The New Bereans

Situational ethics, modernism, and pluralism have infiltrated the mindsets of many who call themselves believers in Jesus Christ.  These mentalities are massive roadblocks to true biblical discernment.  If we approach the word of God predetermined to these mentalities, we will never pass through the gates of truth.  Ever they will elude us, and ever we will meander down dank pathways.

One of these pathways is paved with the word, “Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG.)”  For years I had an addiction to this false reality, and for two years I have been praying about why it is that I am supposed to take a stand against it, and expose this darkness to the light of God’s word.

I was kept in darkness for years about this issue because I did not come to God’s word with an honest heart about it.  I placed my hands over my ears and eyes by claiming that since the Bible does not explicitly talk about entertainment like MMOG’s that I was vindicated from biblical accountability.  (As a word to the wise, you will never find any light or truth in the word of God about yourself and your circumstances if you have a prideful heart like I did.)

After fellowshipping with a dear brother in Christ today I knew it was time I finally get this off my chest and onto my hard drive.  MMOG’s operate on probably the single most cunning principle, which keeps young men (and even increasingly young women) by the droves, coming back day after day, week after week, ad infinitum to an unreal world.

This singular principle governs probably every single MMOG on the market.  I am sure I would be challenged to find even one that does not, whether it is Eve Online, World of Warcraft, or Guild Wars…or any number of others has, in the kernel of their design, a central hub of operation known as covetousness.

How is this so?  Every single decision you make within these false realities is dictated by how it will benefit you or your “avatar,” or your brood/collective of avatar friends.  Each one of these people shed whom they are in the flesh to take upon themselves a digital alter-ego, and run a nearly galactic rat race to get ahead of all competition through gaining 1.) unreal money which allows for the purchase of character modifications, and 2.) unreal character attribute upgrades.  Both of these principles of covetousness are governed by two other principles, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.  Each upgrade or modification (mod) is more attractive to the eyes than the last was, and every attribute upgrade which applies to the avatar itself appeals to the pride of life, as the false character becomes increasingly more powerful.

So covetousness works through the lust of the eyes and the pride of life; however, these are just foundational concepts, not necessarily the fruit reaped.  Rather, it is with raging frequency that one will find ensconced within the social structure of MMOG’s an endless trail of enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, (believe it or not you can actually get your avatar drunk in many games) sexual immorality, impurity and sensuality, and if it were possible, orgies, (often imitated through raucous gesticulating) and certainly last but particularly most common…sorceries.  These happen to be listed in Galatians 5:20 as the “works of the flesh,” which Paul warns that those who do such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God.  So the game itself subjects you to the principalities of the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life…and those two principles manifest themselves through each person’s avatar toward every other avatar as the lust of the flesh.

James 4:6 says that “He (God) giveth more grace, wherefore he saith, God resists the proud, but gives grace unto the humble.”  Pride is the one element which grace cannot penetrate.  One must become humble to see the application of this truth from the word of God.  On bended knee admit your digital sin; confess that Christ Jesus the son came to deliver you from your sin, to set you free from your unreal captivity (Luke 4:18.)  If we do not repent of this we may just find ourselves gaining an unreal world, yet losing a very real soul. Do not let the principality of pluralism tell you that these things are OK because it is a gray area in scripture, or that you have the “liberty.”  Though on the outset MMORG’s may seem innocuous, I would remind you that the whole of creation was subjected to its current tyranny and slavery to sin through the fear of death, (Hebrews 2:15) by one simple bite of a seemingly innocuous piece of fruit…fruit that tasted like godhood!

Moses and the Burning Bush by Arnold Friberg

The first allusion to the resurrection of Christ comes prior to the first mention in scripture of His death.  Right after the fall of Adam and Eve, God tells the serpent how the “seed” of the woman would bruise his head, and that the serpent would bruise his “seed’s” heal.   (I have often wondered what the seed of the serpent was exactly, but I would not be surprised if it has something to do with 1Cor 2:8.)

