*JESUS AND GUNS

In Romans 13: 1-5 God grants governments the authority to establish order and "punish evil doers".  Good governments punish evil doers and bad governments punish whomever they choose. Occasionally one or more good governments will rise up to punish an evil government  such as in WWII.  Many millions of noble men and women have taken up arms and sacrificed their lives in defense of liberty, freedom, and justice. On these core values  America become a nation and it took guns to do it. 

I am writing this article with an attitude of honor for all the veterans who have sacrificed so greatly for our freedom. I also realize that for many guns and the gusto to fight are as American as apple pie and baseball used to be.  So I am aware the subject is complicated and controversial and many good godly people see things very differently from the perspective I'm about to share. 

Even in view of all the above, this is an appeal to consider the words of Jesus.

 “All those who take up the sword

 shall perish by the sword”. 

The relevancy of these words of Jesus and their current application 

for today could hardly be more poignant.

You and I live as believers in an America 

that is becoming alarmed and is increasingly arming itself

 in light of a threatening and uncertain future.

As a believer are you contemplating taking up the sword?

Are your convictions grounded in scripture 

or in evolving situational ethics ?

When one takes the time to meditate on what Jesus was actually saying and more importantly demonstrating in this garden scene of His betrayal, then these words become radically insightful.

Before my conversion I was fully immersed in the sixties culture. I was committed to non-violence, obviously resisted the draft and the Vietnam War, and thus experienced the customary riots and tear gas that accompanied such convictions and activities. As I became a believer those convictions deepened as I saw in Jesus the invitation to enter into a kingdom where it was even possible to love one's enemies.

Over the years I have maintained the underlying conviction that I would not kill someone, that is, I would not cross the line and take a life irrespective of the situation. However just in the past few years other influences have grown.  Because violence has so increased and become so familiar in our culture, it has also taken a toll on my convictions and I have been wavering.  As Jesus predicted, because wickedness would increase people’s love would grow cold. So I have been wrestling with a loss of love, a loss of the high ground and a growing sense of frustration and anger over where I see our country headed and the evils looming on our horizon.

Nine years ago we built a nice home in the woods so my wife and I along with our chickens share the same space with coyotes, some cagey raccoons, skunks, a mazillion squirrels and a few armadillos. In order to maintain some balance I obviously have a few guns, but it was as I was contemplating buying a handgun that I had a very specific encounter with the Lord. At the right time, as He so often does, He clearly stepped in and through a spirit of guidance and revelation opened up my understanding on this issue by inviting me into a passage of scripture. Matthew 26:52 “…all those who take up the sword will perish by the sword”. 

In essence the encounter left me with an unmistakable realization

  that Jesus was trying to communicate

 if you cross the line and take up the sword in order to kill

you would come under the same spirit 

as the evil one you are encountering.

If you take up the sword you will come under the sword. If you take up the sword it will gain legal rights over you. If you take up the sword you will come under the spirit that drives the sword, a spirit of violence, anger, wrath, murder, retaliation or revenge. 

And if you take up the sword BY IT you will PERISH.

IF YOU TAKE UP THE SWORD OR WEAPON

 IT EVENTUALLY WILL TAKE YOU UP.    

It is in the process of taking up the weapon that the perishing begins to set in. It’s the inner thought life of anger, self-defense and retaliation that reduces us to the level of our enemies.

To perish means to rot, to deteriorate, to lose ground. God's intention for the heart of His followers was a heart of love towards ones enemies demonstrated in turning the other cheek, not returning evil for evil, and leaving revenge in the hands of God. All that begins to lose ground, to waste away, and ultimately to perish inwardly before the outward physical perishing when one seeks to take a life.

Consider the overall scene in the garden, where Jesus is demonstrating and living out the fulfillment of all that He has taught. Consider the harmony and singularity of the following passages in light of what He was about to do.

Matthew 5:39-45:  "...do not resist him who is evil; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone wants to sue you, and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. And whoever shall force you to go one mile, go with him two… You have heard it said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy'. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you in order that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven…"

I concede these verses seem almost unattainable. But heaven and being like God is our goal, not the earth. They point to a very high place, one that is beyond the reach of man. It is God’s sphere, and only God in us can live on this plateau. But still Jesus talked as if He expected us to walk on this level. All of these passages pointed to a totally radical and different worldview. The primary aim of these passages was to direct us to live like our heavenly Father and that is above the world, above revenge, above anger, above retaliation. To be so heavenly minded that if someone wants to take your coat offer him your shirt as well.  Jesus was directing us to have our spirit, our life, and our values above. 

So once we have seen the truth or “The Way” presented for us in these preliminary scriptures we then can be attuned to what is really going on in this truly amazing passage.  In the garden, we see in Jesus the manifestation of all He taught the apostles as He invites them as well as us up to this standard.

