What I've been doing

I suppose it's looked a lot like I've given up on Blogging to those of you who still follow me here.

However, I have been working on something.

In one week I'll be launching my new website. It's a collaborative community blog spot/online magazine. I'm editing, sub-editing and occasionally writing there.

Here is a seek-peek:

www.aboutallofit.com

As a direct consequence it's getting close to the time for me to take down this old spot. It has been good to me, but I'm looking forward to the opportunities around the corner.

Alive Again in 2011!

So it's been a big year for me, and sadly an uninspired one.

However, it's coming back round again now, and I am beginning the preparation process for new life to come to Jacob and the Gordian Knot.

I'm currently planning for the transition to a collaborator site. If it goes ahead there will be at least three of us writing blogs for the site.

I'm going for that because the subject matter and intent of the posts of JatG(N) requires a lot of length and attention to detail. I would rather be able to work on a good post for a two-to-three week rotation then be trying to reach a post a week.

There will be more news here as the preparation continues...

Jeremiah Post

This is a post I have taken a lot of consideration to write.
What I have to say in this post is not easy. It's hard teaching. It's personal. It's scary. It's the most liberating discovery of my life.
Jeremiah was born at a turbulent time in the history of ancient Israel. After the prosperous lives of King David and King Solomon the kingdom split in two. The usurper north took the name Israel, the southerners loyal to King David's line took the name Judah.
After hundreds of years of intrigue, backstabbing, idolatry and revival an overarching truth was catching up with the two nations: "Be sure your sins will find you out." It was in this climate that Israel fell to the Assyrian Empire. It's people were carried off. The land was razed. New settlers were brought in. Israel was now a nation in exile.
The good king Hezekiah was able to avoid a similar disaster. In time Assyria fell to the new Babylonian Empire. But after Hezekiah came Manasseh. He was the worst of them. His filth filled the land. Judah entered a downward spiral. The reigns of the next kings would be short and violent. There would be times of great repentance and great relapse. The big question was this: Would Judah live up to it's founding idea? A nation living for God.
It was during the last of the revivals that Jeremiah was born. When he was still young God spoke to him for the first time. These are the first words of prophesy in Jeremiahs book, "The word of the LORD came to me saying, 'Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.'"
The book of Jeremiah is like a personal diary. It contains the outpourings of his heart. Page upon page of prophecy. You begin to see the picture of a God pleading with a nation He loves, through a man who loves that nation too. The message is simple. Turn away from the self-consuming, self-harming practises, and become what Judah is meant to be. What it was made for. A place of justice, peace, and mercy. A picture of life with God.
But the book contains an undertone. The knowledge that the message will hit deaf ears.
Jeremiah pours his life into this message, this hopeless pleading. He never marries, he is hated, persecuted, locked in stocks, jailed, almost dies in a cistern, barely escapes assassination. But worse then all this is the emotional toll. Jeremiah loves his people. A people he knows isn't listening. The words in Jeremiah 20 frame his brokenness, "O LORD, you deceived me, and I was deceived; You overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. But if I say, 'I will not mention Him or speak any more in His name,' His word is in my heart like fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot."
When time has run out Babylon destroyed Judah, carried off the best and brightest of the people and razed the land. The message of hope fell on deaf ears. The people Jeremiah loved and gave his life to destroyed themselves.
Jeremiah wrote another book. It's name is Lamentations; "a song of grief". Jeremiah morns the loss of his beloved. And dies.
So what is it about Jeremiah that makes me take his name like Jacob?
It's because for a long time I was lost in the lie that the West tells us. That life is all about obtaining happiness. Living a life of prosperity and simple joys. And I felt like a failure, like I was being cheated in life, because my life isn't about that. Because although I know I'm going to have a lot of good things in life, the road I've chosen is marked with suffering.
But in truth that is OK. Because life can be about a million things other then happiness.
Jeremiah pleaded with the people he loved, a people that mistreated him, a people who were destroying themselves with there actions. He pleaded because he loved them, and watching them was fire to his soul. Those people were his passion. So he made his life about pleading with them, whether he was heard or not.
In the same way my life is about pleading with those around me, to stop the self-harming practices of the modern world, and become what they were born to be. Images of the living God. His beloved children.
And I'll plead even when I know no one will listen. Because I love them enough to try. Because God put a fire in my bones. And in the end, I would rather pour my life out like Jeremiah then live a life focused on obtaining more happiness.

