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A Proposed Solution to the Middle East Refugee Crisis

Territory under the control of ISIS as of November 2015 is marked in gray.
Territory under the control of ISIS as of November 2015 is marked in gray.

Some people insist that the Bible mandates we accept any and all refugees into our own countries with arms opened wide. If you think that’s true, then for the benefit of any onlookers my only possible response must be to demonstrate either 1) your ignorance of Scripture or 2) your abject hypocrisy and then to block you. That might be fun for a few minutes, but I don’t get nearly the kick from inflicting public humiliation that I used to, so don’t waste my time with such pablum.

Instead, I’m going to engage in some fantastic pablum of my own in proposing a solution to the Middle East refugee crisis.

Without further ado…

Step One: Find some poor, but nominally Christian nation with some extra space. Several candidates in southern Africa come to mind. Offer to develop their national infrastructure in exchange for hosting a number of temporary, well-secured cities with adjoining farmland for housing and feeding refugees.

Step Two: Invite any and all refugees from war-torn regions to relocate to these Cities of Refuge with the following caveats:

  • There will be no minarets, no mosques, no public Muslim prayers, and no Muslim services. In short, Islam will be forbidden within the Cities.
  • All refugees, 3 years and older, will attend Bible classes and memorize Scripture. These classes will be taught by volunteers who demonstrate Biblical knowledge and agree to a Statement of Faith that covers only the barest essentials of the Christian faith. Each refugee family may select from whichever teachers are available in their City.
  • All refugees, from 7 to 17 years old, will be required to attend additional classes in reading, writing, and mathematics.
  • All refugees, 13 years and older, will work to produce the necessities of living for their own city of refuge. Trade between the cities will be encouraged if all of the basic needs of the participating cities have been met.

Step Three: All male refugees, 18 years and older, who have publicly disavowed Islam and sworn allegiance to Jesus Christ/Yeshua haMashiach (I don’t care what language they want to use) and obedience to the Ten Commandments (the full Torah would be even better, but the Ten is a good start) will receive military training and appointments in an organized militia with the understanding that they will eventually return and retake their homelands.

Step Four: No male refugee, from 18 to 50 years old, will be allowed to remain in the Cities for longer than one year. At that time, if they have converted to faith in Jesus, they will be deployed with their militia unit, with arms and logistical support from the Cities, volunteers, and supportive national governments. If they have not converted, they will be forcibly repatriated to their homelands with no further assistance possible. They may choose to take their families with them or leave them behind in the Cities.

I fully realize that the current political landscape would not allow such a scheme without the full military backing of the USA and/or Russia, probably both. I could imagine Russia implementing something like this, but not the USA. We’re too emasculated to do anything so bold and decisive.

Honestly, it sounds more like a Tom Kratman novel than anything that would ever happen in our world, but a guy can dream, right?

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Hunter vs Shepherd

Everyone has a role to play in God’s plan. Don’t be afraid to be who God intends for you to be.
Everyone has a role to play in God’s plan. Don’t be afraid to be who God intends for you to be.

Genesis 21:20 And God was with the boy, and he grew, and lived in the wilderness, and became an archer.

At least on a personal level, archery is almost exclusively an offensive art. You can’t effectively defend yourself with a bow the way you can with a shield or even a pike. So it fits with Ishmael’s character and God’s prophecy about him that he would be an accomplished archer.

Like other shady characters in the Bible, Ishmael was a predator by nature. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; God needs hunters too. They can put food on the table (or the spit, as the case may be) and can take down the enemy’s king from a distance in the heat of battle. But a man who is a predator by nature may not be suitable for certain roles, such as carrying on God’s promise to send a Messiah who would take away the sins of the world.

Of course, this does not mean that Isaac was chosen for that role because of his superior character. He was only an infant. He had no character yet. Isaac was chosen to inherit the blessing of Abraham because that’s what God had promised to do. Nothing more or less. There was nothing Isaac could have done to merit God’s grace.

We all have our roles to play in God’s plan. Some of us are hunters and some shepherds; some are doctors, janitors, soldiers, or millwrights. The important thing is to be who you were called to be and not to be jealous of other parts of the body of Messiah.

(Edited and relocated from “Soil and Stone” where it was originally published on 2/16/2013.)

