God’s Own Summary of the Bible
I read a summary of the bible in God’s own words on Mountainman’s fascinating website, but I think it missed the most important point, and that is that both of the commandments that Christ gave are the same one. I explain it here (http://www.askwhy.co.uk/truth/b11fscollins.php) in a criticism of a book by F S Collins:
We will see that Christ gave two answers when asked for the most important commandment, and the reason is that the two commandments he gave are the same one, to Love God and to love your neighbour. It is a clear indication that God, in practical terms, is your neighbour, your fellow human being on this planet. Just in case anyone should doubt it, let them read Christ’s description of the Last Judgement in Matthew 25:33-46. God says to the sheep at his right hand whom He has blessed:
“I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you made me welcome, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.
The virtuous say to him in reply:
Lord when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and gave you drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome, naked and clothe you, sick or in prison and go to see you?
And God replies:
In so far as you did it to one of the least of my brothers, you did it to me.
To the goats gathered at His left hand God says:
Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you never gave me food. I was thirsty and you never gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you never made me welcome, naked and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me.
And they too will ask:
Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or in prison, and did not come to your help.
And again God will answer:
In so far as you neglected to do this this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.”
If you are a Christian and consider Christ to speak with the authority of God, because he is God, then just what could be clearer than this description of how to be saved. And what could be clearer than that God considered any human being, even the least of them, as being Himself. To abuse or fail to help any human being is to do the same to God, and only by helping your fellow human beings are you displaying your love of God.
So, to get the full meaning of God’s shortest bible, a little more needs to be read, but I cannot see how Christians can miss the interpretation. It shows clearly that most “Christians” are nothing of the kind, particularly those who are most demonstrative of their beliefs like Bush and Blair, the Constantines of the modern day, maybe.
God incarnated as Christ has nothing to say about attending mass, or saying prayers, or having faith, or lighting candles to be saved. It is altogether more moral than all the mumbo jumbo. God is Everyman! You cannot separately love God, you can only love Him through loving people!! He says thou shalt. It is an order. Faith and all the rest might help, but it cannot replace what Christians must do to be saved. They have to love others. Full Stop! Why do Christians confuse this simple message with all the mumbo jumbo?
I just stumbled across this blog on accident but I wanted to tell you how great it was to see someone speaking the truth. So many confuse the issues with faith, belief, virtue, piety, arrogance, rudeness, self importance, and many more troubling attitudes, when the most important attitude is to simply care for your fellow man and/or woman ( your neighbors/ all those you encounter during the day )
T. McMullen
4 February, 2010 at 4:31 am
Pretty close … however an issue of repentance, obedience and keeping the TORAH is required. Yahushua never came to bring another religion eg Christianity. He came to bring Truth, his whole life was dedicated to doing his Father Yahuwah will. Just as we are required to do. And loving ones’ neighbour and doing good as we would like done to us – is a huge requirement. The Kingdom message is not one of death and atonement it is one of obedience of Yahuwah’s commandments just to enter life.
Red Johnson
15 February, 2010 at 5:32 pm
I have looked through the entire new testament and I have yet to see the names of the psychopathic demons jehovah or yaweh.
Jesus Christ referred to Our Father, not a mass murderer god.
Buff
28 March, 2010 at 11:50 pm
The old tesstament God, and Jesus’s God are two different Gods
jeffrey dicke
1 November, 2012 at 10:47 pm
As a summary of the Bible my favorite is Ecc. 12:13:
The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.
Robert Schmid
28 October, 2010 at 4:49 am
On the face of it, saying “keep God’s commandments” is too vague, certainly for most modern Christians at any rate. Christ’s point is that every man is God, and should be treated appropriately, that is compassionately or with lovingkindness as the bible has it (love!). In fact, with a more literal translation of the final phrase of this passage of Ecclesiates, it is clearer — for “this is the whole duty of man” is literally “this is every man”!
Mike Magee
28 October, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Well, you can arrange words so that you can keep saying that every human is God according to your arrangement of words.
But you cannot arrange words so that every human can put back his nose into his face and keep it there as before, by sheer will power, should he suffer an accident by which his nose gets completely severed from his face.
I grant you are one great juggler of words and a great believer in your juggling of words to come to any conclusion by which you feel that you are so wise and so full of insights.
