Philip and the Eunuch

In Acts chapter 8, we are told about an eunuch from Ethiopia, who had traveled to Jerusalem, and was returning to Ethiopia when Philip the Evangelist was led of the Spirit to go out into the desert and meet this man. Philip shared the Gospel with him, and they came across an oasis in the desert, and Philip baptized him.
There are several points that I would like to make here. First of all, a lot of people have come to the conclusion that this eunuch was the first Gentile to become a member of the early church. I don’t think so. The Bible tells us that the eunuch was in his chariot reading Isaiah the prophet. It seems to me that this man must have been a Jew, or he wouldn’t have been reading the Jewish text. It would seem that he was already a Jew, and had received special dispensation from his queen, Candace, to travel to Jerusalem to worship at the temple. I don’t know of any Ethiopian religion that would have required him to go to Jerusalem to worship.
Additionally, Peter is the one who was given the keys to the kingdom, and Peter is the one who, amid much criticism, baptized a Roman citizen later. Much of the time, the early church seems to divide people into two basic categories: Jews and Gentiles. Sometimes the terms used are circumcision and uncircumcision, sometimes Jews and Greeks, but, in context, it is pretty clear that the early Christians really only recognized two ethnic groups. Peter preached a sermon on the day of Pentecost that led to baptizing Jews from every nation, and Peter preached to Cornelius, a Roman, which led to, what would seem to be, the first Gentiles becoming Christians.
Another point that I would like to make is the fact that, although the Bible doesn’t tell us what Philip preached to the eunuch (it only says that he preached unto him Jesus), by the time they came to a place in the desert where there was water, the eunuch had decided that he wanted to get baptized. I have had people ask me the question, “What if you were in the middle of the desert when you realized that you needed to be baptized?” Well, of course that is exactly what happened to the eunuch. When I point that out, though, then these people generally scoff, “Oh, I suppose you think God put that water there just so the eunuch could get baptized!” I am always tempted to point out that it would be foolishness to think that the devil put that water there so that the eunuch could get baptized (okay, I admit it, I have told people that a few times. It never helps the situation, though). I certainly don’t think that it was coincidence that, just about the time the eunuch decided that he needed to be baptized, they came across a place in the desert where he could be baptized.
Another thing, too, Philip told the eunuch that he wouldn’t perform a baptism, unless the eunuch believed. It seems to have become common practice these days, most churches don’t seem to really care if you believe or not. I have heard of churches where people have been talked into getting baptized simply because the church only performs baptismal ceremonies every so often. Sometimes it is because the church is trying to set a new record (“We’ve never baptized fifty people before! Right now there are forty-nine, you could make it fifty! Come on, get baptized!”). Of course, I have known of other churches who swing the other way, refusing to baptize someone for at least three weeks using the philosophy that it is better not to get baptized than to get baptized and then lose interest within a couple of weeks. There may be some truth in that, but I can’t help thinking that it could go the other way: if I had been forced to wait three weeks to get baptized, I might have started to think that baptism wasn’t that important (particularly since the church that taught me about baptism was now delaying the event), and probably would have gone back to my old ways. I’m not sure where I would be now if that had been the case, but almost certainly I would not be a Christian now.