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Sometimes Faithfulness Requires Coloring outside the Lines

Abraham and Sarah sending Hagar into the wilderness
Abraham and Sarah sending Hagar into the wilderness

Peter told us that Sarah obeyed Abraham, not the other way around. (1 Peter 3:5-6) She respected her husband so profoundly that she even called him “Lord.” Can you imagine what kind of reception that would have in one of today’s churches? They would probably call the police on Abraham and report him for emotional abuse. Even so, Peter points to her attitude as the biblical ideal, saying, “Ladies, if you are Sarah’s daughters you should emulate her.” (See Mutual Submission in Marriage, part 1 and part 2.)

Peter painted a rosy picture of Sarah-homemaker and Patriarch Abe, but it was incomplete. Sarah and Abraham weren’t perfect. Far from it. They didn’t always believe, Abraham wasn’t always wise, and Sarah wasn’t always respectful. Consider the matter with Hagar.

Genesis 21:10-11 And she said to Abraham, Cast out this slave woman and her son. For the son of this slave woman shall not be heir with my son, with Isaac. (11) And the thing was very evil in Abraham’s sight, because of his son.

Sarah overstepped her bounds when she told Abraham what to do with Hagar and Ishmael. She had every right to make her wishes known and to give Abraham advice (respectfully and gently!), but this was neither a wish nor advice. It was a command. Old Abe would have been perfectly within his rights to tell her to take a hike.

Whatever we may think of polygamy and concubinage, God recognized both as legitimate–if not always wise–marriage. Abraham had a responsibility to Hagar as her husband and to Ishmael as his father. They needed him. He had put them in this position of need and, even if they weren’t faithful to him, he was determined to be faithful to them. He couldn’t just abandon them. The very idea is abhorrent to an honorable man!

Nonetheless, Abraham knew that Sarah was not normally given to such termagent outbursts. Instead of replying in anger and dismissing her words, he considered them and brought them to God who told him she was right. There was much more going on here than just a personality conflict between two women in the same house. Their lives were prophetic. Hagar and Ishmael had to go in order to set the stage for millennia of conflict that was necessary for God’s ultimate plans. They had to go in order to further establish a pattern of dividing sheep from goats.

My point is that despite Sarah’s flawed manner, if Abraham had refused to listen, doing what he thought was right instead of what God said was right, he would have rejected God’s promise too. God would have either made his life very much harder until he complied or Abraham would have become Ishmael, the cast out one. God would have chosen someone else.

Don’t be quick to anger, and don’t be so bound to propriety that you cannot hear truth through a difficult tone of voice.

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God Sees Ishmael

Ishmael & Hagar in the wilderness, kept alive to be a thorn in the side of the whole world.
Ishmael & Hagar in the wilderness, kept alive to be a thorn in the side of the whole world.

Genesis 16:7-15 And the angel of the LORD found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness, by the fountain in the way to Shur. (8) And he said: ‘Hagar, Sarai’s handmaid, whence camest thou? and whither goest thou?’ And she said: ‘I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai.’ (9) And the angel of the LORD said unto her: ‘Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands.’ (10) And the angel of the LORD said unto her: ‘I will greatly multiply thy seed, that it shall not be numbered for multitude. (11) And the angel of the LORD said unto her: ‘Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son; and thou shalt call his name Ishmael, because the LORD hath heard thy affliction. (12) And he shall be a wild ass of a man: his hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the face of all his brethren.’ (13) And she called the name of the LORD that spoke unto her, Thou art a God of seeing; for she said: ‘Have I even here seen Him that seeth Me?’  (14) Wherefore the well was called ‘Beer-lahai-roi; behold, it is between Kadesh and Bered. (15) And Hagar bore Abram a son; and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael.

God sees you. He knows who you are, who you will be. But he sees much deeper than that. He sees your children and your descendants. He knows who they will be 3500 years later.

God knew from the beginning that Ishmael would be at war throughout his generations, and by including this otherwise private interaction in the Torah, he has given the world fair warning.

There can be no peace with Ishmael.

In the collective sense, Ishmael neither understands nor desires peace. He will not be satisfied with democracy, land, prosperity, or the violent death of every Jew in the world. The sooner we believe what God has plainly told us, the sooner we can forget about ridiculous ideas of nation building and exchanging land for peace and focus on strong borders and containment.

Or missions.

Because the one way that Ishmael might find lasting peace is in truly uniting with Israel through her King and Messiah, Yeshua.

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The Shemitah & the Four Blood Moons

Blood Moons & the Shemitah? I'm not impressed, but I've been wrong before.
Blood Moons & the Shemitah? I’m not impressed, but I’ve been wrong before.