So we are faced with a prophetic ultimatum.  This is chronologically before the time of Job’s conclusion which I discussed in the last post, and from a Christian perspective we know what this means.  While we have insight into this prophecy now, for thousands of years, God was content and absolutely patient in waiting for the actual event to unfold before declaring (I will explain later what I mean by this) what it meant.  What does this say about the nature of God?   It is arresting that the resurrection is mentioned first, and the death of Christ (at the hand of the serpent’s seed) occurs second.  It is of interest that this is one of the first major prophecies in the Bible.  From the time this prophecy was given no-one could have known it spoke directly of the Resurrection of Christ unless the Holy Spirit had revealed it to them. Though I may be wrong (and if anyone knows please tell me) I do not think there is any revelation on this at all anywhere until the actual event.

The next allusion to the concept of resurrection that I know of (my study will not be exhaustive because I am flawed, I am sure there will be many I miss) is found in Exodus 3:6.  This was when God spoke to Moses out of the burning bush and said, “I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.” If you know your bible well, you are not scratching your head…

In the gospel of Matthew, in the 22^nd chapter, the Sadducee’s think they have the Christ in a corner with their willy question about the woman wedded to seven brothers.  According to Alfred Edersheim in his book, “Sketches of Jewish Social Life,” the Sadducee’s were a reactive sect*.  Their way of thinking was the result of being anti-Pharisee.  Who held to the concept of resurrection, but the Sadducee’s contrarily postulated that, because the Pentateuch never mentioned resurrection, it could not be true.  The living Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob evidenced resurrection.  This is likely why Jesus quoted from Exodus and not from the Psalms or the Prophets in Matthew 22:32.  This tells us a few things as a side-bar: 1) be very careful about filtering all of scripture through one lens of thinking (aka systematic theology, I am not saying don’t use them, just be very cautious.)  2) Don’t raise men (like Moses) on a pedestal above Christ,  not even Paul.  3) If Christ were sought sincerely, and He so desired, He could annihilate sectarian beliefs without batting an eye or opening a concordance.  4) This point is a bit mystical maybe, and I will understand if some disagree with me, but it is no irony to me that the mention of the truth of resurrection through God being the God of the living and not the God of the dead is the point which basically dissolved all of the Sadducee’s theology/doctrine/dogma, whatever you want to call it.  In one stroke, Jesus made being a Sadducee rather pointless.  I suspect that if the Church began walking in the fullness of Christ’s resurrection power,  all of our prideful differences and divisions would also dissolve.  To look at it more micro-cosmically, when we die to self and Christ’s resurrection is manifest through us as individuals, our tendency to backbite, strive, be bitter, and react to others in an un-spiritual fashion will also dissipate.

Now I am getting a bit ahead of myself.  Consider that an allusion and a taste of things to come in this series of posts.  Stay tuned for the next blog!

* “Sketches of Jewish Social Life,” -Alfred Edersheim, Hendrickson Publishers – 1994, Seventh Printing, March 2003.

The internet is vividly abuzz with the supposed “Evidence,” or proof of the resurrection of Christ.  It is obvious that the debate around the shroud of Turin is heating up once again, but my purpose is not to debate the authenticity, or the validity of these claims.  I have not seen the documentary from the History Channel, and to be honest, I have little interest in it.  The fact that this documentary was released so close to Easter is obviously to generate as much hype about it as possible, and who can blame them?  It is great marketing.

