A Mother in Israel (Part 4) - Jerusalem

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger. We’re missing Bryan Broome for a while. I’m not sure when he’ll be back, but I hope he will be.

Because Bryan is…

Because Bryan just got married, so I didn’t even invite him to join the Skype call because he should be on his honeymoon and not on a call with us.

We’ve been in the series called A Mother in Israel. We’re talking about Deborah and Jael, and this phrase is used one other time in the Old Testament, correct? Just once?

Only one that I remember, although the idea appears a number of times. There is an obscure little story in 2 Samuel about a woman who doesn’t call herself a mother in Israel, she calls her city a mother in Israel, and this is how that story goes. This is from 2 Samuel 20.

What’s happened is David has been on the run from Absalom. The battle has been joined. Absalom is dead. His army is defeated and there’s confusion about whether or not David is going to return to the throne. A man named Sheba decides to stir the pot and say, “Well, nobody will have David. Let’s every man to his tent, Israel,” so he starts his own little insurrection. There are some other details along the way, but Joab comes back, grabs a bunch of guys and chases him all the way through Israel. We’ll pick up the text there in verse 14 –

And he went through all the tribes of Israel unto Abel and to Beth-maachah and all the Berites, and they were gathered together and went also after him. And they came and besieged him in Abel of Beth-maachah, and they cast up a bank against the city, and it stood in the trench. And all the people that were with Joab battered the wall, to throw it down.

Then cried a wise woman out of the city, Hear, hear; say, I pray you, unto Joab, come near hither that I may speak with thee. And when he was come near unto her, the woman said, Art thou Joab? And he answered, I am he. Then she said unto him, Hear the words of thine handmaid. And he answered, I do hear.

Then she spake, saying, They were wont to speak in old time, saying, They shall surely ask counsel at Abel, and so they ended the matter. I am one of them that are peaceable and faithful in Israel. Thou seekest to destroy a city and a mother in Israel. Why wilt thou swallow up the inheritance of the Lord?

What’s happened is Joab and his guys have laid siege to the city. They’ve begun battering the walls, and somehow the people on the inside don’t get why this is happening. They have closed up their city and locked the doors and they know there’s a besieging army, but this older woman is a little unclear as to exactly what’s going on. So she goes up on the wall and calls out to some random soldier and says, “Get Joab. I need to find out what’s going on here.”

Parley.

Parley. And Joab comes and they have some nice words, and the woman describes the condition of her city. “They were wont to speak in old time…” they used to say… “They shall surely ask counsel at Abel,” a proverb, a meme. Apparently this city had a reputation for having very wise people in it, and when they couldn’t figure out anything else, people would pop over to Abel and get advice from the older generation there.

“We have a history. We have a heritage. We have a reputation, and here you are trying to destroy our city,” and she describes the city as a mother in Israel, and that’s what we’re going to talk about in just a second. She asked Joab, “Why are you trying to swallow up in the inheritance of the Lord? Why are you trying to destroy the city and all that it stands for?” which in her mind is a great deal.

And Joab answered and said, Far be it, far be it from me, that I should swallow up or destroy. The matter is not so, but a man of mount Ephraim, Sheba the son of Bichri by name, hath lifted up his hand against the king, even against David. Deliver him only, and I will depart from the city. And the woman said unto Joab, Behold, his head shall be thrown to thee over the wall.

“Hang on a second. I’ll go get it.”

Yeah, “We’ll get his head.” She does not offer to open the city gates. She just says, “Oh, that’s it? Then we’ll take off his head and throw it to you and you can be on your way, thank you very much,” and she does.

It’s interesting that she has such an esteem for her city. This is not a city of special spiritual significance that I know of, right?

No, we have not heard anything else about it.

Right, but it’s a great thing to her to stand up for her city and say, “Hey, we have a great tradition here and I’m not really crazy about you destroying it, so I’m going to take some brave action to make sure that we can carry on here.”

And she has such confidence. “Oh, that’s all you need?” She doesn’t even debate how this is going to happen. “We will take off his head and it will be thrown to you.” And I love this next line –

Then the woman went unto all the people in her wisdom. And they cut off the head of Sheba the son of Bichri and cast it out to Joab. And he blew a trumpet and they retired from the city, every man to his tent. And Joab returned to Jerusalem unto the king.

