Monday, December 21, 2015

A Temporary post...


We were given a couple of challenges at the end of Sunday morning's Christmas service— these are some notes that I am parking here temporarily.



How was begotten used in John 1:14?
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.


Begotten • μονογενής • monogenḗs,  meaning 'single of its kind'

Strong's G3439  only-born, i.e. sole:—only (begotten, child).

Webster's 1828 -participle passive of get. Procreated; generated.

Thayer's Greek Lexicon expands: "He is so spoken of by John … because by the incarnation of the logos in him, he is of nature or essentially Son of God, and so in a very different sense from that in which men are made by Him." In other words, John didn't want us to think Jesus was God because the Father 'put' an eternal Word/logos in him, but because He is the logos.

Even with only a simple high school science background, "mono genes" probably jumps out when you see the Greek transliteration monogenḗs.  (Although it is pronounced more like muh-nog-ga-NACE).



Did the shepherds really hear the angels sing in Luke 2:13?
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying..
(the specific word for singing was not used) When Paul and Silas were "singing" with the prisoners, Acts 16:25, the Greek word used was hymneō. (And you don't even need high school science to see that "hymn" is there.)

praising: aineō  to praise, extol, to sing praises in honour to God

saying: legō  to say, to speak, to call (using words in systematic discourse)

The word used for 'praising' can imply singing. It certainly does not rule out that the angels sang. What stood out for me, though, was that legō is a 'systematic discourse.'  One look at sheet music for a good Bach Fugue pretty much is conclusive evidence that music is 'systematic.'

But surely angelic beings have the ability to sing, right?
Hmm... The verse that I thought would be conclusive, isn't. In God's challenge to Job, (38:7,) He said that, "the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy."  If God is being literal and not figurative, then the early star matter was resonating and pulsing to produce sound and the angels were shouting about it.

All of this considered, I think the angels probably did sing, but that Scripture was written to emphasize the message of the song, not the music. 

================================
Well, maybe not so temporary after all.  I have two unpublished drafts from 2016 too. I don't remember where I was going with any of them, but this one can stay.  edited April 2017




Saturday, December 19, 2015

Why My Christmas Tree is NOT an Idol ♠ Part Two




In my last post I mentioned that I discovered that many of the "Christmas is a Pagan Holiday" websites that were coming up in searches were also anti-Catholic. I am far from being a champion of Catholicism, their "coronation" of a Pope frequently gives more honor to a man than their other actions give to the Word of God; however, down through the centuries there have been many Catholics who loved and honored God. Satan has surely assaulted the Church's leadership with temptations of power and wealth, and while many succumbed to those enticements, it has also done enough things right that it has survived through the centuries and ministered to untold millions. In this post, I'd like to address the three undeserved criticisms made about the Catholic Church as regards the celebration of Christmas.

• The Catholic Church made up the holiday. Nowhere in scripture are we told to celebrate the nativity.

This is a common charge, and it was one of the Puritan's favorite denunciations of Christmas. It loses some of its punch when you realize that Jesus attended a festival that had not been instructed through Moses. "At that time the Feast of the Dedication took place at Jerusalem; it was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple…" John 10:22, 23. Today, we call this Hanukkah. It commemorates the Maccabean revolt (167-160 BC) and subsequent cleansing of the temple after it was profaned by Antiochus Epiphanes. Our canon does not cover this time period; nowhere in scripture was Jesus told to recognize this event. But apparently, the absence of a command did not cause Jesus to shun it.
Paul addresses a similar situation, "One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind." Romans 14:5

• Jesus wasn't born on December 25th. 

Once you understand why the Catholic church picked that date, you will see that they did not choose it to deliberately coincide with a pagan festival. They started with Luke 1:5, "In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zacharias, of the division of Abijah." They compared it with the list of priestly succession in Nehemiah 12. Abijah is found in verse 17. Abijah served during the eighth week and the 32nd week, and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950s reconfirmed¹ that those weeks remained a consistent assignment through the years. Zechariah, as a descendant in the division of Abijah, would have been serving in the temple week of Yom Kippur when the angel appeared to him. Zechariah and Elizabeth conceived John the Baptizer within a month after Zechariah completed his service. The Catholic Church calculated that St. John the Baptizer was born on June 24, and this remains his feast day on their liturgical calendar. When the angel visited the Virgin Mary at the conception of Jesus, he told her that her cousin Elizabeth was in her sixth, month. cf Luke 1:36. They reasoned that if the future John the Baptist was six months older than baby Jesus, then Jesus's DOB would be on December 25th. Right or wrong, (and yes, strong arguments can also be made that Jesus was born during one of the Jewish fall feasts,) the date was picked using reasoning that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

• The Christians celebrated the nativity during an existing pagan festival to avoid detection.

