Should Christians be Filled with Hate?

Should Christians be Filled with Hate?

Today, hate is raging against those of non-Christian religions. A mosque has been attacked, and many people killed. In WWII, Hitler raged a war of hate, torture, and genocide against the Jews. Today, it is against Muslims. And I have to wonder, how many of these hate-filled people, many of whom claim to be Christians, have read the New Testament recently? Has it escaped their notice, the fundamental messages that Jesus came to teach?

Let’s look at what Jesus did for us first of all. He was Jewish, as were all his disciples and those he taught. He clearly states that he came to turn the Jewish leaders and people away from the errors in their thinking and actions, and back to God. Jesus was clearly the Messiah, and it was rejection of Him by religious leaders who had become corrupt that caused the majority of Jews to not follow Him. The religious leaders clearly wanted to maintain their power, control of the people, status, and wealth, more than they wanted to do God’s will.

What did Jesus do? First of all, he himself prayed constantly. He prayed to God His Father. He taught US to pray to God the Father. While he said that you could ask God for things in Jesus name, his example was to pray to God. His message was to tell and demonstrate to people that the power of God had come down among them. He stated that he could only do what His Father demonstrated. Jesus healed the sick, He raised the dead. He taught about the kingdom of God. He taught that God was love, and compassion. He had a huge amount of compassion for the poor, the widows, and the orphans. He said the greatest commandments were to love God, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

The time had come when civilization, and the Jewish people, were moving from being a herding people to being ‘city’ people. The timing was excellent for Jesus to come, for the Old Testament laws of complex animal sacrifice (which was the currency of a shepherding people), could not be maintained for much longer as the world became more modern. So Jesus came, to be the final sacrifice needed for the redemption of His people. It was only after Jesus was killed, that the teachings about God spread out to the gentiles. Christianity is ‘grafted’ onto the roots of a Jewish tree. Christians worship the same God that the Jews did. And it is my understanding that Muslims worship the same God as the Jews as well.

So shouldn’t we stop isolating ourselves from the poor, the widows, the orphans, and do as Jesus instructed us to do? Can’t we convert more people to wanting to follow the example that Jesus set by being an example of love, compassion, and kindness instead of hate? Hasn’t our own nation, which claims to be Christian, really gone very far away from the teachings of Christ? Isn’t it time to put a stop to this ugly, non-Christian behavior before it’s too late? For hate against others is sin. And we must ask God to forgive us of our sins, then we must change our way of being and do what Jesus instructed us to do!

The Missing Link in Faith Healing

Sadly, most of us don’t pursue spiritual healing until we have a major  illness. Even if we are Christians, we first try conventional medicine, then perhaps alternative medicine. We might ask people to pray for us. We eventually realize that we need to heal our spirit and mind if we ever expect to have true healing of our body.

The Bible has a lot to say about healing. A few years ago, I pursued faith healing, something I really believed in. This scripture was my starting point:

James 5:14
Is anyone among you sick? He should call for the elders of the church, and they should pray over him after anointing him with olive oil in the name of the Lord.

At the time, my church did not have anyone who was the slightest bit interested in spiritual healing (they still don’t). In fact, most churches focus almost exclusively on ‘saving the soul’ (and some don’t even do that), while not doing the rest of what Jesus instructed, which included teaching about God,  healing the sick, loving your neighbor, loving yourself, taking care of the poor, the widows, and the orphans. The Holy Spirit was to empower all true believers and allow them to act as conduits for God’s power.

Healing was very much a part of the early Church. After the Romans decided that Christianity would be their official religion, Churches went from being filled with Spirit filled believers, to people who joined along for the the opportunity to be in positions of power, or for  the wealth the Church could bring in, or to belonging because of social reasons, and so on. Some of course still joined because of the message and their faith, but not all of them. Gradually, the belief that it was the church’s job to heal the sick (and often take care of the poor) dropped altogether. People were typically spoon-fed what the church wanted them to believe, and were often not all that interested (even when Bibles became readily available in their language) in reading the scriptures for themselves.

Jesus healed everyone who asked. He never told anyone that God gave them a disease in order to teach them a lesson, or to help them grow spiritually. If Jesus had believed that, He would not have healed people, because it would have been God’s will for the person to be sick. But that never happened. Jesus wanted to free people of their sickness and demons, and he equated sickness with sin in the person’s life. He also didn’t tell older people that God needed them to suffer in order to end their life so that they could go to heaven. God does not need us to suffer from disease in order to get us to heaven. There are many accounts of God’s people simply ‘breathing their last’ in their old age. And healing did NOT die out with the early apostles. Healing was to be a sign that accompanied believers. It demonstrated the power of the true God to unbelievers, and it was a gift for believers.

