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To Believe, To Love, and To Overcome

Believe + Love + Obey = Victory in Yeshua
Believe + Love + Obey = Victory in Yeshua
Climber on top pitch of Fionn Buttress (Doug Lee) / CC BY-SA 2.0 / Modified

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
(1 John 5:1-5)

All those who believe that Yeshua is the Messiah are the children of God. John did not mean the mere intellectual assent to the idea that Yeshua is the Messiah, but full acceptance and submission to Him as the Lord of the Kingdom of God. James wrote that even demons believe that God is one, yet they do not believe on Him. If they did, they would not have fallen. Likewise, we do not become children of God merely by believing that Yeshua is the promised Messiah, but by believing on Him as Messiah and Savior.

Whoever loves the Father, must also love His children, as any father will attest. If you attack a man’s children, you as good as attack the man. Likewise, if you bless a man’s children, you bless the father. If you claim to love your neighbor, yet treat his children spitefully, you are a liar, for a man’s children are an extension of himself into the world.

We know that we love the children of God if we love God and keep His commandments, for keeping His commandments is the very meaning of loving God. Yeshua said that the greatest commandment is to love God and that the second greatest is to love your neighbor. All the rest of the Law and the Prophets depend upon and these two. He was quoting from the Torah.

In Deuteronomy 6, Moses explains that all of the commandments that make up the Torah are given for our good and the good of the whole people. He said that we should be careful to keep them, to meditate on them, and to teach them to our children. He commanded us to “love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might, and these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.” The very clear implication is that “these words,” the commandments of Torah, are both the instrument and the product of our love for God. If keeping God’s commandments brings blessings (as He told us multiple times), extends our lives, and is good for the whole community, then if we love our neighbors, we ought to be striving to keep God’s commandments. We keep them because we love God, and we keep them because we love His people.

His commandments are not difficult to keep, because all of His children are overcoming the world. Despite what you may have been told by people who refuse to believe the words of Moses (and Yeshua said that if you do not believe Moses, you won’t believe Him either), the commandments of God are not a burden. The Torah is not a curse. Rather, the commandments that men pile on top of God’s commandments are a burden. That is the thing that “neither we nor our fathers were able to bear”, not the commandments of God, which He described as “not too hard for you, not far off nor in heaven, not beyond the sea, but very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart so that you can do it.”

I don’t mean to imply that anyone can obey God’s Law perfectly–No one but Yeshua has ever been able to do that–but God never expected perfection. His Law contains numerous provisions for what we are to do when we fail, so rather than threatening eternal damnation for the slightest infraction, it assumes our evil inclination and tells of God’s eagerness to forgive. Obedience is in the heart, and God is graceful to forgive those who turn to Him with an obedient spirit despite the failings of the flesh.

Our victory over the world is by our faith. Because we have faith in God’s grace to forgive our sins and to work in our hearts as we seek to obey Him, we can be assured of victory over the world. He has already won the victory for us, and the only thing we need to do to obtain it is to put our trust in Him. So long as we live this life, our victory is not completely realized, but we are overcoming the world and our sinful nature through our faith in Messiah Yeshua.

Who else has overcome the world except he who believes that Yeshua is the Son of God? No one! Without Yeshua, there is no victory, there is no eternal life or forgiveness of sins. Through His shed blood, we are brought near to God and pulled away from the world. Through His broken flesh, one day our sinful flesh will be remade in His image, perfect and sinless. This is the ultimate victory of our faith and by our faith.

Because we believe in the victory He has purchased for us, we will behave as victors over the world and over our flesh. Because we love God, we will love His children. Finally, because He has taught us what it means to love by His commandments and by His example, we will obey Him.

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Higher Standards for Higher Position

Character in leadership matters.
I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else. -James A. Garfield

God commanded the people of Israel to be holy, set apart from the world for a special purpose. He wanted them to live to a higher standard, to be a beacon to the whole world, pointing every other nation to the Creator. If the people of Israel were to be holier than other nations, how much more was the High Priest of Israel to be holier than other priests?