I first heard this theory in my high school Latin class, but there is no reason to think that the early Christians, who were willing to face lions, would shrink back and fudge the date of Jesus' birth to hide behind a pagan festival.  Of the two potential festivals sometimes named, neither are a perfect fit for the theory. One, the Saturnalia, concluded on the solstice, three days earlier. The other, Natalis Solis Invicti, was established by Emperor Aurelian, 270-275 AD, and was not continued by his successor Tacticus. It was started after the church fathers had calculated the December 25th date and was not around long enough to make a difference.

The Catholic Church, for all its faults, and especially the early Catholic Church before either Constantine's conversion or the beginnings of the Dark Ages, was not yet willing to blend with pagan practices to make their religion easier to swallow when proselytizing pagan countries.

The hard, undeniable evidence that Christmas is pagan simply does not exist. If your heart's motivation in having a tree is to glorify God and to honor his incarnation on Earth, then that is the purpose of your Christmas tree. Don't let the devil steal your joy. 


¹ I have not checked this out personally. The research was reportedly done by Shemaryahu Talmon, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, published in 1958


Thursday, December 17, 2015

Why My Christmas Tree is NOT an Idol ♠ Part One



Like a good many devilish things, the accusation that Christmas trees are rooted in paganism is—in addition to being horticulturally incorrect—also doctrinally backwards. 180° backwards. Christmas trees are not so much copies of pagan practices as the pagan rituals were corruptions of God's original creation.

I have met more than my share of self-appointed Scrooges and Grinches who cannot get their seasonal jollies by baking gingerbread men or sucking on candy canes like normal people. No, they find their holiday cheer by putting a bug in your hum as they self-righteously announce "The decoration of Christmas trees is a survival of pagan tree veneration," or smugly advance their rhetorical query, "Do you really want to give the impression that you are worshipping a tree?" Then, while you are staggering on the defensive, they bring out the coup de grâce, the deathblow of argumentation; they quote scripture.

For the customs of the peoples are delusion;
Because it is wood cut from the forest,
The work of the hands of a craftsman with a cutting tool.
They decorate it with silver and with gold;
They fasten it with nails and with hammers
So that it will not totter.
But they are altogether stupid and foolish
In their discipline of delusion—
   their idol is wood!
Jeremiah 10:3, 4, 10 NASB

Jeremiah does state that the heathen nations in the vicinity of ancient Judah decorated trees in their polytheistic rites of worship. So now, please explain the 2000 year gap that shows how this Babylonian custom overcame the language barrier, was transported to another continent, and carried on until 1521 in Alsace, (then, a district of the Holy Roman Empire; present-day, the region around the French and German border) where the first occurrence of a Christmas tree is recorded.

While you are working on finding the missing links for the evolution of the Christmas tree that way, I will tell you how the medieval Christian church in Europe was educating the illiterate peasantry about sin and redemption. They were putting on plays. One of the most popular dramas was the Paradise play that told the story of Adam and Eve's fall and subsequent ejection from the Garden of Eden. The staging was usually simple; often, the only item on the set was a fir tree with fruit tied to its boughs. Although these plays could be given any time, some dates were timelier than others. The Passion play depicting Jesus' crucifixion was usually given in the spring; plays about the revelations that Jesus shared with St. John were commonly held about the time of his feast day in late June. And this play with the paradise tree was often performed around December 24 because it was the feast day of Adam and Eve. If you are looking for a custom from which the modern Christmas tree could have developed, then this one fits the timing, the geography, and the culture far better than Canaanite idol worship ever did.

After a couple of days spent researching the so-called pagan beginnings of the Christmas tree, I began noticing a pattern; the overwhelming majority of claims for the pagan origins of Christmas were also Catholic-bashing articles. These generally focused more on date setting and on claims of "making up" a feast not specifically prescribed in the Gospels. Since neither of those are Christmas tree specific, I will address them in a separate post. What is noteworthy, however, is that Christmas trees first became popular during the span of the Protestant reformation, which is fairly strong circumstantial evidence that Christmas trees did not have a pagan origin. 
 

