woman or vice-versa they have to accept this and treat he/she/it accordingly. What this meant in practice was that people who identified as members of the other sex would be allowed to use washrooms designated for the use of that sex. There are plenty of good and valid reasons for having sex specific washrooms, but these were swept away as being of no consequence so that a miniscule fraction of society would have the “right” to make everyone else pretend that men who say they are women and vice-versa are what they say they are, even though they no more are what they say they are than the man who says he is a chicken is what he says he is.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Ontario’s Bill 33 was merely proof of the extreme flakiness of the Dalton McGuinty Liberals and that this sort of thing couldn’t happen elsewhere. It has been happening all over North America. The problem is far deeper than a dispute about who gets to use what washroom. There are cosmetic surgeons today, who claim to be able to change a person’s sex. If a technique were discovered whereby a beak and feathers could be successfully grafted on to a man this would still not make him a chicken. No more so, does removing a man’s penis and testicles and building an artificial vagina make him into a woman. This “sex reassignment therapy” is made available as a treatment for “gender dysphoria”, which is the medical designation for the condition of being so convinced that you are the sex other than the one you were born into that all the evidence that this is not the case causes you to suffer emotionally. The doctor who proposes as “therapy”, for the man who thinks he is a chicken, a jelly doughnut, or Napoleon Bonaparte, that we change reality to conform to the delusion would be regarded as being crazier than his patient. Yet our governments regard sex reassignment therapy as a legitimate treatment, pay for it with our tax dollars, and register it as having changed the person’s sex in the eyes of the law.

This sort of madness does not come upon a people overnight. This collective denial of the reality of sex took place in a series of stages, in each of which, under the guise of accomplishing a social and political reform, an element of the reality of sex was denied, until finally, cumulatively, the reality of sex was denied in its entirety.

The first stage was feminism. The so-called women’s movement began in the nineteenth century as a response to industrialization. The early feminists believed, not without justification, that the changes wrought by mass factory production and urbanization had undermined the security of women thus creating a need for legal protection in the form of recognized rights to own property, pursue a professional education, and a career. This seemed reasonable enough and so we accepted the justice of these demands. The problem was that feminism demanded something other than justice, it demanded the equality. The cosmetic similarities between the two are such that the deeper differences are often overlooked. Had feminism made the case that women had been harmed by industrialization through a loss of their security and were therefore entitled to compensation in the form of legally recognized rights this would have been a demand for justice. By demanding equality, however, feminism demanded that society accept a fiction, the fiction that there is no substantial difference between male and female, man and woman. Justice requires that people be treated right, be given their due, whereas equality requires that people be treated the same, which is not the same thing at all. As feminism has evolved from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, it has continued to march under the banner of the equality of the sexes, but the demands of the harpies and harridans who rule the roost in present day academia, unlike those of the early suffragettes, do not bear even a superficial resemblance to justice.

So in feminism, we have the first stage, the denial of substantial difference between male and female. The revolution was the second stage. The sexual revolution, which had been the dream of libertines for centuries, began in the 1950s and 1960s after the theoretical foundation for it was laid by Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the “research” of Alfred Kinsey, and has been ongoing ever since. The basic idea behind the revolution was that with new scientific discoveries and inventions, particularly of effective contraceptive technology such as the birth control pill, sexual activity had been divorced from reproduction, and so all traditional rules governing sexual behaviour from cultural mores to religious dogmas to government decrees had been rendered outdated and obsolete. This too, was a denial of part of the reality of sex. By saying that the invention of contraception had separated sex from reproduction invalidating the old rules, the sexual revolution denied that for human beings sex had always been more than mere animal reproduction. In doing so it cheapened both the reproductive and the non-reproductive aspects of sex. By saying that the reproductive aspect of sex was something that could and should be made optional by contraceptive technology the sexual revolution reduced the reproductive aspect of sex from the exalted level of being the means of our survival as families, societies, and a species to being the unwanted consequences of the act of carnal gratification. The sexual revolutionaries debased the word love, which traditionally denoted sexual union and the attraction that leads to it as conceived of as being higher than mere bestial copulation, by stripping it of that which made it higher, its connotations of self-sacrifice and self-denial, and making it mean the virtual opposite, mutual self-gratification. In the end, what emerged from the sexual revolution was a concept of sex in which it was less than animal reproduction and not more, as evidenced by the way the phrase “it is just sex” is now used to casually dismiss any attempt, however slight, at reasserting the old standards.

The third stage was the gay liberation movement. What began decades ago as the fairly reasonable demand that people who are attracted to members of their own sex be allowed to go about their private lives without fear of police raids, violent attacks, and other persecution has evolved into an intolerant, bullying, demand that state and society, at every level, in every way, and in every institution, both accept homosexuality and reject and persecute anyone who does not. Much could be written about this transition from a call to let us be to a refusal to let others be but it is the movement’s denial of a reality about sex that concerns us here. Here is that reality: Human beings are a sexual species, which means that male and female must unite for reproduction to take place, which means that the natural order is for male to be attracted to female, and for female to be attracted to male, and not for male to be attracted to male, or female to female. For whatever reason, some people find themselves attracted to members of their own sex, and while we should treat such people with compassion, kindness and tolerance – provided, of course, that they agree to the quid pro quo of reciprocating these attitudes toward others which the self-appointed spokespeople on their behalf appear to have little interest in doing - it is a plain and simple denial of reality to claim that attraction between members of the same sex is equal to opposite sex attraction in the natural order of things, which claim is what the gay liberation movement is now insisting that everybody accept or be branded a heretic and treated accordingly.

The fourth stage is, of course, the one we began this discussion with, in which a person’s sex, male or female, is no longer something that just is, that one is born with, but what a person decides it to be, and if they decide that their sex is something different from the one they were born with, the rest of us have to accept it, and go out of all of our ways to accommodate their delusion.

We have traced this denial of a reality that is immediately present to us in the physical world available to our senses through the stages of several social and political movements from feminism through the sexual revolution through the gay liberation movement to the present stage. This process, by which we have come to deny a part of reality that is right before our eyes, could not have come about, had modern man not first denied, the greater reality of those higher verities, goodness, truth, beauty and ultimately God Himself, that cannot be looked upon directly, but which nevertheless are there to be seen indirectly, reflected in the world around us. By rejecting the reality which we cannot look upon directly, we have lost our hold on that which we can see all around us, and are now reaping the insanity we have sown.

(1) It will seem strange to many to say that beauty is not visible but it is nevertheless true. You do not directly see beauty as it is in itself, you see beauty in a beautiful person or object, that is to say, indirectly.

