What Was Envy in an Honor/Shame World?

Did you know, in the extra-Biblical literature of the time of Yeshua/Jesus, that “envy” was always tied to honor?
 
In the ancient world, honor was all about a person’s renown or reputation, as opposed to modern honor, which is about a person’s core integrity. Reputation, glory, esteem, etc. were all words describing how much honor collateral a person possessed within the community.
 
A person was called envious if they coveted the honor rating of someone else, which led to their grasping at more honor than they were entitled to. In the Bible, we see this best in the form of the honor challenges that the Pharisees (a denomination devoted to Temple-level ritual purity in the home), Scribes (non-priestly legal experts), and the Sadducees (the corrupt and wealthy denomination of “chief priests” who were in bed with Rome and using the Temple for their own gains, as opposed to the faithful rank and file priests) waged against Messiah.
 
As He dazzled the Jewish faithful and the Jewish sinners with signs and wonders and remarkable teachings, his level of honor, or renown, increased, and the honor level of the Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees decreased. Their envy drove them to try and discredit and humiliate him publicly, in order to not only get their own honor back but to become greater than Yeshua in the eyes of the people. In the end, it was their envy that drove the Sadduceean Chief priests to conspire with Rome and have Him killed.
 
Envy in the ancient world was all about upping your social collateral, your glory, and esteem – honor being more important in the ancient world than money.
 
This is why Paul listed envy among the works of the flesh in Galatians 5, along with drunkenness and orgies. Envy is a specific and deadly form of coveting that can even lead to murder, but at the very least, is the antithesis of peacefulness and the covenant faithfulness we owe to one another. It was envy that killed Yeshua.
 
We also see envy on social media today. Have you ever seen one teacher or believer tear down someone else? A lot of times, it comes down to a simple desire to take the audience away from that other person. A true teacher can just teach the truth and trust God to get it to the people who need it, but someone who is grasping for audience share, specifically someone else’s audience share, will try to tear down not false (supposedly) information being put out, but the other teacher personally. That’s exactly what the Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees did to Yeshua. It wasn’t always about what He was teaching (although with the Sadducees it always was about that) because the Pharisees and Scribes were often in agreement, but about Yeshua gaining honor, and the Judean big shots losing theirs. Envy killed Yeshua, and we have to be careful not to allow it to run unchecked within the modern social media Body of Messiah that operates on the honor and shame system of likes, shares, and comments.
 
Grasping for and making claims to honor that didn’t belong to you, in the ancient world, was actually considered to be a sin – in all cultures, not just Israelite. That’s what envy does, and that is why Yeshua was constantly telling people to be happy with taking the low spot at the table, to wear normal length tassles (tzitziyot), and normal sized phylacteries while in prayer. It was all about not coveting honor — not being envious of the renown of others. Our heavenly Father will always exalt us to the position that HE wants us in, if we wait upon Him, and we have to be careful not to try and tear down people whom we may feel (rightly or wrongly) have grasped for more honor than is their due and are riding high. The Proverbs contain quite a few verses about not envying the wicked, for example. 
 
If you want to learn more about Honor and Shame culture in the Bible <—-click here be sure to check out my book, available at Amazon. It’s easy enough for your average 7-year-old to understand, but also engaging enough to teach adults this foundational aspect of Bible context, step by step. 


Social Media Musings Vol 6: Sabbaths, Psalms, and the Kingdom

4/4/18

I have this prayer that I pray each day when I read the Scriptures. I made it up a while back – it helps me to keep the right frame of mind because it is so easy to turn Scripture reading into an intellectual exercise, a goal to get to the end once more, something to achieve. I remember once, about 17 years ago probably, I was reading for hours a day before the babies woke up, and I used to just love it, it was still all so new. But the years go on and reading through became a way to get knowledge that I could wield like a sword. For a long time, God stopped me cold in my tracks and I just couldn’t read the word at all – I was doing violence to it in the way I was reading it – as something to be conquered.

So, I have this prayer now:

Lord, let me never strive to conquer Your Word, as though it was a mountain to be overcome and added to my bragging rights of conquests, but please, conquer me through Your Word.

It changed everything. I get more out of it spiritually than academically now.

4/5/18

Dad and the Sabbath.

It can be hard knowing how to respond to folks who object to commandment keeping (well, only a few commandments are objected to, if we are really honest), and sadly, most folks just get super defensive about those objections when it is unnecessary. I stumbled across a novel solution once during a visit from my wonderful Father in Law, who is in his 80’s – a lifelong faithful Christian man.

The fact that we keep the Sabbath really bothered him. Our Friday night Sabbath meal bothered him. It was different from what he was used to and he protested as we were beginning because it looked “Jewish” and these words popped out of my mouth before I even knew what I was saying (very gently and genuinely);

“Dad, is it a sin to observe the Sabbath?”

He thought about it and said no. I smiled and told him that we should all just enjoy it then. He was surprised when our prayers included Jesus (we changed from Yeshua to Jesus so he would understand who we were talking about, no need to be cryptic and no good fruit to be had by being so) and he recognized the taking of bread and wine from communion at his church.

Next morning, he had forgotten it was the Sabbath. He wanted to get some work done around our new (to us) house that did need some repairs. I swear that man will die on his feet, he is just part of that work until you die generation. You have to literally take him on a vacation to get him to put down his hammer. I love him dearly and respect him. He is a loving father, father-in-law, and grandfather. But he really wanted to work on the Sabbath and it was hard for him to remember that we don’t do that so, we drove him to Yellowstone, and we had a wonderful day there, not working – in a totally non- “in your face” manner. He kept the Sabbath, but in stealth mode. We need to know what battles are and are not winnable, and be clever as serpents yet gentle as doves.

People are where they are and I can tell you without a doubt that if God told Dad to keep more commandments, then he would die endeavoring to obey. Dad just needs to be reminded sometimes that keeping a few more commandments than he does isn’t sinning, nor is it standing in judgment of him. He needs to be reminded in a respectful way, and only when he asks about it. There is no grace in nagging one’s elders, or judging people who are keeping what they know as best they can. It is our commission to seek and save the lost, not to try and convert people who are already converted, because of differences in beliefs over a few commandments. Yes, they are important or I would not be keeping them, but people know what they know and understand what they understand and bullying them and/or getting defensive is not good fruit, nor will it produce good fruit! I have never seen anyone bully another person into a true understanding, but I have seen people manipulated into doing things that they later gave up and decided were worthless beause their eyes were not yet opened to it.

Things are a mess right now – we didn’t create the mess but we do live in the midst of it. Let’s clean up our corner of us and become excellent in our character before we seek to nitpick others – I can actually guarantee that good character puts an end to nitpicking pretty quick as the kindest and most godly people I know, the people who practice zeal in the correct way, those who image Yeshua/Jesus the most accurately – they just don’t do it.

It just takes a few quiet words in a non-sarcastic or defensive tone, “Am I sinning in keeping this commandment, in doing this thing?” Generally, people haven’t actually thought of it in those terms before. It takes the edge off. They need reassurance that we are still faithful to God and our beliefs are practically identical to theirs, and that we aren’t trying to earn God’s love. We don’t have to justify ourselves, and we don’t need to get defensive, we only need to point out that, in fact, the Law is not sin – just as Paul pointed out in Romans.

