A Respnse to "God is in Control, Pt. 2"

A friend sent me this blog post from one of her favorite writers. She asked me to read it and respond to it. My response is below:



“God is Still in Control”, Pt. 2 by G. Craige Lewis
The EX Daily Word for October 9, 2008

Genesis 1:28 – “And God blessed them, and God said unto them,
Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it:
and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,
and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth..”

Yesterday, we discussed the governments of the earth and how God is not controlling our political leaders, our voting process, or even our monetary systems. I received a lot of emails from folks yesterday that just seem to have fits about what I stated on this subject. Many were Barack Obama supporters and were claiming that he is God's man for this election, and others were just simply hurt because I dared to make the statement that God was NOT in control of our earth's political systems. Well folks, get a grip. First of all, God does not endorse men that are morally bankrupt concerning inclusion, abortion, same sex unions, and hate crime legislation. God destroyed nations over homosexuality and cursed generations over killing unborn children. When Jezebel tried to silence God's prophets, He destroyed her and her husband’s Kingdom! And anyone that believes that there is any other way to God other than Jesus Christ is a thief and a robber according to the scriptures and that man is ACCURSED.

Nita,
I read the writing of G. Craige Lewis entitled “God Is Still In Control, Pt. 2. Mr. Lewis probably means well but what he has written is heresy. It appears to be a combination of several ancient heresies including “deus ex machina,” a corruption of Anselm’s teleological proof for the existence of God, and a brand of secular humanism known as "Semi-Pelegianism."

The first problem appears to be that Mr. Lewis doesn’t understand the historical meaning of the term “God is in control.” It doesn’t mean that God runs things like a foreman runs a job, telling everybody exactly what to do and when they must do it. Our understanding of the nature and character of God was given to us by ancient Hebrew prophets to whom God revealed himself. When they talked about kingdoms and empires, kings and emperors, they said that God Jehovah was in control of them.

What they meant when they wrote passages indicating God’s control over national and international events is that God is the author and executioner of ultimate ends or purposes, and that he, by his will and power, is able to orchestrate human activity, without violating free will, in such a way that his purposes are accomplished in the earth.

The Hebrew prophets never taught that God runs everything, or that God violates free will. The Hebrew prophets taught that while there is evil in the world, this evil does not ultimately supplant the will and purpose of God. God maneuvers, God moves, God arranges, God rearranges, and in every possible way God steps in, around, in front of, and behind the actions of human beings to ensure that his will is performed.

Old Testament theology is very straight forward on this point: the Almighty has purposes or an ultimate purpose, and he is powerful enough and wise enough to use EVERYTHING in the universe, (this means things in earth, hell, and heaven) to bring about that purpose, without violating free will. This is first year seminary instruction.

Moses declared that God used Pharaoh for his glory (Ex. 9:13-16). The story of the Exodus is the story of God being on the side of a weak and enslaved people, and against a mighty and powerful nation in what turned out to be an international economic conflict. Slavery is always about economics. The first Israeli-Egyptian conflict was over economics and theology. The Egyptians said to the Israelis, “You were born to be slaves, and slaves you shall be.” The Israelis answered, “Our God has said, “Let my people go.”

The testimony of Hebrew prophets is that God used the elements of nature (i.e. boils, bloodied water, frogs, flies, disease and death among livestock, darkness, hail, etc.) to such an extent that one million six hundred thousand former Israelis slaves marched out of Egypt as free men. The text says that when they left not “even a dog moved his tongue” in protest (Ex. 11:7). God was saying “I am in control.”

In Daniel chapter five, the prophet says as plane as possible, “the most high God ruled in the kingdom of men, and that he appointeth over it whomsoever he will” (Dan. 21, KJV) This section of Daniel 5:21 is translated as follows by The New International Version: “the Most High God is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and sets over them anyone he wishes.” This is not my interpretation of Holy Scripture. This is black letter on white paper. It’s what the Book says: God is in control of the nations of the earth. He sets over them or allows to be set over them anyone whom he wishes.

How can you say God is not in control of this world and of history, and have a Bible in your hand, a newspaper on one knee and a history book on the other? The person who does so either can’t read or doesn’t understand what he reads.

