Matthew 28 and the Great Commission

Most of modern Western Christianity, both liberal and “conservative,” misunderstand the Great Commission as a command to make Disciples of people from all Nations. This is decidedly not what Jesus commanded His Disciples to do. Rather Jesus commanded them to disciple the Nations as Nations, i.e. to make Christian Nations. The misunderstanding is a result of a mishandling of the Greek in Matthew 28. The way that we have translated that into English has allowed us to interpret the passages to mean that we are to disciple people from among the Nations. That is not the meaning that was retained in Older Versions such as the Geneva Bible. In the Greek the command is to Disciple Nations as Nations.

Now certainly that cannot be done without discicipling people in the Nations but the emphasis in Matthew 28 is Corporate. Nations as Nations are to be discipled.

Of course the upshot of all this is that all of life — all its Institutions, all its civil-social structures, all its cultural corporate infrastructure — is to be brought into allegiance to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Matthew 28 teaches there are to be such things as Christian families, Christian schools, Christian social orders, Christian law, and Christian Nations.

Of course an implication of this is the continued place of Nations in a world that has been discipled unto Christ. Christianity does not create a New World Order where internationalism becomes the socio-political means of the organization of mankind. The success of the Gospel means that the Nations as Nations continue to exist. In such a way the long standing Christian principle of unity in diversity is maintained. When the Great Commission is taken in its Biblical context, according to its original intent, the converted World finds a spiritual unity in Christ while the diversity of who God has ordained them to be as Nations continues on. In such a way the created One and many reflects the un-created One and Many.

Supporting this older reading are chaps like Matthew Henry who could say on Matthew 28,

[2.] “What is the principal intention of this (Great) commission; to disciple all nations. Matheµteusate-“Admit them disciples; do your utmost to make the nations Christian nations;’ not, “Go to the nations, and denounce the judgments of God against them, as Jonah against Nineveh, and as the other Old-Testament prophets’ (though they had reason enough to expect it for their wickedness), “but go, and disciple them.’ Christ the Mediator is setting up a kingdom in the world, bring the nations to be his subjects; setting up a school, bring the nations to be his scholars; raising an army for the carrying on of the war against the powers of darkness, enlist the nations of the earth under his banner. The work which the apostles had to do, was, to set up the Christian religion in all places, and it was honourable work; the achievements of the mighty heroes of the world were nothing to it. They conquered the nations for themselves, and made them miserable; the apostles conquered them for Christ, and made them happy.”

This interview is excellent on this matter,

The Murder Of God … The Death Of Man

As the West continues to attempt to murder God thus scrubbing Him from its thinking, the consequence is that it likewise murders anything and everything that would stand in as a Representational figure of God. As such the murder of God in the West is the death of all authority which would be suggestive of God. This observation is as old as the French Revolution. In a 1819 Caricature by English caricaturist George Cruikshank. Titled “The Radical’s Arms”, we find depicted the infamous French Revolution guillotine with the phrase in the Republican Banner, “No God! No Religion! No King! No Constitution!”. You see the elimination of God is the elimination of all that approximates a Fatherly authoritative figure in the social order that is attempting to negate God.

So, when a culture attempts to delete the God of the Bible from its thinking it will inevitably turn to integration downward into the void as all horizontal social order structures that mime the reality of God are given the same heave ho as God is given. The result of this attempted escape from divine patrimony is an escape from all authority bearing structures in favor of man’s sovereign autonomous self as shaped by his uncontrolled lusts.

A further consequence of the West insisting that they will not have God rule over them is the loss of a ruling standard. With no transcendent reference point by which to adjudicate the value of all things human the only thing left is to do, by those still suffering with the residual effects of a long spent Christianity — a Christianity which still recalls some quaint notion that all things must be “fair,” — is to insist that all things human are of equal value. As such the absence of a God transcendent is to make all things transcendent, which is to make no thing transcendent. All must be equal in value. Because of this we find the obnoxious idea that all cultures are equally valuable and equally good. Because of this absenting of God transcendent there are no disabilities, no perversions, and nothing or anybody superior to anything or anybody else. Behold the egalitarian cult wherein because all are equal, and a elimination of all things unequal, becomes the Holy grail to be pursued by all “right-minded people.”

