Discerning the signs.

“Announce this to the house of Jacob and proclaim it in Judah: ‘Hear this, you foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear: Should you not fear me?’ declares the Lord. ‘Should you not tremble in my presence?’” (Jeremiah 5:20-22)

Jeremiah was outraged by the unbelief that he saw among the people, both in the city of Jerusalem and across the land of Judah. It was almost unbelievable that they should be so foolish with their great heritage embedded in the history of the nation. “Hear this!” he proclaimed; but he knew that it was useless - because although they had eyes to see and ears to hear, they did not use them.

The words are reminiscent of those used by Isaiah at the time of his call to ministry when God told him that he would be ministering among a people who were “ever hearing, but never understanding; ever seeing, but never perceiving” (Isa 6:9). It was just the same in Jeremiah’s time some 200 years after Isaiah. And in another 500 years Jesus would be saying exactly the same thing of the generation in his lifetime. He spoke to them with simple stories because of their lack of understanding. He said “This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand” (Matt 13:13).

The spiritual blockage among the people of Israel was seemingly endemic. Jeremiah struggled to understand it. He saw that the people had lost respect for God; they had no sense of awe: “‘Should you not fear me?’ declares the Lord. ‘Should you not tremble in my presence?’” This message was not only to the people, but to their leaders and teachers.

“Hear this!” Jeremiah proclaimed; but he knew that it was useless - because although the people had eyes to see and ears to hear, they did not use them.

Spiritual Vacuum

Jeremiah accounted for this disrespect of God as stemming from the loss of recognition that the God of Israel was actually the God of Creation, who had created the universe, measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and weighed the mountains on his scales (Isa 40:12). The people had turned aside from the truth of the word of God, which resulted in a total lack of spiritual discernment.

They couldn’t even recognise what God was saying to them through the failure of the spring and autumn rains, which were causing havoc with the harvest and meant that there would be food shortages in the near future. God had withheld the rain because of the sins of the people; but they were so foolish they could not discern the signs of his activity.

When people fail to acknowledge the God of Creation, they create a spiritual vacuum that makes them insensitive to the activity of God. It leads to every kind of wickedness that affects the whole of society, which was the teaching of Paul in Romans 1. Jeremiah pointed to the social sins that had produced great inequalities in the nation. The rich had become powerful and had “grown fat and sleek” (Jer 5:27). These greedy men did not care for the poor or give justice to the powerless (Jer 5:28), which was abhorrent to God. “‘Should I not punish them for this?’ declares the Lord” (Jer 5:29).

The Reason for Indifference to God

It was at this point that Jeremiah exploded with indignation. He knew that all these social aberrations were due to a lack of spiritual truth in the nation. The people had turned away from truth; they had abandoned any thought of God in their daily lives – God was an irrelevance. This led them to worship the local Baals in the countryside, and to careless indifference to God in the city where they were intent upon making their fortunes, or struggling with poverty.

But Jeremiah went to the heart of the matter – to the reason why there was such indifference to God. It was surely due to the priests and prophets, the religious leaders of the nation, who had the word of God but did not rightly use it to teach the people: “The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way” (Jer 5:31).

Why was there such indifference to God? Surely it was because the priests and prophets had the word of God but did not rightly use it to teach the people.

The prophets made up their own visions and prophecies. Their major objective was to be popular with the people – to tell them things they wanted to hear. They weren’t bothered with the truth. Jeremiah said, “The prophets follow an evil course and use their power unjustly” (Jer 23:10). “They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord” (Jer 23:16). “Both prophet and priest are godless; even in my temple I find their wickedness, declares the Lord” (Jer 23:11).

It was the priests who were most responsible for the state of the nation, according to Jeremiah; they ruled by their own authority. Instead of faithfully teaching the word of God as given to Moses and delivered to the people at Mount Sinai (Deut 4:10), the priests made up their own teaching, misusing the divine authority they had been given. Their teaching was popular, no doubt reinforcing their own authority and ensuring gifts from the people which kept them well fed.

No Excuse

There was no excuse for the priests because the scroll of the Torah had been discovered during the repairs to the Temple ordered by King Josiah just a few years earlier. The priests were the ones who had access to the scrolls that were being copied by the scribes, so they knew the truth, but they did not handle it righteously. They did not declare the word of the Lord that would establish truth in the nation.

The consequence was that the people could not even discern the reason why the autumn and spring rains had not fallen. The whole nation was lacking in spiritual understanding. They had eyes to see and ears to hear, but they had no discernment.

