Apr, 28
2016
Apologetics

Joshua and the Big Message of the Bible

Joshua Big Message

The Legacy Reading Plan is designed to read through the Bible once a year, every year, for the rest of your life. This reading calendar is naturally segmented into seasons, and seasons into months. So at the beginning of each year you will know that during the winter your focus will be on Pentateuch and poetry, and in the spring historical books, summer the prophets, and during the fall the New Testament. Each season is further broken down into months; therefore, every January your goal is to read through Genesis and Exodus, and every December to read through the Synoptic Gospels and Acts.

There are times when you will naturally ten chapters at a time, and others when you’ll read just one or two. More importantly, however, you’re going to read through the Bible, just as you read through other literature. For example, in reading through the Song of Solomon, sometimes called the Song of Songs, it’s the kind of book that you will read in one sitting. It’s a great book in so many ways. It’s a love story written to celebrate God’s gift of love and sexual expression within the bounds of marriage. As such it’s a frank expression of one of the greatest gifts God has given human kind, albeit one which must be responsibly enjoyed within the bounds of marriage.

The Book of Joshua is the book we start in springtime. It’s an incredibly exhilarating book. (If you don’t have the Legacy Reading Plan, you can download it here. For instructions on how to use the Legacy Reading Plan, click here.)

You have in the Bible this picture that’s so poignant and profound. Adam falls into a life of perpetual sin, and he’s banished from Paradise. He’s relegated to restlessness and wanderings. Separated from intimacy and fellowship with his Creator. Then the very chapter that references the fall records the divine plan for restoration and fellowship (Gen. 3:15). That plan takes on definition with God’s promise to make Abram a great nation through which all the peoples on earth will be blessed (Gen. 12:1-3). Abraham’s call, therefore, is the divine antidote to Adam’s fall. God’s promise that Abraham’s children would inherit the promise land was but a preliminary step in a progressive plan through which Abram and the heirs of Abram would inherit a better country, a heavenly country. That plan comes into sharp focus when we see Moses leading Abram’s descendants out of their four-hundred-year bondage in Egypt. For forty years of wilderness wandering God tabernacle with His people and He prepared them for the land of promise. Like Abram, however, Moses only saw that promise from afar.

When you start to read the Book of Joshua you will see God’s plan taking on tangible reality, as Joshua leads the children of Israel into Palestine. The wanderings of Adam, Abraham, and Moses finally give way to rest on every side. In Joshua you will read these words: “Not one of all the good promises the Lord your God gave you has failed. Every promise has been fulfilled; not one has failed” (Josh. 23:14, NIV).

As Adam had fallen in Paradise, Abram’s descendants would fall in Palestine. Thus, Joshua’s words in his final farewell take on ominous reality: “Just as every good promise of the Lord your God has come true, so the Lord will bring on you all the evil he has threatened, until he has destroyed you from this good land he has given you. If you violate the covenant of the Lord your God…you will quickly perish from the good land he has given you” (Josh. 23:15-16, NIV). Although the land promises reached their zenith under Solomon, the land eventually vomited out the children of the promise, just as it vomited out the Canaanites before them. During the Assyrian and the Babylonian exiles the wanderings experienced by Adam were again experienced by the descendants of Abram.

God’s promises to Abraham, of course, were far from exhausted because Palestine was but a preliminary phase in a patriarchal promise. God would make Abram not just the father of a nation, but Abram would become Abraham the father of many nations. Abram would be heir of the world. The climax of the promise would not be Palestine regained, but something far greater. It would be Paradise restored. As God had promised Abraham real estate so too He had promised him a royal seed. Joshua led the children into the regions of Palestine, but Jesus the royal seed of Abraham will one day lead His children into the restoration of Paradise.

The point here is simply to say as you read through Joshua remember you are on a continuing journey through the Bible, which is God’s unfolding plan of redemption. It starts with Paradise and the loss of Paradise and it ends with Paradise restored. A New Jerusalem, not the old Jerusalem, but a New Jerusalem that Paul says, “is free and she is our mother” (Gal. 4:26, NIV). Paradise lost becomes Paradise restored, and that is what each and every one who loves Jesus Christ had to look forward too.

This is just a little incentive to get in the Word of God and get the Word of God into you, and start seeing that this is a congruent picture of everything we long and hope for.

Paradise Lost Becomes Paradise Restored.

—Hank Hanegraaff

This blog was adapted from What’s the Big Message of the Old Testament?