When God got ready to divide the Northern Kingdom of Israel from the Southern Kingdom of Judah, he caused Rehoboam to resist the advice of Solomon’s (his father) cabinet and Privy Council and take the advice of his age mates who would be in the new government. The kingdom split in two. Then the Bible records these words: “Wherefore the king hearkened not unto the people; for the cause was from the LORD” (I Kings 12: 15a, See also I Kgs 12: 24).

If God is not in control of this world we should get rid of the book of Isaiah because this idea permeates his writing;

Isa 40:22
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.

Isa 40:23
He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
Isa 40:24
No sooner are they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.

Isa 45:7
I form the light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster;
I, the Lord, do all these things. rsv

The most outstanding instance of this idea of God being in control of world events is found in Isaiah’s prophecy concerning Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire.

Cyrus is the Emperor who captured the Babylonian Empire, and afterwards decreed that the Jews could go back to Judah and rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem, sometime after 539 B.C.

Cyrus, being a pagan, worshipped many gods. He came from a culture that practiced abortion or infanticide (killing unwanted babies by exposure to the elements), and probably some form of human sacrifice.

Homosexuality was made popular by the Greeks, but was by no means confined to them. Cyrus knew of it and it was practiced in Persia and in Babylon after he took over.

The Emperor Cyrus was the first conqueror to allow conquered peoples to retain their religion and their culture. It was this tolerance that gave him the impetus to decree that Jews could go home and rebuild both Jerusalem and their Temple.

Now listen to what God calls a man that never knew Jesus, never accepted Jesus, and did not live according to our narrow rules of what we think is right:

“…Cyrus…is my shepherd and will accomplish all that I please…” (Isa. 44: 28, NIV).

“ This is what the LORD says to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue the nations before him and to strip the kings of armor, to open the gates that will not be shut: I will go before you and will level mountains; I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron. I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the LORD God of Israel, who summons you by name (Isa. 45:1-3, NIV).

If God called Cyrus his “shepherd” and His “messiah,” (the Hebrew word for “anointed”), and Cyrus never heard of Jesus, don’t you think he can use Barack Obama who is a Christian? Maybe he is not your kind of Christian but then maybe you are not his kind either. If God could use the ignorance of George W. Bush to get America into this economic mess and into a costly and unnecessary war, why can’t he use the intelligence of Barack Obama to get us out of them?

What we are going through now in America in our financial markets is as much the judgment of God as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He is sending someone to show us the way out. How dare we reject God’s deliverer based on such flimsy claims! But, like I said, the fight is always about economics and theology. The question is, “will your understanding of God permit you to enslave, destroy, and exploit other people?” Some people in the Church say God has called them to do it. I disagree.

Come on people! Let’s get real! The SOVEREIGN GOD of the Universe can use anybody at any time in any place to accomplish his purpose. If he can’t then he is not God with a capitol “G.” He is a little “g” god.

The Civil War was basically a church fight between those Christians whose narrow “Pharisee-like” view of the world allowed them to believe that God had ordained them to own other people, and those Christians who had a more prophetic view of human personality, and who could see that slavery was evil from the root to the fruit.

God used whites in the Church, opposing each other on either side, to bring the judgment of the Civil War upon America which resulted in freeing the slaves. This was something that Lincoln did not want to do, but God arranged the circumstances so that it was what he had to do, just as Pharaoh did not want to let the Hebrews go, but he had to. The fight is always about economics and theology.

This teaching smacks of “deus ex machina” because this is a heresy that says that God only comes at the final end and that in between the beginning and the end human beings are left to themselves and the devil to figure out how things work. The Bible doesn’t support this at all. The Bible teaches that God is at work in human affairs, even in human governments, for the purpose of bringing about his will.

This teaching resembles a corruption of Anselm’s teleological proof for the existence of God because it teaches that God evidently made the world but then he has walked off from it. It’s based on the idea of a watch and watch maker: if you see a watch you can deduce that there is a watchmaker somewhere. This is a teleological argument or an argument based on cause. The teaching in question postulates that God made the watch (meaning the world), gave it a good winding and walked off to let it run by itself. This idea cannot be supported ANYWHERE in SCRIPTURE.

This teaching resembles a brand of secular humanism known as Semi-Pelagianism because like Pelagius, (a fourth century British monk condemned by the Church), it teaches that man’s fate in the world is dependant solely upon man. It teaches that God is not active in the affairs of human beings, nation-states, and national and international politics. Further, it raises the power of Satan and man over the power of God in dealing with God’s creation and with God’s creatures.