Equality is not Justice and Justice is not Equality

Western civilization in its classical and Christian manifestations saw the Good as being the chief end for which human beings, individually and as a collective whole, were to strive. Goodness, like the closely related ideas of Truth and Beauty, was what it was in itself rather than whatever we decided it to be, and it was something we were to seek after and discover. Justice, the condition and act of being and doing what is right, was the particular aspect of Goodness that was the end for which man organized his societies politically, that is to say under law and government.

Today, Western civilization has passed through its Modern era into what is called the Postmodern age, although Übermodern would probably be a more apt term for it as it takes the traits of the modern and magnifies them to the nth degree. In these eras, Justice has been supplanted by a usurper. The name of this usurper is Equality although it sometimes tries to steal the name of Justice as well as its position. Whenever, for example, you hear “Justice” spoken of with “Social” as a modifier then you can be sure that it is this modern Pretender that is being spoken of and not true and legitimate Justice.

The superficial similarities between Equality and certain aspects of Justice are such that the differences between the two need to be made absolutely clear so as to avoid confusion. Equality is the idea that in some way or another people either are or ought to be all the same and therefore should be treated the same way. Justice is the idea that all people ought to be treated right.

It is easy to see how the confusion between the two concepts can arise. If we start with Justice’s assertion that all people ought to be treated right we can see that it is saying in a sense that all people ought to be treated the same way, that is to say, rightly. It is when we start with Equality’s assertion that all people ought to be treated the same way that a problem becomes apparent because we cannot from this assertion derive any sense of the idea that all people should be treated right. This is because treating people right and treating people the same are not identical concepts. Often to treat two people right means to treat each differently.

Allow me to illustrate what I mean by this. If you were to come across a stranger in need and welcome him into your home, treating him as if he were a member of your family, your actions would meet with widespread acclamation and you would find yourself toasted for your generosity, liberality, warm-hearted humanity, and countless other virtues. If, however, your own father, who begat you and lovingly raised you, who provided you with everything you need and gave you your start in life, were to come to you and you were to turn him aside and treat him as a perfect stranger, you would find yourself rightly condemned as a cold-blooded ingrate. In the latter instance as in the former you will have treated people the same way whether they were family members or strangers. In the second instance, however, you will not have done right by doing so.

This, by the way, is the difference between the image and the reality of Equality. Equality projects the image of treating strangers like they were family, but its reality is the treating of family members as if they were strangers.

Equality is sometimes confused with the idea that within a country the law should be the same for all people, governors and governed alike. This idea is a fundamental principle of our legal tradition. Although the principle is often spoken of as isonomy or “equality under law” there is an important difference between it and the concept of Equality. The difference is that whereas the latter asserts that all the people under the law are the same, the principle asserts that the law is the same for all people. This is not a matter of semantics. When we say that the law is the same for all people we are saying that the law is one and it is this, the unity of the law, that is the essence of the principle. To assert that it is the people, who are many, that are the same is to assert nonsense.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal.” No greater statement of utter tripe and poppycock has ever been penned. To say that all men are created equal is to say that all men are created the same. Apart from the most peripheral and trivial of matters – that we are all born and all die, that we all have two eyes, one nose, one mouth, two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten toes, etc. - this is patently untrue. In matters of ability, both physical and mental, personality, quality, and character human beings are like the proverbial snowflake – no two are identical. Nor would any sane person want them to be.

“We are all equal”, those who have been conditioned to accept without question the doctrine of Equality might object to my reasoning above, “in terms of our worth or value.” While that sounds very nice and may give us warm, fuzzy, tingly feelings inside, it does not bear up under scrutiny. The words “worth” and “value” are marketplace words. They can refer to the amount that you are willing to pay for something if you are a prospective buyer, or the amount that you are willing to receive in exchange for something if you are a prospective seller. They can also refer to the intrinsic qualities of the objects upon which the buyer and seller base their decision as to how much they are willing to pay or accept. (1) To say that all people are of equal value, therefore, is either to reduce all people to the level of commodities for sale in the marketplace, which is hardly in keeping with the humanitarianism professed by most egalitarians who in other contexts would most strenuously object to the objectification of people, or to assert them to be equal in terms of some intrinsic quality that is unobservable to ordinary human beings for in all observable intrinsic qualities people are definitely not equal.

That unobservable intrinsic quality is sometimes further described as being our “worth in God’s eyes”. This is tautological, providing us with no new information about what that quality might be, for if it is unobservable to the human eye, who else can see it but God? More importantly, one would be hard pressed to find evidence for this concept in authoritative divine revelation.

The God Who revealed Himself in the words of the Christian Scriptures and in the Person of Jesus Christ is a God of Justice not of Equality. While He holds men accountable to the single standard which is His Law, He holds them accountable in varying degrees in accordance with whether they have received His Law in full or only partly through their consciences. (2) He has given men One mediator through Whom grace, mercy, and salvation can be received because it is only through the cross of Jesus Christ that He can be “just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.” (3) In the Church which is His body, there is “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female”, not because these distinctions are unimportant or are to be eliminated but because “ye are all one in Christ Jesus”. (4) As with the concept of the “one law for all” in our legal tradition, it is unity – the unity of God’s Law, His Gospel, and His Church and, of course, of the One True and Living God Himself – that is taught in those passages and verses that are sometimes misconstrued as teaching egalitarianism. The God of the Christian Scriptures created people differently, giving each their own abilities, qualities, talents, and gifts, and while He holds all people accountable to one Law, He holds each person accountable for the use made of what was given him in particular. That is the difference between Justice and Equality.

(1) The difference between these two meanings of value is what Oscar Wilde alluded to in his famous quip about the cynic who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
(2) Romans 2
(3) Romans 3:26
(4) Galatians 3:28

The People of God

Many Christians refer to the Jews as “God’s chosen people.” If, by this expression, they merely mean “the people whom God chose to form a covenant relationship through whom He gave the world its Saviour in His Son Jesus Christ” then it reflects Scriptural truth. Unfortunately, the usage of the expression suggests that more often than not it means something like “God’s favourites, whom He loves above all other people, the treatment of whom is the standard by which God judges everybody else, so you have better be nice to them and say nothing bad about them or God will get you”. This is not Scriptural truth but a doctrine of racial supremacism. Ironically, those who are most likely to use the expression in this way are those who pride themselves the most on following the Bible rather than “man-made tradition” and on interpreting it literally rather than figuratively.

When the expression as used in this manner is taken seriously and applied to world politics it has some truly terrible implications. We recently considered religious Zionism which, contrary to the orthodox teachings of both Judaism and Christianity, identifies the current state of Israel with the Restoration Israel prophesied in the Old Testament and so gives that state its unqualified support, encouraging our governments to do the same lest they lose God’s blessing and invite His wrath. Israel is to be preferred over the terrorist organizations with which she is perpetually at war, because she is a legitimate state representing a civilized society whereas they are irresponsible madmen who aim rockets at her civilian neighborhoods from bases they put in their own civilian neighbourhoods so that when she strikes back their own women and children are killed. That she takes their bait, however, is to be attributed to the fact that she is under the control of a radical, nationalist/expansionist, faction with a growing fringe element that increasingly uses the language of racial supremacy to justify their own cause and the language of extermination about their enemies. Under these circumstances, it is insane to offer her support without qualification or condition.