April 28th, 2016 by Christian Research Institute | Type: Standard
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Apr, 26
2016
Apologetics

Cultural Change Acceleration Bringing About the Great Evangelical Recession

Dickerson, John-Cultural Change Acceleration

On April 21, 2016, Hank Hanegraaff invited John S. Dickerson onto the Bible Answer Man broadcast to discuss The Great Evangelical Recession: 6 Factors That Will Crash the American Church…and How to Prepare (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2013). The following is a snapshot of their conversation:

Hank Hanegraaff:  In this book, The Great Evangelical Recession, John Dickerson underscores 6 factors about to crash the American church. It is a crash that Dickerson predicts is a s certain as the great recession that pressed millions of homeowners into foreclosure and pummeled some of the world’s largest financial institutions into bankruptcy. Here on the broadcast to talk about The Great Evangelical Recession John Dickerson. Welcome.

John Dickerson: Thank you so much for having me Hank.

Hank: This is an incredible book. You start out talking about the dramatic shrinkage of American evangelicals, and I suppose that has a great deal to say about the weight of evangelicals in the present election?

John:  It really does. We’re often surprised to see—those of us who are sincere Bible believing Christians, which we often used the word “evangelical” to describe that, we believe in salvation by grace alone through faith alone, and that the Bible’s God’s Word—very often lately, not only in this election cycle but in the last couple, many evangelicals have been surprised how little political influence we have. That is one of the, that is the result. The reason we’re having less political influence is the result of one of the trends in this book: that we’re actually a smaller movement than many of us have been led to believe. By the way, all these conclusions, what they are, they are an aggregation of the best research that’s out there from all sociologist, all universities, groups like the Pew Research Center, what I did as a journalist, my skill set is to take complex information and simplify it, get my arms around it. So there’re some good books out there about the status of the church, but I felt like there wasn’t anything that kind of got its arms around all the research. Sure enough that was the first thing that came out of the trend, multiple studies, is wow this movement—not Americans who just say “I’m a Christian,” that’s till about 70%, but Americans who actually believe the Bible, believe Jesus is God, He died on the cross for the sins of the world, salvation by grace through faith in Him alone—we’re actually much smaller, closer to about 10% of the population.

Hank: What I remember you saying in the book, if I’m correct, is you put it in international terms, when you say they’re slightly more evangelical in the U.S. then there are Muslims in the greater metro area of Cairo, Egypt.

John: Yeah. That is shocking. So when you—so there’s four separate researchers. Now there’s disagreement among sociologist about how many evangelicals are in in the U.S. and this is because we’re a difficult group to count. If you want to count the number of Catholics, or if you want to go with a cult like the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, they have very centralized offices. Evangelical Christianity is a much more grassroots organic…spiritual movement led by the Spirit of God and the work of God, so as a result, we got under the evangelical umbrella, we’ve got fundamentalist Baptists churches, there are charismatic churches, there are a whole lot of non-denominational independent Bible believing churches, as a result it’s a tough group to count. So sociologist disagree to the extent that there are some as low as 7%, saying were 7% of the U.S. population, there are still some as high as the low 20%, it’s like maybe 23% of the population. What I did is I wanted to look at all those and say, “Is there among these multiple sociologist, is there a common answer?” What I found was four separate researchers who used four separate methodologies and they all concluded independently of each other that we between 7% and 8.9% of the population. Yeah, out of about three-hundred-twenty-million people that puts us at twenty-some-million., and yes the greater Cairo area there are about nineteen-million Muslims. Now who’s to know how many of those are devout Muslims and how many are conveniently Muslims because they kind of have to be, but that does put it into context. Another way of saying it is this: If all of us who are sincere Bible believing Christians, if we all moved to the state of New York, and if we displaced the New Yorkers, there would not be a serious Bible believing Christian in the other forty-nine states. We’re about the population of New York State.

Hank: I want to focus in on another point that you make in the book, another factor that will crash the American church. This is the growing cultural hatred for anything Christian. I’m the father of twelve children, I have four children in universities at this point in time, and those kids, my kids, are telling me about the growing cultural hatred for anything Christian in terms that I have never heard before. I mean tell me, when I say, “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about,” they say, “No, you really don’t know what I’m talking about. You have to be there to believe it.”