The Levitical High Priest has a number of restrictions on his behavior that other Israelites do not, things that would not be a sin if he were not High Priest. All of those restrictions are intended to protect his ability to serve the nation. The precise relationship between the restriction and his effectiveness as High Priest might not be obvious at first glance, some less so than others. For example, it’s not a sin for a man to marry a widow, not even a king. It’s not even a sin to marry a foreign woman so long as she worships the God of Israel. The High Priest, on the other hand, may only marry a virgin of the people of Israel. He may not marry a widow, divorcee, a woman of “loose morals,” nor any foreign woman no matter her faith or exemplary character.

People today see such rules as irrelevant or even backwards. What difference does it make if a national leader’s wife has a “history”? If you are serious about living by God’s rules, you can probably think of a number of reasons it might matter. There is an enormous gap between the people who see value in morally impeccable leadership and those who want their leaders to be just like them.

The problem here is cultural and, more importantly, it is spiritual. You and I can see why it matters that our pastors or Presidents be above reproach. Other people obviously cannot. They believe that if he makes the right promises, says the right words, and looks good on camera, then he must be qualified for the job. If his skin is like mine or if he’s liked by people like me, then he must understand me, represent me. Right?

Of course, not. Skin color and pretty words have no relationship to a man’s ability to lead, let alone his ability to keep from embarrassing his people in front of the entire world.

Character matters. Experience matters. An understanding and love of American ideals of liberty and faith in God matters. If a man wants to be the pastor of your church or the leader of your nation, his past needs to be a completely open book. His character and resume must be exemplary. His family must be respectful and respectable. If a man hides his past, he should be immediately rejected for any significant position of spiritual or political leadership. If his family is in shambles, his reputation in tatters, no further consideration need be given. He is not worthy of our trust as a people.

We are Americans, and we are Christians. Our leaders must be too. Without reservation.

We are commanded to be a holy people, lighting the way to God for all other peoples. If we hold ourselves to a higher standard—and we absolutely should—how much higher should be the standard of any man who would be our leader?

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Remember America

The book of Leviticus recounts a number of events and instructions that don’t make a lot of sense to us more “enlightened” folk today: sacrifices, blood, fire, ashes, etc. There is a huge cultural gap between that nation of freed slaves wandering in the desert and us modern Americans living in a land of plenty where slavery has been outlawed for 150 years. They probably had an instinctive understanding of the significance of blood smeared on the bronze horns of an altar, while we recoil in horror. The problem is not with Scripture nor with God’s instructions to Israel, of course, but with our deficient understanding and warped perspective.

Here is something a little nearer to us, though, something to which we ought to be able to relate:

And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying: ‘Take Aaron and his sons with him, and the garments, and the anointing oil, and the bullock of the sin-offering, and the two rams, and the basket of unleavened bread; and assemble thou all the congregation at the door of the tent of meeting.’ And Moses did as the LORD commanded him; and the congregation was assembled at the door of the tent of meeting.
(Leviticus 8:1-4)

Moses called the millions of Israelites together to witness the inauguration of Tabernacle and the Aaronic Priesthood. Only a small fraction of them could have had a good view of the slaughter and subsequent sprinkling, dabbing, and smearing of blood. Many probably craned their necks and strained vainly to hear the proceedings, but on that day they all experienced something that we can share.

Do you see it? The moment that unites Israel with every long-lived nation on Earth?

At pivotal moments like this one, they stood together. They survived the plagues and the sea crossing, and now remember it at Passover every year. Together, they witnessed God’s presence thundering from the summit of Sinai, and still remember it every year at Shavuot. Every nation has a number of such defining moments, the fires that burn political and religious bridges to an ancestral land and people.

For example…

  • April 19, 1775, when a loosely organized band of civilians defended their guns and powder from a trained force of the world’s most powerful military.
  • July 4, 1776, when a gathering of respected and determined men signed the document that formally separated the American colonies from Great Britain.

The things that separate one nation from another are the very things that make a nation strong. Formative events and the subsequent remembrances are vital to the health of any nation. They identify us to the world and to ourselves. They draw us together and keep drawing us so long as we remember them together. Although such traditions can’t save us anymore than they saved the Israelites from being scattered by Rome, no nation can stand for long without the traditions and rituals that serve as a collective memory.

We must remember our history and acknowledge the great events that made us a people.

America is no exception.

If we are to survive as a distinct people, we must acknowledge our identity as a Christian nation, founded on Biblical principals. We must remember our history and acknowledge the great events that made us a people. We must teach these things to our children and ensure that they understand the value of national identity and cohesiveness.

