Three Shrubs

There was a green land, green like the Garden of Eden.  There were many trees, shrubs, flowers and grasses.  Everything was alive and bright and flourishing.  Three other shrubs were in the meadow.  Two had been planted years before, and they were alike in kind and size. The third was planted only recently and was distinct from the other two.  All three were brown and dead. 

Then the Lord said, “Breathe life into the shrubs.”  So, a man breathed on the shrubs and said, “Live.”

After a few days the two older plants came to life, grew new vines, and began to overrun their previous growth.  They flourished in the days that followed.  But, the third plant—the youngest of the three—did not flourish.  It remained dead and lifeless.

The Lord said, “Walk around the dead shrub for seven days.  For the first six days say these words to the shrub, ‘The Lord commands you to live.’  But, on the seventh day breathe on the shrub and say, ‘Receive life’.”

So, a man did as the Lord had instructed, and on the seventh day he breathed on the shrub and told it to receive life.  But, the plant remained lifeless and dead.

On the eighth day the Lord said, “Whatever does not bear fruit will be thrown into the rubbish heap.  Take that dead shrub that would not live, and tear it up from the ground, roots and all.  Throw that lifeless shrub into the rubbish heap, for it has failed to bear fruit.”

~ J. Thomas Johnson ~

A Final Appeal

~ J. Thomas Johnson ~

When the people of Israel fell into sin under the reign of Rehoboam, son of Solomon, God determined to destroy them through Shishak, Pharaoh of Egypt.

But, in those days God’s people repented of their sins and determined in their hearts to return to Him and to the covenant they had made with Him at Sinai.  So, God relented from their destruction.  God allowed Shishak to pillage the land, and God made Judah a subservient state to Egypt, but He did not destroy the nation.

As in the days of Rehoboam, my discernment is that God’s church has been unfaithful to Him.  And, as in the days of Rehoboam, God has determined to bring judgment.

But, God has sent us prophets, as He sent Shemaiah to Rehoboam, to warn God’s people in advance.  To those who have repented, God will show mercy in the midst of judgment.  To those who have remained steadfast in their unfaithfulness, God will show no mercy.

I and others like me have been bringing these warnings to the church for the last two decades.  I believe the days of warning have come to an end.  Those who have repented will be shown mercy in the days to come.  Those who have not repented, will reap the whirlwind they have sown.

I do not believe God will relent or change His mind.  God’s judgment is light, but God’s people have loved darkness.  The day of the Lord is drawing near.

Woe to the people of the earth who have hidden themselves in shadows, for the light of truth will expose every heart and every thought to the light of day.  All that has been done in secret will be proclaimed from the rooftops, and every hidden thing will be exposed.

Come into the light, people of God, for darkness will hide us no longer.  Light is coming, and light is judgment on darkness.  But, for those who walk in the light as God is in the light, your good deeds will be exposed and you will be known as children of the Almighty.

We must heed these words.  It is all I can hear God saying.

The Breath of God

~ J. Thomas Johnson ~

Reflecting on John 20:19-31

In the beginning God fashioned humanity out of aphar—out of dust.  There was nothing special about the material.  Today we might say, protons, electrons, and neutrons.  It was common, unsubstantial stuff.  But God breathed on it.  God shared his life with the dust, and a nephesh—a living being—was born.

And God spoke to Adam.  God gave him tasks to accomplish.  God had planted a garden, and God instructed him in how to tend it.  And then God entrusted him with the authority necessary to carry out His word.  This was creation.  And, for a while, humanity walked in the direction God had sent us.

But, we know the rest of the story from there.  Humanity turned from life and embraced what we were before God had breathed on us.  We clung to the flesh—to the aphar—and our spirits became divided, soiled, unclean.  And out of that heart came founts of violence, indulgences, envies, and destructiveness.  Rather than tending the garden, our ancestors consumed it.  Rather than bringing forth life, they brought forth death.  And in the days of Noah, God gave them the fullness of the world they had chosen.  Only Noah and his family survived the destruction that ensued.

Noah survived because he walked with God, and God protected him.  And again, God breathed out a covenant.  Again God gave humanity responsibilities.  And again humans were set on a path out of darkness and into the light.

But, Noah and his children did not continue in God’s way.  By the days of Abraham, none walked with God.  So, God called to a man who did not know Him, and God breathed on him a covenant.  Several times God breathed on Abraham, and with each new breath God gave him additional responsibilities in the world.  Abraham walked with God, and then Isaac, and then Jacob, and then the children of Israel.  In each generation God breathed His covenant, and in each generation some walked with God.

Then God breathed on Moses, and God gave him the responsibilities of speaking—breathing—on Pharaoh, and of delivering God’s people from Egypt, of breathing out the Torah that God had breathed into him, and of leading God’s people through the wilderness.

