The Meaning of the Cross, part 3: Persecution

Meaning of the Cross and Persecution, Among Other Significations.

See the previous article, as this is the third in a trilogy, which begins with When I Survey the Wondrous Nace.

The luxury of what I do is that I don’t have to labor in deliberation and research in coming to some revelation. It’s not me. I’m no genius. I’m no holy man. I have read an ancient book, and have read it plainly and studied history, and that book is a revelation. It’s hard to think about it as not, that’s all.

I think that there are two tendencies in which we indulge that keep us from this:

A refusal to settle on the one preeminent vital scriptural center to the faith, messianic prophecy, and
To compensate for this loss, the taking up theological issues that we are not in a position to know confirm true with certainty relative to that.

I think this is fundamentally a different kind of “biggest problem” we actually have.

Just to get your mind firmly against where we are going, to serve as a point of contrast, look for a moment at these videos:

If you don’t care for videos, go to these. If no, type in “the biggest problem in the church” and click on any link:

Here, the lack of “unity.” https://www1.cbn.com/questions/greatest-problem-facing-church

Here, its gossip: https://www.kcbi.org/it-might-be-the-biggest-problem-in-the-church-today/

Here, “biblical illiteracy”: https://christiantoday.com.au/news/the-biggest-problem-with-the-church-today.html

Here, gender identity, the struggle for truth in the public domain, Christians against immigration. Poverty, self-identity obsessed culture, and others: https://www.christianpost.com/voice/the-biggest-challenges-facing-the-church-in-2018.html

Folks, listen, the biggest problem in the church is that the church does not have a clue what the problem is.

Of course, “biblical illiteracy” is the most promising. That is the biggest problem, but not general biblical illiteracy any more than a general ignorance and apathy. It’s about a certain kind.

Not to say that we should not take up these other issues to any degree or have any kind of certainty about them, to the contrary. Is faith progressive, by works, or does it happen in a moment? Is Christ God or Man or both? Is the authority of faith and practice from tradition or scripture or both? Is the best NT text the textus receptus? I can’t count the weeks of obsession spent pursuing one cultural Christian “golden ticket” or another. I do not mean that we are not obliged to pursue these things. They are important. I mean that we are not to preoccupy ourselves with such questions by relegating the real one to a comparatively ambiguous group, against the one topical preoccupation to which ordination we are supposed to be stewards.

Of course, if you have read much of this site so far you know what our biblical vital center of preoccupation should be: the messianic oracles of Christ. This site is not for the intention of listing them and explaining them. Too much good work has been done and is available on that. The site is for reestablishing the whole prophetic biblical stream of the Messiah as the foundation of faith, lost since the deaths of the Apostles (1 Co 3:10). If your a Christian and right with God but I have to go back and convince you that they are of an importance like no other truth you can extract from the Bible, then I might as well start obtaining my salvation by running a website that sells coffee pods and collect $1.00 donations that I send to World Vision. No, I want to convince Christians what grounding truths of the faith are lost without knowing it and not caring they don’t know. Convincing you of the truth of what has long been found but has been lost, available like water but a liquid we have come to believe is more like lava or chlorine.

Truth is Redundant

I apologize if I sound so redundant from post to post, but the truth is redundant in a certain way. Not redundant in how many times its stated, but redundant in that when you know it you sound boring, like a broken record talking about it. I don’t consider Christ or Paul to be wildly creative in how they were preaching. Compared to our cleverness they seem almost boring and simplistic. There is a whole lot of redundancy there, and a huge amount that is simply saying the same thing in a different way over and over. But if there is one truth to which we are morally responsible it’s reasonable that this one truth would be one that creativity and cleverness are not supposed to be compensating for. The power in this truth is not in the delivery of the message but the truth itself. Its exclusive reiteration is a testimony to who singularly powerful, important and self-sufficient it is. True, how we present it is important, and redundancy of expression is a usually no-no, but when the revelation is this big the more we can get it out there and get ourselves out of the way of it, the more it will be allowed to release us only to its un-obstruction and our awe. In that cause all you want to do is say it and it alone over and over and over again, and all anyone wants to hear who is looking is to hear it over and over and over again.

This is the only topic of scripture and the only phenomenon of scripture that can be said to be exclusively historical, fundamentally doctrinal, and that which is not removed from the revelation without completely destroying how it is conclusively demonstrated as true. Derived from this particular revelation are all of the doctrines we believe and entertain, not the other way around. The doctrines are not established as objectively true or false without the messianic oracular stream. We may believe doctrines, we may be able to supply reasoning and proof texts for them, but if they are not prophesied or come out of the implications of prophecy then our belief and devotion to them is no better than what ties people to any common anti-revelational, unrevealed religion.

I repeat, the Oracles are the only biblical stream of scripture that proves God because it is history, history shown as a miraculous phenomena of cause and effect. Although this is the surest thing we can conclude about Christianity, that God promises and Christ fulfilled, our problem is that this is not our doctrines and what informs them Our chosen doctrines are conclusory ideas, the effect, not this predicative cause. This is our problem.

Our doctrines include those pertaining to salvation assurance, sacramental grace, and apostolic authority, salvation by faith alone, sola scriptura, the sovereignty of God, the day of worship, the existence of God, et al. We think these are the kinds of things with which we must deal and make a decision over. The things we need to be inspired by and move our faith to God. But as isolated propositions they are not the ultimate concerns given to man for faith. They are not the end and beginning of faith, they are not the directing influence of the faith, but contingencies and implications under influence to faith, which come through a confrontation with the scriptural phenomenon of messianic prophecy alone. Or doctrines are not Uber except as the fleet of cars in the ride-share service to the corporative force that demands them, purchases them and puts them into service as its tools of commerce.

The doctrines are conclusions and tropes of the philosophy of the Christian religion. They are the demonstrated truth propositions of a transcendent revelation, not the revelation itself.

The single most important doctrine is “Jesus is Messiah” because that dyad and restrictive apposition expresses historical fulfiller, and Person, Jesus, reified and certified by his messianic phenomena and title, “Messiah.” It is not “Jesus is Lord” before it is Jesus is Messiah. It is not “Jesus is savior” before Jesus is Messiah. It is not “Jesus is God” before Jesus is Messiah, because in them “lord, “savior,” and “God” are human concepts along with the name “Jesus.” Only a non-conceptual phenomena can make real a conceptual one.

This simple fact is the main one that the Patristics, the Catholic Church, the Protestant Church, and all the stripes in between have stumbled over (Isa 8:14; 1Pe 2:8). Not that they don’t believe Jesus is Messiah, but that Truth to them is not more important and first in order to tropes that merely express Truth’s meaning. If this issue is honestly confronted, it can radically change one’s fundamental relationship with the faith and change one’s life, ala 1^st century, not 21^st. It remains indisputable that the direct or indirect teaching of the church is that faith motivation is driven by an assent to creeds, doctrinal and propositional truth, church authority, tradition or sensibility. By this, and for no other reason, the church is being destroyed from within because it refuses to cede control to the 1st century revelation of Messiah Jesus.