We also have to remember that there are many people out there surpassing us in commandments that we keep at a low or moderate level and they may well look at us and count us as transgressors for going light on a commandment that they pursue with much zeal. Much of this is about perspective, maturity, growth, and genuine awareness – and awareness comes from God. It’s a gift. Missionaries are aware of the commandments in a unique way, as are those who work on skid row – they have a measure of grace to understand and excel in commandments that, compared to them, I am practically breaking. Much grace is required to live among one another in humility.

4/7/18

How the Sabbath and the Psalms Reveal Us

I am about 2/3 of the way through NT Wright’s The Case for the Psalms and it is a different kind of book for him. It is an apologetic for the use of the Psalms in everyday worship and for the past 12 days, I have taken his challenge and I have to say, it has been wonderful. I have experienced greater intimacy in prayer afterward, and they challenge my character in a way that simply reading them on my way through the Bible, or studying them from a context perspective, just doesn’t accomplish.

On the Sabbath, I read only praise Psalms, so I start out with Psalm 92, which was specifically sung by the Levites in the Temple every Sabbath day, and then I also focus on the “back of the book” Psalms – all the ones near Psalm 150. Sabbath is the one day that I try not to present my personal petitions to God, unless there is an emergency – and that’s just a personal decision on my part, not something I am forcing or endorsing. I will pray for the persecuted church, and for others, but I leave my own needs out of it. Sabbath is about Him and about His Kingdom. Which reminds me of something that Richard J Foster, a Quaker theologian and expert on prayer and discipline, said:

“In his ‘Rule’ Saint Benedict insisted on regularity in prayer because he didn’t want his followers to forget who was in charge. It is an occupational hazard of devout people to confuse their work with God’s work. How easy it is to replace, “this work is really significant” with “I am really significant.” With a profound understanding of this, Benedict would call for prayer at regular intervals throughout the day – right in the middle of apparently urgent and important work. We, too, will find that a commitment to regular prayer will defeat self-importance and the wiles of the devil.” – Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home by Richard J Foster p. 72-3

Sabbath is also like this, purging us of our self-importance and the devil’s ways, but only if we resist and refuge to do our own works. Our works are so deceptive, they seem so righteous. Railing and gossiping about, and mocking at sinners publicly! Really? That’s boorish enough on normal days, really just preaching to a self-righteous and critical choir who have forgotten God’s mercy, but when we are to be resting and worshiping? Inexcusable. Lovingly reach for them during the week, but don’t tackle the Kingdom as you would a 9 to 5 secular job in advertising, Hollywood, or the legal profession. Good rule of thumb – if you are treating people like Hollywood treats the people they disagree with – you are not doing Kingdom work, you are simply white-washing the world’s methods by applying them to a different subject matter – a subject matter that should never even touch the world’s methods.

Seeking out the Kingdom way is counter-intuitive and never seems right to our flesh, which is combative by nature. Our flesh wants to win, on its own terms, without any sort of radical inner character change towards being loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle and self-controlled. I have been at this for so many years now and still, my first desire is often to fight for the Kingdom by kindling a flame on the Sabbath day. Those of us who don’t commit the obvious sins on the outside are often still the greatest sinners on the inside – and the inside sins are those which turn us into murderers at some point – and always in the Name of God, right? We find ourselves persecuting Him during those very times we feel the most assured that we are fighting for Him – because our hearts are still desperately deceitful and wicked. But as Yeshua/Jesus told Pontius Pilate, “My Kingdom is not from this world.” Make no mistake, His Kingdom is for this world, just not of it. It cannot be seized violently as can the kingdoms of men, it has to be infiltrated by replacing evil with goodness, cruelty with kindness, hatred with love, factions and dissensions with brotherly unity, self with selflessness. The list goes on.

The Sabbath should be our training ground, it should be the day that our inability to be those good things should appear at their most glaring. It is a day when we should surrender ourselves to God so that we will do better – not next Sabbath, but all next week. We cannot suddenly have good fruit on the Sabbath if it was bad all week – Sabbath is just a tool for revealing who we really are – if we can stand to be peaceful, loving, and patient with others all day, or if it makes out skin crawl. It is a day to carefully consider all our own works and to rededicate ourselves to finding out what is God’s work in God’s way, and what poor substitutes we have been peddling in His name.

Shabbat Shalom.

4/10/18

I had something stunning happen.

About two weeks ago, I prayed something that it had never occurred to me to pray before. I asked God to show me if there was anything about me that was pleasing to Him. I spend a lot of time in prayer, fasting, study, and meditation on my actions focused on becoming more conformed to His image, which, by necessity, can be a negative focus on self. Not morbidly negative, but I believe in evaluating my behavior, thoughts, and feelings as honestly as possible.

So, He had to show me an area in my life – how far I have come and yet how far I have to go. So He showed me in His regular way, not heavy-handed and condemning, but by just gently opening my eyes to the situation. I was very sad that I was still representing Him badly in this way, and as I was repenting for it, I told Him that I knew He wouldn’t show me anything that He wasn’t getting ready to help me clean up because I experientially know that about His character.

At that moment, it was like there was this very intimate meeting of the minds, where He had shown me that He knows and is committed to me and I had shown Him that I know and am committed to Him. Needless to say, it was the meeting of a very insignificant mind with an omnipotent mind, but it was one of the most intimate experiences of my life. And in that moment of me truly “getting” who He is and His purposes and character in revealing sin to us – that was very pleasing to Him. He wants to be known by us. He doesn’t want our picture of Him to be muddied by the worldly models that we use to try and describe Him. When we come through to a core understanding of a part of His nature, that delights Him to no end. We were created to know Him and be known by Him – and it is an ongoing process.

Yes, he is described as a Father in Scripture, but that doesn’t mean He should be tainted by our often twisted ideas about fatherhood. We have to take that idea, that conceptual seed, and be willing to see beyond it and come to an understanding beyond our wildest dreams. Throughout Scripture, God spoke through the writers in order to give us beginning concepts that would help us begin to relate to Him, but should never completely define who we think He is. Yes, He is Father, but He is also unlike our concepts of it. He is beyond our definitions. As I said in my book The Bridge, years ago, He is the reality, and what we have here on earth are mere shadows. Some shadows are less dark than others, but they are still just shadows.

And so, do I please God? Yes, I please Him when I see who He really is, even in one tiny little area. He knows how hard it was for me to come to that understanding, how I battled year after year to seek Him out. Everyone desires to be known and loved for who they are – and God is no exception.

4/11/18

John 14:12 “Amen, amen I tell you, he who puts his trust in Me, the works that I do he will do; and greater than these he will do, because I am going to the Father.”

What could be greater than raising the dead, walking on the water, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, curing lepers?

The one thing that Yeshua/Jesus never did, the most important of His works – taking the Gospel to the nations. We look upon it as nothing, because it doesn’t look like we have been given super special secret powers, but given the choice between raising the dead and curing the sick, and bringing the power of God’s resurrection and New Creation into people’s lives… wow. The first is undeniably more impressive by the standards of the world and I imagine more profitable financially – but we aren’t supposed to look at the world’s standards.

“Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness…”

This Kingdom was made to swallow up the entire world, as per the prophet Daniel. Preaching to the choir about how terrible unbelievers (or just those who disagree with us on doctrine) are isn’t doing a thing to promote the Kingdom or to add to it.

Have we become utterly useless and distracted by a scolding and critical spirit? Are we now hated for His Name sake or is He hated for our name’s sake?

4/12/18

Sometimes the most profitable thing we can do spiritually is to break free, even in a small way, from someone who is controlling. I can track some of my greatest times of growth to right after the setting of boundaries, taking responsibility for my own life and learning to just say no to people.

Controlling people are generally unaware that they actually are controlling. They do what they do for reasons that seem good and beneficial, but they have a tendency to project their needs and desires onto everyone around them. They don’t see themselves as pushy, or critical, or demanding, or as bullies – they generally think of themselves as helpful and sometimes even protective. Truth is that controlling people are generally fearful and not in control of their own lives – but here’s the deal, “control” over our own lives is an illusion. No one can guarantee that a tractor-trailer truck isn’t going to come smashing in through their front door any moment. No one can safeguard against cancer striking a loved one. We cannot prevent drunk drivers from crashing into us, or identity thieves from stealing everything we have. We can’t avoid frivolous lawsuits. We cannot prevent our reputations from being destroyed through gossip. We cannot guarantee that our kids will grow up to be good people and not monsters.

All we have is God and our trust in Him that if those things do happen, that He will walk us through it. And that trust is what allows us to let go of our need for a neurotic level of control so that we can live and serve Him, without overstepping anyone else’s rights or boundaries. Controlling behavior, by definition, is about distrust. It’s destructive, and it hampers the growth of ourselves and those around us. Nothing in life is guaranteed, and that is part of the beauty of it. It requires us to trust in God, and not in our own efforts to control our environment.

4/13/18

One thing I love about the Psalms is how they just eradicate self-righteousness.

So often I hear people bragging about their blessings as though they are rewards and not gifts. But the Psalms readily admit that the wicked are sometimes rich, have a house full of kids, and die in their sleep in their old age, after a healthy life. The Psalmists always question why, as do we all, yet presents no illusionary world where the good always receive good and the wicked receive only evil. In a world like that – there would be no need of endurance and faith.

I think of people in oppressed countries, who are caught in the active war between the New Creation world and the Old – they know persecution, and loss, and suffering – just as Messiah said they would. Here, where even the poor live in relative luxury, we credit our prosperity to something related to our obedience and deservedness. We act as though God pre-emptively caused us to be born in a prosperous, Christian nation because He especially wanted to bless us. But that’s like saying that people deserve to be born smart, athletic, or pretty and woe to those who aren’t. The Kingdom doesn’t operate that way. The least will be the greatest, and so those in this world who are blessed ought to humble ourselves and be grateful.

Today I am married for 27 years, and that is a blessing. Yet, am I greater than a woman whose husband left her for another woman? Am I more favored in God’s eyes than a widow? After all, I was never able to bear a live child, so am I cursed or blessed? Maybe it is more complicated than we want it to be, and perhaps we measure blessings along very convenient lines.

The Psalms set things straight. Those who know and are known to the Lord are blessed eternally, and those who do not know Him are blessed in this life because His creation is good and it can’t help but bless us. After all, the rain falls and the sun shines on the righteous and on the wicked – it can’t help itself but be exactly what it was created to be.

4/14/18

How do we seek His Kingdom on the Sabbath? We refrain not only from work, but our works, our fears, our agendas, and from any compromise with the ways of the world in how we go about Kingdom business. If our behavior on this day is bullying, manipulative, borne more of fear and a need to control than love, full of name-calling and presumptuous judgment against people who do things differently (for reasons we cannot be entirely sure of, despite our desire to assume the worst), then we might as well go and work a 12 hour shift because it would be a better witness than being online indulging in the works of the flesh with all of our anger, dissensions, factions, envy, jealousy, and strife.

If we want people to be more like Yeshua/Jesus, then we need to give them a clear example of how different He was than the people picking fights with Him – on the Sabbath, no less. We need to learn self-control and kindness, and let go our ranting and the controlling of others.

Be painstakingly kind, and only then will people listen intently to you on those occasions when you are forced to rebuke. He or she who rebukes without ever having encouraged is nothing but a clanging cymbal, and there are many people who appear to be believers but who have simply found a new way of “proving” that they are better than everyone else. A big part of being a believer is coming to the understanding that we are actually not better than everyone else, and in fact, our own faults start seeming larger than life. The smallest of our faults begin to seem bigger than the gross sin of others who are in deeper bondage. It should create in us an awe of God and a gratitude for His mercy, so that we can pray for those people who are “not where we are” as I would hope people would pray for us when we are “not where they are.”

Be gentle, joyful in the knowledge of your salvation, and mindful of our Kingdom and Covenant obligation to be peaceable, forgiving, and compassionate.

4/17/18

So many Psalms telling us to be silent before wicked people – probably because it is the last thing on earth we want to do, right?

But think about it – people who are cruel don’t play fair. They make rules for conversation and interactions (both in person and behind the back) that people with good fruit (or who are struggling for good fruit) just can’t live by without compromising the witness of our King. Like spiders, they create intricate traps that can hardly be avoided, or even anticipated.

in the end, it is always the same when conversing with such people – you end up waist deep in the mud he or she drew you into, or you just refused to engage in the first place.

I remember a dream almost 2 1/2 years ago where I was pre-emptively warned of such a trap, and I was shown the mud. It was on a farm so it wasn’t all just mud! I couldn’t set one foot on the place without being ankle deep. I was flat out told to keep away – there would be no victory for me if I set foot there.

It was (and has been) an excruciating situation and journey. I have had to trust God with my reputation – which is easier said than done. So easy on the outside to say, “What do you care what people think of you?” But even Yeshua/Jesus asked, “Who do people say I am?” The Psalms are positively drenched in lamentations about ruined reputations and those who trample a man’s honor without a second thought. We live in an era where not only are people angry, not only has their love grown cold, but social media has provided quite the voracious audience for their rantings and underhanded attacks.

And yet, in those lamentations over damaged honor, the theme always returns to, “I will trust God, who will make all things right.” When people slander another person (especially a brother or sister) wrongly, the slander does land squarely on God, and we have to remember that, so that we don’t do it in return. Depending on the person involved, God may have to handle most of or the entire situation – because there are those within the Body who attack without conscience or remorse, and listeners who love to live vicariously through their cruelty while pretending to be above it all. The only thing we can generally do is to try and manipulate them into feeling bad about it – which is a fool’s errand.

I know it is hard, guys, but stay out of the mud. Stay clean. It wasn’t so long ago that I had someone approach me privately who had believed years worth of lies about me – they came to me apologizing because those years of watching me had proven the charges to be without merit. God does take care of us, but we make that job nigh impossible if we are covered in mud that we willingly descended into. It may not seem like much to have one apology when hundreds, thousands, ten thousands or millions believe the lies – but from the standpoint of the Kingdom, waiting for vindication means that God has less of a mess to clean up.

