Episode 101: Mark Part 41—Help My Unbelief!

This is an incredibly heart-wrenching account of a father and son locked in an ongoing and deadly battle with a malicious demon—a battle they have been losing. When they go to the disciples for help, they are no help at all! What is the lesson here and what about the controversy over “this kind can’t go out except through prayer and fasting?”

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14 And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and scribes arguing with them. 15 And immediately all the crowd, when they saw him, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and greeted him. 16 And he asked them, “What are you arguing about with them?” 17 And someone from the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. 18 And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.” 19 And he answered them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.” 20 And they brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. 21 And Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. 22 And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” 23 And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” 24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” 25 And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” 26 And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, “He is dead.” 27 But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. 28 And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” 29 And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”

Although you wouldn’t think it, this is actually the longest exorcism story in Mark’s Gospel—longer than the Legion account in Mark 5, even. It is also the last exorcism account in Mark—the first, of course, took place in the Capernaum synagogue in chapter one and was a direct response to Yeshua/Jesus’s announcing the arrival of the Kingdom for the first time in His ministry. No surprise, any demons in the area would have violent objections to His announcement and one just happened to be oppressing one of the regular synagogue attendees. Yeshua silenced the demon and delivered the man, and people marveled. Here, after the stunning and provocative events on Mt Hermon where He was transfigured before Peter, James, and John in what the Gospel of Matthew calls a vision, there will be one final demonic showdown—again, this one will be violent. Only this one is violent in more than just words. We’ll have another self-manifestation here, which is easy to miss, of Yeshua doing something that only God can do—in this case, receiving and answering prayer. And, I have to add that although this account is in all the Synoptics, Mark has some really unique features that you don’t find elsewhere. Mark, of course, and all the different Gospel writers, tell the same story emphasizing different facts, in order to promote different aspects of Yeshua’s mission. In Mark, of course, the focus is on Yeshua as the fulfillment of the Yahweh-warrior/arm of the Lord bringing forth the Greater Exodus, or the New Exodus. Matthew is much more concerned with Yeshua as teacher—which is a good thing because Mark almost never tells us anything about the content of His preaching, apart from parables. Imagine life without the Sermon on the Mount! Imagine Luke without the grace parables and the Good Shepherd motif!

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 five 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—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 teaches them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com. Let’s get right into the text of Mark chapter nine.

14 And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and scribes arguing with them.

Who is “they”? Yeshua, Peter, James, and John. Where did they come from? The Mount of Transfiguration, Mt Hermon. Presumably, they are entering the villages of Caesarea Philippi on the slope of said mountain. Peter, James, and John shared this vision of Yeshua’s true form and, despite this being the ultimate fanboy moment where they got to see Moses and Elijah, they are told by the Bat Kol, the voice from Heaven, that it is Yeshua they need to hear and obey. Why hear and obey? Because the Greek word used by the writer is akouo, which was used in the Septuagint to translate shema, which means hear and obey and is the word that is specifically used to describe our obligation to hear and obey Yahweh, repeatedly throughout Scripture and most notably in the shema prayer of Deut 6:4-9. And we have seen Yeshua use it many times in telling His disciples and the crowds to listen to Him. I didn’t mention it last week, but this is self-manifesting language. He’s giving His own words divine authority here. So, they are coming down the mountain—another Sinai motif, and there is a commotion—just like when Moses came down with the Two Tablets. Moses encountered gross faithlessness because Israel was worshiping the Golden calf and here in the ancient region of Dan was where Jeroboam set up his own idol. What’s the problem this time? What we will find out is that there is more to faithlessness than idolatry.

Scribes have surrounded the disciples, and we assume they are perhaps from Jerusalem but we don’t have any real reason to assume that. There were scribes in any major population center. The question here is what on earth are they arguing about? Whatever it is, it has drawn a large crowd, polys ochlos, again—we always see references to “the many” of the servant songs in Isaiah throughout this Gospel., no matter where He travels.

15 And immediately all the crowd, when they saw him, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and greeted him.

In Exodus 34, when Moses comes back down the mountain with the second set of tablets, the people were also amazed because his face was shining from being so near the glory of God. Of course, we have no indication that Yeshua’s face was shining and quite the opposite—what happened in the vision evidently stayed in the vision but they were running up to Him. Evidently, based on what we are about to learn about the activities of His disciples during His absence, they have all been waiting for Him to show up.

16 And he asked them, “What are you arguing about with them?” 

Disciples were an extension of their teacher and so Yeshua had to find out what the problem was. He couldn’t just say, “Come on you guys, stop arguing, let’s get to Jerusalem.” If He had done that then, by honor/shame rules, Yeshua would have lost face/reputation among the Scribes. They would win by default in whatever the argument was. So, this had to be confronted and dealt with. Anytime there was an audience present, people in the ancient world were forced to choose their every word and action very carefully to avoid being disgraced and discredited—and a discredited Messiah is no good to anyone. We can never forget that the entire Bible happened within a historical and a sociological context—historical is more obvious but by sociological I mean the way people thought and the ideas they accepted about how things were and how they should be. Yeshua had to operate within that reality—He couldn’t create a bubble within which to operate. Sometimes, people see that as an endorsement of this or that (as people have shamefully done in the past with the institution of slavery) but really the truth was that He had a job to do—inaugurate the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and defeat the oppressive forces of sin and death. What had no bearing on that, He generally didn’t outright address even though He often left us clues. But anyway, He had to address this sort of thing, no matter how ridiculous it sometimes was. This, however, was not ridiculous but tragic. If any parent, if any human being really, can read this and not be broken-hearted—then we aren’t reading this for what it is—the story of a real father, his tormented son, and our merciful Savior intervening. And not just intervening, mind you, but entering into the sorrow of it and bringing everyone else into this tragedy as well.

17 And someone from the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. 

I’ve mentioned before that a man’s students are an extension of himself in the ancient world. So, in bringing the boy to the disciples, it was the same thing in their minds with bringing the boy directly to Yeshua Himself. But this isn’t just someone from the crowd, this is the boy’s father. He does address Yeshua with respect but, as we will see later in the account, there is at the very least frustration in his answer. The boy doesn’t have anything physically wrong with him, but he has a spirit that makes him actually mute. The word for this alalos, is only ever used by Mark and is different from the word used in the account of the deaf Gentile with the speech impediment in Mark 7. But, this is the least of the boy’s problems. This is every parent’s worst nightmare.

18 And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.” 

This is just beyond horrifying. This is not epilepsy. Epilepsy is an actual physical problem, a neurological disorder where the brain goes haywire sometimes. This is demonic torment. We see demons throughout the Gospel but not all of them seem to be particularly malicious or violent—but this one is. If this had been a simple matter of healing, possibly the disciples would not have failed but they did fail. In fact, this is the only recorded failure we see. Why here and why now? They had ministered in two’s before, and successfully. Were they showing off? Were they competing to see who could do it or who should? Goodness knows they were often and very obsessed with their ranking. Or maybe, in light of the first century beliefs about Mt Hermon, were they intimidated by being at the gates of hell? On the devil’s doorstep? Or maybe this demon really was empowered by the locale. In any event, the disciples were asked and they were not able—and I take this as meaning that none of the nine who were left in the villages were able. This was incredibly shameful to their teacher. This is turning into an accusation about Yeshua’s claims to authority and, of course, the scribes are jumping right on it. Of course, let us not forget that the scribes weren’t casting it out either…so, there’s that.

19 And he answered them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.” 

What does it mean to be a faithless generation? It means to lack trust in the power of God over the enemy. And sometimes, we forget that the power to cast out demons isn’t our power but God’s. Demons don’t care about Tyler. Demons care a whole lot about Yeshua’s authority. The disciples, at this point in the game, about to turn south toward Jerusalem for His final Passover and crucifixion, need to be able to function independently based on their absolute trust in Yeshua’s authority, given to them when they were initially sent out on their ministry tours in Mark 6. He is well aware that the time left is desperately short and that they need to understand the unlimited nature of His authority and what He has granted to them to accomplish in His name. But right now is not a teaching moment because this man’s son is in torment.

20 And they brought the boy to him. And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth

As I said, this is one malicious demon. It sees Yeshua and immediately starts attacking the boy. It doesn’t cry out but goes right to trying to harm him. All the other demons so far have been verbally challenging Him, begging for mercy, that sort of thing but this one really seems to be making a power play and holding the boy hostage. Yeshua’s response is not what we have come to expect—which is to just ruthlessly cast the thing out. But then, He loves to keep us from being able to put him in a box and here He is going to teach us something very important.

21 And Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. 22 And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him.

Yeshua has to be somewhat surprised at how nasty and bold this demon is, and right in His face too. If it responds to Yeshua that way, what must this boy’s life be like? So, Yeshua shows that He cares by asking. In an honor/shame society, people often looked at the demonically oppressed as though they are sinners who are deserving of the torment. You don’t ask why someone else has hardship in a world like that, you just figure it is divine retribution for a hidden sin. Such was the tyranny of ancient honor/shame cultures. Yeshua doesn’t ask, “What sin did he commit?” or more to the point, “What was your sin that he is possessed like this?” That’s what his fellow townspeople were probably always asking. Yeshua instead asks the human question—“How long has he been living like this?” The father responds, “Since childhood.” And he further goes on to describe their terrible suffering. This is no garden variety demon of lust or deception or whatever—this demon is determined to torture the boy until he eventually dies. I want you to imagine the desperation of this father who has nowhere else to go and absolutely no hope. When he heard that Yeshua was in the area, he brought his son, only to find the disciples instead. And, one by one, the nine of them proved powerless. He loves his son—if he didn’t, he could have killed him and no one would have raised an eyebrow. After all, he was in a pagan city and pater familias was a real deal. It would be almost another hundred years before Hadrian made it illegal for a father to kill his wayward children. Likely, the synagogue would have also turned a blind eye if this boy had turned up deceased-it was only a matter of time anyway. But this man loves his son, very deeply, obviously. Caring for this child would have been very difficult and it exposed the family to accusations and shame. Plus, they lived under the constant fear of their child dying or being damaged beyond repair. My friends who have children with severe forms of autism often know this father’s struggle and what life was like for the family. No, autism is not demonic, but the danger to the child can be comparable to this depending on the form and the severity.

But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” 

We can forgive his rebuke here and disbelief. We can hardly imagine the day-to-day realities of his life up to this desperate moment. He can scarcely hope at this point that, with the abject failure of His disciples, that the teacher will be able to do any better. But he does beg for mercy and he does ask for help. I want to compare this to the cry of the leper in chapter one, who says, “If you are willing you can make me clean.” This time, he has seen too much failure to be so generous with his faith.

23 And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” 

Some scholars say this is tongue in cheek and Yeshua is being playful but I can’t imagine that those people have ever had to deal with a developmentally disabled child who could fly out of control. It’s terrifying beyond belief and this would take that up a notch because there is a demon, with whom they have been dealing for years—FOR YEARS—actively trying to kill their son. This isn’t funny, this is desperate. Yeshua didn’t ask about the boy’s plight so that He could make light of the situation. He humanized this boy for the crowd, He won’t turn the situation into any sort of light-hearted mockery now. But right now, the man needs to snap out of his well-earned fatalism. He needs to believe and he needs to believe now in the presence of Yeshua. The man has challenged Yeshua and Yeshua volleys the challenge back. “I can do this, but can you take this seriously enough to muster trust that God can overcome this?”

Every parent of a significantly special needs child has, on many occasions, reached the end of their rope. I can think of the times that I was falling apart and then something or someone would snap me out of it because my son needed me and I couldn’t afford to not be strong for him. This last time, with Andrew in November—I had never been so scared in my life and watching him in agony that drugs couldn’t do anything about because his brain was being crushed from the inside, and still being stressed out from the surgery in October. I lost it at one point, I just absolutely lost it. I didn’t know if I was ever going to get my kid back alive or with his personality intact. But there came a moment where I needed to snap out of it. Every parent who has been through this can tell you the same thing. And it works with this dad. What Yeshua said pierced his heart and focused him on the goal again.

