The Aramaic Bible Web Log is a forum for discussing the origins of the Bible and the value of translating the Scriptures from the Ancient Aramaic Texts of the Ancient Church of the East directly into English. I believe that the Ancient Aramaic language is the true scribal language of Scriptures. My translations are posted at http://www.v-a.com/bible/. If you send me appropriate questions or comments, I will post them on this Web Log and attempt to answer or respond to them as best as I can. I will only post what I consider proper. I will not include e-mail addresses, but only your name as you wish it to appear on this blog. Click here to submit your questions or comments via e-mail. Or you may use the FORM MAIL at the bottom of this blog.
I used to sit in church and wonder why it was that I could not get with what was being commonly presented as Praise and Worship. On a few occasions, there would be a different Spirit evident and things would take off, but by and large, I had not felt the unction, urging or necessity to join in with what was be perpetuated in the pretence of praise. There have been times in my life where I have entered into a realm of praise and worship which is truly transcendent, and where I have been utterly taken over by the Holy Spirit for God’s purposes, and yet more and more I find that Christian music and efforts to offer some kind of sacrificial praise are all too much like monetary offerings – an attempt to schmooze God into compliance with our will or to placate Him with our offering.
To understand why this is so, I simply asked that he should teach me what is lacking, both in me and in the corporate setting. The answers I got (and am still getting) were an eye-opener but are precisely fitting, and as always, it all comes down to our attitudes and motivations and just who is really leading.
First and foremost, it is necessary to understand just what praise and worship are. Praise is primarily the currency of Christ, and intrinsic part of the value system of God and of His Kingdom. Praise is valuable, powerful and precise. It is delivered in words charged with power. Like a scalpel, it can be surgical in its ability to heal and to cut away that which offends when it is ministered by the Life Giving Spirit, or it can be cutting and debilitating when we tries to operate on the flesh life of another as we see fit to, because we have chosen to be the judge of what is beautiful and or desirable. In a society fixated upon physical attributes, it is so easy to be given over to judging others according to the flesh and so we go about trying to be plastic surgeons, using our sharp tongues like knives, trying to “help” others but instead eviscerating and wounding, leaving them with the scarring of our “corrective” surgery.
We misapprehend the power of our words, failing to comprehend what Jesus said “I do nothing except that I see My Father do it first.” How often have we been “inspired” to say something which seems cutting and cogent, and overriding the check in our heart not to do it, we unleash our tongue and whammo, we sow the wind of our mouth and rap the whirlwind of another’s indignation. There is a saying in Glasgow, referring to someone who looks like someone has given the a punch in the face, “That man was speaking when he should have been listening” and “Many a man’s nose has been broken by his tongue.”
Praise is Life!
Instead of “What would Jesus” do it is “Do as Jesus does”, and He never acts unless it is consistent with the nature of the Father, and the Power of Praise is central to who and what God is. He was raised upon the example of His Father and looks to the Father as the source of Life. The Father is the repository of praise, He is heaven’s banker, as it were, and in Him is the beginning and end of all praise. Praise is Life! When we minister Life by our tongue submitted to the Holy Spirit, our Word is His Word, it as if God Himself is talking, and believe me, when God talks, people listen. The Sword of His mouth is sharper than any two edged sword – it divides. We are not responsible for what we say WHEN IT IS BY THE HOLY SPIRIT, but when we discern by the gift within us and assume the right to use this God given Power according to our will, then there is the very real danger that we will do it destructively, regardless of how witty, clever or observant we may (see ourselves to) be.
Where we come unstuck, is that we spend our weeks giving in to the temptation of judging others, using our tongues like machetes to cut our way through the jungle of the cares of the world, blinded by the deceitfulness of this world’s riches, and then we go along to church on Sunday hoping to somehow right our wrongs by idolizing Jesus. I know that this is a sweeping statement, but it is for the most part true of many Christians. Jesus showed me an image by the Spirit of a man falling down before Him and so-called worshipping Him, and then another of one who was walking with Jesus – and He said to me, “If you truly love Me, you will do just what I say, but if you idolize Me, you will just get in the way.” Unfortunately this is what has so often been presented as praise and worship – Christianized idolatry, and the most blasphemous and horrible idolatry of all is when we turn God Himself into an idol.
Think about it, can you really imagine something more silly than “Oh Jesus, you are so worthy of OUR praise?”
Jesus wants us to follow Him more than to worship Him.
When the women came to the tomb and found the resurrected Jesus Christ standing there, they fell down before Him and worshipped Him. He said to them, “Fear not!” Obviously, their initial response was one motivated by fear and much of what masquerades as worship is in fact a fear of God, not found in a sense of reverence for His Power and Persona, but because we have not dealt with the sense of our sin by the knowledge of our righteousness in Christ. If we involuntarily slip with our tongue, we should quickly repent, but if we deliberately and knowingly use out tongue like a knife, then this is the blaspheming (contradicting) of the Holy Spirit and of which, the consequences are unremittable. If we walk in the Spirit, however, even the impossibility of the minefield of our own judgment can be negotiated.
In another instance, a demoniac seeing Jesus coming, fell down and worshipped Him, and the demons cried out, “Have you come to torment us before the time?” It was the demons which caused the man to fall down in a feigned show of obeisance, questioning Jesus accusingly as to His motives and actions. Have you ever found yourself on your knees before God asking Him why He is seemingly treating you or someone else a particular way which is actually inconsistent with His Love nature? Pleading with God to deal with something for you, or to do according to your wishes and wants?