John: It’s true. One of the, you know if you want to call it a tectonic plate, an underlying cause of these six trends of decline in American Christianity, one of those tectonic plates is the rate of cultural change is accelerating. That idea is not unique to me. A whole number of secular sociologists are saying the actual speed at which culture changes is accelerating, perhaps due to some technology innovations, like us all having smartphones and other things, but whatever the cause is, the actual rate of cultural change is accelerating. Sadly, for those of us who love Jesus and the church, it is not accelerating in the direction of loving God and His people.

If anything…we know there’s a supernatural component to it, but humanly there’s a great reaction, that the Christians were so powerful politically, and were such a force, and now there’s a generation being taught down through textbooks, really at every level now, being taught that essentially that Christians were bad, and now to fight for justice and equality we have to put the Christians back in their place. And so, you know if you’re listening, this book we’re talking about, The Great Evangelical Recession, if for no other reason, get a copy to read this chapter called “Hated.” And again, I’m an award winning journalist, when I was a journalist, I wrote for secular publications. I was a journalist who was a Christian, but not writing for Christian publications. I’m writing about a lot of my peers, and essentially what I deduced from a lot of research as well as really some anecdotes that are just undisputable, is that every key leading edge of cultural society in the United States right now—so we’re talking about mainstream media, higher education, the large costal metropolis cities, the capital of the nation, and of course our universities and higher education—every leading edge of cultural society right now is a place where Christians are no longer kind of smirked at, we talk about…there used to be an apathy toward us, like “Oh yeah, those weirdo Christians,” that apathy has given way to an outright antagonism. There is a hostility that when you actually encounter it, it will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck because it is a prejudging. It is a prejudice. It is a closed minded hatred towards those of us who name the Name of Jesus and take His word at all seriously, and so boy, you know what I really wrestle in this book.

The book is set up, the first half is all me writing as a journalist, and I’m not trying to weigh in with my opinion, it’s just here’s the facts of where we stand as the church, the bride of Christ, in the United States.

The second half of the book, I take off my journalist hat and I put on my pastor hat—I’ve been a pastor for about seven years now, started attending seminary working on my master’s degree, while I was still a journalist—and I look at the New Testament specifically through the lens of each of these trends. So in other words, this book in one chapter is going to understand the cultural change going on around us. Why is it that a Christian been in jail within the last year for not signing a marriage certificate? Why are these things? Well, when you understand the cultural trends there not as surprising. It doesn’t make it easier, but it helps to understand ok this is why it’s changing in the trajectory. Then in the other chapter, we look Scripture to say, how does God tell us to live when we are hated, persecuted, and misunderstood? How do we represent Christ in a culture that is pagan, and hypersexual, and anti-Jesus? Well, thankfully, a lot of the New Testament believers were in a culture like that and the Word of God kind of comes to life. My prayer in this book is to equip you in your mind, and give you skill and wisdom as you live, but then also at a heart level to say now do we really live for Jesus in these times, because we’re not here by accident, He ordained that we would be living at this moment in history.

Hank: John, you are not simply cursing the darkness in this book but you’re really teaching Christians how to build a lighthouse in the midst of the gathering storm.

John: That’s exactly right. You know there’re two—it’s a natural response when we experience that hatred first hand. There’s a, I mean I remember a time—this happened a couple of years ago—there was a Muslim gentleman who wrote a biography about Jesus. The book, essentially he was going around on mainstream media and multiple journalists, or at least television hosts and radio hosts, were calling him a religion scholar whose and expert in Jesus. Well, the reality is that he’s a creative writing professor and his PhD is in the sociology of Jihad, and this book is saying Jesus never claimed to be God, and a whole bunch of other heresies. So I wrote a piece for a mainstream news outlet saying it’s not fair, this guy’s misrepresenting his credentials, and as a journalist I’m saying to fellow news media persons be fair in expressing this guy’s credentials, because if the scenario was reverse, in other words, if a Christian whose PhD was in the history of Christianity, wrote a book about Muhammad that was blasphemous to Muslims, well NPR wouldn’t have him on for three days in a row. No and so I was just saying it’s not just what we’re doing and as a Christian I would beg to my fellow journalists can we be fair about this? I wrote the argument really thoughtfully and carefully, knowing I would get push back. But, I have to tell you, having written the book about how fast the culture is changing and how hated that we are, I was totally unprepared for the amount of just vitriolic hate mail, and actual professional journalist likening me to a Nazi. Just really horrific stuff, including this so-called religion scholar going on Twitter and just, I mean, every curse word that you can imagine in a completely unprofessional way musing about me, and I remember the hair on the back of my neck standing up because I knew that there’s oppression for our view, but I had no idea just how frightening and outnumbered it can feel when we really stand up to the darkness. So all that to say as the culture around us is changing, we will all find ourselves in situations like that. It might be at a Thanksgiving table where you have a relative who comes out with a moral position that just shocks you, or it might be in your work place. It’s not a question of if we will face hostility, it’s a question of when. So that’s where I try as a pastor to really equip us.