Could this be said of our own generation in the 21^st Century? If God still holds the religious leaders responsible for the state of the nation, we have to ask: do we have church leaders who have eyes but do not see, and ears but do not hear? If so, we must conclude that God is saying the same thing to our leaders today: Should you not fear me? declares the Lord. Should you not tremble in my presence?

This article is part of a series on the life and ministry of the Prophet Jeremiah. Click here for previous instalments.

Charles Gardner reviews ‘No Neutral Ground’ by Pete Portal (2019).

Torah portion: Numbers 4:21-7:89

Nasso (‘Lift up’)

This week’s portion, from the Book of Numbers, continues to stress God’s order in everything. In ancient Israel there were clearly defined roles for the Levites, who were assigned responsibility for each of the parts of the Tabernacle. There was order both in the assignment of duties and in the structure of priestly authority.

To stress the importance that God placed on obedience to that order, we can turn to 1 Chronicles 13. This is the account of when David planned to bring the Ark of the Covenant back to Jerusalem. They put it on a new cart and set off to the accompaniment of music. They no doubt thought that they were pleasing the Lord God with such celebratory singing and by taking the Ark back. However, not only did their use of a cart contravene the law (Num 4) - when the oxen stumbled at the threshing floor of Chidon and Uzzah put out his hand to steady the Ark, because he was not appointed for this task by God, he lost his life.

The seriousness of maintaining God’s order and respecting His authority was surely emphasised that day.

Matters of Life and Death

God still appoints His people for various tasks and gives authority to whom He chooses. Is it still a matter of life and death to follow God’s appointing carefully? We do not carry the parts of the Tabernacle as the Levites did, but we do carry out responsibilities which are a matter of life and death.

Evangelists, for example, have the privilege of being the agents of new birth to those to whom they are sent. To obey such a call is indeed a matter of life and death. It is the same for every one of the ministries God gives, in one way or another.

When Paul was near to the end of his earthly ministry, he was able to declare that there was no blood on his hands because he had faithfully fulfilled God’s appointing, declaring the whole counsel of God to whom he was sent (Acts 20:25-27).

Gifts and Callings

The theme of dead works is also in the Bible. For example, in Proverbs 14:12 we read that “there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.” The Spirit who gives life distributes gifts and callings to those who minister in the Name of Yeshua, such as are found in 1 Corinthians 12.

To resist the Spirit is to deny someone the benefit of the ministry that God has given to us. To seek a ministry that God has not given to us is to be a minister of lifeless works. To take up our privileged responsibility according to God’s particular and unique call on our lives is to be a minister of life to others, sharing in the overall ministry of the body of believers in the world.

It is as important for us to find and follow our God-given calling as it was for the Levites at the time of Moses.

Author: Clifford Denton

We ignore the basic building blocks of God’s Creation at our peril.

Recently I discovered a booklet lodged between two books on a shelf in my study. I had not seen it for many years. It had been given to me by a colleague in the LSE when I was lecturing in Sociology in London University. Its title is ‘The Gay Liberation Front Manifesto: London 1971’. Here are a few quotes from it.

Under the heading ‘Family’ it says:

The oppression of gay people starts in the most basic unit of society, the family, consisting of the man in charge, a slave as his wife, and their children on whom they force themselves as the ideal models. The very form of the family works against homosexuality.

Under the heading ‘Church’ it says:

Formal religious education is still part of everyone’s schooling, and our whole legal structure is supposedly based upon Christianity, whose archaic and irrational teachings support the family and marriage as the only permitted condition for sex.

Under ‘Compulsive Monogamy’ it says:

We do not deny that it is as possible for gay couples as for some straight couples to live happily and constructively together. We question however as an ideal, the finding and settling down eternally with one 'right' partner. This is the blueprint of the straight world which gay people have taken over.

Under ‘Aims’ it says:

The long-term goal of the London Gay Liberation Front, which inevitably brings us into fundamental conflict with the institutionalised sexism of this society, is to rid society of the gender-role system which is at the root of our oppression. This can only be achieved by the abolition of the family as the unit in which children are brought up. (emphasis added)

In sociological terms, the family is the basic unit in society responsible not only for passing on the culture from generation to generation, but for the stability of society as a whole. Once the family breaks down, all the structures of society are destabilised (it is important to grasp that what we are dealing with here is a foundational social issue, not a critique of a particular minority group).

The family is the basic unit in society responsible not only for passing on the culture from generation to generation, but for the stability of society as a whole.

The Cost of Broken Homes

When family life crumbles the first to be affected are children, who depend upon the family not only for learning the rules of society, culture and language, but also for their identity, protection, security and confidence. Millions of children are damaged every year by domestic violence, the breakup of their parents’ relationship and the upheaval of an unstable home-life.