Gerardo Ty Veloso
Gerardo Ty Veloso
30 October, 2010 at 7:14 am
Not my arranging or juggling of words, but the man whom Christians consider to be God, Jesus Christ. If that is so, you had better watch out for a far worse punishment than threatening to rearrange people’s noses. Try reading the Christian gospels. They say Christ had no time for gangsters, even if they pretended to be Christian ones.
Mike Magee
30 October, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Thats because there WERE NO psychpathic demons by those names. Duh!
Magni
14 May, 2011 at 1:21 pm
It is absurd for the author to use the bible to “prove” their is no God other than your neighbor. In the very text he uses, God sits at the end of time judging mankind and weather they will go to heaven or hell. Jesus was an historical fact. He gives us his body to join with his as he is the head of the body. The bible and Jesus also speaks plenty of faith for salvation and prayers, so when the author says it doesn’t, he is lying. We also know from the bible that Satan is the father of lies. Satan knows the bible well, just doesn’t want anyone to truly believe in salvation through Jesus, so he is constantly twisting it and lying.
Nancy
8 October, 2011 at 1:09 pm
I suggest you read a little rather than listening to your get rich quick pastors, assuming that you are not one, as I have only the name “Nancy” to go by. I have shown to you from your own supposedly holy book that there can be no way of misunderstanding what God incarnated–Jesus Christ–said. If tou believe this Jesus was God, then you believe what He said, not what Paul, the first crooked pastor, said. In fact, if you are right, and Christ is God, then you not I are following Satan, the father of lies. Paul, the Antichrist if Christ is God, was the father of lies, and you have chosen to worship him. The good news for you, is that Christ said you have time to repent and be forgiven, but from here on in you must do as Christ told you not what Paul did!
Mike Magee
8 October, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Judaism was originally oral; Ezra the bigoted, racist Jew wrote the New Judaism, which the world has hated & still hates to this day!
The Book of Esther & the Book of Ezra make Mein Kampf read like a COMIC!
The god of Ezra is a sadistic, psychotic monster!
Bob
28 May, 2012 at 5:30 pm
I need forgiveness. What has this to do with God’s summary of the bible?
mikemagee
12 August, 2012 at 11:33 pm
The bible was written not just as a way to live but to also prove a point that no man can live his entire life without sinning. Sin equals death in the end. Jesus provided the way to eternal life. Its not to say we have a free pass to freely sin our whole lives but through being forgiven we grow closer and more appreciative of christs love for us. True repentance is makeing a complete 180 turn from the sin we just did. That is true repentance. As far as love. Yes we are to love one another but not as gods. Thats foolishness. We are to love because we are all creations and true love is about sacraficeing. Putting our own emotions to the side and forgiving. It is harder to forgive an known enemy than your close brother. Not easy at all. Were all guilty of holding grudges. But we work at it til our time is up. As far as Paul is concerned. He is a great account of gods mercy for mankind. Heres a man that murdered christians and got off on it as he was doing it. When he was finally shown his errors of his ways and given mercy he was all in. It is one of many accounts of gods mercy and christs grace because without christs grace there is no other life. As far as using love to get to heaven. That would fall under using lifes works to get to heaven and christ made that very clear. That works alone wont get you into the next life. There is no skating around and just choosing what we like to do and claim heaven as destiny. Love is the greatest because it sums up all the commandments. Example adultery… If you truely loved your spouse you wouldnt got cheat on them or allow yourself to be in an unusal situation.. stealing… If you truley loved you would think about the harm you would be causing with your act..you get the jist..But with that said we still fall and stumble.. We will always stumble but when we get back up we learn from it and move on..Thank god for forgiveness.
Les
12 August, 2012 at 8:36 pm
You try to avoid God’s direct instructions as reported in a book you consider to be holy, with a melange of your own composition, your own mixture of sermonized drivel. But, given that you are a Christian, Christ said to you exactly what you should do to be saved. I quoted above precisely what your God said from His own lips. You illustrate the whole reason that Christianity has failed. You do just as you like by ignoring Christ’s clear words, Christ your own God, and you seem to think that this God will not notice. Perhaps He will not because He is merely a figment of your imagination, or is an idiot God, but, as a believer in God, you had better read what He actually says. You can read it for yourself without your phony clergyman telling you what to read or what it means.