Now, it is certainly true that trees in general, and evergreen trees in particular, have taken on meanings in pagan societies that exceed mere symbolism. Indeed, the general concept of a Tree of Life is so ubiquitous that instead of supporting any claim that the Christmas tree copied pagan ones, it is far more likely that the pagan trees are all contorted adulterations of the original tree in Eden.  

The Celts and Druids were into fantastical wood lore. On the European continent, sacred groves were common among both the Scandinavian and Germanic tribes. The Greeks had their wood sprites and dryads. The sakaki is an evergreen tree used in sacred rituals of Japanese mythology. India has its kalpa-vriksha, a wishing tree. The African baobab tree is associated with a rich and complex history that blends fact with folklore. Smith's Dictionary of the Bible summarizes, "Tree-worship may be traced from the interior of Africa not only into Egypt and Arabia, but also onward uninterruptedly into Palestine and Syria, Assyria, Persia, India, Tibet, Siam, the Philippine Islands, China, Japan, and Siberia, also westward into Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and other countries."¹
 

(Curiously, the one area of the ancient world where tree worship was less common was among the Native Americans, who were also the most geographically separated from their contemporaries. And while they still had their totem poles and prayer sticks, in the absence of a written language, those were used principally as memory devices. As a generalization, trees were considered as gifts of the Great Spirit for healing and were not directly worshiped.)

Why did the heathen begin using trees for worship? I have come to believe that the answer for that centers—literally centers—on the Garden of Eden. "and Jehovah God caused to sprout from the ground every tree desirable for appearance, and good for food, and the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil." Genesis 2:9.  In time, Adam and Eve's eyewitness account of these trees would be imbued with mysticism. 
 

Ask the Rabbi² estimates world population at the time of the Tower of Babel at over 920,000 people, and bases this on his timeline of 339 years between disembarking the ark and the dispersion at Babel. Andrew Snelling,³ using a 101 year calculation for that period, figures a 9,000 person minimum. Either way, it leaves a rapidly expanding youthful population, which has very few elders to pass along the knowledge of God. (And at least one of those was drunk for a spell!) In a world with harsher climatic conditions, little-to-no wealth laid up for a jump-start inheritance, altered nutritional needs, and the time-stresses inherent in raising children, it would be fairly safe to assume that some details about the trees of Eden are going to slip some minds, some will be embellished by some others, and that some of the second- and third-generation children who never knew life in the old world will decide that the old geezers don't know what they are talking about. Satan, who was in Eden and knew better, could spin a confusing web of fables and disinformation to misdirect mankind into worshiping the creation rather than the creator. cf Romans 1:25.
 

Like the Doctrine of Evolution, history and archaeology have provided some metaphorical fossils that could be interpreted to support the notion that the Christmas tree grew from pagan origins, but there are missing links in that record. Other than saying, 'It surely looks possible,' the theory cannot be proven. The true believers who carry the torch of Truth across the generations are not going to willingly copy a heathen practice. Give the reformers some credit and exercise the wisdom of Gamaliel here: if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail.  Acts 5:38. Christmas trees have been around for almost five centuries now; if the original intent was to mock God with tree-worship, the tradition would not have survived, at least not outside a few cults.
 

And there is another reason that deconstructs the possibility that my Christmas tree could be an idol. I have been taught since childhood that it represents New Life, both the new life of a baby in a stable and the new life He would purchase with blood when He became a man. It has always been this way for me. It wasn't until I was well into my teens that I learned that the Druids thought of a fir tree as a sacred wood, so I definitely could not have retroactively made the Christmas tree into an idol. It wasn't until sometime later that I read an article by a wiccan author who gleefully crowed that they had "infiltrated" Christianity with tree-worship, without providing a shred of evidence that Christians are worshiping trees. You cannot take a snapshot of an "effect" and then go to your smorgasbord of "causes" to pick one that suits your worldview. Those are straw man arguments that do not prove a thing.

But mostly, my Christmas tree is not an idol because I do not idolize it.
 



¹ Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, Genesis of Earth and Man, p. 139
² Ask the Rabbi http://www.jewishanswers.org/ask-the-rabbi-3463/noah-tower-of-babel-population-growth/?p=3463
³ Snelling, Andrew. Earth's Catastrophic Past: Geology, Creation, & the Flood. Dallas, TX: Institute for Creation Research, 2009. p. 289