A third consequence of the of God whacked is the necessity to find another transcendent point to take his place. Since God lies bleeding the only candidate left is man. Man said loudly becomes God and this loudly spoken man is most often the God-State. Man can not live without a point of transcendence that can be used for a canon of standardization for social order norms and ethics. Whether one desires to consider the Pharaoh gods of the ancient Egyptians or the modern Hegelian divine Spirit-Mind that incarnates itself into the State men who refuse to have the God of the Bible rule over them will always hoist a immanent god into the vacated place of transcendence.

Now, this has an implication that needs to be teased out. As the God of the Bible is always one and is a unity, what happens when man makes a immanent to be transcendent is that man insists that his immanent transcendent God be one. A god who does not have the attribute of oneness is no god at all. This means that the immanent transcendent God-State must now work to make sure that, as God walking on the earth, all those who have given it life, must be one since the immanent transcendent godhead is a projection of one people. What this means is that the God State will demand conformity to its image. This means that diversity must be eliminated and all must become Borg unto the God-State. Cultures that overthrow God in their thinking become cultures of the anthill and the beehive.

Yet another implication for men who seek to eliminate God from their thinking will be the continued need for a sense of and attraction for “that which is Other.” Rudolf Otto was the author of a book titled “Knowledge of the Holy,” and in it he argues that man is drawn to this numinous sense of the Other. For Western man, God has been He who is wholly Other. This desire for Transcendent otherness if it is not to be found in the God of the Bible will have to be found some place else. The argument could be made then that the West’s current preoccupation with third world and alien cultures is how it is satisfying the lost sense of “Otherness” that was eclipsed when the West abandoned the God of the Bible. As such, those things that are most strange, most different, and most unfamiliar are now those numinous things which the West is pursuing, precisely because the West has overthrown He who alone can answer to man’s need for “Otherness.” This may answer the West’s growing ethnocidal embrace of the macabre body modification cult, third world immigration policy, and sodomite marriage. Having thrown off God as “Other,” only sinful “Otherness” remains and it is pursued with all the zeal of new found love. When you combine this observation with the one from the previous paragraph it is easy to envision that the Oneness that we will finally come to is the Oneness of the Other teased out in this paragraph. This represents a complete integration downward into the void.

Of course the flip side of this observation that because we have committed deicide, thus eliminating the numinous Other, and as a consequence have embraced an immanent other, the results have meant the hatred of the familiar, the known, and the normative. This is seen in the West by the knee-jerk hate impulse against all things Christian and as seen in the destruction of the family. That which is “other” is glorified and pursued, while that is kith and kin to us is abominated. Naturally this means that eventually with the killing of God we will kill ourselves as we worship as “other” that which is most contrary to who the West has historically been.

Finally, for our purpose here, when God is rolled off His throne the Creator Creature distinction evaporates. The meaning of this is that man, no longer having an ontological distinction between God and Man, pursues with rabid fervency, the egalitarian impulse mentioned earlier. When the Creator Creature (God – Man) distinction fails then all other distinctions have no anchor by which to be kept in place. The creeping disintegration and even erasure of horizontal distinctions such as between Male vs. Female, such as between the different races, such as between cultures, such as between Employer vs. Employee can all be attributed to the erasure of the Creator Creature distinction. The scrubbing of the Creator Creature distinction that comes with the scrubbing of God from the consciousness of man means the simultaneous scrubbing of all temporal and horizontal distinctions in favor of a social order reality where distinctions are seen as a social construct to be eliminated in favor of the god uniformity mentioned earlier.