He does not say love one another “as gods”, as you say. How could He when He is supposed to be the one and only God. Read it again! In the passage cited above, He tells you to love other people as God! As if everyone you meet were God Himself, and if God can appear incarnated as Jesus, you have no idea whichever other man or woman he might choose to be incarnated as. You are right that you are supposed “to work at it” until you die. You are to be perfect as God is perfect. God said so, so as a Christian that is your aim. I persist in imagining that Christians cannot really think God is an idiot, even though they act as if they do, so God cannot expect a human being whom He knows is flawed to be perfect literally. To be perfect is your task, your aim, and you must therefore be judged on how well you have achieved that aim. You obviously fail when you spend your life making excuses for why you cannot do as Christ, God, requires.
Paul is a man whose account of himself is all you have in the bible to go on. He spent his career demolishing what God, had told you from his own mouth. If you believe in a wicked spirit, then logically, anyone who teaches other than what God taught must have been one of Satan’s devils.
You say that works will not get you to heaven, denying that love has any purpose at all. That was Paul’s evident intention, even though he pays a degree of lip service to love. Paul’s central message was that faith alone was sufficient, and in that he denies the teaching of God incarnate. You are again correct that “works alone” will not get you into heaven, but that is simply because God is the ultimate judge. He decides. He cannot be bound by any commitment for then He immediately ceases to be almighty, and presumably you accept that God is almighty. So, God can refuse to admit you into heaven on the least infringement or none at all but simply on a whim. Nevertheless the point of the passage cited above is that you will not even be considered unless you have done what God requires as a minimum, and that is to love your fellow human beings as if they were God Himself.
“…skating around and just choosing what we like to do and claim heaven as destiny” is just what you are arguing, like most of your co-religionists. You will beat around every possible bush you can find to avoid the simple truths uttered by God through Christ. The examples you give at the end are examples of works, which according to you will not get you to heaven. True, but not doing God’s works will certainly keep you out of it, according to what He has told you. And the Brother of Christ, James, had quite a different view of works from Paul. I am more willing to believe God’s earthly brother than an opportunist and fantasist like Paul, who destroyed Christ’s message in its infancy with dire consequences for the Christian world since.
mikemagee
12 August, 2012 at 11:27 pm
Mike, your thinking is not without merit. But I think you oversimplify the relationship of the personalities and the teachings of the Bible. It seems to me that you are foremost a logician in respect to your critique of the Bible. You appear to me to miss the spiritual nuance, if I may so call it, because you have not experienced a spiritual re-birth of heart and intent. The purpose of Christ’s messianic mission was to be the Perfect Israelite, the man who would satisfy God’s requirement for the atonement of sin, thus the Old Covenant history of the old testament pages. Scripture teaches that the law was given to identify what sin was, not what virtue was. Jesus shows us what true virtue is, and he can do so because he is a perfect man. Of course as perfect man he would expound perfect virtue. But you and I are not perfect, and yes we are to emulate Christ–but we aren’t saved by emulating his perfect works, but by believing that they atone for our inability to properly do so. Thus we must believe on Him, and count Him as our Righteousness. There’s more to say on this, but I do think you are unable, Mike, to properly understand this side of it because of the condition of your heart just now.
Ken Stack
15 November, 2012 at 9:21 pm
I am confident that you know nothing about the state of my heart, Ken, so what you say about it is irrelevant. As for being a logician, I try to be rational, as we all should, but reason and fancies about spirituality and supernatural powers do not mix. I do not need any metaphors to see that you either do not get the very simple truth I am demonstrating that Jesus taught, or you do not want to. My guess would be the latter. You introduce the ancient excuse that Christ is perfect and so cannot be emulated, ergo, we should not bother. Instead, he has done it all for us. You do not have to try. You are a Paulist, not a follower of Christ, because the atonement argument is a cop out.
Christ, God, if you wish, tells you that you have to treat your fellow humans as if they were God. That is the way to salvation, explicitly. That means you have to try to be a perfect human being like Christ, and he actually said, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect!” (Mt 5;48), so you have to emulate God Himself. Have you the gall to say that the Christian God is wrong, and still claim to be a Christian? If you prefer the God of the Jewish scriptures, as many Christians so-called do, He told the people through Moses that they had to be holy! That must be harder than being perfect.
So you are quite wrong, as all the Christians who have bandied about these excuses since the time of Paul, and from what Christ said about the Day of Judgement, you have little chance of being saved. Instead of making excuses about why you cannot be perfect, you should be doing your utmost to be it. God is forgiving, Christ said, and as long as you tried your best, He will doubtless forgive you the occasions when you fell short of perfection. Without even trying, you must necessarily be falling short constantly.