However, I have to say that the whole premise of needing a “scientific” proof of the resurrection is symptomatic of quite the consistent modern problem concerning genuine faith.   The Bible proves the point over…and over…and over…and over…that genuine saving faith is not generated in the realm of the miraculous.   Nor is it generated through scientific reasoning.   The wonders of the exodus resulted in most of its witnesses dead in the desert, for when the gospel was “preached, the word did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.” (Hebrews 4:2)   Elijah saw God consume a soaking wet altar with fire, and soon after he doubted Gods ability to save him from Jezebel.   Jonah saw an entire nation repent at his few words…and still wanted to see them consumed in wrath.  The disciples were told numerous times by their own Lord that He would die and rise again on the third day!  How many of those disciples were twiddling their thumbs outside the tomb waiting for him to fulfill that promise?  Judas saw all the miracles a human had ever had the privilege of seeing, yet he found his guts spilled all over the place for his selfish treachery and wickedness.

If God wanted to give us rationalistic evidence of Himself…he would have done it.  We ought to be FAR more concerned about Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  Our lives, when transformed by the resurrection power of Christ, are the only valid proof we need of the resurrection.  If that be lacking, then maybe the shroud will make you feel a bit better about yourself and your intellectual comforts.

Job and His Friends by Ilya Repin

In the midst of ash and accusation, boils and belligerent philosophy, a spark of trouble flew upward, beyond the lowly crags of mountain heights, into the deep blue etherium of divine contemplation.  His name was Job, which means “hated, or persecuted.”  According to his accusers, he must have done something to offend the Almighty.  His suffering dictated that it must be so.  It is no wonder that the oldest book of Hebrew lore deals with the deepest questions humans have tried to apprehend.  In the midst of extreme suffering, we have all inevitably questioned the point of life.  Job’s bitter query did not proceed until after seven days and seven nights of silence amidst the conjoining of dust, ash, rending, and “friends.”

There he sat in silence so long…I am sure the day of visitation was fresh in his mind…being replayed like a video again and again and again.  No doubt his silence was one of agonizing mental anguish.  Once the silence is broken, Job basically says that the day of his birth ought to be cursed into eternal blackness. _{(Job 3)} His deep pondering begs the question.  WHY LIVE??? Why live if suffering is our bread, if misery is our drink?

Once Job finally broke his silence…Eliphaz was quick to speak the abundance of his heart and accusation against Job.  He starts off with a few quick words of flattery, probably out of cultural respect, then promptly begins to develop a thread of thought that Job must not be innocent, of course his suffering must be the result of sin because, “Who ever perished, being innocent?”  Or, “They that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.”  _{(Job 4:7-8)}

Like so many councilors that lack any form of humility, Eliphaz completely ignores the questions Job raises, and displays the true motive behind why he sat seven days and nights on Job’s pile of ash.  His motive was to bring accusation against his friend.  Job had asked why it was that he did not just die when he was born.  Then he would have moved on to the indomitable vault of equalization…the grave.  Where the, “Prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor.  The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master.” _{(Job 3:17-18)} Job was concerned with the deeply subterraneous questions of his soul.  Eliphaz was concerned with emanating his own religious pomposity via his theology.

The temptation to give a ringside, blow by blow account is difficult for me to withstand; however, for succinctness sake we must jump forward numerous arguments later, after Job has received jabs, hooks, uppercuts and below-the-belt accusations from his “friends.”  In the midst of his suffering and incrimination Job raises one of the single most important questions that suffering must force someone to ask.  Keep in mind this is probably the oldest book of the Bible, if not one of the oldest written manuscripts ever.   In Job 14:14, he laments, “If a man die, shall he live again?  All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.”  God had not yet been fully manifest and in the Son, so total revelation about life and death had not yet occurred to humanity.  Job did not know yet that eternal life was knowing the Father, and the one whom he would send.

Eliphaz proves his religious ignorance once again by calling Job’s questions an, “uttering of vain knowledge and a filling of his belly with the east wind.”  Why think deeply about your pain Job?  Just repent for your ox-dumb pride.