In 1998 I was one of a group of academics who did a survey of family life in Britain and presented a report to the then-Home Secretary, Jack Straw MP. The report presented irrefutable proof that the heterosexual married couple family is the most stable form of family life and presents the best outcome for children. All other types of family leave children disadvantaged and negatively affect their future life-chances.

Jack Straw responded stating “The family is the building block of society”. He recognised the need to prioritise the married family and promised to publish a White Paper with Government measures to strengthen it. But he ran into problems in the Cabinet because the Blair Government had been heavily infiltrated by LGBTQ+ supporters who were strongly opposed to family and marriage. Straw was never able to publish the White Paper.

Family Matters

The report, ‘Family Matters’,¹ gave strong warnings of what would happen if there were no measures to strengthen the married family. It stated that the number of fatherless children will increase; so too will sexually transmitted diseases among young people. The number of insecurely attached and disturbed children will increase, worsening behavioural and mental health problems among schoolchildren. The cumulative effect of these and other trends will put pressure on the health and welfare services, resulting in a wide range of social problems.

The warnings were ignored - with the result we see today in our daily newspapers and on TV: knife crime, guns and drugs, self-harm (affecting one in five girls aged 13-16), and the rise in the suicide rate among young people, especially teenagers.²

But all this is only the tip of the iceberg of what will happen in the future if we continue breaking down gender differences among children in our primary schools. The level of mental health problems will go through the sky! Gender is a basic building block of God’s Creation which we ignore at our peril!!

Gender is a basic building block of God’s Creation which we ignore at our peril!

Warnings Ignored

We are in a similar position to the people in Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s time, when he sent a strong warning to the King, on a scroll read by a court messenger. King Jehoiakim, instead of taking careful note of the warnings, destroyed the scroll: “Whenever Jehudi had read three or four columns of the scroll, the King cut them off with a scribe’s knife and threw them into the brazier, until the entire scroll was burned in the fire” (Jer 36:23).

Jeremiah went back before God in his prayer time and heard the response: “I will bring on them and those living in Jerusalem and the people of Judah every disaster I pronounced against them because they have not listened” (36:31). Then Jeremiah took another scroll and dictated similar words and a lot more warnings. As we know from history, the warnings were ignored and Jerusalem was destroyed, with thousands losing their lives.

Even those who are not Bible-believing Christians should be aware that the heterosexual married couple family is the only unit in our culture capable of maintaining the very fabric of our civilisation. If it is destroyed, which is the stated aim of the LGBTQ+ lobby, they will actually destroy the foundational structures of society in the Western nations, which can only lead to chaos.

Deafness in Church and State

Yet politicians and church leaders are deaf to all warnings. Either they are so incompetent that they cannot grasp simple facts; or they are bent on a suicide mission to destroy Western civilisation that will bring about their own demise along with millions of others. The Methodist Church in their Annual Assembly are due to debate same-sex marriage next week. Will the successors of John Wesley uphold his commitment to biblical truth, or will they acquiesce to the powers of darkness seeking the destruction of humanity?

Politicians and church leaders are deaf to all warnings.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has already set down a marker for the ‘Apostate Church’ of the last days by encouraging CofE Primary Schools to promote cross-dressing among little children,³ to prepare them for living in the brave new world that the LGBTQ+ lobby are intent upon creating. Jesus said that it would be better for those who harm children to be thrown into the sea and drowned.

Surely God will bring judgment upon those who distort his word and play havoc with the truth. Billy Graham said that if God does not bring judgment upon America he will have to apologise to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Surely the same applies to Britain. But what will our new Prime Minister do, whether it is Boris or Jeremy (Hunt or Corbyn…)? Will any one of our politicians recognise the threat to the future of our civilisation posed by the destruction of the family and have the courage to reverse the tide of change – and will believing Christians have the courage to hold them to account?

References

1 Download the full report here.

2 E.g. see here and here (p7).

3 The Independent, 13 November 2017.

But its believers have found true freedom

Bearing in mind the brutality meted out against protesters as Hong Kong slips inexorably towards China’s orbit of control, we are reminded by author Kai Strittmatter of the tendency for totalitarian regimes to rewrite history.

“In China, remembering events the Chinese Communist Party chooses to erase from history is a subversive act and thus forbidden and punished,” he wrote in the Daily Mail.¹

For example, reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre of 30 years ago has been gradually eradicated and many under-30s have no idea that it ever took place. “The state’s troops murdered the protesters; the state’s writers murder the truth.”

