The spirit that condemned Christ

I don’t know which is worse. Christians who repel other Christians as reprobates whom they superficially judge as needy of sanctions and exclusions to conform to their Old Testament view of ‘holiness’, or a nation judging another nation with phrases like ‘an axis of evil in need of a regime change’ or ‘Sadam Hussein was evil who needed to be wiped out’. Both positions reflect a narcissistic attitude that was endemic in the Jewish culture, which Christ has always been trying to put an end to once and for all.

God came to establish Christ as the ruler, the judge, the shepherd, the teacher, the pastor, the lover of men’s souls. God has never intended that man should sit on the throne of His will and execute it on His behalf as teacher, judge, leader and shepherd who lords it over others. This idea of men lording it over other men is totally alien to Christ, and therefore per se to God.

The Old Testament is a testimony of the ways and imaginations of a people caught up in a relationship with God who proved to be the hardest and most recalcitrant people to receive the truth that Jesus brought to them later in the flesh. Jesus had visited them many times before. The word of truth became flesh and dwelt among them in the form of individual characters who were occasionally inspired by the law when he came alive in their hearts to obey His command to love Him and their neighbours. Christ has always been the living law and the living grace.

Most of the time, however, they hated and destroyed their neighbours believing in a form of ‘holiness’ that was nothing to do with the ‘holiness’ that Jesus was trying to communicate to them. The idea that holiness is achieved by ridding the world of evil, first by ‘soft’ sanctions and exclusions and then by ‘hard ones’ completing the process of separation by social excommunication or by physical death, becomes demonic when men believe they possess the power of God to take the law into their own hands and become judge and executioner on His behalf. This kind of thinking and understanding that inspired these people to throw Jesus down the cliff, to conspire against Him as a social reprobate, to call him a blasphemer and an ‘evil doer’ and to eventually have their ‘holy’ way and crucify Him thinking they were doing God’s will, is a kind of thinking that has infected church life since the Romans retrofitted Christ to the Old Ways Of Men. Sadly, the Old Testament, in this context, is a lie from the pit. Suitable for Roman ideology of empirical rule by iron, by fist and by bloodshed and war but not for God – sorry. Nothing to do with God.

The bi-polar position of cutting off a member of God’s family as ‘evil’ and as a ‘reprobate’ or as a ‘blasphemer’ and of then testifying to the love and inclusivity of Christ is what signifies the contention between the Old and the New Testament, between a narcissistic deterministic soul and an effaceable passive one. The contention is resolved by the blood of Christ that reconciled ALL men and women to God. It is not the role of the church to judge who is failing and who isn’t but it is God’s command to nurture personal obedience by reinforcing TRUTH from Jesus not LIES from the pit.

Church life would be revolutionised if God’s people worshipped Christ instead of a book that suffocates Him.