I was reading Creation story in Genesis and one thing caught my attention.

God commanded something to Adam. Here is what He said.

Gen 2:16  And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat;
Gen 2:17  "but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

God was clear in His instruction. God's purpose for this instruction was to guard Adam to the Highest Spiritual/Moral standrad he had. It was intended to be a spiritual instruction and should have been interpreted spiritually.

Now the devil comes and interprets it for Eve. Here is devil's interpretation.

Gen 3:4  Then the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die.
Gen 3:5  "For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

God said "the day that you eat of it you shall surely die"

Devil said "You will not surely die"

Fact is both statments are true and the difference was God was talking about spiritual death and Devil was talking about physical death. Spiritual death is when a person committs sin and it seperates that person from God that is called eternal death. God is more concerned about our spirit and Devil is more concerned about our body.

God said that the tree was of the knowledge of good and evil. And God judged that the kind of knowledge Adam will get out of eating the fruit will be harmful to Adam.

Devil said "and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

Again we see the difference of interpretation. God knew that if Adam eats the fruit it will be in rebellion to God and the result will be Adam will fall from the glory exactly like Devil had fallen from glory. Again for God it was important that the glory He had given to man be preserved. Devil had his own interpretation. For Devil gaining knowledge was more important than holiness.  For Devil carnal things were more important than spiritual things. So Devil persuaded Eve saying you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

Today many people try to interpret Bible exactly the way Devil interpreted.

Recently I heard an interpretation of following verses

Luke 4:18  "The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, Because He has anointed Me To preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives And recovery of sight to the blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
Luke 4:19  To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD."

Person who was preaching interpreted this passage in terms of helping poor people, fighting for justice etc. While this passage really meant that Jesus was going to liberate people from the clutches of devil. Many people still concentrate on the troubles in this world instead of concentrating on the bigger trouble that is sin. Adam has fallen from glory and because we have all sinned we have also fallen short of glory.

Rom 3:23  for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

Jesus came into this world to liberate and to restore each and every person from this state of fall. But many people are still concerned about worldly things. They are concerned about social justice and social work instead of bringing people to the justice of God i.e. to help them come out of their sins and live a holy life.

Mat 18:11  "For the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost.

If you have not accepted the Lord as your savior. If you have not asked the Lord forgiveness of your sins. You can ask Him to forgive you of your sins and give you a holy life.

May God bless

THE SWORD OF CHRIST

"Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth.

 I did not come to bring peace but a sword.” [Matt 10:34].

     The Sword of Christ!  It must sound uncanny to some of us.  We do not generally think of Christ as one who sways a sword back and forth.  Seldom do we come across this image of Christ in the sacred iconographies of the stained glass art.  Instead, we find Christ depicted as a gentle shepherd, a friend of the little children and one who cares for the sick and the suffering.  The Sword of Christ?   Far from it.   We might think the same of Buddha.  Statues of Buddha depict the great yogi in perpetual meditation, serene and peaceful.  No enticement or mayhem around him distracts him.  Will Buddha ever sway a sword?  Recently I came across a picture of a sword-swinging statue of Buddha in Tibet.  It is not uncommon for humans to attribute opposing character traits – the gentle and the brutal -- to their deities.

     How do we understand “The Sword of Christ?”   One obvious difference is that “The Sword of Christ” is not for massacring our opponents, enemies and nonbelievers.  [The Crusaders of the Middle Ages made this blunder in attempting to regain the Holy Land from the Muslims.  Ironically, some conservative Christian groups read the current conflicts in the Middle-East in these terms.]   Instead of using it as a weapon to annihilate our opponents, we find that this sword is turned on us.  What’s more, it hangs over the most intimate human relationships – the family.  Wait a minute!  A family you say? Yes, indeed!  Isn’t the modern nuclear family already under attack? Don’t over half the marriages end up in divorce?  Shouldn’t Christ, instead of swinging a sword on our family relationships, bring his healing love to rekindle the flickering embers of connubial joys and blessings?  Do we need another attack on our families, much less from any religious sources?

