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Love Torah, Love God. Hate Torah, Hate God.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:1-13 ESV)

Love is kind, selfless, forgiving, and compassionate. This is easy for anyone to understand. If someone needs help, you help him. If someone is hurt, you make him feel better. If someone is rude, you respond with politeness. If someone is angry, you speak kindly to him. Love your neighbor as yourself. This is childishly simple, so why do we still disagree so vehemently about what it means to love someone?

  • You want your neighbors to be considerate to you, so be considerate to your neighbors.
  • You want people to let you merge on the freeway, so you let others merge.
  • You want ice cream and chocolate for supper, so give your children ice cream and chocolate for supper.
  • You want to be able to pour your used motor oil down the storm drain, so smile when your neighbors pour their used antifreeze down the drain.
  • You want to wipe your boogers on the handrails, so shake his hand when your coworker does the same.
  • You want to be able to marry the person you love, so let the sex offender down the block marry the person he loves too.

What could be simpler than “Love your neighbor as yourself?”

Sarcasm, maybe. That might be simpler sometimes.

Go back and read 1 Corinthians 13, the “Love Chapter”, again. Do you see the one, glaring element that modern America’s idea of love seems to have forgotten? Let me lay it out for you:

Love does not rejoice in sin, but rejoices in the truth.

In other words, love doesn’t tolerate open and deliberate sin. It doesn’t celebrate it and threaten to boycott, fire, and even kill people who call sin “sin” and refuse to participate in it. Instead, it rebukes sin and corrects errors. (Not Westboro Baptist correction, but correction that incorporates all the rest of love too. “God hates fags!” is probably not an appropriate response to the two gay guys who use the same grocery store, but neither is offering to cater their wedding. )

Unlike the sarcastic list above, these things are true love:

  • Feeding a child vegetables for supper even when he wants ice cream.
  • Stopping your neighbor from dumping used motor oil or antifreeze down the drain.
  • Closing your offices on the Sabbath.
  • Executing murderers.
  • Politely, but firmly correcting people who are inconsiderate, unsafe, or indecent in public spaces.

In short, “Love your neighbor” doesn’t mean “Congratulate your neighbor for every rude, obscene, or perverse thing he feels like doing.” It means speaking the truth and defending public morality.
That doesn’t mean you are free to force everyone to do the right thing in every circumstance. Nobody can even agree on what the right thing is all the time; how can we enforce what we can’t even define? Here’s a good rule of thumb for deciding what should and shouldn’t be outlawed, tolerated, allowed, or approved:

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

Does God say we should punish one behavior and tolerate another? Great! Let’s do that. I’m not saying that making Torah the law of the land will solve all our problems. For one thing, we have hundreds of sects and denominations fighting over what various commandments mean, but those who are committed to keeping God’s Law will all agree on 90% of it. Those who look for reasons to ignore this or that commandment are as reliable and uniform as a stormy sea.

If you don’t believe in the God of the Bible at all, then I’m not writing to you now. Perhaps I’ll address the pragmatic arguments for a biblical morality some other time. Until then, I’m only writing for those who claim to believe in God and His word, which says

  • God loves those who love Him and keep His commandments. (Exodus 20:6, Deuteronomy 5:10, Deuteronomy 7:9, Deuteronomy 11:22-23, Deuteronomy 30:16, Nehemiah 1:5, Nehemiah 13:22, Psalm 25:10, Proverbs 11:20, Daniel 9:4, Colossians 1:10, 1 Thessalonians 4:1, Revelation 3:12)
  • If you love God, you will keep His commandments. (Deuteronomy 11:1, Deuteronomy 11:22-23, Deuteronomy 19:9, Deuteronomy 30:16, Joshua 22:5, Daniel 9:4, John 14:15, John 14:24, 1 John 5:2-3, 2 John 1:6)
  • If you love your neighbor, you will keep God’s commandments. (Exodus 22:22, Deuteronomy 26:13, Romans 13:8-10, 1 Thessalonians 4:3-8, 1 John 4:20-21)

On the other hand, if you hate God and if you hate your neighbor, then by all means, do as you please. There’s a place for you in God’s plan too. (Matthew 22:13)

America can only have a shifting, devolving morality until someone stronger and steadier kicks us off the hill or we  repent and turn back to God and His commandments. We’d better make our choice soon. God has only allowed us to continue this far so that there will be no mistaking why we were judged. I don’t believe it’s too late quite yet, but our repentance must be complete and it must be now.

