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“FATHER, FORGIVE THEM”
CHARLO, New Brunswick, May 11, 2024 – I’ve written here before about the Bible being messed with. By “messed with”, I mean that it’s been added to and taken away from, which has changed the content and therefore the meaning of certain parts. The Bible’s also been messed with through translation, which is a built-in hazard surely, but in certain instances it’s been purposely mis- (or better said, dis-) translated. All of which is why you need to read the Bible not with your own understanding, but with God’s.
Even better is to have God read the Bible to you.
One particularly concerning change that’s been made in newer translations is the replacement of “charity” with “love”. The two words are not the same – they aren’t spelled the same and they don’t have the same meaning. This is obvious to us. Not sure why it’s not obvious to the translators unless they’re driven by some agenda other than God’s.
Charity is a form of love that doesn’t require emotional engagement. Charity is based on obedience to God’s directives and indicates a seamless alignment of our will with God’s, an active willingness to do as God advises, which in most cases is either to give or to forgive, or both.
Love, on the other hand, is a deeply emotive feeling that yearns as much to receive love as to give it. Being emotion-based rather than obedience-based, love is an entirely different dynamic than charity, so the two terms should never be used interchangeably.
It’s not “faith, hope, and love”, it’s faith, hope, and charity, and of these, Paul reminds us, charity is the greatest.
In one of his letters, Peter talks about the primacy of charity:
“And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins.”
In the newest translations of the Bible, the word “charity” used here has been changed to “love”, which entirely alters the crucial teaching that Peter intended to convey. When you love someone, you don’t have to be prompted to be “fervent” towards that person or to consider his or her wellbeing ahead of your own. You just do those things as a matter of course, as an outpouring of your emotions, prompted by no other directive than your depth of feeling. Your kindness and caring are natural expressions of your love for that person.
But when you don’t feel that depth of emotion (or any emotion at all or only negative emotion) for someone to whom God has asked you to be kind, it takes charity for you to positively respond to God’s request. This is not an emotion-based response but rather a conscious decision to choose obedience to God, and through that obedience to offer something that you otherwise would not offer. You make that choice for no other reason than that God advises you to. That’s charity.
As you can see, there’s a vast gulf in meaning between love and charity, and the two terms cannot and should not be used interchangeably.
Peter was a huge fan of charity. So was Paul. This should not be surprising, as at its core Christianity is all about charity, though not in the sense that the word is used today, either in the new translations of the Bible or in everyday parlance. Charity today has been corroded and cheapened into mostly meaning giving money to a tax-dodging organization that collects financial or other donations for redistribution allegedly to “the poor”, but the lion’s share of these donations usually ends up staying within the organization. This is not the type of charity that Peter and Paul wrote about.
For me, the best example of Christian charity is Jesus’ last words on the cross. According to scripture, they weren’t his only last words, but they were by far his greatest. Jesus said of his executioners: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Instead of cursing his tormentors or lamenting the unjustness of his circumstances, Jesus looked past it all and positioned himself firmly in the realm of charity. He wasn’t responding emotively to the situation but making a conscious decision to choose righteousness rather than self-pity or revenge.
This is the kind of charity Peter and Paul wrote about. As well as being the highest level of charity that we can aspire to, Jesus’ final words on the cross were also his greatest teaching moment. Everything Jesus had said and done up to that point blossomed and bore fruit in those few words. For me, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” is both a summation of the New Testament and the most precious of our earthly inheritances: Jesus entrusted us with those words so that we would cherish them and apply them in the same way he did, so that when our time comes, we would leave those same words in the safekeeping of our brethren, like Jesus did, and like Stephen did, and like countless other martyrs have done down through the ages, blessing their murderers in their final breath rather than cursing them, and showing us how it’s done.
Love and charity are not the same thing and should never be used interchangeably. Love is an emotion, whereas charity is a choice. There is no greater achievement than the offering of charity in the face of hatred and violence. We not only need to know this but to internalize it so deeply that when our final test comes, we’ll be able to repeat Jesus’ last words unprompted and as if fully natural to us, and in so doing cover our own multitude of sins.
RELATIONSHIP OR SUPERSTITION? GOD IS MY FATHER
CAMPBELLTON, New Brunswick, July 6, 2023 – When I was a little kid, my parents took care of all my needs. I didn’t have to ask them to feed me, house me, clothe me, and protect me, they just did it all by default. It’s what parents do for their kids. It was part and parcel of our parent/child relationship.
God does the same for his children. He feeds, shelters, clothes, and protects born-again followers of Jesus spiritually as well as physically for no other reason than that they’re his kids. We don’t have to beg God to look after us; as long as we remain his children, he will look after us.
I mention the Father/child relationship we born-agains have with God because many Christians seem not to know about it. They think they have to ask God specially for protection or to pray for it using incense and incantations. They think they have to plead the blood of Jesus or perform some kind of ritual to get God’s attention or to keep evil spirits at bay. As a child, I didn’t have to recite a verse or sacrifice a pigeon in order to get my three square meals a day. All I had to do was show up in the kitchen when I was called.