Bottom line, we pretty much forgot how to heal the sick. A few people, ‘faith healers’ could usually be found, but some of them were focused more on their income or fame than on doing God’s work. Results were also usually very mixed, with only a few people healed. This gave faith healing a fairly bad reputation. After all, if you have ever prayed with all your heart to be healed, or prayed for someone else to be healed, and then nothing happened, you know what a blow to your faith that can be!

I myself made repeated trips for healing prayer, and usually this made me feel better mentally, but that was all. I did have a miraculous healing of a severed nerve in my arm though, after I prayed. I felt a warm tingling that can only be described as the touch of God, and I had no more pain in my arm, that had hurt very badly for over a year after surgery for cancer. Usually, we are told that we don’t have enough faith to be healed, or that it is not God’s will. While our faith can always grow, we only need a tiny amount of faith to be healed, and if you believe in God, you already have that much faith.

There has been something missing from the modern practice of faith healing, and that is explained very well in a series of 22 DVD’s that have been posted on YouTube, called ‘No Disease is Incurable’. The author is a medical doctor, Dr. Strydom. She based her series, as well as an 800 page book that she wrote, on the work of Henry Wright (A More Excellent Way to Be in Health), and Caroline Leaf (Switch on Your Brain), as well as her own medical knowledge. I respect her work very much, because for one thing, she truly does as Jesus would have wanted us all to do; she is making the teaching from the DVDs  as well as her book available for free!

Dr. Strydom points out that many, probably most, of our illnesses and diseases are spiritual in nature. Disease usually results from sin, which essentially separates us from God.  If, like I did, you think of sins as robbing a bank, killing someone, etc., it is eye-opening to learn that fear, anger, jealously, and lack of forgiveness to others are also sins. In order to start getting healed, we must repent of our sins. Confess them to God. And start to become sanctified, by first of all cleaning up your thought life, and connecting with God. A great starting point for connecting with God is by reading the Bible, and I recommend beginning with the New Testament, and through prayer. After all, how can you live the way God wants you to live if you don’t know what that is?

Most of us are in dire need of cleaning up our thought life. Do you find yourself going over and over what someone said or did to you that made you very angry? Or still being resentful and bitter about the way your parents treated you? Or angry about someone who drove like a jerk on the freeway? Or living in fear instead of trusting God? All of these things produce toxic thoughts, the Bible calls them ‘negative strongholds’, that can allow  harmful chemicals to be released, and set you up for sickness and disease. I highly recommend that you take the time to watch the entire series of DVD’s on YouTube, they are well worth the time! The series goes much deeper into specific illnesses, and the medical and spiritual roots for them. For example, breast cancer might be caused by bitterness. She teaches you to recognize the cause of the disease, and repent of that.

Sin though, including sinful thinking, separates us from God, and sometimes ourselves and others as well. The Bible says that unless you forgive others, God will not forgive you! So you cannot really expect God’s blessings of healing, unless you are living the way God outlined, in the Bible, that you should live. Which means praying, reading the Word, and mainly Loving everyone as if they are Jesus himself. You really have to forgive others, because if you don’t, it is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to get sick from it!

I found I had a lifetime of forgiving to do. I thought I had forgiven people, but found that when I thought of incidents, even from decades ago, they still made me very angry. So I am trying to forgive everyone, ask God for His forgiveness, change the way I am being to be more like Christ, and becoming sanctified by filling my mind up with the Word of God.

So before you go to the elders of your church and ask them to pray for your healing, you must first make sure that you do not in fact have some form of sin blocking you from being healed. If you have any jealously, fear, bitterness, anger, lack of forgiveness, strife (including gossiping), or the more obvious sins like drinking too much, sexual sin, stealing, etc. you need to 

1. Forgive everyone you have not forgiven

2. Confess your sins to God

3. Truly repent (change) the way you have been behaving. You must first change your heart and mind. Stop thinking about things that cause you to sin and fill your mind with God’s word. 

4. Pray frequently and read the Bible. If you say you are a Christian, you really need to have a deep knowledge of what the Bible, especially what the New Testament, says.

5. Live the way Christ lived, the best way you can. 

6. Go for healing prayer, and don’t forget to pray for yourself too!

CSB Bible Review (Christian Standard Bible)

CSB Bible Review (Eventually)

I have enjoyed reading the Bible most of my life. I am always trying to find the best version out there; one that I think has followed the original texts closely, while providing me with something that I can read and understand. If I could read Hebrew and Greek, then I would read the original texts.

I used to like the NIV, until I found out that they had dropped many verses, and made modifications to others. At first I thought that it was more accurate than the KJV. The KJV I think was translated from Greek, both the OT and the NT. Since the OT was written in Hebrew, when the NIV came out I noticed it was translated from Hebrew and Greek. It was so much easier to understand! But besides many dropped verses and partial verses, there are very strange modifications to verses, such as this one:

Zephaniah 3:17 KJV
The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty;
he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy;
he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.

Zephaniah 3:17 NIV
The Lord your God is with you,
the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
but will rejoice over you with singing.”