You know it’s interesting. There’s this verse in 1 Peter. I think its chapter 2 verse 12. Where Peter says live such good lives among the pagans that even though they accuse you of doing wrong, they will see your good deeds and glorify your father in heaven. I came across that verse as I was really praying: Ok God, I see these six trends these six problems in the church, what are your solutions. You know because I don’t want to give my solutions, I want to give God’s. So every one of these solutions is based on Scriptures like that one.

 

Listen to the full interview here: The Great Evangelical Recession with John Dickerson – Part 1

Get the Great Evangelical Recession. To order, click here.

April 26th, 2016 by Christian Research Institute | Type: Standard
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Apr, 21
2016
Apologetics

The Abomination of Desolation of Past Futures

Abomination of Desolation of Futures Past

Are Jesus and Daniel talking about the same thing in Daniel 9:27 and Mark 13:14?

If you look at Matthew 24, you have Jesus actually saying, “When you standing in the holy place the ‘abomination that causes desolation’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel —let the reader understand— then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains” (vv. 15-16, NIV) and so forth. (Matthew 24 is the equivalent of the Mark 13 passage). Jesus of course applies it to His own generation. He says, “I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (vv. 34-35, NIV).

The abomination of desolation spoken of by Jesus was prophesied six centuries earlier by Daniel. And Jesus now takes what happened in the second century under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, his desecration of the temple, and applies it to what is going to happen when the temple is not just going be desecrated but it is actually going to be destroyed. So in the fullness of time, what Jesus declared desolate, was desolated by Roman infidels, they destroyed the temple fortress, they ended the daily sacrifice, and this time, very much unlike the time of Antiochus, the blood that desecrated the sacred altar didn’t flow from the carcasses of unclean pigs but from the corpses of unbelieving Pharisees. This time the Holy of Holies was not only desecrated by the defiling statue of a pagan god, but it was destroyed by the greed of despoiling soldiers, and the temple would never be rebuilt again.

Jesus wasn’t talking about future desecrations?

Christ looked forward a generation and prophesied what would happen forty years hence. So He looked forty years into the future and said this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have been fulfilled. So it’s past to us, but it was future at the time Jesus spoke.

—Hank Hanegraaff

For further study:

Apocalypse When? Why Most End-time Teaching Is Dead Wrong (Hank Hanegraaff)

Response to National Liberty Journal Article on The Apocalypse Code (Hank Hanegraaff)

Did Daniel Prophesy a Seven-Year Great Tribulation? (Hank Hanegraaff)

The Perils of Newspaper Eschatology (Elliot Miller)

When the Truth Gets Left Behind (Gene Edward Veith reviews the Left Behind Series by Tim La Haye and Jerry Jenkins)

Is “Coming on Clouds” a Reference to Christ’s Second Coming? (Hank Hanegraaff)

Which Generation is “This Generation”? (Hank Hanegraaff)

Recommended resources for your eschatology library:

The Apocalypse Code (B1026)
by Hank Hanegraaff

The Apocalypse Code – MP3 Audiobook (M407)
by Hank Hanegraaff

Has God Spoken (B1045)
by Hank Hanegraaff

Has God Spoken – MP3 Audiobook (M405)
by Hank Hanegraaff

Last Days According To Jesus (B512)
by R.C. Sproul

Is Jesus Coming Soon? (B940)
by Gary DeMar

The Last Disciple – paperback (B817)
by Hank Hanegraaff and Sigmund Brouwer

The Last Sacrifice – paperback (B835)
by Hank Hanegraaff and Sigmund Brouwer

The Last Temple – paperback (B1058)
By Hank Hanegraaff and Sigmund Brouwer

This blog was adapted from the Ask Hank feature: Are Jesus and Daniel talking about the same thing in Daniel 9:27 and Mark 13:14?  