Mike Magee
15 November, 2012 at 11:20 pm
OK, Mike. So I see you are the only one who gets it, and the rest of us do not. But now may I ask you a question? Since you claim to more accurately understand what the scriptures mean to convey, what do you personally think of Christ? By way of reference, the Jewish leaders thought him to be claiming equality with God (John 5:17-18) And Jesus as the incarnate Logos (do you know the meaning of this designation from John 1:1-2?) did not deny that it was so. But for Jesus to be who I believe He was as revealed in the scriptures, he needed, as it were, to be as much man as if not God, and as much God as if not man. That kind of reality cannot be understood or explained rationally. You actually cannot rightly understand the scriptures from a rational basis. I know that must sound so strange to you. But as a materialist you believe everything works and can be explained according to rational rules (notwithstanding the lofty thoughts of your non-chemical, immaterial mind). Paul is your convenient scriptural straw man, though you turn a blind eye toward the fact that his commission from the risen Christ was to explain how Christianity could also and primarily include the unconsidered gentile population (Acts 9:15). But if the scripture is true, Mike, you too will give an accounting of yourself before God for your life. I’m afraid, Mike, I’ve got to put you with the group Jesus corrected in Mark 12:24–”Your problem is that you don’t know the Scriptures, and you don’t know the power of God.”
Ken Stack
16 November, 2012 at 2:49 am
I know, Ken, that Christians are the only people that know anything about God, and they always know everything they need to know about Him, even though it is often quite different from what other Christians claim to know. It seems that the scriptures are so mysterious that only Christians can understand them, presumably with the power of God behind them to do it, but they each have a different power. It never occurs to them that they may be deluded or that, given that there are supernatural beings, that the power they are receiving is the power of the Devil and not God.
My problem then is that I don’t “know the scriptures” and, of course, that I “do not know the power of God”. Well, I still prefer to stick with what I know, and not to believe what I fancy, for the latter is merely a scratch away from insanity. You think God is an idiot incapable, despite being almighty, of explaining what he means in understandable language. Instead, he tells you precisely what he means in words that can only, with some determination, be misunderstood, and you or your personal Devil decide it is all too difficult and make it a whole lot easier by inventing code and mysteries that only you can comprehend. That way you can, indeed, make it mean just what you want, and you do!
The passage you throw at me, for example, is actually part of a passage telling us that we do not go to any heaven in which we meet our wives and best friends and live in a supernatural but familiar world albeit blissful. We do not have any such experience because in heaven we are angels, and angels are sexless beings, so our whole sexual life on earth is irrelevant in heaven. Tell that to the people you are converting, and most of them will leave Christianity and invent a religion in which they can meet up with their wives and best friends again, as they’d always expected.
Just before that is a passage which you all, with your spiritual power to guide you, always get wrong, showing your power is corrupt. The interpretation you put on “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars and unto God the things that are God’s” is not that the material world is Caesar’s and the spiritual world is God’s, for the things that are God’s in the context of Caesar ruling the Holy Land is that the land and its people are God’s. He is saying quite plainly in that context that Caesar and his armies had no right to be in Israel at all. That is God’s, the land and the people. In fact, it was the duty of God’s people to stick with their God and reclaim the land and the sovereignty of God. He was in fact being defiant, not being coy.
If God is responsible in some way for the gospels, they must be rational enough for ordinary human beings to comprehend, as otherwise, God is condemning those flawed enough not to be able to comprehend–to you, not having your ability to see what is not there–to eternal damnation. That God does not match the one you all otherwise describe to us, so maybe that God is your God, the Devil. Given that God is loving and forgiving, as you say, and is able to communicate perfectly effectively by common or garden words (the incarnated God is the Word, you say, presumably for a reason!) then what he is saying makes sufficient sense on its own.
Regarding what I think about Christ personally, I thought I had said it. He is telling humans how they should behave in practice, ultimately so that they will make heaven on earth. He is explaining morality. That is assuredly something that few Christians get.