A few days ago my mom asked me what I thought of all the talk about the Shemitah and the blood moons. Because I know that many other people are very concerned about these things, here’s what I told her:

Although I don’t believe the Shemitah is commanded outside the Land of Israel, I think keeping it is probably good business and good land management. Shemitah and Jubilee are likely designed to work in conjunction with natural boom-bust cycles. Ignoring them causes “bubbles” and unhealthy accumulations of wealth in fewer and fewer hands until something breaks, like the Great Depression and World War 2.

The blood moons aren’t a totally unique event. Passover and Sukkot are always, by definition, on a full moon, and they’ll land on lunar eclipses in the same pattern every so often. I’m not aware of any world-shattering events that they signified in the past, though I admit I haven’t looked into it too deeply. Signs in the heavens mean things, just not always the spectacular things we expect. On the other hand, sometimes they mean really spectacular things, but they’re on a time delay, like the birth of Yeshua. There was this big, bright star and all kinds of astrological shenanigans going on, but nobody noticed anything significant on earth for another 30 years.

My usual approach to all things eschatological is this: Understand the patterns laid out in Scripture and history and you’ll be better prepared when you see those same patterns unfolding around you. Live to honor God today and you won’t need to scramble to fix all your messes at the first note of the Trumpet, whatever that Trumpet signifies.

I’ve been wrong before, but the Fall Feasts are just days away. I guess we’ll see, won’t we?

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Where Are the Healings?

Whatever Happened to the Power of God by Michael L. Brown
Whatever Happened to the Power of God by Michael L. Brown

I’ve been reading Michael L. Brown’s book, Whatever Happened to the Power of God. I’m not even half-way through the book yet, but I have to share some of my thoughts with you now. In this book, Brown poses the very same questions that have been bothering me lately, and I haven’t been able to find answers. Here’s the crux of the problem:

American Christianity is a lie.

Or at the very least, it’s not what it claims to be.

Jesus said that if we followed after Him, we would heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons. These signs would follow us everywhere we went, but where are any of these things happening? Nowhere that I know of. Sure, a headache fades here, a cold clears up over there, but so what?

How many formerly dead people are walking around in your church? No platitudes about how we were all once spiritually dead and now we’re reborn. No excuses. Why are we still holding funerals in our churches for young people? Why doesn’t everyone in your congregation have at least 20/20 vision so they can see that nobody around them is wearing a hearing aid?

Where has the power of God gone?

Is it in people on all fours barking like dogs or in gold dust blowing out of the ceiling vents? Baloney! That is not the power of God. You can tell me the Holy Spirit is moving in your town all day long and every Wednesday night, but if people aren’t leaving their wheelchairs behind, it’s all just hot air.

God doesn’t change. He makes miracles for His people. Jesus said that we would do greater miracles than He did. I believe in Him. So what’s wrong?

I invite you to read along with me. I hope Dr. Brown has some answers for us. If you know something, please share. Just no second or third hand stories.

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Wise Choices Early in Life Make Happier, Stronger Families

A parallelism in Deuteronomy 20-21
A parallelism in Deuteronomy 20-21

The starts and stops of this parallelism mark it off pretty clearly, but some of the details might be difficult for some to see.

The second half (Deuteronomy 21:10-23) is a progression from what was probably a bad decision to its tragic consequences: A man captures a woman in a raid on a foreign city and decides to keep her. She’s not to keen on the idea and makes life unbearable for him. Their son learns from his mother and becomes a serious problem. At some point either the son has to be killed or he ends up killing someone else.

The first half (Deuteronomy 20:1-21:9) contains separate laws by itself, but the parallelism provides insight into what it’s like living in the crazy house with the captive war bride and her rebellious son. Besieging a foreign city (or being besieged by foreigners) probably isn’t very different from living with a woman you hate & who likely returns your antipathy. Besieging a city of idolaters within your own borders must be something like trying to correct a rebellious and stubborn son before finally giving him up as hopeless and deciding it/he must be excised like a cancer.

The really curious part to me is the reversal towards the end. Why does part one go from trees to an unsolved murder, while part two goes from a solved murder to trees? Perhaps because in the former case the subject acted wisely and preserved the fruit of the land (his children), while in the latter, through foolishness, he turned the rightful order of life on its head and converted his life-giving trees/sons into instruments of death.

