Tag Archives: Bible

Bible and Theology

#508: Christians and the Law

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #508, on the subject of Christians and the Law.

Someone whom I hold dear, a gamer who met me at a convention and played Multiverser there and later online, sent me a complex question in a message.  It should be stated that he was once a Christian youth minister but was disillusioned and became a devout pagan.  I promised to address the question here.

We begin with the question, in its entirety.

I don’t remember what prompted me to think of this, but I had a thought I wanted your opinion on…as essentially the only Christian I know.

Specifically, I was thinking about Matthew 5:17, “I have come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.”  Etc. etc.

If the Law has been fulfilled…Does that not have…not the same meaning but the same end result?

Think of it like this.  You go to a baseball game, and it gets rained out.  The game has been “abolished.”

You go again the following week, and the Yankees get their asses handed to them in nine innings.

In both cases, the game ended, but in one case it was called off early and in the other case it ran its course and was finished in a natural way.

If Jesus fulfilled the law, if his “new and everlasting covenant” supplanted the older, not-everlasting ones…

Doesn’t that mean that Christians are no longer beholden to anything in the Old Testament?

I don’t just mean the Jewish dietary laws and stuff that modern people ignore routinely.  I mean all of it.

Like.

Christians have no reason to ever quote the Ten Commandments; the covenant of Moses was fulfilled.

Leviticus, Deuteronomy, all historically interesting but no longer binding?

Those things haven’t “passed from the law,” or at least hadn’t as of Matthew 5:17-20, but if the covenant is fulfilled and a new one is written…isn’t the Law itself no longer the Law?

You’re under a new Constitution now.

I’m still happily Heathen; none of this stuff is incumbent upon me, but something got me thinking about this and you’re pretty much the only person I could imagine talking about this with.  So.  What do you think?

I am tempted simply to say he is at least very close to completely correct, and leave it at that.  However, there are many Christians who would think me a heretic were I to do that, so I have to explain in more detail.

The awkward place to start is to say that almost everyone misunderstands the Law of Moses, and almost always has.

In Exodus 19 (and later in Deuteronomy 5) we have the introduction to that Law, and although it is effectively identical it is poorly understood.  It begins, roughly, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the house of Egypt, out of the land of bondage.  It then continues You will have no other gods before me.  This, though, is the opening structure of what is called a suzerainty treaty, something very common in the ancient middle east but perhaps analogous to some of the politics of the twentieth century.

Here is the set-up:  there were a lot of little countries in the world at that time who fought with each other, the winner taking slaves and treasure and ongoing tribute until there was another battle which turned the tide.  However, they were surrounded by three giants–Egypt, Syria, and Assyria.  Every once in a while one of those would make a move against one of the little countries, and face it, if The U.S. or Russia or China decided to conquer one of the adjacent little countries there wouldn’t be much hope of stopping them.  So when this happened, the victim country would send an envoy to one of the other big countries and apprise them of the situation, and that other country launches its military scaring away the aggressor, who really didn’t want to fight one of the other big boys.  Then the rescuer sends his envoy into the capital of the country he just saved, and becomes the suzerain.  He presents the treaty.  It begins, usually very elaborately, “I did all these wonderful things to rescue you.”  That’s our opening verse here, I brought you out.  It doesn’t have to be longer in Exodus, because the first eighteen chapters tell us about that, and probably a good part of Genesis supports it.  The treaty then continues, “Because I did this, this is how you are going to show your gratitude to me,” and that’s the content of the Law of Moses:  This is how you show your gratitude to Me for rescuing you and making you My people.

Two things should be evident from this.  The first is that that Law never applied to anyone not descended from the people rescued from Egypt, unless they in essence grafted themselves into that people, becoming Jewish.

The second, though, is that the Pharisees had it wrong.  Jesus’ message wasn’t really, “I’m throwing out the Law and doing something different.”  It was “The way you understand the Law is entirely wrong.  It was never something to do to get God to accept you.  It was always what you do to show how grateful you are that God has already accepted you.  And because it is so badly misunderstood, we’re going to get rid of it and let you show your gratitude however you think does that.”

So we look a bit deeper.

When asked for the most important commandment, Jesus answered it was to love God, and that the second was to love people.  That was actually not a new thought; there were rabbis who thought that.  But Jesus said that the entire Law was summed up in those two commandments–that is, the Law was a picture of how to show your love for God and for other people.  Loving looks like this.