Finally, we must not allow those who do not value America to tell us who and what America ought to be. While our primary citizenship is in heaven and not on earth at all, those of us who keep America’s founding principals in our hearts and minds are America, and those who do not keep them, neither want nor deserve the title.

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When the Heart Wants Too Much of a Good Thing

The golden calf is what happens when we let our hearts control our lives
The Golden Calf by Esteban March

When Israel left Egypt, they had nothing of their own. Though they carried (and misused) much wealth, everything they had was theirs solely through the action of God. He rescued them from Egypt and enabled them to plunder the wealth of their former masters on the way out. He destroyed the Egyptian charioteers, provided them with food and water, and even protected their clothing.

Their response to God’s generosity was less than inspiring. They complained and pined for the days of their suffering. They set up an idol at the very foot of God’s mountain while His presence thundered from the peak.

God had every right to destroy them and start over with Moses, yet He relented. He spared the vast majority of Israel and kept His promise to dwell among them.

He could have taken back all the things He had given them and sent them back to Egypt. No one would have blamed Him. But He didn’t do that either. Instead, He promised to remain with them, to guide them to the Promised Land, and to drive out their enemies before them.

These promises didn’t come without some demands. Here are the things that God demanded in return:

  1. Make no covenant with pagans. Destroy their altars and sacred places. Don’t bow down to false gods.
  2. Keep the seventh day Sabbath, the Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the early and latter Feasts of Firstfruits.

In other words, remain faithful and have regular parties in honor of the great things God has done and will do on behalf of his people. What a cruel taskmaster God is! His standards are just too high!

That’s sarcasm, folks.

God’s mercy is infinite. Despite our repeated failings in even the smallest things, He still loves us and wants to do great things for those who love Him in return.

After the incident of the golden calf, the Israelites were acutely aware of their vulnerability and God’s kindness to them. When God gave Moses the order to begin building the wilderness Tabernacle, He also told him to take up a collection for the required materials. The people’s response was overwhelming. Six times in Exodus 35-36, Scripture tells us that everyone whose heart and spirit moved them brought material for the work: precious metals, stones, fabrics, wood, skins, time, and labor.

In fact, they brought so much stuff that the workmen had to ask Moses to stop them.

But wait! The people were only bringing what was on their heart to bring. Why didn’t they let the people bring it all and then find some other worthwhile use for the excess? It could have been given to the poor or used to make the Tabernacle into something even grander than originally planned. What’s wrong with giving more than asked?

In most things, there’s nothing wrong with giving more than asked. If a homeless person asks for a dollar, there’s nothing wrong with buying him a whole meal or giving him a coat. If a friend asks you for a loan, it’s not wrong to give him a gift instead. If God asks for a golden box, there’s nothing wrong with making Him a golden calf too. Right?

More sarcasm.

These gifts weren’t for a homeless person or a friend asking for a loan. This was the Tabernacle which would be used to worship God in the ways that God prescribed. He is very particular about how He is to be worshipped. The problem with people is that their hearts often prompt them to do things they just shouldn’t do. When they made the calf, they called it YHWH who brought them out of Egypt, but they knew full well that no bovine had rescued them from Egypt. They made the calf as some kind of focal point for their adoration of God, a replacement for Moses and the pillar of fire. Whatever their justification for that infraction might have been, I think we can be certain that they were following their hearts. Those who participated in that idolatry believed that they were doing right.

The heart is a great thing. When it is conformed to God’s will, it can be a great tool for good, but when it isn’t, it can be just as great a tool for evil, all with the best of intentions.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can understand it?” -Jeremiah 17:9

God understands it. He knows what’s in our hearts, and that is why He gave us rules to constrain it. His Law is no more of a burden than a Keep Out sign at a toxic waste dump. God’s commandments are for our own protection and well-being. Do you want to stay out of spiritual trouble? Then stay within His Law.

There’s nothing wrong with listening to your heart when it leads you in the right direction. A heart that’s pleasing to God can be a beautiful thing, but when it leads you to stray outside of the lines that God has drawn, it can bring unending heartache. How do you know when your heart is leading you astray? Well, there’s this book, you see….

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Family Prayers from Proverbs Released Today!

Family Prayers from Proverbs ISBN 1508551855
Family Prayers from Proverbs by Jay Carper. ISBN 1508551855

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Growing Godly Children. Building a Stronger Future.

