having a cup of tea while waiting for a shortening / molasses / boiling water / brown sugar slurry to cool enough to add yeast to it, so hey, howzabout a quick sermon about the nature of God and how we do or don't see it reflected in the godly, and in poseurs? a thread:

I have to start with heavy sticky theological stuff that I personally am underqualified to fully parse so bear with me. There are many ways of understanding omniscience,

and people have for millennia debated whether an omniscient being would necessarily be able to see the future before it happens --

the God of the Bible, the O.T. God, is generally considered by believers to have this power of precognition. Anti-choice people lean hard on Jeremiah 1:5 in this regard ("Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you"),

and of course if we take prophecy to be the literal reading-out of future events (I don't, but that's a different sermon), then precognition is a whole Godly thing, it's one of His main lookouts. With me? OK:

posit first the precognitive God, Yahweh in all His glory, and He now has a son, Yeshua Whom we call Jesus. Jesus is God-in-man, and whether He'd have that gift of precognition isn't settled by the Bible pro or con -- he's attentive to prophecy, but doesn't, Himself, prophesy;

He knows how things are going to go for Him, but He's not making predictions, He's just relying on the Scriptures He grew up reading & interpreting.

Turns out there's a state-sanctioned conspiracy to frame Him, so that He can be murdered. His Father, our sky-God, sees the whole scene as a 3D panorama; whether Jesus knows the particulars is a profound theological question,

but He's not stupid. He knows when He rides into Jerusalem that they'll probably kill him.

You or I, if we understood our position the way Jesus understood His, almost certainly do ~not~ ride into Jerusalem. But why is Jesus incarnate in the first place? To set an example for us: how we ought to live our lives, how we ought to regard persecution -- not to fear it,

indeed to embrace it ("if wicked men despise and hate you all because of Me / blessed, blessed are you" runs a line from a post-Vatican II hymnal jam that I can't even type out without tearing up),

to say, Well, they're probably going to kill me, who knows, maybe I even ~know beyond the shadow of a doubt that they're going to kill me~, but I'm still going to do what's right. Which in the case of Jesus is to spread His Word even into the Holy City.

And in our case is "do what you're supposed to do." Honestly that simple. Faith / hope / charity & good works. Even if we don't want to, even if we're very out of sorts about it, even if we feel we've been treated unfairly we do it --

because we know a story about a Guy Who was treated REALLY SUPER UNFAIRLY, but Whose response to ~being murdered~ was "if that's what you feel like you need to do, then all right, I won't resist. Here I am."

Some of you will by now see this coming, as Christ's ministry is never not explicitly political.

The President has a duty to fulfill -- not a law; just a duty. You hand over the office to your successor. It's a noble tradition, this -- just simple sportsmanship. Can o' corn stuff. Grace in defeat.

The president's official public position is "Well, I didn't really lose, so I shouldn't have to hand over power." This is the president American evangelicals propped up by a really embarrassing margin.

So instead of undertaking his duty, he's throwing a big rally for himself.

What do you know about that.

You gotta ask yourself

if our model is a Person Who, in His omniscience, understood that the crowd bent on His death was wrong, and that He was genuinely without guilt (in any matter at all, according to the teachings!! the least wrong Guy in the history of the universe! blameless!),

and still showed up to crucifixion party ~and, on the way there, upbraided his apostles for trying to resist the violence of the state against Him~,

well,

what does that tell you about the faith of a guy who can't even summon up the sportsmanship to participate in a simple official exercise as he leaves office? Who has to have a party where people tell him how great he is, how the world has done him dirty?

it tells you everything about that guy's faith, if you meditate on it a little: absolutely everything. /thread