So that ended that military coup real fast. We do not know who this woman was. We do not know her name. Generally there were not civil offices that a woman would fill. It’s not a royal city so she’s not a princess or a queen or any such thing. I don’t remember it being a Levitical city. She may be a prophetess, but she’s not called such. She’s called a wise woman, probably older but we’re not told how much older.

What we know about her is she’s bold. When everybody else is confused, she sees straight to the solution. “I’ll go talk to him and see what’s going on then,” and she does. She’s loud. She can make her voice heard.

She has the ear of all the people.

Yeah. She knows that what she says is going to happen, not because of any personal or legal authority, but because it’s obviously the right thing. Her city is wise. Once she fills them in and points out what needs to be done, obviously they will go along with it. She assumes she will be heard, that her voice will be recognized, that her wisdom will be recognized. So she goes to all the people in her wisdom and says, “Look, this guy tried to stage a coup. He’s a traitor to the king. What more do you need to know?”

Probably Sheba said something at this point. There’s nothing good he could have said that would have helped. “Well, yeah, because David is this and David is that!” so there you’ve got your testimony. Anything else?

Should have pled the 5th.

This would be a good time for lying, but he couldn’t come up with that, so they simply grab him and take off his head and throw it over the wall, again not opening the gates of the city because Joab didn’t necessarily have the greatest reputation – as a powerful warrior, to be sure. Honesty and integrity? Eh, you know. So you just send it by air mail and that will be that.

On the one hand we should point to this woman. She is something of a mother in Israel. She does not put on battle armor and take on either Joab or Sheba. She uses her age and wisdom effectively. She gives good advice to people who will listen. She obviously has earned the right to be listened to. She is a wise woman, and Abel is a city known for wisdom.

One thing about wise people is they listen to other wise people. When you have wisdom, you learn to shut up and listen to other people who also have wisdom and you hear them out. So the elders of the city know this woman. They know she speaks wise things. They listen to her voice, and the fact that she’s not an elder is irrelevant. She communicates effectively what needs to be done, they register “Yeah, she’s absolutely right, we need to do that,” and then they do it. But our focus here is on what she calls her city. She calls her city a mother in Israel.

You were telling me before we started that you’ve run into this concept of a heavenly mother. Did you want to tell us something about that?

Yes. This happened to me multiple times back in Maryland, where I had different women come up to me in the grocery story or walking down the street and invite me to their Bible study to hear about the heavenly mother, which I think is a reference to Galatians 4:26 which says, “Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.”

Of course, my red flags go up and I’m thinking, “Okay, so you’ve discovered a new truth? Uh-huh. I’m sure you have,” so I’d say, “Oh, that’s interesting. Where do you get that in the Bible?” and we have a brief conversation, but mostly I never see these women again so I don’t think too much more about it.

But I did find out through a channel on YouTube – Mike Winger, I think is his name, and he talks about different cults and he mentions this cult of the Mother God, so I found out that’s who they were, but I haven’t looked into it much more than that. So that is the association that I have with this verse, which I have a feeling is not entirely correct.

[laughing] No, no. Of course, this has been an age that has seen the rebirth of the goddess. Bumper stickers tell us the goddess is alive and magic is afoot and things like that. I’ve never to this point seen it connected with anything in the Bible. It’s usually very anti-biblical. God as father is evil and violent and demanding and the source of all problems, whereas the mother goddess is good and we know her by intuition and emotion. She’s ecologically friendly and kind and sweet and all that.

Trying to pick Jerusalem above, the new Jerusalem, as a counterbalancing goddess in the Christian religion, that one’s new. That one I have not heard of before, if that’s what’s going on here.

I am interested in the fact that people kept picking on you. Was there something on your forehead like “Victim” or something?

A vibe? I don’t know, but apparently it’s quite a growing thing, from what I can tell. As I said, I haven’t looked into it too much, but I think probably it was a regional thing, that there were more missionaries of this cult in that region than there are in our current region.

California has got enough weirdness. It’s hard to even get a following for anything too terribly new. We have all the old stuff.

