More Tolerable for the Land of Sodom and Gomorrah

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

You recall the story of Lot and his family in Sodom and Gomorrah, as described in Genesis 16:18-33 and 17:1-29. The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were so gross, including homosexual acts, that the Lord decided to destroy those cities. Lot and his family barely escaped with their lives.

The verses in this photo, Mark 6:7-13, tell how, when Christ sent out His disciples to preach and heal, some cities and towns wouldn't receive them. To those towns and cities, the disciples were told to shake the dust off their sandals as a sign of the curse on them: it would be "More Tolerable for the Land of Sodom and Gomorrah" on Judgment Day than for those cities. Why? What was the great sin they committed?

Without a doubt, the homosexual act that the men of Sodom tried to commit against the Lord's messenger-angels was one of those sins: from this story, the term "sodomy" has come to mean homosexual acts. But this wasn't the only gross sin! In Ezekiel 16:49-50 we read - "Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease was in her and in her daughters; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. They were haughty, and committed abomination before Me: therefore I took them away as I saw good."

So, along with committing "abomination" (i.e., homosexual acts), the prophet Ezekiel lists pride, gluttony and "prosperous ease" - enjoying the luxuries of this world while allowing "the poor and needy" to starve. Pro-LGBTQ pseudo-Christians often use these verses to turn attention away from homosexual acts and toward the other sins, but all of these sins are equally sinful.

But there exists an opposite extreme, being overly judgmental: In Mark 9:38-41, we read about the disciple John telling Jesus - "Teacher, we saw someone who doesn't follow us casting out demons in your name; and we forbade him, because he doesn't follow us." In a parallel passage, the brothers James and John asked Jesus if they should forbid someone who was casting out demons in Jesus' name and call down fire from heaven to destroy the cities of Samaria that did not receive the disciples (Luke 9:49 & 54). In both texts, Jesus replied - "Don't forbid him, for there is no one who will do a mighty work in my name, and be able quickly to speak evil of me. For whoever is not against us is on our side." And in Luke, Jesus added - "Whoever is not against us is for us."

Jesus ate and drank with prodigals and sinners. He forgave the woman caught in adultery with the words - "Neither do I condemn you: go and sin no more." He even forgave Peter who had denied him three times. The Lord is always ready to forgive if we are willing to repent and turn from our sins.

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Some will then say, "Jesus accepted people just as they are, so you should accept me just as I am." There is a grain of truth in this, among the chaff: the Lord does indeed accept us just as we are... but He doesn't expect us to remain just as we were! As He told the woman caught in adultery - "go and sin no more."

Another excuse that some will bring up is "God made me like this" or that they were "born that way," especially these days in regard to homosexuality, lesbianism or transgenderism. But this flies in the face of known scientific fact: there's no genetic difference between them and normal people, the overwhelming majority of these folks have succumbed to the mass psychosis of current LGBTQ propagandizing: there are many stories of previously normal teenagers being exposed to LGBTQ indoctrination in the schools, then several of them together declaring that they are "trans" and demanding hormonal treatment or even sex change operations. The tragic aspects are that they will not only be sterile for the rest of their lives but that the rate of suicide of this group is shown to be ten to twenty times higher than the rest of teenage population.

The ideology behind this is relativism: there is no objective truth or reality, you can have your truth and I can have my truth; you can have your reality and I can have mine. Taken to its logical conclusion, it leads to solipsism: I am the only one who really exists as a rational, thinking person; everyone else is merely an object for my utilization. Perhaps this explains the sharp increase in autism spectrum young people today because this is characteristic of their thinking too.

But this ideology of relativism is an oxymoron: "Everything is relative, there are no absolutes, and that's the absolute truth! [So therefore there are no rules for my sexual behavior, I can do whatever I want.]" This is absurd: it is logically impossible to say that there is no absolute because that's an absolute statement. Therefore the obverse must be true: there is an absolute, there is a God. Objective truth and objective reality really do exist. The only difficulty is discovering what or who IT or HE is. It isn't easy, but it also isn't impossible.

Someone once said - "Ask, and you will receive; search, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you." Guess who? Jesus Christ, that's Who! It's recorded in Matthew 7:7 and Luke 11:9. It won't happen, though, all by itself. It won't fall into your lap, you have to ask, seek and knock: "you gotta wanna." If you don't want to change (and most people just don't), you won't change. You must seriously search for the truth. Then, He promises, you will find it.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!

(Linked to www.Hosken-News.info of 20 Oct. 2018.)