April 21st, 2016 by Christian Research Institute | Type: Standard
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Apr, 14
2016
Apologetics, Journal Topics, Reviews

Empty Villages of People Erased from Space and Consciousness

Burge, Gary-Ethnocracy not Sustainable

 

On the April 6, 2016 edition of the Bible Answer Man, Hank Hanegraaff invited Dr. Gary Burge onto the broadcast for an interview. Gary is a professor of New Testament at Wheaton. He holds a PhD in New Testament studies from Aberdeen University in Scotland. He’s the author of two incredible books; one is entitled Whose Land Whose Promise, and the other Jesus and the Land: The New Testament Challenge to Holy Land Theology.

Hank Hanegraaff: Just a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of spending some time with Dr. Gary Burge in the West Bank and I am delighted to have you on the broadcast.

Gary Burge: Thanks Hank. It’s really great to be with you again.

Hank: I want to quote from your book Whose Land Whose Promise and get your reaction. I saw this up close and personal once again a couple of weeks ago but the quote from Bethlehem pastor Mitri Raheb. He says,

I am a Palestinian [Christian] living under Israeli occupation. My captor daily seeks ways to make life harder for me. He encircles my people with barbed wire; he builds walls around us, and his army sets many boundaries around us. He succeeds in keeping thousands of us in camps and prisons. Yet despite all these efforts, he has not succeeded in taking my dreams from me. I have a dream that one day I will wake up and see two equal peoples living next to each other, coexisting in the land of Palestine, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.

The reason I bring up this quote is I want to start by asking you whether this is simply a vain dream in light of the strong Zionist predilection to completely cleanse the land of everyone but those who can legitimately say they are Jews and that based on a theology, a theology called Christian Zionism.

Gary: Yeah, Hank, thanks for that, that is a marvelous quote from Mitri Raheb. Mitri Raheb is one of the most famous Palestinian pastors who reside in Bethlehem, of course, and your listeners may not know, but, he’s an amazing pastor and theologian, prolific writer as well. I don’t think it’s a vain dream at all. I think that what’s unfortunately happening today is that too much of the politics of both the Palestinian side and the Israeli side are conducted by sort of outspoken extreme voices, and moderate voices, like Mitri’s, and there are many moderate voices inside of Israel as well, understand that this land, this country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan intimately will have to be shared. This idea of building what we call an ethnocracy—rule by a race—is just simply not going to be sustainable. So, I mean today, for instance, 49% of the population of greater Israel between Mediterranean and the Jordan is Palestinian, and they have a really high birth rate. So everyone knows that in 50 or 60 years the population will be majority Palestinian. Minorities cannot rule majorities and have a sustainable future. It just doesn’t work that way. It didn’t work in South Africa, it won’t work here. So I tell my friends who really do love Israel, and I think we all should, you know, love both peoples in this conflict, it seems to me that the only future that Israel has is to become what I call a bi-national state, that is to say, two nations, two peoples, learning how to share this world together. Otherwise, if you simply have a policy of containment, like Mitri describes—right now Palestinians of the West Bank, over 2 ½ million of them, live behind a 30 foot wall, electrified fences, check points everywhere, regular shootings—this experience just makes a population explode., and I don’t believe there’s a future for that at all.

Hank: You contributed to the Christian Research Journal a Summary Critique Review, a review of the book Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948. It’s a book by Noga Kadman. An important book in that the story of what happen to the Palestinians in the birth of modern Israel in 1948 is not well known to most Christian intellectuals in the West. I would say most Christians period.

Gary: No. Most Christians don’t know this part of the story. Actually I think, I’m really, really glad that the Journal had us review this book because most American listeners that I meet and speak to when I’m out on the road at conferences is they don’t realize that when Israel became a nation in 1948, the Jews were actually in a strong minority in the country. They did a British census in 1948; there were 1.3 million Palestinians and 600,000 Jews. So, therefore, the Israelis knew as they began their state, they had to do a couple things: they had to move out a huge population—we call it ethnic cleansing—and that they destroyed the villages that these people came from or they gave their homes and properties to incoming Jewish settlers.  But what Noga Kadman has done is she has written the definitive book telling about how this ethnic cleansing worked like, just like machines, it was just incredible. Then what she does is she quantifies exactly what happens in all these villages. So, she did case studies of how villages were cleansed, how populations were moved, and at the end of the book, she actually gives you a catalogue of all four hundred some odd villages, and what was there, what’s left today. If you go to Israel as a tourist, you’ll never be shown this stuff. This is the dark secret. I think of it as the dark hidden secret which is in Israel and every Israeli knows it but they can barely talk about it. To build the state they had to cleanse the land, they felt, and this led to enormous suffering for three quarter of a million people, about 750,000 people were essentially affected by this. So, yeah, Kadman’s book is really, really important indisputable evidence of the cleansing of the land.

