Episode 181: Privilege–what it is, isn’t, and why it matters

When I teach the kids, they call me Miss Tyler, but today I am Auntie Tyler. Privilege is a concept that appears all over the Bible and in every sort of literature within it. Privilege is incredibly important within the Biblical narrative–but why? I want to peel back a lot of the rhetoric, talking points, and misinformation out there to take a hard look at how Christians should view privilege and what it should mean in the life of the Body of Christ.

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So, this morning we are going to do something very different than usual. We’re going to talk about the sociological reality of privilege and what it is, what It isn’t and why it matters—especially to the church because we find it mentioned all over the Bible and in all types of Biblical literature from the historical narrative to poetry, and wisdom sayings to apocalypse. Privilege is a word that tends to provoke strong reactions from white people, like me, even when we readily acknowledge the ways in which we ourselves don’t have it as good as other people do for this or that reason. Personally, I believe the topic has been poisoned by those who want to make it look like the argument of privilege is saying things that it absolutely is not saying—that every single white person has it better than every single person of color (POC) in this country or that if you are white then you haven’t struggled. The truth is that absolutely no one is saying that even though there are talking points out there that have been designed to provoke fear and defensiveness in white people. But the Bible talks about privilege.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have years’ worth of blogs at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on Amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids. (affiliate link) I also have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for adults and kids. You can find the links for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com, and transcripts for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

Let’s look at the UK. It shouldn’t even be remotely controversial to say that, if you are a member of the royal family or the nobility then you have natural privileges and perks that average everyday folks do not have. You are more likely going to attend Eton and Oxford than public schools. You will have top-notch health care and access to whatever it is that will assist you in developing your natural talents. You won’t worry about money as long as you are responsible with it because you have inherited wealth from your ancestors, as well as titles—giving you standing that you did nothing to earn. In fact, you didn’t earn anything you were born to possess or benefit from. No one does, rich or poor. We would all agree that it is a privilege to not have to deal with certain hurdles that others have to try to jump over.

Let’s look at Israel, and I understand this is a sensitive topic right now but who on earth would choose to be born behind the barriers in Gaza or the West Bank? Any takers? Of course not—there is no one who would not rather be born to a Jewish family in Jerusalem instead. Who would make the conscious choice of being born a woman in Iran or Afghanistan now that the Taliban has regained control of the country? Who would choose to be born in a war zone, or in an apartheid state on the side of those being oppressed? I am very grateful to be living in America and to be white because it means that I didn’t struggle in the ways that many of my friends of color have struggled. I am grateful that I wasn’t born into poverty in Mexico or South America, whose governments are either in cahoots with, controlled by, or in a losing battle with powerful drug cartels. I am grateful I have never had cause to live in mortal fear of what will happen to my sons who, despite being biracial, easily pass as white. There are hurdles I have never had to jump because I am who I am and I am sure you can say the same thing. The Bible flatly tells the have’s not to despise the have not’s and to not ignore them or mock them. When we deny the privilege all around us, we are despising and mocking those who suffer the consequences of the situations they were born into.

And there are other kinds of privilege. Generational wealth and education within the middle class. Although slavery was made illegal in the 1860’s, various forms of it lingered long afterward and even to the present day. Even poor whites, during antebellum days, benefitted and profited from cheaper cotton and tobacco than they would have if the workers were fairly paid and were free to seek employment elsewhere or were educated. My ancestors didn’t own slaves, as far as I know, but they did enjoy the benefits of what was being perpetrated against enslaved people. At the end of the Civil War, my family retained what they had before the war, while freed blacks were let loose with absolutely nothing. No land. No money. No education. No open arms waiting to embrace them anywhere. It is only within recent memory that the black community in America has been able to begin generating generational wealth–the ability to send off their children with a fair start in life educationally and financially and for the children to someday inherit and build upon what they had growing up. People who are firmly middle-class often fail to see what an advantage it is to have things provided for them because their parents had things provided for them. People who are upper middle class and rich are often completely oblivious to it. But the Bible isn’t. And the prophets sure weren’t.

The way your family life is set up constitutes an area where advantage and disadvantage can be quite obvious. No one would deny that growing up in a loving, non-abusive, supportive Christian two-parent family free from addiction—regardless of socio-economic conditions—gives young people a huge leg up psychologically over those who do not have it. Attending a school where the teachers truly care and support their students makes a world of difference. Never having lived in foster care, being raised by relatives while parents are incarcerated, dead, or just gone remove a lot of hurdles that real kids out there face. Foster kids are often put out onto the street when they hit their 18th birthday; when the support money stops coming in, and they end up at men’s shelters or on the streets.

Some privileges are seemingly random—physical beauty, musical or athletic ability, intelligence, health, and being able-bodied. All of these contribute to a person’s chance of success—including color and gender. Nothing I have mentioned so far has anything to do with merit or virtue. They are very much what we could call “accidents of birth.” No one is born deserving or not deserving any of these. They just are what they are. I would be a ridiculous fool to say that it isn’t a privilege to be very intelligent, white, and to have come from a family that was mid to upper-middle class by the time I graduated from High School. My parents paid for college—another privilege. My husband has those same privileges. We never had to worry about how to pay for college, and neither did our kids. Neither of us earned that—even though we worked hard in school because there are people who worked even harder to had to work full-time or part-time or take out student loans to afford their tuition. They, through no fault of their own, had that hurdle that we didn’t even hardly know was there. Not only that, but we were able to attend more prestigious schools with better science and engineering programs.

Let me just stop right there. Do I feel guilty about that privilege? No, I don’t—that would be counterproductive and self-centered. But that isn’t the same thing as me not seeing the injustice of it and knowing that change needs to happen. I really like Star Trek because it represents a world where a lot of this inequity has been defeated. I mean, there will always be abuse and irresponsible parents, but I believe that a world where no one is hungry and every child has equal education and opportunities is in alignment with the trajectory of Scripture. That we should greatly desire it goes without saying. I had a dream back on September 4 that I want to share. I wrote this in the morning when I woke up but haven’t shared it until now:

Last night, I dreamed that I woke up one day as a black woman in America. I still had all my memories of being a white woman, and the voice I used while talking to others was the voice of a white woman but the reactions to it were very different. I saw neglect and disrespect. I saw black youth in what can only be called a pit of vipers–cobras specifically–and my demands that those in charge do something about them going unheard and not taken seriously. And I am talking big obvious cobras just under the sand. Then, suddenly, I was white again, and I yelled about it and people scrambled to deal with the cobras as though this was the first they had heard of them. I went from setting to setting like this with similar results.

It wasn’t a matter of attractiveness because the woman whose face I bore was younger and far more attractive (I would kill for her hair, lemme tell you). The face was far more professional looking, well groomed, you name it, but she wasn’t white.

For many years now, I have been asking God to really make the reality of “privilege” clear to me, and that did it. I was so frustrated. Being “white” on the inside, in the way I thought, acted, spoke, etc. had absolutely no effect on these people’s reactions to me compared to how they responded when my face and body reverted back to my own. It was like a switch flipped in their heads that I should be listened to, cared about, taken seriously, and even feared.

Not caring about cobras waiting to strike at kids who were black until someone white was there demanding action and help in getting rid of them? And that’s the point, isn’t it? The not caring. It’s worse than hatred, really. The pretending that things aren’t wrong when steps can be taken on behalf of kids, even.

It was strange; the cobras were actually yellow. I had no idea there were yellow cobras but I looked them up and there they were, Cape Cobras. Geez, they looked just exactly like the ones in my dream, venomous and highly aggressive. They live in South Africa. And white adults were just standing by, casually uncaring. To care would mean needing to do something because no one could ever, ever see something like that in real life and refuse to act if they had even an ounce of love for kids. We don’t want to compare ourselves to apartheid South Africa—but after my dream, I think that maybe we really need to reconsider if we are different enough from them to feel good about ourselves.

How can this be true in a country that calls itself a Christian nation?

And that brings me to another reality in life about privilege, one that I knew about but had normalized until my book designer David posted something about it. I hadn’t ever realized that it shouldn’t be normal for me to worry about being sexually assaulted if I am out walking at night. It isn’t something that men need to obsess over or even really think about. They might get beaten up and mugged, of course, that can happen to men or women, but they don’t lie in their beds at night thinking, “What if an intruder breaks in and rapes me?” I think about that. I have always thought about it. Imagine being a single woman. Oh sure, I have had to deal with my fair share of discrimination—having started my working life in the 90’s. And I have had to deal with dismissive comments no man would ever hear, regardless of color. But the worst treatment I have received as a woman has been in the Church.

It was in the second church I attended as an adult that the modern worship leader began to come on to me and harass me sexually. When I rebuffed his advances, he didn’t stop. When I went to church leadership, I was told that it must be nice to know that I’ve “still got it at my age.” I was 33, hardly geriatric. And the idea that any woman naturally loves that sort of attention from a married man with six kids? Ew. It creates a hostile worship environment. Before too long, when his wife found out, I was blamed and it was made known that I was unwelcome in that congregation. He was more valuable than I was. I was the problem, even though I had done my due diligence in reporting it. It was a Southern Baptist Church, and although it surprised me then, now it wouldn’t.

