The True Spirit of Athaliah by Chris White

Athaliah is the only  known queen to have sat on the throne of David during the period of Israel’s monarchies (Her story is found in 2 Kings 8:16-11:16 and 2 Chronicles 22-23).  Neither the Bible or known histories say much about her ability as a ruler but  much about the evil she promulgated during her reign.  As far as pedigree is concerned, Athaliah came from the first family of idolatry as she was the daughter of King Ahab and Jezebel who worked tirelessly to lead their subjects away from God and to follow the idol known as Baal.  King Jehoram was fixed up with Athaliah through an alliance between Israel and Judah.  As queen consort she had no real legal power but had the power of example and the power of the womb both of which she used to lead her nation into greater depths of devotion to the idol Baal.  When her husband passed (a terrible disease of his bowels) her son Ahaziah inherited the throne but ruled for only a year when he was cut down in battle as a judgment from the Lord.  With no title to the throne,  Athaliah had all potential successors from the house of David assassinated thus securing the throne of her husband and son for herself.  Unknown to Athaliah was that the nearest relative of her son (still an infant) was hidden from her coup and was secretly raised under the protection of the high priest of Jerusalem Jehoida.  When the child became a young boy, he was brought out of hiding and publicly anointed king.  The trumpets were blown and it was proclaimed from the temple that King Joash was the new and rightful ruler over Judah.  When Athaliah heard the great noise and acclamation of the new king she came out in public and cried out “Treason! Treason!” but was unable to stem the tide of events.  Before the day was over, Athaliah was executed for her crimes and the house of David was restored as the royal family and rightful heirs of the throne.  The irony and lesson of this story is really found in Athaliah’s end.  She who would cry treason was guilty of the same on two counts.  First she used her influence to lead as many people as possible to commit treason against God by following after the local god of prosperity and fertility.  Second she used her power to try and destroy the house of David through treacherous murder.   When we encounter such dark characters in scripture, we are reminded that the story we find ourselves in today includes the forces of evil.  The Bible is clear that God did not create evil or that evil will prevail in the end, but for now evil exists by permission.  I can’t help but see in Athaliah the same spirit that sought to tempt and destroy Jesus.  Was it not the devil working in the heart of Herod the Great that stirred within him a murderous genocide of all male children in hopes of wiping out the most important descendant of King David?  And was it not also the same spirit that sought to lead Jesus astray by offering Him all temporal power if He would only bow down to him who was not God?  This spirit of darkness, the devil continues to lead the nations astray even today, but like Athaliah, he prevails only temporarily and his rule will come to a complete and abrupt end with the appearance of Jesus, the Son of Man and Son of David.

Review of the Strategy of Satan by Warren Wiersbe

Even as I write this there is an ever-so-vague temptation in my mind to act a bit skeptical about a book on detecting and defeating the work of Satan.  After all, I am a reasonably intelligent man and we all know or have seen or have heard of people who are, shall we say, a bit over the top in their fears and anxieties about the prince of darkness.  But, as C.S. Lewis would say, that kind of wild-eyed fanaticism is exactly what someone as subtle as Lucifer would want.  If people associate talk about the devil with crazy, they will disbelieve in his existence: exactly what he would want you to do.  The fact of the matter is I do believe in the existence of the Devil.  Jesus Christ believed in the Devil and was actually victorious over Satan’s greatest efforts to corrupt Him—a feat no other person has ever been able to accomplish.  Perhaps part of the reason many people avoid the topic altogether or say things like “the only devil that exists in the universe is the devil inside” is because if there really is an objective, malevolent spirit like Satan, it is freaking embarrassing how much influence we have given him in our lives.

I’ve never met Dr. Warren Wiersbe, but have long known his reputation for being a sound and balanced teacher of the Scriptures.  When I found his book The Strategy of Satan: How to Detect and Defeat Him I thought it merited my attention not only because I would like to personally be more victorious over the dark influence of temptation but also because Dr. Wiersbe is not one of the “Church-Lady-Crazies” who is looking for the devil in virtually everything.  I was not disappointed and found this to be a sane and biblically sound treatment of a topic many of us would just assume avoid.