New Year Post

OK, so it's been a while, but I've had a million other things to think about and the Jeremiah Post is being difficult.

I thought I would just take an opportunity to talk to everyone listening about the new year.
This is a year full of serious efforts for me. Hoping to have a new video camera soon, and I'm about to start advertising the blog a bit more, so expect a lot of new stuff from me. Current plan is at least a blog a week.

I'll be back in Sydney studying "digital television" which for me means studying for making internet content as well as preparing for a longer term future in film making.

I'm still planning to do Bible college starting 2011, not sure whether that will mean Sydney or Melbourne, but we will see.

Anyway, a big thanks to everyone who's been reading this site. The views and comments are really important to me, and will only get more so. The net will be my base of operations for the start of my career, so this is home base in many respects, and you all were my start.

Here's to the new year, and the new decade.

God Works in Mysterious Ways... heh...

So... Were was I? ...

Um... Right, so here we come to one of the most complicated, convoluted and confusing parts of dealing with an all-knowing eternal God. He has a very different way of looking at the world. If you want to serve Him you have to understand that His plans don't make sense. They aren't clear. They're disjointed and indirect.
At least, they are to us. He sees things we don't, and He knows more then you can dream.
On top of that He is a poet. He believes in symbols. He loves to play out things sweet, bitter sweet and sometimes just bitter. It seems to me that few people, if any, ever understand the full significance of their life. For those of us who are servants of the Lord, we're not supposed to understand. We are only supposed to obey. More of that in the Jeremiah post though.

As for the wider issue of God's will, we soon hit contentious ground. Remember it's not our place to understand what it is God is doing. So this is honest to goodness unclear.
Is everything that happens the will of God?
My answer is simple.
No. Very little that happens is according to God's will. But you can be sure of this. Though as individuals, as families and as nations we defy God's will, His plan for the world is unavoidable. God can use bad things. Things He never wanted to happen to His advantage.
But then you'd be right in asking why an all-powerful God, an all-good God would let bad things happen at all. The answer is one that is distasteful to most; we asked for it.

The human race decided to seek a life away from God. Most of what we see today is God letting us explore that option.

What you need to keep in perspective is that this life, and everything that ever happens here is very small in the eyes of eternity. A person can suffer unimaginably in even the opening years of their lives, but God offers an eternity of something unbelievably good. And that offer will be made to everyone.

I've often heard non-Christians point out the amount of people who never hear about the Gospel, and the seeming inequity that raises. My reply to that is in two parts.

First, we know that Judgement of the soul does not happen at the moment of death (Revelation (the whole book)), and that we are capable of consciousness apart from our bodies (1 Samuel 28). I don't doubt that many a revelation and conversation has gone on in that in between place.

Second is that God takes a persons upbringing and environment into account when he judges a person, as large portions of Romans indicates. God judges people by their hearts. A person who says they follow Christ and even look like it, but have no evidence of it in their heart, will be far worse off then a person who grew up in the Amazon and never even knew about aeroplanes let alone Jesus, but committed themselves to conducting themselves in a right way, and longed for the true, the pure and the just. Jesus is the only way to eternal life, I'm just trying to say that even someone who doesn't know about God can commune with Him, and follow Him.

Then there is the greatest bogyman of all. Hell. How does a good God send people to a place were they suffer for eternity?