     Examine the text closely.  Both Matthew and Luke (Matthew 10:34-39 & Luke 12:49-53) list the same set of relationships – father and son, mother and daughter, mother in-law and daughter in-law.  What is unique about these three sets of relationships are that they are generational and vertical.  Jesus talks about the power relationships within family that serve as pedagogical vectors of values.  The transmission of values is facilitated by vertical generational power relations – from father to son, mother to daughter, etc.  [The teacher-student relationship also falls within this scheme.]  What is missing here is what we might consider very important -- the husband and wife relationship.  Unlike the other generational relationships, the relationship between husband and wife is horizontal.  When relationships are horizontal and mutual, there is very little room for power plays.  The downside, of course the value transmission rarely occurs in relationships that are mutual.  In spousal relationships, values are rarely transmitted from one to the other.  We hardly effect changes in our spouses.  Both husband and wife enter into marriage with the baggage they bring into the relationship.  We don’t transmit values; what we do of course is to serve as catalysts for the flowering of our spouses -- building each other up -- and in the process create new values.  This is the mystery of the married life.  Conflicts emerge when we fail to understand this essential nature of the marital life and turn it upside-down -- what should be mutual and horizontal into vertical.  Unwittingly we also invoke our religious traditions to justify those exploitative patriarchal power arrangements within family structures.

     When conflicts arise in spousal relationships, often it is the love of and commitment to our children that often douse the conflicts.  Nature has built into human procreative psychology love and commitment toward our offspring.   For all of us, our offspring serve as the objects of our vocational and religious goals.  We tend to realize our personal religious existence through our families and especially through our children.  This is one reason why parents with children tend to attend church regularly and a growing church like ours places a lot of emphasis on children and family oriented programs.  Contrarily, couples with no children and young adults tend to attend church infrequently.

     Having said this, we need to ask why parents with children are more committed to the church than couples with no kids.  The reasons are not hard to find.  When we examine this closely, we find that some of the underlying motives for which we use the religious structures to transmit values are suspect.  And often they are inherently un-Christian.  Let me point out the four ways in which we unwittingly exploit the religious structures to transmit values to the children and the young people.  First, we look to our religious institutions to transmit commandments, rules and regulations.  Second, adults tend to use the religious structures to transmit their own irrational biases and prejudices.  Third, we impose our own vocational goals on our children; and finally, we turn our children and families into objects of worship and devotion.

     Let us examine these one by one.  I remember as kids we sang an action song in our Sunday School.  The words of this song go something like this:

Be careful little eyes what you see [3 times]

There is Father up above is looking down with love

So be careful little eyes what you see.

Be careful little ears what you hear [3 times]

Be careful little hands what you do [3 times]

Be careful little feet where you go [3 times]

Although the song was fun to sing, the implicit message that it conveyed was that religion is ultimately about rules and regulations, dos and don’ts.  Parents look to the church, Sunday Schools, Christian Education programs to subtly impart the rules of behavior to their kids.  These rules and regulations demand obedience and any deviant behavior creates guilty feelings and bring with it punishments, hellfire and in extreme cases threat of excommunication.  Of course our youngsters need some guidelines for private and public behavior and rules for their own safety and protection.  It is the duty of the parents and elders to provide these to their children and youth.  But the Christian life is not about rules and commandments and it is not imposed upon an individual by external forces and regulations.  The Christian life is an outward manifestation of the inward working of the Spirit of Christ that produces the fruits of righteousness.  Apostle Paul says, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” [Galatians 5:22-23].  Take note that no law or rules of behavior can create the kind of character the Spirit of Christ can bring forth in our lives. This is one area of our religious life – rules and regulations -- over which the Sword of Christ should fall heavily.  We are Christians not because we follow rules and regulations, but because Christ lives within us.  Life in Christ is not about good works, nor is it about observing rules and regulations.  It is a new creation [I Corinthians 5:17].