Brenham, TX – March 5 – In this time of shifting moral standards parents often feel helpless against unhealthy influences on television, on the Internet, and in pop culture. They need more effective tools to teach their children time-honored principles of wisdom and godly behavior. Brenham resident Jay Carper has created a small book to help meet that need.

Carper’s Family Prayers from Proverbs for Wisdom, Wealth, & Wellness is a family prayer book based on the Book of Proverbs. He distilled each chapter of Proverbs into a short set of three to four prayers designed to draw every member of the family into meditation on the meaning of Solomon’s writings and how they apply to everyday life.

Family Prayers from Proverbs will help parents counteract the influence of the world on their children’s minds and spirits and make wise choices instinctive. Using this prayer guide in your family devotionals will have a lasting impact resulting in a stronger work ethic, healthier relationships, and a better future.

The book is available through online booksellers or by contacting the author at [email protected]. You can also ask your local bookstore to carry Family Prayers from Proverbs on their shelves.

About the Author: Jay Carper lives with his wife and son in Brenham, Texas, where they are part of a small community of Torah-observant believers. His parents have been involved in ministry with the Assemblies of God and other organizations since before he was old enough to know it, and he inherited their love of the Bible and its Author. He believes that a person can only obtain eternal salvation through faith in the grace of God which was made manifest in the death and resurrection of Jesus. While searching for a deeper understanding of God’s love for His people, Jay began exploring God’s Law and the Hebraic roots of the Christian faith in the 1990s and has been an active participant in Torah-observant congregations since 2001.

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Title: Family Prayers from Proverbs
Subtitle: for Wisdom, Wealth, & Wellness
Author: Jay Carper
ISBN: 1508551855
EAN13: 9781508551850
List price: $9.98

Check out my growing playlist of short videos on the Proverbs in my  Youtube channel.

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Beauty in the Eyes of God

One artist's idea of what the High Priest's uniform would have looked like. Source unknown.
One artist’s idea of what the High Priest’s uniform would have looked like. Source unknown.

God loves beauty. Gold, silver, jewels, fine craftsmanship…The wilderness Tabernacle was embroidered and bedecked with the best that those humble, recently freed slaves had to offer. (Perhaps I should say with the best that they had liberated from their former masters.)

Consider the uniform of the high priest. For his outer layer, he wore a gold crown, shoulder pieces of carved onyx, a gold breast plate covered in jewels and attached to a multicolored, embroidered tunic with gold chains. Beneath that he wore a blue robe fringed with golden bells and little, cloth pomegranates. If all of this wasn’t flashy and extravagant enough, would that you could see what he wore next to his skin!

Plain, white linen. That’s it. Simple, clean, and beautiful.

The high priest wasn’t elected. He didn’t run for office or volunteer. Out of all of Moses’ cousins, some of whom wanted the job badly, God picked Aaron for his purity of heart and attitude of service. Hebrews 5:1-2 says that the high priest wasn’t a proud man. Although his successors weren’t always like him, Aaron was a kind and merciful man of the people. Like Moses, he was a simple man who would have been as happy ministering to slaves as leading the worship of an entire nation, and this is what God found most beautiful about the man he chose to be high priest.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, but what if the one looking on can see past everything you’ve built up on the outside to fool the world? God knows you, and your gold and jewels can’t fool Him.

God loves finery, but what He loves most of all is an obedient & merciful heart.

Is there someone you know (or knew) who exemplified this spiritual ideal of inner purity?

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Building Stronger Families Through Prayer

The family that prays together, stays together
THE LORD’S PRAYER by navalatanjjnn

The people of God are at war.

For decades, those who fear God and place their faith in Him have been under a concerted attack from multiple fronts. Islam is infecting the world with its violence and hatred. Feminists and homosexuals deny reality and attack anyone who exhibits the slightest common sense or ability to perceive the terrible effects that their philosophies have on families, communities, and individuals. Moral relativists celebrate every perverse and destructive behavior, while decrying all moral standards as oppressive. Lawyers, marketers, and politicians corrupt the truth and build careers on finding new ways to manipulate people into making counterproductive decisions. The list goes on, but by far the most effective attacker is the one we have been battling for millennia: our own evil inclination.