First I need you to take everything you know about hell and dispose of it unceremoniously. The Catholic Church once had a love affair with a particular poet. Who liked to write about things like hell, which, ironically he didn't believe in, because he was a pagan. But the Catholics liked it anyway, and essentially adopted it as cannon. So pretty much every image of hell we have is based on this.

At best the typical picture of hell can be called culturally irrelevant, at worst blasphemous. Again it's a case of baby Christian syndrome. Most Christians haven't even read the Bible, let alone understand it. Instead they take on centuries old folk lore and call it truth.

The culturally relevant and theologically sound view of hell can probably be best explained like this. In hell a person's soul is separated from God. Then they are destroyed. It is an eternal punishment. The person will not be recreated. They are gone forever. Something lives on in that place. But that thing is not the person.

You see in the beginning we were created perfect. In the image of God. Beings of pure good. At the fall "sin" was introduced. Best think of sin here as new elements, ideas, all of them bad by nature. Greed, mistrust, pride, envy, the list goes on. The people we are today, you and me, are people caught in between. In between the perfect person God intends us to be and the ugly, selfish thing that the forces of evil want us to be. If we choose God we get Heaven, the place where He will restore us to what we were meant to be, and all the bad, the sin, is destroyed. Otherwise we choose hell, were the perfect image will be destroyed and the bad will live on separated from God.

That thing that lives on in Hell, in torment, it's not a person. It's not any of the things you loved about them. It's their sickness. It's their pain. It's the demons inside them that tortured the real person all their life. The real person is gone. Destroyed.

Cold Hard Cash

I've been thinking about the Jeremiah post coming up, and I think I need to backtrack a little to properly explain that one. There are two massive concepts I have to give you some incite in, to help explain my views. The first is faith, the second is God's will. So I have to backtrack, not one, but two post to get there.
So let us start on faith with a firm testing ground.
Money.
The theoretical Christian ideal for thought about money is as follows. All the world is God's. Money is included. I am God's servant, thus He makes His resources available to me. I love everyone just as well as I love myself. It makes no difference how much money I "have", because all money is available to me, and if it benefits anyone it is good.
Sum total, a buck in the hand is the same as a buck in the bush. God will provide.
Before you dismiss this as too bizarre, take look into Hudson Taylor's story. This bloke moved to China in the 1800's to preach the gospel, and just crossed his figures when it came to money. And it worked like a charm.
BUT it gets more complicated then that. Christian are commanded things like:
'"Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you," Thessalonians 4:11'.
In our society that means, almost inexorably, a nine-to-five job. Add a family, that we must provide for and we're looking far more like everyone else. With our societies huge wealth it gets even more blurry. How do you provide the right amount of education and positive upbringing? Need to keep a roof over their heads. Need to get a good computer and a fast internet connection. The holiday is an important life experience. Good schooling, transport.
Hudson had it easy. It was a straight forward equation. Work for God. Wait for his pay. There was no one else.
So what's with that? Let me give you a little illustration to clear things up.
Imagine a person walking through a jungle when he comes to a cliff. On the other side of the drop the jungle carries on like before.
God tells him to get over the ditch. There's two options open to him. The first is to go into the jungle, cut down some trees and begin to construct a bridge. If he does this, he has faith. And he works in his faith to get to the objective God's given him.
The other option is to just try to walk across on thin air and pray God will hold him up. This action is just as faithful and twice as brave. Also twice as likely to fail.
You see it's here that we begin to understand why God wants Christians to work hard, etc. It's so we live a normal life. A natural life. Because the best way to convey Christ is to show him in real life. I'm far more impressed by an individual who gets up in the morning and suffers through whatever task they are doing to try to reach an end they believe in then by someone who has life fall into their lap because they believe something.
The only time God tends to use just walking across is when He needs to take a shortcut.
What you need to understand is that both those techniques in the end require the same amount of faith. Someone with a true grip on the concept of God knows that the same God who defies gravity is the one that compels the laws of physics to maintain the structural integrity of the bridge.
In fact if something goes wrong and you fall it's God's creation of gravity that sends you plummeting toward the ground, and His invention of momentum that smashes your fragile body over the hard rock. In a convoluted way it's God that kills you.
Faith isn't in the action. How big, or crazy or supernatural it is. It's in the doing at all. What's on the other side anyway? Why should I risk for that?
If we really understood what was going on, we would know that it's the same level of faith that leads one man to pray and wait for the money to show up in the mail as it does for another to work a hard day.
Unfortunately it's easy for a man to have faith in the economy or society or structural engineering rather then God. That's the reality you will see in the churches, mostly.
Keep your eyes open for those who follow God to whatever end He is leading them, through whatever trials that will take them. They are the people who will show you what Christianity is.

