What a realisation!

So often in our tabloid, syndicated-to-the-hilt, visually oriented, and, of course, commercially driven media the objective of “the public’s right to know” is utilised as an overriding justification for publication of content that, simply, is unnecessary for the public and unhelpful for those it concerns.

In the Bible, a king called David writes, “You love all words that devour, O deceitful tongue.” Words can wound, and information can cause pain — and so often our media will “love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking what is right.” (Also David, Psalm 52) The defense that it rates well is inadequate, yet it is enthralling to discover a genuine discussion of journalistic ethics that reflects biblical truth about speech.

God teaches that Christian people are to speak the truth in love, and that, whatever other abilities we may have been given by Him, if we don’t exercise those with love, we have nothing. Oh, that our press would operate on this basis — to do so would serve the “public interest” well!

Bizarre experience yesterday afternoon just before the sun went down at Sydney Uni — the photo above was one of a bunch I snapped with my phone, and it really doesn’t do it any justice.

As I paused to take a few photos, I realised that no fewer than 15 people were doing exactly the same thing!

I was reminded of the truth of Romans 1, which explains how God reveals himself to everyone in creation but how so many have turned to serve creation, not the creator. This doesn’t detract from the beauty or experience of creation at all — instead, it frames everything within the beauty of a God who is intimately involved with and deeply cares for the world He created and sustains. Thank God for sunsets.

This week I had the privilege of joining six hundred others from a Christian student group at Sydney University for part of a week-long conference. I was meant to be there the whole week, and was pretty disappointed to find myself stuck in bed for a couple of days after “flu-like symptoms” descended on me Sunday evening! Still, made it up on Wednesday in time for the second half of the week. Rowan Kemp gave some great talks, explaining from the Bible who God is & why the Trinity is essential for understanding Him, how Christians are given a “deposit” or guarantee from God now as a sure sign of what is to come, and what “Spiritual gifts” are and their usefulness not just to individuals, but for the whole of God’s church. And plenty of other stuff, I’m sure!

I’d originally been going to help out leading a Focus (International Student) small group but for obvious reasons (i.e. the whole not arriving til Wednesday thing) this didn’t work out. Yin and Michael led the review group (based around the talk content) until on Thursday Yin got sick and, as many of the students had gone home (they were only attending part time), we combined the two Focus review groups into one. Phil and Anna served this group by exploring some of Christianity’s promises and claims: pray that God will use the material this group went over to continue to stir thoughts and point people to Christ as King and Saviour.

On Thursday night, Rowan shared a vision for the next 50–70 years of the lives of Christian people in that room, where by sustained prayer for many different ministries God might take the lives of many there for His purposes and glory throughout the world. It’s an exciting dream and one I want to prayerfully pursue for the rest of my life, thanking God for those who are passionate about so many different ways He gives us to serve and asking that we could do so more completely because of the Spirit now in us, making us more like Jesus.

If someone feels called or led or like God spoke to them… no-one knows what to do.

– Mark Driscoll

I actually laughed aloud hearing him say this. It’s really sad but so completely upside down I find it kind of hilarious. Mad world.

His disciples said, “Ah, now you are speaking plainly and not using figurative speech!”– John 16:29

Yay for clarity! You can find the fulltext of John 16 here. Apologies for the slight ramblingness of this post. It gains clarity towards the end… twas somewhat shaped off a Skype conversation that I haven’t the time nor energy to properly edit at this point :)

John 8:14 is pretty funny in its portrayal of the sheer incorrectness of the Pharisees’ assertion of the passage prior: It’s like… you can’t speak truth because you’re speaking truth about yourself (!!)… and then, fastforward back to 16:30 – “We know that you know all things and don’t need anyone to question you; this is why we believe that you came from God” – then, in verse 31, Jesus — “oh, so NOW you get it…”

Verse 32 — “But, seriously… yeah, right. Even if you say you do you’re all about to pissbolt… Oh, that’s now, btw.”

33 — “but I’ve said this stuff so that”… You’ll know after the resurrection what’s going on… The resurrection is the act that will make sense of all of this; there will be no figures of speech because it’s a concrete demonstration of what the Christ is achieving — “overcoming the world” and bringing peace for those who are in him — kinda like way the Father is with Him even when all others desert

Verse 23 is confusing… “You won’t ask me anything” vs. “My father will give you whatever you ask in my name”… are they both talking about prayer or is the first talking about information/knowing stuff about Christ’s identity and relationship to the Father and the second talking about prayer?’