The problem with this concept goes much deeper than its political implications. Scripturally, it is correct to say that God made a covenant with the children of Israel, after rescuing them from slavery in Egypt, in which He agreed to be their God, and they agreed to be His people. In making this covenant, He went out of His way to demonstrate that He was and is not just another petty tribal deity like Baal, Chemosh, Moloch, Dagon, and every other idol that the other peoples of the ancient Near East worshipped, but rather the One true and living God of the whole world. The way many Christians seem to think of the relationship between God and the Jews, however, tends to reduce God to the level of one of these tribal deities.

That God is the one true and living God and not just another idol is a doctrine established from the very first words of the Torah in which God is declared to have created the heavens and the earth – including all things which the heathen nations worshipped as gods, such as the sun, moon, and stars. The first promise of redemption in the Torah, is made not to the patriarchs of the nation Israel, but to the mother of all living (Gen. 3:15).

Therefore, when God called Abram to leave his country and go west to Canaan, promising to make a great nation out of his descendants, He said “in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed”. (Gen. 12:3) a promise He reiterates when Abram, now Abraham, passes the test of his faith when he is commanded to sacrifice Isaac. (Gen. 22:18). He further repeated this promise to Isaac (Genesis 26:4) and Jacob (Genesis 28:14). To each of the patriarchs of Israel, the promise that their descendants would be made into a great nation was linked with the promise that all of the peoples of the world would thereby be blessed. God’s purpose, therefore, in bringing this nation into being and entering into covenant with them, was much larger than the nation itself, but pertained to the whole world.

After God delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, He brought them into the wilderness of Sinai and presented them with an offer. If they obeyed Him and kept His covenant, He would in turn make them a kingdom of priests and holy nation (Ex. 19:1-6). This offer was accepted and the terms of the covenant were handed down to Moses, beginning with the famous Ten Commandments which begin by prohibiting the worship of any other gods and the making of idols. These were announced to the Israelites by Moses, then written down in a book and read to the Israelites, who each time agreed to the terms, and the covenant was sealed with the blood of a sacrifice. (Ex. 24:1-8).

The overarching theme of the covenant, the details of which continue to be spelled out throughout Exodus and Leviticus and which are reiterated in Deuteronomy on the eve of entry into the Promised Land, is that God is not like the gods of the other nations, and therefore Israel is not to be like those other nations. The gods of the other nations lead their worshippers into practices the true and living God considers abhorrent, therefore Israel is not to worship those idols, or commit those practices, but is to keep herself separate and holy. To further the distance between her and the idolatrous nations, she is given detailed instructions on where and how to worship God, her own priesthood, and a set of ceremonial and dietary instructions.

Yet when we come to the prophetic literature of the Old Testament we find that it is filled with promises of a day when the nations of the world would flock to Jerusalem to learn the ways of God (Michah 4:2, Zechariah 8:22) and the Temple in Jerusalem would be a house of prayer to all people (Isaiah 56:7). Most significantly, it is prophesied that God would raise up priests and Levites out of every nation (Isaiah 66:20-21), indicating that in this day, all peoples would be God’s people.

The literature that contains these promises was addressed to the nation at the time when she was facing imminent judgement, in the form of the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities, after a history of violating the covenant by worshipping idols and following after the practices of the heathen. The promises are connected to the message of hope contained within these prophecies of doom – that God would break the cycle of rebellion and judgement, by sending a final deliverer, the Messiah, Who would make good on all the promises God had ever made to Israel and her patriarchs, would establish a new covenant in which His laws would be written on their hearts, and would restore them to the land promised to their forefathers.

Judaism is still looking for that Messiah, but Christians know that He has already come, and furthermore, that He has established the new covenant by the blood of His sacrifice on the cross, a fact of which we are reminded each time we come to the Lord’s Supper and hear the words with which the Lord instituted the sacrament on the eve of His crucifixion. How does this affect our understanding of the old covenant, and the people with whom God made that covenant?

There is much confusion about this due to a number of errors that have sprung up. One new doctrine, very popular among North American evangelicals, teaches that the present age in which God is working through the Church, is a parenthesis in His dealing with Israel which will be resumed after the Church is removed in the rapture. Another doctrine, teaches that God has rejected His ancient people, just as they rejected His Messiah, and that the Church has replaced Israel as the people of God. The truth, as traditionally understood, is more nuanced than either of these views.

God does not have two different covenants with two different peoples. The first covenant, the old covenant, was fulfilled by Jesus Christ, Who also established the new covenant. God’s people, are those with whom He has a covenant relationship, and since the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, such a relationship is through the new covenant.

The new covenant offers salvation from sin through the grace of Jesus Christ to be received freely through faith. The offer is made to the whole world. Anybody can receive this grace by believing in Jesus, and when they do so they are made part of the people of God. This does not mean that God has replaced His old people, Israel, with a new people, the Church.

The Church is a continuation of Israel, not a replacement for it. This is clearly what St. Paul the Apostle teaches, when he writes that the ceremonial law, which separated Israel from the Gentiles, has been torn down so that believing Gentiles are no longer “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel” but “fellow citizens with the saints” (Eph. 2:11-19). In the Book of Acts we see this unfold, as Christ commissions His disciples to take His Gospel, from Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, then to the rest of the world (Acts 1:8), as the Gospel is taken to the Gentiles, and the dietary laws (Acts 10) and circumcision (Acts 15) are revealed or ruled to be unnecessary in the Church, the body of Christ in which the Gentiles are united with Israel, through faith in the Messiah. St. Paul uses the metaphor of an olive tree to illustrate how the Church is a continuation of Israel. Israel is the root and trunk of the olive tree, from which certain branches (unbelieving Jews) have been pruned, and into which wild branches (believing Gentiles) have been grafted (Rom. 11). The tree of Israel in this condition – unbelieving Jews cut off, believing Gentiles grafted in, is the Church.

When he uses this metaphor, St. Paul writes that the day will come in which the unbelieving bulk of the nation will believe and be grafted back into the tree (vv. 23-31). This clearly coincides with the Old Testament prophecies of the Final Restoration, and equally clearly makes the conversion of the unbelievers to faith in Jesus Christ the necessary pre-condition for that Restoration. The unbelieving state of Israel in the Middle East today is therefore not that Restoration, although there are good grounds for supporting that state against her mortal enemies for other reasons.