To worship means to bow down, to recognize attributes and power in another to which we submit. This can happen on a level which is essentially animal, like a dog cowering before the Alpha male, or it can be heart recognition of the actual presence and person of God and of His Goodness, and the submission to that as a reciprocal response to Love by love, in Love. We cannot submit willingly and enter in if we are burdened by the sin of unforgiveness which is what predicates our judgment in contradiction to God, ergo we cannot walk in the Spirit and so we will continue to stumble in darkness and to stand on the landmines of our self sabotage judgments.
Praise can be the EXPRESSION of Love and mercy, or it can be the expression of wrath and of judgment. When we express wrath, we store up wrath for the day of wrath. Like I said, God the Father is the repository of our praise, but He is also the repository of our wrath. When we repent, He literally transmutes that wrath into praise, as they are in essence the same thing. Whatever comes out the DEPOSIT of our heart is what goes up to heaven as the offering of our mouth – is it praise to God or judgment which shall be visited back upon as wrath?
This is why the day is coming when the wrath of God will overflow and God will not put up with it forever – when the bowls of His wrath are filled to overflowing and the are pored out upon the earth, man will reap in the flesh what he has sown in the flesh, and there will be no respect of persons. Everything is God’s to begin with, all the Power, all the Praise, all the Glory – everything. He has entrusted us with a deposit, and we either lay up treasures in heaven (our praise) or we store up wrath. The more we store up wrath, the more wrath is all we have to “minister” and so we get worse and worse in judgment and criticism, and the evil deposit of our heart is enlarged. The more we lay up praise, the more praise is what we have to minister and the Good deposit is enlarged, so that even though we are in the world (the paradigm of Good and Evil) we are not of the world, for our Commandment and mandate is of the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus gave us a New Commandment, which was the original Commandment which was from the beginning, that is, “That you should love one another as I have first loved you” and “By this shall all men know that you are My disciples (followers), IF you have love, one for another.”
Jesus did not come to undo the Law, and what is more in the Sermon on the Mount, He tightened the requirements of it to the extent that no one could possible be justified by works. He alone would be the Way to the Father, and become the Life Giving Spirit, the connection or conduit between God and Man, our High Priest to minister our praise, which is the deposit of God, the earnest of our inheritance, WHICH IS THE YERY SPIRIT OF GRACE. This is why the words which we use are so powerful and so vital. Whether they come out of the Good deposit and are in the service of God by the Spirit of Grace to build people up, or whether they come from the evil deposit and are used to cut people down, they are essentially empowered by the same energy, but in the latter context they become perverted into an antichrist power for evil purposes.
If we
continue to operate in the Good & Evil paradigm as a judge of good and evil
instead of as an Ambassador of Christ, we will be subject to the Law of sin and
death – it is inevitable. The Law brings us to Christ, but to imagine
that it ceased to exist at
Where the Law ceases to be a force is when one is in the Spirit, then we are essentially above the Law, but to be in this exalted state of being, we must remain in Love. Here is the catch – our Spirit is in Love because our Spirit is Christ, in which the fullness of God (who is Love) resides. Our soul (the spirit of our mind) is being renewed to this truth and we are being converted from what is old to what is New (that which was from the beginning). This is a process, and God has provided for the fact that at times we miss it and we fall from the grace position to the Law position, hence why it is so vital to quickly repent and be restored.
Jesus is preparing a mansion for us so that we may dwell together with He and the Father – we are all His workmanship. This work is being done in us and for us.
So in Spirit we are perfect, but in the spirit of our mind, we are being perfected (brought to maturity) and God has deposited in us ALL THAT IS NECESSARY FOR THIS PROCESS, and He did it in “mustard seed” form, having given us all things that pertain to life and Godliness in the full and perfect knowledge of Him, for His service. The SEED, which is CHRIST, remains in us, and He that is born of God cannot sin, hence why we should and indeed must identify with our sinless core nature of Christ in us, which is God in us, which is the mystery of the Ages. As long or as much as we identify with the flesh, we will judge ourselves and others according to the flesh in contradiction to the Spirit of Grace.
My little children, I write these things to you that you do not sin, but if we sin we have an advocate with the Father, even the righteous Jesus.
God perfected praise in the mouths of little children, and we must become as little children in order for this to be perfected in us. This is why we must be born from above, born anew of the purity and innocence of the anointed Christ child who died and gave His Life, a ransom for us all. Let us not be Bonsai believers, our roots bound by our traditions of unbelief and enclosed in our habits of self-righteousness, embittered by unforgiveness. Let us who are of the light come in to the light so that our dead works may be shown for what they are, the vain attempts to cover for our own sin which ensures our separation from God. He that comes to God must believe that he is, and that He is the rewarder of those that diligently seek Him, and His reward is in His mouth, and if we do well then we shall have praise of God, for what God has called clean, let no man call unclean, and we are cleansed by the Word which He has spoken over us. It’s all in our words, folks, it’s all in our words.
Ian W.
Although Christianity is under attack in the world, we need to stay objective in discussing the origins of the Scriptures. The Internet provides an opportunity for free discussions. Thank you for participating and expressing your opinions, as I have.