The passage referred is in Galatians 4 and I’ll read some of what’s going on here. Paul is summing up his arguments or giving them an analogical expression pointing back to Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. He says to those who are defecting from the true gospel to a gospel of circumcision, of works righteousness –

For it is written that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh, but he of the freewoman was by promise. Which things are an allegory, for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children.

But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not, break forth and cry, thou that travailest not, for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband. Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.

Paul says allegory, but he doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. He means that in this history there is a spiritual principle being worked out into the open so we can see it. Abram had a promise from God, and the promise involved a seed. When he talked this over with Sarah, somehow together they came up with the idea that maybe Sarah was not by name at this point included, and that she was too old to bear a child by any natural process – she was at that stage of life – and that obviously God intended that Abram take a new wife.

There was a young slave girl named Hagar from out of Egypt, and Sarah pointed her out and said, “Will you take her, and then she’ll get pregnant and she’ll have a baby and I’ll adopt the baby. I’m sure that’s how God means to provide you with a seed,” and Abram, to his eternal discredit, went along with this, but it didn’t go so well. Although Abram loved his son Ishmael, the child by Hagar, he’s not the child of the promise.

That was not how God planned on doing it. God from the beginning had said, “One man, one woman forever. That’s marriage. You don’t need to be breaking God’s law in order to get God’s blessing, even breaking God’s law in the name of keeping God’s law. No, don’t do that.”

Although Ishmael did receive the sign of the promise, which I think is very interesting.

He did receive the sign of the promise. He was circumcised. He was recognized as being within the covenant, received the mark of the covenant, and for several years until his teenage years was raised as a child of the covenant, until Abraham understood, “Oh, no. It’s supposed to be a child with my proper wife, my first wife, Sarah.” When they got over themselves and simply trusted God for the miracle, Sarah brought forth a child, Isaac, and God said, “That’s the child. In Isaac shall thy seed be called.”

When Isaac came of age, Ishmael kind of made fun of him. Sarah sees this and says, “This is not going to work. Get rid of the bondwoman and get rid of her son. The son of the bondwoman will not be heir with my son Isaac,” and although this grieved Abram a great deal, God confirmed the message. “She is right. Basically, you screwed this up and you’ve got to live with the consequences of this one.” That does not mean that Isaac was necessarily ungodly. In fact, the text in Genesis says that God was with him, which is some of the irony here.

What Paul is saying to the people in Galatia is, “Yeah, Abraham has many children. Many of them have been circumcised. That does not make them children of God. What makes them children of God is faith in the promise. So just as Ishmael was a natural descendant of Abraham, just as he bore the seed of the promise and yet became a true child of God only by faith, so you Jews can be a child of the promise in the same way.” In other words, Jews are now in the category of Arabs.

That was not calculated to win any votes from anybody, but that is what he is saying. Israel today stands in the same category as Ishmael – genetically and biologically descended from Abraham, marked with the sign of the promise, but without faith not truly children of Abraham in the biblical sense.

I said all that to say this. The covenant principles they were operating on when Abram went to Hagar, he and Hagar and Sarah were all thinking in terms of works righteousness and the religion of the flesh. “If we do stuff that we are naturally capable of doing, if we are good and do good stuff, God will bless us.”

Well, that’s a false gospel, and Hagar as a mom represents that way of trying to get God’s blessing, but so does the Jerusalem of Paul’s day – the Jerusalem that murdered the prophets, that crucified Christ, that persecuted Paul – that city that then was, and was in bondage with her children, though it bore the name Jerusalem was Egypt and Sodom. It was Babylon the Great. It was a whore that propagated a false religion.

Could it return to God’s blessing? Yes, by repenting and embracing the true Messiah by faith and rejecting all claims, whether they be biological and genetic, or whether there be ceremonial, or whether they be cultural heritage. All of that in itself doesn’t save us. So over against that Jerusalem, now we finally come to it.

Paul speaks of a different Jerusalem. He says the Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. Then he takes a prophecy from Isaiah 54. This theme is something that the Bible assumes throughout, but it doesn’t develop in one place in any great detail. It just kind of assumes that we’ve been paying attention from the beginning. This is the prophecy –

Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear. Break forth into singing and cry aloud thou that didst not travail with child, for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord. Enlarge the place of thy tent and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations. Spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes, for thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left, and thy seed shall inherit the Gentiles and make the desolate cities to be inhabited.