After him, God breathed a covenant on Joshua, and then on the judges of Israel, and then on Samuel, and then on Saul, and then on David, on whom God’s covenant, God’s breath, God’s spirit came to rest.  David, too, walked with God, and God breathed on his descendants.

God continued, after David, to breathe on prophets, who breathed out on God’s people what God had breathed into them.  And then God rested, and God waited.  The breath of God’s mouth drove the people of Israel into exile because, like in the days of Noah, and as in the days of Babel, they had turned against God’s word, God’s breath, and they had fought to return to dust.

In due time, God breathed on their captors and gave them the responsibility of returning the people of Israel to the land of David, but God did not breath again on His people.  God sent a few, last prophets before He fell silent, and then, God’s people waited.  But, they grew impatient, and in their impatience they poured over what God had breathed on their ancestors.  They were greedy for the breathing of God, and they worshipped the breath of their ancestors.  Yet, still, God did not speak.

But then, God breathed again.  God spoke to John the Baptist, and John breathed out what God breathed in.  He called the people of God to turn and walk with God as Adam had, as Eve had, as Enoch had, as Noah had, as Abraham had, as Samuel had, and as David had.  Some were deaf to God’s word.  Some heard but did not understand.  And some heard and breathed in what God had breathed out.  They followed John.

But God had given John the responsibility to speak but not to lead or to guide.  That responsibility God reserved for Himself.  As God Himself had walked with Adam and with Eve, God determined to walk with humanity again.  And again God would breathe on the dust, and again God would entrust His people, His children, with responsibilities in His world.

John baptized God as He journeyed among us in the flesh of Jesus.  God walked amongst His people, and God breathed on them.  God fought their ignorance and violence with the breath of His mouth.  God again made a covenant with them and spoke to them of what it means to tend the garden—the kingdom of God.  He taught them how to walk with God.

The Father entrusted twelve with His breath, His words, and two failed to receive them.  The first embraced the darkness before God would breathe on him again.  The second failed to remain with his brothers.  But ten had received the word that God had spoken, and they stayed together, despite their fear and doubt.

So, God breathed on them again.  God made a covenant with them.  They were to remain in Jesus, keep His word, and, on this night, God entrusted His breath to them.  And with that breath came reconciliation with God (forgiveness) and condemnation.  They were sent into God’s garden to breathe on the dry bones of God’s people what God had breathed into them.  And God has entrusted the forgiveness or condemnation of their brothers and sisters to the word God gave them to speak.

They have breathed out, what God has breathed in.  At Pentecost God entrusted their breath to the church, but God would make no new covenant with humanity other than that He made with them.  Their word is the final breath of God, and the fate of all who have followed after them is to be determined by response to their testimony.

Do not come to God, people of the earth, without them.  God’s word is their word, and their word is God’s word.  God entrusted Thomas and later Matthias and later Paul with the bearing of this same word, as well, but these ten were given this unique responsibility, and with them it remains.

Each of us has received this breathing through them.  God’s testimony comes to us through theirs.  These books are written that just as we share our life with our children, the life God breathed on them might be shared with us.

Now God is breathing again.  God is bringing judgment on the darkness.  The judgment God brings is light.  All that has been hidden is being revealed.  For those who will receive God’s breath, the light will be a refiner’s fire.  For those who cling to the flesh and to the dark, God’s light will prove terrifying and destructive to the fabrication they have built.

God is tearing down the idols—in churches, in culture, and now in homes.  Purify your homes, people of God.  Remove all leaven.  Tear down all idols.  Make yourselves no more graven images.  Dwell on the light and no longer on the darkness.

For those who hide their idols in their homes as Rachel hid her idols beneath her saddle and as Achan buried his idols beneath his tent, the light will bring only despair.  For those who bring their idols outside their homes and cast them to the rubbish heap, the light will be their joy, and they will rejoice at its coming.

But, God’s people have said, “We have no idols.  We have only the worship of the Lord our God.”  But, we have deceived ourselves.  Everywhere God looks He sees His people worshipping the works of their own hands.  God sees flags and statues, crucifixes and cathedrals, achievements and children worshipped and praised and celebrated while God’s word goes unheeded and God’s people perish for lack of knowledge of Him.

We must receive what God has breathed into these men, and we must breathe out what we receive upon our children and our neighbors and our nation.  Why will we remain in darkness?  Will those who have pursued life and salvation in Jesus grab hold only of ash and dust?  Will those who God has called and convicted and spoken with listen only to the works of their own hands and the products of their own bodies?

