Born to Win Podcast - with Ronald L. Dart

I think I am at long last beginning to understand something that puzzles a lot of people. How was it possible to hate a man who could make the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear? A man who could restore an insane person to his right mind? What on earth could motivate religious people to want to kill him? The healer, of course is Jesus, and the men who wanted to kill him were the religious establishment of the day. The Jews had been through a lot to get where they were. They had endured 70 years of exile in Babylon, and even after they came home and restored the Temple, they had made their way through some terrible times. They had been oppressed and occupied, and through it all they had to continually beat off challenges to the orthodox faith. And by the time Jesus came on the scene, the majority had firmly established themselves as the religious leaders of the Jews. The political structure of Judaism was a relatively stable, two-party system—Pharisees and Sadducees. Then, Jesus appeared, and posed the most serious threat to their power that they had ever encountered. Jesus was a problem. And if you take your time reading the New Testament, it becomes plain that they didn’t hate him because he healed sick people. They hated him because he was not orthodox. I use the term orthodox, not in the sense of identifying a sect I use it in the broader sense of the word: conforming to established doctrine especially in religion.

What kind of people are we coming to be? And What kind of Christians might we be when we no longer govern our lives by the words of Jesus? The road ahead is long and dangerous. And our educational system has given us a generation who are governed by what? What informs us about right and wrong? Experience? It is a hard teacher, but effective. Philosophy? It is too often wrong, by its own admission. In a way, when we read the Bible, we are learning from the experiences of generations past, so we don’t have to repeat their mistakes. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children. Hosea 4:6 KJV

Insight comes in small packets. There's no landslide of wisdom. You can't go to school and take a course in Wisdom 101. But she is everywhere. Every day, she is always around. Solomon said, Wisdom calls aloud in the street, she raises her voice in the public squares; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out, in the gateways of the city she makes her speech. Wisdom is just everywhere. Now it follows naturally that the message of necessity is broken up into packets that come to you at odd moments and odd places. One moment you don't see something and the next moment you do. She demands your participation in the shaping of wisdom. She demands that you be attentive. She demands that you think about it and that you work your way through it. Now, you notice I speak of wisdom as she? I do it because Solomon did in the Book of Proverbs—I think with a reason in mind.

If you have read much of the Bible at all, or if you have gone to church very long, you know that somewhere, out there in the future, there is a day of judgement coming. Now, there have been a lot of fanciful notions about judgement day. Somehow, in my youth, in listening to various preachers, I got the impression of God, sitting behind the bench in a courtroom like setting with a lot of books open before him, judging my life. One preacher I recall envisioned God playing our sins back for us on a giant movie screen for everyone to see. Another envisioned God having a big lever by his throne, and when we come there for judgement, some go to heaven but for others, he pulls the lever and a trapdoor opens and sends them screaming down to hell. Most of what you hear about the judgment day owes more to the imagination of man than to the Bible. Then there are all the jokes about St. Peter and the pearly gates. But I will spare you those. But I do have to tell you, there is a judgment day. But this judgment day is nothing like the traditional depictions of it, and there is one very surprising thing about it which I will come to later. But the first thing to know about it is that the writer of the book of Hebrews connects the judgement day to the Day of Atonement—Yom Kippur—a day usually dismissed by Christians as a Jewish Holiday. But in this series of programs, I have been making the case that these are not merely Jewish Holidays, but Christian holidays as well. Why so? Because every one of them is about the life, work, plan and ministry of Jesus Christ. So, what do we know about the judgement day?

In the autumn of every year, the Jews celebrate their most solemn festival—Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Would it surprise you to learn that Yom Kippur is a Christian holiday as well? That the New Testament church observed the day, only with a different sense of meaning? Very few Christians take any note of the day at all, and that is surprising, since the day is all about the ministry of Christ. They cheerfully observe Easter which is not in the Bible at all, and ignore the Day of Atonement which is not only biblical; it lies right at the heart of the meaning of the Christian Faith. Maybe it is because observing the Day of Atonement requires a fast, but it is probably because no one ever thinks of it. So, how can I say that Yom Kippur is a Christian holiday as well as a Jewish holiday? It would be best, I think, to look at the Christian significance of the day.

I honestly don’t know what people expect in terms of a prophet. I don’t think many people even know where to look for one. You certainly would be making a mistake if you looked for one in a pulpit of a church or speaking in a stadium in front of 60,000 people. You aren’t likely to find a real prophet in those environments. One ancient prophet, for example was a sheep-herder and a fruit-picker before God spoke to him. And he seems to have been a reluctant prophet, at that. He wasn’t schooled, trained or taught. On one occasion, when he had delivered an unpleasant prophecy concerning Israel, he was told to knock it off, go home, and shut up. We’ll find his reply, as well as a most interesting principle regarding how God chooses to reveal his secrets to man, in the Book of Amos.