But that still paled in comparison to what began to happen when God called me to teach—even though I make no effort to teach men. Heck, I make no effort to teach anyone except by posting on my websites and social media pages. I am only on the radio because people came to me and asked me to do it and I have only spoken at conferences where I was asked to come and given authority to teach. And yet, even in minding my own business, I get gender-based hate mail from men who (instead of simply disagreeing with me) get ugly and pull verses out of context to tell me that I must remain quiet. Even at home, I guess, because that is where I teach from. The reason is because of my gender, and not my level of knowledge, intelligence, giftedness or calling. It’s something men never have to deal with. Likely, it is something they can’t even imagine—and any sort of discrimination we can’t even imagine represents a privilege in our lives.

In the outside world, in many ways, I am more privileged than a black man. But inside the evangelical churches (along with too many others) he would be privileged over me. Someone white might tell him to shut up, regardless of how good a preacher or teacher or leader he is, but it would only be based upon his color.

One of the ways I like to explain privilege is this—“who would you never, in a million years, want to trade places with?” For all that many Evangelical white men (certainly not all) complain about a war on men and specifically a war on white men, I don’t see any of them volunteering to be a black man and much less a black woman. And it is because they (and we) recognize that it is far better to be white in this country than black. This doesn’t mean that as long as you are white, you have it made because you absolutely do not. A white male can struggle terribly because of poverty, a lack of generational wealth and opportunity, poor education, disability, poor health, etc.

Privilege isn’t the same thing as having no struggles, it’s just an acknowledgment that the playing field isn’t equal. And that shouldn’t make any of us bristle. Nor should it make anyone feel guilty for whatever privileges they did have. We were born into an unjust system, but it doesn’t mean we have to ignore it or have a right to deny it. We need to pray and work for a better world. One of the things I hate to hear the most is that America is a great country because the best and the brightest can rise to the top. Yeah, they can, but not always and it isn’t inevitable. As a special needs mom, I am not satisfied with living in a society where we are okay with only the best and brightest being able to escape abominable circumstances but where everyone else is destined to continue to suffer and somehow it’s okay. America won’t be great until everyone escapes, and every child is fed and educated and safe. Maybe the worst thing I ever heard another believer say is, “Well, God knew that people would be born into those circumstances,” when I made the statement that it broke my heart how much more difficult it is to preach the Gospel to people who have never known anything except deprivation and fear and righteous anger at being sidelined. It isn’t okay with me. It shouldn’t be okay with any believer to allow it and ignore it and even institutionalize it or see it as inevitable. And if that makes me a liberal then what on earth is wrong with conservative Christians? I am simply siding with those with whom Messiah identified in Matthew 25 in the parable of the sheep and the goats.

Those of us with whatever measure of privilege we have, as believers, must always speak up on behalf of and assist those who do not.

Prayers for a Privileged People by Walter Brueggemann C. 2008 pp 87-8 (affiliate link)

A Prayer of Protest

Since our mothers and fathers cried out,

since you heard their cries and noticed,

since we left the brick production of Egypt,

since you foiled the production schedules of Pharaoh,

we have known your name,

we have sensed your passion,

we have treasured your vision of justice.

And now we turn to you again,

whose precious name we know.

We turn to you because there are

still impossible production schedules,

still exploitative systems,

still cries of pain at injustice,

still cheap labor that yields misery.

We turn to you in impatience and exasperation,

wondering, “How long?” before you answer

our pleading question,

hear our petition,

since you are not a labor boss and do not set wages.

We bid you, stir up those who can change things;

do your stirring in the jaded halls of government;

do your stirring in the cynical offices of the corporations;

do your stirring amid the voting public too anxious to care;

do your stirring in the church that thinks too much about

purity and not enough about wages.

Move, as you moved in ancient Egyptian days.

Move the waters and the flocks and the herds

toward new statutes and regulations,

new equity and good health care,

new dignity that cannot be given on the cheap.

We have known now long since,

that you reject cheap grace;

even as we now know that you reject cheap labor.

You, God of justice and dignity and equity,

keep the promises you bodied in Jesus,

that the poor may be first-class members of society,

that the needy may have good care and respect,

that the poor earth may rejoice in well-being,

that we may all come to Sabbath rest together,

the owner and the worker,

the leisure class and the labor class,

all at peace in dignity and justice,

not on the cheap, but good measure,

pressed down,

running over … forgiven.




Episode 170: Why Gender and Identity Confusion Are All YOUR Fault…and MINE Too.

Last summer, I did a series on my kids show about gender identity issues and I wrote this at that time to help adults understand how it is absolutely not the kids or just the liberal media who have created this problem—we’ve been just as bad and even worse as believers. How can that be? What can we do? This week we are going to explore just that. My series for kids can be found here. There is also an extensive book list on this topic below.

(My affiliate links for Amazon products are included in the post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)

If you can’t see the podcast link for this episode, click here.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have six years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids (affiliate link) and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

This week is really different and this episode is designed to dovetail with the series I did last summer with the kids. I designed it to help children deal with the modern crisis of gender confusion—without talking the slightest bit about sexuality because I don’t believe this has anything to do with sexuality. I believe it has to do with kids not being able to win no matter what they do, and not being permitted to be the unique people that God created them to be. Between worldly culture, and religious culture, we have really done a terrible disservice to children that has created problems that were worse than the ones we thought we were preventing.

Evangelical Christianity has been positively obsessed with creating “masculine” Christian men and “feminine” Christian women. But what does that even mean, and who decides, and based on what cultural time period and values, and what about people who were never born to meet those elusive standards? How are our kids reacting to these standards and how do these expectations damage and confuse them and drive them into thinking they aren’t really boys and girls but instead people who can’t measure up for this or that reason? Little boys are made from snips and snails and puppy dog tails, right? Not always right. Big boys don’t cry, but Jesus wept, and so did Jacob, Joseph, David and many others in the Biblical text. Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, except when they aren’t. Girls are supposed to be meek and submissive, not bring home any income that will threaten their husband’s fragile egos, and stay home and raise families based upon 1950’s upper and middle class white household standards that weren’t feasible for much of anyone even fifty years before, but what about those who never marry or can’t have children, and do not meet our culture’s standards of physical beauty? If we look back through recent and ancient history, what expectations of ours would we find to be worldly and culturally determined and which would actually be commanded and celebrated throughout Scripture? We will be covering this and a whole lot more today.

First things first. In the Bible, God never endorses any culture. The Bible, in fact, stands as a critique of human culture—past, present and future. That’s why it is useful. It didn’t tell Abraham that the ancient Near Eastern way of doing things was good. It didn’t tell the Israelites in Egypt that their culture was good. It didn’t tell the people at Sinai that they had it right. The Bible, from front to back, is the story of God rescuing us from not only our sins but our cultures—from the brutal ancient Near Eastern reality of the OT to the brutal Greco-Roman Hellenistic reality of the NT to the unique brutality of our modern times. Hellenized Judaism got slammed and so would American Christianity if we would spend a lot more time listening to what the Spirit has to say. In fact, the Bible never says, “Yes, you guys are perfectly just and absolutely doing it right.” The Bible can’t say that because we have always been and will always be creatures who are influenced by worldly standards of worth, beauty, justice, ethics, and morality. We can no more claim ourselves to be unaffected by the injustice of the world than by the pollutants in the air. We are all compromised, and we have even incorporated our culture into our religious observances, and we do that because we read our own cultural ideals into the text without even thinking about it or being aware of it. But perhaps the most damaging thing we have done is when we lift the cultural reality, the background scenery, of the Biblical world and set it up on a pedestal as an ideal for our lives in the here and now. Guess what? God was initiating a campaign to bring them out of that culture and into His, which is founded on the principles of justice and righteousness, love and goodness, grace, kindness and gentleness, and perhaps most importantly, self-control. We cannot be completely like Him when we are also clinging to the culture—no matter whose culture it is. Yahweh has reached out to us both through His instructions at Sinai and even more dramatically through the New Creation inaugurated at the Cross, not to enshrine the standards and culture of ancient societies but instead to set humanity on a trajectory of reform and freedom from participating in the evils of this world. Evils, I might add, that come in some really surprising forms.

In many ways, we have reformed. Slavery is almost unheard of within the Judeo-Christian world—despite being accepted as good and even God’s will into the 18th century by just about everyone who wasn’t enslaved. Women can now be educated in almost all Christian sects and have been freed from the tyranny of polygynous marriages that set them as rivals to their sisters in Christ and subjected them and their children to the divided attention and resources of their husbands—who enjoyed their undivided attention and partook of the undivided resources of many women. Women can now survive abandonment, as there is now respectable employment for us in the world. Children are no longer left exposed on hillsides to die as people walk by without noticing, even though we still have abortion and many of the social problems that lead women to make that choice. So much has changed but so much more needs changed. It is a better world than it once was, as any student of history can attest, but we still have a long way to go.

