Sunday, November 6, 2011

Is Gambling a Sin?


IS GAMBLING WRONG?

      I recently heard a prominent and popular preacher on TV doing a question and answer session – giving answers to questions from members of his congregation.  The question at hand was, “What’s wrong with gambling?”

      The preacher’s answer was short and predictable. “It’s trying to get something for nothing,” he said.  This, of course, isn't true since most gambling I am familiar with requires an investment of money.  In anticipation of the next logical question he tried to explain why playing the stock market is not the same as gambling.  Then, as if realizing his answer was ringing a little hollow, he added,  “Besides, if you’re playing the stock market you won’t have a cocktail waitress trying to serve you drinks.” (This is a good ploy when you sense that your arguments are weak.  Use humor to distract and deflect attention away from your answer.)

      As I thought about his answer I couldn’t help but raise a few questions.  If the “sin” of gambling is trying to get something for nothing wouldn’t that make it wrong for homeless people to go to the rescue mission for a free meal and place to sleep?  Wouldn’t that make it wrong for needy people to accept Thanksgiving food baskets or Christmas toys from his church?  And what about Christmas gifts or any gift?  Isn’t that getting something for nothing?  If a rich man is handing out hundred dollar bills on a street corner, would it be a sin for me to try to get one?   And would I be sinning if I signed a slip of paper and dropped it in a box for a drawing for a TV at a new store opening?  And wonder of wonders, isn’t the Grace of God about getting something for nothing?  Oh, no!  What will we do now?

Social Media - A Barometer of Society


Social Media - A Barometer of Society
 
      The Social Media of a society are pretty good reflections of the heart and soul of that society.   Which comes first is hard to say.  Does the media create the way society lives and thinks or does the media simply reflect what is?  Perhaps there’s some of both.  It’s debatable.   It is still true that the media gives us a good insight into our culture. 

      Take Facebook, for instance.  It is a good barometer of contemporary society – how people think, feel, react and what’s important to them.  Some people seldom post anything except something about sports.  Others post mostly about animals.  Some post what they are eating or other such mundane activities.  Others seem to post things that make them appear to be wealthy, important or special.  No doubt all of these things are important to those who post them and they apparently are important to a lot of people who like to read them.  

      As Andy Rooney would say, “it seems to me” that Facebook mostly reflects a society that is bored and living and thinking mostly on the surface of life without much thought for the deeper or greater questions and issues of life.  It appears that life is pretty much lived and understood on a trivial level.  Many in our society rarely think beyond sports, trivia games, videos, the latest fad or movement, some Hollywood event or celebrity, or the latest movie.  The meaning of life, as seen on Facebook, is reduced to entertainment, having fun, egoisms and cute little slogans and warm fussy quotes. 

      And as usual, contemporary Christianity in America always becomes a reflection of society at large (which should tell you that it is sick and confused).  I see a lot of this reflected on the religious posts of Facebook. 

      On Facebook, as in society at large, we see a Contemporary Christianity that is really into reductionism – reducing the Christian Faith to its least common denominator so there are few doctrines or requirements of belief or practice.  This reflects the multi-culturalism and inclusive campaigns of society. 

      You see this in how all the churches these days want to drop defining names and be called something cool like New Life, or New Wine, or Celebration Ministries, or World Outreach or The Rock, etc.  -  anything that reflects being hip and cool and all-inclusive.   The name of the game is entertainment and fun.  Churches are reduced to smorgasbords with the biggest ones offering the best dishes and people choosing churches based on their appetites (passions).   Content, beyond how to live a happy, prosperous and fulfilled life (i.e. how to sanctify the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life), is absent.   Whatever resemblance to content remains is reduced to cute little quotes and slogans that fill the pages of Facebook.  They sound cute but in the end they mean nothing and serve no purpose except to entertain for a brief moment.  They are, to borrow words from Shakespeare, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing  - a good reflection of society and contemporary Christianity.  

The Orthodox Septuagint or the Protestant Masoretic?

The Orthodox Septuagint or the Protestant Masoretic?

     The Orthodox Church uses the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, the one used by Christ and the apostles (as quoted in the New Testament).  The Protestant world uses the Masoretic text which came some 1000 years after the time of Christ and was altered by Jewish Rabbis who tried to erase prophecies that seemed to point to Jesus as the Christ of the Old Testament.

     The Septuagint was translated in Alexandra circa A.D. 250 during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphius as a publication of the Library of Alexandria. This Library was the Media Center of the Roman world. Ptolemy wanted a copy of every book in the known world to be available through the Library. Accordingly, he found a way to include a translation of the hitherto untranslated Scriptures of the Jews which could be made available through the Library. Scholars who were fluent in both Hebrew and Greek traveled from Jerusalem to Alexandria to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.