Fear not, for thou shalt not be ashamed. Neither be thou confounded, for thou shalt not be put to shame. For thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more. For thy Maker is thine husband. The Lord of hosts is his name, and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel. The God of the whole earth shall he be called. For the Lord hath called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused, saith thy God.

For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.

It goes on and talks about a city. The metaphor shifts from being a woman to a city.

Behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles

But then it’s just back to –

And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children.

And so on. This is what Paul applies to the Jerusalem which is above, so the question is what’s the Jerusalem which is above?

The big hint here from Isaiah is that this Jerusalem is someone/something that produces children to God, that in fact God calls his wife, his bride. Now, if we happened to have read through Ephesians and Revelation and the rest of the Bible, now we can put the pieces together. He’s talking about the new covenant Church or, in a broader sense, true believers of all ages, climaxing and culminating in the new covenant Church. The question then is why does he call it the Jerusalem which is above, because the church seems awfully much to be on earth.

Calvin says this. This is from his commentary on Galatians 4:26 –

The Jerusalem which he calls above, or heavenly, is not contained in heaven, nor are we to seek for it out of this world, for the Church is spread over the whole world, and is a "stranger and pilgrim on the earth." (Hebrews 11:13.) Why then is it said to be from heaven? Because it originates in heavenly grace, for the sons of God are "born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh,
nor of the will of man," (John 1:13) but by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The heavenly Jerusalem, which derives its origin from heaven and dwells above by faith, is the mother of believers. To the Church, under God, we owe it that we are "born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible," (1 Peter 1:23) and from her we obtain the milk and the food by which we are afterwards nourished.

Such are the reasons why the Church is called the mother of believers. And certainly he who refuses to be a son of the Church in vain desires to have God as his Father; for it is only through the instrumentality of the Church that we are "born of God," (1 John 3:9,) and brought up through the various stages of childhood and youth, till we arrive at manhood. This designation, "the mother of us all," reflects the highest credit and the highest honor on the Church.

There’s a lot there. He says that it’s not called heavenly because it’s in heaven. I would differ just a little bit with him. I would say it’s not all there.

There is a good portion of it that is there.

A good portion of the church actually is in heaven, and our King is in heaven, and right now, given how many ages have passed, it may be that the majority of the church is currently in heaven. It may not always be that way, but right now it kind of seems that way. Anyway, a large contingent of the church is in heaven. Jesus is in heaven. But the Church in heaven – we can’t return calls. They don’t talk to us, nor do we talk to them. We can talk to Jesus and he’s on the throne, but the Church insofar as it is a mother to us in the present is the Church on earth.

Now, the Church in heaven has laid up rich treasures for us. We have the confessions and the creeds and we have the hymns, we have the sermons, we have their traditions. We still draw on the things that believers in past ages have done, and that continues to nourish us, but the odds are that the person who brought any one of us to Christ is someone who, at least at that point, was alive and on earth. They may still be alive and on earth.

So the basic figure of a mother is that a mother produces children, and that’s almost the definition. Now, we associate a great many other things with a good mother, and so does scripture and rightly so, because good mothers should not only give birth but should nourish, protect, bring up, educate, train, disciple, set an example for, and we can talk about all the things that good mothers are supposed to do, and so the Church for us. God is our father. God begets us by incorruptible seed. But the earthly means he uses is the preaching of the Word, and that he commits to his Church.

I love the line here from Calvin, although I think it would make a lot of people nervous. “And certainly he who refuses to be a son of the Church in vain desires to have God as his Father,” but then supplies his reason. “For it is only through the instrumentality of the Church that we are born of God and brought up through the various stages of childhood and youth, till we arrive at manhood.”

To say “I want God as my father, but I want nothing to do with the Church because…whatever…they’re all a bunch of hypocrites, none of them is good enough for me, none of them have their doctrine right, they all compromise at crucial points” – you know, God didn’t say anything about you should go to church if you can find a perfect one, or one that’s at least 90% correct, or one that’s 60% correct in most things and absolutely has to do this one thing or you’re out of there, unless of course that one thing is confessing Jesus as Lord. But that’s not generally what it is. It’s generally that people pick on some peripheral issue.