Mike Magee
17 November, 2012 at 2:24 am
I thought I’d be done with you, Mike, but you keep the thing going with misunderstanding heaped on misunderstanding. If I can use an analogy, you’re like the man who only talked about marriage but never got married. A sincere Christian is one who at some point decides to leave the argumentation and self-serving critique behind and follow the lordship of this God and man Jesus as best he knows how. And now before you begin to destroy by dissection this approach as well, consider also the “Nike approach”–just do it. And if you won’t do it, then deal with your own motives accordingly. If there’s no afterlife and no God and no accountability, then I guess you’re just having a fun time with your blogging hobby, but if the opposite is true, then it’s important to decide once and for all–and not at the expense of others to cover up your own dissatisfaction. We who call ourselves disciples or followers of Jesus Christ are not one-dimensional simpletons, but we do not have all the answers either. In most areas of life, we end up having to decide things for ourselves, alone in a room, as it were. And we live with our own choices. It’s the same for spiritual things. Maybe you’ve made your choice. Maybe it’s to attack what you see as nominal Christianity. But, and you know this as well as I do, it’s ultimately not what we’re against as much as what we’re for. This will be my last post, Mike. I hope you don’t give up on God; He hasn’t given up on you.
Ken Stack
17 November, 2012 at 4:03 pm
There was no need to tell us it is your last post. You have obviously said all you have to say, and you no more comprehend Christ’s morality than you did at the outset. I have to be married to understand marriage, where you mean marriage to stand for being Christian. Well I have been both married and not married, and while married and not married I have experienced love. Now, if I may escape the analogy, I understand the meaning of God and Christ’s love as the original article explains it, but you do not, preferring to swath yourself in muddle and excuses. Loving a phantom is not loving God.
Mike Magee
17 November, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Sounds like Ken said…if you wanna get that deep, why haven’t you just
spent some time in Seminary and get a mesters or doctorate in Hebrew and Greek?
Bit preturbed, you can rationaize like you do…reading between lines…
(i.e. maybe Sarah was barren..but I never read anything that said they didn’t or couldn’t have a realtionship involving sex…) I’ve yet to get this feeling that man was some dumb primate that had no wisdom and had to progress through millions of years. I’m a literalist…”Not one jot nor tittle shall pass from the Law” (you know those vowel tics you see in Hebrrew..those!) So far, so good and archaelogy
finds same documents verbatim…hmm? I’d say a bit blessed to have had the New Testament written in Greek…leaves a bit less doubt on meanings since it was a
written language of the day, not spoken…(i.e. except a man be born of water AND
of the spirit he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God…study that AND word and you’ll find equality not necessarily a “physical” dowsing…maybe much why Baptists feel its needed and not as much a outward testimony testament to their faith.
Also…Corinthians…”When that which is complete is done, then that which is in part will be done away” I believe this was in reference and foreseeing the Bible being cannonized…Seems following all this, the Jews gave up aniamal sacrifce too…
rjohnson
11 January, 2013 at 5:23 pm
We are discussing practical Christian morality, not theoretically supernatural mysteries introduced to fog out what is important for human living in Christ’s teaching. Note that Paul was mainly sabotaging Christ’s teaching, and John was a late book that has little of Christ’s original words in it because it too was aiming to detract from practical morality. Read the original piece again. Doing as Christ said is too hard for most Christians, so they do not do it, but instead mystify the message to make it all together easier to do, namely to ritually worship God instead of doing it by acting the way he said–loving others including your enemies.
Mike Magee
11 January, 2013 at 7:15 pm
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Grant Talabay
2 May, 2013 at 6:11 pm
YO MY MAN,
Evangelicals follow Paul’s gospel -SAVED BY FAITH & LIVE LIKE DEMONS!
BEWARE THE LEAVEN OF THE PHARISEES!
THIS IS THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS:
Matthew 7:21-29
I Never Knew You
21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’
Build Your House on the Rock
24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
The Authority of Jesus
28 And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, 29 for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.
John 8:31-32
The Truth Will Set You Free
31 So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
CHRISTENDOM IS NOT CHRISTIANITY!
JESUS AND THE MONEY-CHANGERS
Undergirding the theory that it was the cheating money-changers whom Jesus targeted as the culprits in the system of animal sacrifice, is the claim that the whole process had become “too commercial.” This is akin to claiming that the institution of slavery had to be dismantled because it had became too commercial. Although both Temple sacrifices and human slavery had a firm economic foundation, it was the inherent immorality of those systems that brought together the historical forces which finally led to their collapse.
Several hundred years after prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Hosea had denounced the sacrificial slaughter of animals, Jesus carried out what is euphemistically called the Cleansing of the Temple. It was just before Passover and he disrupted the buying and selling of animals that were being purchased for slaughter. And because Christian scholars and religious leaders continue to ignore biblical denunciations of that bloody worship, they also try to obscure the reason for Christ’s assault on the system.