My point here is that much of what is termed ‘Christianity’ today is actually superstition. Not understanding the foundational tenet of our belief (that God is our Father), many Christians rely on rituals and sacrifices to “invoke” God, petitioning him for things he provides anyway by default to his children. When you rely on superstition instead of faith, ritual instead of relationship, you miss the whole point of why Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross. A mindset that’s steeped in superstition and ritual will do things like “meditate on”, memorize, and study God’s Word, hoping this roundabout approach will help crack its meaning. But you can’t understand the meaning of God’s Word in a roundabout way, relying on your own insight and intellect. You can only understand God’s Word through the guidance of God’s Holy Spirit.
When I was newly born-again, I spent three and a half years neck-deep in Catholicism. I was taught to get down on my knees and recite “prayers” to Mary and angels and saints, and to accompany the recitations with candle-lighting, holy water dabbing, and rosary bead counting. I was never taught about my relationship with God. I was taught rituals. I was taught superstition, like this water is holy and that water isn’t, and candles need to be blessed, as only blessed candles will provide spiritual protection. Ditto for salt and oil and crucifixes (and pets). Everything needed to be blessed, and evil spirits could only be chased away by incantations, recitations, the sprinkling of holy water, and the frantic waving of crucifixes.
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad, this fallback to superstition that is the hallmark of many denominations today. I thank God that he sprung me from superstition and taught me about our relationship through his Word. Now I know that I don’t have to study the Bible, I simply read it, and in reading it, God opens up its meaning to me through his Spirit. This is how he teaches his children.
So I’ve learned, through his Spirit, that God is my Father, and as my Father, he does everything a father does, and he does it perfectly. If God’s my Father, then I’m his child, and as his child, he will feed me, clothe me, shelter me, and protect me. I don’t have to ask for those things; he’ll do them by default, as long as I remain his child, that is, as long as I continue in his will and his Word.
And prayer – well, prayer is just talking to God. No recitation or props are needed. I can pray standing up, sitting down, laying down, or standing on my head, if I want to, and I can pray wherever I am at any given time using whatever words come to mind or no words at all. It’s a relationship we’ve be called into with God, not a ritual. We do not know God as our Father by ritual; we know God as our Father by faith.
Jesus says we need to become like little children if we’re to enter into the Kingdom. Part of that directive means to understand that we’re in a Father/child relationship with God, with all that such a relationship entails: We not only know God but God knows us. We’re not like fans worshiping a pop star from a distance while the pop star has no idea we exist. We know God intimately and are known by him intimately.
This Father/child relationship forms the basis of our faith. Without it, we’re just mouthing empty words and making empty gestures, however holy they may seem to us or other people. Without a relationship with God as our loving Father, no matter how much church-going and Bible-studying and good-deed-doing and evangelical outreach we do, all we’re going to hear from God on Judgement Day are the four worst words in all of creation: “I never knew you.”
It’s a relationship we’re called to have with God and need to have with God, a loving, one-on-one, Father/child relationship. And we need to maintain that relationship in good standing, the way that Jesus maintained his relationship with God in good standing when he was on Earth in human form (“I always do that which pleases the Father”).
If you don’t have the same relationship with God that Jesus had, you need to get it and you need to get it now. Because without it, you won’t make it Home.
A REMINDER TO HONOR YOUR PARENTS
DARTMOUTH, Nova Scotia, June 11, 2021 – Why did God command us to love him but not to love our parents? Why are we instead commanded to honor them?
God made us in such a way that we would naturally want to love him. In other words, we have an inbuilt desire to love him. However, through misapplying our free will, we sometimes give the love that’s meant for God to people and things. This is why God included the Commandment to love him specifically, and to do so with all our heart and all our soul and all our might. If we keep this Commandment, we won’t stray off the “love path” (lol) and mistakenly give the love that we’ve been made to give to God to someone or something else.
Our parents are not God. No matter how hard they try to be good parents, they are all too human and all too prone to the flaws and faults of humans. While God does put into our parents’ hearts a certain measure of his love for us at our birth, that love is conditional and can fade with time. Many things can happen to negatively affect the love. God invites and enables parents to love their children and vice-versa, but his Commandment is for us to love him.
Rather than commanding us to love our parents, God commands us to honor them instead. In simplistic terms, we honor our parents by not speaking badly of them. If we have a grievance with them, we take it to God. We take it ONLY to God. In Genesis, one of Noah’s three sons exposed his father’s nakedness to his brothers, but Noah’s two other sons honored their father by walking backwards towards him as he lay drunk and asleep and covered his nakedness with a garment. They covered their father; they didn’t gawk at him or expose him or ridicule him or blame him for his mistake: They covered him. And for so doing, they were later blessed by Noah and by God. The son who exposed Noah was cursed.
While it seems relatively straight-forward, honoring our parents is one of the most frequently broken Commandments among Christians. I have heard countless professional preachers present themselves as survivors of child abuse and go into gory detail about their alcoholic mother and/or physically abusive father. Then they make things worse by inviting their listeners to share their own abuse experiences.
Most of us born-agains love our parents and have no problem keeping the Commandment to honor them. But for those who do have a difficult relationship with their mother and/or their father, honoring can still be done even in the absence of affection. All that is required is a respect for the role played by the parents (not respect for how well the role is played; respect for the role itself). And at the same time, we should always speak kindly of our parents, covering their mistakes like Noah’s two respectful sons covered his. Do this, and you’ll be blessed. Don’t do it, and you’ll be cursed, because you’ll be breaking a Commandment, and nothing good ever comes from willfully breaking God’s Commandments.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 