“They don’t have enough programs for my children.”

Yeah. “We sing hymns instead of contemporary Christian music.”

Or praise songs instead of hymns.

Yeah, one way or another. We’ve picked all kinds of things that are not key to our relationship with God, and people walk out of church over them all the time. “The preaching is too dry. The preaching is too emotional. The preaching isn’t doctrinal enough. The preaching is nothing but doctrine.”

We do all kinds of silly things, and the result is rarely that people move from one church to another and stay there. It usually becomes an excuse for rotating through churches one after another every year or two, with no true submission to any one church. They become connoisseurs of churches, sampling them smorgasbord-like, finding the thing that meets our taste right now but may not in a year or two when other situations come up.

But if the Church is our mother, would we treat our earthly mother that way? Would we rotate from household to household? “Aunt Susie, will you be my mother this year? Because my other mother is being kind of cheap with the credit cards. Oh, Aunt Susie, you’re going to get on me about my driving? Okay, maybe Aunt Mary would be my mother now.” It’s about that ridiculous sometimes. That’s not having a mother. That’s a failure to have a mother.

There is a degree of commitment and submission, certainly to the rule of the elders but more specifically and more importantly to the preaching ministry of the gospel. Is it the gospel that offends us? Do we think that there is a better source of nourishment?

When my girls were little they generally liked what we gave them, but sometimes they would get fussy and not eat this particular baby food or that particular baby food, or this flavor of it or that flavor of it, and we’d cave in a little now and then. But when you start letting your baby set the menu, you’ve pretty well given up your place as mom. Mom knows what’s nourishing for babies. Babies don’t, and even young children often don’t.

The Church feeds us, and one of the great responsibilities of pastors and elders is to make sure that the whole Bible is being presented, whether in the main service and the preaching ministry or Bible studies, personal devotions, or books that are being recommended. It becomes the responsibility of church officers to make sure that everyone is getting well-rounded meals that will nourish them and build them up in faith, and as well receiving the prayers and the love and the rebuke that will help them grow from babes in Christ to young men, to old wise men and women in the faith.

That’s what the Church is supposed to do for us. It’s supposed to be a source of health, nourishment, encouragement, and protection. When we have a problem there should be no doubt. I call up my Christian friends, my Christian brothers and sisters. I call up the church officers. I call my pastor. I ask for prayer. I ask for counseling. I ask for intervention. I ask for meals. I ask for babysitting. They’re the people I turn to because they are about me and it’s their responsibility – a cheerful joyful “Let me help” – to take care of me and to nourish me.

The man or woman who doesn’t want that because it’s too intrusive, too controlling, always telling me what to think and what to believe, and criticizing my new trendy rationalistic beliefs – that’s not how this works. God, by making us his children, puts us in the context of this heavenly city.

This podcast we’ve called Halting Toward Zion and we’ve looked at mostly this new covenant Church as a community, a civilization, a culture, a city. Another way the Bible describes this is that of marriage and that of motherhood, so these are other metaphors and images we need to draw into this.

When I was writing the original article for this, I randomly found a blog somewhere. I assume Brandi Remington is a young woman, because Brandi ends with an i, but maybe that’s just my prejudices, and I don’t know anything about her faith or worldview, but she writes this –

“An ideal city would act as a mother to its residents, providing them with safety, support, guidance, esteem and examples of how to navigate through life, allowing them to eventually operate on their own as strong leaders.”

About the only word there that I might qualify is ‘esteem,’ if by that you mean a sense of identity, purpose, belonging. “I know I’m a child of God. I know that God values me because of what Jesus has done, that I’m not a nothing and that I have a purpose in God’s kingdom.” If that’s what we mean, these are good things. This is what an idea city should do. The problem, of course, is that we don’t have any ideal cities on earth right now. We don’t even have a whole lot of good cities.

There was a time, I think, when various cities like Abel existed, in terms of a godly culture, and over multiple generations have propagated such a culture and developed it and lived it out, even in America. In early America I think there were such, perhaps even on the frontier. In the westward expansion there was still some of this, but it is fast receding into the background. Cities now – you try to describe a city as a place of communion, community, of nourishing, of support and guidance – what, San Francisco? LA? Really? Sacramento?