24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” 

The father immediately snaps out of it and cries out, ironically because his son is mute and cannot cry out for himself. “I believe; help my unbelief!” Pisteuo and apistea are both related to pistis, translated as faithfulness in the fruit of the Spirit but it can have a lot of different nuances. It can mean trust or allegiance—what it doesn’t mean is just empty belief. Like, you believe that it’s a bad idea to jump off the bridge but you do it anyway. The demons believed that Yeshua was the Messiah, the Son of God, but they didn’t follow or trust him. In the west, we are focused on believing all the right things instead of placing our trust and allegiance in those things. It is one thing to believe in eternal life in the world to come and quite another thing to trust God so much that you won’t hesitate to die in His service because you know He keeps His promises. So, what Yeshua is demanding of Him, here, is not mental assent that, yeah, it is conceivably possible that the demon can leave his son. It is trust that not only is it possible, but that Yeshua has the absolute authority to do it.

I want you to notice something here that is very profound but easily missed. The father’s response takes the form of a prayer. I mean, would you come to me and ask me to help with your unbelief? Of course not. I can’t do anything of the sort. All I can do is point you in the direction of Yeshua and tell you to give Him your absolute allegiance and He will teach you to trust Him but you would never expect me to generate such a thing. I can’t. No one can. Only God can overcome our distrust. This man, whether he was aware of it or not, just prayed to Yeshua and asked for something only God can give.

25 And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” 

Now that the man has placed his imperfect trust in Yeshua and has asked Him for what only God can give—help in the area of distrust—Yeshua goes back to business as usual. Now, even though the man said nothing about this being a spirit causing deafness, Yeshua discerns the nature of the beast (so to speak) and not only commands it to leave but to never come back again. So, this is a rare double-rebuke of a demon. And it might seem odd because we don’t see Yeshua having to add a command to not come back in any other account but let’s look at the nature of this particular demon. This is the nastiest one yet—worse than Legion. Legion came running to Yeshua, begging not to be treated badly. The other demons were similar. But this one was so bold and hateful that it was trying to harm the boy right in Yeshua’s face. Any amount of hatred that isn’t even concerned with its own well-being is alarming. All the rest of these demons were very concerned with their own survival but not this one. It was just bent on destruction. So this one had to be told to never come back. And there are some who say that maybe there was a generational curse but nothing is said about it, or that there was a particular sin—maybe of idolatry—in the home but nothing is said about that either. I think we still like to look for reasons why such things are deserved but, in any case, we know this boy has been possessed since he was little and so I don’t think we want to go there and say that a child can earn a demon. Just really goes to show how underhanded and heartless and ruthless the enemy and his kingdom truly are.

26 And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, “He is dead.” 

So, evidently it can make noise and it is still so evil that it either keeps trying to hurt the boy or it is resisting Yeshua’s authority to the very last but it finally comes out. There is quite the debate within the scholarly community. Most seem to take this as a comparison—the boy was “like” a corpse, while others take it literally. It actually doesn’t matter as far as the account goes because the ordeal has been so difficult that when the demon leaves the boy he at least appears dead to all the onlookers. And those people in that age all knew what dead people look like. Me? I have remarkably never seen someone who was dead except at two funerals I was singing at and neither of those people were close to me. I don’t know how you get to be fifty-one years old and have never seen a loved one dead but I just haven’t. I have been incredibly blessed. But these people knew what a dead person looked like.

27 But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. 

Yeshua physically takes the boy by the hand—a very common motif in miracle stories. We have the account with the leper, Peter’s mother in law, Jairus’s daughter, the people in Nazareth and also in Capernaum, the deaf Gentile with the speech impediment, the blind man who say men walking like trees, blind Bartimaeus, the little children, and the crippled woman in the synagogue. Pay close attention to how Yeshua uses His hands and what happens—including accounts like the breaking of bread for the thousands. Now, we also have to pay attention to the counter theme of what His enemies do with their hands—they nitpick over ritual cleanliness in ways unauthorized by the Torah, Yeshua says they will not lift a finger to help those burdened by their extra commandments, they use their hands to arrest and physically attack Yeshua, etc… And then when we see the apostles later, they use their hands the same ways Yeshua used His. We never see them being violent, ever, but they are sometimes subjected to violence at the hands of their enemies. So, we have this pattern of using hands to give life and provision and encouragement and blessing and then you have this other pattern of using hands to harm and take and oppress and withhold aid. The hands will tell you who is and is not following Yeshua. I know I have to be very careful because my entire ministry is based on what I write. Even this teaching is being read from a script because, if left to my own devices, on my gosh I end up on crazy rabbit trails..

But, Yeshua takes the boy by the hand and lifts him up and he rises. The word for lifts up, you can probably guess if you have been listening to the rest of this series, is egeiro, our common word for resurrection throughout Mark’s Gospel, but we also have a word from last week that I didn’t mention, anistemi—which is the word used by Mark to recount Yeshua’s words coming back down the mountain, “And as they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” So, the resurrection imagery here is unmistakable and no coincidence. The boy wasn’t dead but he might as well have been before Yeshua defeated this particularly destructive demon and bringing him back to community and the world of the living. This was a cosmic battle of epic proportions at the place referred to in Scripture as “the gates of hell” aka Mt Hermon.

28 And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” 

So, they go back to where they were staying—I mean, we know they were there six days before the four climbed the mountain so they had to be staying somewhere. And they actually do the right thing and ask Him, but only once they were alone, “What the heck??? Why couldn’t we cast that out???? I mean, we’ve been able to cast everything out and heal everyone and this thing wouldn’t budge. We all tried. It was SO EMBARASSING!”

29 And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”

And, I know, some of you are saying, “Whoa there, girlie, I know that verse says “prayer and fasting” but there’s a problem with that. You know there are different manuscripts of the New Testament texts just like there are different manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures before the Masorites decided on the “one true way” the Scriptures needed to be recorded about 1200 years ago. But you get scribes making mistakes, you have them accidentally adding something to one Gospel that’s from another, or on the wrong line, or whatever and it doesn’t radically change the meaning. It’s just an error. So, we have some manuscripts that are more important and reliable than others. Some later versions have some pretty glaring errors that you can’t find in any earlier documents. Then, sometimes it appears as though a scribe is trying to be “helpful” and I think this was the case here. It’s commonly assumed to be original because it ended up in the KJV but it just isn’t warranted. And there was a huge controversy over it that I am not going to go into now but I will post a link to the debate. https://carm.org/king-james-onlyism/was-matthew-1721-removed-from-modern-bibles/

I prefer it to just be “and prayer” and these are my reasons. (1) I am not averse to fasting and do it and especially in deliverance related situations if I know ahead of time that I am going to have to do such a thing, (2) We have Yeshua’s own words in Mark 2 that it was inappropriate for His disciples to fast as long as He, the Bridegroom, was with them, but once He is gone they would fast—are we truly to believe that He set them up for failure by not having them fast—if that indeed was the only way a demon like this could be dealt with? (3) I think what we have here was a two-fold failure on the part of not praying—by the father and by the disciples. I will explain.

First of all, I think the disciples had gotten the idea that they were doing the healings and exorcisms themselves. I say this because they asked, “Why couldn’t we do this?” It wasn’t, “What did we do wrong?” Because, I am going to just flat out say that once we get the idea that we can do any of this by our own power or authority, we’re just dead wrong, and even though God will work through us anyway if there is something He really wants to accomplish. But it was never them. It was always God working His will through them, okay? And so, we have to lean on God—always and forever—and we can never forget who is actually fighting the battle. I think the disciples had experienced a lot of success and I have to say it had to be something to have people dazzled by your “abilities.” Not many people can hold up under that kind of adoration and all the posturing we have seen from them is proof that they are ambitious and do not have their minds in the right game. They have their minds on worldly matters but that can’t continue. I think they didn’t go to God and honor Him with their petitions and that He didn’t allow this exorcism to work for even one of the nine. I think this was a reality check.

But Yeshua also says this type cannot go out except by prayer—if He included fasting then that is puzzling since the text says nothing about Him fasting—and that is exactly what He compelled the father of the boy to do when he said, “I believe, help my unbelief!” It was a prayer. It was, in fact, the kind of prayer that God always answers. God always answers Kingdom-advancing prayers but not generally self-serving prayers. If you ask for wisdom, or to know Him better, or for more faith, or for better fruit, or to be forgiven or for the spread of the Gospel—well, those prayers are the very definition of calling on the Name of the Lord because they advance His purposes in the world. The father asked for a good thing. “Help my lack of trust.” Yeshua responds to that prayer with an action that will guarantee the father never doubts the power of God ever again.

Before we close, I want to mention a quote from D.L. Moody: “There are three kinds of faith in Christ: 1. Struggling faith, like a man in deep water, desperately swimming. 2. Clinging faith, like a man hanging to the side of a boat. 3. Resting faith, like a man safely within the boat (and able to reach out with a hand to help someone else get in).” This father’s faith is the first kind—and with good cause. He’s been struggling to keep his head above water (and his son’s head) for so long and he is just in survival mode. Let’s just say that Yeshua just threw the man and his son into the boat and told them that they could finally rest. Do you think this man will have a quiet and private faith from now on? No, he will forever be talking about what God did for his son.

Next week, we get another Messianic reality check with the second passion prediction.



Episode 67: Gospel of Mark 12–The Third Controversy–The Wedding, the Wineskin, and the Torn Cloak

The third controversy dialogue! This time, the question is, “why aren’t your disciples fasting like the disciples of John and the Pharisees?” Yeshua/Jesus, however, doesn’t bother to answer that question. Instead, He asks a better question and answers that one instead–in a very confusing way. This can be a troublesome passage of Scripture because the mini-parable of the wineskin and the torn cloak can be a bit confusing but hopefully, you will come out of this much clearer on the concept that Yeshua was striving to communicate.

Transcript below–
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Mark 12—The Wedding, the Wineskin, and the Torn Cloak

18 Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. And people came and said to him, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” 19 And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. 20 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. 21 No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. 22 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.”

This week we are talking about the third controversy dialogue—the first concerned Yeshua’s claim to be able to declare sins forgiven, the second revolved around who should and should not be included in table fellowship with a righteous man, and this week the subject is “to fast or not to fast.” To summarize, Chapter one of Mark was all about commissioning and Yeshua’s battles against the spiritual powers of darkness in the form of demons and sickness. Starting in chapter two, He starts having to contend with opposition from people. In the first controversy, they wouldn’t even challenge him verbally, just in their thoughts. In the second, they questioned His disciples instead of Himself. This week, they are going to up the ante by speaking to Him personally, on the surface not about His own behavior but about that of His disciples. They still aren’t willing to come at Him head on. This is still rather passive-aggressive behavior.

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 five 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—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

All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. I am not planning to check up on you. Totally not the Bible police.

Alrighty then, fasting in first century (and before that, even) Judaism. Let’s talk about this. First, we’ll go to Scripture—Zechariah 7:4-5—but we are going to ignore Yom Kippur references because this situation in Mark has zero to do with that kind of commanded fast day. We’re going to be talking about fasting for mourning and repentance:

4 Then the word of the Lord of hosts came to me: 5 “Say to all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth month and in the seventh, for these seventy years, was it for me that you fasted?

So, we have two fasts mentioned here and we also know of at least two other communal fasts days being observed by the nation. The fast of the seventh month is obvious and that would be Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonements on Tishri 10 where the entire Nation is commanded to fast. But Zechariah also mentions a fast in the fifth month and you might not know about it so let’s quickly review. The fast of the fifth month would be on the 9th of Av, which commemorates the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem and is also associated with the destruction of the Second Temple as well, according to the timetable set forth by Josephus, who was actually there. According to Ta’anit 68a-d, which is a commentary on Mishnah Ta’anit 4.6, concerning fasting and prayer, there were five reasons for fasting on the 17th of Tammuz, in the fourth month, and four reasons for fasting on the 9th of Av. In addition, we have the fast on the 3rd of Tishri because of the murder of Gedaliah the Governor, and on the 10th of Tevet in observance of the fall and taking of Jerusalem.

So, quickly, on the 17th of Tammuz they believed that Moses had broken the first tablets in response to the Golden Calf incident, the Tamid offering (twice daily) offering in the Temple was interrupted by the Roman siege and never resumed again, the walls of Jerusalem were breached by the Romans, Apistemus burned a Torah scroll, and an idol was set up in the Temple. It is not clear historically who set up the idol, however, or when and who Apistemus was. On the 9th of Av, the disastrous result of the ten bad spies report fell upon Israel as they were told that they would die in the wilderness, the destruction of the First and Second Temples occurred on this day. Also, after Biblical times, in the second century, this day was associated with the end of the Bar Kochba revolt and the razing of Jerusalem before it was rebuilt as a fully realized pagan city.