This brand of heresy was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth century on Native Americans, but especially on African Americans to prevent them from rebelling or in anyway attempting to free themselves from bondage. It says “this is your God-given fate and there is nothing you can do about it.” I wonder where would we be if Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rosa Parks had thought like that? They made a move for freedom because they believed that God was on their side and because they believed that He acts in the world. They were right because God does act in human affairs.

Gandhi was not a Christian. Christian Britain had been enslaving and exploiting India for more then 300 years. No one but God, the God of Israel, stepped in to show a little brown man, with no army, how to make an oppressor, who is a world power, let go and be glad to do so. God is at work in this world.

This form of secular humanism would have us divorce ourselves from God because “he is not interested in acting on the world stage anyway,” they say. God would have to be awfully selfish to create a world, send his Son to redeem it, and then not use his power to bring it to his ultimate purpose.

People of limited vision and small minds always attempt to limit God’s work in the world so that they can feel free with doing and saying what ever will limit people, put them in bondage, and make them slaves. Wherever the God of Israel has been worshipped in the world the oppressors have sought first to kill Him, or to kill His influence, or to kill the hope of His people, for they know when his people look to him and cry out to him, he brings liberation.

I have read other writings by this author and they were good and orthodox, especially the stuff about the preachers who have been exposed recently. But this present writing is pure heresy. Maybe he should stick to providing advice to the lovelorn in the genre of a gossip columnist and leave the interpretation of Holy Writ to those who have studied the nature and character of God.

God is in love with justice. God is not an invention of the American Conservative Right. He pre-exists them and He will not fit into their box.

Falling Into Your Own Pit

“God did not deliver on Republican Prayers: In a good Christian Manner, James Dobson’s Republican Organization, Focus on the Family sent out a notice 2 weeks ago requesting that all Republican Christians pray for rain in Denver to disrupt Obama's acceptance speech at the outdoor Invesco Field."

The above is an e-mail that I received from a friend last night telling me that James Dobson and his right wing followers were summoning people to pray that Denver would be inundated by a storm, thus disrupting the Democratic National Convention, and most importantly Senator Barack Obama’s acceptance speech on last Thursday night.

It seems that God did not hear their prayers, but instead turned their prayers against them. Senator Obama did make his acceptance speech on Thursday night to a capacity crowd of almost ninety thousand people at Invesco Field, while millions watched (and cried as I did) around the world. But since the right-wingers sought injury to others through a storm, now they have had to cancel portions of their convention and revelry because of a storm. “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein…” (Prov. 26:27, KJV).

The questions in my mind are: “When will powerfully placed preachers realize that God is not a Republican or a Democrat?” And “when will fundamentalist believers of any ilk, (Christian, Muslim, LDS, etc.) cease to invoke the name of God to support their personal agendas?” When celebrity preachers lead already narrow minded people to believe that God is as narrow minded and as petty as they are the outcome is an embarrassment for them and an insult to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When unbelievers see people who are supposed to be followers of Christ pleading with God to ruin the events and purposes of their opponents it makes a mockery of the teachings of Jesus.

I also wonder if the fundamentalists think that it is wrong for me or other believers to disagree with them? I am sure that many of the people gathered to hear Senator Obama speak considered themselves to be Christian. So was God supposed to punish the believers at Invesco Field for supporting Senator Obama, and pass over George W. Bush and John McCain for engaging in an ungodly and unjust war? No body died at Invesco Field, while Gorge Bush’s policies, supported by John McCain, have caused countless numbers of lives.

If Dobson’s actions in this matter are a reflection of the character of his god, it seems to me that his god is more like a bad dog than the God of the Bible. You can sic a dog on your opponent, but you can’t sic God on your political opponents. Maybe Dobson’s Bible doesn’t contain this verse “If your enemy hungry, feed him…” (Rom. 12:20).

We must remember that rabid, irrational Christian fundamentalism is never about Jesus any more than the fundamentalism of the Pharisees was about God or the Law. Fundamentalism is about fear and power; fear of the larger world outside and beyond the control of the fundamentalist; and using that fear and any other fear to control others. Fundamentalists once taught that God created African peoples to be slaves, that women should never be educated or given the right to vote, that Jews are habitually filthy and manipulative, that Chinese people were law breakers, that Native Americans were alcoholics by nature, and on and on the list goes.

