A Look at Refugee Politics based on 1 Kings 11 (draft)

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The Facebook Post that I REALLY Want to Make

 Facebook subscriber —

 You know very little about my "religion." That fact is abundantly evident in a wide range of acerbic comments in your posts.

The enemy of my "religion" is apostasy. Apostasy can be either abandonment or defiance of God's declarations. Jude defines it as "ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ."
Paul tells Timothy that the apostate are those who "depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared."

As such, feminism, homosexuality, abortion, islam, false witness, lewdness, anarchy, uber-intellectualism, and the plans of man are all apostate ideologies. So while Grace covers a certain amount of tolerance of those who are ignorant and uninstructed, tolerating apostasy within the the Church leads to a loss of Power.  This is why we have not seen more of the Supernatural in action: we have been busy serving the natural. 

You see the Church as ineffective precisely because too many apostates want to be tolerant of these sins. They are deceived into believing a false "love" that cripples the Church because it loves men more than it respects the Holy God.

Tolerating things that are known to be affronts to the Lord keep the Glory Power from being released. God is not going to entrust His Glory to those who want to serve the ideas of men.  That would be casting His pearls before swine!

Biblical instruction is clear: Seek the Kingdom of God first. Pacifying the lost is not on the list.

When the Church rediscovers her first love, a passionate relationship with Jesus, then the brightness of that Glory will cover the Earth and you can either accept it or run and hide.

A New Look at the Fiery Furnace

Even if you did not grow up with a lot of religious training and you had post-modern parents who thought they'd let you choose your own religion when you were older, if you were really an All-American Child, then at least once during your childhood somebody invited you to either a Sunday school class or a VBS (Vacation Bible School) and at some point in your youth you heard the story of the Three Hebrew Children who were thrown into the Fiery Furnace by the King of Babylon because they refused to worship an idol, and they came out unscathed.

If you were raised by a progressive atheist, you may have heard the expression "fiery furnace" used as an idiom in classic literature meaning "an ordeal successfully survived." 

Or if you did go to church regularly as a kid, you may have heard the story taught something like this one The Wonder Book of Bible Stories — Logan Marshall — The Story of the Fiery Furnace   You would have had fun trying to pronounce the foreign sounding names:  Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and King Nebuchadnezzar.  And you were probably told that being thrown into the furnace was a "punishment" for not obeying the king.

It is that "punishment" worldview that opens up a crack of wiggle room just big enough to miss the bullseye.

At least, that is the way it was taught in my Sunday school. We looked at the fear of punishment, not the passion of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to serve their God. They had a fiery furnace of intimacy with God, not a fire of affliction.  It became a reward where they met God face to face. They stood. God said, "Well done!"  The only thing that burned were the ropes that bound them. It did not cause them to stumble but to reap reward. Standing in faith set them free, but even that freedom turned out to be the second prize. First reward was being with the Lord face to face.
How often is such intimacy with the Lord taught as the Biggie?  In my experience the answer is "rarely."

  "What god is there who can deliver you out of my hands?" Nebuchadnezzar had pompously demanded, Daniel 3:15.  But Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were passionate. They spoke with united wild abandon:

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to the king, "O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to give you an answer concerning this matter.  ~Daniel 3:16

Obviously, once viewed from the reward perspective instead of the punishment perspective, we see that there ARE things that we MUST NOT BOW TO. Popular culture is full of things that we must not bow to. False religion must not be bowed to. We cannot trade off our souls for political correctness.  

Sure, it is great and all to teach that God can deliver.  But why did He deliver? On a whim? No. A lucky spin of fate? No. He delivered in response to the men's passionate desire for intimacy with their God, a desire that been practiced all along and built into a steady relationship; not newly discovered as the logs for stoking the furnace were being removed from the storage crib. God acted in response to the men's refusal to bow to the world and the appeasement of men. This really is a two-sided coin. One cannot serve two masters. They chose to love one and not give a flip about the other.

As we move into 2017, the knowledge that God can deliver does not get us to the finish line. It is a good first step, but hey, I know a guy who can fix cars too! It does not mean that he will fix mine.  For that to happen, we need a contract, a covenant, a relationship, or such active love for each other that not having a functional car is unthinkable!

The deliverance of the 'Three Hebrew Children,' (and it could be just as accurate to call them college students,) was not all 100% God.  They knew their covenant, They had built a relationship. They made a decree that God could use and act upon. It was a co-labor situation. They supplied their testimony; God supplied the supernatural.

My First Revelation of 2017

I am excited about my first special find in scripture in 2017! The year was still so new that folks on the West Coat were still back in 2016 when I discovered this jewel.

I found it in what is sometimes called The Doxology of Jude.  Beginning with verse 24, it is probably the most well-known part of the book of Jude, and in the King James Version it goes like this:

     Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.

When I encounter a somewhat familiar scripture like this one, my brain will tend to click over into standard interpretation mode and hear what I expect to hear. In this case, I'd usually hear kept from falling and presented faultless. But this year I was reading The New English Bible, a translation that was commissioned by the Church of Scotland back in the 1960s.

Now where King James' men structured their sentence to emphasize how we are presented—faultless, the scholars from Cambridge and Oxford organized it to emphasized where we are presented—before the presence of His glory. Here, read it for yourself:

     Now to the One who can keep you from falling and set you in the presence of his glory, jubilant and above reproach, to the only God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, might and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all time, now, and for evermore. Amen.

 Jesus can set you in the presence of his glory, jubilant and above reproach! 

What a revelation of perspective! Set in the presence of His Glory!

This is where I want to be for 2017!  Not simply kept from falling, as great as that is, but set in the Presence of His Glory.

I know there are dire warnings about that place. "God is a consuming fire." Regarding it with a casual attitude can result in casualty. "None shall see God and live."  But I am moving closer to a state of wild abandon—and I no longer think it takes a leap of faith to get there. It is possible to just step into it. Enoch did. Moses did. Isaiah did. Elijah did. Paul did. John did. Many have. And Jude clearly believes it is possible for everyone.

I want to be set in the Presence of His Glory and I want others to share it with me.