Under the new covenant, a person who does not believe that Jesus is the Christ cannot claim a covenant relationship with God on the grounds of racial descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whereas a person who does believe that Jesus is the Christ, although ethnically a Gentile, has been made a full partaker of the commonwealth of Israel. That is the orthodox Christian doctrine on the subject, and there is no support in it for the kind of racial supremacism in which Arab life is treated as cheap and worthless compared to Jewish life, which supremacism is disturbingly becoming more prevalent among Israel’s governing class, and her supporters.

Some Mother’s Day Reflections

It’s Mother’s Day again in Canada, the United States, and many other countries of the world. I’m pleased to see the holiday is still around. It is a wonder that it was not declared a hate crime to celebrate Mother’s Day decades ago.

After all, it isn’t exactly an inclusive holiday. It excludes all people who are not mothers. That by definition excludes all people who are not biologically female (although pointing that out might be a hate crime in and of itself these days). It excludes plenty of females too, however. What about daughters and granddaughters? What about our sisters and our cousins, whom we reckon up by dozens, and our aunts?* I had started to get the impression that to exclude people was the worst possible thing one could do, a crime of hate so ghastly, so horrible, that is was absolutely unpardonable under any circumstances. At least that is the impression the news and entertainment media, classrooms, and many a pulpit have been giving for decades.

Then there is the fact that Mother’s Day is honouring, well, motherhood. Isn’t motherhood supposed to be degrading to women though? Isn’t that what the great and wise leaders of the Womyn’s Revolution, who brought Enlightenment and Liberation to Personkind back in the 1960’s taught us? That to be a wife and a mother is to be a slave or at best a second class citizen. That motherhood is an inferior choice that keeps women from achieving self-fulfillment through the pursuit of a career.

I suppose that I should not have written the above even in a sarcastic fashion. One doesn’t want to give the humourless dingbats who have created this oppressive cultural climate in which everything ordinary, decent, and honorable in life is degraded and everything weird, indecent, and ignoble is honored any new ideas.

The honouring of motherhood in Mother’s Day seems to be pleasantly out of sync with contemporary Western culture. On an ordinary day of the year the only kind of motherhood that seems to be honoured in our society is single-motherhood. Single-motherhood is honoured today because in traditional culture, our society regarded having a child outside of wedlock as being both sinful and shameful.

That, of course, is completely unacceptable to people living today. Contemporary society likes to justify its rejection of the standards of the past by saying that those standards were unfair.

“It placed an unfair stigma upon the child born out of wedlock. Why should he be blamed for the actions of his parents”.

“It reflects a double standard. The mother who had a child out of wedlock was judged far more harshly than the father of the child if he was judged at all”.

There is some truth to these judgements. All error must be mixed with truth if it is to become widespread and popular. Unmixed error deceives very few. There is much however, that people who make these judgements gloss over, and much that they are simply wrong about. The way traditional society behaved towards men who got unmarried women pregnant, for example, is grossly misrepresented.

It is often forgotten that the social purpose of the stigma against unmarried pregnancy was not to punish the child but to deter people from having children outside of the bonds of marriage. Likewise, the social purpose of seeking to prevent people from having children outside of marriage was not to prevent young people (or anyone else) from “having fun”. Rather it was to promote responsible behavior and stable families. A child raised by a father and mother who are married to each other stands a far better chance of doing well in every area of life than a child in any other situation. Society as a whole is much better off when children are raised by their fathers and mothers in traditional homes than when they are raised in other situations.

Implicit within traditional standards is the concept that we as members of societies have duties to our societies that must govern and take precedence over our personal desires and pursuits. That is a concept that is not well liked today and is widely rejected. It’s current unpopularity, however, does not make it false.

Now, the category of single-motherhood covers more than just women who have gotten pregnant outside of wedlock. It also includes women whose husbands have died or abandoned them. The shame that society attached to out-of-wedlock pregnancy should never have been allowed so spill over onto such women.

This, however, is only a minor consideration in contemporary society’s decision to simultaneously lower the status of traditional motherhood within the context of marriage and elevate the status of single-motherhood. What it really demonstrates is that we have lost our sense of the value of parents, family, and the home. Money, science and technology, and the material resources the latter can provide, are all we value these days. We assume that by having society provide resources for the raising of children through government social programs that we can replace stable marriages, legitimacy, and the home, and get rid of all the rules that supported such things while interfering with our freedom to pursue our pleasure in whatever way we saw fit.

In our rejection of our society’s traditional standards we are saying that we think we know better than our parents, grandparents, and all the generations of great-grandparents prior to them.(1) On this day, devoted to the honouring of one of our parents, we may wish to reflect upon the significance of that. Is such arrogance honouring to our fathers and mothers?

It is God, of course, who tells us to honour our fathers and mothers in the fourth commandment. Some churches, today, have started to address God as Mother rather than Father, or to combine Mother and Father in a single title “Mother-Father God”. This is yet another product of the same collective brain rot afflicting our society that I have been discussing.

Now, someone might object and say “What is wrong with calling God Mother?” Assuming that the objector professes to believe in Jesus Christ and Christianity my answer would be that while feminine images of God do exist in Scripture, and while God is Spirit which cannot be categorized according to biological sex, God in His revelation of Himself has called Himself Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To call God Mother is to presumptuously read contemporary egalitarian and inclusivistic ideas into Christianity at the risk of confusing our God with a contemporary rival deity, the Mother Goddess of neo-paganism. What we will end up with if we do so is a version of “Christianity” that bears about as much resemblance to traditional, historical, Biblical Christianity as neo-paganism bears to traditional, historical, pagan religions, i.e., almost none.

If I felt the compelling need to address a prayer to a female personage I would rather address a prayer to Mary, the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God, than to the “Mother-Father God” of contemporary liberal “Christianity”. Although I am a Protestant I would consider it less blasphemous and it at least has the benefit of centuries of tradition behind it.

God the Father commanded us to honour our fathers and our mothers. We are not doing very well with that commandment these days. We have built nursing homes for our elderly parents, where the government pays strangers to look after them, while we go about our daily lives and forget about them. We have developed a culture that glorifies youth and refuses to honour the wisdom that comes with age. Within the last few decades children have developed the disrespectful habit of addressing their parents by their first names.

It is a good thing, therefore, that the Gestapo of contemporary, egalitarian, inclusivistic, multicultural, democratic liberalism has not yet gotten around to banishing Mother’s Day. We need that one day of the year to honour our mothers. We aren’t allowed to honour them any other day any more.

Lord have mercy upon us.


*Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan

(1) The problem is a few generations old already but if that sentence were adjusted to reflect that fact it would sound extremely awkward.

