Normalization

 

If you went out to eat dinner and upon receiving your salad, you found a small slug on one of the leaves. You would complain and get a new salad.

If you went again, the next weekend and ordering again, found a fingernail in your soup, you would complain and either get a different side dish or possibly leave.

If someone actually convinced you to go a third time, on the following weekend and upon receiving your main dish, you find several curly black hairs, most likely you would never return again to that restaurant.

At what point do we stop interacting with the world/social media/news? With the previous metaphor in mind, at what point does the corruption, perversion and depravity of these things drive us away as “it’s no longer worth it”?

In the distant past, the practice of monasticism became the place the godly went to get away from the influence of the world. While becoming a monk is not better or necessary than being a regular person, running away from the influence of evil is necessary.

I fear we may be slowly losing our passion for holiness. We are allowing ourselves to become conditioned to the normalization of sin.

Oppression as Fruit

 

 It could be the case that some ecological disaster, plague, or war decimates the majority of the global population in the near future. This does not mean that the world is coming to an end but that the fruit of sin is being reaped. This sort of suffering is not punishment from God but the consequences of not living as truly human. Mankind was designed to love and to be loved and anything else will only lead to suffering. When you plant carrot seeds, carrots will grow. 

The world could fall under the oppression of Islam, of Chinese communism, or global technocratic socialism. But regardless of the suffering that follows the Church will never cease to be. The Church does not need comfort and ease, it does not need technology and it does not need the support of any government agency. The Church will continue to be until and throughout the kingship of Jesus Christ is manifested across all of creation.

Speaking with Authority

 

From the point that the gospels and the epistles began being circulated, the followers of Christ had the authority of the apostles upon which to base their beliefs. As the first generation of Christians died, false gospels and writings that claimed apostolic authority began to be circulated, so the church needed to make an official declaration of “this is what the church has always believed,” and did so by identifying which documents were in agreement with historic Christianity.

In essence, the church drew the boundaries for what would be considered authentic Christianity. The identification of the gospels and the epistles was not intended to be an exhaustive declaration of Christian doctrine, it was more of a statement about what was not in agreement with the apostolic faith.

Ultimately, they were saying, these documents (what we call the Bible) are in agreement with what the church has always believed and taught and “those” other documents are not. The forthcoming seven ecumenical councils were a continuation of that thought. They were further declarations of “what the church has always believed and taught.”

Language, History and Accuracy

 

    One big problem is that we do not know how much time passed from creation to the invention of Sumerian cuneiform writing. The creation of a written language is reflective of the worldview that created it. How far did men deviate from their view of God at the time of Adam to the religion of ancient Mesopotamia?

Did men not write prior to the Sumerians? Or has it simply been lost?

    History, prior to the time of the Sumerians, was like a giant telephone game. Historical and religious stories were passed down from generation to generation with the inevitable errors being introduced. With the arrival of Moses into the Egyptian empire and his writing of the first five books of the Old Testament came the key for interpreting and filtering known history. The stories that were told were eventually written down but Moses with access to the libraries of Egypt corrected historic-religious history.