Jenny Agutter
Jenny Agutter
Jeremiah 31
After Jerusalem was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar and the leading citizens were taken captive to Babylon, the Prophet Jeremiah was set free because he had spent years telling the people to accept Nebuchadnezzar’s rule as fait accompli, the will of almighty God. Jeremiah made his way to Egypt and found some Jews doing there very well without the temple sacrifices, thank you very much. This moved him to make a crucial prophesy that more or less gave birth to the whole Christian idea six hundred years later:
Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
But note that this “new” covenant was to be made with the Israelites – the house of Israel and the house of Judah – not the Gentiles. It was not a matter of tit-for-tat, obey these commandments and get these blessings. The non-Jewish strangers who lived in Israel, who didn’t receive any promises from God, were obliged to observe the Law as well: Numbers 15:15 One ordinance shall be both for you of the congregation, and also for the stranger that sojourneth with you, an ordinance for ever in your generations: as ye are, so shall the stranger be before the LORD.
At the same time, the promise passed from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Judah, thence to the Kings of Judah, and finally rested (Christians believe) on Jesus Christ. And Christians believe they partake of his blessing simply by allowing Christ to live his risen life through their own lives.
Paul speaks of the holy heathens, who knew nothing of the Law, yet lived according to its precepts based on the dictates of their own conscience. He says there is no sin imputed where there is no Law. After Calvary, as a side-effect of the redemption of the world (1 John 2:2) there no longer remains an excuse for sin based on ignorance of the Law. It’s essence is now encoded within the human heart.
According to John in the same epistle, sin is the transgression of the Law. For Christians, it is the transgression of the moral Law, since the ceremonial aspects of the Law were “nailed to the cross” (Col. 2:14).
Some theologians say in the kingdom of God Christians will not sin, but this is stated by the Christians in the Reformation tradition as a purely legal definition which is imposed on us, forensically, by decree, from above, rather than the bottom-up objective sanctification of the soul which is the result of man freely cooperating with grace, which is the Catholic view. In the latter view, the New Covenant is a completed work by Christ on the cross, but is always “under construction” in its practical application to the individual Christian as we individually become refined like gold until all impurity is gone. At that point, we retain our free will and the possibility of committing sin, but we won’t sin because it would go against our transformed nature.
Paul transformed the original Jesus movement into one that was proselytizing in character. Until Paul’s ministry, all sects of Judaism (including that founded by Jesus himself) were triumphalist and self-contained, in some cases provincial to the point of forbidding even marriage outside of the cult (in the extreme), and outside of the House of Israel (at the very least). Never were procedures for a proselyting “Great Commission” stated in the Old Testament, only prophecies that the family of nations would come to Mount Zion to worship, somehow drawn by the light.
Joan Jett
Jonah
Jonah is a short story, completely fictional, which was written by a “liberal” during a time following the Babylonian Exile when proto-neocons were promoting Jewish exceptionalism. The moral of the story is that God’s forgiveness is available to everyone, not just the people of your own little group.
That moral is, of course, lost on evangelicals, who prefer to focus on the whale part, and insist it really happened exactly as written as evidence of God’s power to create miracles, and was not merely a plot device to keep the story moving along.
The plot of Jonah is simple.
- God tells Jonah to go to the Assyrian city of Nineveh and preach repentance, for the end is nigh.
- Jonah gets on a ship to obey, but soon God realizes he’s really just making for a port in the Med rather than Nineveh so so he assails the ship with a storm.
- Jonah admits to the ship’s captain that he offended his God, so they toss him into Davey Jones’ locker and immediately the storm abates.
- A giant whale comes along, swallows Jonah, and steams all the way around Cape Horn, up the Persian Gulf, up the Shaat-al-Arab between Iraq and Iran, and spits him out on the bank of the Tigris nigh to Nineveh after only three days.
- Now God tells Jonah again, go and preach repentance unto the inhabitants of the city, or he’s gonna nuke it in forty days.
- Jonah complies this time, and to his great surprise the people of the city put on sackcloth and pour ashes on their heads and repent of their wickedness just like Jonah told them to do.
- That outcome pisses Jonah off exceedingly, because he was really there just to see the divine fireworks.
So Jonah goes off in a huff and pouts. Then God comes to him and says:
JONAH 4:11: “Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?”
This is one of the rare instances in the Bible where God is being funny, and it turns out he has a sarcastic wit. God is saying, in essence, “Even if you hold the lives of more than a hundred thousand little children as nought, think of all the cattle that would be lost!”
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JUDE
Jesus had two disciples named Judah. One was surnamed Iscariot (Yudah of Kerioth) and he was the famous betrayer. The other one was simply (as spelled out in John 14:22) the Judah who was not Iscariot. Since he has been overshadowed and overlooked throughout history, Catholics have made him the Patron Saint of Lost Causes. Often, when newspapers were still a thing, you would find a prayer to St. Jude in newspaper classified ads asking him to intercede in the sale of a house or the like.
He was known as Judas the brother of James in Luke and Acts, and since James was the brother of Jesus, that makes Jude the Judas who is identified, with Joses, Simon, and at least two sisters, as one of the other siblings of Jesus. There is a Thaddeus in the list of the Twelve contained in Matthew and Mark, and Jude has traditionally been identified with him to make everything work out.
Jude urges his readers to “Contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” This postulates that the entire deposit of Christ’s doctrine was delivered and closed by the time he wrote, with no further revelation possible.
When he says, “remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ” he seems to be locating the apostles somewhat back in time, and excluding himself from that group, which is the forger letting his forgery slip.
He uses the same language that the author of 2 Peter uses to answer concerns that the Lord seemed to tarry: “How that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts…’ This is so close to 2 Peter 3:3 (which reads “Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts”) that many believe the author of 2 Peter used Jude as a source.
There is a doctrine among Protestant circles that Christians are “saved” (past tense), and can never lose their salvation, which gives God very little to do on Judgment Day. But Jude asks the reader to recall “how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not” as well as the angels who “kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.” Jude is saying, sure, no one can take us out of the hand of the Lord once we have been grasped by him…except ourselves, by falling into unbelief.
Jude quotes from the book of Enoch, “seventh from Adam”, which is not part of the Bible canon. He cites Enoch prophesying, “Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” Since Jude is part of the canon, that makes this small part of the book of Enoch canon too.
But Jude softens it up a bit, soft-peddling the “destroy” part of the original passage in 1 Enoch 1:9 which reads, “And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones to execute judgment upon all, and to destroy all the ungodly, and to convict all flesh af all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”
He also paraphrases an incident in a book that has been lost about Satan and Michael quarreling over the body of Moses. If the holy angel Michael did not rebuke Satan himself, but only said “the Lord rebuke thee” how much more so should we not rebuke human enemies of the faith but only pray for the Lord to make the rebuke. But at the same time Jude calls unbelievers “filthy dreamers” who “defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities” so go figure.
Terminal Cruise 