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Lord’s Prayer

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.

To Wield the Sword of Faith

Flood me with your Spirit, O God. Drown Satan in a deluge of your mighty power! Shake the foundations of hell. Let the beauty and love of Christ pour through me like a cataract. Let me wield the Sword of Faith. Renew me, empower me, purify me this and every day to your Great Commission.

~ adapted from a sermon of Charles H. Spurgeon

Mason Barge 5/6/2015

Prayer Against Hypocrisy

Lord God, I understand your holy Word well enough. I study your Word, but I do not follow it. Christ has told us that those who love Him follow His commandments; yet, who actually does this?

I read your commandments to care for the poor and to lead a life of service, but I live in luxury while others starve and look for others to serve me, instead. I seek my self-glorification at every turn; often my greatest concern in life is to vindicate myself in even the most petty matters. I long for money, power, comfort. I look to politics to save the world, when you have stated so clearly that the world will be destroyed and only those who look away from it, those who focus their eye on You, will be saved.

Help me to find you, Lord. Help me not to read your Word and then ignore it in my actions. I expect to be saved by my faith; and yet, You tell me bluntly that faith without works is dead. Help me Lord; I love you, I give myself to you. Affirm my sincerity and help me to see my vast hypocrisy and, by the power of your Almighty Spirit, overcome it. In Christ’s name, I pray this.

Mason Barge 10/14/2015

Meditation

“Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance, but laying hold of His willingness.”

~ Martin Luther

Blessing

Now may the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the eternal high priest himself, the Son of God Jesus Christ, build up myself, and all Christians, in faith and truth, and in all gentleness and in all freedom from anger and forbearance and steadfastness and patient endurance and purity.

~ Polycarp of Smyrna (69-156)

Mason Barge 12/1/2016

Think of the day ahead in terms of God with you, and visualize health, strength, guidance, purity, calm confidence, and victory as the gifts of His presence.

Psalm 86:1-5 (NKJV)

Galatians 3:13-14 (BSB)

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” 14 He redeemed us in order that the blessing promised to Abraham would come to the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.

Note: The Greek term used for “redeemed” literally means “bought out.” If we pawn our watch, we say we “redeem” it from the pawnshop when we pay back the loan and get our watch back. Much like in English, the literal meaning of redeem, “to buy something back” with money, is extended to the more abstract notion of Christ buying back our lost souls by paying our “debt” with His life.

DP Parallel Bible (3-Column) - Galatians 3

Notes on the Scripture

Redemption from the Curse (Galatians #31)

We head off into a tangent today, but hopefully an interesting one. We will start with a proposition, made by some scholars, that many people will find alarming: Jesus might not have been “crucified.” There is a debate among scholars about whether Christ was crucified on a cross, at all, or instead hung upon an upright pole with no crossbeam. If you are interested in the arguments, here are two examples: Theology Network and Wikipedia.

England, ca. 500 A.D.
Cross found with
body of a girl

But the point I want to examine is not the arguments, but our reaction to the proposition. If your first reaction is, “that is complete nonsense,” well — so was mine. But this is a good lesson for us. Why do we react with complete, and even angry, dismissal? What if it is true? Few readers are going to have the training (or the time) to actually examine the issue and, thus, be in a position to know whether it is true or not.

We do have some good reasons, even without examining the arguments, to doubt the “hung on a pole” theory. We might think that early scholars would have been well-situated to translate the various terms correctly, and thus, the tradition of the cross would not have been propagated without good reason; furthermore, history tells us that the Romans often used a cross to execute criminals.

But there is another factor at work: People tend to think that whatever they have previously learned is true, and we will cling to a falsehood simply because it is what we first learned. This is a major impediment to knowing the truth. With only a few exceptions, we must be open to the possibility that something we have learned in the past was misinformed. Otherwise, our quest to know God’s Word will be hindered by sheer personal bias.

After examining all the arguments, I have to say, it seems to me like the tradition gets this one right. Jesus was, in fact, hung on a cross to die. As pertains to our faith, however, the question is completely irrelevant. The only significance of how Jesus died is whether He fulfilled Old Testament prophecy in the manner of death. And what the prophecy says is not that He would be crucified, but that He would be hung on a tree.

Hebrew had one word, etz, that meant both “tree” and “wood”. The Old Testament prophecy applicable to the crucifixion comes from Deuteronomy:

The Romans, on the other hand, would often leave bodies of criminals hanging for many days, until they rotted, as a sort of warning. So the initial relevance of the passage to the crucifixion is that Jesus’ body was taken down before sunset and buried.

Paul uses another part of the passage, however: “he who is hanged is accursed.” Now, the Jews would actually hang a particularly shameful criminal from a tree; and so we tend to see the word etz (meaning either wood or tree) as referring to a tree, within the Old Testament. But Greek (unlike Hebrew) has a specific word meaning tree, dendron, that Paul does not use. He uses a word (xylon) that means wood, but can be used to mean tree, the same way we might use “steel” to mean “sword”.

It is a masterstroke by Paul, in his argument that the Law is a curse. If you are confused at this point — and I bet you are — confusion is the intention of the passage! “Tree” and “wood” are so jumbled together that one can only conclude they mean the same thing.

Jesus was killed by the Law — because the Pharisees and Sadducees thought He had committed blasphemy, an offense against the Law of Moses punishable by death — and he was killed by a method that can be translated both “hung on wood” and “hung on a tree.” That which killed Him — the Law — cursed the Son of God. And what can we say about a person who curses God? God cannot be “cursed,” in the narrow sense — we cannot bring ill fortune to God by wishing evil on Him! To imprecate against God is nothing but blasphemy, and therefore, to “curse God” has no effect except (possibly) to bring God’s curse on oneself. (Leviticus 24:15-16)

And so, when the Law “cursed” God by hanging Christ on wood, the effect is to show that the Law is accursed. This is Paul at his most difficult, but hopefully the meaning is now clear. If you try to curse God, the curse is on you. So when the Law cursed Jesus by hanging Him on a tree, the Law cursed itself.

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“Hateful Christianity”

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