All of these consequences of eliminating God, as recited in this essay, serve to reinforce one another. The consequences are distinct yet complimentary. When man reaches out to strike and eliminate God the result is always that man loses his own mannishness.

Goodwin & McAtee — Adam & Christ … Fall & Redemption

“Adam’s fall, you know, was in the garden; Satan there encountered him, and overcame him, led him and all mankind into captivity to sin and death. God now singleth out the place where the great redeemer of the world, the second Adam, should first encounter with His Father’s wrath, to be in a garden, and that there he should be be bound and led away captive as Adam was… Because by a temptation let in at the ear man was condemned, therefore by hearing of the word men shall be saved. “Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy brows” that was part of Adam’s curse; Christ he sweat drops of blood for this, it was the force of that curse that caused it. ‘The ground shall bring forth thorns to thee;’ Christ he was crucified with a crown of thorns. Adam his disobedience was acted in a garden; and Christ both his active and passive obedience also, much of it was garden; and at the last, as the first beginning of his humiliation was in a garden, so the last step was too; he was buried, though not in this, yet in another garden. Thus the type and the thing typified answer one another.”

Thomas Goodwin
Christ Set Forth (Works vol. 5, pg. 198

The cheap knock off version.

There in the Temple Garden, filled with the Presence of God, Adam fell to Satan’s fiat law word, and so brought upon all of his generations a captivity to sin and to death. In a recapitulation of the that first Temptation in the Garden — a garden that was characterized by the Father’s presence — the Lord Christ is tempted in a waste land Wilderness. But whereas the first Adam fell despite being supported by the Sanctuary Garden, the second Adam resisted the devil, despite a barren wilderness that announced God’s absence. The Greater Adam quoted God’s fiat word against the fiat word of the devil as he counterfeited God’s voice and so resisted the Devil. Also, it is of interest to note that as Adam fell to the Serpent’s wrath in the Garden so the Son first encountered the Father’s Wrath there in the Olive Press garden of Gethsemane. In each case both Adam’s are bound and led away as outlaws to the Father’s favor.

We find other parallels between the Fall and the Restoration. As Adam fell by the temptation of the false Word so man is restored by the hearing of the true Word. Whereas in the Sanctuary Garden Adam was cursed with the promise that “Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy brow,” now in the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ, who is the bread from Heaven, bears Adam’s sweaty curse by sweating drops of blood. Note also that the consequential curse for Adam was the certain promise that ‘The ground shall bring forth thorns to thee’ while Christ bears on his brow a Crown of Thorns thus providing a poignant reminder that Christ is bearing Adam’s thorny curse come to full growth.

As Adam’s death barred him from the Tree of life because of his sin, so the tribe of Christ is restored by eating Christ whose tree of death has become to us a tree of life.

The Garden theme comes to play again as Christ’s humiliation reaches its apex as He is buried in the garden tomb. This humiliation apex though is answered by the beginning exaltation of the Lord Christ where He is vindicated there in the Garden by resurrection.

Touching The Definition Of “Nation”

One of the earliest heresies in the Church was Gnosticism.

Ancient Gnosticism was laced with idealistic Platonism and viewed the physicality of our humanness as being sinful and evil. For the Gnostics the body was evil. What was really important about man was his spiritual nature. As such the Gnostics either were ascetics in order to choke off the corporeal pleasures of man or they were libertines reasoning that if the body isn’t important they could do with it whatever they pleased. The key choking point in terms of Christianity is that because of the Gnostic view of the inherent evil of the corporeal they denied the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

In every way the Gnostics diminished the importance of the corporeal, the physical, and the material.

We find an incipient Gnosticism in much of the Church in the West today among those who, though affirming the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, still at the same time deny that our physicality, our DNA, our lineage is of any consequence. Such men have arrived at the point where they insist that the generations that preceded us and who have passed on to us our corporeal heritage should not be considered as having an impact on the people we ourselves are and the cultures we build. For the Gnostic Alienists that which alone matters as it pertains to our humanness is our Spirituality – Spiritual nature. For the Gnostic-Alienist if we are born again spiritually then that overcomes any and all physical genetic realities, (except gender .. but they are merely being inconsistent at this point. In time they will surrender this physical distinction as well.)