It’s too bad more people don’t read the Old Testament prophets.I know, they can be a little hard to follow at times. Most of them are poets, and they use a lot of imagery.But it is a little disconcerting when you muddle through some passages that seem to be ancient history and then suddenly find the prophet talking about the last days of man—the end of history. And the prophets are telling someone at the time of the end that God is not amused with their behavior and all hell is about to come down on their heads. Wouldn’t you like to know who he is talking to, just in case it happens to be you? In the last program, I asked a couple of important questions. When you read the Old Testament prophets, you can get the impression that the only nations that matter at all are in a tight little knot in the Middle East. With the entire world in conflict, there is no mention of the most powerful forces in the world in our day. It is as though the entire English-speaking world doesn’t exist.

When you study the Old Testament prophets, it is clear that they are often speaking about the last days of man on the earth. Or perhaps, more accurately, the last days before the return of Christ and God’s dramatic intervention in man’s affairs. But when you read the prophets, they only seem to talk about ancient countries in the Mideast: Israel, Moab, Ammon, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon. You would get the impression, reading along, that the rest of the world doesn’t matter. That the Middle East is the only place where anything important is happening on the world scene. In fact, it seems that the most powerful force in the modern world, the English speaking people in general and the United States in particular, are not even players at all. That is, unless we are overlooking something very important. For a very long time, there have been those who made the case that the United States and the British Commonwealth are actually the ethnic descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh, the two sons of Joseph, the son of Israel. Even the British royal family have sometimes believed that they were the physical descendants of King David of Israel. It its earlier forms, this theory was no more racist than society in general, but in later years it has become identified with movements that are flagrantly racist. The original appeal, I think, had a lot to do with a simple match between what Israel was supposed to look like in the latter days, and what modern nations matched that pattern. The match was close enough to allow a lot of credence to the theory. So what are we to make of this. When the Bible speaks of an ancient people in a latter-day context, how are we to take it?

Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. 1 Corinthians 15 51–52 KJV There is no idea more central to the Christian faith than the resurrection of the dead. And yet, in these early days of Christianity, it had been called into question. It is in the great 15th chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that Paul wrestles with a group that claimed there was no resurrection from the dead. I presume they still held a doctrine of the Kingdom of God, but for them, it was a physical kingdom—something a lot of Jews believed and expected. But Paul made it plain that they had it wrong.

Even if you are not Jewish, you are probably aware of the two main Jewish holidays in the autumn of every year: the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur. But you may not be aware that these are also Christian holidays. Around the end of the first century, there was a lot of persecution of the Jews in and around Rome, and the church began to differentiate themselves from the Jews in every way they could. A lot of practices that were very common in the early church disappeared in the smoke of an oppression of the Jews. But why would the early church have paid any attention to what we know as Jewish holidays? For one thing, Christians and Jews shared the same God. In its earliest years, Christianity was viewed by the world, not as a separate religion, but as a sect of Judaism. The earliest Christians were Jewish, and they had no consciousness of starting a new religion. Rather they saw what they were doing as a restoration of a purer faith. Judaism, in the Christian view, had gone astray and they were going to put it right. There is nothing strange about that; nearly every new sect of religion sees itself as a restorer of lost paths. And so the first Christians, who were Jewish, continued to observe the holidays they had observed all their lives, and they taught the Gentile converts to do the same. But it was inevitable that they should begin to see new significance in these days that transcended the Jewish/historical meaning of the days. To put it simply, the early Christians saw Christ in the Jewish holidays. And now, 2,000 years later, you and I come along and wonder, What did they see?

One would presume that Christian people would like to know more about God. And yet there is a treasure trove in the Bible of which most Christian folk are blissfully unaware. In the first place, we don’t read our Bibles enough, and in the second place we dismiss parts of the Bible for one reason or another. Now I submit that, on the face of it, dismissing any part of the Bible is not a smart thing to do—for the Bible is the true record of the revelation of God to man. And if you want to know and understand God, the Bible is where you would expect to begin, right? And in the Bible there is a thread that has been all but dismissed by most Christian people and it has been so for a very long time. That thread is a set of days that the Bible calls the appointed times of Jehovah. You may know these as the Jewish holidays but the premise of this series of programs is that they are much more than that. They are the holidays of God and therefore are Christian holidays, because they speak of Christ and his work, and they have just as much meaning for Christians as they ever had for Jews. Of all these days, the one with the least obvious connection is the day the Jews call Rosh Hoshana and the public calls, The Jewish New Year. There is a complete list of all these days in the 23rd chapter of Leviticus and this holiday is summarized: And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall you have a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation. You shall do no regular work on it: but you shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord. Leviticus 23:23–25 KJ2000 Like any religious holiday, you take a day off from work and you go to church, that is you assemble before God—that is what a holy convocation is. That part is simple enough, but after that it becomes a little more difficult. For example, the day is a memorial, but a memorial of what? And you may have noticed that this is the first day of the seventh month, not the first month. How then can it be the new year?

Knowing God #5

The New Atheism