We have to trust God, and His plans for His Kingdom, more than we love our immediate reputation. Sometimes we have to go through a season of humbling and allow Him to kill our flesh, at the same time that He is preparing a fellow servant for severe discipline. Sometimes, like the Amorites, a person’s iniquity is not complete enough for them to be dealt with. I know how far I had to fall before I was willing to utterly bend the knee and accept the Lordship of God in my life – and that hasn’t been just a one-time thing.

Some brothers and sisters are in such an ugly place that they really have to sink into deep trespasses against their fellow servants before they can be broken and used by God. Sometimes they have what looks like a lot of fruit, but it will never ripen, or if it does, it will be the wrong sort of fruit. That is God’s domain because only He can see the truth of it.

Our job is to be in constant prayer so that we will know when to be silent, and when it serves to Kingdom (and not just our pride) to speak out in our own defense.

4/18/18

Crucifying our Reputation and Grievances

God has really been teaching me deep things about His Kingdom at night and I am so ashamed of how we behave towards one another – grieved at how much damage it does to the Kingdom and the witness of our King. Not only in what we say and think about one another based on this or that doctrine or whatever, but also how mindlessly we retaliate when wronged (or when we feel wronged), only thinking about ourselves and not about what effect it will have on the Kingdom. And everything that adversely affects the Kingdom has a cost in real people’s lives.

What is my life, or my reputation, compared to furthering the Kingdom? Why do any of us feel like we must have justice NOW, or God has failed us? We were told to expect persecution, even (and sometimes especially) from brothers and sisters in the faith. We were warned – it was part of the price tag of our redemption, but we want easy lives PLUS we expect to inherit the world to come, as though there is no more evil in the world, either out there or at work in our own flesh and the flesh of everyone around us.

We are not seeking first the Kingdom if we are more concerned about our immediate comfort than we are about how our actions will impact His Kingdom. His Kingdom is our salvation, but now that we have it, are we unconcerned with those who don’t? Everything we do either grows the Kingdom or caused stumbling blocks. Growing the Kingdom costs us, a lot. But that’s the greater works we were called to do – not raising the dead and working miracles, but becoming what NT Wright calls “Passover people” – people who live and breathe in order to prosper and champion God’s works in the world. We are called to the radical works that defy evil through love and good fruit, not to the worldly works that are simply dressed up with the Bible but use the same tactics as the devil. We cannot bite, devour, and destroy one another and claim it is done in the Name of God and in the service of His Kingdom. As Paul told the Corinthians, isn’t it better to be defrauded by a brother than to bring the shame of it before the entire world? Social media has made every little battle the business of the whole world, to our shame. To God’s shame.

When two believers go at it publicly, it is a shame to the Kingdom. When one believer attacks another, it is a shame to the Kingdom – but the one attacked has a choice to make. Does that person trust God to deal with His own wayward servant or do they retaliate and cause a larger scene? Tell me, if it was your children in the grocery store, which would you choose? Your response would be to tell them to stop, that you would deal with it, and then later, as and when appropriate based on ages, and maturity and such, you would. You wouldn’t let it slide, but parenting is complex. Just try being God…we owe it to Him to wait upon Him and not make our grievances public except in extreme cases, and only then with prayerful caution, in fear and trembling and not as a knee-jerk reaction.

People have been asking me about the books I have been reading lately, and these two have been impacting my prayer life immeasurably, both by Richard J Foster, a Quaker theologian:

Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home

Celebration of Discipline.

Both books contained a lot of what I have always done naturally, but there were some methods of prayer that I was unfamiliar with that are reaping big rewards.



Dwelling in the Ohel Moed: Bearing or Blaspheming the Image of God

I have been spending much time meditating upon Psalm 15 – probably the most hard-hitting and challenging of the short Psalms as far as really laying out what it means to (or not to) represent God’s character. This Psalm delves not only into the Torah Laws concerning the pervasive theme of righteousness and justice, which is characterized by doing right to our neighbors in concrete ways and especially to the “least of these”, but also into Temple cosmology, the concept of the Tabernacle/Temple as being the place where Heaven and Earth meet.

 

1  O LORD, who shall sojourn in your tent?
Who shall dwell on your holy hill?

Let’s look at this first verse – although one might be tempted to assume that the word for tent here is sukkah, it is actually ohel – a very important word in Tabernacle studies. The ohel moed was the tent that Moses first set up outside the camp of the Israelites while the actual Tabernacle was being built. After the incident with the golden calf in Exodus 32, God was not willing to dwell in the midst of the people because they had corrupted themselves. Starting in Exodus 25 and through 31, God had already given detailed instructions for the construction of a mobile Tabernacle as His dwelling place as well as instructions detailing how the Priests and Levites would minister on God’s and the people’s behalf and care for the portable shrine. Building the Tabernacle, however, was not an overnight job and the Israelites had seriously defiled themselves through idolatry. So Moses set up a tent outside the camp and would go inside whenever he needed to talk face to face with God. This ohel, then, became the meeting place, the place where heaven and earth came together and God would meet with the representative of His people. When you see Temple language in the Bible about God’s throne being in Heaven and His footstool on Earth, that was the picture of the joining together of God’s Kingdom and the realm of men. Heaven and Earth came together in the person of God Himself, as evidenced by the cloud of smoke by day and the column of fire at night first present in the Exodus, then at Sinai, the Ohel Moed, the Tabernacle itself, Solomon’s Temple (but not the second Temple, which never was visited by the pillar of cloud and fire) and finally in the person of Yeshua/Jesus. Each of these marks a milestone towards the restoration of what existed in Eden, where the Kingdom of Heaven existed on earth and was inhabited by two perfect image-bearers who were entrusted with the divine mandate to rule and reign as God’s faithful representatives – expanding Eden and God’s just and righteous rulership to the ends of the earth.

So, this verse is speaking figuratively of the tent of God, the ohel moed, where Moses and Joshua alone were found worthy of sojourning. We see that Joshua (rendered Yeshua commonly in the first century) stayed there full time (Ex 33:11), whereas Moses would visit when He had a question or when summoned.

The holy hill itself is Mount Moriah, the site of Solomon’s Temple which David received the plans for, by the Hand of the Spirit, in writing, in I Chronicles 28:19.

So really, the question here is – who is up to the standard set by Moses and Joshua, who sojourned in the ohel moed? It is not a flippant question, or some pie-in-the-sky goal, it is a serious question of who is bearing God’s image. When Yeshua died on the cross, defeating and shaming the powers of sin and death, He inaugurated the New Creation existence that we now partake of, bought by His blood. Although we cannot duplicate the absolute perfection that is Messiah, there is no reason why we cannot endeavor to rise to the level of Moses and Joshua, who were constantly in the presence of God and who were amazing image-bearing examples. Not perfect, but pretty darned awesome. As we also have access to the Spirit through the indwelling, we have a leg up on the Israelites who could only look from afar as they kept God’s holy Laws. It is our privilege and obligation to not only keep His commands on the outside, but to also be transformed on the inside into people who desire to live by them and, frankly, can’t imagine wanting to violate one (I am not there yet personally).