Our God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  There is no other.  We must open our eyes and see the darkness within us.  God is breathing on us now, why will we not receive?  We must deny ourselves, despise all but God’s breath and we will live.  But, if we cling to the darkness and the lies of the nations of the earth, we will not withstand His coming.

We must purge our houses of leaven by tearing down the idols we have made.  Let the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Who became flesh in the Person of Jesus be the Lord of your household and worship no longer the work of your hands or the generation of your bodies.  For the Day of the Lord is at hand.  And the Morning Star is rising with healing in His wings.

Now is the hour of salvation!  To those who cling to the flesh, light is dawning, and who can endure its rising?  But, to those who will forsake their idols and worship the Lord our God only, the hour of our healing is drawing near.

Reflecting on Genesis 21:8-21

By J. Thomas Johnson

There are times in which contemporary sensibilities and the narratives of Christian Scripture run seamlessly together. Contemporary concerns with respect to environmental stewardship, for instance, and the biblical insistence in Genesis that humanity was created to care for creation are deeply compatible. However, at other times contemporary mores and Biblical narratives seem to diverge fundamentally. I suspect that the narrative we find in Genesis 21:8-21 is as good an example as any of this apparent divergence.

Genesis 15 recounts a covenant that God made with Abraham. At the heart of God’s promise was a miracle. God promised Abraham and his wife, Sarah, that after decades of infertility they would have a son. So, perhaps as a way of helping God along, Sarah suggested that Abraham take her maidservant, Hagar, as a concubine and produce a child through her. Abraham agreed, and the result of their union was Ishmael. And almost immediately conflict between Sarah and Hagar began to develop.

However, God’s promise to Abraham was not fulfilled in Ishmael. God had intended to provide a child to Sarah and Abraham together. So, in time, Sarah did become pregnant, and gave birth to a boy in her old age. They named him Isaac. And the conflict between Hagar and Sarah escalated.

This conflict is at the heart of Genesis 21:8-21. As Sarah observed the interaction between Ishmael and her baby, she uttered one of the crasser statements to be found in Genesis: “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac” (NRSV, Gen. 21:10).

So much is bound up in Sarah’s charge to Abraham. A distinction of classes is, of course, explicit. But buried within these harsh words are pain and regret and envy and, perhaps fundamentally, fear.  These are not surprising qualities to be found in Sarah given the narratives of Genesis which have preceded hers. What is surprising, at least to me, is that God instructed Abraham to follow her counsel. “But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring'” (21:12-13).

In the text, we are told that Abraham loved both of his children, and it seems implicit that Abraham could only exile Ishmael and Hagar because of God’s promise to care for them personally. And God was true to His word. Genesis tells us that not only did God send His angel to communicate with Hagar and to rescue them both from thirst, but also, “God was with the boy, and he grew up;…” (21:20).

I’ve often reflected on why it was that God did not require these two rivals, Hagar and Sarah, to find a way forward together, and why it was that Ishmael and Isaac could not have been raised as brothers. And then, again, the risk to both in the culture was certainly great. When Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, married two women and took two additional concubines later in Genesis, the rivalry between the women and the children was painful and, in the case of the children, violent. It resulted in one of the sons being sold into slavery by the others. Was God’s decision to support Sarah’s desires rooted in this sort of cultural complexity?

Even more, when God became flesh in the Person of Jesus several thousand years after these events, Jesus taught us that God’s desire was for His followers to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. He instructed His disciples to accept insults without retaliation and to respond to governmental oppression by going beyond what was being forcibly required. In the teachings of Jesus, certainly Sarah’s concerns would have received a rebuke, wouldn’t they? And yet, at the time, God consented to allow her callousness to persist.

As I reflect on this passage again, I am reminded that God begins with us where we are. The rivalry between heirs was pervasive in the culture of Abraham’s day, and Sarah’s concern for the safety and future of her son was certainly reasonable.  And God, rather than asking Sarah to undergo a miraculous and radical transformation of character and worldview all at once, instead allowed her to remain uncharitable, while He Himself served as a personal example of watchcare and devotion to a child that was born outside of His expressed will. God became Himself the caregiver that Sarah could not find room in her heart to become. And by His example, the descendants of Abraham have learned that those who wish to be like God must follow Him into the wilderness and care for a child born out of an act of faithlessness.

I am convinced that Jesus could instruct His followers to embrace their enemies in part because God Himself had set the example for such practices in instances like that of Hagar and Ishmael’s abandonment. Sarah had never seen or experienced this kind of generosity of spirit, and so, she had no context out of which to obey such a command. It is only after God demonstrated His love to those He had not chosen that He asked humanity to respond in kind. God goes first where He asks humanity to follow, and no example of this reality is more fundamental in the church than that of Jesus journey to the cross.