There are many great scriptures and lessons presented in the book but I want to interact with a couple of them that I found particularly helpful.  One of the things Wiersbe points out is that Satan may not touch a person without God’s permission but God does permit such things that in disobedience we may be chastened and in obedience we may be proven and strengthened.  I thought it was also interesting that one of the chief times we should be aware and beware of Satan is when things are going particularly well for us or we have gone to great lengths to obey the will of God.  In one case we succumb to pride and the feeling that we do deserve better than we are getting (the thankful-to-God-but-what-have-you-done-for-me-lately syndrome), in the other we are marked by the enemy because we have served God well and he wants to undo things quickly.

According to Wiersbe another of Satan’s great strategies is to tempt us with impatience with God’s will.  Impatience is a mark of great immaturity and the scriptures continually encourage us to patience in all things.  Impatience is an impediment to realizing God’s will.  In the Bible there is a famous story of King Saul who grew impatient with waiting for Samuel the priest to make a sacrifice to God before they went to battle and so thought he would just himself and disobey God’s law entirely.  Sadly, I see this impatience played out in many other ways as well.  The Christian single that grows impatient waiting for God to provide them a spouse and so they take matters into their own hands and make an infernal mess of their lives.  Or the pastor that is so anxious to gain a reputation as a shepherd and leader that he loses patience with those in the congregation that are struggling with sin and he hastily kicks them out without leaving room for them to repent.  To this the author writes: “When you find yourself impatient, you can be sure that Satan and the flesh are at work, and that you are in danger of making a wrong decision.  When the circumstances of life are irritating, that is the time to beware!  When family problems, friends, finances, or feelings are making life uncomfortable, then you can be sure Satan is near, waiting for an opportunity to attack.  But God has given you a defense!” 

And what is this defense?  Making a clear-headed commitment to follow God even if the circumstances in life are not as we would desire.  Finding opportunity to worship and thank God, knowing that all things are working for the good in our lives.  And probably most important, spending much time in the word of God.  As Dr. Wiersbe so aptly points out, if Adam and Eve found they couldn’t talk to Satan without trouble, we need not talk either, but learn and repeat back the truth of the scriptures which are the will of God.

I’d recommend this book as a worthwhile treatment and Bible based study on a topic we could all stand to learn a bit more on.

Let's Keep America Beautiful by Chris White

Several nights ago I was conversing with a young person about his recent trip to Africa.  Like most Americans who travel overseas, they are often shocked by the amount of litter that seems to be everywhere and my friend was no exception.  I explained to him that when I was growing up (during the 1960’s and 1970’s) we had a litter problem that was just about as bad as any place I have ever visited outside the U.S. but we had something that put an end to it: The Keep America Beautiful Campaign.  Night after night, as we sat in the glow of the family television set (only wealthy people had more than one set in their homes) we would see a public service announcement featuring an American Indian from the past paddling his traditional canoe into a present day modern and industrialized but unnamed metropolis.  Everywhere he goes, this man who deeply loves and respects nature, encounters careless and thoughtless people throwing their trash out the window.  The announcement closes with a motorist dumping the remains of his drive-thru hamburger meal right at the feet of this native man and looking directly at the camera we see there is a tear running down his cheek and then we hear the voice-over  admonition that caring for our great land begins and ends with you(if you want to watch the video for nostalgia/or/informational purposes go here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=j7OHG7tHrNM

My young friend was quite surprised about this and asked me if I really believe that one public service announcement had that much power to change the face of America?  “Absolutely”, I told him, “to this very day whenever I throw my hamburger trash out the window, I’m haunted by a vague sense of guilt and the face of an Indian man who is being a big cry-baby about some litter that by the end of the week is going to blow into the next county or will be eaten by a bunch of wild possums.  Never underestimate the power of a good public service announcement.

Bombs in Boston and the Judgment of God by Chris White

The bombing of the Boston Marathon has once again brought up the discussion among Christians as to whether America is under the judgment of God and whether we should declare a call to prayer and fasting as found in the Old Testament book of 2 Chronicles 7:14 “ if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”  Such an idea was discussed recently in a column by Joseph Farah of World Net Daily and has been well received by many (read the article here: http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/day-of-prayer-earns-congressional-endorsement/?cat_orig=faith).  As a pastor and someone who preaches the Bible, I often struggle when this verse is rolled out in regards to America because it is definitely being used out of context and while the precept holds true, to the best of my knowledge our country does not have a covenant with God as Israel did and thus is not a promise.  In Chronicles there is only one time where the people actually did humble themselves and pray as prescribed here and God did relent in His judgment of them. But within a couple of generations the entire nation was taken into captivity by another nation (an ancient war technique in the near east) because God said the evil had gone too far and the repentance was too little.  So the very people with whom God directly made this promise were not spared the consequences of their actions at a certain point.