2  He who walks blamelessly and does what is right
and speaks truth in his heart;

A few people in Scripture are described as blameless – which doesn’t mean that they never did anything wrong. It does mean that when they did transgress, that they owned it and repented of it – which is exactly what it means to “speak truth in” one’s heart. I am sure you’ve done what I am about to describe: You do or say something really wretched, and just as your conscience begins to call your judgment into question, your mind (the ancients believed that brains were merely skull wadding and that one did all their thinking with their heart, until about 500 BCE) begins to rewrite the scenario. “Oh Tyler, you weren’t really being a jerk, don’t be so hard on yourself, you were simply speaking the truth in love!” No, I wasn’t, but the thoughts come in so quickly that it was always easy to mistake them for the leading of the Holy Spirit instead of for what they are – the pathetic and enabling excuses of my flesh. Our flesh doesn’t like to see or acknowledge it’s true reflection. It wants to masquerade as blameless while not wanting to walk that way.

3  who does not slander with his tongue
and does no evil to his neighbor,
nor takes up a reproach against his friend;

Slander. Slander is the national social media pastime. From posting fake news gossip stories (or even true stuff that is none of our business) about people we don’t even know to destroying the reputations of anyone who disagrees with us, we are a blaspheming society. The Greek word blasphemo isn’t solely related to speaking ill of God, but speaking slander, gossip, and evil of anyone. And in America, we have been deceived into thinking that blaspheming one another is a virtue under the auspices of our near-idolatrous worship of the first amendment. People ought to worry less about guns and a lot more about the people whose lives and livelihoods are daily destroyed by the viciousness of the tongue. There are social media and youtube ministries completely devoted to character assassination in the Name of God but according to the tactics of the devil. They are popular because we relish causing pain to others vicariously while foolishly thinking we will never face consequences for it.

We are to do no evil toward our neighbors, but as the Torah expert asked, “Who is my neighbor?” As Yeshua related the scandalous parable of the Good Samaritan, He made it crystal clear that “Who is my neighbor” is the wrong question. Torah Law, all of Scripture, commands that we be the neighbor – regardless of what everyone else is doing. In fact, that line in verse three could be shortened, given our divine mandate, to “and does no evil.” If we are bearing the image of God, we will do evil to no man because we will be every man’s neighbor. Let them do evil, and let us abstain from it entirely. No excuses, just don’t do it.

I like how the Tree of Life Version renders the next bit “and does not disgrace his friend.” It is easier to understand. A friend is someone who does us no harm, and therefore we have no excuse for ever doing harm to them. In the honor/shame context within which this Psalm was written (the entire cannon, actually), disgracing someone was a terrible crime. Reputation lost was not easily, or sometimes ever, regained. One was not to gain reputation in such a way that their friend lost reputation as a result. We see this often in the world of social media, however, one person will wage a PR battle against someone who has done them no harm, over small disagreements that take on the illusion of being bigger than the Cross.  But as with the entirety of verse 3, such a person should not consider himself up to the standard of Moses and Joshua, who were privileged to sojourn with God in His tent.

4  in whose eyes a vile person is despised,
but who honors those who fear the LORD;
who swears to his own hurt and does not change;

A vile person isn’t merely annoying, or holding to different doctrinal opinions, or teaching something we don’t like. A vile person is someone who revels in the works of the flesh and scorns the fruit of the Spirit. The word translated as vile is nimas, and it is the word used to describe the rejected and murderous King Saul – a man who slaughtered innocent priests for giving comfort to David, who tried to kill David out of envy, who murdered the Gibeonites just because of foolishly misdirected zeal despite the Covenant made by Joshua and Caleb, and who broke his word and regarded his own oaths as nothing.

In fact, the rest of verse 4 details some of Saul’s crimes. Chief among them was that he did not honor those who feared God. He slaughtered the priests! He thought he had a good reason, but we are not to kill those who fear God but instead honor them. Even when we disagree with them – to not honor those who fear God is to be vile and despised. And just in case you missed it, “fearing God” is not the same as understanding everything about what should and should not be eaten or celebrated, or agreeing on doctrinal issues, or having the “correct” pronunciation of the Name, or keeping the “right” calendar. All that becomes an idolatrous fascination with knowledge really quick – resembling more of a gnostic cult than a God-fearing community.

Saul also repeatedly made oaths that he would later turn his back on – starting with the promise of his eldest daughter to David, and culminating with repeated promises to stop hunting David down. Saul was a treacherous dog, the anti-David, a picture of the anti-Messiah. We must represent a God who keeps His promises by always keeping ours. If He could give His One Unique Son in order to set the world right, as promised, then we can keep our word without grumbling.

5  who does not put out his money at interest
and does not take a bribe against the innocent.

We are not to profit off of another man’s hardship. That was the whole point of refusing to charge interest on a loan made to our own brothers and sisters.

Taking a bribe against the innocent – this one goes a lot deeper. Very few people in this day and age are judges, as we live in an entirely different culture, but again, it ties back into usury – charging interest against the needy. We are not to profit at the expense of a brother who has come into hard times or to the detriment of someone who has not sinned. There are a lot of things that people do that we may not like, but our not liking them does not make those things sin. We don’t get to lie about people or things just to discredit them, or because we want people to listen to or agree with us instead. We must not pervert either truth or justice through lies. Say I have a tiny little ministry, and I make tiny little videos that hardly anyone watches (hey wait a minute, that’s actually true lol), but I am angry at someone and so I decide to make a video slamming them to the mat (I may even do it without naming them but describing them to a T). Well, I can guarantee that I will get a lot of views, likes, and shares, and maybe even some donations. I have seen people do it too often. Those views are like a drug. The “likes” are a very potent argument for doing it again – and the shares mean a larger audience where more people are listening to ME and hating my enemies. Emboldened and rewarded through social media approval, I decide to make another such video against someone or something that makes me angry. More views and more likes ensue  as the sharks smell blood and circle. Pretty soon, I am venting every little petty grievance in front of an audience growing larger and larger. Have I not fallen into the trap of taking bribes against the innocent? Am I not gaining something in exchange for tearing another person down? We are to be above board and never profit from benefitting at someone else’s expense. It is the same as usury and bribery.

He who does (not do) these things shall never be moved.

I don’t know about you, but I hate how easily moved I am when I am irritated. It is my gauge of immaturity, my distance from those who were able to sojourn safely in the tent of God. I want to be able to dwell, to sojourn, without apologies and without the need for repentance. I want to represent His character the way Moses and Joshua (usually) did – because that is what I was made and saved for. I wasn’t saved so I could go to heaven when I die, but to occupy and change things here, starting with my own life and then increasingly pouring the love of God into the world around me.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal 2:20)

We died in Christ on that Cross, so that we could become those New Creation people who could live by faith in the Son of God – so He could do His works through us, so we could do greater things than He did (taking the Gospel not just to the Holy Land but to the ends of the earth – certainly the greatest of all works). We died in Christ so that we could become tent-dwelling sojourners, as we were always intended to be.

 

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2016). (Ps 15:1–5). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.



Social Media Musings March 20-27 2018

3/20/18

I am not a fan of memory verses.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a big believer in memorizing Scripture, but verses out of context can be worse than nothing at all – because out of context they can seem to mean the exact opposite of what they actually mean.