Christians and "Christians"

The other day, at college I had a really insightful conversation with some of my classmates. I've found the themes repeated lately so I think it's time for me to write about it.

It was during this conversation that one of the girls said something I thought was just inspired.(if you've been reading the comments on my post yes this is Brooke's famous quote) She was talking about a person she knew who claimed to be a Christian but showed no evidence of it in their life. A hypocrite. What I would refer to as a "Christian". She then summed up her feeling about this person in a rather eloquent way. "I was like, I'm more of a Christian then you, except for the not believing in God bit!"

It's a sad fact that every one of us will come into contact with a massive number of this type of person in our lifetimes. It's unavoidable. But I want to make this clear, with no apologies. These people show with their actions that by definition they not only fail to be in relationship with God, but become the worst of His enemies.

It's precisely because of the label they give themselves. Christian. To be honest I don't like calling myself a Christian. You see it has a fundamental flaw. It's a word without a definition. It literally started as a nickname. It doesn't mean anymore then the words, jock or nerd, do to us now. It has connotations, but if you ask people for a definition they'll fail to give one, and if they do it'll almost certainly be a different to the definition anyone else will give you. This is because it's not a word with a definition, it's meaning comes from it's vibe. It's the vibe of the thing.

So, you see, the word Christian means a lot of things to a lot of people. I don't want to be to tightly associated with the word, because it in turn is tightly associated with a lot of things I'm definitely not, and a lot of beliefs I definitely don't have.

So you see, when I person identifies themselves as Christian, it doesn't mean anything in particular. Just that they associate with people, organizations, rituals and/or beliefs that in turn are associated with the word Christian.

The major faction of "Christians" in the West. The hypocritical kind, stem from one major fault line. It's in understanding one half of the salvation story. I need to reiterate concepts like sin and "hell" in a latter post, but the key is understanding that God offers release from sin and thus, an immunity to "hell".

The "Christians" understand this, they see freedom. Complete freedom. They look at it this way. I am freed from the consequences of my actions, thus I can do whatever I want. I don't even need to understand them.

This is utter ... ... just fill in the blank with every single negative phrase and expletive you can think of and it's probably a good descriptive. God does offer freedom from what we are captive to now. But He also guarantees captivity to a new master. Himself.

And so the "Christians" stop at freedom. They never move forward. They never challenge their beliefs or their behavior any further. They question nothing. Why should they? They have a self-replenishing get-out-of-jail free card, and almost always they go to a church were they are comforted and encouraged not to go any further.

But in the end these people just remain stuck half way through a process. I process of death and rebirth. They have died to a captivity they knew, but they havn't come back to life. They havn't exected the new burden of them. They havn't subjected themselves to the physics of their new world.

Jesus never said life with him would be easy. There are parts of the Gospels were he tries to talk people OUT of following him. He tells them how hard it's going to be. He says they must give up everything. He calls himself a hard man, who gathers were he did not sow, and reaps were he did lay seed. He did not ganentee what we call freedom.

People need to read the contract carefully. Becoming a Christian means selling your soul. It means becoming someone else's possession. You work for Him now. You have nothing.

There is a truth few in the West seem to understand about Christianity. The one fate that is worse then not being a Christian. Is the one in store for those that call themselves a Christian but do not bend their backs and serve their God.