Job then responds to this indictment and receives one more from Bildad.  It is at this point in chapter nineteen where Job reaches a crescendo of angst.  He points out that his miserable councilors have accused him ten times, and he begins to lament that he has been forsaken by every last person whom he valued.  He first laments deeply of God forsaking him, and how God had stripped him of his glory and crown. _{(Job 19:9)} Job was destroyed on every side…troops had been raised against him, his brethren were put far from him, every acquaintance of his had become completely estranged from him.  His kinsfolk failed him, and his familiar friends forgot him.  Those most intimate with him, his maids and dwellers of his home, now viewed him as an alien and a stranger in their sight.   His breath even became strange to his own wife.  The word strange in the Hebrew is metonymous with the word for adultery.  So it could be said that his very breath was as the breath of an adulterer to his own spouse.  This gives us a sense of just how disgusting Job’s suffering was to his kin.  His own children also rose up and despised him and spoke against him.  All this would be bad enough but the dagger in his back is twisted a little bit more when he says that even his “inward friends” have turned on him as the hand of God touched him.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death by George Inness

It is as if the veil of fellowship had been drawn and stitched.  It was woven from the fabric of solitude, and the stitches were the condescending glances of accusation he received.  No man is more forsaken in the midst of people than this man.  He was so alone that his bones clove to his skin and flesh.  This was likely due to malnutrition from prolonged fasting.  Eating no longer meant anything to him.

Finally, it is within this broad context that Job laments, “Why do you persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh?  Oh that my words were printed in a book!  That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock forever.  For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.  And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God:  Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.”

Was it not Christ our Lord, whom upon the cross asked from the bottom of the deepest well of trepidation ever probed, “My God my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  Did not all of Christ’s sheep scatter into hiding?  Did not Jesus become as an adulterer to them?  Were they not completely ashamed of His suffering?  Was Peter not in the valley of the shadow of death?

By now, I hope you have noticed the parallel between Job being forsaken by all, and Christ being forsaken by all, even His Father.  These continuities are absolutely staggering.  I will let your imagination continue to connect these concepts.  It is at this point, of Job’s deep suffering, where deep calls unto deep.  Some divine tremendous light has perforated the subterranean expanse of his tragedy, and he concludes the only thing an open mind, a humble heart, and a suffering soul can conclude…there must be, there has to be, I know there will be…a resurrection from the dead!  My Savior will stand upon the earth someday and I will stand with him.   So it was that He (our Lord), for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.  The broadest depths of human suffering when contemplated with a view of God in mind, require resurrection to be true.  Were it not, sanity would become pointless…

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.  Colossians 3:2

We are here instructed to set our minds on things above, this implies 2 truths.  1. Our minds are not naturally set on things above.  2. If our minds are to be set on things above i.e. heavenly things, we must set them there.

This is not an idea, or a suggestion, it is a command.  Notice Paul does not say “God sets the minds of his elect on things above when, and where, and to the degree he wishes.”  No!  He commands us to set our minds on these things.  This is no monergistic act of God; it is either a willful or synergistic act of ours.  This is not something we wait for God to do; this is something he is waiting for us to do.

Now herein lies the challenge for 21st century Americans,  there are innumerable things vying for our attention, attempting to draw our eyes away from the eternal and onto themselves.  We must intentionally separate from these things in order to focus on the eternal.  What am I getting at?  Merely listening to contemporary Christian music, praying before meals, or reading a 5 minute daily devotional will not give you an eternal mindset or perspective.

So how do we set our minds on things above?  Reading your Bible and prayer are a good start but there’s more to it than that.  In the following verses Paul lists sins to put away, and godly things to replace them with, this is getting closer.   Then he adds the final piece of the Puzzle, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you . . .“ To have a heart for God you must have a heart occupied by God.  Without His indwelling, a heavenly mindset is impossible to gain or maintain.  If we desire to be his disciples, and see things as he does, we must have a relationship with him.

“Whoever loves transgression loves strife.” -Proverbs 17:19 (ESV)

The tendency to want to argue, strive and debate with people about things is symptomatic of a direct linkage to the love of transgression.   All throughout the scriptures, the word transgression is linked to the idea of sin, but it is more specific.  Transgression is to purposefully rebel.  In other words, when we know something to be the right thing to do, but instead we rebel against that and do the opposite, we are transgressing.