In some cases, the more they try to be the mother that supplies all care and nourishment, the less they tend to do well at it.

Yeah, because there are standards for these things. It is not enough for people to say, “I love you. Let me take care of you.” Let’s define love. Let’s have a standard of what you think is in fact loving, and what taking care of might look like in practical instances, and let us compare it against scripture.

Our generation has become very bad at taking people at their word. If someone says that they love you, then you should submit to them because obviously you should trust them and they mean us well. We should just go with it because they love us and we should accept them as they accept us totally and completely.

That’s not biblical remotely, because to have the Church as our mother is to have God as our father, and God is pretty clear about what he wants from his children. God is father, the Church is mother. It’s not the other way around. So no, there’s no co-divinity in heaven.

I get that question a lot from kids. “If God is our father, does he have a wife?”

The answer is yes, but she’s not a goddess. It takes all of God’s people together to constitute a bride for Jesus, to constitute the holy city, a temple fit for God, not 1 or 2 or 3 or 4, certainly not just 1, though it be the Virgin Mary herself.

There is no queen of heaven in an individual sense. There is the Church, the bride, the new Jerusalem, and that city rooted in the work of Christ but spread out through time and eternity is basic to God’s plan for his people. We are to acknowledge the role of the Church.

There is, especially within American Christianity and it’s probably the same elsewhere, but we Americans are very independent. We don’t want the dead past telling us what to do. We don’t like traditions, and traditions can be dangerous. There are bad ones.

At this point my girls might remind me of the parable of the ham. Do you know this one?

Ah yes, the ham. You have to cut off the ham before you put it in the pan to go in the oven.

And when the little girl asked her mom, “Why do we do this?” she said, “Because your grandmother always did that.”

“Well, why did she do it?”

“I don’t know, we probably should ask her.”

So next time Grandma is there she asks, “Why do you always cut off the ends of the ham?”

“Because when we were first married we only had one pan and it was about this long, so you had to cut off both ends of the ham to get it to fit.”

There’s nothing wrong with what she had done, but because somehow along the line not everything had been communicated properly…

The ‘why’ had not been communicated.

Yes, and often our traditions can be of that sort. They may actually have served a purpose at some point, and then stopped. But then other traditions do have a why, do have a purpose, and it’s easily understandable. Some of them are not absolutes, they’re just good ideas, and they become dangerous when we turn them into absolutes.

We want to avoid moralisms. We want to avoid any authority that isn’t scripture. But just as our own parents tell us things that we put into practice generation after generation and pass down to our own kids, Christians of the past have had some pretty good ideas. They may not be infallible, but to think that we automatically are smarter than them just because we live later in the time stream is kind of arrogant. At the very least we owe them the honor of listening and discerning what is wise, what is practical, and to what degree we can implement that wisdom, even if we don’t do it exactly the way they did it.

There was a generation just back two or three, the generation mostly I think just before mine or maybe two back, that decided that Christian education was a really, really good thing, and they were right. They thought that Christian education should embrace all culture and all of life and it should be more than just public-school education with some Bible verses attached and some spankings, and they were right.

There were a lot of holes they left and there were a lot of holes in the foundation, with much too much reliance on common grace and on natural law, although they called it other things. So every generation we have to re-think. But to go back to the drawing board every generation and assume that our ancestors were idiots is to dishonor not only the Church but to dishonor God, because those people were Christians too. They had the Bible.

And they had the Holy Spirit.

They had the Holy Spirit. This is the communion of the saints stretched across all of time. So as we come to the Church as our mother we need to understand that Mom can tell us many wise things that we may not have to do exactly as she said, but that doesn’t mean we don’t listen and that we don’t learn and that we don’t build on the direction she’s pointing.

To simply despise the Church and say we don’t need the Church then, and worse, I don’t need the Church now is contrary to God’s whole plan of salvation. So we will continue to halt toward Zion, to limp like Jacob in search of that heavenly city, that new Jerusalem, the Jerusalem which is above which is the mother of us all. And it’s our hope that the things that we’re doing here in this podcast will help people get a better cultural sense of what that means, so it’s not just religious words.