The commentaries to Ta’anit 1.4-6 (I use the Kehati) also tell us that the Torah scholars fasted on Mondays and Thursdays for various reasons but especially concerning the need for rain.

And the disciple/teacher relationship. This is one of the positive things that the Jews picked up from Hellenism because it isn’t Jewish or Biblical in origins. The whole idea of young men binding themselves to a teacher of some sort, to whom they were to show more preference to than their own earthly fathers. It is so important to understand the difference between what is pagan and what is cultural. There is nothing pagan about having a teacher and being a disciple, it’s just good administration! It’s kind of like the “sons of the prophets” but obviously very different in scope. They weren’t Torah scholars, they were learning to sit in the counsel of God and deliver His words to the people. They didn’t have Torah scrolls just laying around to use and frankly, in the days of the prophets, Torah scrolls were few and far between and all but lost. It wasn’t until well after the exile that Torah study became something to do and focus on. And, of course, we see the creation of the synagogues in Hellenistic times as well. The Greeks did contribute positively to Judaism, but also very negatively. Their way of thinking is what was behind the shift from seeing Torah as a way of living righteously and in harmony into more formalized law codes, which I believe led to much of the animosity between the Jewish factions during the centuries leading up to Yeshua’s birth until after the destruction of the Second Temple when one group emerged victorious.

But the teacher/disciple relationship was very intimate. The disciples were supposed to emulate everything about their Master, from the way he taught to what he taught, and to just do as he did. So, if you see the disciples doing or not doing something then the blame goes on Yeshua, that was the mindset. They wouldn’t do things that didn’t reflect His beliefs and His way of doing things. I mean, at least James and John asked before calling down fire on Samaria, right? If they aren’t ritually washing their hands then He gets asked why. He gets the blame for their behavior. Okay, I think that is enough background for now.

18 Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. And people came and said to him, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” 

John’s disciples—that’s John the Baptist’s disciples, of course. And remember, John was arrested back in 1:14, but his disciples would continue living as their master taught them. This was a formal relationship that was ongoing even though John was imprisoned by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great. The Pharisees, as there were only 5-6000 of them in all of Israel at the time, and that’s not many, they really were loosely affiliated and bound only by doing the same things the same way, for the most part—they still had lots of debates which we see recorded in later writings. There were two schools, Hillel and Shammai. In the end, Hillel won out. Anyway, the Pharisees had no authority of their own—unlike the Sadducean chief priests who were Roman collaborators, and the Herodians, who were allied with the Roman puppet ruler Herod Antipas. But the Pharisees were popular with the people.

So, we have both groups fasting—the Pharisees and John’s disciples—but nowhere is it even hinted at why or what time of the year it is. Nada. So, let’s assume it is not important why. People came to Yeshua—not John’s disciples or the Pharisees.  They asked Him why His disciples weren’t fasting like the others were. Notice something—they aren’t saying, “Why aren’t you fasting like WE do?” Hey, at least this group is actually challenging Yeshua to His face, right? And the question isn’t an inherently moral one because we don’t know why the fasting is taking place but we can reasonably expect that not everyone is doing it. And I want to point out something important here—fasting twice a week is the luxury of wealthy men who aren’t working hard in the weather all day, okay? People who actually know hunger aren’t out there fasting, they are eating very little every day and just trying to stay alive.

I also want you to remember that, according to John, at least two of Yeshua’s disciples had once been John’s disciples. So, they had changed allegiance and adopted a new way of doing things.

19 And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. 

Does Yeshua say that the disciples of John and the Pharisees are wrong to fast, or sinning? No. He only addresses the question that He is asked, namely, why are HIS disciples not fasting along with the others. Now the question being asked is, “Why are you in disagreement with them?” but the question He answers is, “should the present age involve fasting for the companions of the Bridegroom?” The question He answers is about the appropriateness of certain actions at certain times—which will also come up next week in the fourth controversy dialogue and the third food controversy. It is not a commentary on fasting being inappropriate in general. I mean, Yeshua fasted for forty days and nights so he was definitely not an anti-fasting advocate. This is not a debate. This is just an explanation of “why not now for these people?” and not a condemnation of the practice in general. The disciples of John and the Pharisees are not being labeled as doing anything wrong.

So, fasting is not condemned but to fast at a wedding would be a grave insult to the host. Utterly inappropriate behavior. Other people in town, not invited to the wedding, could fast to their heart’s content, but those called to witness the joy of the union would be shaming the host by refusing to join in the festivities. Paul says in Romans that we are to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. We don’t do a comedy routine at a funeral or mourn at a baby shower, right? It’s disrespectful and, beyond that, it’s just plain cruel behavior. I am actually going to quickly tell you a story about my wedding. During the middle of the reception, my husband’s uncle got a call that a family member (who was not in attendance) had unexpectedly and tragically died. Word quietly spread among those who absolutely had to know and not to anyone else. Mark and I didn’t even know until the next day. Some people just quietly walked out of the wedding because they were too upset to celebrate, and quite understandably. What did happen is that the wedding celebration was not compromised. We have something very similar here. There is both a time and a place for everything. There was absolutely nothing wrong with them leaving the party to mourn, how awful it would have been for them to stick around and pretend to be happy. In the same way, turning the wedding into a funeral would have also been wrong. I mean, if the person had died right then and there it would have been an entirely different story and mourning would have been inevitable and appropriate, but that was not the case.

So, Yeshua addresses the situation with His disciples who are eating and drinking (the second food controversy) while others are abstaining for unknown reasons. The reason, He claims, is because this is a time of joy and celebration. Of course, in hindsight, because we have a narrator, we know that they are in the presence of the Divine Messiah—the answer to Israel’s prayers for salvation and deliverance and the fulfillment of the Isaianic New Exodus, the promised Yahweh-Warrior! There has never been such a great cause for joy in the history of the world, not before and not since. How can anyone fast??

In the Psalms of Solomon 3:8, the reason for fasting is explained as “He maketh atonement for (sins of) ignorance by fasting and afflicting his soul, And the Lord counteth guiltless every pious man and his house.” Elsewhere, as in the Book of Esther, we see fasting participated in during times of great mourning, sadness, in order to divert disaster and to petition God.

Although the bridegroom imagery is popular in Christian circles, it appears only in this metaphor, which appears in all three Gospels, and once in John. In other words, we’re really overdoing it in our romance-obsessed culture. Not too much should be read into the parable of the bridegroom because Yeshua was describing what the Kingdom is like, not what He is like. I was actually rather shocked when I realized how little material a whole lot of artwork is actually based on. We shouldn’t try to go too far beyond a simple metaphor here—Yeshua says this situation is like that situation where you cannot mourn at a wedding. This is a word picture. When we see works such as “like” or “as” or personification at work, these are simply modes of comparison and we have to be careful about putting too much of what we want and think we need to see into the text.

20 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. 

Okay, back to doing things at the appropriate time. Here we have what is probably the first veiled reference to His death in this Gospel. At a wedding feast, the guests leave and not the bridegroom. The bridegroom and the bride stay. We shouldn’t mistake this for a modern wedding where the happy couple leaves early. So this would have sounded odd to them—why would the bridegroom be taken away from his wedding? We know, of course, but they couldn’t know. I think everyone was just looking at him like, “Like, you totally made sense until that last bit, so, you know, whatever…”

But, as I said, we know what was going to happen and they would have a few days of absolute despair and sorrow.

Now, we get to the very first parable, a mini-parable, in the Gospel of Mark. This one confuses a lot of people because it gets inappropriately combined with other stories concerning wine. If you recall last year’s episode on parables, you cannot swap the meaning of parable images from one to another. Seed doesn’t always mean the same thing, nor does wine. Each parable stands by itself. If one symbol only meant one thing, there would be a lot of really messed up stuff in the Bible. Just as an example—Noah released a dove from the ark, in Psalm 74 the downtrodden of Israel are compared to a dove, in the Song of Solomon, the bride is compared to a dove and her eyes are also compared to a dove. In Isaiah and Nahum, doves are associated with mourning, Jeremiah and Ezekiel compare people escaping destruction to doves. Hosea calls doves silly and lacking in sense, and Yeshua calls them innocent but not wise. Then, of course, the Gospels compare the Holy Spirit, the Ruach, to a dove. Now, you see all these inconsistent images—each true in their own way as a comparison, but not something where you can plug and play, making every dove image to be an image of Ephraim as Hosea does. It’s not reading the Bible as an ancient text when we want everything to line up nicely. Sometimes a dove is just a dove.

Let’s look at this mini-parable—but Luke adds an extra verse so we’ll combine that here:

21 No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. 22 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.”

 Luke adds:

39 And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’”

On the surface, this is a big “no duh” right? Of course, you don’t sew a new piece of cloth onto an old garment and of course, you don’t put new wine into old wineskins. Nowadays we don’t do too much patching because we just toss out the old and buy something new because clothing is so cheap when it is made with the equivalent of slave labor in third world countries, but they weren’t quick to throw out anything that was old. Despite this, they would have patched old with something else old. With old scraps.

As for wine, it was poured, freshly pressed, into goatskins—which is super gross. The grape juice would react and ferment and would swell the skin, which would expand because that’s what skin does when we feed it too much—not, NOT that I know this from any personal experience, oh no. I am still the same size five I was when I got married. Or maybe twice that, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, wineskins can’t be reused because they dry out and get brittle. Apply a bit of pressure to an old one and it will split and burst. Again, people are saying, “No duh, what does this have to do with fasting? Is fasting the patch or the cloak? It can’t be the wine, so, is it the wineskin?”

But Yeshua isn’t doing any of that—He is talking about something larger—the Kingdom. But to see that, we have to also include the wedding story into the parable, and it usually gets excluded. Three metaphors about doing what is inappropriate at the entirely wrong time. You don’t mourn during times of joy. You don’t tear a piece off of something that is new while trying to salvage something that is old, and you don’t try to force something explosive into something that was not built to withstand the pressure. Even though, as Luke adds, people hate change. That’s why he added that after drinking the old wine no one wants the new because the old is good enough. That’s how we all are, isn’t it? Comfort zone theology.

The Gospel—the Kingdom of God, in the person of Yeshua, is finally invading the wretched existence of His impoverished, beleaguered, oppressed people. They’ve been praying for this salvation, this deliverance, this change. But whenever Heaven invades Earth, things on earth have to radically change. Yeshua didn’t come because everything was hunky-dory just as long as the Romans were gone—the overthrow of the Seleucids out of Israel and the installation of the Hasmonean priest-kings was proof that Jewish self-rule was just as (or even more) oppressive and murderous than foreign rule. It takes a special kind of psychopath to starve his mother and brothers in prison, but Aristobulus I did just that. Alexander Jannaeus had 800 Pharisees crucified just for opposing him, and had their wives and children slaughtered before their eyes as they hung on those crosses. The Romans stepped in and put Herod in charge and he was a monster, but so were his predecessors. The hatred continued between the Pharisees and the Sadducees and it was so terrible that the Talmud, in Yoma 9b, called the first century a time of gratuitous, senseless hatred. It was a time of terrible hatred and oppression—not just against the Jews from the Romans but in terms of Jew vs Jew. Hellenism inspired factions, and factions went to war with one another for supremacy over doctrine and beliefs. There were assassins, the Sicarri, wandering Jerusalem during the feasts and carrying out political assassinations.

Yeshua was born into this horrific mess, into a time of disease and death and hatred and demonic torment. This was the old cloak. This was the old wineskin. This is the world as it was before the Cross. They wanted the Romans gone, but they needed new hearts and a new way of looking at God’s laws and His intentions or having the Romans out of the way would be meaningless. The old was not good enough. They would still suffer under Jewish leadership if the Romans were gone—they would probably plunge right back into the brutal civil war that had marked those Hasmonean years. There’s a reason why Yeshua was so controversial and it wasn’t because He was throwing away God’s laws but because He was bringing an honesty and integrity to them that would blow the current system apart. He wasn’t playing ball—not with the Sadducees, or the Pharisees, and certainly not with the Herodians. The isolationist anti-Gentile policies would have to be a thing of the past because they would be pouring into the Kingdom, as Yahweh promised in Isaiah.

