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FIVE RIGHTEOUS SOULS, AND COUNTING
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, June 9, 2024 – YouTube’s algorithm recommended a video to me a while ago featuring a YouTube prophet with a following of nearly a million. I know he had a following of nearly a million because that’s the first thing he mentioned in the recommended video. But rather than rejoicing that he was reaching so many people with (what I hope was) the Word, the YouTube prophet was instead lamenting that he “only” had nearly a million subscribers and that he was praying to get millions more.
This got me thinking about Jesus and about how many followers he had during his ministry years. We don’t know exactly how many he had (and I suspect he didn’t know, either, unless God told him), but their numbers waxed and waned according to what he was preaching. When Jesus was preaching about love and healing and being showered with blessings, the numbers were high; when he was preaching about loving your enemies and doing without, the numbers dropped off. Towards the end of Jesus’ time on Earth, the numbers dropped off especially precipitously (leveling off at nearly 0 at one point) before slowly and steadily climbing to where they are today.
But where are they today? What I mean is: how many genuine followers does Jesus have? I’m not talking self-professed followers; I mean people marked by God and filled with God’s Holy Spirit. How many of these do you reckon Jesus has today? I’d wager it’s a lot fewer than the YouTube prophet’s “nearly a million”. I doubt it even breaks 10,000. Whatever it is, it’s a number known only to God (and maybe now also to Jesus).
The exact number of Jesus’ genuine followers is important, though, because it determines how much more time we have before the Judgement. Remember how Abraham bargained with God to forestall the destruction of Sodom if a certain number of righteous people lived there? Abraham was a pretty good negotiator because he bargained God all the way down to five righteous souls. Abraham probably thought that five righteous souls would be a slam-dunk – what self-respecting metropolis couldn’t come up with at least five righteous souls? Sadly, Sodom couldn’t.
So numbers are important, just not the way the YouTube prophet views them. Also important is the degree of a soul’s righteousness. Every righteous soul has a specific degree of righteousness, depending on the measure of the Holy Spirit that God has granted that soul. Another word for degree is value, but most people don’t like the word “value” in relation to souls. They don’t like the thought that some people’s souls have a higher value than others, even though it’s true. God loves us all the same, but that doesn’t negate the fact that our souls have different spiritual values depending on the choices we make.
There’s a threshold for righteousness in a soul. When the value is below that threshold, the soul is considered unrighteous; when it’s at or above the threshold, it’s considered righteous, and the more righteous choices that soul makes, the more righteous it grows. Again, the value of the soul comes from the choices people make, not from something God has or hasn’t done. God measures and designates a soul’s value; he doesn’t impose it.
These spiritual facts are crucial for understanding the state of the world. Just like every individual soul has a spiritual value, so, too, does every family, every neighbourhood, every village and town, every city, every state and province, and every nation. When summed together, these values give the world its total spiritual value.
I don’t think it’s very high these days.
I don’t know my spiritual value. I know I’m born-again and under God’s grace, but I don’t know my spiritual value. I think I’d prefer not to know (lol), kind of like I’d rather not know my exact weight. Better to focus on doing God’s will than worrying about my measured value. I don’t think Jesus thought much about his spiritual value during his time on Earth, any more than he thought about the number of his followers. He didn’t consciously try to raise his spiritual value; he just made sure always to do “that which pleased the Father”. Based on that alone, Jesus’ spiritual value remained higher than anyone else’s before or since.
Credit scores and social credit scores are the world’s latest human valuation products. Of course, you can buy good credit or social credit scores or even cheat your way into them, the way you can game pretty much every aspect of the world (including the algorithms that designate how many followers you have on YouTube). But God you can’t cheat; your spiritual value is measured and designated by God, making it fool-proof. The only measure you should ever be concerned about is God’s valuation of you. Any other value assigned to you by the world can be falsified and is therefore untrustworthy and not worth worrying about.
The takeaway from all this is that Jesus never worried about how the world valued him; his only concern was doing God’s will. As followers of Jesus, we should also not be concerned about what the world thinks of us or the numbers it assigns to us. Yes, God will love us whether we do his will or not, but it’s critical for the future of the world (and for our own soul) that we do God’s will and continue to do it to the end, as Jesus did. Being designated righteous by God and remaining righteous under God’s grace is an enormous privilege that comes with enormous responsibility.
As the scripture about Sodom attests, we’re all that stands between the continuation of the world and its destruction. We are children of God living in God’s Kingdom, so we can’t just do what we want; we need to do what God wants, regardless of the circumstances we find ourselves in at any given time. We need to be righteous and remain righteous in God’s eyes.