The Sacrifice

Homer’s Iliad is an epic poem, originally written in dactylic hexameter in Greek in the 8th Century BC. It tells a story, set in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, about a falling out between the Greek hero Achilles and the Mycenean King and leader of the Greeks Agamemnon, after Agamemnon dishonored Achilles, which led to Achilles withdrawing with his men from the war. The gods are very active participants in Homer’s account of the war, and Zeus decrees that the Greeks will lose to Hector’s Trojan forces until such time as Achilles is properly honored and returns to the war. Agamemnon seeks to make amends to Achilles, but the hero will not listen until, with the Trojans on the verge of burning the Greek encampment, he allows his friend Patroclus to fight in his armour in his place. Patroclus is killed by Hector at which point Achilles, turning his wrath from Agamemnon to Hector, reenters the battle and slays Hector. The poem ends with King Priam, Hector’s father, ransoming the body of his son from Achilles.

Sacrifice is to be found throughout the Iliad. Greeks and Trojans alike sacrifice to the gods of Olympus. Sacrifice, in the Iliad, is conceived of both as offerings which are the gods just due, and a means of placating the wrath of an angry god. The former concept can be seen in Zeus’ arguments with his wife Hera. Hera is single-mindedly set upon Troy’s destruction and is displeased with Zeus’s decision to temporarily turn the tide of battle in Troy’s favour. Zeus takes the position that since he has already decreed final victory for the Greeks that ought to satisfy Hera and that at any rate Hector deserves honor too. He points out that due to Hector’s conscientious piety the altars of the gods in Troy have never been empty. The second concept can be seen in the first book of the Iliad, where the Greeks return Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses, priest of Apollo, to her father. They also bring a hecatomb (a sacrifice of 100 cattle). The purpose of the sacrifice was to appease Apollo, who had answered his priest’s prayers and sent a plague among the Greeks.

The most disturbing sacrifice in the Iliad, however, is that offered by Achilles himself, at the funeral of Patroclus. At the funeral which occurs in the twenty-third book, Achilles slays twelve captive sons of the Trojan nobility and burns their bodies on the funeral pyre as a sacrifice, fulfilling a vow he made to his deceased friend in the eighteenth book. This is the only human sacrifice to occur in the Iliad.

Whatever the sacrifice – cattle, oxen, wine, captured enemies, and whether offered as a routine pious obligation or as a propitiation on the part of a sinner who has offended a god, sacrifices were perceived as gifts men give to the gods and/or to the departed spirits of their comrades and ancestors.

This kind of sacrificial system was not unique to the ancient Greeks. Indeed, versions of it existed among virtually all ancient peoples and some versions of it survive to this day. This includes the ancient Middle East where the true and living God spoke to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, made a covenant with their descendants the ancient Israelites, and later revealed Himself fully in the person of His Son Jesus Christ.

What does the true and living God think of sacrifice? Does He demand sacrifices from His worshipers or accept them if they are offered?

God’s revelation of Himself begins with the five books the Jews call the Torah and which are also called the Pentateuch. These books are the record of God’s covenant with His people Israel. God had promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that He would make of their descendants a great nation, give them the land into which He had called them, and they would be His people and He would be their God. The first book of the Torah ends with the Israelites in Egypt, the second book of the Torah begins with them still in Egypt, 400 years later, in slavery. God reveals Himself to Moses, an Israelite who had been adopted into Pharaoh’s family, and Moses leads the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt into the wilderness of Sinai. There God makes a covenant with Israel, in which He gives them His commandments, a priest class and religious system to worship Him, and a basic constitution for when they enter the Promised Land.

In the Torah, the God who makes a covenant with Israel, is revealed to be the one true God, the God who created the heavens and earth and all that exists. At the very beginning He is seen as accepting sacrifice from Abel and rejecting the sacrifice of Abel’s brother Cain, which leads to Cain’s jealous fit in which he murders his brother. A few chapters later man has become so corrupt that God sends a Flood to destroy the world, preserving Noah and his family in the ark. After the Flood is over, Noah builds an altar, and offers sacrifices of clean beasts and fowl. God “smelled a sweet savour” – He accepted the sacrifice. God accepts sacrifices from the patriarchs as well.

When Moses goes to Pharaoh to demand that He let God’s people go it is for the express purpose that they might go out into the wilderness and sacrifice to their God. At Mt. Sinai the covenant God makes with Israel is sealed with a sacrifice. It is there that God gives the Israelites, as part of their religious system, a system of sacrifice. The sacrificial system, like most of the ceremonial aspects of God’s covenant with Israel, is recorded in the Book of Leviticus.

How does the Levitical sacrifice system compare to pagan sacrificial systems? There are many similarities. In the Levitical system God ordained sacrifices of animals as well as burnt offerings of grain and other agricultural produce. There were offerings which were to be conducted simply as acts of worship and there were sacrifices that were to be brought by repentant sinners. Then there was the Day of Atonement, to be held each year, in which the High Priest would enter the innermost part of the Tabernacle/Temple with an offering for the sins of the people in general.

There is one very noticeable difference between the sacrificial system established by the Lord and that of many pagan religions, especially those of the other people groups in the Middle East in that era. This is a difference that the Lord emphasizes and which plays a very important role in subsequent Israeli history. The difference is that the Lord condemns the sacrifice of human children as an abomination and a capital crime, whereas Ba’al and Moloch demanded such sacrifices.

There is only one occasion in the Old Testament where God appears to demand a sacrifice of this nature. On that occasion, recorded in Genesis 22, God speaks to Abraham and tells him to take his son Isaac, and go to the region of Moriah and offer Isaac as a burnt offering to the Lord on one of the mountains there. Abraham, obediently set off for Moriah with Isaac and two servants. Leaving his donkey with his servants, he and Isaac took the wood, fire and a knife, and began to climb the mountain. When Isaac noticed that they appeared to have forgotten an essential element of the sacrifice and asked about it, Abraham replied:

“My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering”.

Abraham bound his son, laid him on the altar, then reached for his knife to complete the sacrifice. Here God stopped him and said:

Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.

Abraham then noticed a ram caught in a thicket behind him which he sacrificed instead.

This is the only occasion where God commands a human sacrifice of anyone in the Old Testament. (1) He commands it, knowing that He will prevent it from actually taking place, in order to test and demonstrate Abraham’s faith.

In contrast, among the peoples of that part of the world in that era, the sacrifice of first-born children to idols was prevalent. References to the practice can be found throughout the Old Testament. It was the practice of the peoples who were living in Canaan before the Israelite invasion under Joshua and Caleb. This is the context in which God’s order to the Israelites to wipe out the peoples of the land of Canaan after He led them out of Egypt and the wilderness must be understood. It is not explicitly stated as the reason, for God does not need to justify Himself to man, but Israel’s failure to follow through on the order, led to her own contamination. The historical and prophetic writings of the Old Testament record that Israel would in periods of repentance and revival, tear down the altars of these idols, but that in periods of backsliding and apostasy they would not only tolerate these practices among the remnants of these peoples but would join in the worship of the idols and the child-sacrifices themselves, which would bring God’s judgment and condemnation.

