In my last post, I began a look at the war on Gaza from the context of the business of war.
NB: See my post from Dec 8, 2023 “Challenging the Church to be the Church in a time of war.” (If you haven’t read that post, please do so before finishing this post). My bottom line: inflicting war and violence is the way the nations operate and it is antithetical to the way of Christ and what it means to be a cross-bearing (Mark 8:34), enemy-loving (Matt 5:44), kingdom-centered (Matt 6:33), follower of Christ.
NBB: Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day! (see my post from Jan 2020)
A Map! Where people should look to find Jesus
In an interview on the Bible Project podcast, Dallas Jenkins, the creator of “The Chosen” (the Netflix version of the life of Jesus), noted that his team was discussing how to depict Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7; or better Matt 4:23-9:35). In the show, they decided to portray Jesus as if He was working on the Sermon on the Mount over a period of time.
NB: This may strike you as odd, but the text doesn’t say either way. We may assume that Jesus just stood up one day and delivered the speech (though there are good reasons to believe that Matthew has stitched sayings of Jesus together to compile the “Sermon.” This is evident from the fact that many of the sayings in Matt 5-7 are found all over Luke’s gospel. This suggests that either Luke took sayings from Matt 5-7 and scattered them throughout his work, or Matthew took isolated sayings of Jesus and pasted them into one Sermon; or perhaps, both are correct—Jesus both presented them in one longer sermon and He reiterated them as isolated sayings in various contexts).
The point is: we don’t know if Jesus had to work on a sermon or if He just spoke and the words came out as Matthew records. If you were to ask me, I suspect that maybe He did “work on it” as the show suggests.
In one scene, Jesus was deliberating on how to end the Sermon. Finally, the big idea comes to Him. Jesus wakes Matthew and declares, “I’ve got it.”
Matthew responds, “Got what?”
“A map,” Jesus states. “Directions for where people should look to find Me.” Jesus continues, “The way to find Me is to look for the person who is meek and merciful”—referring, of course, to the Beatitudes.
“How is that a map?” Matthew queries.
Jesus explains, “If someone wants to find me, those are the groups they should look for.”
Brilliant. To find Jesus all one must do is look for His followers. And how will they know when they have found His followers? When they find a group of people that are meek and merciful and peacemakers!
It is my concern (or shall I say “conviction”) that much of the Church (especially those within my own tribe of evangelicalism) has lost sight of this.
The world is to know us because we are different. Not just different in any old way, of course. Different because we look like Jesus. We reflect Jesus’ kingdom. We are, in light of the biblical story, God’s image bearers—just as Adam and Eve were intended to be.
And what an image bearer looks like is Love! Jesus said, “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
When we love like Jesus we look like Jesus. When we weep like Jesus we look like Jesus.
This is precisely what Jesus says in Luke 6:35, “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men.”
Again the implication is clear: when we love our enemies, we look like God. This is what it means to be “sons of the Most High.” To be a “son of” (and the gender is important only as it relates to the cultural implications of that day) meant to have the characteristics of the one of whom you are a “son of.”
The Business of War and the deception of the Church
The war on Gaza is (at least in part) a business decision. You can call it a political decision if you wish. Those who wield the political power in the US—especially the Biden administration, but most of the US Congress as well—are making business decisions. Sure, they sell it under the guise of “security”; or “foreign aid in support an ally.” But at the end of the day, as I will argue in this series of posts, money far outweighs all other factors. In fact, money (and “power” is closely aligned with money) exponentially outweighs all other factors combined.
The corporations who benefit from the government contracts to build the weapons—yes, the people of Gaza are dying from bombs paid for by us—have far more influence on the powers that be in Washington DC than we might imagine.
The Beast and 666
I wonder if the devil was scheming when one day he realized that perhaps the best way to destroy the church was not by using power against it, but by giving it power.
Scot McKnight suggests, “A more forceful way of saying this is that when the church ties itself to political powers, as it did from Constantine to Theodosius I, it becomes Babylon. Christendom was the most tragic mistake in the history of the church” (Revelation for the Rest of Us, 183).
NB: The Determinetruth podcast (available on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts) is currently airing a series on the book of Revelation. Today’s episode (Jan 15, 2024) begins a discussion of the Beast in Revelation 13:1-10.
But, thank goodness, you might think, we are past such days. No longer are the church and the empire one and the same. Au contraire mon ami. What if, instead of the church being the empire, as it was in the Middle Ages, the church has simply aligned itself with the empire?
As a biblical scholar, it is easy to see that the writers of the NT were attempting to expose Rome as a fraud. Rome was nothing more than the present embodiment of empire: It was the Beast! I suspect that few Christians today will have trouble with the assertion that at the time of the New Testament Rome was the embodiment of the Beast.
What is interesting is that a careful reading of the NT suggests that this was not the case for the Christians who were reading Luke, Paul, Peter, and John. That is, the first readers of the NT writings did not see things so clearly. To them, it was not apparent that Rome was the Beast. The writers of the NT were trying to alert the first Christ followers that Rome was the Beast. In other words, what is clear to most readers of the NT today was not clear to the original audience.
“But how can this be? It is apparent that Rome was the Beast!”
It is this same lack of awareness that I suspect is the problem today!
What I mean is that when we call out Rome as the Beast of Rev 13 there is little to no dispute that it at least referred to the ancient Roman empire. But when John wrote Revelation he was concerned that many of the Christ followers had been deceived by the propaganda of the empire. They had been or were in danger of being, seduced by the Great Prostitute (the goddess Roma). This concern is powerfully embodied in the heavenly cry, “Come out of her, my people” (Rev 18:4).
NB: it is worth noting that the word “wilderness” occurs only 3x in the book of Revelation (12:6, 14; 17:3). The first two occurrences describe the place where the “woman” (which represents the people of God) flee to in order to be divinely protected (“nourished”) by God. Yet, even though it is God that carries her into the wilderness (12:14—the eagle represents God (See Exod 19:4; Deut 32:10-12), the woman is still subject to the attacks of the Serpent who “pursues/persecutes” (12:13) her in the wilderness. The third occurrence of “wilderness” is in 17:3. Here it is where John is taken so that he may see the Great Harlot. In other words, The Harlot Babylon (which represents the material wealth/pleasure of the Roman world) is in the wilderness where the people of God are. Satan has brought Rome to where we are and we must “Come out of her.”
It is ironic, then, when prophetic voices in the church today call out the present embodiment of empire they are met with the same sort of resistance.
Could it be that we too have been seduced by the Beast and the Great Prostitute?
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