Here we have Jesus who has taught us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek, and He is about to go to the garden and turn the other cheek and not resist his enemies even to the point of death. Into that context He invites Peter and a few other disciples. And then of all things He seems to contradict everything He has ever said on this subject and tells Peter to bring a sword to the event.

Now wait a minute! what on earth is going on? The mindset of the Jews up to this point was that the Messiah was going to physically usher in another kingdom. But now He is talking about His dying and worse yet, one of them is just about to betray Him. In the garden they were internally perplexed; confusion, fear, and chaos filled the air as a mob carrying swords and weapons was descending upon them. Out steps Judas and betrays Jesus and the convulsing, crushing, internal realization that Jesus their Messiah, the fulfillment of all of their dreams and aspirations for themselves as well as for the nation of Israel was about to be arrested and crucified.

It was in this exact context a completely different story line was unfolding. In the very essence of Jesus' suffering He was also being the ultimate shepherd for Peter.  And how did He do that?Please stop and ponder-

It was into that intense beyond description situation

 that Jesus had told Peter

to bring a weapon.

Peter of all people, the impetuous, independent, headstrong walking-on-water Peter who had just said even if everybody else deserts you I will, not, I cannot, I will die for you. He told that Peter, not timid Thomas, to bring a weapon to the event.

There you have it. I would say if there was ever a time to use a weapon this would have been it. Enemies coming to arrest and possible kill your best friend and Messiah, righteous indignation, the crushing of all hopes of earthly victory, chaos, anger and hatred filling the air and Peter has a weapon in his hand, not only a weapon but also the one Jesus TOLD Peter to bring. So Peter sees what’s about to happen and having been told to bring the sword he swung it. No small swing, but one that was mere inches from stabbing the guard in the face or slitting his throat. I believe Peter meant to kill, his inner (and lower) nature was animated, pulsating, and in control.

I think that was exactly the point Jesus was trying to make

 and to exactly the man who needed to hear it.

Jesus understood Peter’s nature, so why did He set him up?  Because this was Peter. This is the one who on the day of Pentecost would usher in the kingdom. This was Peter who would stand up against the same Sanhedrin that was about to crucify Jesus. This was Peter who would need to lead the church through the martyrdom of Stephen and face his own imminent death in Acts eight. This was Peter who would need to lead by setting the precedent for the entire church, who would face a hostile, persecuting, Jewish people as well as the Roman world, and this was the Peter who would one day be crucified upside down. Peter needed to know at the most foundational core of his inner being one clarion call, a fact as foundational as bedrock and a principal so high that it could inspire men to live above any and all circumstance, one that could guide the church through centuries of potential enemies and persecutions. And that was this:

The taking up the sword or weapons

to advance or protect the kingdom of God

would make God's kingdom no better than the kingdoms of this world.

It would have ruined Peter and the church he would one day lead.

“ All those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword”

So we find Peter’s life never wavered from the lesson he learned that day.  The message to Peter was if you come under a spirit of anger, retaliation, and revenge and take up arms you will be not only no better than your persecutors but 

your persecutors will gain the mastery over you

because then you will be fighting on their turf, not Mine!

Jesus lived what He taught and rose above the situation and in love restored the ear of the man Peter had tried to kill.  And Peter got the message, loud and clear and forever. Jesus' kingdom is not of this world; that’s why He told Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world.  If it were, then My servants would fight”.

This value was so entrenched in the church that over the centuries we have hundreds if not thousands of testimonies of martyrs who faced their executioners with such a radical joy and expectation of being with Jesus that occasionally their very executioners would lay their implements of death aside and convert to Christ on the spot, to join those who were not of this world.

This encounter, this opening up of my mind to see the heart of Jesus reflected in this passage so helped me at the core of my being. I am deeply thankful that the spirit of God guides us into all truth at the time we need it. 

I so realized that if I or we in America are going to face persecution

 then I don’t want to be caught with a gun in hand

and  a spirit of fear, anger, or retaliation polluting my soul.

No, I yearn to be so filled with the love of God and the Holy Spirit that I may like Stephen behold heaven opened and see Jesus arising to welcome me into His arms. I feel that it would be such an honor to be able to stand so completely assured in my inner man about all that I have built my life and to look a persecutor in the eyes and love him. That is I believe the transcendence Jesus is after.

As said earlier I know this is a very difficult and complex topic, one that may eventually test all of us to the core, regardless of where we stand now. What I am sharing is a revelatory encounter my Father gave me because He knew I needed some encouragement to live up to the Biblical convictions I have always held dear to my heart but was in danger of compromising.

What I do believe is that we are all being swept up into a violent age, and an age of rising armament. In the first century there was a radical difference between how the believer responded to persecution and the path for which many today are preparing.  It seems to me that the drift for many is headed toward a place where there will be very little difference between the responses of the believer and the non-believer to aggression. In the church in America there is a subtle and not so subtle taking up the sword.