     Their translation, known as the Septuagint from the seventy-two who completed this work, was praised as grasping the true meaning of the Hebrew and setting it forth in Greek by the most erudite of the Jews who were contemporaries of Our Lord Jesus Christ, including Philo and Josephus. The Septuagint found such favor with the Jewish community in Alexandria that they established a celebration on an island in the Nile to mark each anniversary of its completion. The Septuagint immediately found a widespread reception in the pre-Christian literary world, notably in Rome itself. Both the authors of the New Testament and also the Fathers of the Church used the Septuagint as an authoritative source in teaching Christian doctrine. The Septuagint, abbreviated as ‘LXX’, is the scriptural standard for the Orthodox Church as Old Testament scripture whether in Greek or in Church Slavonic.

     The Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled every one of the prophecies concerning the Messiah found anywhere in the text of the Septuagint. This is the consistent witness of the Fathers from Saint Dionysius the Areopagite to Saint Irenaeus of Lyons. Indeed, the recent discovery of St. Irenaeus’ The Proof of the Apostolic Preaching in an Armenian Monastery was first published in a translation from Armenian into French in Paris, August 23, 1913 (Cf. § 30, p. 683). St. Irenaeus’ Proof comes down to this: “What the Scriptures prophesied, Christ fulfilled” and this is the keystone of the Apostolic preaching. Thus, His Resurrection on the third day, is, in the Nicene Creed, confessed to be “according to the Scriptures,” that is, in fulfillment of the prophecies of Christ recorded in the Canonical Scriptures.

     The destruction and leveling of Jerusalem, which was prophesied by Christ, (Mt. 24:2; Mr.13:2; Lk. 21:6) was accomplished under the Roman General Titus in 70 A.D. Around A. D. 90 the Jews initiated a program of eliminating, wherever possible, or altering all of the prophesies of Christ in the Hebrew texts available to them, and of a further program of reconstructing their version of the text of the Old Testament by using inferior texts. As it happens, the Psalter in the Septuagint stands as that book which, more than any other in holy Scripture, is replete with prophecies of Christ. Given the widespread popularity of the Septuagint Psalter, even in the first century A. D., the Jews were limited in how far they could take their deliberate eradication or alteration of the prophesies of Christ. They chose not to alter or delete the prophesies in the Psalter quite possibly out of fear of tipping their hand as regards their extensive tampering with other texts in the Canonical Scripture of the Old Testament.

     The text produced by the Jews is called the Masoretic text. The final edition of the Masoretic text appeared around 1000 A.D. This text, stripped as far as possible of the prophesies of Christ by the Masoretes, i.e. Jewish scholarship, is the text preferred and used by the protestant world. This corrupted text stands behind the Old Testament translation into German by Martin Luther and into the English of the 1611 King James Version.

     The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls written in Hebrew found in the Judean wilderness circa the 1950’s calls the Jewish endeavor outlined above into serious question. These scrolls dating from the first century A.D. confirm basis for the Septuagint in the Hebrew of the Qumran texts. The texts found in Qumran are in consonance with those used in the translation of the Septuagint. Further, they are dated approximately 900 years before the eleventh century rescission of the Masoretes. Each of the prophesies of Christ are in place, intact, and supported by the texts found in the Judean desert. Even apart from such modern supporting documentation for the text of the Septuagint, we can, as Orthodox Christians, continue to rely, as did the Evangelists, Apostles, and Fathers of the Church, upon the Septuagint as Canonical Scripture.

The Faith of our Fathers

THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

      The other day as I was driving to work I was scanning through the stations on the radio. I paused at one station as I heard a choir singing the old hymn Faith of our Fathers. This used to be one of my favorite hymns when I was a boy. I remember hearing the choir sing it so beautifully on a Billy Graham crusade back in the 50’s.

      Years ago when I listened to it as a Free Will Baptist, I never gave much thought to the words. But now I began to wonder about the meaning of the words. The first thing that came to mind is how could I have just accepted the use of the term “fathers” when my tradition then taught me to “call no man father”. I remember how we would recoil at addressing a priest as father and even make fun of it, but when WE sang it in the hymn it seemed to be ok. Somehow the injunction against calling anyone father didn’t apply to us, and we seemed oblivious to our inconsistency.

      The second thing I thought about as I listened to this old hymn once again was a question that popped into my mind. What is the faith and who are the fathers referred to in this hymn? The faith of what fathers? In the hymn we pledge to be true to it till death. Surely, then we should know what faith and what fathers we are pledging to, shouldn’t we? Is it the faith of Billy Sunday, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, William Tennent, Benjamin Randall or Alexander Campbell? There’s quite a divergence of faith among these men so which one is the faith of our fathers?

      Or is it the faith of the earlier fathers such as Martin Luther, Charles Wesley, John Armenius or John Calvin? As a Free Will Baptist, when we sang Faith of our Fathers, we certainly were not pledging ourselves to the faith of Charles Wesley, since we rejected the doctrine of a second work of grace known as entire sanctification as held and taught by Wesley. Nor were we pledging to be true to the faith of Alexander Campbell since he taught baptismal regeneration. We couldn’t have been singing about the faith of Martin Luther since he also held the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, baptized infants and taught that Communion is not symbolic but the true body and blood of Christ which conveyed grace to the communicant. And he also taught there is only one true visible Church, which we certainly didn’t believe. And we would never pledge our lives to the faith of John Calvin since he taught a limited atonement, double predestination and that anyone who had been saved could never loose their salvation. So what fathers and what faith were we singing about?