The Crucifixion

I have been reading an article written by a Muslim scholar who has obviously spent a great deal of time and effort trying to explain why he does not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and why no one else should, either. He does make some good points, but there is also a great deal of confusion in what he writes. The article can be found here.
Let me address some of his concerns (I don’t think that I can possibly address all of them, and probably not any of them to his satisfaction, but here goes):
First, he quotes Apostle Paul as saying that, “For all your good deeds are like filthy rags.” Of course, Paul never said that, it is in Isaiah (and the article gives the chapter and verse), but his point is that, according to Paul, salvation is only through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
He goes on to say that Jesus clearly had one thing in mind, but had to change his plans as the situation changed, and that crucifixion was not on Jesus’ agenda. He cites the prayer in the garden as evidence of this, and yet, if you read the prayer, Jesus is clearly submitting to God’s will. Jesus was, even then, setting the example that, sometimes, even when we pray for one thing, God’s will is not in it, and we have to be willing to do what God wants us to do. Further, Jesus himself prophesied the crucifixion, in Matthew 20:17-19.
He goes on to say that Allah tells them (and, I presume us) to demand proof (Koran, Sura 2, verse 111 “Say, ‘Produce your proof if ye but speak the truth’”). I find it interesting that the Koran is not subjected to the same burden of proof that the Bible is. Of course, he assures us that the Koran is the inspired Word of Allah, just as Peter tells us that the Bible is. He insists that any reader must be allowed to analyze the proof, and I agree, but I would ask that the proof be analyzed with a great deal of prayer, as opposed to simply gainsaying the evidence (of course, I say that, knowing full well that Ahmed Deedat would insist that he did pray over this, and he is not gainsaying the evidence, and that I should pray and not gainsay the Koran).
He insists that Jesus was not crucified, that Jesus was only assumed to be dead. He takes a lot of issue with the fact that “most” depictions of the crucifixion show Jesus being crucified differently than the two thieves. I have never noticed that, personally, maybe I just never paid that much attention. To be honest, I don’t really care how an artist painted the crucifixion, I don’t know of any artist that was there and painted it. It doesn’t surprise me that there are inaccuracies in the paintings. I would hope no one bases his or her faith on paintings done hundreds of years after the fact.
Mr. Deedat also goes on to say that we Christians have essentially charged the Jews falsely for the death of Christ. He further goes on to say that Muslims should defend their Jewish cousins from the Christians. There is an interesting concept. I have to agree that Jews need to be defended. Part of me wants to blast the anti-Semitics in Islam at this point, but I am very much aware that there are many anti-Semites that call themselves Christians as well. Quite frankly, if one believes in the crucifixion and resurrection, one should be thankful to the Jews for helping to orchestrate it (it was God’s will, after all), if one does not believe in the crucifixion, than what exactly is it that one blames the Jews for?
He also objects to the idea that Jesus, who taught His disciples to turn the other cheek, would tell them to buy swords. He rejects out of hand the idea that Jesus was talking about spiritual swords, even after the disciples told Jesus that they already had two swords, and He said, “It is enough.” If Jesus were planning sedition, His disciples were clearly going to need more than two swords. Particularly since, as we read later, Peter, who bore one of the swords, was only able to inflict a relatively minor wound on one of the High Priest’s servants (not one of the High Priest’s guards, mind you, one of his servants). The Apostles might have been manly men, but they were not trained in combat, as were the Temple Guard.

I could go on, but there is a lot here already. Perhaps some other time.

Politics

Normally, I try to stay away from politics in this blog, but there are some things that have happened lately that I feel I must comment on:

First, I would like to thank Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Mr. Reid wrote a letter to Mark Mays, of Clear Channel Communications, essentially passing on a baseless accusation that Rush Limbaugh called military members that didn't agree with the war in Iraq 'phony soldiers.' In point of fact, the phrase 'phony soldiers' came from an ABC news report about people protesting the war claiming to be veterans of the Iraq war, when, in fact, they had not been to Iraq at all, and some of them aren't even veterans. In any case, the letter was auctioned off Friday, and leveraged into a 4.2 million dollar donation to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation--a charitable organization set up to help the survivors of Marines and Law Enforcement officers killed in the line of duty. This is the sort of thing that we like to see happen in the name of 'supporting our troops.' So thank you, Mr. Reid.

In other news, we are taking up a collection to buy Ann Coulter a shoe horn. It needs to be a very strong shoe horn, because her foot is so much bigger than her mouth, and it needs to be durable, because she manages to get her foot in her mouth so often. She made a comment last week saying that she wanted the Jews 'to be perfected.' As if that made them any different than the rest of us... She has caught a lot of flack about 'these are the kind of comments that led to Auschwitz.' I have to disagree. The Nazis weren't trying to perfect the Jews, they were trying to perfect themselves. A lot of Germans believed that they had been weakened by Jewish influence, Hitler preached that the Jews needed to be eliminated in order to recover the 'master race'--the blond-haired, blue-eyed people that God intended for us to be... The criticism, of course, stems from the fact that the Nazis and Ann Coulter both seem to think that the Jews are inferior. I don't think that Ann Coulter would advocate killing Jews because they are imperfect (and if she is advocating killing people who aren't perfect, then she should set the example by getting in line for execution first--and people like me will just have to hope that once she's gone, the push to kill imperfect people will die down). I've said it before, and I'll say it again, "There are no perfect people." We also need to get her one of those bumper stickers that says, "Christians aren't perfect--just forgiven."I think I understand what she meant. The plain and simple truth is that the Jews have been waiting for a savior for over two thousand years. Some of them set out an extra chair and set an extra place setting at meals, in case the Messiah shows up. Meanwhile, we Christians know Christ. We are waiting for Him to come back, and take us Home. The Jews are inextricably linked to our salvation, and they don't even see it. Some people cry that they killed Jesus; my salvation was bought with His blood--I say, thank God for the Jews! I would like to see as many of them in Heaven as possible. I don't want to see them threatened or browbeaten; that's not effective anyway. Side note: Recently some sociologists discovered some Latino Roman Catholics in the United States that celebrated Chanukah, Purim, and Passover. They only did this in the privacy of their own homes, they never talked to anyone at church about it, and all are descendants of Spaniards that lived during the Spanish Inquisition. Apparently these people have been (secretly) practicing Jewish rites for over 400 years...