We get some things right, don’t get me wrong, but one of the things we have gotten very wrong is our very American idea about what is manly and what is womanly. Ideas that very much exclude men who are not naturally tall, muscular, or rugged looking. Ideas which exclude women whose facial features aren’t delicate enough or their bodies thin enough or curvaceous enough to conform to this decade’s idea of what makes a woman beautiful. Pastors give sermons talking about how men need to have a beautiful woman on their arm, one who is a model of social perfection. But social perfection differs widely from era to era and a woman’s/girl’s body is subjected to the fickleness of the worldly culture that tells men what to consider beautiful while they themselves must often deny whom Yahweh uniquely made them to be in order to measure up to the men on the covers of romance novels. We have created a tyrannical system where only a few can measure up—not to Biblical standards of beauty and gender-perfection (which are characterized not by looks but by fruit, virtue, and industriousness inside and outside of the home for both sexes) but to cultural norms. Christian men want a woman who looks good according to the culture, and women have been trained to want a man who is likewise culturally acceptable. Such is the tyranny of the worldliness of the church and such is the trap our children have fallen into—but they are increasingly realizing that it is futile and are responding in unhealthy ways.

Pastor Stewart Allen, in January of 2021, preached a sermon that became viral on the internet where he complained about wives letting themselves go and how men “need” a beautiful woman on their arm. It did not go unnoticed that he wasn’t thin, as he demanded of his wife, or attractive by modern standards, as he demanded of his wife, or even well dressed in the pulpit. Everything that came out of his mouth was worldly—and being cheered on by his audience. And he isn’t the only one saying these sorts of things—giving the message that men only need to be men but women have to meet cultural standards of beauty that few attain, not even with the help of airbrushing and computerized manipulation of their images. We live in a world where men may age but women must not. This is a message that is exalting our sons (as long as they are suitably masculine in their behavior, as defined by culture) and setting our daughters up either for failure or for vanity at a very early age. That culture does it, of course, is to be expected. That the church follows culture is criminal and vile. I do also find it strange that in terms of dealing with transgendered individuals, we say that a man and a woman are defined by their chromosomes and not by anything else, while saying the opposite when it comes to how men and women are required to behave and look. In that case, it isn’t enough to have that XY chromosome and to have male genitalia—because to be a Christian man you also have to go to lumberjack school and be capable of growing facial hair—or you aren’t really a man at all. It’s a no-win situation because we have become decidedly unbiblical and worldly in our expectations.

We weren’t always like this, obsessed with these ideas to the point of forcing Christian men to be uber-rugged in order to be acceptable as men of God. And we certainly didn’t get these ideas from the Bible, which says absolutely nothing about the ideal man in terms of appearance but instead focused on the heart and on the actions required of Kingdom humans, male and female alike. The problem came in when we decided we needed to look not only respectable in terms of our behavior, but also prosperous in terms of our appearance. Again, not biblical. Instead of standing out as counter-cultural and a refuge for the least of these and the poor and the outliers of society, we strive to look like the world in terms of their values—only, it is the 1950’s white middle and upper class world that never worked for anyone else and doesn’t represent the historical reality that both men and women have been breadwinners and that makeup and fancy hair were reserved for royalty and not for normal people because of the time and resources required to indulge in such luxuries. But now a woman isn’t deemed to be an acceptable wife or to look professional without looking like the royalty of ages past while men get away with a far, far lower standard.

What about the kids who don’t and can’t measure up to cultural standards (as opposed to Biblical standards)? Are we going to make our congregations into extensions of the hell so many of us endured in High School? Maybe some of you enjoyed the social life of High School but if you did then there’s a really good chance that you lack the perspective to appreciate what we adults are doing to our kids to try and get them to measure up to worldly standards before they ever even see a schoolroom. It’s nothing but peer pressure, and it is an insult to God and how He made individuals, not Barbie and Ken dolls.

God does not control us or commandeer us. God has never demanded we look a certain way or work out or wear elaborate outfits or makeup or spend a ton of money at the salon on our hair and nails. God stands as a witness against out materialistic and beauty-obsessed culture and not as a fan of it. Women aren’t even allowed to look like themselves if they want to appear professional, or if they want to keep a man—when he leaves, we get the speculation that we have let ourselves go instead of looking at the faithfulness and self-control of our husbands. And self-control, by the way, in Greco-Roman context, was inherently tied to the ability to control oneself sexually. But in a culture focused on externals—in a church culture focused on externals—that’s just where our worldly minds take us. And our kids watch it, and they internalize it, and they judge themselves according to those standards even before their peers get ahold of them. Am I pretty enough? Am I doing the right things to be attractive? Am I macho enough? Am I enough of a man to satisfy the crowd’s demands?

Here are the questions we force on kids when we inflict severe and unyielding gender stereotypes on them: “If I am not feminine or masculine enough, does that mean I am gay? I have all the girl parts but my body is not very girlish—so maybe I am really not a girl at all. And I am not interested in hair or makeup or being a cheerleader, am I a lesbian? I love sports and science and I am loud and boisterous and my parents tell me that I came out of the womb that way. Maybe I am a boy trapped in a girl’s body.” Or how about, “Grandpa says that I am a 98 lb weakling and that I need to get outside and play sports, but I was in the hospital three times last year with asthma attacks. I get told that I need to toughen up if I want to be a real man but I am really interested in music and painting. I write my own songs and play three instruments and my art teacher tells me that I have a real talent in oils. I don’t enjoy watching sports, much less playing them. Even though I have a crush on Sheila down the street, the other boys say that I must be gay and even the guys at church. Did God make me wrong? Why am I so skinny and sick? Why am I so talented at the arts and music? If I go to Julliard will I really come back as a…well, I hate that word a lot. Why is the way I am not manly? Why do I have these talents if they aren’t for guys and only for girls? It seems as though—if I show the world who I really am, that I don’t belong to any group at all and I don’t know how to deal with that.”

What values are we really promoting here? Where is the emphasis on fruit and godly living? Why are we focusing on attractiveness and the seventy-year-old cultural norms of a select few in order (promoted on television, no less) to show the world that Christians somehow have most-favored nation status? It’s simply another form of prosperity Gospel but just as in the areas of health and money and stuff, most people come up empty. Instead of the church being a sanctuary, it becomes just another reminder that they don’t measure up. And our kids are watching. And our kids are the victims. And our kids are fighting back by trying to mesh who they know they are on the inside, messy and unique individuals who do and do not measure up to this and that, by showing it on the outside. Or, in extreme cases, by changing their outsides. Very frankly, it is because we have given them no way to be whom God created them to uniquely be, while still validating them as males and females. It’s a heart issue we adults have and we have forced the hand of all the kids who have never really fit in, and who have no idea how to fit in. People like me. And I wonder what I would have done when I was a teenager if this had been an option for me, this counter-culture pushing back on the insane ideals that were never really reasonable for the majority. Resentment and confusion build throughout the generations until they explode into something really damaging. And not just with gender. And when it happens, we blame the generation which explodes when we should blame ourselves for perpetuating anti-Kingdom values. Haven’t we always known that it was wrong? But haven’t we gone along with it anyway, desperate to belong?

When our kids are struggling with this insane, unjust, and ungodly system of measuring up—when they don’t even know if they are really boys or really girls because they don’t fit into that very strict mold that Evangelical Churchianity has foisted on the (and the rest of us have adopted as our own and gone along with) how dare we judge them when what we must do is step back and measure what makes a real man or a real woman in terms of godly character. Until we can accept others as image bearers regardless of how well they fit in socially, aka in worldly ways, then our kids won’t be able to stomach what they hear in church as we preach one set or values from the text while we live out our faith and indoctrinate one another and especially our kids according to the worldly standards of the 1950’s while pretending that they are somehow Biblical. Or that they were a great time to be living if you weren’t upper or middle class suburban whites. There are books out there telling girls and boys what they need to be in order to be pleasing to God and none of it comes from the Bible—it comes from the culture of the last few centuries and especially the golden age of Hollywood, when men were portrayed as tough and as controllers of the world, and women were soft, and delicate and occasionally spunky but still knew their place and couldn’t get anything done without a man to protect them. That led into the era of John Wayne and Billy Graham, who changed the way the world saw evangelists with his rugged good looks and focus on physical fitness. Today, it looks like Mark Driscoll and Allen Stewart telling men and women from the pulpit about how they must measure up physically and not spiritually.

If we want to talk about gender confusion, we must start with what the Scriptures demand of both genders and then look at what they are being taught from many pulpits. And we have to learn to be discerning about the messages we teach our children—often with the agenda of not wanting them to be socially unacceptable or homosexual or whatever it is that embarrasses us—and the messages that our kids are receiving from the pulpit and asking ourselves if we are making them into barbie and ken dolls or into servants of the most high, meeting different standards and living up to what it really means to bear the image of the unseen God whose character, and not appearance, must be emulated. This God without DNA because He had to create it and who is unapologetically described in the Bible as both paternal and maternal, emotional and forgiving, merciful and justice-minded, patient, loving, kind, gentle, self-controlled, generous, an ally to the vulnerable, no respecter or persons Jew or Greek, male or female, Greek or Barbarian (an idiom meaning educated or uneducated), slave or free and we are to emulate Him in that. No excuses. What we are not called to do is to create an idol out of any cultural ideal and substitute that for the command to represent Him to the world—and the manifestation of His glory to the world will look the same and different depending on who He created us to be.