Perhaps its about the perfect sufficiency of the cross — reading 22 AND 23 together:

(Paraphrase of Jesus:) You will be sorrowful til I’m back, and then I basically won life (literally! haha) and you have a joy that can’t be taken away from you and what you’re asking the Father will be asked in my name!

You’re not trying to ask it directly of Him (the Father) anymore. You won’t need to, because you have the Spirit of Christ once Jesus has conquered death and returned to His Father. What I think that means, in the context of the “Spirit of truth” from earlier in the passage, is that the things you ASK for are asked as Jesus would (i.e. you’re not standing alone before the father with an impaired relationship asking things for yourself once Jesus has conquered and we’ve received the spirit of truth that speaks what He hears from the Father and Son. Our hearts will desire different things, and we’ll have a complete joy that can’t be taken from us in Christ.

We don’t get the Spirit so we can ask for crap, but so that He can declare what he hears (from the Father) — AND — in verse 14–15, His purpose is to glorify the son, who is King over everything that is the Father’s; the Spirit will declare the things of Jesus to his people. So, asking of the Father “in my name” is about asking to receive joy in full…

“I am not saying that I will ask the Father on your behalf” — Does this mean Jesus ISN’T an intermediary (as in Hebrews 7:25)? And Romans 8:26 says that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us when we don’t know what or how to pray. But this passage (John 16) says that the Holy Spirit will speak only what He hears from the Father and Son: therefore, His intercessory prayer for us will necessarily take the shape of prayer for things that God desires. And that should be our prayer always.

Christ needn’t ask the Father on our behalf because His act of death and resurrection/victory OVER death means that our sins have been paid for if we trust in Jesus and call him our Lord. When our sins are paid for, we can be in relationship with God the Father and pray to Him; the High Priest that Hebrews 7 talks about is presenting us blamelessly in unblemished relationship again with God, so we can approach Him. When Christ’s perfect sacrifice was made, we are able to and should do as the writer of Hebrews says we should in chapter 10 of that letter: Where there is forgiveness of sins and lawlessness, there is no longer any offering for sin. Therefore… let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

We are able to draw near to God. Right now this is in the form of prayer to Him and for His purposes; that He might achieve them and use His people to this end in His service. We don’t need to pray in a church or temple, we don’t need to burn incense or hear music to uplift us — though these things are not intrinsically bad. We have freedom as we are saved by Christ’s sacrifice for us; we have a new Spirit which He has put in His people to allow them to draw near to God without impediment or constriction. We needn’t pray to Christ, because He has opened a new way to the Father for us, having fulfilled the law of the scriptures and making perfect that which we (His people) could not.

God’s presence used to dwell in the holiest place of the Temple; now, He dwells in the hearts of His people as Christ has made us His own.

When Jesus says “It is to your advantage that I go away”, he means it. If Christ hadn’t gone away from His followers to the brutal Roman cross to pay for our sins, we would not have peace with God, and there’s no way He could say “I have overcome the world” without lying through his teeth unless He faced death and came out the other side, opening a new way to God for His people.

But, you see, they were. At least fifty of them, hanging on his every indifferent word. Such is the metooism of the Internet, deserving of its proper-noun-capitalisation as one would capitalise the title of any film of the ‘my-life-is-falling-apart-and-oh-I-hope-something-interesting-would-happen-to-substantiate-sales’ variety. These days, however, not even all such films declare themselves worthy of said capitalised status. The deliciously ambivalent “definitely, maybe” sports no such accoutrements common to film, and, you know, things with names – but its name provides for fascinating displays of nothingness in all kinds of contexts, so it can perhaps be forgiven. I sat across from a workstation preparing the launch of this and other films in this country on Monday, and listened, enthralled, as the male lead declared he was thrilled to hear “definitely, maybe is releasing in Australia”. Well, that is a non-announcement, now, isn’t it? (Launching on V-day… vacuous?)

Still, when even our most influential and award-winning actors and directors lament the dearth (or, perhaps simply the death) of cinema’s golden age, we must pause to consider what is being achieved by the broad spectrum of media before us. All the trends of Internet media cannot save us from its dubious creative potential in the face of browser limitations (I have recently been working myself into a lather over the indefinite lag between multi-touch reaching the Internet compared to the rest of consumer technology — let it be noted, mobile client-side is the future?). All the films in the world cannot save us from the mediocrity of their scriptwriters, as all the blogs in the world cannot save us from trends of buzzwords and analysis and not a single real client or solved problem in sight. Neither can google (that not requiring proper-noun-capitalisation as it is used synonymously with ‘search’) save us, investing its vast resources into online platform advances. Platforms are not content. Content drives growth. Enough of that. Clooney says we should all watch TV, because that’s where the innovation is going on these days. I struggle to come to terms with that, somewhat. Part of me would (honestly) be quite content to sit and watch endless episodes of whichever series is available on DVD. DVD, because, as much as I occasionally enjoy advertising, I have absolutely no desire to see the same commercial over again fifteen times over the course of a single episode — get your bloody ads on YouTube and if they make consumers care enough, they’ll find you… nothing wrong with democratising TV advertising values, except, ironically, the potentially diminishing production values of such ads in light of the decreased expenditure on production — yeah, that’s what I thought.

