Monday, June 4, 2012

A Re-Writing of Thoughts, Rought Draft, Philosophies that Seem Right but Are Counterfeits, Potential Item 1

Philosophies whose far-reaching consequences have badly undermined, subverted, perverted, and twisted organizations purporting to believe and advance the gospel, and the gospel itself:

1. For everything you do, you should ask how it advances the kingdom of God, or helps fulfill the great commission.
   
    This one gets equivocated with "gospel centrality", and as that label generally signifies, the gospel is not central: men are.

    In fact,  true believers who aren't readily useful to these ends either get treated nicely but ambivalently, pushed-aside, or trampled before all is said and done. The Church is not merely a mission organization--and it is almost a mortally urgent enough a situation to rephrase that "the Church REALLY ISN'T a mission organization": the Church does not exist to save men, or see them saved, that is, the activities of its members, but is rather a congregation gathered by the Lord God, for His pleasure, to worship Him, to be a peculiar people, separate, Holy, pleasing, and "the great commission", perhaps meriting the excision of "the" to remove it from the principle place in men's minds, is but one function: I say "but one" because of the pervertedness of "mission", "evangelism", "gospel" in our age: if they were not so, if the world were not so loved, then I would have to write differently: the gospel indeed is something about which the Church is to gather, because it is precisely what tells of and points to Christ: fail to gather around and declare the gospel, fail to gather around and feast on Jesus Christ. But again, what must be emphasized are the proper placements, the order: it is spoken of today as a thing for men to go out doing in God's name, but the the savior is God, not men, and the purpose of the Church is the corporate worship of God, not scheming to reach men: the Church does not exist to ensure men saved, it is the habitation of those who are, and to really throw a punch at this though--though urging remembrance that it is due to the dire and twisted age we live in--its function as means to reach men might be said to be but ancillary: quote the end of Matthew all ye want, that was said to His apostles, and while their commissioning is bequeathed to all who believe, they must remember the gathering is for the Lord and His sheep.

   The sense are all wrong in our day, because millions have been gathered in wrongly and mistaught: the churches--gatherings indeed but not of Christ, despite ostensible reasons--now exist to serve the unregenerate, those who can't even worship, those who can't continue walking aright without many programs and devices, and many adjustments to definitions and senses of scripture to claim and thinking (in willful ignorance) that despite all the evidence, because they have prayed for Jesus, they are "the Lord's", or saved: they are, however, the Lord's--as objects of wrath, at enmity with Him, though delusional to think otherwise. The mistake regarding these things is that they are made to be about the world, a humanitarian good-cause, a GREAT cause--astoundingly large, colossal, and so seen by many as worthy because it's big rather than trivial, but it was called "the great commission" because it's scope is universal--to go to every nation and tribe; a bit in the gospel so missed by those enamored with saving men, rather than obeying Christ and seeking to live ordinary, or "quiet and peaceable" lives as commanded, is that small things indeed matter: forsake them for the grand, and you will fail in that as well.
   
    More men come to get men saved than they do to be saved from sin, because they need direction, purpose, meaning in life: it becomes yet another secularly spirited cause-based purpose for living, something to give meaning, to guide one's actions, rather than being led by the Spirit of God, often not so rewardingly, given His leading is to make one forsake sin, and become Holy: to obey God, irregardless of how grand one's works seem.
   
    Likewise, more come for the meaning in whatever form, perhaps a more moral, therefore fulfilling, life.
   
    Men come for the promise of blessing, in the temporal sphere, to have a satisfying life. "Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control", but these are left out of their context of hardship (the "straight" before "road" is related to "hard" and notoriously difficult to translate), "tribulation" (which means "suffering--the kind we don't wish to endure) on account of Christ--indeed according to Him perhaps moreoften at the hands of those who will claim God (right then at His time) and then Him ("the many", "who will reproach you") than necessarily at the hands of secular or other-religious authorities (though they are definitely included in that practice): for the lamp on a stand shines brightly in the dark most evidently among those who know something about the truth, than those who cynically answer upon hearing "the truth", like Pilot, "what is truth".
   
    God did not come to give men a mission in life, a wonderful plan in which as men freed from sin they can realize their dreams, or even to enslave them as followers to self-appointed leaders in the Church who demand obeisance as their right, as the will of God, shouting "obey your leaders", and not explaining either the meaning of "obey" from Greek, or the context of that verse. Christ Jesus came to save sinners, to save them not from its consequences per se, but from that which begets those consequences, not the death and destruction they beget in this life per se, but the death they merit at the hands of an infuriated God who is Holy, who is Just, but who is not loath to visit wickedness with its due simply as a matter of principle that a good man must uphold, as the modern evansmellical kingdom likes to portend to remove offense from the gospel.

    We are indeed to do all for the advance of God's kingdom: but principally for God's glory, because His honor is at stake: in His coming was planned a sacrifice to save men, but we must remember also that Jesus quite explicitly said the purpose of all He did was to glorify the Father: He came, sinners to save, but to glorify the Father: it is the glory of God that is the high goal, not the saving of men which is the wonderful evincement of the riches of His mercies, the which reveals his wondrous love and how great are His mercy--to His glory. Men squeal in scorn at hearing this, that the end in view is God's glory--and not as the modern Christian often says "to God's glory', but really to His glory; they squeal, "God the narcissist", but of course such is a grave misunderstanding, because narcissism is a self-focus, whereas God, King of Kings, is preparing a whole nation to worship Him, and He exists as separate persons in the same being: perhaps a slightly more accurate blasphemy would be to call Him an "attention whore", but the reality is He is the only One in all of Heaven and Earth deserving of every attention and affection, and also demands love toward neighbor, and defines such as intrinsic to loving Him: He even condescended to become a man, and live among men, and proclaim a salvation for wicked man, and give them such attention as a very man that it is written that He can sympathize with our sorrows and travails in this life.

   Irregardless of the scorn, however, that is heaped upon His name, in the end He has promised, "every knee will bow".


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