...Some things I'm mulling over, plus pictures from a visit to Bishop's Castle Colorado last week...
Turn to Me and be saved, all you ends of the earth;
for I am God, and there is no other.
Isaiah 45:22
Beware of falling down the million-mile drop that is believing that someone needs interpret God for you. He needs no help or translation to speak to you. He made you, and He knows how you work best, and how to talk with you.
Mentors and church leaders can help you see blind spots in yourself, and help you unravel the truth of the Lord where you’ve confused it because of your own shortcomings and the way your past effects your thinking. But don’t ever buy into the idea that you NEED them to understand what God is teaching you. He doesn't need help. Though He sometimes allows us to help one another.
To believe you need human leadership in that way is to let ourselves fall all the way back to the Middle Ages. Back to when everyone had successfully been indoctrinated for years upon years, to believe that the only people who could hear from and understand God were those in the leadership of the church proper. And additionally that the only acceptable way for the Word of God to be read was in Latin; though the vast majority of people couldn’t understand it (including most pastors, who just repeated words they didn’t understand to give their “sermons”). People had been told that English was “too crass” a language for the words of God. (Ironically, they likely would’ve said the same about Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of Scripture, but nobody asked.) Some lords even had laws banning serfs from being educated, which would certainly include the learning of Latin, so peasants had no hope of understanding the words of Scripture read in church. and they were forbidden outright to read the Bible for themselves.
(Peasants were also not allowed to own a sword, have their own bread oven (they had to pay their lord to use his), or leave the land in which they were born or change their professions unless they became a freeman -- but that's an entirely different interesting subject.)
With those two beliefs in place --that only the leadership of the church could hear from and understand the things of God, and that Latin was the only language acceptable for the words of God-- the powerful leaders in the church (positions anyone with enough money or connections and enough ambition could get in to) had all they needed to command the population like kings with a heavy dose of fear and mysterious, lofty words, rituals, and “requirements” for salvation. What could the people do besides obey? Their salvation was supposedly at risk, and no one could read or speak Latin to study the Scriptures themselves to find out otherwise. And who wouldn’t just assume that the church leadership had their best interests at heart, anyway? There's a reason this long succession of periods is often referred to as the Dark Ages.
In a similar, related vein, study the Scribes and Pharisees of the New Testament, both in Scripture and in histories. They were nothing if not righteous and upright. Even going so far as to create an entire system of laws (the Halakha) to help them avoid violating the Law of God contained in the Ten Commandments. Eventually they came to elevate their man-made laws to the same level as those coming from God, and consequently came to believe (though probably not consciously) that they could now get right with God on their own this way, because they felt they could achieve uprightness, instead of coming to Him on His terms.
Interesting thought patterns we humans fall into, considering God alone is god, and we are not. Who are we to think we can find another way to do what He requires?
(Also interesting since the reason God gave the commandments He did was to prove to us, through our trying and falling short, which is unavoidable, that we need Him to do for us what we can’t do for ourselves — so we’ll surrender our wills and come to His feet with humility.)
The Pharisees worked tirelessly to try to achieve righteousness. But to be righteous does not mean godly; it means being a doer of right. Which is a good thing, certainly, but it's not everything, you can't do it without failing, and it doesn’t save you. They were the definition of living by the “letter of the law”, but missing the spirit of the law entirely. Of not being able to see the forest for the trees.
That’s why Jesus went after them so fiercely. For starters they were falling prey to the wild beast called pride with all their doing of right actions, and didn’t even know they were being eaten alive. Pride creates the worst kind of blindness, still allowing us to believe that we can see everything and see perfectly clear, even as we trot blindly toward the edge of a cliff.
And secondly, Jesus was ACTUALLY the Son of God, the living Word in flesh; He gave the very words the Pharisees claimed to live by. But they did their own reasoning, and cross-referencing the text, and checking all they original words in their original language, and hunting through every concordance... And somehow came to the conclusion in their own human minds that the Son of God was a fraud. (!!) Some massive pride-blindness and self-righteousness in play for certain.
They had elevated words (and what they wanted to believe) above God Himself. We do that today too. Yes, He has absolutely given us Scripture, and it IS infallible, inerrant, living, active... But we must recognize God Himself as God, EVEN ABOVE Scripture, or it is (perhaps shockingly) very possible to actually make an idol --a false god-- of even Scripture. Absolutely anything we raise to the same level or higher than God Himself, is an idol. No matter what it is.
That’s why Jesus went after the Pharisees so hard. They were so focused on what they wanted to ponder and how they wanted to understand it, on how righteous they could be, that they missed the actual in-the-flesh Manifestation of everything the Word of God was pointing to. How broken Jesus’s heart must have been by that. He offered them a wake-up call, and most of them deliberately tried not to hear. They put their fingers in their ears and called Him a liar. But a few, like Nicodemus, listened; those few had the humility to admit they were not God, and follow the One who is.
‘Beware, in your prayer, above everything else of limiting God, not only by unbelief, but by fancying that you know what He can do.’ —Andrew Murray
'Grant the Holy Spirit the honor of being
more learned than you are.'
—Martin Luther
(Quotes belong to their authors. Pictures and thoughts are my own. No using them without permission, please. :) )
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