So you are mostly right that we don’t need to quote the Ten Commandments–but that’s because they are effectively descriptions of love.  We as Christians don’t refrain from killing because there’s a rule that says don’t kill.  We don’t kill because killing is a very unloving action, and we are supposed to express love even to those who hate us.  So indeed the Law is irrelevant–except that if we are acting against it, we might need to check whether what we are doing is against the concept of love for God and others.  Sometimes it won’t be.  You mentioned the dietary laws, and although we know that at least some of them had important health benefits (trichinosis, food poisoning from spoiled shellfish) their point seems to have been that this was a way of showing gratitude, and we don’t have to show gratitude that particular way as long as we show it some way.

I should add a footnote.  It is evident in the New Testament that the Jewish Christians continued to keep the Law.  However, it is also evident (see Acts 15 and Galatians) that they did not expect the non-Jewish Christians to do so.  This supports the argument that the Law doesn’t apply to most of us:  the Jewish believers were still Jewish, descendants of those delivered by God from Egypt and so adherents to that treaty.  They understood that it was a way to show their gratitude, not a way to win approval, but it was still an obligation upon them.  Thus we have examples of Paul making sacrifices and Peter observing the dietary laws, but at the same time we see that the non-Jewish converts did none of these things.

I know I’ve discussed this somewhere else, but am not certain where.  I do know that this notion is not my own unique heresy–just to cite one other person, Augustine, who when asked about the rules of conduct demanded by the Gospel described them as “Love God, and do as you please.”

Thus my pagan friend is completely correct that the Law of Moses does not really apply to Christians, and exists more as a reference book for understanding how to love God and others.

I’m going to link to three of my books which I think elucidate different aspects of this.

I do hope this has been helpful, and to my heathen friend, thanks for asking.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Memories, Music, Reviews, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#500: A Five Cent Review

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #500, on the subject of A Five Cent Review.

As I was posting the four hundred forty-ninth mark Joseph “young” web log post, I realized I was approaching half a thousand, and wondered whether I should do something to note that milestone.  I decided that a quick look back picking out some of my favorite posts might be worth the effort.  If you missed these, well, I won’t say that there weren’t other good posts nor even that these are all necessarily the best, only that they are the ones I remember fondly.

Unfortunately, on my first pass through those original four hundred forty-nine posts, I marked sixty-five as significant in one way or another, and realized that I would be publishing another fifty before I hit the milestone in question, so I was going to have to go back and read quite a few articles and pare down the list a bit.  I did remove some of those originally included, but I added one or two as well.  Hopefully I’ve succeeded in producing something of quality.

Of course, I have made a practice since this mark Joseph “young” web log began of posting an annual review of almost everything I published over the previous year, here or elsewhere.  The most recent one was #490:  Looking Back, and the previous ones are linked from there.