Read more at Amazon…

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The Wind Won’t Hold Forever

God makes it easy to disbelieve if you are determined.
Pharaoh’s chariots drowned by the Red Sea

It was just a wind that blew a dry channel through the Red Sea, an algae bloom that turned the Nile red, and a superficial, if bloody, wound that allowed Yeshua to come out of the grave again. He wasn’t really dead after all, you see.

Men have invented uncountable reasons why what God said is true isn’t really. If people held the rest of recorded history to the same standards to which they hold the Bible, then we’d have to put Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and King Alfred in the same category as rainbow unicorns.

God makes it easy to disbelieve if you want to. If you are really determined, sometimes He’ll even help you along like Pharaoh chasing the Hebrews between the walls of water against all good sense. Egypt was devastated by one miraculous plague after another, a massive storm had just blown a hole through the Red Sea, and a pillar of fire had kept his chariots from advancing on the Hebrew camp, and still he went on. What was he thinking?

We all see the Truth eventually, of course, but if you wait for Him to force it on you, it’s usually too late. The wind will have died and the water will already be closing.

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All in God’s Time

I tweet to 4-5 of my Twitter followers every morning for warm fuzzies. I call these my “blessing tweets.” It’s a way for me to acknowledge people I’m connected to and let them know that I appreciate them. I don’t have a plan as to which followers are included on any particular tweet, and I schedule them about a month in advance, so I have no way to tell what might be going on in people’s lives on the day of the tweet.

One morning, my blessing tweet essentially said, “May God make good things come your way,” addressed to four people. What I didn’t know was that the mother of one of those four people would pass away the night before the tweet would be posted. He replied to me,

“I just wanted to thank you for tagging me in a post today. Last night my mother went to be with the Lord, and this was a real pick me up.”

I had nothing to do with the timing of this tweet. It was God, and God alone, who determined that it would be sent today. There’s more going on in spiritual dimensions than we can ever know, and God’s timing is rarely ours. It’s why faith in the face of adversity is so important. God always has a plan. It’s our job to keep pushing ahead, and, no matter how bad our situation looks, we have to trust that He knows what He’s doing and that “all things work together for good to those who love God.”

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God Knows Why You Suffer

Why would a just God allow all the suffering in the world?

A girl is born in a strange land where her parents were exiled following a brutal war that left most of her extended family dead or enslaved. While still a teenager, she is taken away to become the trophy slave-wife of a wealthy foreigner. She soon finds herself in a position to change the course of an empire and to save millions of her people.

A great empire in another era suffers wave after wave of horrific natural disasters. A prophet tells the emperor that if he would only repent of a particularly grievous sin, his people would be spared. The emperor is a proud man and refuses to budge. Millions are impoverished, tens of thousands die by starvation or disease, and the government is in shambles. At any moment in the process the emperor could have repented or the people might have overthrown him and begged God for mercy, but pride is a powerful master.

A child is born blind and his parents die when he is still young. He lives for many years begging alms and often going hungry. One day the Son of God finds him and heals him before a throng of witnesses. He sees for the first time in his life and spends the remainder of his time on earth preaching the gospel, bringing joy and meaning to countless lives.

We often hear doubters ask “If God cares so much, why is there so much suffering in the world?” To the simple minded, it sounds like proof positive that God either doesn’t care or doesn’t exist, but the world is an extraordinarily complex system. There are at least as many reasons why a person might suffer as there are people. One person suffers because he made a bad mistake, another suffers because there is an important lesson he needs to learn, or a wrong he needs to right. Perhaps there is some benefit to come that will overshadow all his pain.

It is even true that we need struggle to grow and thrive. As individuals, nations, and even as a species, we must have a certain amount of pain to drive us to achieve anything worthwhile. Great ideas and great art, usually only come after great struggles. Can you imagine the shallow, narcissistic philosophies of a people who have no serious challenges to overcome? You don’t need to imagine it; you have only to turn on the television.

We cannot possibly fathom all of the connections between people and problems. The only thing we can be certain of is that only the Creator can possibly know the full truth and that the scales will always balance at the end.

God knows each and every one of us. He knows what we need to live and what we need in order to achieve the greatness He sees within us. Don’t hide from pain. Study God’s Word so that you can know love and justice when you see it. Put your trust in Him, knowing that His purposes are everything, while yours are nothing. Then face your challenges head on. Fight injustice, fight cruelty without fear, because when you do what’s right and trust God for the outcome, He will be with you.