Love God - Love Torah
If you love God, you will love His Law. If you hate God, you will hate His Law.
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Have No Enemies: being made perfect by love

The Didache is an ancient Christian writing that purports to be a summary of the teachings of the Apostles. The most interesting things about this particular writing are that it dates from the first century, from the very earliest years of the Gentile congregations, and that it was considered by many early Christians to be authoritative Scripture.

For the next couple of weeks [posted June 17, 2015] I’ll be tweeting highlights and thoughts derived from the Didache at Twitter. You can read along for free at Early Christian Writings or buy your own copy at Amazon.

The first chapter of the Didache focuses on the second greatest commandment, love your neighbor as yourself, through a series of instructions on living out the commandment, all of which are directly derived from other Scriptures, both Old and New Testament.

For example, one instruction says “Love them that hate you, and you will have no enemy.”

The kindergarten level interpretation of this is if you are nice to those who are mean to you, they’ll change their minds and be nice to you in return. Of course we all learn very quickly that it doesn’t really work that way. So what could the writer have meant?

If you return love for hate, most of your enemies will continue to hate you. They might hate you even more than at first.

If you return kindness for cruelty, your afflicter may become even crueler than before.

But be sure of this: Your enemy will no longer be your enemy. He will be the enemy of God, punishing you for the goodness of God that he sees in you. More importantly, he will be his own enemy, fighting to keep his own spirit from hearing the testimony of your actions. Your kindness will become the instrument through which God disciplines his soul, sealing his condemnation if he doesn’t repent or transforming him if he does.

The Didache also repeats Yeshua’s words, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also,” adding “and you will be made perfect.”

"Turn the other cheek" isn't about pacifism, but about temperance & forgiveness.
“Turn the other cheek” isn’t about pacifism, but about temperance & forgiveness.

Yeshua wasn’t telling us to be pacifists. That’s the kindergarten interpretation again. He was telling us to be slow to anger and don’t make overly quick conclusions about another’s motivations. Don’t immediately react to violence with violence. Rather, learn to control your passions in order to better judge every situation. Maybe you were struck by accident or because of a misunderstanding. If you discover that someone does indeed intend to do you harm, by all means defend yourself and others.

By mastering self-control, patience, and good judgment, you will become a better person and more Christ-like. This is what it means to “be made perfect.”

Understand also that love and kindness will not always appear as you might expect. Do you love your own soul? Then cut off your hand if it makes you to sin.

We know that God’s Law is the working out of love in an imperfect world. It is a reflection of the character of a perfect Creator who wants only the best for His Creations. Where it forbids, it forbids out of love. Where it allows, it allows out of love.

Be kind. Be patient. But also be wise.

(See here for thoughts on why The Didache cannot be included in the Biblical canon.)

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Coveting Ground Zero

Korah was a prominent Levite and first cousin of Moses and Aaron. Dathan, Abiram, and On were all from the tribe of Reuben, which would have been the lead tribe instead of Judah if Reuben had not sinned against his father. Dathan was from a large, important family. Abiram was the son of a great man. On was a powerful man in his own right. The 250 princes were all respected men in Israel.

But they were not content with the great anointing and outstanding positions with which God had already blessed them. The hands and feet wanted to become the head and eyes. It isn’t a bad thing to want to be a teacher, a prophet, or a priest. It becomes a bad thing when God has appointed you to some other role and you reject that anointing in order to usurp another’s place.