There was only one actual human sacrifice which God would ever accept. It was a very different kind of human sacrifice than Achilles’ sacrifice of the 12 Trojans to the spirit of Patrocles or of the offering of firstborn children to Moloch. It was not a sacrifice God demanded of people nor was it an offering man made to God. It was the last sacrifice God would ever accept and it lies at the heart of the New Testament.

It is foreshadowed in the account of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. Note that Abraham told Isaac that “God will provide himself a lamb”. After God stops him from sacrificing Isaac, it is a ram that Abraham finds and sacrifices, not a lamb. It would be centuries later that God would provide that lamb Abraham spoke of.

John the Baptist pointed Him out in John 1:29 where, seeing Jesus coming to him, he said “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

Christ’s death on the Cross was a sacrifice – the final sacrifice, the last blood sacrifice God would accept, and the only one which would ever be truly effective in taking away people’s sins. St. Paul, writing to the Church in Ephesus, wrote:

And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour. (Ephesians 5:2)

Writing to the Church in Rome, St. Paul wrote that God set forth Christ “to be a propitiation through faith in his blood” (3:25). A propitiation is a sacrifice that appeases the wrath of a deity, that turns away the deity’s anger against a sinner, and makes that deity pleased with the sinner again.

It is the author of the Book of Hebrews who gives us the fullest picture of Jesus Christ as the true sacrifice. The Book of Hebrews depicts the Tabernacle/Temple, priesthood, and sacrifices of the Old Covenant as shadow-pictures of Christ, Who is the true High Priest (3:1, 4:14-15, 5:1-10), without sin of His own, Who offered up Himself as the one true sacrifice once and for all (7:27) and so was able to enter the true Holy of Holies, in the eternal Tabernacle in Heaven with His own blood to take away the sins of the world (9). Christ’s sacrifice is forever (10:12), perfects those who are sanctified, i.e., set apart as belonging to God, by it (10:14) and has therefore done away with offerings for sin because it has accomplished remission of sins (10:17-18).

What makes this sacrifice different from the human sacrifices which God condemned in the Old Testament?

For one thing Jesus was the only truly innocent victim. Other human beings have “all sinned and come short of the glory of God”. Offering one person, tainted with the guilt of sin, cannot atone for the offences of other sinners. At the Cross, however, God “made Him to be sin for us, Who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (Col. 5:21)

Then there was the fact that Jesus’ sacrifice was a voluntary sacrifice. The prophet Isaiah, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, looked ahead through the centuries and wrote of Christ:

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. (Isaiah 53:7)

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus, hours away from the Crucifixion, prayed “Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me” but submitted to the will of His Father “nevertheless not My will, but Thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). He did not fight back, or allow His disciples to fight back, when Judas brought the priests and temple guards to arrest Him.

Finally, and most importantly, Jesus’ sacrifice was not something that men offered to God, or that God demanded of men. While pagans had a concept of sacrifice as propitiation for sins, the way they understood it to work was that when they had offended the gods, they would offer them a gift, to butter them up, and appease their anger. Tragically, God’s own people often tended to think of it this way as well. This is why there are so many passages in the Prophetic writings where God tells Israel that He doesn’t want their sacrifices – that He wants faith and humility, mercy and justice, instead. This is why King David, in Psalm 51, composed after Nathan had come and exposed his sin in the affair of Bathsheba, wrote:

For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. (vv. 16-17)

Instead of being something men offer to God, Christ’s sacrifice is God’s gift to man. We have all sinned. We all sin. We have nothing we can offer God to make up for our sin, to make things right between us and God. God, however, being loving and gracious, chose to make us right with Himself. The sacrifice necessary, to make things right between man and God, was not something we could give to God. It was something He had to give to us.

Although Jesus was condemned to die by the chief priests of Israel, those priests did not condemn Him with the purpose of offering Him as a sacrifice. Jesus, as the book of Hebrews tells us, was both the priest and the sacrifice. He offered Himself to God as the final propitiatory sacrifice to reconcile man to God. God declared His acceptance of the sacrifice by raising Christ from the dead and seating Him at the right hand of the Father in Heaven.

It is important that we remember that Jesus was Himself divine. This is vitally important to contemplation of Christ’s sacrifice for at least two reasons. First, the sacrifice of Christ was not just the sacrifice of an innocent man. It was the sacrifice of a Man Who was also God. The Person offered up to God on the altar of the Cross was God Himself, and therefore of infinite worth. That is why His sacrifice is once and for all. Secondly, since Jesus was God Himself, this sacrifice was not something God demanded from or received from human beings. This was a sacrifice, in which God offered up Himself as a sacrifice to Himself, on our behalf. That is why this sacrifice, unlike any other, takes away the sins of the world.

When Jesus died the veil dividing the Holy of Holies, the innermost part of the Temple which signified the direct presence of God with His people, from the rest of the Temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom. It is man’s sin that barred him from access to God’s presence. Christ’s death took that sin away and we are now invited, through faith in Christ and His sacrifice, to boldly enter the presence of God Most High.

Christ’s sacrifice sealed a New Covenant between God and man, a covenant in which everyone who believes in the Savior God has given are now part of God’s people, a covenant in which obedience to God is to flow out of love, not in order to earn God’s acceptance, but out of faith that we are already accepted by God through Christ. The only sacrifices that God will accept from His people today are the “broken spirit” and “broken and contrite heart” that David wrote about and the sacrifice St. Paul wrote about in Romans 12:1:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.


(1) Judges 11 is not an exception. There the judge Jephthah makes a rash promise to sacrifice the first thing that comes to meet him when he returns from his victory over the Ammonite. It turns out to be his daughter. There is a debate about whether Jephthah actually literally sacrificed her or fulfilled his vow in another way, by placing her in service to God in the Tabernacle. Whatever the case, if he did literally sacrifice her it was in clear violation of the Mosaic Law. There is no indication that God accepted such a sacrifice.

The Centre of Christianity

What is the essence of Christianity, the heart of the Christian message, the sine qua non of the Christian faith?

Many people today would answer this question with an ethical statement. “We should be kind to others”, would be a fairly standard example of this kind of answer.

Is this the correct answer?

Before answering that question we should ponder another question. Why do so many people think that the essence of Christianity is an ethical message about being good or kind to other people?

One answer to that question might be “Because Jesus taught us to be kind to other people”. That is true. In His most famous Sermon Jesus said “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” (Matt. 7:12) Since most people would prefer that others were kind to them this could be paraphrased as “be good and kind to other people.” Does this lie at the absolute centre of Jesus’ message though?