Despite my longstanding tradition of being a contrarian whenever I see an American flag and Cross get too close (it’s more of a knee-jerk reaction), I actually want to go on the record as endorsing a national day of prayer and fasting on 9/11/2013.  While I harbor no illusions or even wishes that America is God’s new chosen nation, there is no reason to believe God doesn’t specifically judge Gentile nations when they spin out of control with evil.  More important is that often God judges the real gods of these nations.  The great example of this is when God called the Ten Plagues on Egypt, each plague (flies, sores, frog, river turning to blood, darkened sun, etc) was actually a judgment on a different god in the Egyptian pantheon.

Our dear nation has too long abandoned the true God and has largely followed after the gods of Mars (war and power), Mammon (money), Mercury (merchandising), and Venus (beauty and sex).  What do we see before us in the headlines?  Our gods being destroyed by some unseen hand.  Despite the most advanced military we are bombed from within.  Our wealth is evaporating and can never keep up with our spending.  Even though we all have more stuff than we can ever use, we are all trained from childhood to consume to our full capacity and to be insatiable about it.  Personally, the very fact that Christmas decorations start appearing in stores right after 4^th of July is a judgment all its own!  We have gone from permitting sodomy in the privacy of one’s bedroom (as if that was ever a virtue to begin with) to making it an issue of marriage equity and civil justice.  We may not be under God’s judgment in a cataclysmic sense with the proverbial lightning bolts and earthquakes, but if within every sin there is the seed of its own punishment, we have sown to the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind and who knows where this will end.  Do we need to repent, pray and turn from our wicked ways as a nation?  Absolutely.  Will I be praying on 9/11? Ditto.  Will God heal our land if we do?  I honestly can’t say.  But I would hope “we the people” would be open to praying more and often for our nation.  Perhaps if we did that, flying the flag at half-mast would be a little less common.

Sometimes the Status Quo is the Way to Go by Chris White

^" Do not move an ancient landmark
    or enter the fields of the fatherless"  --Proverbs 23:10

Proverbs 23:10 is a message for all of us.  In context it prescribes equity between neighbors and just treatment of the poor.  The old saying “people aren’t against you as much as they are for themselves” holds true here.  We all have a side to us that tends to want to arrange everything according to our own interests even if that means blurring the lines to do so.  In the ancient world, property was marked by boundary stones or landmarks.  These established normal property lines and determined what belonged to whom.  An incremental land theft could be made when a boundary marker was moved and in so doing the property owner on the receiving end of this was actually being robbed of their livelihood.  If the landowner is poor, their poverty is exacerbated.  A question worth asking here is why only ancient landmarks are mentioned and not new ones?  New ones still having living witnesses who can and will question any alterations in the lines.  Ancient ones, however, don’t have any living witnesses to defend them.  With no one alive who was part of the original decision and formulation, the present generation is easily tempted to take liberties according to their needs and desires now.  Obviously this moral value regarding real estate has a broader implication for any person or society.  Some things do need to be updated over time to fit current realities.  No one understands this better than pastors who are often torn between the pressure of staying current with a constantly changing society and the safety of “we’ve always done it that way”.  Both positions have their pluses and minuses.  But other boundaries need to be changed with extreme caution or not at all.  It seems especially true now where modern man is questioning the very foundations of human society such as marriage and family structure.  Behaviors which were once considered evil are being declared harmless, and that which was once aberrant is now normal.  Even now in America, matters that have long been constitutional rights are up for discussion and modification, while new rights are being ‘discovered’ that would have been utterly foreign to our nation’s founders.  What to do? Never question an ancient boundary?  Perish the thought!  The wisdom in this matter is to investigate why the boundary was set where it was long ago and who set it in the first place.  In some rare circumstances a change might be in order for antiquity alone is no guarantor of always being right.  But in most circumstances, if an honest inquiry is made without a particular bias for novelty or antiquity, good reasons will always be found for leaving the boundary marker right where we found it.