The other part of me finds it’s all much the same. We all know The Simpsons is brilliant, because it pushes boundaries and made certain people in the 1990s acutely uncomfortable. Family Guy fills the void, now, only without the coherency. Its near-absurdist “we-don’t-actually-expect-you-to-get-this” irreverent take on pretty much anything is funny, but not for reasons we can comprehend. And it’s hardly going to stand the test of time. An animated analogue to The Chaser’s War on Everything, only less coherent. But let’s look at The Chaser for a moment — it is the news. Oh, wait, The Colbert Report used that line first. At any rate, The Chaser made international media before Stephen Colbert, for the audacity of — wait for it — actions beyond mere commentary.

And there we find it. The matter in which the public’s interest is held is not the simpering-yet-somehow-hostile satire, but in the violation of the sole sanctified role of government, the defence of its citizens. The noteworthiness of this act came not in the violation of this responsibility for security, but the triviality by which this breach took place. Such is the Leviathan in whom we are collectively engaged by social contract: without defence against the status hominum naturalis, bellum omnium contra omnes as Hobbes rightly presumes it, if we consider ‘nature’ after the fall.

The implication, of course, is that our government is powerless — or, at the very least, powerless to enact that which it is its duty to. C.S. Lewis expresses it thus:

“As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.” (C.S. Lewis, “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”, in ESSAY COLLECTION: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories)

One might argue this is merely the impact of democratisation of governance. That, as the Leviathan power is somewhat more dynamic in its headship in this present society, it will necessarily reflect ‘leadership’ over lives in ways unprecedented in history, as the will of the individual is closer to that of the state. What pluralist absurdity: the existence of democracy itself demarks the necessity of compromise, the inability of man to, independent of the state, agree. Democracy is responsive to and guarantees the persistent disparity of the will of the individual and the State.

The role of the state, therefore, should be constrained to that of arbiter and defender alone. Anything beyond that is an unnecessary infringement of the rights of the individual. Yet our political clime is such that we assume this necessary, and, historically, this is true. We accept the mediocrity of humanity, celebrate it even. There is nothing new under the sun.

And we still trust in our ‘leaders’ for potential change. Hello, Kevin, hello, Obama. You are mere men. Your revolutions will fade. Hello, those leaders who have come before them. Your names are not remembered.

Make poverty history, cry the same people who decry government-sanctioned discrimination against the poor, the indigenous, the homosexual. Their voices are not alone. Make poverty history, cry the same people who decry government-sanctioned secularisation and interest-rate-driven threats to their comfortably prosperous ‘but-not-too-much’ upper-middle class ‘christian’ existence. Their agenda is not that of the Christ.

“A hungry man thinks about food, not freedom”, Lewis continues in that same essay. What then, do we consider? We are hungry, though not for food. We are hungry for meaning that is not forthcoming. Hungry for the righting of wrongs in our eyes; wrongs that are plain to all, but persistent because of… well, how would you finish that sentence?

Let me find your grace in the valley
Let me find your life in my death
Let me find your joy in my sorrow
Your wealth in my need
That you’re near with every breath
In the valley

There is only one meaning, one absolute reality, one Lord, one faith, and one God worth trusting because he is over all and sustains all. Without him, the meaninglessness of this earth’s seemingly-perpetual ability to decay should have us surrender to that entirely. Instead, we are to surrender to Him, or embrace that ambivalent indifference so ultimately characteristic of the endeavours of humankind.

Our leaders were all fantastic, Andrew was used so powerfully by God to speak to people who follow Jesus and those who don’t alike, and there were more engaging discussions had than at… somewhere that would have a lot of them. So many people seeking something, and so many who seem close to finding, but that’s all outside of our power. To God alone be the glory.

How awesome is the LORD Most High,
    the great King over all the earth!

One of the reasons the hard drive is so full is the ridiculous number of photos I take. The situation isn’t assisted by ridiculously beautiful sunsets ridiculously often. These two just in:

I’m contemplating moving all my photos onto the PC known as Media on our network (it’s a Shuttle XPC thing with Windows MCE installed), because it has a 320GB hard drive, and because WOW Media Center’s photo album playback is awesome. I used it today and was very impressed. Definitely not for everything, but if you just have a heap of photos to go through sequentially it’s great. I was sitting there with a remote clicking “next next next” as required, and it was a throughly painless experience.