The consequences of their covetousness were devastating. Note that, the more responsibility each man had for this rebellion, the more severe the consequences.

Coveting leadership when you don't understand its foundations is like playing with fire.
Coveting leadership when you don’t understand its foundations is like playing with fire.

The entire nation was nearly destroyed excepting Moses and Aaron. Moses interceded on their behalf, asking God, “Why should the whole nation suffer for the sin of one man?” Moses knew that Korah was the initial instigator and that the rebellion probably would not have happened at all if he had not been tickling the ears of his three fellow conspirators. God partly agreed with Moses. Yes, Korah was the instigator, but he didn’t force anyone to go along with him. They all chose to defy God by rejecting his choice of High Priest. Even so, God recognizes that some people bear more responsibility than others by virtue of their greater authority and influence. The greater the authority and influence of the criminal, the greater was God’s wrath. So much so that the entire househ0lds of three of the ringleaders were destroyed, and not just the men themselves.*

Leadership isn’t just about wielding power. It is primarily about being responsible for those whom you lead and standing that much closer to ground zero when you misuse the power that comes with authority.

* What happened to the fourth man, On? He is only mentioned the one time. According to Rabbi Ozer Alport (and the Talmud, Sanhedrin 109b) in his Parsha Potpourri, On’s wife talked him out of the rebellion. He initially acted on emotional impulse, but his wife pointed out that he was just being used by Korah. In keeping with his implied history as a self-made man, he repented and returned to a more profitable path.

Korah’s Half-Truth: All the people ARE holy!

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The Freedom of Knowing One’s Limitations

I don't care. Signed, Reality.Reality doesn’t care what you think. Consequences follow action, intended or not.

Order and hierarchy have been inherent in God’s plan from the very beginning, whether among the angels, in the Garden of Eden, among men, or within families. Although the laws that govern spiritual authority are not as readily subject to experiment and objective verification as the laws that govern chemical reactions, they are just as real and just as inviolable. A man who continually drinks dilute amounts of drano will eventually suffer from alkaline poisoning whether he learned the lessons of high school chemistry or not. He might get away with it for a short while, but the consequences of his actions will catch up with him.

The same is true of those who reject spiritual authority. Women who reject the spiritual covering of their fathers or husbands, men who reject the authority of God’s anointed prophets and judges, children who reject the authority of their parents… They might live indefinitely believing that they have chosen their own path, that they have found freedom in self-governance. Really, they have left one service for another and gained nothing lasting in the transaction.

After all, who is more free? The slave whose master will defend him and trusts him with a great deal of autonomy? Or the escaped slave who has no resources, no shelter, and who has become an open and defenseless target for abuse and re-enslavement by another master?

The latter may appear to have more freedom in the immediate sense of having no allegiance and no duty to a higher power, but in the long run, his available choices will be severely limited and possibly eliminated altogether because he does not understand the laws of the world in which he lives.

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The PATRIOT Act Expired! Didn’t It?

A Parade of Tyranny: Nazism, Islam, Obamanism, Big Brother, Communism
A Parade of Tyranny

Eh…not so fast.

You’ve probably heard that the PATRIOT Act has expired. It’s a lie. Only a few provisions of the Act expired and some of those were merely outsourced to Verizon, AT&T, et al, by the USA FREEDOM Act.

I guarantee you that there is much worse to come.

There is a very simple trick that every citizen can use to gauge whether a bill in Congress is pro- or anti-liberty: read the name. The better the name sounds, the worse it probably is.

  • PATRIOT Act – Perhaps the most anti-American, anti-liberty bill ever passed by Congress.
  • USA FREEDOM ACT – Anti-freedom to the core. Fascism at it’s finest.

When Israel clamored for a mortal king like other nations, Samuel warned them that a king would tax them, steal their children, and enslave them. Once they had a king, it was too late to change their minds. Sometimes they had a good king, but more often than not, they had a cruel tyrant. In either case, there was no way to get rid of the king until God did it for them.