My intention is to lift up the Word and bring clarity to a subject that is developing a momentum that will have most of us swept up into situational ethics. Whatever your position, think it through beforehand.

We each need to be thoroughly centered in His leading 

and that leading needs to be unequivocally

 grounded on the word of God.

*THE LOVE BETWEEN THE FATHER AND THE SON

In the relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit we see the greatest love of all eternity past and future. Each year as the Jewish Passover Seder is celebrated, we see one of the most profound and poignant images of this love enacted. Each year, not only Messianic Jews but also all Jews practice the following tradition:  before the Seder begins, three separate pieces of matzo, or unleavened bread, are placed in three individual layers of a special napkin.  During the Seder, the middle piece of matzo is removed by the father of the household and broken in half.  One half of this middle piece is returned to the napkin, and the other half is wrapped in a separate napkin and hidden, to be brought back at the end of the meal.  What an incredible insight this gives us into the relationship between the Father and the Son!

Let us consider for a moment the endless love that has always existed between the Father and the Son.  We can more easily understand the concept of eternity if we look to the future, but there was also an eternity before time.  Imagine for a moment the depth of a relationship between Father and Son that existed from eternity PAST.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.”  (John 1:1,2).  “The Lord possessed Me at the beginning of His way, before His works of old…then I was beside Him as a master workman, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him…” (Proverbs 8:22,30).  In the form of God, Jesus could merely with a word create an ocean, and bring galaxies into being.  Together with His Father, He could just imagine, speak, and create.  For eternity past, Father and Son so loved each other’s fellowship, of which all earthly loves are but an ever so faint shadow.  For an eternity before the creation, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit lived together in such a fullness of love, a fullness of glory, incredible intimacy and joy.  We read in Philippians 2:6,  “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.” He existed in the very form of God!

But as so graphically demonstrated in the Seder, the middle piece of God—the Son—was pulled out of this unity, to be separated, to be broken, and to be hidden away from this fellowship. When this Son, who spoke universes into being, was about to enter the world, scripture says, “Sacrifice and offering Thou hast not desired, but a body Thou hast prepared for Me”  (Hebrews 10:5).  When God the Father approached the issue of canceling sin, He knew sacrifices were insufficient. So He prepared a body for Jesus.  Contemplate the scene in the manger.  Here in the form of an infant lies the co-creator of the universe.  Can you picture the angels who have worked with millennia of history, who have watched over prophets and kings, who have waited for God to draw back the veil from His majestic plan?  Imagine them staring wide-eyed at this little child with no home, no honor and no glory. Imagine Michael and Gabriel, or the angels who had slain the 185,000 Assyrians (Isaiah 37:36), peering from the heavens at the King of Kings and Lord of Lords lying as a fragile infant.

And like the angels, the prophet Isaiah long before had wondered, “Who has believed our message?  And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”  (Isaiah 53:1). He continued, “ He grew up before [the Father] like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground.”  Jesus, in a parched, dry, hostile and alien environment, grew up BEFORE THE FATHER; always mindful of the Father, never speaking a word or doing an action unless He saw the Father doing it.  This tender young shoot was entirely focused on the Father with whom He had shared all eternity, be it in temptation, in struggle, in honor, whether being rejected or being hailed as king. 

As a young boy at the age of twelve, when Jesus was found in the temple He said, “Did you not know that I had to be in My Father’s house? (Luke 2:49).  Is it any wonder that we find Him so often up early, even before dawn, climbing a mountain to meet with His Father, or up at night with Him in communion?  In His immediate consciousness as He awakened there was a deep soul-thirst for His Father.

In John 17, we see Him consumed with His relationship with His Father.  Jesus prays with lifted eyes, “Father, the hour has come to glorify Thy Son, that the Son may glorify Thee, even as Thou gavest Him authority over all mankind, that to all whom Thou hast given to Him He may give eternal life.  And this is eternal life that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.  I have glorified Thee on earth having accomplished the work which Thou hast given me to do, and now glorify Me together with Thyself, Father, with the glory which I ever had with Thee before the world was.”  We see Jesus, having fully taken on the mantle of earthly sonship, now saying in essence, Father, I want to come back to that glory.  I long to come back to that eternal place, that fellowship we had.  Now glorify Me, that I can glorify You and return to the glory that was there.

Now consider another Jewish tradition that the precious Son enacted just before His trial. During Passover, it was the custom to carefully select a young unblemished lamb and set it apart.  For four days this lamb would be with the family.  Imagine in your house what an affection your children would develop for this lamb.  This was not an incident experienced in the barn by the father.  The father was responsible that the children see the tender price that must be paid for sin.  To know that this lamb was set apart for slaughter would not have been in keeping with our ideas of positive family memories.  Instead it provided a context for a deeply imprinted realization of the horrendous price of sin.  As a boy and all through Jesus’ growing years, each Passover His father Joseph had chosen a lamb and brought it to the family, and for four days Jesus would have been with this lamb.  How old do you think Jesus was when He realized that He was one day to be the lamb?  Yet for years after this realization, He continued to keep the Passover.  What a Son!  What a Father!