[Aside: I am proud at having combined these three things — starting with my running out of disc space, actually more due to video than photos, but I needed the photo reference to launch into the sunset big and onwards to Media Center — under the title of “Out of space”. It really only applies well to the first one, but hopefully the post meandered transparently enough that no-one noticed or cared. I say this now because evidently people do read what I write here for the writing. Curious as to whether or not I can get criticism as well as praise, or if people will choose to say nothing at all rather than something nice. Not that I mind comments that are nice, but… it’d be good to move beyond that. Okay, this aside is definitely outside the scope of the title!]

Having said all that, Merry Christmas all. That bears absolutely no relation to the title, unless you’re some weird conspiracy theorist who is convinced that Jesus was sent by Martians. I prefer to believe he’s the son of God, which might strike some as no less weird, but at least it’s historically correlated (both in prior prophecy and contemporary recording)! Whatever your perspective, try and think about why you’re celebrating Christmas this year…

Jesus Before Pilate

¹Very early in the morning, the chief priests, with the elders, the teachers of the law and the whole Sanhedrin, reached a decision. They bound Jesus, led him away and handed him over to Pilate.

²“Are you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate.

“Yes, it is as you say,” Jesus replied.

³The chief priests accused him of many things. ⁴So again Pilate asked him, “Aren’t you going to answer? See how many things they are accusing you of.”

⁵But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed.

⁶Now it was the custom at the Feast to release a prisoner whom the people requested. ⁷A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising. ⁸The crowd came up and asked Pilate to do for them what he usually did.

⁹“Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate, ¹⁰knowing it was out of envy that the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him. ¹¹But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead.

¹²“What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked them.

¹³“Crucify him!” they shouted.

¹⁴“Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate.

But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”

¹⁵Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.

The Soldiers Mock Jesus

¹⁶The soldiers led Jesus away into the palace (that is, the Praetorium) and called together the whole company of soldiers. ¹⁷They put a purple robe on him, then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on him. ¹⁸And they began to call out to him, “Hail, king of the Jews!” ¹⁹Again and again they struck him on the head with a staff and spit on him. Falling on their knees, they paid homage to him. ²⁰And when they had mocked him, they took off the purple robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.

The Crucifixion

²¹A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross. ²²They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull). ²³Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. ²⁴And they crucified him. Dividing up his clothes, they cast lots to see what each would get.

²⁵It was the third hour when they crucified him. ²⁶The written notice of the charge against him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS. ²⁷They crucified two robbers with him, one on his right and one on his left. ²⁹Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, “So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, ³⁰come down from the cross and save yourself!”

³¹In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves. “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! ³²Let this Christ, this King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.” Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him.

The Death of Jesus

³³At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. ³⁴And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”–which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

³⁵When some of those standing near heard this, they said, “Listen, he’s calling Elijah.”

³⁶One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down,” he said.

³⁷With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.

³⁸The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. ³⁹And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”

It was… very helpful, I think, in terms of perspective. The thing which struck me most about the talk was a reference made to 1 Chronicles 29:14–16:

1 Chronicles 29

¹⁴ “But who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand. ¹⁵ We are aliens and strangers in your sight, as were all our forefathers. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope. ¹⁶ O LORD our God, as for all this abundance that we have provided for building you a temple for your Holy Name, it comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you.

There’s a passage in the Old Testament, before Jesus came along, which instructs the people of Israel to give a tenth of all they get. One reference is Deuteronomy 26:11–13, which instructs them to “set… aside a tenth of all your produce” to give away.

Later on, in the New Testament, Jesus critcises the religious teachers of the day for being hypocritical in the way they’re following God’s law. In Luke 11:42, Jesus says “Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone.” Obviously, Jesus is critical of the religious teachers (Pharisees) here… so, how much should we give?

The Chronicles passage quoted above puts everything in perspective for me. Contextually, this is being written just after a great temple has been built for God by the Israelites… the Israelites giving so that this could happen. But King David says “Who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you…”

So, everything comes from God. Okay. This is the killer bit: “…we have given only what comes from your hand.” The translation I’m using doesn’t put exclamation marks after that statement, but I think there should be. They’re not really giving anything! Everything they (and, consequently, we) have was given to them by the Lord — it already belonged to him!

This really changes the way that I think about everything… it’s not as though I would be giving 10%; I’d be keeping 90%.

“It comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you.”