So when Solomon says that those who love transgression, in turn love strife, what can we then say about our strife?  I love how the bible does not bandy about with words, or make excuses.  Instead it just simply says that if you love to strive and argue and wrangle with people, you love transgression.  Is there anything simpler to understand?

Love of Argument = Love of Transgression

It amazes me how people, Christians especially, can find all sorts of justification for arguing their pet doctrines in such a manner that they are only manifesting this exact problem.  It is no wonder John the Apostle spent so much time telling us to love one another.

I guarantee you, if God has not done a true changing of your heart through the power of his Spirit, and you are not changed from the inside out, you will find every justification you can possibly find in the bible to be a total jerk.  Jude admonishes us in his Plutonium-charged weapons-grade epistle that the false prophets are the kind of people who, “Speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.” (Jude 10) We know a tree by its fruit, and we are to discern that.  I am finding more and more that debating and wrangling over petty doctrinal issues it is a huge distraction.  The fundamental issue’s are a persons character, and the way they think they are representing Christ, far more than the specificity to which they adhere to every jot and tittle of correct doctrine.

If you have the love of Christ in you, by all means, correct, exhort, preach and certainly call a spade a spade.  But if you are false in your character, so also will your words be false.  Even a true word becomes wormwood in the mouth that is rotten . . . I have finally understood a false teacher for what a false teacher is.  He/She is simply a person who in themselves is false.   And you do not have to be a pulpiteer to be false in your representation of the true Messiah.   Look at Ananias and Sapphira, they never uttered a false doctrine that is recorded, but they were slashed from this life through their wicked falsehood.

One of the reasons that people will not inherit the Kingdom of God will be because they love “Emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, and heresies…” (Galatians 5:19-21) and I think the order there is important.  Oh we love to talk about how adultery is bad, how fornication is bad…but how many hate it when Christians strive and be seditious and cause division over things that are unimportant?

But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. . . I Corinthians 1:3

When talking about the Corinthians spiritual immaturity and their inability to handle the meat of the word, all Bible teachers seem to handle it the same way; The Corinthians couldn’t understand deep theology, or had no interest in it, therefore he couldn’t give it to them. I am starting to think that this interpretation may be missing Paul’s point completely.

What if his point was this, I cannot give you the meat scripturally because, you will become more inflated with pride and distort doctrine to your own ends. I have seen many of us theological types take doctrine and distort it by magnifying one truth and explaining away another A theologically astute fleshly Christian, can often do far more damage than an ignorant fleshly Christian.

Concerning the doctrines of Grace I like the way Spurgeon puts it.

“No man ever learns anything aright, unless he is taught of the Spirit. You may learn election, and you may know it so that you shall be damned by it, if you are not taught of the Holy Ghost; for I have known some who have learned election to their soul’s destruction; they have learned it so that they said they were of the elect, whereas, they had no marks, no evidences, and no works of the Holy Ghost in their souls. There is a way of learning truth in Satan’s college, and holding it in licentiousness; but if so, it shall be to your souls as poison to your veins and prove your everlasting ruin.”₁

I agree with him thoroughly, doctrine in the hands of a fleshly man can wreak havoc. I have a personal theory that divine sovereignty and election may have been the very doctrines Paul avoided with the Corinthians for this very reason. When we zealous young Calvinists believe it is our God given duty to explain TULIP to every carnal Christian, and heathen we can find, and insist on working it into every presentation of the gospel, we often do more harm than good.