Erasing the Past

Sound familiar? Yes, such erasure of the past is proceeding apace all over the globe – even in our country, but especially in the Middle East, where Islamist terror groups are hell-bent on turning truth upside-down in order to justify their murderous behaviour.

They even go to the extent of denying that the Holocaust ever took place, and refuting ancient Jewish links to the Holy Land despite the weight of evidence, backed by libraries of documents and multiple acres of archaeological digs.

True, the land was indeed held by the Muslim Turks for 400 years until Britain’s General Allenby effectively won it back for God’s ancient people. But even Jordanian academic Rami Dabbas, in saying that Arabs have everything to gain from ‘normalisation’ with Israel, acknowledges: “The Arabs are the original occupiers, and have no right to deny the return of the Jewish nation.”²

“It is time to solve this conflict, and that begins with us, the Arabs, accepting the Jewish people’s true historical connection to this land. We have everything to gain from so doing.”

Totalitarian regimes are hell-bent on turning truth upside-down in order to justify their murderous behaviour.

Socially Harmonised Subjects

Kai Strittmatter, meanwhile, in his essay, goes on to mention China’s “socially harmonised and politically compliant subjects” whose every move is being increasingly watched by ‘Big Brother’ on an apocalyptic scale, with a staggering 600 million CCTV cameras.

That’s almost one for every two people in a vast country now exporting its surveillance and artificial intelligence technology all over the world in an apparent attempt to expand its global influence.

But before we congratulate ourselves for not succumbing to this extreme form of socialism, consider how a largely compliant British society has been so quickly and easily mesmerised into a politically-correct harmonisation of ideas, ethics and morality – the ‘normality’ of same-sex ‘marriage’ and even the encouragement of transgenderism in primary schools, that effectively amounts to state child abuse.

And who among us dares to question this diabolical form of social engineering, otherwise known as ‘cultural Marxism’? We have been trained like dogs to ‘sit’ and ‘walk’ at the command of our progressive masters. Even pulling at the leash is forbidden, and we are condemned as unloving bigots if we should so much as suggest that there is another, better way.

We Christians are too easily cowed into a corner, opting for reflective navel-gazing or gathering in our holy huddles while the world outside recklessly careers towards the cliff. But there is another side to China, for the same reason that there is another side to England.

Out of the Ashes

With the World Cup cricket tournament currently being hosted here, Hatikvah Films have been promoting CTA’s docudrama Out of the Ashes – the hugely inspiring story of how one of England’s greatest cricketers heard the call of God to China.

Twice achieving the ‘double’ of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in a county cricket season (in just 20 and 25 matches respectively), CT Studd was a leading member of the England team that first brought the Ashes3 back from Australia in 1883.

But his missionary endeavours reached much wider fields. As part of the so-called Cambridge Seven, Studd endured years of extreme hardship and deprivation to bring the Gospel to the Chinese people. After giving away his vast fortune to Christian causes, he also went on to serve God in India and Africa, where he founded the World Evangelisation Crusade in 1913.

But it was the China Inland Mission, founded by Barnsley-born Hudson Taylor, that first stirred his heart. And it is believed that, due largely to their efforts, there are more Christians in China today than there are people in Britain. In fact, estimates reach as high as 100 million, but it is difficult to quantify, partly due to the severe persecution that has forced many believers to practise ‘under the radar’ while others have paid with their lives.

We Christians are too easily cowed into a corner.

These brave souls may have been ‘chained’ by Communism (or even slain by the Dragon symbolic of China), but they have been truly set free by Jesus, who said: “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31f).

That’s the potential power of the Gospel, and we praise God for men like Taylor and Studd who gave their lives so sacrificially for the Chinese people.

Teeming Millions

So when you think or hear of China again, picture the teeming millions of believers being persecuted for their faith. Pray that they will stand, as this cricketing hero of old stood the test in a fiery trial.

Studd left the comfort zone of fame, fortune and familiarity for foreign fields, for he was convinced that “if Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.”

Reflecting further on this, he said: “Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.” And in a poem he penned, he posed the ultimate challenge: “Only one life, ’twil soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.”

References

1 Daily Mail, 15 June 2019. Kai Strittmatter is author of We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China’s surveillance state, Old Street Publishing, £9.99.

2 Israel Today, May 2019.

3 Literally, an urn with the burnt-out remains of a bail, used to keep the wickets in place. The contest came to be known as the Ashes in response to England’s loss to Australia at the Oval in 1882, when a satirical obituary declared that English cricket had died and “the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia”.