  1. I test, politically, as a moderate slightly left of center, but I hold a number of more conservative views; one of those is on abortion.  I somewhere suggested that conservatives needed to find way to promote and explain their views to people on the fence, and this, #7:  The Most Persecuted Minority, was a proposed television spot.  It was eventually turned into a radio spot and aired on Lift-FM for a while.
  2. Also on the subject of abortion, #9:  Abolition compares the pro-life movement to the abolition of slavery, in an unexpected way.
  3. #10:  The Unimportance of Facts is my proposed explanation for why voters don’t care what the facts actually are, only whether the politician holds the same views as themselves.
  4. Written a few days after my father died, #51:  In Memoriam on Groundhog Day memorializes him with my recollections.
  5. Having read that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg (now deceased) believed that abortion should be strictly a woman’s decision as an equal protection right (and not a privacy right to be decided by her and her doctor), I wrote #63:  Equal Protection When Boy Meets Girl, suggesting that in regard to unexpected pregnancies most of the advantages are with the mothers.
  6. I’m glad I wrote #65:  Being Married, because I have referred quite a few young couples to it in the years since.  It is a collection of some of the best marital advice I ever received, and worth a read even if you’ve been married as long as I have.
  7. #72:  Being an Author discusses how to identify such a person, that is, how to know whether you can call someone, including yourself, an author, or indeed a poet, artist, or musician.
  8. Having read that Neil DeGrasse Tyson stated it was highly likely that the universe was a similation, I suggested in #76:  Intelligent Simulation that this was entirely inconsistent with his assertion that the theory of intelligent design was not scientific.  The article quotes from my then-pending book Why I Believe.
  9. A satirical article becomes the springboard for a consideration of #79:  Normal Promiscuity, which looks at the fact that what were once identified as illicit and abberant sexual liasons because they were dangerous are now embraced and encouraged as normative.
  10. I genuinely enjoyed writing #83:  Help!  I’m a Lesbian Trapped in a Man’s Body!, a satirical look at the notion that our gender is dependent on something we believe about ourselves.
  11. #84:  Man-Made Religion challenges the notion that the diversity of religions demonstrates that they are all human inventions.
  12. A famous landmark ice cream shop in Milwaukee faced a protest and a boycott when the owner would not permit customers to order in Spanish, and in #87:  Spanish Ice Cream I explain why expecting him to do so is unreasonable.
  13. #88:  Sheep and Goats explains why the popular parable is so badly misunderstood and what it really means.
  14. I almost cut this one as I reread it, but it struck me that #90:  Footnotes on Guidance, as a recounting of my own experiences, might be useful to those whom God is leading to places they did not expect to go.
  15. #93:  What Is a Friend? describes two different understandings of what constitutes friendship, and how that matters.
  16. The notion of government taxing the rich to help the poor is put into perspective in #105:  Forced Philanthropy, asking whether we want the government eagerly awaiting our deaths so it can spend our money.
  17. I wrote what I consider a very valuable nine-part series about ministry, how to recognize and identify it, and how music sometimes fits into it.  The last of those, #107:  Miscellaneous Music Ministries, is not the best of them nor the most useful, but it does briefly identify and link the other eight, and so is the easiest to include here.  I would recommend the entire series, but usually find myself recommending specific entries in it which relate to particular ministries.
  18. Reacting to a discussion of my previously mentioned article on forced philanthropy, #108:  The Value of Ostentation looks at how ostentation actually helps the poor, and why it is a bit illogical to object to it.
  19. I explain why so much current popular Christian music is comprised of simplistic songs, and why this is not so bad a thing as good musicians tend to think, in #109:  Simple Songs.
  20. #114:  Saint Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles responds to the argument that God cannot exist if He allows priests to abuse children.
  21. Inspired by a television show, #115:  Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference applies it to reality, noting that people who deny a connection between environmental factors and homosexuality are ignoring facts.
  22. #120:  Giving Offense is primarily about tolerance, that it does not mean declining to state opinions but only willingness to respect those with whom we disagree.
  23. #126:  Equity and Religion addresses the argument that governments should not provide funding for pre-school education run by religious organizations.
  24. #130:  Economics and Racism explains why racism, by and against everyone, rises when economic conditions fall.
  25. #132:  Writing Horror gives a few tips on writing horror stories and running horror in games which must be worth reading, because Places to Go, People to Be republished it in French as Maîtriser l’Horreur.
  26. A misunderstanding of what it is to be “racist” inspired the composition of #135:  What Racism Is, clarifying that blacks and other non-whites can be and frequently are racist against whites, and that assuming that because someone is white she is racist is a racist assumption.
  27. I wrote a four-part miniseries on the sin and judgment in the first chapter of Romans.  The fourth part, #141:  The Solution to the Romans I Problem, links and summarizes the first three, and gives the solution, that we Christians need to repent of our hidden idolatry.
  28. Responding to a foolish statement from PETA, #162:  Furry Thinking discusses the proper relationship between humans and animals.
  29. In the 70s and 80s I asked a lot of major contemporary Christian musicians their advice for anyone wanting to do what they do, and in #163:  So You Want to Be a Christian Musician I consider the best of that advice, and what we should really want.
  30. I refer people to #168:  Praying For You frequently–whenever someone asks me to pray for them–as it explains what I think is a correct understanding of the obligations created by such prayer requests.
  31. I was hesitant to write #193:  Yelling:  An Introspection, which discusses the futility of yelling and the negative counter-productive impact it has, but several readers thanked me for it.
  32. I would be remiss were I not to mention at least one article about temporal anomalies, and my list includes #199:  Time Travel Movies That Work, a few films in which the outcome is not disastrous.
  33. #200:  Confederates actually argues that the American Civil War was about modern issues like state drug policy and immigration rules.
  34. #207:  The Gender Identity Trap suggests that the idea that someone can be a different gender inside than their physical sex is entirely about prejudices and stereotypes, with nothing to support it in reality.