Now the question is, “What is the difference between a fundamentalist in Jerusalem or Baghdad who straps on an explosive belt and walks into a crowded market and ignites it and one who sits at home in America praying for rain on Invesco Field?” They both mean to cause harm. The difference is only in degrees. Today he calls for them to pray for rain because someone opposes his politics; tomorrow he will call them to spill blood for the same reason.

Lynching used to be a Christian exercise.

McCain’s Choice: Sarah Palin Compared to Barack Obama?

McCain’s Choice: Sarah Palin Compared to Barack Obama?


The Republican presumptive nominee, Senator John McCain, announced his choice for vice-presidential running mate on Friday, August 29, 2008. He chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Immediately, the McCain Campaign and the right wing media pundits began to spew out comparisons between Gov. Palin and Sen. Obama that highlighted Gov. Palin’s “executive experience.” Now let’s get this straight: they want the voters to compare the experience and background of Sarah Palin to that of Barack Obama.

There is no comparison. Sarah Palin has not lived as much, seen as much, felt as much, run as fast, reached as high, grasped as much, accomplished as much, or come as far as has Barack Obama. There is absolutely no comparison between the life of cookie cutter suburbia and a black man born of interracial parents, raised by a single white mother, schooled in various countries and cultures around the world, mentored by white grandparents, got a degree from Columbia and has a Harvard Law degree. A suburban soccer mom who became governor cannot be compared to a person who has struggled all his life to succeed and did so, choosing higher education and public service over drugs, prison, and failure.

Sarah Palin also fails the comparison test when it comes to experience in government. She fails because experience is not just about the position that you hold, but it is also about the quality of problems you have faced. The governor of an entire state with less than one fourth the population of the city of Chicago cannot encounter the same depth of problems and challenges as a State Senator from the Southside of Chicago (population of Alaska: 670,000; population of Chicago: 3 million).

Sarah Palin has been mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a suburb of Anchorage. Wasilla has a population of 8,500 whereas Hyde Park, the district that Senator Obama represented in the Illinois Senate, has a population of 29,920. This Chicago neighborhood is three and half times larger than the town of Wasilla. The point is that this nation and the world are now beset with the kind of problems that one is not prepared for by being a mayor in “soccer-mom suburbia” or the governor of a state with a population equal to that of Memphis, Tennessee.

John McCain did not choose Sarah Palin for her so called “experience,” but to try to capture the disaffected “Hillary Clinton voters.” This means women who wanted to break the glass ceiling of American politics by making Hillary Clinton the first female presidential nominee from a major party, and hopefully the first female president of the United States. What’s wrong with that?

The problem with the choice and the thinking behind it is that John McCain, and those around him, act as if any woman is the right woman. Hillary Clinton won the millions of votes that she did because, like Barack Obama, she has worked outside of “white bread America” and “soccer mom heaven” long enough to be acquainted with the problems that everyday Americans face. She has seen the face of America up close. She has seen the affects of racism and bigotry, sexism and the glass ceiling. She has witnessed the results of inadequate healthcare, and like Obama she has studied ways of solving these problems. There is no evidence that Sarah Palin even knows these problems exist.

Every person who believes in women’s rights should be up in arms over this selection because it makes a mockery of women’s progress and female leadership. This selection says the best person to be a heart beat away from the presidency is a woman who doesn’t believe in a woman’s right to choose,* has no established policy on healthcare, knows nothing about foreign policy, and has no known domestic policy. In other words she was chosen simply because she was a woman governor of relatively unknown background. It’s like replacing Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas simply because Thomas is black. This is like replacing a roaring and majestic lion with a tabby cat simply because they are both of the feline family.

Any woman voting for John McCain because Sarah Palin is on the ticket is not thinking, and may even be siding with her own ideological enemy.

*The writer of this blog is not a proponent of abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or the mother’s life is in danger.

The most unfortunate fact about abortion is that it occurs whether legal or illegal. When abortions are illegal poor woman are butchered in back alleys, while rich woman are listed in hospital registrations as having appendectomies. The author believes that spiritual, governmental, and academic communities should promote programs that teach abstinence as well as safe sex and thereby reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. The author does not believe that teaching safe sex encourages sexual promiscuity, but that in many cases it prevents a person from being faced with a choice that includes abortion.