When God gifts someone with the talents of music or other arts, it isn’t because He wants them to play baseball instead. And we insult God when we shun His beautiful gifts just because of cultural pressure. Evidently, God is under the impression that masculinity is about having a penis but other than that, a man can be so many things, have so many talents and interests—and it is only the idolatry of culture that tells us otherwise. And frankly, whether you or I approve of homosexuality or not, same-sex attraction doesn’t eradicate gender. Suggesting otherwise drives people in the wrong direction and toward gender confusion and not away from it. When we penalize culturally “un-masculine” or “un-feminine” traits, we compound the problems. There is nothing wrong with a man who wants to be a stay at home dad. In fact, that might very well be God’s design for him. Who are we to tell God what men and women should do and look like? This is what we do when we marginalize Deborah for being a leader or Paul for being sickly and, by his own admission, meek in person and only forceful in writing. Or when, as Mark Driscoll and others have attempted, made their version of Jesus into a tattooed, swearing, muscle-bound fan of cage fighting who would mock men who didn’t measure up to modern masculine ideals.

We’re the problem. As moms and dads and relatives and teachers and preachers. In fact, we are worse than Hollywood because anyone can see they are worldly but we pretend that our standards are somehow not worldly because they reflect the worldliness of another generation and one specific ethnic group. It seems holy and right because we look back with rose colored glasses and refuse to see what life was really like in those days and the cost of that lifestyle for those who couldn’t ever hope to have it. Men can be meek, and women can be strong. God makes and uses all sorts of people. Not everyone will be married and not everyone will have kids. Since the Resurrection, our command to be fruitful and multiply has been tweaked into a need to preach the Gospel and multiply the children of God in that way. There is nothing wrong with being our unique selves in service of God’s Kingdom as long as we image the character of God as preached by Yeshua and by Paul—who both set such high standards that growing into them should be far more of a focus than our appearance.

Are we giving our kids what they need to measure up to Kingdom standards? Or are we desperately wanting them to look attractive to the world based on standards that have nothing to do with the cruciform message of Christ and Him crucified, resurrected, and reigning?

Helpful books (affiliate links)

Valente, Sarah Hawkes Mary Ellen Rutherford is a Brave Little Girl –uses the story of Deborah to show that brave, rough and tumble girls are still girls

Pyle, Nate Man Enough: How Jesus Redefined Manhood–this book revolutionized my understanding of how we harm boys and men

Baumann, Andrew How Not to be an *SS: Essays on Becoming a Good and Safe Man

Snodgrass, Klyne Who God Says You Are: A Christian Understanding of Identity –this was the book I based my children’s series on, but it was written with adults in mind

McKinney, Jennifer Making Christianity Manly Again: Mark Driscoll, Mars-Hill Church and American Evangelicalism –excellent book on the problems with promoting certain destructive male stereotypes as inherently Christian.

Gregoire, Sheila Wray She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up

Payne, Philip The Bible vs Biblical Womanhood –new release, read it last month and it was a really terrific challenge to those who wish to lock women and girls into man-made boxes

Barr, Beth Allison The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

Williams, Terran How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

Byrd, Aimee Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

 




Episode 146: Critical Failure–Why Are So Many Homeschooled Adults Abandoning the Bible?

This was a homeschool conference talk I gave over the weekend and fair warning–it is not for the faint of heart (I actually had people walk out/mute me). I directly tackle the reason so many kids are walking away from the Bible and their faith and deconstructing after being homeschooled. But it also applies to churched kids in general. What happens when we teach our kids to think critically about everything EXCEPT the Bible and about faith and about our own interpretations and doctrines? It’s an easy mistake to make even without meaning to. Let’s explore the problems and how to reverse is so that if our kids do deconstruct, they will still have the building materials to reconstruct a better and stronger faith.

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

I don’t care who you are and how you live and what kind of example you have been. Your kids might walk away from the Bible and from the faith entirely—you have to understand and be prepared for that possibility. It requires a lot of humility, which we often lack, and it necessitates prayer and trust in God. We cannot, can not, guarantee anything about the future lives of our children—goodness, we can’t even guarantee today. We do our best and hope that they will love God and surrender their lives to Jesus, but this is not a battle we can win in the flesh or through any specific curriculum or homeschooling method. Parenting isn’t about guarantees but about flying by the seat of our pants and hoping against hope for positive results. Having this mindset has been a must for me and kept me sane during my four years of homeschooling my now twenty-one-year-old twin boys, one physically and developmentally disabled and the other supposedly normal but as all you boy moms and dads can attest to, there is nothing normal about boys! And I say that lovingly, from the time they turn fifteen months old to the time someone else buries them—they are generally a handful unless you get one of those quiet studious ones. I think that my boys were born late enough in the day that they had already run out of those and only had the wild ones left.

And sometimes we think we should try to tame them and maybe we should—after all, which of us has not been tamed since we found our salvation at the foot of the Cross and inside that empty tomb? Sometimes we forget that it was not the Bible that tamed us in any real way, but relationship. The Bible can be seen by children as the enemy when we use it in ways for them that don’t reflect our experience with the divine. So, we have to be careful else they end up like the wayward children of Israel who had a whole lot of do’s and don’ts but no indwelling of the Holy Spirit to write those commandments on their hearts in such a way that it becomes important to them, this love of God and neighbor. Every religion on earth has rules and ethics, and anyone can follow rules and observe community morality if they set their mind to it—but what sets the followers of Jesus apart is that they are being transformed from within. And guess what? We can tell the stories and we can live it out in front of them and we can hold them to our notion of what Biblical standards look like, but what we cannot do is open their eyes and draw them to our Savior—that is God’s work. And so it is of the utmost importance that while we are telling the stories and impressing upon them the beauty of the Word, that we create a hunger within them for what we have. And for that, we must constantly be changing toward perfection and they need to see it and furthermore, they need to understand that it isn’t about anything we are doing in our own power. We are following the leader, and we are largely the people who will show our kids whether or not that leader can and should be trusted.

Our maturity in the faith matters. It is a matter of life and death. My kids have seen my journey because I became a believer a mere two years before we adopted them at birth. And it isn’t my constant Bible reading and studying that has impressed upon them the reality of God but instead how they have watched me struggle and change and blow it and apologize and make amends. You see, despite all of their biblical education, they aren’t readers and so their father and I are the only Bible they have right now. They were the guinea pigs for every one of my Bible curriculum books but they are also at that age where they are discovering what it means to be grownups and I love some of their decisions and I hate others. But it’s in God’s hands now. I am just grateful that they still come to me when they have questions about what the Bible says about this or that—but what I want to talk about is why they still ask me questions and why they know that nothing is off limits.

You see, I handled homeschooling differently than what I see from the majority of believing parents and I did it quite by accident and it had the unintentional effect of leaving the door open to them while they are deciding who they are and what they want to be and how God is going to figure into all that. And your kids will go through it too—some sooner and some later. Everyone goes through it differently, and we have all seen the young “golden children” who look like ministerial prodigies turn from the faith because they grew up within a culture and not as sinners fundamentally changed by the Cross. I don’t blame them—it isn’t like you can really tell if someone is saved or not. For parents, generally good behavior is enough to convince us that our kids are believers. But anyone can behave, and especially the compliant ones—like me. Anyone can say the right things to please their parents and set their minds at ease—okay, that wasn’t me but then that’s why I am not there in person because talking without a script can be disastrous. I will never forget the time that I went off script and told viewers that, instead of teaching adults via video, I instead announced that I made adult videos. So, if you ever hear that rumor, I am the one who evidently started it.

From the time my boys were preschoolers, I taught them critical thinking in some fun ways. Mostly it involved my telling them something ridiculous and looking into their trusting little eyes and saying, “Now, do you think that is true? Tell me why that does or doesn’t make sense.” And we would talk about it and sometimes they would talk to one another about it because I was definitely the third wheel in that relationship. But before they would run off to play, I would always tell them the truth and I made sure to really drive home the reality that just because they love me and depend on me and trust me, doesn’t mean that I am always going to be right about everything. Grown-ups lie, they misjudge their level of knowledge and expertise in areas, they fall for and pass on someone else’s lies, or they mistake their opinions for truth. And we all of us do that whether we like it or not, whether we really understand it or not. Allowing them to understand that my take on things can be questioned, that they can ask me questions knowing that I will be honest if all I can give them is an educated or uneducated guess, or will just flat out tell them I don’t know the answer to things, has really bolstered their confidence in me as someone they actually can take their Bible questions to. If I have no idea, I won’t pretend as though I do. And not just on the Bible but other topics too. Honestly and credibility begin with our being honest about what we do and do not know, and being open to new information.

Critical thinking requires honesty and credibility along with learning how to use logic as well as understanding that just because something seems logical to us, doesn’t mean that we had enough expertise to make that judgment. Critical thinking begins and ends with our honest evaluation of our own level of understanding, experience, and limitations. And most kids, and even homeschoolers, never learn critical thinking because we parents are often fooled into believing that teaching an alternate view from what they teach in public schools represents critical thinking when all we have done is to indoctrinate them in another view that they are not allowed to question—namely our views. I found out in my first year of homeschooling that I was very much indoctrinating my kids every bit as much as any public school could (and I am not going to lie, we have had wonderful public-school experiences in six different school districts, so I am not anti-public school). Among other things, I had my kids absolutely convinced that the end times were close enough that they stopped caring about being adults because they never thought they would ever be adults (and I didn’t even believe that myself, I just read the Bible to them)! I also taught them (long before homeschooling started) to revere a lot of urban legends about Christian origins because I hadn’t yet begun to delve into responsible scholarship. I thought I was teaching them to think critically but what I was really doing was simply presenting a different unquestionable narrative. And if that sounds familiar, you are not alone.