The fact that there is a denial of our inherited lineage going on is seen in a recent comment by one of the current leaders in the neo-Gnostic Alienist Christian movement,

“In Biblical times and before that, the Greek word “ethnos” did not indicate genetic similarity but “people born under the same religious rites.” Genetic similarity was incidental, for religious rites were a family affair, and therefore everyone born within the confines of a home was a member of that home, whether he was genetically part of that home or not. Most of the time the children born within the confines of a home were indeed genetic offspring of the head of the home, but this genetic relation meant nothing. (Their genetic relation to their mother’s family was never considered true relation.) Adoption into the family, therefore, was common, for it was nothing less than passing under the same religious rite, and therefore becoming a member of the “ethnos.” On the other hand, genetic heirs born outside the home or outside the land were considered not part of the “ethnos,” for they had not been under the same rites…. family and ethnos were a religious entity, not a genetic entity.”

Such a statement is astounding in its clear and unapologetic Gnosticism. To suggest that ethnos does not indicate genetic similarity and that the genetic relation meant nothing but was only incidental completely makes hash out of texts like Genesis 10 which gives us the table of Nations. You will notice that the Nations are listed there as being comprised of those who are definite blood sons of distinct Ancestral Fathers. That which comprises a “nation,” is not, contrary to certain Alienists, those who merely share certain religious propositional allegiances. Now certainly, Nations, will typically share a common faith but to deny that which makes a nation a nation is a shared genetic bond is incipient Gnosticism. Now, nobody denies that one can become part of a “nation” via adoption but the fact that adoption exists does not mean that nations are not primarily comprised of a common genetic tie.

Given the ascendancy of certain Gnostic emphasis’ in the Church one wonders how it is that St. Paul was not a Racist because he could write,

3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers,[a] my kinsmen according to the flesh.

Didn’t St. Paul know that he didn’t have any kinsmen according to the flesh but rather that his kinsmen were according to shared Religious propositions?

The same chap referenced above could write elsewhere,

“In the Christian anthropology – whether Calvinist or Arminian – man is defined ONLY religiously. Man is a moral being, and therefore only his religion determines his culture, his character, his productivity, etc. His physical characteristics – or his economic position, or his nationality – have no bearing on his culture, or his character.”

Here we see the Gnostic error. For the Alienists of this stripe man’s morality is abstracted from his humanity, as if morality can exist apart from a person’s humanity. We see the Gnosticism again when it is insisted that man’s corporeal humanity has no bearing on man’s culture or his character. Really? So, the argument here is that a family that has produced generations of Bulgarian weightlifters, because of God given genetic disposition, will suddenly produce a child who will be a prima-ballerina? What we are being told here is that centuries of characteristics of people groups has been in error; Scotsmen as typical fighters, Dutchmen as typically frugal, Irish as typically hotheaded. All of this is sinful thinking and according to Alienist Gnostics this thinking is pagan. However, the truth is that this is alienist Gnosticism trying to pass off as Christianity. Who God has created us to be in our corporeal – genetic natures is real and is to be considered. Now, of course we don’t absolutize these physical realities but neither do we dismiss them as being not real for to do so would be Gnostic.

What They Didn’t Tell Me In Seminary

This post is inspired by a column I read today at,

http://thegospelcoalition.org/mobile/article/tgc/what-i-wish-id-known-reflections-on-nearly-40-years-of-pastoral-ministry

The chap there (Rev. Storms) has been in the Ministry for nearly 40 years. I’ve only been in this calling for 25. So, with 15 fewer years, take this for what it is worth.