The unbelieving world – even as it hates us – is depending on us.
SPIRITUAL VALUE
MEADOWVILLE, Pictou County, Nova Scotia, March 9, 2022 – I have to tread lightly with this topic so that my words of encouragement aren’t interpreted as condemnation. This is not condemnation. This is encouragement.
We all have a spiritual value. We are all equally loved by God, but we all have a different spiritual value that is expressed as a score. Some of us have a high value, some of us have a low value, and the rest of us have something somewhere in between. We can’t avoid having a spiritual value score. It can change depending on a wide range of factors, but none of us can opt out of having one. It’s calculated automatically in the spiritual realm and is perpetually being updated.
The world also assigns its own forms of valuation in the form of scores. China is leading the way in assigning a social credit score to each of its citizens, while the rest of the world, for the time being, only assigns evaluations such as credit and academic scores. Social media is rife with scores. When I was growing up, men assigned women a value out of 10 as a form of appraisal. (I think many men still do that.) We’re also assigned number valuations in the form of age, income, height, weight, vision acuity, etc., and scores on our various abilities and disabilities, including athletic achievements. Our intelligence is expressed numerically. All of these features are given a value that is almost always a number, so that eventually, in the eyes of the world, we become little more than a collection of numbers that hang off us like so many price tags fluttering in the appraisal breeze.
As born-again believers, we know that our worldly evaluation is unimportant. What people or worldly entities think of us is irrelevant. Our only concern should be our evaluation in the spiritual realm, so our spiritual value score is the one we should constantly work to increase. Counter-intuitively, however, we increase our spiritual value score not by focusing on it, but by focusing on God and his righteousness.
Again, I need to stress here that spiritual evaluation is not meant to discourage you. There is no need to be discouraged. Your spiritual value is in your hands. You determine what it is by the choices you make and by the words and images you choose to entertain within your own mind and to share with others. Unlike with worldly scores, your spiritual value score is not downgraded for failing to accomplish a particular task. In fact, sometimes our failures give us the biggest boost in spiritual valuation, because it’s not necessarily in the winning that we win, but in our sincere desire to do what’s right in God’s eyes.
In Old Testament times, there were hundreds of laws that the faithful followed in order to stay in God’s good graces, as directed by Moses. But we’re currently in New Testament times. Beyond the Ten Commandments, we no longer need to adhere to the Mosaic laundry list of to-do’s regarding purification, ritual, and sacrifice. Jesus took care of all that once and for all time by his sacrifice on the cross. But we do still need to stay in God’s good graces. We can’t go to Heaven otherwise.
So how do we raise our spiritual value score? This is a question we need to ask ourselves because we should always be aiming to raise our score, no matter how high we may think it is. We can’t know our score (only God and those he designates to know can know it); we can only guess our score, and we can definitely guess wrongly. Think of the parable of the sheep and goats. In the parable, Jesus divided them into going to Heaven and not going to Heaven. The goats he dealt with first, telling them they hadn’t made the cut and informing them why. They were shocked that they’d been condemned not based on things they’d done, but on things they hadn’t done. The sheep were also surprised to find that they were justified based on things they’d done without realizing they had even done them.
And that’s my point – we don’t raise our spiritual value score by checking off a laundry list of “to do’s”, like in Old Testament times. We don’t go out looking for people to help; we help whoever God brings to us to help. This is a critical difference. The sheep who were justified did all the right things in God’s eyes without realizing it; they just simply and quietly went about their lives righteously. The goats, on the other hand, ignored the cries for help of those God brought to them, and as such lived unrighteous lives. Even if they’d checked off every box of the Old Testament laundry list of laws, the goats would still have ended up condemned, because they chose not to help those God put in their path to help. Think of it as the Good Samaritan law that we’re all bound by and that’s encapsulated in the Ten Commandments and in Jesus’ command to love our enemies. There are no asterisks (*) in any of those commands denoting exceptions under special circumstances. That includes war.
I don’t know about you, but I want my spiritual value score to be as high as it possibly can be during my time on Earth. I know I’m responsible for it: My score is 100% my doing. I know it doesn’t go up by my checking off a laundry list of to-do’s, but by living righteously in God’s eyes. Whoever he sends to me to help, I help. Whoever he sends to me to forgive, I forgive. Whoever he sends to me to slap upside the head, I slap upside the head, but lovingly, so as not to discourage them. This is how Jesus lived and moved through the world, and this is how we’re to live and move.
I can only imagine how high Jesus’ spiritual value score was during his time on Earth. None of us can ever achieve that, but we can still aim for it.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 