      It couldn’t have been the faith of the Apostolic Fathers since we knew nothing about them or their faith and if we had we would have rejected their faith outright as contrary to the Christian faith.

      So what is the faith and who are the fathers of this old hymn?

America and the Spirit of Rebellion


America and the Spirit of Rebellion

America was founded on a spirit of rebellion.  Consider how the founders of our Nation and the Revolutionary War were in clear and direct contradiction to the Bible on which they claimed to base the new nation. 

1)   In the Old Testament it is written that God hates the spirit of rebellion, which is worse than witchcraft.
2)   When Israel was in captivity and reduced to slavery, God never instructed them to form an army or rebel.  They were to endure in repentance until it was God’s time to set them free.
3)   In the New Testament we are told to submit to and obey the authorities and to respect the government.  This was written when the government at that time was pagan and oppressive.
4)   St. Paul admonished slaves to obey their masters whether they were good masters or evil masters.  If they endured the evil, they would have a reward but if they rebelled they would be in the wrong.  When the run away slave, Onesimus, was converted to the Christian Faith, St. Paul sent him back to his owner.
5)   The apostles lived and suffered under a pagan government in a pagan society.  Never did they advocate rebellion.  When they were arrested and mistreated for obeying God, they submitted to the incarceration and punishment.  They never led a march or protest or advocated such.  They trusted God for their deliverance and vindication in God’s time.
6)   The Gospels clearly teach us to do good to those who do evil to us, to turn the other check and to live in humility and meekness. 

Now it becomes evident that the founding fathers were not following the teachings of Scripture but a spirit of rebellion.  And it becomes evident that the Protestant Evangelical world by and large follows the same spirit of rebellion in rejecting these clear teachings of Scripture by either ignoring them or saying they don’t apply to us today.  If we can ignore one Scripture, why not ignore all?  If one part doesn’t apply to us, why should any part apply to us?  Who’s to say and who’s to decide what does or what doesn’t?  Such an individualistic and private approach eventually leads to little or no beliefs, which is the salient feature of American “Christianity” today.

For the most part, the founding fathers of America were not Christians but Deists.  There is a big difference.  The slogans “God Bless America”, “God and Country” and “In God We Trust” are expressions of Deism but have no significant Christian meaning or content.

The rebellion against England involved politics and economics but a large part of it was religious.  The spirit of rebellion did not want to submit to the ancient forms and beliefs of the Christian Faith but instead sought the freedom to form religious beliefs according to individualistic and private interpretations.  Such, also, was the rebellion of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
 

The Amazing Message of TV (and other) Preachers


The Amazing Message of TV (and other) Preachers

            As I sat down for my morning coffee the other day I was flipping through the channels on TV.  I came across a local preacher of one of the mega-churches in Nashville.  He was expounding on the unity of the church.  He pointed out that on the day of Pentecost the believers were of one mind and one spirit.  Then he pointed out that St. Paul taught we are to maintain the unity of the faith.  (For some reason he didn’t dwell on the concept of  THE FAITH.)
         I should have expected the next words that came out of his mouth as I have observed when preachers quote Bible verses that don’t exactly say what they want them to say, they then proceed to explain them away and reinterpret them according to their private interpretations.
         So the preacher continued, supposedly expounding on what the Bible says about unity.  “Listen people”, he said, “We don’t’ have to believe everything alike or agree on everything.  We don’t have to be like little robots all saying the same thing.”  (The little robot analogy is a common tactic to belittle the unity of one true faith as taught in the Scriptures.)  Then he said, “But there ARE some things we Have to agree on.”  
         “Really?” I said out loud to myself.  “And who is going to decide what those essentials are?”  But I already knew the answer.  HE was going to decide.  But why does he get to decide and I don’t?  What if he comes up with five essentials we all have to agree on and I come up with six?  How are we going to work that out?  And what if we let the Church of Christ preacher decide?  That list won’t match his.  And what if we can’t all agree on what this preacher decides is essential?  Does that mean we aren’t Christians?  And why aren’t we like little robots if we all have to agree on his essentials?  Why not leave it all open?  After all, there is no Bible verse that says we have to agree on certain essentials and certainly not one that gives us a definitive list. 
         Then I flipped to another preacher (no, I didn’t say I flipped the preacher).  This preacher was on a rant.  At the top of his voice he is screaming, “I'M SICK AND TIRED OF HEARING EVERYBODY GIVE THEIR OPINION ON THIS AND THAT.  I FOLLOW ONLY ONE OPINION (now he is waving the Bible in the air and prancing/strutting across the stage) AND THAT IS WHAT THIS BIBLE SAYS, THIS BLOOD BOUGHT BIBLE!"  But isn’t what he says the Bible says just one more opinion?
         I don’t know, but it just seems to me that if the robots sitting in the average pew on Sunday morning would ever really listen and pay attention to what is being said from the pulpit and really think it through the pews might soon be deserted.