Much later, the Apostle Paul, in his epistle to the Galatians, would recall this episode in the life of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael, and Paul would suggest that God’s love for Israel herself had more in common with His love for Ishmael than with His devotion to Isaac. The canon of Scripture taken together suggests that we all are children born in a world of rebellion against God’s intentions for humanity. We all have come, in one way or another, into a world that has lost faith in its God, a world that has tried to fulfill God’s intentions by its own wisdom and with its own strength. Each of us has more in common with Ishmael than with Isaac. And yet, God cares for children who would not be had He been trusted, and God has been with us. Perhaps this story, too, is echoed in Paul’s summation of the Gospel of Jesus: “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (NRSV, Rom. 5:8). When we are faithless, God is faithful. Ishmael became a great nation. May the Name of the Lord be praised by our willingness to follow in His footsteps.

King of the Hill

By: J. Thomas Johnson

Do kids still play king of the hill? Some may remember standing atop a hill while other kids tried to wrestle, toss, or somehow eject you off and claim the throne momentarily. I know my children don’t play it. In fact, I can easily imagine myself stepping in to stop them if they tried.

I’m not sure from whence that instinct has come. When I was a child, my friends and I rarely saw a hill that one of us didn’t try to claim. But, for whatever reason, that game and many others of my childhood are disappearing from the public life of children. Sam Greenspan wrote an article a few months back that listed king of the hill as one of eleven childhood games that are too violent for contemporary American culture. http://11points.com/11-playground-games-played-kid-violent-today/

King of the hill was both a powerful and a terrifying game. While climbing the hill, I would be filled with aggression and violence. The only goal was to topple the king. The only morality was achieving that goal. The thrill of having achieved that goal was intoxicating.

And yet, once atop the hill, with the power of victory came isolation and paranoia. Whereas all of us climbing the hill had been allied in an attempt to depose the king, upon becoming the king, now I was surrounded only by enemies. In many ways for me, it was more fun to topple the king than to be the king. I can remember on many occasions allowing myself to be defeated so as to recapture the simplicity and safety of the attack. It was a game that, if I had been truly observant, had many life lessons wrapped up in it.

It seems to me that in the public life of our culture, the vast majority of people have come to appreciate the safety of standing on the slopes trying to topple the king. Whether we’re talking about celebrities, comedians, politicians, principals, pastors, institutionalized religion, or even God there is safety and comradery in joining the masses attempting to topple those who have the audacity to stand atop the hill. Today it would seem that the moral high ground is on the slopes. From news media to social media to community life, the safest place to stand is on the slopes and the safest stance to take is opposition to whoever or whatever stands upon the summit.

A few years ago several prominent comedians—Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock among them—made headlines when they publicly declared that they were done playing college campuses because of the hyper-sensitivity of students to their humor. Here is a link to an Inside Edition story from 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kVdHr7sR0o.

This is a strange rebirth of king of the hill.  In this version the players cooperate to topple the king, but very few if any wish to assume the summit. And those who do assume the summit spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince the masses that they are, in fact, on the slopes with them, disowning the summit on which they stand and trying to distance themselves from power and associate it with an adversary.

It seems to me that Heath Ledger’s Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is the prophet of a newly emerging kind of leadership:

Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just… do things.

There are some interesting social dynamics tied up in this historically atypical social competition. Edwin Friedman in his book A Failure of Nerve has diagnosed our culture as chronically anxious. There seems to be a growing consensus about this cultural anxiety, but causes and correlations are difficult to discern. Some believe that the rise of social media is to blame or smart phone technology or unprecedented wealth and affluence or the ease of access to mood-altering and pain-reducing pharmaceuticals, while others, like me, suspect it is the loss of faith in God as Creator and Sustainer of life that has allowed these other things to contribute to such systemic anxiety and despair.

Like kids on a playground, outrage may be safe, mocking may be community-affirming, and protesting might be morally soothing. And all these things have their place in an ethical society. But, if these transitional phases become habitations, both personal character and social ethics will eventually be undermined. As the Jewish and Christian Scriptures have long warned us:

1 Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, 2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.

Psalm 1:1-2, NIV

Being outraged by evil is certainly an ethical stance. The capacity to see the hypocrisy or foolhardiness or grotesqueness of evil is a moral type of discernment. Publicly protesting evil can be a valid form of resisting it. But, for those of us who follow the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob Who became flesh in the Person of Jesus, our personal morality and our cultural ethics are not rooted in our reaction to evil, but in our submission to the teachings God has given to us and our practical embodiment of those teachings in our lives.  There is great peril in allowing the Joker to be our sage.  Jesus’ voice will lead us to the health for which our moral outrage longs:

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

Matthew 5:43-45, NIV