Amen to that.

I’ve recommended this before, but I’m reading it right now with my 9th grade American Lit students and that is Earth’s Holocaust by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

You mentioned that today and I am not familiar with it at all. What’s it about?

It’s sort of a fairy tale. It begins “Once upon a time,” and then Nathaniel Hawthorne says, “But whether that was just recently or in the near future I refuse to say,” in classic Hawthorne style. The tale is that he goes out to the Western prairie where all of the world has decided to burn all of the things that are no longer useful.

They cast onto the fire patents of nobility and signs of old heraldry like we’re past that as the human race. We’ve moved past that. Then they’re like, “Well, we also are done with kings, because we have this new empire in the new world,” and they go on and burn alcohol and weapons, because we’ve grown past war. I mean, obviously, no one ever needed alcohol. They go on and they’re considering what else to burn, and then as they go, someone who was really on board with burning alcohol realizes, “Wait, you want to burn my tobacco too?” So the reform just keeps pushing and pushing and pushing until there’s not much left.

So they get to the end and the fire is still burning. Oh, they’ve also burned all the books because the past has nothing to teach us. Shakespeare burns brightest of all the books. Nathaniel Hawthorne notes that American authors don’t tend to burn very long. They just sort of turn into ash very quickly, except for a few things by Ellery Channing.

In any case, they’ve burned everything and they get to the end and they’re like, “Well, I guess that’s it. There’s nothing else left to burn,” and a figure emerges, who is all dark and has glowing red eyes. We’re thinking, “Oh, who could this be?” except that we’re also reading The Scarlet Letter, so we know about the black man who lives in the forest who’s the devil.

He says, “Ha ha, wasn’t this fun? Too bad you can’t get rid of the human heart,” and all of these evils still persist in the world because, yup, we still have the human heart and that’s where evil and strife and war come from, not from the weapons and the gunpowder and all that stuff.

It’s a great read. I think it’s Nathaniel Hawthorne at his best, from what I’ve read of him.

With the help of my wife and daughter, I have two musical recommendations that I think will fit what we’re talking about. One is the Doxology, which is old and simple and trinitarian and reverent. The other was from Andre Crouch, “To God be the Glory,” which is modern and probably not something that will last for all time, but in my generation was a wonderful enthusiastic outburst of joy at the greatness of God in our salvation. No glory to me, all glory to God. So there’s always something to sing, and what was once contemporary drifts quickly into the past and becomes history. That doesn’t mean though that we can’t go back and appreciate older styles.

I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw someplace. It’s a worship leader with a guitar, obviously addressing his youth group or congregation or something, and he’s beginning to pluck at the strings. He says, “I composed this last week, but I think it’s still relevant.” The Church of What’s Happening Now.

The Church is and was and there are roots, and we need to appreciate all the fruits. Going back and realizing, “No, we don’t write songs like this anymore. We don’t sing songs like this anymore” does not mean that those songs are bad and that our songs are good. There are standards of excellence and there are ways of appreciating things that may not be to our taste now, but once God’s people used them to glorify God and there’s still stuff to be learned from them.

My pastor was just talking about singing in his sermon on Sunday. He was in James where it says, “If anyone is cheerful, let him sing praise.” He made the point that you can sing anywhere today. You can sing in your car and people will just think you’re on a conference call. It seems weird in today’s culture even to sing at all, let alone to sing by yourself, but singing is wonderful.

I think it’s a wonderful thing in the Church to grow up surrounded by music. You go and you hear music every Sunday and it’s part of the rhythm of your life and part of the mode of thinking that is shaped in you.

And you not only hear music, but you sing it. People who will not sing any other time, we hope sing at church. That’s not always true, sadly, but it’s an opportunity that we should not pass on.

Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, who at this moment is on a train from Bakersfield to Stockton, and I hope he gets there. Otherwise, I will have a long drive and not much sleep tonight.

In any case, thank you also to our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. Thank you to our financial supporters for helping to keep the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website – anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion.

If you’d like to get in touch with us for any reason, you can email us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.

Brandi Remington quote - Righteous Mothers, Righteous Cities - https://www.offthegridnews.com/religion/righteous-mothers-righteous-cities/amp/