     The second point we consider is related to the first one.  If we carefully analyze the rules and regulations we seek to impose on our youngsters, we might be surprised to find under the layers that they are not about the freedom of the spirit, nor about the grace of God in our lives.  It is about subjugating youngsters to imbibe adult prejudices and cultural bigotry.  Take for instance the sexism we find justified in almost all religious traditions.  Women in any faith are second-class citizens.  There are other prejudices that we transmit through our religious traditions and practices.  While serving as a pastor in India, one of my parishioners requested me to pray that God would show a groom for her daughter from the same caste.  It is no secret that we still practice caste-based parish ministries in India.  I am ashamed to find such congregations existing in the United States and Canada.

     Another related issue to the caste-based churches is this.  A growing phenomenon we observe in the Asian-Indian community in the United States is the inter-racial marriage.  Many Indian Christian youth date and marry white kids.  [My daughter and two nephews also married whites].  Although I welcome this, I see the sinister side of this growing phenomenon. I seldom come across our youth dating blacks.  It baffles me why as Christians we do not encourage this since we share almost the same ebony shades with the black race.  Isn’t this an outright racism we as a community manifest?   It is on this bigotry that the Sword of Christ must fall swiftly.

     Thirdly, parents have the tendency to impose their will on their children.  We tend to shape our children and their future by the goals, which we think are important for them and us.  As a young man, St. Francis of Assisi proved himself as knight in the wars with Perugia.  Although his father was a wealthy noble man of Assisi, Francis’s heart was in serving the poor and the down trodden.  One fine day, Francis sold all his possessions, including the stallion and gave the money to the poor.  His father was furious and threw him in jail.  On his release, Francis became a monk and dedicated his life to the service of God and the poor with whom he associated.  You see very often the plans we hold for our children is at cross-purposes with what God has for our kids.  And parents by forcefully shaping their kids in their own image often go against what God may have intended for their kids.  In the process we harm our kids with stunted spiritual maturity and rob them of their God given graces and potentialities.  Jesus warned against this by saying, “Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones . . . it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea” [Mark 9:42].  We parents need to be very sensitive to see the signs of God’s working in our children and respond to it rather than impose our plans on them, which may be contrary to what God may be doing in their lives.  

     Finally, we are often blind to the narcissism that this generational power arrangement fosters within the religious context.  Many of us see our image reflected in our children and family and they become the objects of our religious goals and devotion.  And slowly, our children and family come to usurp the place of God in our lives.  Anything that takes the place of God in our lives is idolatry and an abomination to God.  Remember the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac.  The story narrates how God required Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.  The moral of the saga is that God had to tutor Abraham not to make his son the foundation of his life.  Although God’s promises to Abraham were to be fulfilled in Isaac and Abraham’s hopes were all pinned on Isaac, Isaac was not to be the center of Abraham’s life.  Isaac was God’s gift to Abraham.  What God gives us should in no way rob God of the primary place God deserves in our lives.  Abraham had to go on trusting God and then he would see all things fall in their place.  It was almost like God handing a knife to Abraham so that he would cutoff the offending ties to his son Isaac that might otherwise usurp the place of God in Abraham’s life.  Although, God’s promises to Abraham and Sarah were to be fulfilled in Isaac, Isaac was not to become the object of worship.  This is also true of our pet projects, however good they may be.  Sometimes our churches and mission projects take center stage in our lives.  Many Christian leaders have fallen by the way side by making their pet projects the center of their life.  You see, if we are not careful, we will shape our children, families and projects in our own image and eventually these will usurp the place of God in our lives.  And the Sword of Christ must fall heavily on all these unholy alliances.  Jesus exhorts us to examine the areas of our lives that take center stage in our lives.  Nothing should come between me and my God -- not my children, not my family, not my vocation, and not even my pet mission projects that God may have called me to do.  I pray that God would search our motives of our religious existence and grant us the discernment we need to avoid these pitfalls while nurturing our children and youngsters in Christian faith.

Rev Dr Anand Veeraraj

New Jersey Indian Church, USA

pastorveeraraj@aol.com;

www.njic.org

(609) 406-7815