The Pharisees had, under Greco-Roman influence, turned Torah away from being a way of wisdom and life and a system that was meant to show us how to love God and others, really to protect others from ourselves into a legalistic system of the observance of minutiae on one hand and the creation of some seriously bad loopholes on the other. What must we do in order to say we are observing this commandment on one hand vs how can we create loopholes for ourselves to get out of some of the more difficult, circumcision of the heart-type of requirements. We talked about this last year in my series on the Seven Woes of Matthew 23—the maddening demands coupled with some disturbing loopholes that allowed people to break their oaths and vows while the minutiae of cleansing bowls and cups based on whether or not there were handles and all that sort of thing. Don’t think I am saying that every Pharisaic ruling was one of the evil “traditions of men.” I share in my Hannukah program how Yeshua only used that term when calling out behavior that was oppressive to others—like using legal loopholes related to the korban regulations (offerings) to keep from having to support parents in their old age. Of course, religion can be a positive or a negative thing. Yeshua gave us religion ruled by the two great inviolate principles of interpreting Torah. Is it loving to God? Is it loving to others? The Pharisees, some of them in some ways, gave lip service to that in favor of trapping God with the words of the Bible in such a way as they could justify some things that broke the law to love neighbor and respect parents if only they could find another verse that gave them an out. And before you get all huffy, we still do that! Part of being a disciple of Yeshua is in allowing Him to show us where our wineskins are still old and where we are hoarding the old wine of our beastly nature. When He fills those old flesh areas with new wine, they begin to crack and in my own life, whenever I start feeling that happening, I call it a boiling out. The refinement heats up and I can feel the pain. Until one day, whatever it is that needs to go, that gets in the way of my loving God and others gets revealed and shown in all of its ugliness and God gives me the choice to keep it or to get rid of it. But I can no longer ignore it, even if I really wasn’t entirely aware of it before. And oftentimes, we really aren’t aware of what unloving jerks we are. I mean, that’s what this walk is about, right? Submitting to the fire and seeing what boils out and being unendingly shocked at how carnal we still are.

But the Kingdom of Heaven (which the Gospel told us was invading the earth in the person of Yeshua ben Yosef, Jesus Christ), like Aslan, is good but not tame (now there was an excellent metaphor courtesy of CS Lewis), it is not a patch to be applied to our otherwise carnal natures, it is not new wine that we can expect to be safely stowed away without doing damage to the person whom we once were. It is not compatible with who we were and are and will never stop its work until we are bursting at the seams with its byproduct—love.

No, it is explosive, it is demanding. It seeks out and conquers that in our lives which is incompatible. It tears, it bursts out, and it is utterly inappropriate for us to prefer that old flesh nature, saying, “it is good enough.” Yes, we cling to the old. We desire that comfortable old cloak, and that old familiar wine–but it has to go. And so desperate we are to keep it that we take a little bit of the Gospel here and there and apply the comfortable parts to our lives. Or, just as terrible, we settle for external obedience so that we can look good while what is inside has ceased to live, like settled old wine. The people in Yeshua’s day wanted to remain the same (don’t we all?). They just wanted to get rid of the Romans and believed that would be enough to usher in a new age of living by their own laws in peace. But the nightmarish Hasmonean times after the death of John Hyrcanus should have been proof positive that such an alteration would only be a regime change. God intended to change the world from within, one person at a time. The cloak, as it was, could not be patched, and the wineskin had served its purpose. Neither could handle the Kingdom of Heaven on its own terms and survive radically unchanged. Everyone was going to have to re-evaluate and choose where to put their trust. Would it be in the “new thing” promised by Yahweh in Isaiah 42, 43, and 48 or would they cling to just wanting their comfortable old hope of the same old same old with only their external circumstances changed?

Remember, in Isaiah, how Yahweh was repeatedly saying that He was going to do a new thing:

Isaiah 42:9 “Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them.”

Isaiah 43:19 “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

Isaiah 48:6 “You have heard; now see all this; and will you not declare it? From this time forth I announce to you new things, hidden things that you have not known.”

Yeshua is ushering in a new age, yes, an age where Yahweh has once more intervened for the salvation of His people. But, like the exiles who balked at the idea of pagan Cyrus being the arbiter of their deliverance, resulting in only 5% returning to Israel when commanded to by Yahweh Himself, the people to whom Yeshua was being revealed, those who heard Him preach, who saw great healings and exorcisms and miracles—would they accept this messenger? He, at least, is a fellow Jew, of the royal line of King David. Cyrus was a hard pill to swallow—maybe Yeshua would be easier to accept?

Of course, we all know from our own lives that God cannot possibly make it easy enough for our carnal natures to submit willingly to the new things He wants to do in our lives. We all want His blessings but on our terms, and pain-free at that. We want Him on our side, on our side. We don’t understand that He needs to be on everyone’s side, and it is we who are to be on His side. Folks never really change, eh? Same old battle, only the day of battle is constantly being renewed.

So, what have you been content and even desperate to patch up so that it looks like the ugliness is gone when it is actually alive and well? Maybe only your family sees it? Maybe only anonymous people on the internet get an earful of it? Maybe only you know it is there because you have it stomped down? Maybe you have given up all but just a bit of a vice? Goodness, I know from my own life, and this is hilarious, that you can give up every food that is bad for you and still be a glutton on the good stuff. It’s ridiculous. Some folks give up all physical manifestations of pornography while still engaging in a very ribald fantasy life (and that was me for years after giving up porn). I call it “it’s better but it isn’t good, it’s still bad.” We like to adapt our sins instead of getting rid of them entirely, right?



Episode 28: Yom Kippur and Ba’al Peor Broadcast and Transcript

Yom Kippur and Ba’al Peor—Character in Context Transcript—October 2019

This is a transcript of a radio broadcast, and so it is not polished like one of my regular blogposts. Please don’t email me or comment about spelling or grammar mistakes unless I accidentally said something nasty. Archives of all past broadcasts can be found and are available for download at the link below:

characterincontext.podbean.com

Yom Kippur is almost upon us and so I want to talk about the sin of Israel with Ba’al Peor among the Midianites. I know, you’re probably like, “what the heck?–and where the heck is she going with this?”

Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year. The Word says that we are to afflict ourselves, but I see a whole lot of perfectly healthy people online trying to figure out a way to claim they are afflicting themselves while still eating three square meals and taking a day off of work. I dunno. To me, that sounds more like the definition of not afflicting oneself—no work, eating. I don’t see anything even remotely unpleasant about any day off work when I can eat. It’s kinda what I live for. It’s called a vacation. Yes, even if you are praying all day and repenting, you’re still making demands on God by partaking of the daily bread we ask Him to provide. But affliction, mourning—those are times when we forgo life’s pleasures if we are healthy enough to do so. I want to talk about spending one day, one day, without food and water. I also want to talk about the spiritual implications of not even remotely being willing to even go one day without food and water.

And to do that, we are going to delve deeply into the idolatrous fiasco at Ba’al Peor because that was 100% about grasping for pleasures that were not coming from God’s own hand.

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 Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five 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—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.

First, let’s read the Yom Kippur Scriptures, and then we are going to talk about where the word “afflict” shows up in a parallelism in Scripture, which means I am going to teach briefly about parallelisms—which, if you don’t know what they are, this is going to open up a lot of Scripture for you in your casual readings. And then we are going to talk about Ba’al Peor. Hold on to your hats, and please give me a chance to make my argument and don’t get angry with me. I love you guys, and I am just trying to do battle against a mindset that I have seen lead to some dangerous places.

Before I start I just want to plant a seed related to something that God unexpectedly started teaching me back in July and I have spent the last two months deep in the Word studying it out. Specifically, this—we partake of what God provides, and when He provides it—if God is not providing it, either over or just right now, then we don’t partake of it. In this lies the sin at Ba’al Peor—as well as a lot of other sins and not just food-related. Sometimes God withholds good things for a season or in a circumstance—and I believe that to high-handedly take what He has not given constitutes theft.

29 “And it shall be a statute to you forever that in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall afflict yourselves and shall do no work, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you. 30 For on this day shall atonement be made for you to cleanse you. You shall be clean before the Lord from all your sins. 31 It is a Sabbath of solemn rest to you, and you shall afflict yourselves; it is a statute forever. (Lev 16 ESV)

26 And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 27 “Now on the tenth day of this seventh month is the Day of Atonement. It shall be for you a time of holy convocation, and you shall afflict yourselves and present a food offering to the Lord. 28 And you shall not do any work on that very day, for it is a Day of Atonement, to make atonement for you before the Lord your God. 29 For whoever is not afflicted on that very day shall be cut off from his people. 30 And whoever does any work on that very day, that person I will destroy from among his people. 31 You shall not do any work. It is a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwelling places. 32 It shall be to you a Sabbath of solemn rest, and you shall afflict yourselves. On the ninth day of the month beginning at evening, from evening to evening shall you keep your Sabbath.” (Lev 23, ESV)

7 “On the tenth day of this seventh month you shall have a holy convocation and afflict yourselves.[b] You shall do no work, 8 but you shall offer a burnt offering to the Lord, a pleasing aroma: one bull from the herd, one ram, seven male lambs a year old: see that they are without blemish. 9 And their grain offering shall be of fine flour mixed with oil, three tenths of an ephah for the bull, two tenths for the one ram, 10 a tenth for each of the seven lambs: 11 also one male goat for a sin offering, besides the sin offering of atonement, and the regular burnt offering and its grain offering, and their drink offerings. (Num 29, ESV)

Okay, now this is pretty standard knowledge to those who believe and preach that the Feasts of the Lord are forever—they show us the history of Israel and find their fulfillment (past and future) in Messiah, who has, of course, not fulfilled them all yet so we keep them in anticipation and remembrance of Him. I am not even addressing this to people who believe that the festivals are done away with because that is between them and God—I am talking about people who rail on folks who don’t keep the Feasts and are more than healthy enough to fast for a day and night but try to find ways of getting out of it. You see, to me this is a huge problem with credibility. Don’t yell at people for celebrating Christmas and Easter if your Yom Kippur is simply a day off of work where you eat normally and say a few prayers and try and feel guilty about the sins you really should have repented for a long time before this. So, I am preaching to the choir here—the choir might not like the tune I am playing, but they’ll survive. You guys know how much I care about you and our collective witness.

So, what exactly does afflict mean in Scripture? What’s the word in Hebrew translated as “afflict?”

The word is T’annu, and the lemma, ayin nun heh means a whole bunch of unpleasant things:  to be wretched, emaciated, humiliated, oppressed. It is a verb and not a noun, this is an action and not a state of being. Although it is also a day that brings great joy because it marks important transitions in the shemittah and jubilee cycles and a release from slavery, the day itself sees us behaving as servants who are being disciplined. The question is, does a servant under discipline go boldly to his master’s pantry while taking a day off of work and begin eating as if it was a normal day?

So where else does t’annu show up? Glad you asked.

21 Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river Ahava, that we might humble ourselves before our God, to seek from him a safe journey for ourselves, our children, and all our goods. (Ezra 8:21)

That reference to humbling ourselves is t’annot, the plural version of the verb t’annu—and here Ezra says that he declared a fast so that they would humble/afflict themselves. Clearly, here t’annu is associated with affliction through fasting.

26 The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord! May your hearts live forever! (Psalm 22:26)

Here, affliction is contrasted with a future state of eating and being satisfied.

3  ‘Why have we fasted, and you see it not? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?” (Is 58:3)

 

Again, same root word and here we have the added bonus of what is referred to in ancient writings as a parallelism. In a parallelism, which is very common in ancient wrtings, you get two phrases that say the exact same thing two different ways—equating the two concepts.

Let’s take a really awesome example from Shakespeare’s Richard III where he has a plethora of parallelisms and yes, I know what plethora means. It would be terrible, for example, if I thought I had a plethora of pinatas when, in fact, I did not.

“I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown,
My figured goblets for a dish of wood,
My scepter for a palmer’s walking staff
My subjects for a pair of carved saints
and my large kingdom for a little grave.”