Hank: You are a New Testament theologian, and ideas have consequences, you think about the Christian Zionist notion that the cleansing, the ethnic cleansing of the land is a divine command. For Zionists, secular Zionists, this is a defensible cruelty, but for Christians it’s a divine command. And this gets down to a hermeneutical issue doesn’t it?

Gary: Oh, it does. It really does, because, in fact Hank that’s exactly right, because what they do is they read the land promise to Abraham, say in Genesis 12, and what they do is they jump from that to the Book of Joshua, and see how Joshua then used military violence to cleanse the land of Canaanites,  and then they jump from there to the twentieth century, and they think that those models for land promise and land reclamation, these all ought to be in play today. What they have jumped over are the prophets of the Old Testament and they jumped right over the New Testament and that’s why I wrote that book Jesus and the Land because I think that as Christians we need to think theologically about land promise and what we believe as Christians about territory and God’s presence in the Holy Land.

Hank: A couple of weeks ago I was speaking in the West Bank and talking about the gospel in the face of religious extremism. Now I pointed out that two fault lines run through the Zionist landscape: one is the promises God made to Abraham were not fulfilled in the past, and, therefore, they must be fulfilled in the present or the future, and the second thing is that God has two distinct people; your comments.

Gary: Well, I think the issue here is that—I think in the Old Testament they understand that that promise of land was actually fulfilled in the arrival of Joshua, the establishment of the tribal lands under judges, and the establishment of the monarchy in the Old Testament. I think the important thing for us to remember is the New Testament is reconfiguring what it means to understand land in God’s providence. What the New Testament has done is it says, look even though Judaism is territorial, we as Christians do not embrace that territorialism. In other words, God’s interest, God’s project today is a different project that He had in the days of Joshua. God’s project today is the reclamation not of the Holy Land from one people, but it is the reclamation of the entire world for all people. So you have a kind of universalizing of the message, a universal embrace of all cultures and nations, and of all lands. That is why the church has always had a worldwide mission because we believe that God does love all cultures and places. So there is no hint inside of the New Testament of the construction of you might say an empire, a nation, a kingdom in the Holy Land, there is instead a charge to go out broadly into all lands. You can actually, Hank, I believe you can find that kind of Christian Zionist impulse right in the Book of Acts. In Acts 1:6 when Jesus arrives in His resurrected glory, the first question that the apostles have for Him is Lord are you now at last in all of your power going to restore Israel’s kingdom. It’s a political question they have. So they have fallen to that low point of thinking God’s interest is in the reconstruction of American political sort of kingdoms. And Jesus deflects the question entirely as, no you are supposed to go to the ends of the earth. So, in other words, the providence, sort of the location of God’s interest is not in the Holy Land; the location of God’s interest is in all lands and therefore go out.

Hank: I’m talking to Gary Burge, he is a professor of New Testament, contributor to the Christian Research Journal, and we’re talking about a review that Gary did on a book entitled Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948. One of the things you write in this review is that,

Both sides had witnessed terrible things but nothing can quite compare with the Palestinian losses of life, residence, and culture that we see…it is difficult to imagine the expulsion of 700,000…people, the demolition of their homes, and the many atrocities they suffered after 1948.

Gary: Right. I know. In fact that’s one of the parts of this whole story that I find the most frustrating personally because, Hank, as you and I know, as you travel in those areas and you do research on what actually happened, when we come back to the United States and we try to describe the Palestinian narrative of their experiences, so many of us either don’t understand it, or really find it hard to acknowledge it. To be sure, Palestinian violence against Israelis is indefensible, and it’s horrible, and it’s subject to condemnation. I understand that. But, what we don’t understand is that there’s violence that goes the other direction as well from Israel to Palestine. It is not always defensive and the number of Palestinians who have been killed is so out of proportion to the Israeli deaths. It’s just hard to believe. Really it’s the loss of hope. You know, you and I, Hank, we have hope because we believe that we have a future. We believe that we can, you know, have a safe home to live in, a career, we have a family, we have a lot of freedom here. The Palestinians have lost hope because they live in containment. It isn’t going to be long before some people are going to look at this and begin to describe it with that horrible word that was used in South Africa. At what point does this become kind of an apartheid situation? Everyone hates to use the word, I understand that, it’s an explosive word, but we have to give these people hope and freedom or else their containment becomes a situation just like that.