God allowed Israel’s enemies to blind and enslave their king, parade him about like a carnival sideshow, and the rest of the people fared even worse. They were killed, enslaved, and scattered, and they traded one tyrant for another. Centuries later, when God gave them an opportunity to accept their rightful King, they rejected Him again. Once more Israel’s enemies destroyed the Temple, slaughtered and scattered the people.

We think we’re different, of course. We’re a “Democracy“! Unfortunately, you can’t rid yourself of a tyrant by voting, petitioning, or carrying signs. It doesn’t work that way. No nation is ever truly freed from tyranny without two things:

Bloodshed and Repentance.

I am not calling for armed overthrow of the government. Let me repeat: I AM NOT CALLING FOR A VIOLENT OVERTHROW OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.

I am merely asserting its inevitability.

I suppose it is remotely possible that repentance alone (a return to God’s Law and wholehearted allegiance to Messiah Yeshua) might circumvent the need for blood, but I don’t believe that has ever happened in all of human history. Even the great Jewish revivals in scripture under Kings Hezekiah and Josiah required the deaths of large numbers of pagan priests.

For decades, each President has been more tyrannical, more anti-American than the one before. The surveillance state has been growing rapidly since the late 80s, insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives. Moral decline has accelerated with the gleeful encouragement of a multitude of federal agencies. Power has been siphoned away from the individual and the state and accumulated in a very few hands at a staggering speed, hidden only by the equally rapid expansion of more immersive entertainment and convenience-enhancing technologies.

We are slipping. Quickly. Time is running out for a peaceful return to a free America if that threshold has not already gone by.

Repent, America. Now.

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Take A Stand Now

I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)

There is a certain philosophy that believes humanity can pull itself up by the bootstraps, that we can mold and shape each other into the very image of perfection through legislation, indoctrination, and public shaming. The great problem with this philosophy is that it is diametrically opposed to the declarations of the only one who has ever been perfect, and how can people who start by rejecting the ultimate source of all perfection, make anyone else perfect.

With the singular exception of Yeshua, every great man and woman throughout history suffered one or many terrible personal flaws. Benjamin Franklin was a philanderer. Thomas Jefferson harbored a number of serious heresies. He and George Washington owned large numbers of people who were unjustly enslaved. Martin Luther and John Chrysostom were virulently anti-semitic.

My purpose isn’t to tear down the great men of history, but to point out that expecting perfection of anyone is absurd. We agree on the core tenets of moral behavior without demanding absolute conformity in every detail. Yet we are surrounded by a massive cabal of fools who threaten violence and social reprisals against anyone who expresses the slightest disapproval of the behavior of some people or the slightest tolerance of the mere words of some other people. They call it “social justice”, but it’s only antisocial perversion. As they’ve done with everything, they’ve turned the words upside down. They claim to be making America better while they gleefully destroy everything that once made her great. They lie and lie and twist every good and beautiful thing until it’s as foul and deceitful as they are.

Open tolerance of sin is not a virtue.

Not even our greatest heroes were perfect, but we don’t praise them for their flaws. We praise them for what they did right. We tolerate the sins of people who aren’t proud of them, and we support our weaker brothers who acknowledge their weakness, because only God can make people perfect and that ideal will never be realized in this mortal span. Meanwhile, our backwards, degraded culture praises the most depraved behavior and vociferously condemns anyone who speaks out against it no matter what that person’s accomplishments might be. If we are to survive, we must reverse this trend.

You can start by never apologizing for condemning open sin. Your disapproval of someone’s personal behavior outside the workplace is rarely relevant to your job, so when you are attacked in the workplace for opposing homosexuality or abortion or feminism, stand your ground. Your enemy will eventually cannibalize even his own, so apologizing will almost never save you. “I just want to be left alone,” is so much whispering into the wind. They will not leave you alone. When the man to your right has been eviscerated for his so-called extremism, you will become the next “extremist.” The Social Justice Warriors will not allow you to escape this fight. They will demand your abject surrender no matter how hard you try to keep your head down.