So the theme here is exchanging riches for poverty, and he says it seven different ways one after another. The Bible does this all over the place, but in general the same thing is only said twice. In this case, in Isaiah 58 which details an acceptable Yom Kippur, it says

‘Why have we fasted, and you see it not? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?”

Both lines say the exact same thing—we did X and you didn’t notice. In this case, X is described in two ways—by fasting and humbling themselves, this equates the two concepts. Fasting is equal to humbling oneself which is another translation of the same root behind affliction.

And you know what? You don’t even want to know how many times this lemma shows up in Job to describe suffering that goes WAY beyond mere fasting, which is really only kinda annoying when you aren’t used to it. It isn’t truly what someone who is truly being afflicted would call affliction, but evidently it is considered to be enough by God, thank God.

But some get really eager to get out of this commandment even when they have no legitimate health concerns that would put them in any sort of conceivable danger. I see the same thing with folks who claim that there is yeast in the air and therefore God never meant us to get leavened bread out of our homes during the week of Unleavened Bread following the Passover. I see an inherent danger in being so unwilling to do something that is really very simple—something that can be planned for ahead of time if need be. About a month or two before Passover, I don’t buy anything leavened, I use it up in recipes and only buy one loaf of bread at a time and use it up before buying a new one. That way I am not wasting anything.

But Yom Kippur fasting requires no planning whatsoever. It just requires a willingness to be uncomfortable for 24 hours—the first so many hours are spent with a full tummy and sleeping anyway so the real fast is rather minimal. My kids have been doing it since they were ten without complaint.

But I want to get to Ba’al Peor. So, let’s read the account:

25 While Israel was staying in Shittim, the people began to have immoral sexual relations with women from Moab. 2 Then they invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, so the people were eating, and bowing down before their gods. 3 When Israel became bound to Baal of Peor, the anger of Adonai grew hot against Israel.

 

4 Adonai said to Moses, “Seize all the ringleaders and hang them before Adonai facing the sun, so that Adonai’s fierce anger may be turned away from Israel.”

 

5 So Moses said to the judges of Israel, “Each of you, kill your men who have been joining themselves to Baal of Peor.” 6 Then behold, a man from Bnei-Yisrael came and brought a Midianite woman to his brothers before the eyes of Moses and of the whole assembly of Bnei-Yisrael, while they were weeping at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting!

 

7 When Phinehas son of Eleazar son of Aaron the kohen saw it, he arose from the midst of the assembly, took a spear in his hand, 8 and went after the man of Israel into the tent and pierced them through—both the Israelite man and the woman’s belly. Then the plague among Bnei-Yisrael was stopped. 9 However, 24,000 were dead because of the plague!

 

Of course, this took place in the wilderness. After Balaam was not allowed to curse Israel—he came up with a better idea. Hit them where they are vulnerable—food and sex. This way Balaam can “obey” God and just let the Israelites damn themselves. And, might I add, that nothing whatsoever has changed over the last 3500 years? Nothing at all? These are still areas where we are not only able to fall but rush headlong until we do.

“Where are our leeks, and onions, and “free” fish and bread and noms?” and even worse, “All we have to eat is this worthless manna.” Dude, it takes some serious stupidity to say something like that when you’ve been supernaturally fed manna and quail, in a desert, for decades. And us, oh my gosh, if we had leeks and onions and free fish and bread—just think of how WE would be complaining about those menu choices that they considered a luxury. What would people do without coffee, sugar, processed foods, meat every single day and different kinds at every meal if we want it, more cheeses than I can name, restaurants catering to anything we can possibly desire, fruits and veggies, fresh, all year long. I mean, people kick up a fuss about fasting one day a year and I get scared thinking about what it would be like if there was a limited and rationed food supply and they couldn’t even fast for a day. No, seriously, I am serious. It’s scary. What might even a believer do for a cup of coffee or a ho ho or an orange? I tell you, we are so spoiled that we wouldn’t have even made it to the Sea of Reeds before turning back.

But Ba’al Peor, in Hebrew it means the “Master” of Pe’or—the regional god. At this point in the Wilderness journey, almost all of the first generation was dead—this was the second generation. In the very next chapter, the generation who will enter the Land are counted, numbered. So this is a generation of people who has been fed for nearly four decades—not by the sweat of their brow, but by the Hand of God. They haven’t labored for a thing. Everything has been given to them. Their biggest challenge is tending their livestock and moving their tents from time to time and coming up with new recipes for quail and manna. These forty years were meant to be a time of repentance for the nation, where they worshipped and learned to depend solely upon God in preparation for entering a Land flowing with milk and honey where they would again reap the benefit of someone else’s work as they took over vineyards and fields they never planted, drank from cisterns that they never dug, etc…it was almost over. But they wanted more than God was providing for them at that moment—even though they were soon promised abundantly more. I mean, God wasn’t starving them. They had plenty to eat and drink. And they could have sexual relations if they wanted—with their wives! But that’s the deal, they were living during a season of both blessings and restrictions. Oh, I imagine they could eat one of their livestock if they wanted, but we never see any indication that they do—no, they like a free meal on someone else’s tab. They wanted what they smelled over yonder, fresh roasted meat with the blood still in it—strangled meat, cooked up on the altar of a god who wasn’t such a drag, obviously. No dietary restrictions, none of this living in the desert eating the same thing every day, and no silly rules about who you could and could not have sex with and when.  Or, at least, it certainly seems that was the attitude of far too many of the men.

God said, “I give you such and such to eat and drink. I will provide it six days a week and double on the seventh but you are not allowed to go out grasping for it on the seventh day and even if you do, it won’t be there. I have also given wives for your sons and husbands for your daughters.”

But the Israelites were always grasping for more—and not just the Israelites. This began in the garden. “You shall not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—but they wanted it and one by one they each grasped for what was forbidden and took it. Even though they had been provided with abundance that they never sweated and suffered over.”

Lot received the best of the Land, the Bible says his share was well watered like the Garden in Eden. It was his—but he grasped for city life despite being a shepherd.

God made Esau firstborn, and yet Rebekkah took matters into her own hands by grasping on to a deception against her husband which led to nothing but trouble for her.

Saul grasped tightly to a Kingdom he knew full well no longer belonged to him and it led him into necromancy and attempted murder.

David had the kingship and many wives and sons and daughters, but he grasped for Uriah’s wife who was forbidden to him.

We want what has not been given to us, or given to us right now, or yet.

The Temptation in the wilderness showed us all the way. Be willing to receive what God alone has provided and pay attention to when He is and isn’t providing. Trust during the lean seasons and do not become ungrateful and picky during the seasons of plenty. We must wait for God to give us position and authority and must never grasp those things for ourselves out of season or they will ruin us and everyone around us. We must not long for those things that God has not given us to the point where we go about getting them in wrong ways. It’s such a huge theme in the Bible, this lack of gratitude and patience and trust and needing to have what we want right stinking now. Or else we’re going to go to another god’s camp to get it—Ba’al Peor’s camp, for example. The Midianites offered up the desires of the flesh with no restrictions. Their lives must have looked pretty awesome compared to relatively boring Israelite life spent in the very presence of God—but this younger generation had never known it to be any other way. Perhaps God’s presence was rather passé…you know? Like, “Oh yeah, the cloud and the fire, almost didn’t notice.”

Okay, so don’t get me wrong. I would have personally been suffering smelling the roasted meat of the Midianites and I am not saying otherwise. I don’t know what the meat in question was, but pretty sure it wasn’t quail. They were playing for big stakes so I am thinking fatted calf here. And there is something about foreign women that is always very exotic to men—I mean geez, look at Solomon—he was like the walking, talking one-man example of the entire Ba’al Peor debacle with all his foreign wives and their gods and the temples he built for their gods and we all know why he wanted to make them happy. Nothing has changed in that department.

We eat from God’s provision every single day of the year and most of us have never skipped a meal except by choice. He gives and gives and gives and gives us and if He asks us to afflict ourselves, to fast, for one day out of every year—how small a thing is that to do for Him? I guess the question is, what are we worshiping and obsessing about? Is it God or our next meal? Is our focus on the provision or the provider? The Bible is full of stories about men and women making disastrous choices because they chose to grasp at something that God has denied them. One day a year He denies us food and drink—is that really worth our effort to try and get out of it? Are we really adverse to afflicting ourselves even in such a small and non-threatening way? Sometimes I think of Namaan the leper, and how angry he was when Elijah told him to go bathe in the Jordan if he wanted cured. And, instead of rejoicing and running to do it, he went away furious because he thought the terms of the cure were insulting—he even suggested more appropriate bodies of water. And his servant reasoned with him that if Elijah had asked him to do anything truly difficult, that he would have done it without question. Many are the same about Yom Kippur—we are not being asked to do anything beyond our ability. If God asked us to do something more difficult would we do it? Or is this reticence symbolic of a resentment that God would place any discomforts on us at all?

When I get emails about the keeping of commandments, it’s usually pretty much the same thing—people want their pleasures. They want their “harmless” pornography and want my permission to “dabble” in it, and as a former addict I would never give anyone the okay to do it, married couples who feel they will die if they can’t have sexual relations during the wife’s menstrual cycle (yet who will loudly chastise unmarried people for not being celibate), people who don’t want to give up leavened products during the week of Unleavened Bread, and people who want me to tell them that fasting on Yom Kippur isn’t really necessary for affliction because they really don’t think they can go for a whole day without eating. Each of these involves saying no to our desires, it is a minor sort of affliction, truly. We are not being denied anything we need for life. Let’s just say that God has taken it off the table He so graciously allows us to eat from. But we don’t see the option we want there, even though we are looking at His bounty, and we feel panicked and oppressed. Honestly, for a group that likes to tell people they had better keep the commandments, a lot of us are insanely resentful about keeping certain ones.  It’s the stuff you hear in ministry that people would never say in public. In public, you know, we put up a moral façade a lot of the time, and then when no one is looking we are struggling as much as or more than the people we scold. But flesh is everyone’s enemy, and it is commanded that we afflict ourselves on Yom Kippur. We need to be humbled. We need to be denied and put in our place and remember who is and who is not God. We need to feel the weight of our desires and beat our chests and realize that we are not giants of the faith on Yom Kippur but people still subject to the desires of our flesh. But, I am afraid that without fasting, it is generally a rather empty gesture. We lose the effect of coming face to face with our utter weakness before temptation. But, God be praised, we only have to really hold out for about 12 hours, once the full belly and sleep wear off.

If we are not willing to do that, then I imagine we really don’t have a clear concept in mind of what Yeshua endured for us, on an empty belly, for forty days and then for the day of His crucifixion.

Really. It’s one day. We need to be unmasked. We need to face our most basic weaknesses. It is a gift to be able to do so on the day that anticipates so great an atonement.



Yom Kippur Basics

We are now heading into the last of the official Feasts for which I have not yet written a “basics” blog–Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year and since it is coming up next week (2020–September 27th at sundown through the 28th at sundown on the Rabbinic calendar this year–not on my husband’s birthday, like last year) it is high time to tackle it. As far as Yom Kippur goes, there are pretty much three main questions I get:

(1) Why do we need a day of atonement when Messiah already atoned for us?

(2) What does it mean to afflict ourselves, we can do it without fasting, right? What if I just promise to just sit around and feel really guilty about my sins?

(3) What if I can’t fast for medical reasons?

Before I answer those three questions I am going to post the “Yom Kippur” verses from the Torah.

29 “And it shall be a statute to you forever that in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall afflict yourselves and shall do no work, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you. 30 For on this day shall atonement be made for you to cleanse you. You shall be clean before the Lord from all your sins. 31 It is a Sabbath of solemn rest to you, and you shall afflict yourselves; it is a statute forever. (Lev 16 ESV)

26 And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 27 “Now on the tenth day of this seventh month is the Day of Atonement. It shall be for you a time of holy convocation, and you shall afflict yourselves and present a food offering to the Lord. 28 And you shall not do any work on that very day, for it is a Day of Atonement, to make atonement for you before the Lord your God. 29 For whoever is not afflicted on that very day shall be cut off from his people. 30 And whoever does any work on that very day, that person I will destroy from among his people. 31 You shall not do any work. It is a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwelling places. 32 It shall be to you a Sabbath of solemn rest, and you shall afflict yourselves. On the ninth day of the month beginning at evening, from evening to evening shall you keep your Sabbath.” (Lev 23, ESV)

I obviously left out the verses pertaining to the Yom Kippur sacrifices/offerings because, well–no Temple. This is a basics blog–it deals with our responsibilities to God and one another and not the intricacies of the Yom Kippur sacrifices and their spiritual significance and all that. So, no scapegoats here.