The truth is that I had to learn to think critically about the Bible before I could teach my children that it was okay to question and wrestle—like Abraham, Jacob, Moses, the Psalmists, the Prophets, and many others did. Because if we don’t allow them to think critically about the Bible and about faith we are (1) being unbiblical in our approach to faith, (2) leaving them helpless to the honest challenges, questions and wrestling that others will present them with, (3) setting them up for failure because they might only have a relationship with a set of unassailable do’s and don’ts, which makes us comfortable at our age, without any of the realities of an actual relationship with God, when relationships are messy, and (4) legalistic instead of wise. And we’re going to talk about all of those today. Or, I am, anyway.

Disclaimer: I am neither a scholar, or a theologian, but I play one on the radio. Seriously, about ten years ago I began to dive deeply into the Olympic sized pool of Biblical scholarship, and I think the first book I read was David DeSilva’s Honor, Patronage, Kinship, and Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture—and my brain exploded. I became obsessed with Biblical sociology—as my Amazon bill attests to. It changed how I read everything, and different scholars had different opinions based upon their field of expertise, and when they were all combined the Bible became this beautiful mosaic highlighting the story of God’s rescue plan for humanity while teaching us wisdom and love and compassion and hospitality and humility and presenting us with conflicting commandments that force us to cleave to Him, to wrestle with Him, to be continually depending on His wisdom and begging Him for a larger share of it. And I learned about Covenants and these obscure passages in the Bible—it was like I had been living in a dark room and someone flipped on a switch. The point is that we cannot think critically without experience, exposure, and wisdom.

Experience in relationship with God and others alerts us when a verse about God and our responsibilities toward others are being taken out of context and manipulated and misrepresented. We need to know who God is and isn’t before we go out trying to be His ambassadors in the world and especially before we try to model Him for our kiddos. Exposure is almost as important, and the least utilized and especially within fundamentalism and triumphalist denominations. If all we have are approved interpretations, we will be incapable of thinking critically and if we are not allowed to be exposed to people who see things differently, we will have no other choice than to assume that there is only one way to look at a passage. Quashing questions and shaming and discouraging the questioner are all ways of stomping out the dangers of exposure to new ideas but a faith that doesn’t know of any other alternative isn’t faith at all—because faith is inherently about trust and it is a fluid thing. Where there is no room for questions and wrestling, no faith is needed—sometimes, no faith is even possible. And the freedom to question must be instilled early, and at home, where it is safe, or it will happen out in the world where you have no say whatsoever. And for those of us who were not allowed to question and were forced to accept what we were presented with, often blindly, we must learn the freedom the Bible gives us to question, first and foremost, before we are safe people to be questioned. And without wisdom, the ability to know when to hold fast and when to let go, what to do and what not to do, and all the nuances of a real faith walk—it can become nothing but an exercise in fear-based legalism where others suffer for our inability to be flexible when the situation demands it.

You see, teaching critical thinking when it comes to topics like evolution, sexuality, science, math, etc. and then shutting it down when it comes to the Bible is probably the biggest mistake we as parents can make and I believe it is why our kids are experiencing such crisis when they leave our homes and find critical thinkers everywhere on the one subject they weren’t allowed to really even independently think about. And let me tell you that there is no more important subject on earth to teach our kids to think critically about. Because someday they will, and if it isn’t with us then someone else is going to be in control of the dialogue and they are going to make arguments that fundamentalism and triumphalism aren’t going to be able to satisfy if your kids are smart.

A few definitions here—fundamentalism is not all bad and I agree with most of its tenets, but we get into trouble when we force the Bible into the very modern box that says every single verse means exactly what it looks like it means and is absolutely true and that there are no errors, scribal or otherwise, and that we must take everything literally. Fundamentalism never existed until very modern times when the idea of evolution and some scientific discoveries brought certain elements of the text into doubt. Ancient people, for example, absolutely believed in a flat earth—not just the Israelites but every pagan nation based not on critical thinking but what they could see with their eyes and what made sense to them. Until 500 BC, they also believed that brains were useless skull wadding and that thoughts originated in the heart and emotions from the other internal organs—so the OT supports this belief while in the NT, Jesus and Paul talk about thoughts originating in the mind instead of the organs.

As a scientist who has also studied the ancient world, I much appreciate that God spoke to Moses’s audience in terms of what they could understand and not in terms of scientific accuracy—because if God had been scientifically accurate, He would have had to invent new words and would have no way of even beginning to teach them what those words meant. And for that matter, it would be beyond our understanding as well. And although it seems wise to tell kids that every word is literally and accurately true, which is important to us as post-Enlightenment people, instead of truth, which is based on the priority that ancients gave to wisdom, it is also a recipe for disaster. God speaks to us where we are, and He spoke to them where they were—in the wilderness, listening to Moses tell the story of God’s rescue plan to save humanity from the evils of sin and death that they saw all around them in the ancient Near Eastern world. It was not a book to teach them about science, they simply wouldn’t have even understood the concept of a world that wasn’t micromanaged by gods and goddesses—as evidenced by their continually worshiping regional deities alongside Yahweh throughout their existence!

And so, in Genesis one, God spoke of the creation of the universe in their modern vernacular of the building and furnishing of a Temple. It made perfect sense to them that Yahweh was announcing that He had taken up residence as their god and king. We modern folks forget that the Bible was written for us but it wasn’t written to us and when we don’t know what they knew, we can draw disastrous conclusions—disastrous because they cause divisions and infighting when none are warranted and we take up positions based on what makes sense to us. And, of course, we pass that onto our kids, and they become locked into fundamentalist ideas that there is only one way to see what is written—and it is our way, not theirs. When that happens, we also tend toward elitism, as though now in all our modernity we are the ultimate arbiters of what this ancient document written to ancient people actually means. We must always be humble before the text and especially before our God who is always generous and compassionate to communicate with us where we are according to our understanding and not according to His, because our brains are just way too small, and we still know far too little.

Triumphalism is another problem in Western Christianity. Triumphalism is the practice of religion that forces us to always be focused on victory, positivity, and personal and denominational glorification. We got that from Rome, by the way, this idea that we are marching gloriously on to victory, and we have so many hymns about it that we don’t even question it. The problem is that triumphalism allows no discussion of the very real evils happening to our brothers and sisters in the contested regions of the world where Christians have no political or, more importantly, military power. The Bible speaks of a non-triumphal reality of suffering and injustice and lamentation. In fact, 40% of the Psalms are lamentations, crying out in agony, pain, confusion, and anger toward God over horrible circumstances. And an entire book of the Bible is dedicated to Lamentations! The Prophets lament, Moses laments, David laments—we see lamentations everywhere except in those places where Christianity is coupled with power and protection. But we must think critically about the reality of the historical church in the world, and we must teach our children to think critically about the triumphalist, Christian nationalistic narrative because it is not reflected in the Bible nor in the rest of the world and when our adult kids are asked the hard questions about theodicy—how a good God can allow terrible evils—if they aren’t familiar with the terrible evils described in the Bible and have only been handed empty platitudes, they will be, again, unprepared. Believe me, the Western Church will not be victorious, but Jesus will be. It’s going to be a messy ride, though.

It’s messy because relationships are messy. Faith is messy. And we should embrace the mess, and teach our kids to do the same or they will leave our houses so rigid that they will snap as soon as pressure is applied. We need to raise them up as children of the Book, yes, but all of the book and especially the messy parts. And we need to get to the point where we and they can do it fearlessly. We parents have been indoctrinated to believe that doubt is the enemy but not allowing doubt is what we truly must guard against. Do we answer a fool according to his folly or not? Back-to-back verses in Proverbs 26 give us entirely different answers because wisdom teaches us that life isn’t black and white but instead situational. If God is love, then why did the Canaanite genocide happen? Did it even happen or is it an example of ancient hyperbole, literary exaggeration to drive home a point that we see all through Scripture because that is how they communicated. Are we afraid to really really talk with our kids about the Bible? Are we only talking at them and telling them what we want them to accept—even if it doesn’t tell the whole story?