Now we see Jesus, with this full realization, riding into Jerusalem.  On the very night that the families were taking the lambs into the house to be examined, the Lamb entered “the house” to be examined before He was slain, before the Sanhedrin, Pilate, and rejection by His own people.

“Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to His disciples, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’  And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and distressed.  Then He said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch with Me.”  And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” (Matthew 26:36-39. The weight of what was about to take place was upon Him; there was no place to turn aside.  Again, it was the Son before the Father, appealing with all of His being for a way out, with a heart completely willing to obey, but in such agony His perspiration is mingled with blood.

On the cross, He was offered something to dull the pain.  But here again, He so stood before the Father, looking for the Father’s face and for the Father’s love and vindication.  But instead He now entered the darkest void of all.  In the darkness of that hour, the Father in some way took OUR sin and placed it upon His perfect, obedient son, and in so doing had to turn His back upon the Son. And here we face the greatest pain of all history. Because of God’s total enmity with and hostility toward the sin placed upon His son, their union and friendship was broken; it was severed; they where separated.  To such an extent that in an agony far beyond the garden Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”  It was a cry that a million books could not describe.  This love had been abandoned.  When our sin was placed upon Jesus’ back He faced the full and due penalty of what you and I would have faced in that place, and He was separated from His Father.  Now see why He cried out.  As He looked for the eyes of the Father who had  turned away, He now saw our whole eternity in hell placed on Him alone.

There was an incomprehensible wrenching of this incredible love from all eternity past: 

it was this love, this trust and relationship that was on the altar.

 The price of sin was to be paid between them.

They alone, together, made atonement for our sin.

We have a picture of colossal magnitude painted for us in Genesis.  When Abraham offered up his son Isaac, he was able by faith to tell Isaac “the Lord will provide for Himself the lamb”.  (Genesis 22:8).  In that scene, the father Abraham raised the knife over the son, but we need to realize the knife of Abraham would never and could never fall.  It was merely a sign.  

Whereas Abraham had a way out, the Father God did not.

While Abraham saw a ram caught in the thicket, there was no such ram for the Father that day, except the deeply beloved Son before Him.  The Lamb, caught in the thicket of our sins, now lay bound. The Father looked to you and to me and to the multitudes that would accept and reject Him, and He could not turn aside.

As the Father raised His hand, “from the sixth hour darkness fell upon the land until the ninth hour” (Matthew 27:45).  As the darkness spread over the earth, it was as though nature itself had to shield its eyes from the sight unfolding before it.  Can you imagine those angels now?  Those angels who years before had stood gazing in intent wonder at the defenseless infant; now where could they run, where could they hide from such a scene?  The earth itself jerked back and staggered in such horror that the rocks split apart at such a sight.  Is it any wonder that nature itself went into convulsions and that saints of old literally rose up out of their graves and walked around Jerusalem! 

As the knife came down the price was paid and the curtain of separation in the temple was rent in two.  We read in Hebrews 12:1 that it was “for the joy set before Him He endured the cross”.  What was that joy for which He surrendered His relationship with His father, His glory, His dignity, all His natural rights and His very life?  It was the joy of seeing that the love that existed with the Father from eternity past would now reach into all eternity future, extended to include every individual who would respond to it. The joy set before Him was the knowledge that “He will see His offspring” (Isaiah 53:10), and that the pleasure of the Lord, which was His longing to be reconciled to all mankind, would prosper as a result of His sacrifice. 

After these things I looked and behold, a great multitude,

which no one could count, from every nation

and all tribes and peoples and tongues,

before the throne and before the Lamb,

clothed in white robes and palm branches were in their hands;

and they cry out with a loud voice, saying,

Salvation to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.

AL QAEDA IN DENVER

ABC News

Sept. 19, 2009

By RICHARD ESPOSITO, BRIAN ROSS and CLAYTON SANDEL

Zazi, who initially denied any ties to al Qaeda, later admitted connections to the terror group and told FBI interrogators he had received explosies training at a terror camp in Pakistan.

A computer belonging to Zazi showed he had researched baseball and football stadiums and sites used in the recent Fashion Week event in New York City, law enforcement officials tell ABCNews.com.

The officials said text messages sent by Zazi suggest the plot was nearing the attack phase. One message said the "wedding cake is ready," which authorities say may have been code to indicate the attack was ready. Al Qaeda operatives have frequently used references to weddings to disguise planned terror attacks.