Now that the preliminaries are over with, let’s get to the basics from the verses listed:

Statute forever. Tenth day of the seventh month. No work. A solemn rest. Afflict yourselves.

This day is spent in total fasting–no food, no water, no comforts, no entertainment. It is spent in prayer and petition and in recognition that we are only forgiven by the grace of God. This isn’t an earning of forgiveness, but an acknowledgment of God’s authority and goodness–it is true repentance as symbolized throughout the ages in the Biblical text. Even the Ninevites knew how to please God through fasting-centered repentance. We humble ourselves because He deserves for us to acknowledge how inadequate our witness is in the world–and by refusing to partake in the very blessings that are a gift we do not deserve. After two thousand years, there shouldn’t be any tribe or tongue that has not heard of the Savior, but there are so many unreached peoples that we ought to be ashamed of our lack of passion (and compassion) in this area. People are dying without Him while we argue about stupid stuff and eat three square meals a day and gorge ourselves on entertainment and comforts of all sorts. Folks have money for superfluous essential oils and Netflix but seemingly none for the needy. We have plenty of reason to repent and be humbled.

Of course, this commandment was written to people who were living under a constitutional theocracy–which means that they had God as their King, and He ruled according to the commandments given in the Torah (the five books of Moses: Genesis through Deuteronomy). This means they had no excuse whatsoever not to stop working, absolutely nothing barring them. They answered only to God and to the judges set up by Moses. By the first century, things were more complicated. So many Jews spread throughout the Roman Empire were slaves and their masters had absolute power over their life and death. They had not lived under a system that fully supported the celebration (yes, celebration) of Yom Kippur for many hundreds of years–except within the Holy Land. Likely those slaves kept neither Sabbath nor Yom Kippur nor the Feasts as they were commanded in Scripture. This was and is the consequence of living in Exile–which Moses warned the Israelites about during his own life–that they would be forced to live under the laws of other nations as part of their punishment. That they would be forced to serve masters other than God. Nehemiah 9 includes a prayer where this fact is lamented–that even living in the Land, they were not free.

And today we are in exile as well. We have restrictions on our lives because Messiah is not yet ruling and reigning here on earth. If He was then we could celebrate God’s festivals without restriction. That we have restrictions now is one of the reasons we mourn on Yom Kippur, and repent, and long for His return to us so that we can be fully commandment-keeping people in the world He created. So, just let me say that I know people sometimes have severe work restrictions and especially young people just starting out with no vacation (or not enough vacation) and no sick days (or maybe they just aren’t willing to lie and call in sick on a day of repentance). And if you absolutely cannot get out of working that day then please do what you can do. Don’t just give it up and live it up that day. There is something you can do–there is always something. We can always honor God, even if our methods are curtailed by circumstances.

Now, to the questions:

(1) Why do we need a day of atonement when Messiah already atoned for us?

This is a common question and it is very simple to answer. Yeshua/Jesus bought our salvation and atonement as individuals on the Passover when He was crucified. That part is done. Now, we are obligated to live with Him as our Master, obeying Him and walking as He walked–which, of course, is obeying the Torah at such a deep, self-sacrificing and honest level that it makes the written commandments of Exodus through Deuteronomy look like child’s play. Yom Kippur, which is short for Yom HaKippurim (Day of the Atonements), is a day for National, not individual, atonements. We, as the Body of Messiah, have not lived up to our calling to walk as our Savior walked. We have shamed God, we have fallen short, we have not done all that we could do either for Him or others. We stand as shameless accusers of the brethren and gossips in our online witness and terrible critics. Frankly, we owe Him a corporate apology and need to ask His forgiveness for how we have represented Him, for our corporate sins and for our corporate ommissions, for failing to complete the Great Commission, for falling away from keeping His commandments, for cooperating with or ignoring or even supporting abortion instead of working to eradicate it, for serving money instead of Him, etc. We got some splainin’ to do.  Yom Kippur isn’t about salvation, it is about owning our failings as a worldwide Body and asking to have our collective slate wiped clean. This day isn’t about “his” failings or “her” failings or “their” failings, but ours. We are all in this together and that is one of the most important lessons of Yom Kippur.

(2) What does it mean to afflict ourselves, we can do it without fasting, right? What if I just promise to just sit around and feel really guilty about my sins?

The word translated into English as afflict is T’annu, and the lemma, “ayin nun heh” ענה means a whole bunch of unpleasant things:  to be wretched, emaciated, humiliated, oppressed. It is a verb and not a noun, this is an action and not a state of being. Although it is also a day that brings great joy because it marks important transitions in the shemittah and jubilee cycles and a release from slavery, the day itself sees us behaving as servants who are being disciplined, yet have come to trust in our Master’s goodness and forgiveness. The question is, does a servant under discipline go boldly to his master’s pantry while taking a day off of work and begin eating as if it was a normal day? Let’s look at where the verses with this word show up:

Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river Ahava, that we might humble ourselves before our God, to seek from him a safe journey for ourselves, our children, and all our goods. (Ezra 8:21, ESV)

That reference to humbling ourselves is t’annot, the plural version of the verb t’annu—and here Ezra says that he declared a fast so that they would humble/afflict themselves. Clearly, here t’annu is associated with affliction through fasting.

The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord! May your hearts live forever! (Psalm 22:26, ESV)

Here, affliction is contrasted with a future state of eating and being satisfied.

‘Why have we fasted, and you see it not? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?” (Is 58:3, ESV)

Again, same root word and here we have the added bonus of what is referred to in ancient writings as a parallelism. In parallelism, which is very common in ancient writings, you get two phrases that say the exact same thing two different ways—equating the two concepts.  Both lines say the exact same thing—we did X and you didn’t notice. In this case, X is described in two ways—by fasting and humbling themselves, this equates the two concepts. Fasting is equal to humbling oneself which is another translation of the same root behind affliction.

And you don’t even want to know how often this word shows up in Job–it means real suffering, not just imaginary suffering. Fortunately, all we are being asked to do is fast, so it really is just symbolic suffering, depending on how enslaved we are to our appetites. Almost no one actually NEEDS to eat and drink every day. We just want to.

(3) What if I can’t fast for medical reasons?

Then don’t fast. Just don’t make a big deal about it or try to invalidate the commandment. I have seen people do that and it just boggles my mind. Trust that God understands, but don’t try to haul people who can do this into sin because you feel uncomfortable or condemned. Leave everyone else alone. It is still a national requirement for those who can do it, regardless of whether you can or think you can or whatever.



Social Media Musings Vol 3: Praying for Modern Untouchables

This is crazy, if you had told me a few weeks ago I was doing this I would have growled at you and called you insane, a liar, or worse. I might have spit at you (okay not really, but I would have been grossly offended). But then God shared something with me that I, as a teacher of children, could not ignore. It is almost futile to just sit around hating child molesters while knowing that they aren’t going away, that it is a generational sin, and if I am not part of the solution then I am part of the problem. Most will never be caught. If they were, the prisons aren’t big enough. God isn’t going to just kill them all en masse – even if I wish sometimes that He would. Since the Cross, God has dealt with evil primarily one way – by transforming it through the power of the Cross. The exile from the garden didn’t wipe it out, even the flood just limited it for a while. So, what did He ask me to do that was so unthinkable? That I need to explain step by step. If you would like, you can start out by listening to this interview on the power of radical forgiveness that unexpectedly segued into this unexpected topic – but if you don’t want to spend the time (hour and a half), you can read the daily journal below. And by the way, I am moderating ALL comments now. So if your comment is incendiary or insulting, it won’t see the light of day – and I won’t read very much of it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS8Tu1bEIW4?feature=oembed&w=1080&h=608]

January 1, 2018

This is a risky thing to say because people might not read the whole thing and get offended – but when has that ever stopped me before? This year I am going to spend a lot of time praying for the repentance and salvation of child molesters. Yes, I know, you want them dead and in my heart of hearts, I sympathize. I have prayed for God to kill them all at once, only to retract it, thinking of how many car accidents, plane crashes, whatever – would happen all at once. It’s the old “you have three wishes” scenario where people end up destroying the world based on good intentions.

We all know that God is not going to kill every child molester any more than He is going to strike down every malicious gossip, or any other kind of murderer. So what’s the alternative? Do we want their eternal condemnation so badly that we want them to die in their sins? Do we really understand the consequences of that? Their eventual eternal condemnation means only one thing – more victims. More children molested, bottom line. More child sex slaves. More child porn. That’s the price of their not repenting and coming to salvation.

About 17 years ago, as a new Christian, God challenged me on this and it has taken all this time to even begin to get my head screwed on straight about it. I pray for their repentance and salvation because I love children more than I hate them. I would have every single one on earth saved before I would have even one more child violated.

A lot of times, we don’t understand the justice of God. He is more concerned with eradicating evil than He is in condemning sinners. Evil is only eradicated one way in the post-cross world, and that is through repentance. Repentance leads to salvation. Salvation leads to transformation and reconciliation. And that is a tough pill to swallow – it is why radical forgiveness is so offensive to our flesh. We want people like this to burn forever, right? I am on record as wishing the US Government would have the death penalty for child molestation and rape, just as it is in the Bible, but that’s not our reality.

We have to deal with reality. Reality is: no repentance leads to more victims. Eternal vengeance vs salvation is really going to be measured in a higher victim count.

Will any repent? I don’t know. But if I am not praying for that, and none repent, what will be my culpability in the victim count? I believe that prayers work – and even if only one, only one repents, there will be untold children saved.

So, that’s my big goal for 2018 – to strive to protect children by focusing my prayers on the salvation of their greatest enemies. Truly, if we want child molesters to suffer – I imagine that the suffering they would endure as believers, having to face their sins and hopefully, make restitution and confession, would be pretty terrible.

***

After a long, agonizing, and prayerful day today spent searching my heart, I have decided to fast and pray for 40 days. It won’t be my first time, and I fast relatively often for various amounts of time without ever saying anything about it. But some things I have been reading about in “A Chance to Die” have me thinking a lot about my calling to teach children, and although I have prayed often that God would allow me to impact every child on earth for His Messiah – it occurs to me that I would like to pull back for a while and pray for the spiritual bondage to be broken in the lives of those who victimize them. Some demons can only go out with prayer and fasting, and I imagine that anything that could override a human’s natural protectiveness over children for the sake of a moment’s pleasure has to be something akin to that. I posted about why I have been praying for these people this morning and did a radio interview where I talked about it last week (I will post it in the comments) but I feel a seriousness about this. I plan to ask God for a soul on the first day, two on the second, four on the third, and so on. As things stand now, I am not able to ask for the sake of the molesters, but for the sake of the present and future victims they will continue to harm if they are not delivered. If we, as a people, do not protect our children then our love has grown colder than cold.

I am letting you know this because I am planning on journaling through this process on my wall, day by day. Also, if you all know about it, I won’t succumb to the day 20+ boredom and decide to start eating again. Yes, I know when my weak spot is – when I am no longer hungry but bored to death. Eating is more entertaining than you might imagine – even to someone who fasts quite often and even for extended periods. The only reason I will seriously consider stopping is if I start having TIA’s or strokes again, and I have been okay since December 7, so I ask prayer support on that so I will be able to do it.

I just feel so strongly like I need to do this. I don’t even begin to understand this.

January 2, 2018

Day 1 – The Reluctant Missionary – 128.2 lbs

Although it is hard to believe now – the great missionary to India’s children, Amy Carmichael, did not enjoy wide support back home for her efforts. Can you believe there were actually people who were angry with her? She should have stayed home with the D.O.M (Dear Old Man) who had effectively adopted her to come and live with his family. He would die of a broken heart without her, after all (he did not). She should have stayed closer to home. She should have continued working with the poor back home. She should have…and the should have’s tragically kept people from praying for her efforts.

The call of God rarely sounds sane to those who have not heard the precise instructions. We are quick to judge, and even quicker to condemn and dismiss – but only time will tell what God has and has not instructed.