Kids are hypocrisy detectors, and when we homeschooling parents are on our soap boxes pontificating about the importance of getting our kids out of public schools because they aren’t being taught to think critically and then we forbid our kids to think critically when it comes to the most important book, the most important aspect, and the most important relationship of their lives—the house of cards is going to fall and a lot of adults are never able to get over that because they lack the tools to reassemble their faith—not upon the false foundation of fundamentalism and triumphalism or whatever -ism they were raised with—but on the foundation of God’s salvific work through Jesus, which is the true metanarrative of the Bible. Not young earth creationism, not the flood, not the identity of the Nephilim or Nimrod or Melchizedek, not how the divine name is pronounced or the claimed pagan origins of this or that doctrine or ritual or when or if the rapture is going to happen. None of that—we need to provide them with the building blocks to reconstruct in case they deconstruct. We cannot afford to simply indoctrinate them with what we want them to believe and see it as enough because as we can see all around us, it is not enough. Our kids are walking away, and who can blame them when we tell them to think critically when we ourselves too often have mistaken the adoption of alternate world views with a critical assessment of the situation. Believe what I tell you to believe, accept my explanations, don’t ask those questions, have more faith, pray more, don’t listen to that other denomination or that scholar or that theologian, and you will be okay just so long as you don’t stray from our path. I mean, God’s path…

And so, I embarked upon this very unique ministry, this very strange ministry—certainly not the ministry I wanted or thought I was being prepared for. I had a series of dreams involving children beginning in 2004, where I was surrounded by one hundred children and none of them were biological. So, you can imagine how terrifying that was. I had no idea how that was going to happen, and I didn’t even want to think about it. I was absolutely terrified that meant we were going to be foster parents to all one hundred at the same time. But, you know, I had no desire whatsoever to make that happen, so I just put it on the shelf. Ten years later, a friend from Ghana had a vision about me that was almost the same. Still, I waited. A year later I had a dream about believing parents who were leaving their kids behind, so I went back for them. I found Jesus with them, and He told me that the parents had gone off expecting to meet Him, but He was lingering for the sake of the children and wouldn’t be coming when they expected.

But a year before having that last dream, God slammed me to the mat by giving me a very odd book to write—teaching serious Bible college level materials to children. And so, I wrote Honor and Shame in the Bible, and the process was amazing—it was like it just flowed out of my brain, in order, making perfect sense but then when God gives me a book to write, that’s always how it happens. I have like twenty unfinished manuscripts in my files of books I tried to write without Him. It doesn’t work. And I taught families how to look at the Bible critically, like scholars, in terms of honor/shame culture which couldn’t be more different than our own if we tried. And I started getting feedback from parents because their kids were really getting it, and they were analyzing the text based on this one small subject and they couldn’t wait for Bible study because they were able to engage with the text in ways they never thought possible. And they were having family discussions and debates about what was going on based on this understanding. Parents and children were learning to see the Bible as something to interact with, struggle, and question their previous assumptions—by critically looking at the Bible stories with a more ancient set of eyes. And it started to come alive. And it all led to understanding Jesus and His mission better.

And then came my volume on Covenants, and it happened again. Kids were writing their own suzerain vassal covenants and exploring what it meant to be in Covenant through the eyes of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Phineas, David, and Jesus. They learned about kings and vassals and land grants and the difference between covenants and treaties and testaments and they were understanding concepts that weren’t very well understood just a hundred years ago but are now clear because of archaeology and the deciphering of ancient languages. And again, it all led to understanding Jesus and His mission better.

Then I wrote a much-needed volume on the ancient dyadic community mindset and a lot of the gruesome question of the Bible where only fifteen of the fifty lessons were suitable for children—but I wanted to equip parents with real answers and real ways to begin to look at the texts about sexuality so that they could answer the questions as their children became old enough to ask them. I knew that these sections of Scripture were very frustrating to those who are unacquainted with the ancient Near Eastern audience of Scripture, and the laws and mindsets and basic context of those times—how they thought and lived and behaved and what made sense to them but was lost to us until just recently. And again, it all led to understanding Jesus and His mission better.

My final volume tackled what being an image-bearer meant to the people of the ancient world, and we explored some “what if” stories about how life could have been different apart from the rebellion in the Garden. But the bulk of the book was about our New Creation life and how we represent God as image bearers through the development of the fruit of the Spirit. All of it was designed to make kids see themselves in the Bible, to enter in and be a part of the story of God’s rescue plan for humanity. And, of course, it all led to understanding Jesus and His mission better.

Kids are smart, and they are hungry to be treated as co-heirs in the Kingdom, which they are. How we present information must be age sensitive and yet we must be even more sensitive to explore and think critically ourselves—we cannot be afraid of the text, but we do have to respect it. We can’t box it in as though we need to be kept safe from it, as though it could possibly give us an entirely complete picture of God—who is forced to communicate His ineffable, indescribable greatness through metaphors because there simply are no words that are sufficient. When they come to understand that God is bigger than the Bible and that the Bible is a tool to help us into a beginning of understanding of just a glimpse of His majesty, the Bible can become their ally instead of their jailer. A companion in their quest to commune with our God and embrace Him in His complexity. And when that happens, they will still struggle with the hard questions and the doubts and the confusion, but it will be with the Bible as a companion that speaks different truths in different situations and not as an adversary who is cold, cruel, and detached from our struggles. We must give them a Bible that is like Jesus and not a Bible that fits into what we think we can manage and control. Jesus was unpredictable in His beautiful wisdom—never saying quite what we would expect, or doing what we think He should, or conforming to any standard of behavior that we can predict with any amount of assurance. The Bible doesn’t tell us why one man is stoned for gathering sticks on the Sabbath when David lived despite his sexual assault of Bathsheba and his murder of her husband. God is complex. Jesus is complex. The Bible, therefore, is complex as well and probably inspires more questions than it gives answers to.

To honestly be in relationship with the God of the Bible and Sinai and the Cross and the empty tomb takes a lot of stepping back and letting go of our need to be certain, which has reached idolatrous levels in the modern world. In reality, a God who can be predicted is a God that is small enough to fit into my approval zone and not big enough to rescue us from sin and death. When children can be told that, like Aslan, God isn’t tame and manageable but wild and good, He becomes big enough for them to trust with their lives, their fear, their sadness, their future, and their questions and anger as well. The God who fits in a box is generally either shockingly permissive or crushingly legalistic—and cares about what we care about and hates what we hate. The Bible tells different stories about God for the same reason that our friends, families, and neighbors can tell entirely different stories about us without any of them being lies. As we are complex creatures by design, God is even more so and thank God for it. But this beauty cannot be appreciated when we do not allow our kids to think critically about what they are reading, and what it might mean, and to listen to other critical thinkers, and when they don’t even know that it is possible to look at the Bible and see what it really does and doesn’t say. When we take off our denominational, fundamentalist, triumphalist glasses and really delve into what it is saying. And yes, kids can do that too—a little at first but more and more as they grow older and deeper in relationship and wisdom.

Questions are only the enemy when we neurotically believe that we must have all the answers or else our kids will become heathens. Those fears are baseless even though they are drilled into us by leadership that doesn’t have all the answers but fears losing control. Or by those whose egos do not allow an appearance of ignorance. But we are all ignorant, it is inevitable. We are all wrong about things, it’s undeniable. We all have a very small and limited understanding, and that’s okay. We all read things into the Bible that just aren’t there. We have all fallen for urban legends and hoaxes. We have all made faulty assumptions based more on 21st century Western ideals and Hollywood than on the ancient context of the original audience. And one of the most valuable ways of teaching our kids to think critically is to openly admit when we find we were wrong and to apologize—from experience I can tell you that kids are used to being wrong and it is so discouraging until they really understand that we as parents are wrong too, more often than we know. I always say that the only way I know to keep from being proven wrong is to stop studying and never listen to anyone. But that would be an illusion because I would still be wrong. And it seems to me that when we love someone, we don’t want to be stuck with what we knew about them at any given point but instead desire to know them more and more. But it requires thinking critically and re-evaluating when necessary and listening to a lot of others and not being married to our denominational understandings or so enamored with any teacher (and especially me) that we put their materials in a place where only God deserves to sit.

Too often, we present our kids with what we consider to be “the final word” and do not allow them the opportunity to journey with God and others because we are more concerned with orthodoxy (having all the right ideas, creeds, doctrines, etc.) than with orthopraxy, which is what the Bible stresses. Orthopraxy requires a lot of critical thinking and is the bane of legalism, because orthopraxy is about doing the right things in the right ways at the right times. Orthopraxy tells us to love our neighbor and to love God with all we have. Orthodoxy tells us what that is and isn’t allowed to look like according to black and white rules that do not allow for wisdom to have any say at all. The Qumran Covenanters (the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls), who might have been the Essenes spoken of by Josephus, were all about legalism. You do not break the Sabbath even to save a drowning man, whereas the Pharisees expected a person to break the Sabbath to save lives—as do modern Jews to this day. Discovering orthopraxy requires us to think critically about the Bible and especially the Torah but also about the Proverbs and the Psalms. Is the person who dashes Babylonian babies against the rocks really blessed or was that the honest venting of a man who is at the rock bottom of despair? Do we answer a fool according to his folly or not? Depends on the exact situation. Is it okay to beat a slave to death if it takes more than two days for him to die? What about the pilgrims who slaughtered Native Americans because they believed they were living in the new promised land and found permission in the book of Joshua?

What was the Torah ultimately guiding us toward? The ministry of Jesus. An end to our oppression of others, a society to which many of the Torah laws—well, we’re just all grateful that is no longer our context. But they did represent an important trajectory out of sin and death and into life and love. Everything begins somewhere. And being captured and forced to be the wife of the man who slaughtered your family, as horrific as we rightfully see it now, was far better than the battlefield rape that was considered a soldier’s right in the rest of the world. Orthopraxy teaches us to weigh every decision by what love looks like to that person, in that moment and according to their need and there are no hard and fast rules, no detailed instruction manual outlining every situation. The Bible was given to us to guide us on to wisdom and love, not to replace our need to think critically about what is actually good, or bad, in a situation and act on it. The Torah is good, but it only provided the bare minimum of behavior modification in the otherwise brutal and vile realities of the ancient Near Eastern world.