1.) They didn’t tell me in Seminary how to help someone die. There has been nothing more difficult in the 25 years I’ve been in the ministry then to minister to the dying. No matter how often I step into this role as a midwife of the soul’s entry into the presence of God I always walk away from the committal service wondering if I had read enough scripture with the now deceased. Had I given enough comfort to them? Had I prayed long enough with them? Had I laughed enough with them or played enough of their favorite games with them on their good days? Had I pointed them towards Christ enough?

There is nothing more humbling about the ministry then the sense of inadequacy that washes over a minister after the time worn gruel of seeing death have its short term victory. Seldom has faith had to so tenaciously engage then upon the long jagged death of a well loved parishioner. I can only hope to die as well as those I’ve been honored to shepherd.

2.) They didn’t tell me in Seminary how much fighting would have to be done for orthodoxy. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe it is not seemly for a Seminary Professor to talk about how the life of a minister who cares would be characterized by one conflict after another in the setting of local Church, the denomination, the refereeing of congregational family dust ups, or local meetings among the clergy in the community where one is ministering. Maybe Seminary Professors had themselves learned that it is better to go along to get along and so figured that they would, by their silence, teach us to go along to get along as well. They didn’t tell me in Seminary how the Church is the problem as much as it is the solution.

3.) They didn’t tell me in Seminary how to deal with the sense of betrayal that arises when people, who you’ve long been close to, leave the Church. They didn’t teach me how to put off the bitterness and hurt. They didn’t teach how to fake before everyone else in the Church and act like the departure of loved people doesn’t hurt. All this said, quite admitting that when people leave they leave for reasons they believe to be absolutely legitimate.

4.) They didn’t tell me in Seminary how ill equipped any man is to be a minister of the Gospel. It would have been good for us to have drilled in our heads how the position of Minister is way beyond the capacity of any one man. They should have told us that a sense of inadequacy is a something that a minister daily lives with and they should have told us that the constant sense of inadequacy would be better for us to live with then the sense of thinking ourselves perfectly adequate unto the position.

5.) They didn’t tell me in Seminary how strange I am and neither did they tell me in Seminary how strange other people were becoming. My Father-in-law entered the ministry in 1956. He used to tell me, when he was winding down from the ministry in the late 90’s, how odd people had become compared to when he first started. Twenty-five years later for me now, I can say that people are odder now then they were when I started. Worldviews have consequences and the stranger a culture becomes in its worldview, the odder the individuals in that culture become. In Seminary I graduated with an emphasis on Culture. We examined cultures and probed as to how they worked. Nothing though could have prepared me for how strange our own culture has become.

6.) They didn’t tell me in Seminary that Ministers should not take themselves too seriously. Ministers, like myself, have a terrible habit of self-importance. We would have been well served to have been told early on to get over ourselves.

7.) They didn’t tell me in Seminary that it was acceptable as a minister to just blow people off when they need to be blown off. If we are not supposed to take ourselves too seriously then it is perfectly acceptable not to take non serious people seriously. Ministers have a tendency to want to please and satisfy people, (it’s part of the reason why they went into ministry) and as such Ministers tend to compromise themselves by trying to satisfy people who should not be satisfied.

8.) They didn’t tell me in Seminary that it was alright to be a failure, or at least they didn’t tell me how to properly measure failure and success.

9.) They didn’t tell me in Seminary how it is normal for most church people, in our accelerated culture, to not have time to meditate, to read, and to think. Of course as people don’t have time for this it makes it next to impossible for a Minister to really help people on a deep permanent level. As such, much of the ministry is, at best, a triage and band-aid routine.

10.) They didn’t tell me in Seminary how generous and kind many people could be. Of course that is something that is easy to learn and appreciate after the fact. It is amazing how the Lord Christ, after some “people encounter gone sour,” will bring into the Minister’s life people who are kind beyond measure.

It is amazing how many of the people I have served over the years have had the virtue of kindness and generosity.