Sometime between 17 and 19 years ago, as a new Christian, God issued a challenge that provoked me to lash out at Him in anger:

I was listening to a local radio show in a small, southern Idaho town, and the hosts were talking about homosexuals. I remember the one host said that he would like it is God would put “them” all on a boat in the middle of an ocean and then put a hole in it so they would all drown. I was outraged – where was his decency, any sense of mercy? I quickly shot off an email to him and went back to my work in the lab. As I was muttering to myself, I heard God respond in what I call His “loud inside voice.”

“I can’t believe anyone would have that kind of hatred in their heart!” I muttered.

“You mean like your hatred for child molesters?”

The message was in so quickly– my defenses had been down because my offense was up. I heard what I heard clear as a bell, and I was angry about it for a long time. As with every incidence in my life of hearing this particular voice, it has always left me without argument. I also can’t just dismiss it or ignore it, The voice has always been right, painfully right, even if I didn’t understand why. I disagreed with and resented the unspoken message, and I still do, but I knew then it was right as I know it now.

Yes, I hated child molesters, and much of me still does. I am not going to detail my own story here, or the things in my life that have happened since that day in the lab. Some of the story is mine to tell, and other parts belong to others – I cannot tell their story and to tell mine would be counterproductive.

If God was merely pointing out and congratulating my hatred for child molesters with a divine “high five”, I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit offended. But there is always a message within the message – and, in this case, the message was terrible:

“You hate them with such an intensity that you want them all dead and condemned, AT ANY PRICE.”

Right after the Biblical Feast of Sukkot, I began studying the reality of evil and radical forgiveness. Nothing I have ever studied has been more excruciating. I have been shaken to the core – and yet, my mind has also been eased by learning about what forgiveness is and is not.

Two weeks ago, God showed me the reality behind my fantasies of revenge and retaliation – they weren’t going to ever happen. I may be a murderer in my heart and mind, but my hands are not willing, despite my verbal bravado. God also showed me that He has no intention of killing every single child molester on the planet. And we know that the justice system will not be incarcerating them all, and even if they did – they would not remain safely locked up. There are not enough jails in the world to hold them, and the Biblical penalty of death in such cases is not being implemented. That is our reality.

So what power do we have? Prayer.

So, do I simply pray for an ever-growing number of victims? Will that do anything to stop the abuse, to stop there from being more and more victims every single day? No, the victim count will rise and I will simply have more victims to pray for, every day more and more. That isn’t acceptable to me – I don’t want my prayers to simply be a trauma ward after the fact. It seems like admitting defeat, “We can’t stop them all so let’s just pray for their victims.”

We have to remember that, in much of the world, this behavior isn’t even illegal. Do we just write off those kids? Pray for them after the damage is done and irrevocable? That isn’t acceptable to me either. I can no longer justify ONLY praying for the victims.

As I see it now, the only recourse is to pray for those who are victimizing the children in the first place. Worldy methods just don’t work – people just go back and offend and offend again and again. I believe the only hope for the children of the world is for their abusers to come to Yeshua/Jesus, and for that to happen I believe the demonic stranglehold of this unfathomable evil has to be broken in their lives. Yes, I want them to suffer, and I want to sit back and comfortably hate them and abandon them to the devil – but that comes with too great a price tag–more and more victims.

How many more children should be sacrificed on the altar of my revenge, just because the thought of them being forgiven is too terrible for me to bear?

And so today I begin 40 days of fasting and praying for the salvation of the people who, if they do not repent and come to salvation, will victimize more and more and more. I am so conflicted. I want to do this for the sake of future victims. I want to do this for the sake of the children whose molestation would stop now, today even, if salvation comes to their attackers. I want revenge – but more than revenge I want to evil to end.

I suppose that if such a person comes to Messiah, that they will suffer as they contemplate their sins – as I suffer when I contemplate the times I have hurt people. But salvation has always been about this – about someone not getting the punishment they deserve, right? Faith is about trusting that although there will never be true justice in this world, that we will know it in the world to come. And so I am called to this bizarre mission field – but unlike other missionaries, I am reluctant. Today I will ask the Lord for the salvation and deliverance of one child molester – something that up until now has been unthinkable to me. I even do it knowing that this might make me the most hated woman on earth. But what if? What if a father, one who was molested himself, stopped before he even began? What if even one child trafficker had a salvation experience and turned him/herself in. What if someone else refused to kidnap or purchase a child today? What if?

I have seen amazing things come from prayer – I believe that God works miracles through prayer. Yeshua/Jesus told His disciples that they would do greater things than He did while on earth – what could be greater than to save children? Are we willing to pay the price? It is high.

A word of caution on the comments – this is a sensitive and emotional subject, for all of us. I have friends who have been molested, whose children have been molested, some people’s children have committed suicide after molestation, others go on to commit these terrible crimes themselves. No matter what has happened, there are victims on every side, hurting in different, and violently painful ways. I ask that everyone just extend grace to one another. I won’t allow any victim bashing – assume that if someone is lashing out, that they are frustrated and hurting. It will be hard for me to endure because I am hurting too, but if I can endure it, then I ask everyone else to be patient and loving as well. Our personal situation is not the same as everyone else’s – but we tend to only see our own side of it and want everyone else to as well. That’s natural. What I will not allow, and have never allowed on this page, is personal attacks, cheap shots, any demeaning of anyone else on this wall – no naming of names – this has always been a rule here. I don’t even allow my enemies to be slandered here. We can’t fight evil by doing evil.

January 3, 2018

Day 2 – The Man Who Stood in my Grey Zone. –

If you haven’t read the last few posts, you might want to before reading this. The stuff I am writing about right now is going to be disturbing to folks – especially without the context of the posts that have come before.

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He wasn’t totally in my gray zone, mind you. A lot of him stood in the zone I reserve for the blackest of the black – at least I presume he did. I really don’t know.

In the early 1990’s, NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association) got outed for holding their monthly meetings in the San Francisco public library, one floor above their children’s section, so the news reports went. No one was happy – not parents, not non-parents, not the well established gay community of the city. My gay friends at work and in the neighborhood (I was working at an Aerospace company in Berkeley, right across the bay) were outraged. Christian/non-Christian – you name it, people had their torches and pitchforks out and frankly, that was good and right. NAMBLA is set on the legalization of pedophilia and is probably the most hated group in the US.

While watching the news one night, brows furrowed and mouth pursed angrily, muttering obscenities (hey, I was NOT saved at that point, okay? Honesty time here), they interviewed a guy that made everyone watching catch their breath in horror.

“I am just grateful that my grandfather loved me enough to allow me to play Doctor with him when I was a little boy.”

The kid looked like he was in his 20’s, my age at the time, or that’s how I remember him. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I don’t know if this young man ever had, or ever did, molest anyone – but he equated the act itself with love. His grandfather had twisted his little boy trust into believing that violation was some form of familial nurturing. I have always imagined that was the only way his mind could deal with the molestation – to turn it into something special instead of acknowledging the horrific nature of it. I wonder if he was even interested in molesting anyone himself, or if he just joined the group as some unconscious attempt to normalize what had happened to him – to make it okay.

Do I believe that God can heal that kind of twisting? I have to. Does that twisting excuse abuse? No. It better explains it but doesn’t justify it, doesn’t make it any less wrong, doesn’t make it an inevitable outcome, and certainly doesn’t give anyone a free pass on consequences.

All day yesterday, praying for people I don’t want to pray for – I spent a lot of time walking because only while walking would my mind quiet down, only then could I just pray. Sometimes I just loudly groaned because praying was hurting me in areas that I hadn’t felt in a long time. My flesh, in this, is hostile towards God. I obey, but with no joy, with no sense of holiness or righteousness. I pray because I have been given that burden. My flesh is screaming, “foul.”

I am not a great prayer warrior, and never have been, so this is difficult on a number of levels. My prayers are not from the heart, each syllable forced from my lips. I make a rather pathetic spectacle as I retreat to the treadmill (I don’t want to wear out my carpets), groaning and protesting from a place deep inside me.

It is what it is, and that is why I don’t ask anyone to join me, or expect anyone to understand, or approve of, what I am doing. I don’t quite approve of it, not yet. I am not asking anyone not to hate, not to want these people dead. I am not telling anyone what to do or judging anyone. All I am doing is sharing this insane thing I know God has asked me to do, for whatever reason. Maybe not one will come to faith – maybe this is about breaking me completely by having me do the unthinkable for 40 days. Reluctant is my new middle name, and I just hope that my grudging prayers count for something. Maybe salvation for someone who is tormented by demonic thoughts but has never offended yet, maybe my prayers are strong enough for that, but it will be many days, I think, before I can do this without feeling like this.

But the children. Each offender (or potential offender) who turns towards God and is delivered – I think I once saw a statistic that the average molester will hurt 100 children. I have trouble, still, wanting to pray for people who have crossed that line, but right now I can, absolutely, focus my prayers on the people who have not yet. I just think of that NAMBLA kid, and it does make it easier. I pray he got help, and I pray he is okay now.

Yes, if we were under Torah they would be killed – the ones who got caught, anyway. But we are in exile. Exile means we do not live under Torah. Exile means no easy answers. For years I have said, “Well, if we only lived by Torah…” but we don’t. So it’s either (1) continue to lament about what should be, (2) become a politician and change the laws, (3) become a vigilante, (4) or pray in the only way I can think of to keep this from happening in the first place. The cycle has to be broken – this is the only path I see available to me. I wish we lived in the fantasy land where the laws were correct on this, but instead, we live in a real world that we need to face and deal with according to the weapons of God and not the weapons of this world.

Jan 4, 2018

Day 3 – Do I Love a God Who Can Forgive and Restore Nazis? – 124.0

Today I have the privilege of telling you about two heroes of mine.

I once listened to a popular radio talk show host, a conservative Jew, whose mother was Catholic and whose father was Jewish and she stated quite frankly that she couldn’t accept Christianity because of the forgiveness factor. She simply couldn’t accept a Jesus who would forgive the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Eva Mozes Kor, on the other hand, was a “Mengele twin” from Auschwitz, who did forgive, and found great freedom – without ever condoning the Holocaust, she forgave. Her video is viral out there on youtube, and I recommend everyone watch it.

Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsie were imprisoned for hiding Jews during the Holocaust and then sent to the Herzogenbusch and Ravensbruck concentration camps. It was the dead of winter and frail Betsie was generally sick, yet unfailingly taught from the Bible she had smuggled into the camp. Betsie’s eventual death was tragic and made it all the harder after the war for Corrie to forgive the perpetrators of the Nazi madness. At a speaking engagement years after the war, she was greeting people afterward, when, standing a few people before her, she caught sight of an SS guard that she recognized from the camp. How could she shake his hand, how could she keep from lashing out and scratching his eyes out? She was in a torment – until he came forward in repentance, freely confessing his past sins, and told her he was now a Christian. He asked if she could accept him as a brother in Christ, and the love of God swept through her and allowed her to take his hand – with great joy.

Just want to be clear here that Joseph Mengele died, as far as we know, never repenting. Eva Mendez Kor’s decision to forgive was a personal one, which didn’t involve any sort of reconciliation – it was a true, free gift. One she has been widely criticized and hated for within the Jewish community – BUT, she had the absolute right to do it or not do it. I am posting a few videos and articles about her in the comments – I hope you will watch this incredible woman and hear her story.

Anyway, last night I wrestled all night. I didn’t sleep much, and what dreams I had were scattered and unhappy. I felt very lost and stuck. How can He forgive and restore people who came to their senses after the Holocaust? According to the words of our Messiah in John 6:44, the Father had to actually draw them first. Nazis. I knew one, in my youth. By the time I met him, Jerry was older than I am now. I only learned years later that he had been a Nazi – he seemed like the most normal person on earth, really nice. I don’t know what he did in the war, where he was stationed, any of that. Gosh, he was so normal. A couple of years ago, while I was still homeschooling, we read a book called The Wave – and since then I have never questioned how “nice people” can descend into depravity and violence so quickly. It was remarkable how quickly and easily people’s minds can be warped to the point where right seems wrong, and wrong seems justified. We see it in the aftermath of revolutions all the time.