Take a stand now while there are still some willing to stand with you, while there is still something worth saving. If you have to go down, you might as well go down fighting, with honor instead of humiliation. I guarantee that there will be people who will admire your principled stand. Some of them might even be able to offer you work. People everywhere are tired of being bullied simply for having principles. Many of them are ready to fight back and just need an example to follow.

Don’t forget that it is far from certain that you will go down at all. These hateful people are almost never as strong as they make themselves out to be. Make them fight for every inch and never give back any ground once taken.

Witness the massive pushbacks that are happening in the computer gaming and science fiction industries. If you aren’t familiar with these controversies, search for “Gamer Gate” and “Sad Puppies”. The gamers, writers, and fans involved aren’t always exemplars of biblical virtue, but a few people took a stand against overbearing, politically correct bullies, and they sparked a fire in a parched forest. In both arenas the backlash against progressive, anti-moral ideologues has been marvelous to watch. I encourage you to support both battles in whatever way you can.

We are in the midst of a cultural war and there is no neutral ground.

Join this fight today and begin washing the fetid stench of godlessness and antinomianism from America. Pin, tweet, share, and reblog this post for other Christian and Jewish patriots. This is a war for the very survival of our nation and our civilization, and every able-bodied, God-fearing man and woman is our militia.

Take a Stand Now Against SJWs. Put them on the run.
We are in the midst of a cultural war & every able-bodied, God-fearing man & woman is our militia.

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The State vs. The Family

Karl Marx knew that the family must be destroyed before the state can finally reign supreme.
Karl Marx knew that the family must be destroyed before the state can finally reign supreme.

Numbers 1:2

…by the house of their fathers… God’s people are organized by families headed by patriarchs, and when left to their own devices, families in agrarian societies will almost always organize themselves into patriarchal clans with or without ever having heard of the God of Abraham. The modern secular state is incompatible with God’s intended form of civil government. Lawrence Stone wrote,

The modern state is a natural enemy to the values of kinship, especially among the upper classes, for kinship is a direct threat to the state’s own claim to prior loyalty. Kinship leads to aristocratic faction and rebellion, such as the War of the Roses or the Fronde, to the independence of entrenched local potentates using kin loyalties to create powerful local connections, and to making the working of the jury system of justice impossible by the subordination of objective judgment to ties of blood. In the sixteenth century, the State in England increasingly assumed monopoly powers of justice and punishment, military protection, welfare, and the regulation of property. This takeover was accompanied by a massive propaganda campaign for loyalty, inculcating the view that the first duty of every citizen is obedience to the sovereign, that man’s highest obligation is to his country, involving the subordination of all other considerations and loyalties, even life itself.1

I don’t believe Stone is necessarily correct concerning the jury system, but his observations on the need of the god-state to subvert kinship ties for its own security are spot on. The Assyrian emperors understood this principle thousands of years ago and regularly deported and scrambled entire nations in order to uproot them from their ancestral homes and break the alliances of blood. The same phenomenon was observed in the relocation programs of the Soviets in the twentieth century and of the Americans in the nineteenth.

On the other hand, God’s intended system of government employs a balance between family and national allegiances. For example, God allows only one religion, one priesthood, and one Temple for the entire nation, but military and political structures are based on clans. Tying such things as military commands to patriarchal clans tends to discourage the military adventurism of conquest and world policing and the centralization of power into the hands of a small political elite, while a central religion with pilgrimages to the capital city helps to maintain the sense of kinship between potentially widely scattered clans.

1 Lawrence Stone. “The Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England: The Patriarchal Stage”, The Family in History, Ed. Charles E. Rosenberg. Philadelphia: 1975. 24

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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.