Let’s look at the oft-quoted “I am the Lord, there is no Savior except me.” It pops up a lot throughout the Tanach/Old Testament and is a favorite among those trying to get people to deny Yeshua/Jesus as Messiah. Because we are a religious society trained to take verses, by themselves, at face value, and because most folks do not read Scripture end to end, over and over again – some people don’t understand what it means and are led away to their own destruction.

There has never been any Savior except God, obviously, but how does He save? Well, usually when there is a verse like that, it is being used as a slap in the face of adulterous Israel or Judah who is paying some foreign nation to come to their aid militarily. God says to them, “Hey! Remember Me? I am your Savior! Not them! They can’t save you!” As they would strip the Temple treasuries to pay for foreign chariots and soldiers – well, we can all see how ridiculous it was, and what lack of faith it represented, Without turning to God, there can be no salvation at all, not through anyone. God was repeatedly having to remind Israel of that fact. They weren’t going to win a battle simply because they were paying off Assyria or Egypt to protect them.

How does He save? Well, by Joseph’s own words, God sent Joseph ahead to Israel to be a savior during the time of famine. During the Exodus, He did great works through Moses and Aaron – He saved the Nation through them and worked miracles through them. During the time of the Judges, he sent Judges to save Israel from their enemies. Throughout Israel and Judah’s history, He saved them through angel armies, through natural events like rainfall, through this and through that. In these last days, He has saved us through His one unique Son.

But, out of context, as a mantra or a memory verse, not taking the whole of Scripture into context or how God chooses to save time and again – it looks like Yeshua cannot be the Savior, only God can. Well, as you can see – that’s not the Scriptural view. We see HOW God CHOOSES to save.

Truly, we have no Savior but God – but though He is the author of our salvation, He sends saviors and, finally, a Savior to do His saving. Never allow anyone to confuse you based on any verse, and especially if you are not extremely well-versed in the Bible from beginning to end. If you have tasted salvation, then you know it is real. As God told me on the night I came come to denying Yeshua, “What will you have to CHOOSE to FORGET in order to deny Me?” This is why we are commanded, over and over again, to remember and recount His deeds. Write down your testimony – read it often! Do not forget your first love, how you came to salvation, how real it is. The changes worked by God through His Spirit because of faith in the Son, and not just by you through willpower. Remember what evils you have been delivered of – and be humble. You didn’t accomplish that by yourself. Do not deny so great a salvation. If you have trouble remembering what you knew so well at first, ask the Spirit for wisdom.

But don’t allow people to come in and take you as one of their trophies. And I am going to say this very plainly – it is through Christianity, because of faith in Yeshua, and not because of Moses, that a world once utterly dominated by paganism and abject cruelty is now a more righteous, just, and compassionate world. Yes, there are still problems – but crimes once commonplace and legal are now unthinkable. Why? Because the Cross changes everything it touches, including the unbelieving world – where even atheists now care for the poor and oppressed. In the first century, no one cared for anyone except their own limited clan. Yeshua changed that – not Moses, and certainly not some sort of godless social evolution. That’s the proof of the New Creation inaugurated at the Cross. When we take the long view of history, the change is evident. All glory to God, through His Son Yeshua.

3/24/18

What was Yeshua/Jesus saying no to when tempted?

I am nearing the end of Watchman Nee’s The Normal Christian Life – haven’t been writing much about it because it is quite complex and I have not been up to the task, but this morning I am making an exception. Honestly, I haven’t agreed with him on everything, and some of it irked me, and then after sitting on it a few days, or more, I started to see where he was right, or at least more right than I gave him credit for. That’s the stuff I am still mulling over and can’t write about yet. But this morning I wanted to write about something I read last night:

“For even with all these experiences, we are still unsafe for him to use until this further thing is effected in us (God’s working out of our salvation at the deepest level of the soul). How many of God’s servants are used by him, as we say in China, to build twelve feet of wall, only, when they have done so, to undo it all themselves by pulling down fifteen feet! We are used in a sense, but at the same time we destroy our own work, and sometimes that of others also, because of there being something undealt with on the Cross.”

I am a firm believer that God only gives us the level of ministry we are mature enough to handle at that time. When I see ministers, and people in general, fall into gross sin (which Scripture, time and again, equates with sex, greed, and slander) or tearing people down instead of building up Messiah/Christ and His body, I know they either reached for more than they could handle, or took more than they should have when tempted.

Years ago, there was a ministry ran by a bunch of people who were way too new to minister. There was a lot of zeal there, but no depth because there just couldn’t be. I was asked multiple times to come on board and God never even gave me a chance to pray about it – one of those “smacked across the head with the holy 2×4 of discipline” moments. It appealed to my ego to be asked, but once I thought about it, I knew I lacked the skills for that type of leadership – and I still do. The offer for this or that has come again and again many times over the years and my answer is always no. I have literally watched ministry, out of season, destroy and drive people crazy – including two of the people who initially asked me to join with them. Ego takes over, people get drunk with the power that naturally comes from being listened to and agreed with and egged on. Having an audience has a way of bringing out the worst of our demons before we are capable of conquering them. Remember when Joshua and the children of Israel went into the Promised Land? God told them He would not drive out all their enemies at once because, if He did, the wild animals would be too numerous for them. He does that with our dysfunction too. Little by little, year by year, He heals and equips us. We must be humble like little children and wait.

Anyway, social media has become religiously toxic for this very reason – people are tempted with an audience that they may not have the ability to cope with, and they do not yet have any good fruit to represent God’s character adequately. They may just have a lot of charisma, which is an outworking of the flesh and very dangerous when left unharnessed and unbroken. The result is that they go the easy route – they rant and rave, they get controlling and insulting, they make mountains out of molehills, they slander and live in a state of offense, or they may just destroy their “competitors” behind the scenes. They lack the proper level of depth in that season of their lives and so they cannot step back and re-evaluate when challenged, they attack character instead of admitting their own faults, and they take disagreements as an affront against God Himself. As Watchman Nee wisely pointed out, they tear down whatever they have built, as well as the building of others.

I was watching an interaction the other day – it involved someone who I have been watching for years who has made a ministry out of publicly disagreeing with people, sometimes honestly and sometimes not, and I couldn’t help but think that this person is wasting what gifts they have (which are considerable) in an attempt to gain a bigger audience. It makes me sad, not only because of their wasted potential but also because they are ruining the perfectly valid work of others in an attempt to be more than they are honestly ready to be. Slow and steady may not win the race with a jackrabbit in real life, but we aren’t called to race with rabbits. We are called to bear the image of God’s character in this world. That takes more than spewing Bible verses, a lot more. Even the enemy can quote Scripture – as we saw in the Temptation in the wilderness.

And that was the point I wanted to come to. Each of Yeshua’s/Jesus’s temptations involved proving himself to be the Messiah NOW, to be the ruler of the kingdoms of the earth NOW, to be acknowledged NOW – to not have to go through any sort of waiting period, and especially not persecution and crucifixion. It is the greatest temptation of ministry, to be big before we are very small – to imagine we are big when it is God who either is or is not big within us. For that matter, it is a terrible temptation to see a “big ministry” as more important than a “small ministry.” I speak of big and small in terms of worldly standards here, and not according to how things look in God’s eyes,

All this is to say – resist the temptation to grab for more than you have been given. Allow God, and not men, to give you what He knows you are ready to handle. Do not desire fame, and especially do not crave influence beyond your ability to represent God’s character to a lost and dying world. When ministers fall, and when they fail and lack the integrity to fall back and admit error, it does such damage to others. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. We should heed the warning against becoming stumbling blocks – and a hateful experience with someone who claims to be God’s representative is the biggest stumbling block of all. Better to be a bit off on your doctrine than to butcher His character for the world to see. We should constantly and genuinely be asking for those refining fires, and then we must submit to them and not presume that the devil was the one turning up the heat.