1. A Sermon (No. 5) Delivered on Sabbath Evening, January 21, 1855, by the REV. C. H. Spurgeon at New Park Street Chapel, Southwark

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.  And God said,  ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.  And God saw that it was good.  And God separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light Day, and the darkness he called night.” -Genesis 1:1-5a

Why must the Spirit of God deem it noteworthy to tell us that light came out of darkness?  Is this a physic’s technicality?  Is this merely history? Should we even care?  It seems to me that light cannot be defined apart from darkness.  Light, from the first few verses of Genesis, was set in contradistinction to darkness.  God then separated the two into phases of night and day.  We can hardly understand light except by its absence.  Surely we also know now that darkness is really nothingness, for it is simply the lack of light.  This is a common way the bible defines words that are hard to understand.  The physics of light is amongst some of the most difficult concepts in nature to grasp, being both a particle and a wave, many physics students have groaned when trying to grasp this antimony, I know because I was one of them.  In its most simple terms however, darkness is the absence of light.

Peter used this same tool of contrast to define another complex word, “Whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit; let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it.  For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer.  But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”  I Peter 3:10-12.  Righteous here is defined through its contradistinction to, “those who do evil.”  In essence, they will be the opposite of this.  Do you do evil?  Then there may be a question as to whether or not you are among those to whom the Lord looks.  Is God’s face hidden behind a veil of mystery for you?  Is he lost amongst the conflagrations of your sins?  Surely saints do sin, we fail, but we are not defined by a life of sin.  The apostle John boiled these two concepts of light and righteousness together to present a wonderfully simple statement.  “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” I John 1:7

Remember, the next time you see the sun rise out of the darkness of the deepest night, the Son of God has commanded, by the life he lived, for you to come out of darkness and walk in the light.  May the Day Star arise in your hearts.

If you have ever been caught in a back-eddy, after having been tossed from a raft, then you know the terror of struggle, and the panic you feel when all of your effort is required to get back into the current again.  Metaphorically this is the same result as a conversation between believers that I hear not infrequently.  Without fail there will be a brother or a sister who is grieving over the current state of things in the church and they will lament that we need to get back to the way things were during Christianities formative years.  The more “mature,” wineskin will respond to this requiem cynically by asking, “Which early church would you like to get back to…the Corinthian church with all its carnality…or how about the Galatian believers with all of their legalism?  Or what if we were more like the Thessalonian church; they were a bunch of louts and layabouts…”  Bla bla bla, around the death eddy the conversation swirls until hope is suffocated and the old wineskin cavorts away, skipping with glee, while his twin daggers of discernment and rebuke reflect a glimmer of pale light as he twirls and sheathes them.

With all of the precision and diligence of a grammatical Samurai, Arthur Katz dashes headlong into this vicious circle of puerile reasoning, hacking its foolish carnal logic to tatters.  The issue, he tells us, is with the term Apostolic, a term which was little more than an entitlement to me before I read this book.  Men like titles, so by nature when we see one, we automatically think in terms of hierarchy.  It takes a few hundred pages, but once done, Brother Katz has completely waylaid all misconceptions you may have had about this hierarchy whatsoever.

Early on in the book he says, “There is no man more qualified than the one who believes in his deepest heart that he is without qualification.  The whole preliminary work of God is to disqualify us before we can be qualified.₁“ He would then go on to point out that Moses was at a pinnacle in life when at 40 he had everything going for him, God would have nothing to do with it though as brother Katz would go on to say, “and yet God does not think it lavish, wasteful or extravagant to give Moses another forty years of waiting in the wilderness until he is completely emptied out–and then He calls him.₂”

You may be thinking…uhhhhh wait, Moses wasn’t an Apostle, and what does he have to do with the term Apostolic?  Everything!  Art had great concern that people today have no idea what it means to be sent by God, rather than sent by themselves, or their own efforts.  In a world of fast food, fast love, and quick religion, the joy of patience and the glory of Godly contentment has been lost.  Brother Katz takes off his kimono and drops the sword in favor of playing a violin with a rose in his teeth as he romances deeply with the idea of being patient for God’s calling.  Taking every discipline the Father sends for the joy that it itself is worth.  He asks, “Will we be willing to submit to waiting and to conditions of trial and preparation for true service when the whole religious world clamors for action?₃”