I want to agree with the Jewish radio talk show host – I really do. I want to believe that there are crimes, ones that fall short of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (slandering/lying about the witness of the Spirit in any way – whether it be to attribute divine miracles to Beelzebub (Matt 12:27) or for a believer to call the inner witness that Yeshua is Messiah a lie (John 15:26, Hebrews 6)) that are just beyond God’s ability to forgive. I want to think that an evil person is evil forever – it makes me feel better about hating them. I want them in that big evil box I keep stored safely away where no one can jostle it.

I want for so much more to be unforgiveable. So much more. The agony of thinking that so many other things are forgivable is just constant. I feel it like a great, heavy, ache in my chest.

Yesterday was not a fruitful day in prayer, though I did pray. I was reading Romans, Amy Carmichael’s biography (we have come to the point where she has rescued a young temple prostitute – praise God!), and a book that a couple of friends just read that would probably start a riot if I admitted it. The guy has a lot of wrong to say, but when he says something right – it is right at a very disturbingly deep level. Ah well, we all have a piece of the puzzle, right?

My prayers – begging God to break the cycle of child sexual abuse. I can still do little more than pray for those who are offenders in their minds but who have not yet harmed a child. When I think of praying for anyone who has actually transgressed in the flesh, and when sometimes I am able to reach beyond myself and do it, I want nothing more than to pound my fists on the floor and throw things. In the night, I want to scream for not understanding. How can He ask this of me? How can I refuse? I used to write internet porn stories on the old boards – a child could have found them, and read them. Maybe I am a molester too because of that. Maybe everyone who has ever left a magazine laying around for their kids or babysitter to find, or took their kids to the store only to have them walk by explicit women’s magazine covers, maybe we are all guilty in one way or another. I don’t know. Where does God draw the line on what it is to violate a child? I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.

I know what God has asked me to do. I guess I would rather be Jonah and wait on the hillside, under a green plant, for their destruction. But I know that God, from beginning to end, deals with sin not generally by massive destruction (which doesn’t work in eliminating sin), but through redeeming and transforming sinners – like me.

Jan 5, 2018

Day 4 – God is so totally not interested in my suggestion box comments

I am such an idolater. I constantly judge Him for not being more like me. I resent His independence from my feelings about how I think things should be.

My ideas about justice and what is right and wrong are so incredibly temporal and tied up with my emotions. I want Him to make sense to me. I want Him to agree with me, hate what I hate, be as unforgiving and unbending as I am, and yet love what I love and be as flexible as I can be when it suits me.

So I rail at Him when He asks me to do something that I find offensive, mostly because I can’t find a single Scripture backing me up and I resent that, a lot. I want to at least have a horse in this race, a non-flesh argument on my side – even one. That’s the worst part. Understanding that He is right and yet still not agreeing with Him. It’s just messed up.

As soon as I came to peace with that – my being messed up and needing to be dealt with – I got this burst of energy yesterday. I can pray now. I still disagree with Him, but am at peace with the fact that – well, that it’s my problem and He doesn’t need to hear about it 24/7. I cannot, however, promise that He has heard the last of it.

We really, rarely believe that He is God and we are just the created, the servants, the slaves, the children – whatever. However we put it, we are still unwise, subordinate, fleshy, and totally committed to seeing things from our own point of view. We don’t take the long view because, in some ways, it is unfathomable to us. We cannot imagine a future where just will look like no more tears, no more desire for revenge, no more betrayals, where we won’t care about what was done to us anymore.

Did you know that love and hate in the bible are not emotional words, but instead covenant terms? Emotions are kinda wild, and they lead us astray way too often. But chesed translated instead as Covenant loyalty – that will get us through the long, dark night of our doubts and times when we wonder about the legitimacy of all this. When hatred becomes a lack of preference, a non-Covenant status, the unchosen, and not necessarily the hatred that drives our flesh to murder, gossip, and every other evil work – we are called suddenly to a much higher level of our following of Yeshua/Jesus. It isn’t about what we feel, understand, or agree with – it is what the Master calls us to do in response to what He has done.

So I am done fighting, maybe. Maybe. For now. Asked God for four sexual predators converted and transformed yesterday. I prayed that God would violently break into their consciousness and show them His heart and His truth. I asked that they won’t even be able to enjoy thoughts of violating any child. More than anything, I plead for the cycle to stop, because we will never catch them all, not even most of them. God most effectively deals with evil by changing people. In a world where they can manipulate and hide for a lifetime, and even go to other countries legally to violate, when it is so hard to prove charges – oh God, please. Stop them. Stop them because kids don’t usually tell what happened. Stop them because I can’t. And then, let them be moved to face their consequences and do right by their victims, who deserve to be acknowledged as having been desperately wronged.

No update tomorrow, want to focus on worship and this is not Sabbathy material.

Jan 7, 2018

 

Day 6 – The God who has mercy on whom He will have mercy

First of all, answering a concern. If you have no concerns, then skip ahead. Why am I fasting publicly? Am I looking for attention? Well, honestly, I fast like very often and I have never mentioned it in the past 7 years I have been on facebook. I have fasted 40 days in the past without a peep out of me. I routinely fast from between 3-5 days, again, no one ever knows. I am fasting for my own spiritual growth so why would I say anything? But, like Esther, who fasted publicly and told people about it – sometimes there are situations so serious that we need folks to come alongside us. Unlike Esther, I can’t and won’t command anyone to join me. But I do appreciate the prayer support. As for journalling it – you guys know I journal through everything I am going through. Same old same old. What I am praying for is just too big for me, like it was too big for Esther – I can’t do this without support. This isn’t about me this time, it is about other people. Though God is strong enough, I am not.

Am I going to keep oiling my head and appearing happy – well, yeah – the only pains I have talked about have been my wrestlings with God, and those hurt just as bad whether I am eating or not, and you are all used to me doing it. What fasting does is really make me more pliable, and my defenses against what He wants a lot weaker – and so this is good.

My health: is awesome, actually. Haven’t had one of my warning headaches, but if I do, I will re-evaluate. My option on the table is a vegetable and water fast, but I hate those with the intensity of a thousand red hot suns, so I prefer to just water fast. You need to understand, when God has me fasting, I literally cannot swallow what I put in my mouth. It’s abhorrent to me. I would have to do it willfully. I wouldn’t be able to eat a pizza right now, gross, and you guys know how much I love pizza. Extra cheese, turkey pepperoni, maybe some mushrooms, artichoke hearts, olives – but as long as there is extra cheese, I am not picky. And the crust brushed with butter and rubbed with garlic.

So, back to what I wanted to write about:

Romans 9:18

So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.

Got told last week that what I am doing (praying for the salvation of sexual predators in order to save future victims from being violated) was dangerous and leading people astray. I accept that it is distasteful, and it certainly was to me at first. Hardest thing I have ever prayed for. But we are wrong if we look at God as though He can be manipulated into an injustice. Truly, only God really knows what true justice and injustice looks like, and so He has undoubtedly hardened some offenders – of that I have no doubt. Just as Eichmann and Mengele went to their graves without regret, there are pedophiles out there who are hardened beyond salvation. I don’t ask God for those, although I do wish for their speedy deaths or at least permanent incarceration.

I can’t ask for and receive, anything in prayer that God does not desire – that’s a fact. He isn’t a pagan god who can be manipulated by my using the correct pronunciation of his one true name (like Isis did to Ra), and forced into doing what I want. No, He can only comply with His own nature.

The more I do this, the more hope I have for the cycle to be broken among the young – especially those who have not offended yet. God doesn’t want a single child molested, not even one. He also doesn’t want them to become pedophiles themselves. God hates injustice.

Interesting side effect of all this, it has put all other small slights (and compared to this, they are pretty much all small) into a radically realistic perspective. We really want everything done to us to be a damning offense, right? But the big stuff is coming into perspective as well. Not only am I coming to forgive the evil that was done to me, but also, the evil done to someone else whom I love more than my own life. It is their violation that torments me, not my own. I realize that in praying this, I am praying for them as well – that they will not offend. My love for them alone, will not keep them from doing this to someone else. I am praying not only for their life, but the lives of what children they might have or come in contact with. I hadn’t really thought of it before because I was too consumed with agony. I don’t share their story because it is not mine to tell, and no one should be exposed and violated simply for being a victim. Their story isn’t inspiration or outrage fodder for others – not unless they choose that.

God has mercy on whom he will have mercy, and He will render without hope, those whom he chooses. Or else we wouldn’t be here, right? No one deserves what He did for us, How He redeemed us at the Cross and then began the New Creation in each of us, transforming us – making us into His image-bearers. We don’t deserve any of that – no one does. So we pray for everyone, and He will decide which prayers to honor and which to ignore – but there is no danger in praying, in blessing those who persecute us, just as long as we hold to what is good and reject what is evil (Ro 12:14)

Jan 8, 2018

Day 7 – The Mormon technicality (I have since been informed by different ex-Mormons in my sphere that the view of Mary’s actual impregnation that I was exposed to was regional, but that the rest remains uncontested)

I have lived in predominantly Mormon communities for 11 of my last 23 years. The town I live in now has 120 Mormon churches in it for a town of 56,000. That’s one Mormon church for roughly every 450 people – plus we have a Temple here. The first Mormon town I lived in, for ten of those years, was a small town of 10,000 in southern Idaho and, if anything, it was a lot more Mormon than this one. You were either a Mormon, or a jack-Mormon (unobservant yet loyal). If you were a Christian running for office, it had to be as a Democrat because you would not be allowed to run as a Republican – the church had that tied up. They also had the police force firmly under wraps.

The one thing I learned early on, after coming to Christ, was that molestation of girls by their fathers and stepfathers was epidemic and protected by the church. Why? Because of their belief that Heavenly Father, Elohim, physically came to earth and impregnated his literal daughter, Mary. Their god is in heaven making babies like gangbusters and, as a 12-year-old Mormon girl once told me, so this is not second-hand gossip, “Heavenly Father saw that Mary was the most beautiful girl who had ever lived and couldn’t help himself.” Honestly, I wanted to go home and bathe in bleach after she told me that. I mean, someone actually told that to a 12-year-old girl, or maybe she was a lot younger when she heard it. I really don’t want to think about it.

So, in this we have a conundrum. A god with no self-control who had sex with his own daughter to make Jesus, who would someday become a god by living according to the tenants of Mormonism.

My neighbor came to me, upset about a write up of Mormonism in like Time magazine or something, right before the 2002 Olympics in SLC. “Why don’t they think we are Christians?” I laid out before her that Christians, besides believing that becoming gods ourselves was Lucifer’s sin, don’t believe in a carnal god who impregnated his own daughter. She quickly and nervously jumped in, “Well, no one knows for sure what happened.” But she didn’t deny it.

Although these beliefs are not well known in the larger Mormon empire, they are very common in Utah and Idaho, which are more traditional than the moderate Mormonism elsewhere. And don’t get me going on their views of evil angels and people being reincarnated black.

So, we have a belief that their god is carnal and had sexual relations with his daughter. Although most Mormon men would never consider the ramifications of that, much less ever do such a thing, too many men in these more rural Mormon–dominated communities do – they hold more to the old ways of Mormonism that are more deeply tied to the doctrines of their prophet Joseph Smith than their modern-day politically-minded prophets. I know a lot of women who escaped Mormonism out of such communities, and they tell tales of their own molestation at the hand of fathers and stepfathers while their mothers stood by – not knowing what to do because they won’t get called into heaven if their husbands are displeased with them. I have been told of meetings with a Bishop (or something, can’t remember) where his advice to distraught mothers was, “Get a deadbolt for the inside of her door.” In Mormon homes, “Temple worthy” homes, as long as a man is observing the laws externally, and tithing according to the dictates of the church accountants, he will not be acted against. The Mormon father is, in some ways, a god in his own home and not just a man. As I said, you find this in the more ancient and traditional communities that stretch back to the 1800’s.

So, today, I didn’t know exactly what to pray for – but I wanted to put the plight of these precious girls in your hearts. It is one thing to pray for the salvation of someone who believes that he/she is still just a mere man, but someone who believes that they practically already are, and will, in fact, be a god? I pray that God will rid them of this arrogant notion and convict them of their abominations. I pray for the strength of these girls, as they grow up, that they will not be intimidated by religion and promises of glory, but instead ruled by love and compassion when it comes to dealing with their own daughters and husband. Their minds are being twisted, and it isn’t their fault. My heart is sick with grief for them.