To be honest, Ann Coulter illustrates an unfortunate aspect of Christianity. We, as Christians, think of ourselves as 'chosen.' Well, okay, we don't just think of ourselves as chosen, we are chosen. But we have a bad tendency to think that we are somehow special, that God chose us because we have some talent or ability that was instrumental to His grand scheme--as opposed to God giving talents and abilities to people who are willing to follow His direction. But our 'specialness' comes from our obeisance, not from our abilities, or our looks. If any one of us decides not to follow God, he will simply raise up another. We are recipients of Grace; not because of what we have done or even could do, but because God is a loving and merciful God. God would like to extend His Grace even further, but is often limited by our failings as Christians. If the Jews are not saved, it may very well be because of us. Apostle Paul wrote about not 'boasting against' the Jews...

Parables

In the gospels, Jesus did a lot of teaching in parables. This was a way to get a point across by relating to people, talking about things that they already knew, but relating that to something that they didn't. One of the things that I have heard people say about parables is that, since they don't represent things that actually happened, they aren't actual doctrine; you can ignore them with impunity. That position doesn't make sense to me. Jesus, God manifest in the flesh (1 Tim 3:16), was teaching His followers through parables (Mark 4:2). Now He was able to create characters and situations to convey an idea. If anything, we should probably pay more attention to the parables than to all the stories in the Bible (not to suggest that it would be okay to ignore the stories, it wouldn't be).
In Luke 14:15-24, Jesus taught something which has become known as, 'The Parable of the Great Supper." In this story, a man planned a great supper, but his chosen guests started making excuses, so he sent his servants to look for other people to eat this dinner, so that, at least the food wouldn't go to waste. They went out and just found anybody they could, even carrying in crippled people to partake of the feast. Now, the obvious interpretation of this parable is that, since the Jews rejected Jesus as their Messiah, God opened the door to the Goyim, the Gentiles, to attain salvation. Some people have gone as far as to say that we are the new chosen people. I don't think that's the case; I think the parable is somewhat broader than that. Keep in mind that Apostle Paul wrote, in Romans 11, that we Gentiles have no right to boast against the Jews, because, just as Paul himself, being a Jew, had rejected Jesus but had repented and been saved, so too, other Jews could be brought to the knowledge of Christ. They were taken out because of unbelief, but, if they, God's first choice, were to accept Jesus as their Messiah, they would be saved. Perhaps Antisemitism has some of it's roots in jealousy--they were God's preference, and, even now, God would prefer them over us. Of course, the other excuse is that 'they killed our Lord and Saviour...' Please. Get over it. It was His plan to die for our sins in the first place. In any case, back to the parable, anybody that rejects Jesus, misses out on the reward--be they Jew or Gentile. Fortunately for us, anybody can repent, and get back in God's grace--be they Jew or Gentile. Remember Romans 1:16?