 

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Law vs. Grace, Part 2

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

In my first essay on this topic, "Law vs. Grace: Which Will Win?," I wrote that St. Paul made a clear disctinction between Law and Grace, and that nobody can be saved by merely observing the Law of Moses.

But there is a further distinction that must be made: St. Paul himself was not condemning those Jews who would choose to continue observing Jewish religious customs. As Paul wrote - "...when they perceived the grace that was given to me, James and Cephas and John, they who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcision. They only asked us to remember the poor -- which very thing I was also zealous to do" (Galatians 2:9-10).

So basically, what he's saying is that it doesn't matter whether you observe certain religious customs {"the circumcision") or not ('the Gentiles"): the thing that really matters is faith in Christ and demonstrating that faith by remembering the poor. Note carefully that at the First Council in Jerusalem, the Apostles did not condemn those Jews who wanted to retain their religious customs: "For Moses from generations of old has in every city those who preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath" (Acts 15:21), clearly implying that the Jewish believers in Jesus could continue observing their traditions. The main point was that Gentiles who believed in Jesus as the Annointed One ("Messiah" in Hebrew, "Christ" in Greek) did not have to first become Jewish proselytes and observe the Mosaic Law before they could become Christians.

Paul makes this point again, this time rather sharply, in ch.5, v.4 - "You are alienated from Christ, you who desire to be justified by the law. You have fallen away from grace." If you believe that all you need to do in order to have salvation is to observe a collection of religious customs, rituals and ceremonies, you're sadly mistaken! The essence of the Christian faith does not consist of certain ethnic foods, or speaking in an archaic dialect, or singing in a certain strange manner, or using square and triangular musical notes, or crossing oneself right-to-left vs. left-to-right - those are all cultural traditions, human traditions, not Holy Tradition. The Christian faith is faith in Christ! All those other things are optional, not essential!

And in v. 6, Paul clarifies - "For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision amounts to anything, nor uncircumcision, but faith working through love." Merely following religious ritual ("circumcision") or no rituals ("uncircumcision") without faith doesn't save. What saves is a practical, working faith: if we say we "love mankind" but that love doesn't work out in practical, visible ways of loving that sometimes unlovely relative or neighbor, we're simply fooling ourselves when we say we have faith in Christ. Paul sums it up again - "For in Christ Jesus neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation" (Galatians 6:15).

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What is this "new creation"? Paul tells us what happened to him: "For I, through the law, died to the law, that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that live, but Christ living in me. That life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself up for me" (Galatians 2:19-20). "Crucified with Christ" = "Christ in me" = "being in Christ" - see 2 Corinthians 5:17 - "Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new."

In Ephesians 1:22-23, St. Paul focuses on the Church, emphasizing the community or group nature of our salvation: "He [God the Father] put all things in subjection under His [Christ's] feet, and gave Him to be Head over all things for the Church, which is His Body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all." Where is this "fullness" of God's glory to be found? In Christ's Body, the Church!

St. Paul's whole first chapter of his letter to the saints in Ephesus uses over and over the plural "you" and "we" or "us" - he's not interested in preaching the modern-day Gospel of "Just Jesus, My Bible and Me" rugged individualism, self-centered pseudo-salvation that's simply a self-deceiving, phony easy-believism ticket to heaven. This heresy is called "Antinomianism" - it teaches us that we don't need to do anything, certainly not follow a bunch of rules, simply believe, because "doing things" might make us think that we are trying to save ourselves by our good works, not by faith.

Such people mis-quote Ephesians 2:8-9 - "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast." They indulge their fleshly passions and lusts, thinking that they don't need to do any good works. But they conveniently omit the very next verse - "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that we would walk in them." That word "walk" refers to our day-to-day behavior, our actions or works.

Many Christians labor under confusion about the meaning of "works" in St. Paul's New Testament letters: Paul uses the word "works" in two distinctly different ways - "the works of the Law" that refer to trying to keep the ritual Law of Moses, versus "good works" that refer to the way faith works through love. The first "works" he always describes negatively: they can't save us. But the second "works" he always describes positively as the evidence of Christ in us! All religions including Christianity have rituals and traditions - they're not bad as such, but they aren't the essence of Christianity. So here's how we should understand "Law vs. Grace" - Law is our human, fleshly efforts to save ourselves through religious ritual, but Grace is Christ's resurrected life in us empowering us to do good works.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!

(Linked to www.Hosken-News.info of 07 Oct. 2018.)

 

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