While ruminating upon Leviticus 8:15-17 he points out that: “God is not interested in the outer hide and the flesh; He counts that along with the dung.  The inside, in the inner man, worked by Him in the hidden places, born of inward wrestling, are the offerings of a sweet and pleasing savor before God.  We have been guilty as contemporary Christians of offering our personalities, our winsomeness and our fleshly abilities to God, simply because we do not have the inward parts to offer, never having learned to rest or wait before God.  We have despised the suffering, reproach and obscurity in which alone the sweet offerings are formed deep within us.  We have not esteemed such things as God esteems them, and have preferred to do without them.  We need the obedience and vision that will enable us to take our hide and flesh outside the camp and to exclude it from the holy place, as well as from the pulpit.₄”

If you have read many of our posts, you can obviously see that this man is right up our alley.  I have to thank sermonindex for first placing a sermon from Arthur Katz on my iPod.  After nearly having to pick myself up off of the floor because of the forcefulness and earnestness of his message, I soon started reading all that Google could muster about this man.  I bought his autobiography, “Ben-Israel, Odyssey of a Modern Jew.”  Having read it in only a day or so, it left me pacing to know what happened to him after he was born again.  Apostolic Foundations answered that question for me. I would suggest that this was probably his Opus.  Not having read any of his other books, I find it hard to believe this book could be topped.

There is no way this book could have been written, had it not been lived.  I am suspicious that Apostolic Foundations was only a perpetuation of what Arthur lived out.

I definitely recommend “Apostolic Foundations” to anyone at all who has a care to serve God in any capacity.  I would also suggest placing this book into the category of revival.  I do not know if that was exactly his intent, but I see revival written on every single page.  I was sent to my knees in prayer so many times reading this book that it took me a month to read.  I could hardly get through a paragraph without having to repent and ask for God’s grace to help me overcome.  I hope this review will inspire even one person to purchase this book and pray for its application.  Arthur Katz was a burning man with a precise vocabulary.  May his words catch others on fire. You can order the book here.  I only wish I had had the opportunity to hear him preach in person before he went home…

1.)    Arthur Katz, Apostolic Foundations, Burning Bush Publications, Third Printing: January 2002 © 1999 by Arthur Katz page 12

2.)    Ibid page 12

3.)    Ibid page 14

4.)    Ibid page 29

How then can man be in the right before God? How can he who is born of woman be pure? Behold, even the moon is not bright, and the stars are not pure in his eyes; how much less man, who is a maggot, and the son of man, who is a worm!” Job 25:4-6

I am becoming more and more aware of the necessity of humility for the believer. In American Christianity we place such emphasis on ability, and education while giving humility mere lip service. But the problem is that education and skill alone produce mountains of pride, and prevent Gods blessing from fully coming.

I remember when I was asked in High School, “Why is pride a sin? What is so wrong with feeling good about yourself?” I was tongue tied! I found it impossible to spit out a good answer at the time, but now I can explain it fairly well. The Bible tells us some things about pride: it goes before destruction 1, God hates it 2, and it keeps us from seeking after God 3.   If a sin is hated by God, leads to destruction, and keeps us from seeking after God, this is pretty damning.  Nothing will ruin your walk faster than pride because it gives you boldness to break all the commandments. The thrusting up of mountains of pride should be a self evident problem for the believer.

But there is another grievous effect of the prideful life, it prevents Gods blessing from fully coming upon us. Paul tells us that God has chosen the foolish things . . . base things . . . things which are despised . . .and the things which are not . . . that no flesh should glory in His presence 4 , Pride restrains Gods hand of blessing for he will share his glory with no one.

Pride bars the door of the vault in which Gods blessings reside; because Humility comes before honor 5.

1. Prov 16:18
2. Prov 6:17
3. Psalm 10 4
4. 1 Cor 1:27-29
5. Pro 15:33