There is an implication of the idea that “being good to others” is at the heart of Jesus’ message that has perhaps not occurred to many of those who would give a knee-jerk “yes” answer to that last question. If, “being good to others” was central to Jesus’ message, with everything else He taught being peripheral, then Christ’s message would be an anthropocentric message, man-centred, rather than a theocentric message, God-centred.

This implication actually points us to the reason why so many people conceive of the Christian message as being basically ethical. There has been a revolution in Western thought over the last 500-800 years.

If we go back to the roots of Western civilization in ancient Athens, Socrates laid the intellectual foundation for two millennia of Western thought when he re-focused Greek thought away from questions about the substance of the material world, which had been the focus of earlier Greek philosophers such as Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Empedocles of Agrigentum, and Heraclitus of Ephesus. Socrates, focused on questions about things which transcended the material world. “What is courage?” “What is justice?” “What is virtue?” He searched for answers to these questions insisting that a valid answer would be one which would apply universally to all examples of these things. Socrates’ student Plato, through whose writings his teacher is known to us today, developed out of Socrates search for universals, the idea that the material world is an imperfect, shadowy reflection of reality. Reality, according to Plato consisted of perfect, eternal, immaterial, universals which he called eidoi (usually translated “Forms”) and which man could only contemplate through the use of reason. Plato’s own pupil, Aristotle, differed from Plato in that he taught that man approached transcendent universals though particulars that one experiences empirically in this world, but agreed with his teacher that the transcendent universals themselves, are the subject of the highest, truest, and most important knowledge.

This concept of the Athenian philosophers, that things which are invisible, eternal, perfect, and beyond the world available to the senses but imperfectly represented in that world, was the foundation of Western thought for millennia. It provided the intellectual framework within which Christian theology was developed.

Then, over the last several centuries, modern philosophers began to reorient Western thought away from the universal, the invisible, the transcendent, towards the physical world. In the 14th Century, William of Occam taught a form of nominalism (the denial of the existence of metaphysical universals). In the 17th Century, René Descartes tried to develop a rational belief system in which nothing was “known” unless he could logically demonstrate it from something of which he was absolutely certain. His search for such certainty turned inward until he reasoned that since he couldn’t doubt that he was doubting, his mental activity and hence his existence, were certainties. It was a brilliant solution to his problem – brilliant, but autocentric. Immanuel Kant, in the 18th Century taught that our knowledge was subjective, that we can only ever know phenomena (external things as they appear to us) because we play an active role in how we perceive things, therefore noumena (things “as they are in themselves”, this is the term which in classical philosophy includes everything beyond the world available to the senses) are forever outside our knowledge. In the 19th Century, Auguste Comte, one of the first sociologists, argued for positivism, the idea that we can only know that which we can experience, observe, and empirically test in the material world. He taught a progressive theory of the history of human knowledge in which theology and metaphysics are primitive stages prior to the “positive” approach of modern science. In the early 20th Century an extreme version of this doctrine called “logical positivism” became popular in intellectual circles.

This reorientation of Western thought away from the transcendent, invisible, and eternal to the imminent, visible, and temporal both contributed to and was the result of the birth of modern science with all of its blessings and curses. It has also led to a way of referring to the physical world as the “real world” that is popular among parents who wish to encourage their kids to focus on their education and get good jobs, among people who have come to regard life as a long bitter struggle to sustain one’s physical existence, and various others. It has further led to a popular misconception of the relationship between the scientific and the possible. Since scientists express the summaries of their observations as “laws” many people have gotten the wrong impression that a scientific law means “such-and-such has to happen in this way under all circumstances” rather than “such-and-such has always happened in this way in our observations and experiments so there is a high probability that it will continue to always happen this way in the future”.

This in turn has led to a bias against the possibility of the supernatural, of miracles. Thus, people who had adopted these modern perspectives, and who therefore read the Gospels and dismissed the possibility of the Virgin Birth, the turning of the water into wine, the healing miracles, the calming of the storm and walking on water, the raising of Lazarus, the feeding of the 5000, and the Resurrection, but who still wished to think of themselves as Christians, had to look for an essence of Christianity which relegated all of the supernatural aspects of the Gospels to outward religious trappings of the Christian message. This left them with the ethical teachings of Jesus Christ.

Did Jesus Christ make ethics the heart of His message however? Do those who see Jesus as primarily an ethical teacher even understand His ethical teachings?

“Love thy neighbor as thyself” Jesus is often quoted as saying. He did say that, but He was not introducing anything new. He was quoting Leviticus 19:18. Furthermore, He made it explicitly clear that “love thy neighbor as thyself” is not the highest principle of His ethical system. It is only the second greatest commandment. The greatest is to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength”. Loving God, takes precedence over loving man, in Christ’s ethical teachings. This precludes “being kind to other people” from being central to Christ’s teachings. It is important but it is not the most important thing.

Jesus said of these commandments “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”. What does this mean? “The law and the prophets” are what Christians call “the Old Testament” and what Jews call the Tanakh (from the acronym of the initials of the Hebrew words for Law, Prophets, and Writings). When Jesus says that “on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” He is saying that the Old Testament is summarized in these two commandments. He is also saying that someone who truly loves God and his neighbor, will keep all the commandments of the Old Testament.

That is something that people who think Jesus’ teachings can be summarized in “be nice to one another” are not likely to be very comfortable with. The Old Testament contains all sorts of commandments that such people usually don’t like. They like to think that the point of Jesus’ teachings was to do away with the Old Testament commandments and replace them with “be nice to each other”. Jesus Himself, however, warned people against interpreting His words this way:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:17-19)

These words occur in the Sermon on the Mount just prior to the section where Jesus quotes six Old Testament rules and demonstrates that the standard of righteousness God requires goes beyond the mere, literal, sense of the commandments. The commandment against murder, Jesus says, means that “whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” The commandment against adultery, Jesus says, is broken even by lustful thoughts. The Old Testament includes civil law provisions for divorce and swearing oaths, but the righteousness God demands of people, Jesus said, requires that you do not divorce your wife unless she has been unfaithful and that you speak the truth at all times so that an oath is redundant and unnecessary. The Old Testament includes instructions for civil judges as to how to dispense justice and commands love for one’s neighbor. Jesus adds that one is not to take the former into his own hands and avenge oneself and that love should be extended even to one’s enemies.

The “love” Jesus preached, then, goes beyond the bland “kindness” and “niceness” that the modern liberal reads into it. Jesus’ ethical teachings are extremely demanding. Furthermore, they are filled with threats of judgment and Hell. This is exactly the sort of thing that people who think Christianity is about “being nice to others” don’t like, but Jesus talked about these subjects more than anybody else in the Bible.