The truth is that without Jesus, and a real relationship with Him and an understanding of His ministry and teachings as the Greater Moses, Greater Solomon, Greater Jonah and Greater Temple, the Torah is very confusing and especially for children. And so by interweaving the Genesis stories with archaeology, sociology, sound exegesis, history and most importantly Jesus on my radio show, Context for Kids, I am teaching kids to go beyond the text into a living, breathing, struggling, questioning, happy, sad, real faith that is not simply a set of beliefs but an outworking of trust and the inherent messiness of God being real, Jesus being real, and our relationship with Him very real as well. I don’t want them to have a relationship with a book and a set of beliefs. That leaves us no better off than Muslims or Buddhists. I want them to have a vibrant, growing, interactive relationship with the King of kings where they are allowed to do all the things that the Biblical authors did as they wrestled with God and knew Him and knew that He knew them. And how many of them had not a scrap of Bible to even help them along.

One last word. One pitfall of parents coming to an understanding of Torah after they were already believers is a knowledge of Jesus, and sometimes we take it for granted that we can read Torah portions to our kids and they can just pick up what we attained through entirely different means—you know, by focusing on Jesus and His teachings and actions. But it just doesn’t work. Not in the long run. Jesus is the goal of Torah, which means that Torah serves Jesus and not the other way around. That’s why Jesus clashed with the religious authorities who had turned the Torah into an idol, and even more so their interpretations which were more inspired by Hellenistic law codes than the ancient wisdom literature that was given to us by Moses. Jesus wanted them to see the point of Torah, but they were interested in legislating what they could and couldn’t get away with. Your kids need Jesus more than they need the Torah because only Jesus could walk out the true, long-term, non-culturally specific intentions of God that we could only guess at without Him.




Waiting for the promise: patience makes perfect

(My affiliate links for Amazon products are included in the post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)

I came across this, written eight years ago today, and considering the fact that one year later God told me to write my first Context for Kids curriculum book (affiliate link) then my Context for Kids YouTube channel and website, and now I have the Context for Kids radio show (airing on two stations and also on my podcast channel) and will be speaking to a homeschooling conference next month–well, I figured it was good encouragement for those of you still waiting on your promise from God. Or it could be your second or third promise because those trip us up too–especially when that promise comes from the dream of a scholar whom you have admired for many years. Not sure I even want that one to happen or how it would but then I never saw any of this coming or wanted it either.

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There’s this phrase I use, not sure where I got it from, but someone undoubtedly coined it long ago. It’s a great one.

“Creating an Ishmael.”

I say it whenever our impatience causes us to jump the gun on the huge deliverance planned for us when it looks as though we have been cursed, or forgotten, or when we feel there just isn’t time left for God to deliver us from our circumstances and deliver on His promises.  But I don’t say it with judgment or a scowl because the people who judge Abraham and Sarah harshly have probably never had anything withheld from them–possibly because nothing great will ever be demanded from them or come from them.  I am wondering if I can think of anything amazing that ever came to anyone in the Bible who didn’t have to suffer and wait for it.  Offhand, I just can’t think of anything really.  Except that Adam and Eve got the Garden right away, and we see how well that went.

An “Ishmael” is what we create when we try and force a blessing, when we figure we know what form God’s blessings *should* take and according to what timetable they *should* arrive.  Disappointment driven by sorrow and humiliation coupled with hopelessness can really push a person towards taking matters into their own hands, which is what Sarah and Abraham did when Hagar became a surrogate mother in a misguided and impatient effort to speed up what was meant to be a purely miraculous event.

In a perfect world, Abraham and Sarah would have welcomed Isaac into a world that never heard the cries of baby Ishmael.  Perhaps Hagar would have married another servant and lived a more contented, uneventful life.  But that isn’t what happened, not by a long shot.

Perhaps it would have, in a world where Sarah was not branded as a failure, either by herself or others, or in a world that is willing to wait for the fulfillment of promises.  Abraham and Sarah have done nothing that we all have not done in one form or another, even if we do not see it.  After all, how many times have we seen someone have a dream or a prophetic word that they decided that THEY had to bring to pass?  I have been a part of two congregations where a building plan inspired by a prophetic word completely altered the course of a local assembly, and the course of a minister’s life, and not for the better.  And the words might have been very valid!  But fulfilling such things in the flesh, as Abraham and Sarah did, is not a valid option.  You see, God does not need our interference when He has promised something, He needs us to prepare ourselves and wait for Him to make it happen.

About 10 years ago I had a dream that I have never understood the interpretation of, although my husband and I have chatted about it often.  Last year, a sister of mine from Africa, who I have never met, had a confirming vision.  I want to use it as an example of how we could have mucked everything up, and still might muck it up, for all I know, if we get impatient.

I was sitting in an upper room watching a movie on one of those screens they used to have in school, the ones where you would pull them down from above.  The movie was about a man and woman who were raising 100 children, none of them biological.  I saw their tiny little house, I saw toys out front, and thought about how much I admired them.  As the movie ended, I realized it was about my husband and me.

At this point, we had our two children, neither biological.  I was greatly confused and yet it was one of the most vivid dreams I have ever had.  So, I tucked it away.  Now what could I have done?  I could have said, “well this means this and in order for this to happen, that has to happen, and I had better get to work.”  Fortunately, a few days earlier I had left the church system due to the first of the two situations I spoke of earlier regarding building plans hurting a congregation (or in this case destroying the congregation) by compromising a minister.  I had seen firsthand what happens when we assume and do not wait–we screw everything up.  David (the pastor) didn’t have to do God’s work for Him, and I wasn’t going to repeat the mistake.  But over the years, I started wondering as I saw nothing happening and I got older and older.

Then in January 2013, my friend from Africa, a minister, sent me this about a vision she had while praying, “I SAW A LADY WITH SO MANY KIDS, MOST OF THEM WHEN BABIES. YR NAME WAS WRITING UNDER THE PICTURE BOLDLY WITH CAPITAL LETTER. THE SPIRIT OF GOD WHISPERED TO ME, “TALK TO HER.”

I told her the dream I had had so long ago and that I had feared that in waiting, I had missed my calling in life.  We were both very glad that I had waited and she had not waited!

Now again, I had a choice, but not coincidentally, I had just come out of my second incidence, a few months before, of a minister going forward in his own power who was hurting people and himself in the process trying to make a word come to pass himself—one promising an international ministry when, strangely enough, he already had one but I suppose he thought there should be more nations than just two.  My choice, in light of these failures, was to continue waiting or to make something happen. I chose to wait, based on scripture and personal experience.

I think of my life over the past 10 years if I had rushed forward and created an Ishmael.  Perhaps I would have become a foster mother, and maybe my immaturity and woundedness would have been magnified, and my spiritual journey stunted in my zeal to lean on my own understanding.  Not to mention what I would have done to those poor kids. I know in my heart now that path would have been a disaster.  But still–what does it mean?  Who are my 100 children? Are they really babies?

I can tell you this, that when my sister in Africa confirmed the dream for me, I decided it was time to grow up in a big way.  I decided something I was incapable of deciding 10 years ago–that those 100 children, whatever they represent, need someone to care for them who doesn’t have a ton of issues to inflict on them.  So, I started preparing myself to be their mother, whatever that means.  When I decided to change for them, things started changing for me.  And a few weeks ago my husband had a dream where we were living in a tent that kept getting bigger with more and more people in it — which reminded me of this:

Is 54:1-2 Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord. Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes;

And still I do nothing, except that my efforts on the behalf of my promised children have been redoubled.  With every new reminder, I become more and more determined to prepare myself and wait for God to prepare the circumstances, even though the temptation becomes greater and greater to make it happen myself.  Fortunately, after all these years I am still clueless as to what it all means, or I might have created an Ishmael already.

You see, creating an Ishmael happens when we start changing our circumstances, but creating an Isaac happens when we allow God to do His thing, according to His timetable.  We believe that changing our circumstances is the same as cooperation and obedience when, in reality, we are usurping the authority of God. We are saying that we don’t think He can get the job done quickly enough to suit us.  But the timetable is EVERYTHING.  The time between promise and fulfillment isn’t the curse, it’s the blessing.  If a woman only had a week between learning she was pregnant and giving birth, she would not be prepared to be a mother — UNLESS she had already spent much time in preparation before she ever got pregnant.  That is what the promise is for, to give us the heads up to prepare ourselves, and not to make us hopeless and impatient. It’s about walking in trust.