There are more ways to be great in the kingdom without fame, and without an audience, than there are ways to be great through fame and influence. Yeshua knew that – He was even constantly telling people not to blab about what He had done but to give credit to the Father. Fame followed Him, and killed Him and thank God He had the maturity to handle it. Thank God He had the maturity to deal with the nitpicking of those within the leadership who wanted to tear down His wall, while mistakenly believing that they were building their own.

Tearing you down does not build me up.

Matt 23:12 Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Don’t reach for anything – except greater refinement. When you get that right, you will be handed greater responsibility, and then it won’t so easily destroy you and others.

3/25/18

Expectations of suffering

So much of our bad fruit, the works of the flesh, is rooted in a lack of faith. We really don’t believe in the world to come where everything will be okay, our tears will be wiped away, that everything we have done here will be worth it. We get sidetracked, panicked even, because we are focused on getting what we want, what we feel we deserve, and receiving justice. We long for the upper hand in this life, but we weren’t promised that – serving Messiah often means that, in this world, we have to revel in being on the bottom rung, being wronged, being slandered, etc…

When I see people going wrong, it is because their flesh and souls are kicking against that. Satan tempted Yeshua into having the upper hand “now” – and it is a terrible form of temptation. We resent the friction of this life, and we often feel that we (like the older brother of the prodigal) deserve better for “getting it right.”

Yeshua, our Master, showed us that things don’t work that way. He is our model, our tavnit, our blueprint. Good fruit comes when we stop being offended that we suffer, when we stop figuring that we deserve better. That’s a snare of the enemy – we are so concerned about being treated well that we can’t be used effectively. So concerned with having everything our way that we don’t see His way in the midst of it.

That’s where the works of the flesh originate – envy, jealousy, slander, divisions, arguments, outbursts of anger, gossip, greed, and the like.

We figure that we deserve X… and that makes us worldly – and X isn’t just stuff. X can be control, or a receptive audience. or credibility that we haven’t earned, or whatever.

Thank God that none of us are truly receiving what we deserve.

3/26/18

“If Caesar and the dark powers that stood behind him were to be confronted with the “good news” that there was “another king, Jesus,” the community that was living by that message had to be united. This would of course be a differentiated unity (“God’s wisdom in all its rich variety”; and we may compare the vivid lists of ministries in I Cor 12 and Eph 4). But if it was all differentiation and no unity, Caesar need to take no notice; they were just a few more peculiar eastern cults come to town.” – NT Wright, Paul: A Biography, pg 324

The early church (the first three centuries) accomplished what it did because of unity – unity that they needed to have in a hostile world. They built the first hospitals and orphanages, and the first societies for the relief of the poor. Women soon learned that they were safer under the umbrella of Christianity than living as pagans, and the same can be said of children (especially infants), the poor, ethnic minorities, and slaves. They could accomplish it because they saw themselves as a united front, working for the cause of King Yeshua/Jesus, right under the nose of Rome. Unlike the zealot party in Jerusalem, they did not operate through violent revolution, but instead through the administration of love and good works. They honored those whom Roman society swept to the side, and they served the least of these. Within a few hundred years, Christianity had almost completely supplanted paganism in the Empire – not through syncretism, which history proves didn’t actually happen until closer to the end of the first millennium, but through carrying their crosses in everyday life. Like leaven mixed into three measures of flour, the Kingdom of Heaven was violently clashing with the kingdoms of the earth – through love instead of violence.

In a hostile world, that isn’t a one-person job but a many person job. They needed one another. The problem nowadays is that we are deceived into thinking that we don’t need anyone else, and that we can sit at home pontificating online to strangers (if anyone is even listening) and reading the Scriptures privately instead of doing the weightier matters alongside our brothers and sisters. I know the arguments – we want to be of one mind, but the problem is that we demand a one-mindedness where it is our mind that must be duplicated. No, what must be duplicated is a mind that believes first and foremost in “Christ, and Him crucified” and we have to learn to get over the discomfort of having folks disagree with us on other things.

Frankly, the biggest challenge in the Western church is a lack of real persecution – we have grown lukewarm to the point that we feel it is a sort of zeal to avoid other believers who simply disagree. That isn’t a spiritual zeal, that’s just conveniently avoiding anyone who disagrees with us, we have wrapped our self-centeredness, our desire to feel safe and comfortable, in a deceptive cloak of righteousness. The end result is nothing, zip, zilch, nada – we are getting nothing done. Oh sure, we have our own personal testimonies, but we can’t stand against the Caesars of our day because, instead of a united Body of Messiah, we look like a body caught in a bombing. pieces lying everywhere, separate and powerless.

In Brother Yun’s The Heavenly Man, he talked about when that happened to China. All of a sudden, groups and people who had once risked their lives for one another were splintered and suspicious and contemptuous of one another – not because of Messiah and Him crucified, but over this or that other thing. Make no mistake, everything, absolutely everything, is less important than our mutual belief that the Son of God was crucified, buried, and rose again. This week especially we should be mindful of it.

So we have disagreements on other things. They have to take a back seat. Heck, we can’t even influence people with whom we are unwilling to speak and meet with. Our government, our leadership, our culture is what it is because of us, and not in spite of us. We are too fractured to fight the good fight – and so instead we fight each other, and you know what our master said about a kingdom divided against itself. We cannot stand – we can’t stand each other and so we cannot stand against the enemy.

3/27/18

Accusers or Redeemers?

As per God’s laws, we ought to diligently search out a man’s vindication before we seek to believe the accusation. What kind of people are we? Heartless gossips or redeemed sinners? We ought to ask ourselves, are we more like the satan, accusing others endlessly before the throne (make no mistake, ALL accusations from the mouths of believers end up before the throne), or are we like our Lord, who refused to act even against Sodom before personally investigating the matter?

We are not wise enough to read a headline, and often even a full story, and know whether or not to believe the accusations. We do not have the discernment to know the truth without personal investigation – and how often we prove it!

And if we have sinned by posting an accusation, which is then brought into doubt or disproven, our responsibility as Passover people, who have been redeemed from the slavery of sin – is to apologize and retract. If we do not then do not be fooled, the accuser will have the right to accuse us, and the right to be heard when he does it.

This isn’t a game – we are playing with other people’s lives. We ought to fear God – or at least be grateful that He hates listening to accusations about us and love our neighbors in the same way. We ought to make Him look more like He is – merciful, and less like He is not – quick to accuse and judge.

We can tell more about ourselves from where our minds immediately go when faced with appearances and what we do with those thoughts, than from all our posted Bible verses and spiritual talk.