Notice that this addition, along with many other dropped verses, seems to be saying that once you are ‘saved’ you no longer have to confess your sins and repent of them. Which is not at all the case! But more on that at a bit later date.

I recently got very excited about The Complete Jewish Study Bible. One person did the translation, a Messianic Jew. He took an older JPS translation of the Tanaka for the Old Testament, and reworded it since his Hebrew was not up to the task of translating it from scratch. He then did the translation of the New Testament from the original Greek. I have long felt like we needed to understand the Jewish religion better, because after all, they likely wrote most of the Bible. The early Christians, including Jesus, were Jewish. But throughout the New Testament, it was obvious that the translator had his own agenda that he was inserting into the gospel.  First of all, I didn’t know there were that many ‘drug users’ in Biblical times. And I didn’t recall a huge number of instances of the Bible blasting homosexuals. There was Sodom and Gomorrah, but those men were raping everyone! Then Paul mentions it, and he also thinks people would be better off to not even get married. So I started looking up verses in other Bibles. As one example,

Here is how Revelations 22:15 is translated:
Outside are the homosexuals, those involved with the occult and with drugs, the sexually immoral, murders, idol-worshippers, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.

Pretty much every other translation reads close to this:
Outside are the dogs, the sorcerers, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying.

For years, I have really liked the HCSB Bible, particularly the Study Bible. While not a perfect translation, almost everything that was in the KJV seems to be in the HCSB, yet you can read it very easily. The study notes are very comprehensive, and have been a big help to me. The font is also very readable, and dark enough, as contrasted with a lot of Bibles. The study Bible is colorful and has a great design as well, and it is available in large print editions. I like reading measurements in feet instead of cubits!

So recently I learned that the HCSB was going to be updated, and named the CSB. This will probably cause a lot of confusion with the CEB version, but I was really happy to hear the news, because even a really good version of the Bible can always be improved. So while the print versions won’t be released until mid-March 2017, the electronic version is out. I am reading it on Accordance Bible software, but it is also available on the Holman website. Holman' slogan is 'Every WORD Matters!'

While I have only just started reading the New Testament in the new CSB version, I have been very alarmed at the large number of Bible verses that have been dropped, either in whole or in part. Most of the dropped verses are IN the HCSB, in the text itself, but they are in [brackets]. I thought that if I pointed this out to the publisher, they could fix the digital copies, and have time to fix the text before the print copies came out. Their response however, was that (most of) the missing text is in the footnotes, and that they had many ‘endorsements from renowned Biblical scholars, authors, and pastors’. I don’t know about you, but I usually don’t read the footnotes unless I have trouble understanding the text.

Here are the verses I have found so far that are missing:

Mark 11:26
But if you don’t forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your wrongdoing. (Don’t you think this is important to know)?

Mark 9:46
Where Their worm does not die,
and the fire is not quenched.

Matthew 17:21
However, this kind does not come out except by prayer and fasting. (This explains why the disciples could not heal the child, but Jesus could- and it is helpful for everyone who is in the healing ministry).

Matthew 18:11
For the Son of Man has come to save the lost. (I don’t know about you, but I want to know everything Jesus said, that is is a pretty important verse- why he came)!

Mark 9:44
Where Their worm does not die,
and the fire is not quenched. (Yes, this verse is repeated 3 times I think, but dropping it twice? It must be repeated to give it emphasis for some reason).

And these verses have been changed, usually dropping part of the verse:

Romans 8:1 Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus (and
Omitted) ‘who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the spirit’. This missing piece is crucial, because it points out that Christians are not condemned IF they follow God’s rules!

Mark 10:7 omits ‘and be joined to his wife’

Mark 10:52 changed from ‘your faith has healed you’ to ‘your faith has saved you’ (I have been studying healing, and wonder if this change is due to most churches not even trying to heal the sick).

Mark 12:15 is supposed to begin with ‘Should we pay or shouldn’t we?’ But they have this portion of the verse on the end of verse 14.

Luke 4:4
But Jesus answered him, “It is written: Man must not live on bread alone.” (And they completely dropped ‘but by every word of God’), which was the whole point to this verse to begin with!

I’m not saying the CSB is all bad….they did improve some of the text. The Beatitudes now begin with ‘Blessed are’. And ‘feeding trough’ has been dumped and we are back to a ‘manger’. Psalms 1 still says ‘happy’ but so does the JPS translation, and I trust the Jewish scholars to know their Hebrew. So some of the wording was improved, and some of it took a step backwards in my opinion. I liked reading Yahweh instead of Lord, because in medieval times Lords were pretty common! And I found places where Messiah was replaced with Christ. I prefer Messiah.

Bottom line, Bible translation by a committee of PhD’s…..again. The NIV dropped scriptures altogether, and make no mention of them in the footnotes. The CSB moved them to the footnotes, one step away from dropping them altogether. Sigh.