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The Cause & Stoning of a Rebel

The Making of a Rebellious SonDeuteronomy 21:10-23, like so many passages in the Torah, at first appears to be a random assemblage of rules. When you look closer, however, you might see a pattern emerge:

V10-14 – A man marries a beautiful woman who was captured in war.
V15 – The man now has two wives, one loved and one unloved.
V16-19 – The son of the unloved wife is also unloved.
V20-23 – The unloved son rebels against his father, turns to crime, and eventually becomes a murderer.

A man has gone out to war and returned home with an exceptionally beautiful woman whose entire family has been killed. She has every reason in the world to hate him, and the wife who was waiting for him at home during the campaign is not likely to be pleased either. The man doesn’t love his first wife or it’s very likely he wouldn’t have wanted the second one, certainly not under these circumstances. Competition, complication, and soon: domestic conflagration.

He follows this unwise decision by diminishing the inheritance of his first wife’s (or second, the text isn’t specific) innocent son who responds by rebelling against the rule of both his parents, eventually resorting to crime.

There are two pieces of evidence that point to the prodigal being very young.

First, the character of a grown man isn’t likely to be terribly effected by his father’s foolish decisions. The character of a child, however, can be scarred, strengthened, or warped beyond repair by experiences early in life.

Second, the Jewish sages say that the law concerning stoning a rebellious son was intended to take the boy out of the world before he does something, like murder, that would place his soul beyond all hope. Hence, it would only apply during a six-month twilight of adolescence between childhood, during which time he would not be held responsible for his criminal behavior, and adulthood, when he would be fully accountable for his own actions.*

I’m not convinced the sages were correct in their assessment of the law’s applicability, but I agree that the placement of that command towards the end of this domestic downward spiral indicates that the first domino was toppled by the boy’s father and not by the boy himself. This doesn’t excuse him. The murderer or adulterer or homosexual in verse 22 is still to be executed for his own crimes regardless of what his father did or didn’t do.

The thing I want you to take away from this, the most important thing that is not even written in the text, is that the consequences of your behavior as a man or woman even in the earliest stages of your marriage–indeed even before you marry at all–will ripple through generations of your descendants.

Be very careful in choosing a mate. “Listen to your heart” sounds honest and sweet, but it might be the most foolish advice anyone has ever given. (On the other hand, anyone who takes advice from pop singers probably deserves his fate.) Don’t marry the first girl who bats her eyelashes at you or the first boy who tells you he loves you. Don’t rely only on your own judgment, but seek out counsel from the elders of your community, from people with many more years of experience and wisdom. Your urges, your instincts, your “heart” is far more likely to lead you to destruction than to happiness.

Being in love is wonderful, but marrying someone just because you’re in love is stupid and selfish. The great secret that none of those pop stars will tell you is that you can choose to fall in love and you can choose to allow yourself to fall out of love again. Physical attraction is important, of course, and requires a certain amount of raw material to work with, but beyond the mere physical, it takes work to build a quality relationship and it takes even more to maintain it. If you aren’t willing to carry some heavy burdens, my advice to you is don’t even start down the road.

Don’t try to be ready for marriage and family before you start. You will never be ready for marriage or children or any other great thing in life until you are well into it, maybe not until it’s long over. Rather, get used to the idea that you won’t be strolling through flowery meadows ever after. There will be cliffs and rivers and mountains to cross. You’ll need determination, and more than anything, you’ll need a map and good directions.

Your stupid decisions today could be devastating for your children ten or thirty years from now. Keep your eyes and ears open, and walk prayerfully.

* Incidentally, the rabbis also say that there has never been an occassion to put this law to use.

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The Needs of the Kingdom Come First

Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11
Isaiah 40:1-26
Matthew 23:29-39

Deuteronomy 3:23-26 Then I pleaded with YHWH at that time, saying: 24 ‘O Lord YHWH, You have begun to show Your servant Your greatness and Your mighty hand, for what god is there in heaven or on earth who can do anything like Your works and Your mighty deeds? 25 I pray, let me cross over and see the good land beyond the Jordan, those pleasant mountains, and Lebanon.’ But YHWH was angry with me on your account, and would not listen to me. So YHWH said to me: ‘Enough of that! Speak no more to Me of this matter.’

There have been few men as close to God as Moses, so it seems incongruous that God would not heed his heartfelt prayer. Why doesn’t God grant every prayer every time? Charles Capps says one thing, Marilyn Hickey says another, and Henry Wright says something else again.

“Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?” really is one of the most disturbing and puzzling questions a person can ask. Maybe He just doesn’t like the motives of the people at the whywontgodhealamputees website, refusing to jump through hoops at the demand of mortals who have already decided He doesn’t exist. However, that doesn’t work for the many thousands or millions of true believers who are maimed and ill and unhealed, people who don’t care about proving anything to God or anyone else. They just want to be healed. To be perfectly honest, I can’t claim to understand why God responds to some prayers and not others, but I’m sure there are at least as many reasons as there are people.

When I was in the Air Force, they used to tell me that I could pick any job or assignment I wanted (within reason), and they would try to give it to me with this one caveat: The needs of the Air Force come first. If I wanted to go to England and if having me in England fit with the Air Force’s mission, then there was a good chance that’s where I’d go. But if the AF needed me in Japan, then I was going to Japan.

I believe that God operates the same way. He leaves most of the details of our lives completely up to us, but routinely throws trials and tasks in our path because those things are important to Him. Maybe they will help us to become the people He needs us to be or maybe they will serve the overall mission of His Kingdom, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will be pleasant or have any resemblance to what we want. I believe He answers the prayers of the righteous (not so much those of the unrighteous), but that He frequently answers us in ways that we don’t like. If we believe, we can cause a mountain to be moved into the sea, but only if such a move aligns with God’s plans and our lives are aligned with Yeshua.

Ultimately, I believe that it comes down to this. God is His own person and isn’t answerable to anyone, not to you or me or the Director of the National Security Agency. He is the absolute, end-of-the-line boss of everyone in every circumstance. Most importantly, He makes his own decisions for His own purposes, and there is no reason to assume that we are the center of His world or that our good is His primary purpose. He is concerned with our good, of course, and He wants us to be healthy and happy, but that doesn’t mean that what’s good for you and me is the only thing He wants or that it’s the most important thing in His world. His view is bigger than that.

God is to be the center of our universe, not the other way around.
God is to be the center of our universe, not the other way around.

 13 Who has directed the Spirit of YHWH,
Or as His counselor has taught Him?
14 With whom did He take counsel, and who instructed Him,
And taught Him in the path of justice?
Who taught Him knowledge,
And showed Him the way of understanding?
15 Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket,
And are counted as the small dust on the scales;
Look, He lifts up the isles as a very little thing.
16 And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn,
Nor its beasts sufficient for a burnt offering.
17 All nations before Him are as nothing,
And they are counted by Him less than nothing and worthless.

Isaiah 40:13-17

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∞ > 10: God Is Not a Grasshopper

Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22
Isaiah 1:1-27
Acts 9:1-22

Deuteronomy 1:23-33 “The plan pleased me well; so I took twelve of your men, one man from each tribe. And they departed and went up into the mountains, and came to the Valley of Eshcol, and spied it out. They also took some  of the fruit of the land in their hands and brought it down to us; and they brought back word to us, saying, ‘It is a good land which YHWH our God is giving us.’… Yet, for all that, you did not believe YHWH your God, who went in the way before you to search out a place for you to pitch your tents, to show you the way you should go, in the fire by night and in the cloud by day.

When Moses recounted the story of the twelve spies, he left out an important detail: ten of the twelve spies brought back a bad report. “The land is bountiful and beautiful, but we are grasshoppers next to the inhabitants!” Is it any wonder that the people lost their faith? Why did Moses make it sound as if the Israelites doubted God for no good reason?

Because they did! God promised to bring them into the Land. He destroyed Pharaoh’s army and spectacularly broke Egypt’s power. The whole world was soon talking about Israel and her God in fear. Yet when ten men told them how mighty were their enemies, they turned on the God whose presence was physically manifested among them in a gigantic pillar of fire. What were they thinking!? It didn’t matter how many spies came back with a bad report. It didn’t even matter that two of them spoke truthfully. No handful or army of men can stand in the way of God fulfilling his promises to us.

But we can.

If you say that you are inadequate to the mission God has assigned to you, then you are completely misunderstanding your mission. The problem with saying that “We are grasshoppers in our eyes” is that we are irrelevant. Stop looking at yourself and start looking at God! Is He a grasshopper in our eyes?

Fear is so easy. We entertain it and feed it our whole lives while we starve faith. It’s no wonder we don’t see miracles when by our constant expectations of disaster we accuse God of faithlessness.

How God sees you vs how you see yourself.
How God sees you vs how you see yourself.