When Someone is in Error: Our Example in Priscilla, Aquila, and Apollos

I had a dream last night about the most precious saint, one trying to teach something on the internet, about the Bible, that she just didn’t understand. Her heart, however, was so right on and her fruit very good. Let me start from the beginning:

I was on social media going over my newsfeed when this sweet little mini-teaching came to my attention:

“Shrimp isn’t food! We can’t eat shrimp! But don’t worry, there is plenty of crab to go around and it’s even better.”

Somehow, in the dream, her tone and heart came across crystal clear in the presentation. Her name was foreign, I am betting African, very exotic and beautiful to my mind, but I couldn’t have reproduced it on paper if my life depended on it. I was about to click on her name so I could gently correct her in private before the internet vultures descended to call her names and humiliate her publicly when I clicked the wrong thing, or the screen refreshed all on its own, and *poof* her post was gone and I couldn’t find her. I sat there, just sick at heart about what was about to happen to this woman with the beautiful spirit. I woke up and went to prayer about it.

I knew this woman had received an incomplete teaching herself, obviously. She certainly wasn’t wrong on purpose. I wasn’t sure if she had just seen a meme with shrimp on it, saying it wasn’t food, and took it at face value as being the only outlawed crustacean now, or if someone had seen a pic of her on social media eating it and had laid into her and really didn’t teach her, or what. What I knew was that she didn’t have all of the information she needed for understanding, and certainly not the understanding to teach. We see it all the time on social media, right? Folks lambasting people about what they are doing wrong, but not really providing a complete teaching, or even trying to impart understanding. And we certainly don’t see the social media critics sticking around to make sure people are equipped to go on with life after they receive a disembodied tidbit of information about this or that Torah Law. They are critics who go around looking to correct, not teachers looking to impart understanding. She knew that shrimp was not food. She believed it with her whole heart. She obviously didn’t even know exactly why it isn’t something that the Bible would call food. Perhaps she didn’t even understand that when the NT says the word food, that it is in an OT context, that the Bible painstakingly defines the word food, that all food has always been clean (despite the belief of the Pharisees that one could defile perfectly good food with unwashed hands), and that no additions or subtractions were made by Yeshua/Jesus in what qualifies as food, once the context of the first-century controversies is taken into account. This delightful lady wanted to obey God, n’est-ce pas? Of course! Someone convicted her of eating shrimp and she went up to the mountaintop to lovingly inform others – and make no mistake, her delivery was loving. God can do much with such a lovely heart as hers. I honestly felt very maternal feelings for her, she was so genuine.

But I lost track of her! She was about to reap a potential harvest of public correction, humiliation, name-calling, and – worst of all – she didn’t know enough to answer questions she would get from people who did not agree. Of all the things I ever learned in Church that offends me the most, it was the idea that new believers should be out preaching before they have been properly equipped. It has resulted in many precious babes landing right in the mouths of wolves who destroyed them before they even had a chance to mature. Eagerness without the knowledge to back it up isn’t so much zeal as a recipe for disaster. We have a responsibility to instruct new saints to hang back in humility while they become strong enough to be suitable guides for others.

And what about the person who “taught” her or those who were undoubtedly about to hunt her down over the coming catastrophic crab crisis? What is the responsibility now that she has it wrong? What model is provided by the Scriptures? We find it in Acts 18:

24 Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures. 25 He had been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. 26 He began to speak boldly in the synagogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. (ESV)

(Just FYI, the image I used for the thumbnail is actually a marble floor from ancient Ephesus – perhaps our intrepid Bible heroes and heroine set foot upon those stones.)

“He knew only the baptism of John” – so his understanding, if anything, was merely incomplete. Like the lovely young lady in my dream. She obviously had the good fruit down, which requires the kind of knowledge that scholars cannot impart to anyone and has to instead be grown by the Holy Spirit, but her knowledge was incomplete. What did Priscilla and Aquila do? Did they interrupt the teaching, call him names, label him as a false teacher? After all, as Roman Jews, they had been recently expelled by Claudius from their home in the early 50’s and were probably in a bad mood. They knew the Scriptures and here was this young upstart with a pagan name, despite all his eloquence. He had something wrong, which obviously made him a heretic according to the by-laws of the First National Church of Facebook and its sister denomination, First Assemblies of Twitter. By those unwritten rules of conduct, they had every right to make a series of internet videos denouncing him as a moron and an idiot, calling his motivations and integrity into question, and telling everyone to listen to them instead. But what did they actually do?

“They took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately.” Wow, so little drama. Taking him aside meant two things – they recognized the need not only to instruct, but also to protect his honor among those whom he had been teaching. Also, they saw that his lack of knowledge was not a character flaw – someone had relayed to him an incomplete picture, and probably because they themselves had been given an incomplete understanding. It happens. At its core, this story is about treating each other like brothers and sisters, about those who actually have a MORE COMPLETE understanding stepping in to gently instruct those whose understanding is LESS COMPLETE. This is not what happens on social media, where most correction is public, brutal, and given by those who actually know very little yet look for every opportunity to look like experts by being the sheriff of that one bit of information. On social media, people treat an incomplete understanding as though it is a character flaw! As though knowledge is what we worship, instead of a relational God who is teaching and enabling us to be His image-bearers, and was even willing to send His one unique Son to die on the Cross to make it happen.

Priscilla and Aquila were Jewish believers – they grew up with the milk of Torah and evidently had the maturity to stomach the meat of the weightier matters as well. They were mature believers, eminently qualified to teach both from the standpoint of knowledge and maturity of fruit. They modeled for us the proper way to correct – not tearing one another down publicly over genuine lapses in understanding, but guarding the reputation of the one being corrected, instructing in such a way as to not become stumbling blocks to a brother whom God has called, and with the goal of having their brother be able to be more, and not less, able to minister afterward. If they had handled the situation in our modern social media way, the incident would have resulted in an angry schism within the crowd, some following after Apollos and some going after Priscilla and Aquila. Apollos, by the ancient ways of honor and shame culture, would have had to fire back insults in order to undermine their character, in an attempt to get his standing before the crowd back. Instead of building God’s Kingdom together, they would have divided it into two separate camps. We see people trying to do this very thing in I Cor 1 – but Apollos, Peter, and Paul were having none of it!

So, when we see someone in error, we have to make sure that we (1) have enough knowledge to correct, and that means we have done the hard study ourselves and haven’t just watched youtube videos or consulted Rabbi Google or Pastor Yahoo, (2) take the person aside privately and gently to better instruct them, and (3) make sure that we guard their honor jealously so that we do not create schizms or make it so that no one will want to listen to them in the areas where they are right. Doing this wrong, and unbiblically according to the New Creation model, results in damage to the Kingdom, not a strengthening of it. In the beatitudes, Yeshua preached a radical new option to the old honor/shame paradigm – one that made gentleness, mercy, peacefulness, and meekness the traits worthy of honor, as opposed to the ruthlessness required by the public battles for honor practiced by the Pharisees, Scribes, Sadducees, and the rest of the ancient world.

I am reminded that Yeshua/Jesus preached that a good shepherd will leave the ninety-nine in order to go after the one and bring it home. I find it very telling that the good shepherd does not bring the ninety-nine along as an audience in order to correct that lost one publicly. If the good shepherd is that solicitous of the needs and dignity of one lost one, how much more so should we respect a brother or sister who is simply wrong about something?