  35. #208:  Halloween is one of two articles I wrote about the holiday (the other Faith in Play #11:  Halloween) examining Christian attitudes toward it.
  36. Following up on #207:  The Gender Identity Trap, #212:  Gender Subjectivity observes that no one can know that he feels like the wrong gender inside, because that isn’t more than that he doesn’t feel the way he thinks society expects him to feel, and in this case society is simply wrong.
  37. #215:  What Forty-One Years of Marriage Really Means is an addendum to the previous #65:  Being Married, providing an important understanding of what it means that marriage is a covenant, not a contract.
  38. #216:  Why Are You Here? answers the existential question, that is, why do we exist.
  39. #230:  No Womb No Say challenges the notion that men, not having uteruses, should not be able to express an opinion about abortion, by raising a different issue in which men lack the requisite anatomy but still are expected to express an opinion.
  40. #239:  A Departing Member of the Christian Gamers Guild answers suggestions that involvement in fantasy role playing games is detrimental for Christian faith.
  41. #245:  Unspoken Prayer Requests explains why I think they are theologically invalid.
  42. In June of 2019, after attending The Objective Session of The Extreme Tour, I began publishing my songs on this web log.  I ranked about forty of them based on music, lyrics, and the quality of the performance and recording I had available, and began with the one I thought (with a bit of input from one of my sons) best, #301:  The Song “Holocaust”.  It includes a link to a recording of the song.  Additional songs are chained beginning with the second, at the bottom of the article.
  43. #309:  Racially Discriminatory Ticketing highlights and explains a blatant example of racial discrimination by blacks against whites.
  44. In March of 2018 I began a miniseries about early contemporary Christian and Christian rock musicians, still ongoing, with Larry Norman.  Two years later the thirty-ninth entry in that series focused on one of the best bands of the eighties, #342:  Fireworks Times Five, with extensive links to videos from all four of their excellent albums.  It also links the previous thirty-eight such articles.
  45. In 2020, after COVID-19 caused the cancellation of the live Origins game festival, Black Lives Matter protestors demanded that the corporation running the gaming convention make a public statement in support of their position or face a boycott, which shut down efforts to launch an online convention.  #344:  Is It O.K. Not to Make a Statement? attacks this divisive and destructive policy as a blow against the constitutional right not to speak about something.
  46. A frustrated musician asked the question on a Christian music Facebook group, and I offered an answer in #352:  Why No One Cares About Your Songs, which I think might be a must-read for those who aspire to any creative endeavor.
  47. In the discussion of the polarization of America, I suggest in #375:  Fixing the Focus that many Christians have our eyes on the wrong things.
  48. The old economic principle derived from sheep grazing on common land finds a new and problematic application in the world of online retailing, elucidated in #377:  A New Tragedy of the Common.
  49. Normally I link reviews, but this one was sent to me privately, and was the first review I saw of my book Why I Believe, so I feel I would be remiss if I failed to mention my reprinting of it in #386:  An Unsolicited Private Review.
  50. A popular song, a friend’s pregnancy, and the recollection of a spoiled surprise party prompted me to write #394:  Unplanned, suggesting that there aren’t really any accidents, and, again, talking about abortion.
  51. The question was asked, specifically in relation to worship, and I offered an answer in that context which extends beyond it, explaining #396:  Why Music Matters.
  52. #406:  Internet Racism gives reasons for rejecting the call (in Great Britain) that those who post racial slurs against the poor performance of black athletes should be brought up on criminal charges.
  53. I was personally asked to respond to a long article giving ten reasons why the Biblical account of the exodus was untrue, so I wrote an eleven-part miniseries.  It concluded with #425:  Do Similarities Between the Accounts of Moses’ Birth and Certain Myths Make Him a Fictional Character?, which also links and briefly summarizes the ten previous articles.
  54. One of my patrons asked me for #426:  A Christian View of Horror, which suggests that to some degree it can be embraced, but ultimately there is one insurmountable problem.
  55. #429:  Luther College of the Bible and Liberal Arts speaks of the legacy of a small school whose campus has been almost completely obliterated by time.
  56. A couple decades back, the respected Australian role playing e-zine Places to Go, People to Be launched a French edition, and asked my permission to translate articles I had written for them to release in another language, and subsequently to do so with articles I had published through other sites.  Late in 2021 I finally got around to compiling a linked list of what was was then twenty-six translated articles, in #431:  Mark Joseph Young En Français.
  57. #434:  Foolish Wisemen draws a lesson about celebrating Christmas versus the rest of the story from the account of these visitors.
  58. #444:  Ability versus Popularity discusses contests in which the public is asked to vote for the best, and contestants encourage friends who know nothing of the competitors to vote for a friend.
  59. I had recently seen the argument that laws restricting abortion were an impingement on the religious practice of Jewish women, and since I had heard the same argument decades before in Senate hearings I wrote #446:  The Religious Freedom Abortion Argument, and decided to include it here.
  60. #449:  Cruel and Unusual is not exactly about the death penalty and expresses no opinion on it, but does find fault with the protest that opposes it by attempting to make it more painful.
  61. #459:  Publication Anticipation provided a list of my books recently published in 2021-2 plus my expectations for 2023 and beyond.  Those mentioned there which have been published since are listed in the 2023 review article mentioned at the top of this page.
  62. I’m listing #469:  Church History because it was an answer to the last question I was asked by my long-time friend John Mastick which I answered in a web log post before he died.  His question was about what distinguished Calvinists, Pentecostals, and Charismatics from each other, and I threw in Catholics, Lutherans, and Evangelicals for clarity.  He had previously prompted #413:  The Abomination of Desolation and #465:  Believing in Ghosts.
  63. The issue arose in our study of the Gospel According to Mark in the Christian Gamers Guild’s Chaplain’s Bible Study, leading to an expanded exploration of it in #475:  The Mother of Jairus’ Daughter, which I contend is the woman cured of bleeding in the healing nested in the middle of that miracle account.
Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Games, Logic and Reasoning, Memories, Music, Reviews, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#490: Looking Back