Hank: Gary Burge, you are a hero of the faith to me and I deeply appreciate your contribution to the Christian Research Journal.

Gary: Thanks Hank.

Get Jesus and the Land (B1059) by Gary Burge. To order, click here.

Get Gary’s review of Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948 (Indiana University Press, 2015) by Noga Kadman in vol. 39 b, 1 (2016) of the Christian Research Journal. To order, click here.

Subscriptions to the Christian Research Journal are available. To order, click here.

April 14th, 2016 by Christian Research Institute | Type: Standard
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Apr, 07
2016
Apologetics

Father Themi on Seeing the Crucified Christ through Solidarity with the Beggar

Father Themi-Identify in Solidarity with the Beggar

Father Themistoclese Athony Adamopoulo, “Father Themi,” is a Greek Orthodox priest. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Australia, but was looking for fulfillment in all the wrong places. At one point he was a neo-Marxist, at another stage a rock star, (founding member of the 1960s Australian rock-n-roll band The Flies), on another level an academic with a PhD from Brown University and a Master of Theology from Princeton Divinity School, but then he had a radical encounter with God. He had a Damascus road experience, and as a result of that he has given up everything to serve the poor.

Hank Hanegraaff invited Father Themi to be a guest on the March 14, 2016 Bible Answer Man broadcast. The following are some highlights of their conversation.

Hank Hanegraaff: In studio with Dr. Father Themi. He is an Orthodox priest who has given his life to reaching out to the poor in a tangible way. I think this is an example for all of us. It’s not our bank account in this world that ultimately matters, it is doing precisely what Jesus Christ said to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not corrupt, where thieves do not break in and steal, for where your treasure is there your heart will be also.

Thinking right now about the words of Paul in Corinthians, Father Themi, when he says there’s no foundation that you can build other than Jesus Christ, but on that foundation you can build, you can either build using gold, silver and costly stones, or wood, hay, and straw, and the day of the Lord is going to reveal the kind of material we were building with. If what we have built survives, we’re going to receive a reward. If it does not, we are going to suffer loss. Paul kind of gives us an image of people escaping burning buildings with little more than chard clothes on their backs. So the here and now is critical. People often talk about salvation; very seldom talk about the fact that there are degrees of reward in heaven. What we do now matters for all eternity. I want you to talk in this regard about what you have done. First of all, the culture shock. You’re in America sitting in a prosperous city that culture shock between where you are right now and when you go back to Sierra Leone. It is a different world. Even though you can transfer from one culture to another very quickly with an airplane, it’s a completely different world, but there’s a world there of hurting people that need to be reached, not only with the Gospel, but with material means as well.

Father Themi Adamopulo: You hit it on the head. We are living in two planets. We call it earth, but I call it two dimensional planet. There is the abundance, and the apparent wealth of nations such as yours, the United States, and Canada, Europe to some degree of course, and Australia and so forth.  These are the rich countries. They’re the countries of abundance and wealth. There is another world that is hidden and it seems to be neglected by our consciousness. It’s as if we don’t want to know about it. We only get to know about it in certain times that we allow ourselves to get involved, e.g. when there is an Ebola crisis. Ok, suddenly we’ve become aware of Africa, but even then, even then, only when it strikes us. When Ebola hit us in Sierra Leone last year, it was terrible. People were dying everywhere. Ok, even where we were, people dying in the streets, people’s bodies in the streets. Near us, it’s pandemonium, ok. Nobody lifted a finger in the international world. For months we were suffering. Months! Until, a gentleman from Liberia came to the United States, gave Ebola to a nurse in Texas, suddenly, Ebola exists in the consciousness of the Western world. But, until Ebola hit a White person there was no Ebola, and all the thousands of people that were dying in Africa—and I saw it myself, I’m a witness to that—nothing was done. Even the World Health Organization said in the beginning oh this is not a big deal, lets not worry about it. It was shameful, and disgusting, that such a statement could be made, and it was made. The rest of the world was completely immune to any cries. I repeat, it was only when Ebola hit Europe and the United States that suddenly the armies came, the doctors came, and the convoys came and blah, blah, blah came. Until then, nobody came. That’s an example of the hidden world. The world of suffering that we either consciously or subconsciously want to do away with from our consciousness. You see? That’s the world I live in. I call that the crucified Christ.