The Holocaust

I was just reading that they have recovered a diary of a Jewish girl killed in the holocaust. They are calling her the Polish Anne Frank. NPR has an article about it here.
There are a lot of people that don't believe the Holocaust actually happened, or, if it did, it wasn't nearly as bad as it has been made out to be. There are various reasons for this:
First, let's face it, the Germans during the Third Reich weren't really very much different from Americans during the same time period. We survived the Great Depression without committing genocide, why couldn't they? For starters, we didn't have a madman in charge (Adolf Hitler was very charismatic, and he was able to bring about a number of changes in the German economy that made life better for a lot of people. Some have said that 'he was a good man--at first,' others have said that he was just building his power base. In any case, by the time he started publicly doing things that normal people would recognize as insane, a lot of Germans were already fiercely loyal to him--and the rest were very much afraid of the Nazis). For another thing, who would we have exterminated? The blacks? Granted, Americans of African ancestry weren't very popular, but most of them didn't have any money. To be fair, a lot of European Jews didn't have any money either, but there was a lot of Third Reich propoganda about how they were all rich, and they had gotten their money by cheating good Aryans. There was also a lot of propoganda pushing the idea that just the presence of the Jews weakened the power of Germany. That would have been a much harder idea to sell in a country that had long taught that our strength comes from our diversity--even though so many were willing to overlook the contributions of darker-complected Americans. Keep in mind also, that Germany suffered through the Great depression while making 'reparations' for World War I. Many of their largest industries were either shut down or severely limited as part of the peace treaty--we didn't want them building up their military again. You may have heard horror stories about how the Great Depression affected the US ecomony--Germany was much worse off.
Second, some people are bad at math--or, just haven't looked at the big picture. There were over 6 milion Jews in Poland before World War II, less than 200,000 after. There were about 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Obviously, not all 6 million of the Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust--some of them escaped to England, or the United States, or even to Palestine. That's true. And, I have to admit, it does seem like an odd coincidence that the number of Polish Jews that escaped matches up almost exactly to the number of Jews from other countries that died in the Holocaust. Remember, the Holocaust started in Germany.
Third, some people don't believe in the Holocaust simply because they are anti-semitic. I know that sounds strange, but the philosophy works something like this: Because of the Holocaust, Great Britain and the United States decided that the Jews needed their own homeland--a nation that would fight for them if any nation ever tried to oppress Jews like that again. Obviously, then, the Jews faked the Holocaust in order to gain sympathy with the world powers and orchestrate the creation of the nation of Israel. Some of them hid, and then paid the German SS to lie at the Nuremberg trials... Interesting theory, but, what if Germany had won the war? Then what? For that matter, going into the Nuremberg trials, the Germans that testified really didn't know what was going to happen to them. Many of them were executed. How much money do you pay someone to confess to crime that was never committed and accept the death penalty? Not to mention, the Jew's assets were seized by the Third Reich to support the war effort. Are we to believe that they managed to hide enough money away to bribe men to die for their cause? Further, even though, we've established a motive for faking the Holocaust, did the Jews really have the means to fake something that huge? I think not. There were an awful lot of poeple that witnessed how badly the Jews were treated by the Germans under Adolf Hitler. Most of these witnesses were not aware of the death camps, but, in order to fake the Holocaust, there would have had to have been people high up in the German government working on the conspiracy. There were no Jews in such positions.

Fourth, the revisionists claim not so much that the Holocaust didn't happen, but that it has been exaggerated, and that too much emphasis has been placed upon it. Most of these don't believe that the Nazis had gas chambers (in spite of the fact that three of them were still standing when the Russian troops arrived). They claim that the number dead was much less than 6 million, and that most of the ones that died were simply victims of disease or malnutrition. They also point out that there were a lot more than 6 million killed in battle during the war, so why the emphasis on the Jews? (Most of them don't point out that Stalin actually killed more Jews than Hitler did.) Personally, I think most of these really fall under the first heading, they can believe that the Jews were badly mistreated, but a campaign to eradicate them? Surely not. You might convince me that the Holocaust history should be revised. Maybe the numbers are exaggerated. Maybe it was only 5.5 million (I don't really know how the numbers were arrived at, but I suspect that the 6 million number is non-negotiable because if we start saying, well, maybe it was only 5.5 million, then somebody will say, oh, but it was only 5 million, and before you know it, the Holocaust didn't happen at all, which would be absurd). Maybe, most of the dead really did die simply because the Nazis didn't feed the Jews or provide them medical care in the camps. It certainly would have been less expensive to let them die through neglect than to spend money on diesel fuel to create carbon monoxide to gas them.

I think that bottom line is, it was a terrible thing, and we don't like to believe that we, as human beings, are capable of such things, but we are, and we need to be reminded occasionally of just what we can do. The Holocaust should not be remembered as an example of what bad poeple the Germans were, or even of how terrible the Nazis were, but just how terrible we human beings are. We can be real monsters. We are also capable of great good, but sometimes that seems to be the exception.