After Jesus’ baptism, and his 40 day fast in the wilderness, the Gospels record that He began His preaching/teaching ministry. The message, the Gospels record Him preaching throughout Galilee is “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” What did that mean?

The kingdom of heaven is what the Jews were waiting for. The Old Testament records the covenant God made with the people of Israel, and the history of how they would be unfaithful, God would judge them, they would repent, and He would restore them. The prophetic literature of the Old Testament records the words of the prophets addressed to Israel and Judah (and sometimes to the surrounding nations) in the last days of the divided Kingdom, in the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions that wiped out Israel’s political sovereignty. The prophets spoke of this as God’s judgment on Israel for unfaithfulness, idolatry, and a lack of mercy and justice. The prophetic pronouncements of judgment and condemnation, however, were tempered with a message of hope. God will not be angry with His people forever. He will establish His kingdom on earth, He will establish a New Covenant in which He will write His laws, not on tablets of stone but upon the hearts of His people, He will send a Redeemer.

“The kingdom of heaven is at hand” meant that that promised time had arrived at long last. Therefore, Israel was called upon to repent and to “believe the gospel (“good news”, in this case meaning that the long-awaited kingdom is finally here). At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus made it explicit what He meant by “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”, when He rode into Jerusalem on the Sunday before Passover on a donkey. He was the promised Redeemer. He was the Messiah. He was the Christ. That was His message.

This had been present in His teachings all along. He said things no ordinary teacher of ethics would ever have said. In the portion of the Sermon on the Mount referred to above, where He expounded on the meaning of 6 commandments in the Old Testament, He used a formula “You have heard that it was said…but I say unto you” which placed His own teachings on the level of the writings He had declared to be authoritative Scripture. At the very end of that same Sermon, just before He compares His teachings to a rock, and people who do what He says to a man who builds a house on the rock rather than on the sinking foundation of sand, He said:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matt. 7:21-23)

Do you recognize the significance of this? Jesus is saying in these words that He will be the one who will pronounce the final judgment upon men. He was saying that He was Himself God come down from Heaven to live amongst His people.

This lay at the heart of everything He said, and everything He did, from His telling the man with palsy whom He healed “Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee” to when He promised the rich young ruler that he would have treasure in heaven if he gave up everything he had and followed Jesus, statements no ordinary teacher could have made without committing blasphemy. He accepted men’s worship, commended those who displayed faith in Him and rewarded that faith, and rebuked those who did not believe, including on several occasions, His own disciples.

When He presented Himself in Jerusalem openly as the Messiah, initially the masses welcomed Him, crying out “Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.” By the end of the week, they were demanding His blood from Pilate, crying out “Crucify Him”. That too, lies at the heart of His message.

Jesus at one point asked His disciples Who men said that He was. They gave various answers and He then asked them Who they said He was. Peter answered “the Christ, the Son of the living God”, which answer Jesus commended. He then began telling His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, where He would be put to death, and three days later He would rise again.

On the night before His crucifixion, at the Last Supper He took bread and after blessing and breaking it, He gave it to His disciples saying “Take, eat; this is My body”, then took the cup and after giving thanks said:

Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. (Matt. 26:27-28)

The “new testament” is the new covenant that was promised by the Prophets. What Jesus was saying here as He commissioned the Eucharist, was that He Himself, would be the sacrifice that would establish the new covenant. His sacrifice would do what no other sacrifice could. It would take away the sins of the world, making peace between God and man, a peace into which all people everywhere are invited to participate through faith.

Jesus Christ Himself, then, is the centre of Christianity. Christianity is about Who Jesus is, about His sacrificial death on the cross, and about His Resurrection from the dead. The Resurrection is the evidence which confirms that Christ is Who He claimed to be.

The Athenian philosophers 400 years before Christ came to earth, argued that true wisdom lies in contemplating the transcendent, the perfect, and the eternal, the things which lie beyond the world we know through our senses. The sort of things they had in mind were universals which correspond to categories of physical particulars. God, of course, is also beyond the world we experience through our senses. He does not, however, correspond to a category in the physical world. How then is He to be known to us? In the pagan cultures of two millennia ago, people made statues of their deities and worshipped their deities through these statues. This practice, called idolatry, is forbidden in the Ten Commandments and condemned throughout Scripture.

St. Paul writing in Colossians 1:15 refers to Jesus as “the image of the invisible God”. The word translated “image” there is the Greek word eikon, from which the English word icon is derived. Jesus is what no idol could ever be. He is the perfect image, the perfect representation, of the true and living, invisible God, because He is God incarnate as a true man.

God’s revelation of Himself to man in Christ, particularly the redeeming love revealed in the death and Resurrection of Christ, is what Christianity is all about.

Sanctus

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts
Let men and angels praise Thy Holy name
Almighty Father, Son and Holy Ghost
Throughout the ages evermore the same.

Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory
The sun, moon, and all the stars speak of Thee
Mountains, seas, and rivers tell Thy story
Thy handiwork proclaims Thy Deity.

All things which breathe obtain their life from Thee
And every blessing underneath Thy sky.
Let our voices sing throughout land and sea
Glory be to Thee, O Lord Most High.

On Advent Sunday

In long eternal ages past
Before the earth was made,
The stars hung in the nightly sky
And sea’s foundations laid,

He lived and reigned upon a throne
In sovereign majesty.
Being and life, they were His own
And Godhead – Deity.

All things belong to Him by right
As God’s begotten Son;
His Father was the King of Light,
Creator had He none.

Although all this He had and was
He came down to the earth,
Was clothed in flesh and One of us
Became by virgin birth.

His mother was a young maiden,
Betrothed but not yet wed,
When first the angel came to her
And these glad tidings said:

That she’d found favour with the Lord
And had been very blessed;
She would conceive and bear a Son
Whose name would be Jesus.

He’d be the Son of God Most High
And sit in David’s chair;
His Kingdom would not have an end,
He’d judge all Jacob there.

Young Mary wondered at these words
But rejoiced to hear them.
Her Son had long awaited been
Since prophets spoke of Him.

He was Messiah to the Jews -
With the promised Kingdom
His Laws He’s write upon their hearts
And redemption bring them.

He was the Logos to the Greeks,
The most divine Reason,
The Order beneath everything
Giving life its meaning.

All of Creation still awaits
His return appearing
To judge the living and the dead
And reign on earth as King.

As we begin the Christian year
This anticipation,
We enter in with joyful hearts,
Full of celebration.

We join with Christians ‘round the world,
Now and in days gone by,
And re-enact the wait of old
For His Nativity.

We do so to invite Him in
To dwell inside our hearts
That we might be as one with Him
Who of His church are parts.

“Lord Jesus come and live in us”,
Upon our knees we pray,
“We turn our hearts again to you,
On this Advent Sunday”.