Where the average—I’m now speaking to the women in your audience, if I may—the average daily monetary allowance for the African woman by in large, sub-Sahara Africa, by in large is about two dollars a day, two dollars a day. I want your women listening, mothers, to tell me what can they do for two dollars a day? Now, I’m telling you, sixty-percent of the world’s population, Hank, sixty-percent, that’s six people out of ten, are living under two dollars a day, sixty percent. We are a small minority on this planet. We’re a small minority. Even when I go up to eighty percent it’s still under three dollars, again. If we are looking at the reality that is facing us, out of seven or eight billion people that live upon the earth, half of us, half of us are living under two or three dollars a day. The other half of us are enjoying the abundances and the luxuries that exists in the rich world and we are not even aware that we have them, and we’re not even aware because all the depressions and, you know, the so called anxieties, and all these things, and we are not aware of how much we have around us. You know? Because we’re not aware of it, we don’t appreciate it. But, if you get an African immigrant coming to the United States, they will appreciate everything. They will see everything. They will see the electric lightbulbs that work. They will see the toilet that works. They will see the water tap that runs water. They will see a button on the door there that switches on and off the light. They will see a beautiful table. They will see it. But, an American coming or a Westerner coming to your office, Hank, would take all this for granted.  That’s the difference. That’s one of the great differences.

Now, how many children are dying a day? Let’s get down to that. Twenty-two thousand children die every day in Africa, mostly in Africa. Twenty-two thousand children die every day. That’s unacceptable to my reality. That’s unacceptable.

I’m there firstly to what? To repent for all my sins as a rock star, as a Marxist. I’m repenting. And I’m living with them, and understanding them. We have beggars coming to us every day and you have to help. What we do, Hank, is this: First of all, we identify with them. We don’t try to lord it over them. The worst attitude is I am the White man who has come here to help you, you poor unfortunates, you the poor of the world. That would be so anti-gospel and yet it exists. You know fly by night missionaries who come I am the great missionary who come two or three days in Africa and then go away. I’m afraid that’s not the right attitude. You have to be—you identify in solidarity with the beggar. You do not talk down to him. You do not abuse him. You do not lose patience with him. You talk to him on an equal basis with a beggar, with the beggars of the bottom of the barrel of this world. Once you do that something extraordinary happens, Hank. You begin to see the crucified Christ. You begin to see in the desperation, in the cry.

“Where are you sleeping tonight?”

“I have nowhere to sleep father.”

“Have you ate today?”

“No, father.”

“Where are you sleeping?“

“I’m sleeping out on the porch, father.”

“Father, do me a favor. When I die, will you bury me?”

“Nobody will bury you?”

Now, if you understand that, then you understand the crucified Christ, the voice of the crucified Christ, the pathos of the pain of the destitute of the world. Where else can I be but with them. That is our mission.

Hank: The mission’s called Paradise for Kids.

Father Themi: Whoa, Paradise for Kids is our sponsor; the mission is the Orthodox Church. It’s the Orthodox Patriarch of Alexander and we are a branch of that. We are jurisdiction of the Orthodox Patriarchy, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchy of Alexandria. That’s where we are.

Hank: You’re getting your hands dirty, talk to people, we only have a few minutes left, about getting their hands dirty.

Father Themi: Well, know that, I’m not requesting people to come to Africa. That’s not what I’m doing here. I am saying this: Be aware of what you have. Be aware of the riches that are around you, the material riches. Be aware of the comfort, no matter how little you have, you have far more. Just the hospitals you go to. Just the— I mean, when I get sick, I have to fly out of there to come all the way to New York just to be seen . You know I have some poor eye, I have to have eye surgery, I have to come all the way to New York in order just to get something simple like a cataract thing, replacement. Be aware of your medical service here. Be grateful to God for all the things you have. At the same time, you have an obligation to the poor. I mean the poor here, the poor in this country, the poor here, the destitute here. You have an obligation as a Christian. It’s not negotiable. I was hungry and you fed me. Matthew 25. I was naked and you clothed me. I was thirst and you gave me to drink. And you will hear the words, come ye who fed me, you who gave me to drink, come and enjoy the riches of the kingdom of heaven. May we become aware of that brothers and sisters, and Hank thank you for the invitation, God, bless you.

April 7th, 2016 by Christian Research Institute | Type: Standard
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