Some promises, some “children,” are too darned special to be given to people who are not prepared.  The longer the wait time, the graver the responsibility, in my opinion.  Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samson, Samuel, John the Baptist — great men who needed extraordinary parents refined in the fires of disappointment and the agony of waiting.  How many years did David spend on the run when he could have killed his rival and grabbed the crown?  There is no verse saying that God helps those who help themselves, but there is this one:

Is 40:31  But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

It is the ones who wait who will stand strongest, who will soar highest, who will run with endurance, and will simply walk. It’s all about how we walk.  So don’t give up hope, you are not forgotten, you just may be being prepared for greater things than those who appear to have it all so easily but might only be succeeding through charisma instead of promises. And when you get it, remember to keep waiting and remain patient, because the next promise can trip you up just as easily as the first one. Just because we trusted and were patient once, doesn’t mean that our Isaac can’t have an Ishmael for a younger brother instead of an older one.




Setting the Record Straight about the Spirit of the Law

One of the most important things we can learn how to do in our religious lives is to question our own learned rhetoric and paradigms. And so today I want to say a few words about keeping the Law according to the spirit and not the letter. I have tackled this previously in my blog Setting the Record Straight about Christianity where I came against the idea touted by some of those in the Hebrew Roots Movement and among some Messianic Jews that if you don’t keep all of the commandments you are unsaved. Consider this the sequel.

So what is it to “keeping the Law according to the spirit and not the letter” and where does it come from?

This is grossly misunderstood in many circles so, I am just going to briefly summarize the problem we have out there. When a Christian decides to keep more of the commandments than your mainstream Christian, they might be called a “legalist,” or “not believing in the finished work of Christ on the Cross.” But how do we get to that point where somehow keeping commandments becomes sinful?

Let’s first look at what it means to keep the Law according to the spirit and not the letter. First, where do we even get that phrase? Since it is repeated so often, we need to know. Here is the source of the confusion:

Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (I Cor 3:5-6, ESV)

What does this mean, that the letter kills and the Spirit gives life? And I want you to notice something–Paul does not say that we are to keep the Spirit of the Law and not the letter. Even though this is the mantra we repeat and believe, it is not actually in the Bible. Let’s look at the other “spirit/letter” verse from Paul:

But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God. (Ro 2:29, ESV)

This verse is also not, in context, telling people to obey the “spirit of the law” and not the letter. Instead, it is pointing out a man whose parents kept the commandment to circumcise (which was considered to be one of the cultural markers of Judaism) yet who lives in violation of the commandments, has what amounts to a sham circumcision because that person is not living as a true Jew, for whom God’s commandments and His Word are precious. And what does Paul say about the concept of breaking the Commandments of God so that good may come?

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? (Ro 6:2, ESV)

Obviously sin still exists and we can still commit it. So where does the mantra really come from?

But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. (Ro 7:6, ESV)

That’s a lot closer to our mantra, right? So now we need to look at the next verse for context:

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” (Ro 7:7, ESV)

The Laws of God are not sin–they instead show us what sin is. And so for those people who have been trained in this saying and never really thought about it, I have an honest question (because I used to say it too so I am in no way condemning anyone): You know that you keep a lot of commandments. In fact, you almost certainly keep the majority of those that can be kept in this day and age without a Temple and a functioning Priesthood (the regulations of which make up a whopping 58% of the laws). You love those laws that you keep. You promote them to others. You know they are good and protect us from one another. Our Savior was asked which law is the most important and He quoted from the Shema of Deut 6:4-9, and Lev 19:18:

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matt 22:36-40, ESV)

So, what was going on then, and what is going on now? Jesus/Yeshua has clearly said that the Law and the Prophets depend first, on loving God and second, on loving our neighbors as ourselves. In stating this, He was re-emphasizing what the Law was given to us for–the laws were given to us in order to be the bare minimum to protect us from one another’s beast natures. But He says nothing here about that Law being evil, nor does Paul, nor does anyone. The law must be used, however, for the purpose of loving God and neighbor, and not as a system of earning brownie points, or else it can become not only a trap but a deadly one. But what this doesn’t mean is that breaking the law is, in and of itself, somehow a sign of faith and keeping it somehow an act of faithlessness. Remember that faith, in the Greek, is the word pistis, which comes down to meaning trust. It would be silly for us to say we trust God and try to prove it by breaking all the commandments that (according to our beloved Messiah, to the great sage Hillel, and many others) teach us how to love God and love and protect others from our evil instincts.

Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully (I Tim 1:8, ESV)

We can’t, for example, love others and keep the spirit of the law by breaking the incest commandments, right? Or by committing murder, theft, or adultery. When we lie, slander, and gossip, it isn’t because we trust God but because we ignore His love and disregard His justice by refusing to be reflections of His mercy. We show that we have no fear of or respect for Him when we casually break His commandments. And we must not have disdain for His commandments because they are the bare minimum requirements, as we learned in the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus not only preached the Law but raised the bar exponentially. Not only are we commanded to keep the commandments on the outside but also on the inside. Does that mean we will do it perfectly? Of course not! And this is where faith/trust comes in. We have to trust Him to fill in our honest gaps and to not condemn us over our weaknesses as we grow in His love and righteousness.

So, no, the spirit of the law doesn’t mean disregarding the law because that wouldn’t be in the spirit of it at all! We would have to ignore all of our Messiah’s teachings! How is that trust? Jeremiah prophesied about the days of the Messiah:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jer 31:31-33, ESV)

Loving God and neighbor by keeping His commandments was promised to be internalized within us, and that is our trust in the “finished work of the Cross”–that we would be granted that transformation, and that we would live in the reality of the New Creation that Paul wrote of:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Cor 5:17, ESV)

Jesus ushered in a new reality at the Cross, a second and greater Exodus out of sin and death. Not a death that nullified the definition and existence of sin but a death that conquered the stranglehold of sin and death over all those who would believe. Those who have truly tasted salvation know what I am talking about–slowly but surely, as we grow in Him and learn to love, those sins that were once so naturally a part of our lives fall away and become unthinkable–but they never become unsinful! We increasingly just don’t want to commit them anymore. But this is a gift. One that we once languished without–a gift that the entire world was suffering for lack of in the early first century.

But I come back to the original question–“what is the spirit of the law?”

Those who are unaware of the historical realities of the first century often do not know that it was a time of gratuitous hatred among the deeply factionalized Jewish people. Different groups (we could call them denominations and not be entirely wrong) had some rulings in those times that have been denounced by later generations. Just as, among Christians, we look back in disapproval of a great many former policies perpetrated by the Church and by Christians in the name of God–pogroms, inquisitions, the burning at the stake of those considered to be heretics, the condoning of slavery, etc..

But, the Jews have a concept–“Pikuah Nefesh” and we would rightly call it “the spirit of the law.” Yeshua made reference to it when He spoke of the “weightier matters” in Matthew 23:23. These are justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Mercy is the attribute which guides Pikuah Nefesh–which literally means “saving lives.”

Pikuah Nefesh dictates, in a situation where two commandments are at odds with one another, which you keep and which you break. And whenever anyone comes to me unhappy that a friend who keeps fewer commandments has called them unsaved or not trusting in the finished work of Yeshua at the Cross, or a legalist, I ask them a few questions:

(1) If you were held hostage by a terrorist and they had a gun to the head of a child and told you they would shoot if you didn’t eat a plate full of pork, would you eat it? (Note: no one has ever said no to this question because everyone realizes how heartless and selfish it would be to end a child’s life, one of the weightiest matters, over food restrictions, a much less important matter)

(2) If someone was drowning on the Sabbath, would you move heaven and earth to save them no matter how much work was involved? (no one says no to this either, but at least some of the Qumran Covenanters who penned the sectarian documents found among the Dead Sea Scroll would have allowed them to drown)

(3) If refugees flooded into your town on the Sabbath and there was no food in the house to feed them, would you go shopping so that they could have rest on the Sabbath even though it would mean work for you? Would you kindle a flame? (I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is a former orthodox Jew and is now a believer in Yeshua and he agreed that he would definitely do this as well)

A legalist would refuse to serve others in all of these situations, believing that the keeping of the letter is the most important. But in doing so they would not be observing the spirit of the law, Pikuah Nefesh. We were never meant to be robots, using one law to get us out of the obligation to serve another and telling God that we were just doing what He said. A great many legal arguments in the Talmud center around this very concept. We must first and foremost serve life and mercy–and this is why the letter can kill if we misuse it.

But this nonsense about saved/unsaved over the number of commandments kept has really got to go. On both sides.

Only 42% of the Laws of the Torah can currently be observed, as 58% revolve around the Temple. On that 42%, 67% is kept and cherished by the overwhelming majority of mainstream Christians. Messianics/Hebrew Roots believers, at most, observe only 11% more. That leaves a lot of laws that we don’t observe. So, the whole idea of “Torah Observant” is really just as much of a myth as more mainstream Christians claiming that they believe the Law has been done away with. Both of these are mantras that people think they believe but actually do not–and certainly do not live by. It comes down to a lot of unwitting posturing on the different “sides” as each side tries to be right by saying things that aren’t actually all that true once we really stop and think about it. So how about we all ditch the illogical rhetoric that none of us truly live by and get to work, together, for the good of the Kingdom and for the sake of those who are still perishing. We all love God’s commandments–the majority of believers just have different opinions on which of the non-moral ones are still important to God. Let’s try to keep it in mind that none of us can claim to entirely know His mind, nor are our individual interpretations of Scripture faultless. We are very much in need of the very grace we should be extending to others.