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #490, on the subject of Looking Back.

Once again, as we did last year in web log post #461:  2022 in Review and in previous years linked successively back from there, we are recapping everything published in the past year–sort of.

I say “sort of” because once again some material is being omitted.  There have been a few hundred posts to the Christian Gamers Guild Bible Study which can be accessed there but aren’t really fully indexed anywhere.  Meanwhile, the dozen articles in the Faith in Play series and the similar dozen in the RPG-ology series were just indexed on the Christian Gamers Guild site in 2023 At the Christian Gamers Guild Reviewed, and won’t be repeated here.  The RPG-ology and Faith in Play series were both released in book form this year, along with two other books, RPG Theory 101 and Other Essays in Role Playing Games and An Analytical Commentary on The Book of Romans.  These are all available in paperback and Kindle format; follow the links for more information about them.

I also posted several days a week on my Patreon web log, which announces almost everything I publish elsewhere on the same day it’s published, but again omitting the Bible study posts.  There is also a bi-monthly review of my work at Goodreads under the title The Ides of Mark, now at sixty-two installments, which does include some information about those Bible Study materials.

This year saw the last of the web log song posts, at least as an ongoing series.  These included:

I continued posting the ninth Multiverser novel Con Verse Lea, featuring Lauren Hastings, Tomiko Takano, and James Beam, from chapter 27 to the end (chapter 85), which are indexed there along with several behind-the-writings posts about it, and after posting a few character papers to the support site I continued with the tenth novel, In Version, featuring Robert Slade, James Beam, Joseph Kondor, and Derek Brown, through chapter 91.  Behind-the-writings posts on these two books included web log posts:

Collaborator Eric R. Ashley and I have managed to finish the twelfth novel, A Dozen Verses, and the thirteenth, Multiverser:  The Thirteenth Story, and are working on one called Verse a Tile.  Separately, I picked up the horror book I dropped, Corpoises, and wrote a bit more, and will probably finish it shortly.  I’m also continuing setup work on the analytical commentary series.

I think the rest of everything is a bit miscellaneous and disorganized, but here’s what I find.

Mark Joseph “young” web log post #465:  Believing in Ghosts considers whether ghosts exist and what attitude Christians should have about them.  It was an answer to a question from a friend.

Another question from the same friend led to post #469:  Church History, rather narrowly focused on distinguishing Reformation Protestants from later Evangelicals and both from Pentecostals and Charismatics.

Responding to a question from a time travel fan, #474:  Preliminary Temporal Thoughts on Paper Girls looked at the description of a television series and the time travel implications.

In our Christian Gamers Guild Chaplain’s Bible Study the accout of the healings of Jairus’ daughter and the woman who touched the hem of his garment arose, and when I suggested the woman was the girl’s mother I was asked why I thought this.  That seemed too big a question for the Bible study, so it became web log post #475:  The Mother of Jairus’ Daughter.

A few years ago someone had written to ask me what I knew about Bernice Wurst, an artist who was a friend of my mother who gave me two of her paintings.  I had featured one of them in an article in the Game Ideas Unlimited series.  It bothered me that when I looked for information about her on the web, there wasn’t much, so I decided to record the few reminiscences I could recall in post #486:  Bernice Wurst:  Impressions of an Impressionist.

In other news, I made it to AnimeNEXT this year, and expect to be invited coming up in June once again; I edited and subsequently reviewed two books for a friend–the BeautyAndTheBell trilogy–and expect to start on the third soon; and I posted a few recipes and some other images to Instagram.

I think that summarizes the year; the new year has already gotten started, but you can keep up by following my social media sites including Patreon.  I’ve already started something new this year, but maybe I’ll tell you about it next year once I see how it goes.