They have done this by focusing on the money-changers, although they were only minor players in the drama that took place. It was the cult of sacrifice that Jesus tried to dismantle, not the system of monetary exchange. In all three gospel accounts of the event, those who provided the animals for sacrifice are mentioned first: they were the primary focus of Christ’s outrage.
The Gospel of John gives the most detailed account of the event.
“When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the Temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords and drove all from the Temple, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said: ‘Get out of here.’ (John 2:13-16)
Matthew’s gospel does not detail the kind of animals that were being sold for slaughter, but it gives the same order of events.
“Jesus entered the Temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. ‘It is written,’ he said to them, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer but you are making it a den of robbers.’” (Matthew 21:12-13)
The same account is given in the gospel of Mark who, like Matthew, also reports that Jesus accused those at the Temple of making God’s house into a “den of robbers.” And there is universal acknowledgement that in both gospels, when Jesus said this, he was quoting from the prophet Jeremiah (7:11). That prophet had hurled the same accusation at the people of his own time, almost six hundred years earlier. He said it while standing at the Temple entrance, after he had already warned the people “do not shed innocent blood in this place.” And when Jeremiah said God’s house had been turned into a den of robbers it could not have had anything to do with money-changers–they did not exist in his time.
In the time of Jeremiah, as in the time of Jesus, there was a great distinction made between “robbers” and “thieves.” In contemporary times that distinction can best be understood by comparing the crime of petty theft with crimes of armed robbery by those who violently attack/kill their victims. But in ancient Israel there was an even greater distinction. A thief could be anyone who succumbed to a momentary impulse to steal something, but a robber was someone for whom violent crime and killing was a lifestyle.
Both Jesus and Jeremiah were indignant about the violence of sacrificial worship, not the possibility of petty theft by money-changers. When they said God’s house had become a den of “robbers” the Hebrew word that was used (here, transliterated) was “per-eets’” defined as “violent, i.e., a tyrant–destroyer, ravenous, robber.” It was the violence of the system, the killing of innocent victims in the name of God, that they were condemning. The money changers operating in the time of Jesus were driven out of the Temple because they were taking part in the process of sacrificial religion, not because they may have been cheating the pilgrims.
The gospel of Mark correlates Christ’s attempt to dismantle the sacrificial system with the plot to kill him. Like Matthew’s gospel, Mark’s account of the Temple Cleansing starts by saying that Jesus “began driving out those who were buying and selling there.” It goes on to relate how he explained to the people why he was doing this, by quoting Jeremiah’s opposition to animal sacrifice: “My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. But you have made it a ‘den of robbers.’” And in the verse of scripture immediately following that statement, Mark reports that “The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard about this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him because the whole crowd was amazed at his teachings.”(Mark 11:18)
It is ridiculous to claim that the religious leaders of Christ’s time would have plotted his death because he undermined the function of the money-changers. Nor would the crowd have been “amazed at his teachings” if Jesus was simply telling them to make sure they were not short-changed when they purchased Temple coins. What the people were amazed at was his condemnation of animal sacrifice; it had been hundreds of years since that kind of condemnation had been heard in Jerusalem. And it would not be allowed. A few days after he tried to overthrow the cult of animal sacrifice, Jesus was crucified. The religious leaders of his time were determined to preserve the belief that it had been ordained by God, who demanded its continuance.
That determination is echoed in the teachings of contemporary Christian leaders. In spite of Jesus, and in spite of the many biblical denunciations of animal sacrifice (*see endnote) they continue to maintain the ancient fiction that it was God who demanded His creatures be killed and butchered as an act of worship.
It is understandable that in the time of Jesus the religious leaders were committed to upholding the system of Temple sacrifice at all costs: it was the center around which their lives revolved and their livelihood depended. And in biblical times, most people were illiterate and dependent on what their religious leaders taught them concerning the scriptures. But it is not easy to understand why contemporary Christians uphold the validity of the cult of animal sacrifice. In an age of widespread literacy, there is a choice to be made. The bible clearly presents an ongoing conflict between those forces that demanded sacrificial victims in the name of God, and those forces that opposed it as a man-made perversion.
And because there is a choice to be made, it is deeply disturbing to see Christian leaders joining hands across the centuries with their ancient counterparts, in order to validate a system of worship in which the house of God became a giant slaughterhouse, awash in the blood of its victims.
*Partial list of scriptures opposing animal sacrifice.
Psalm 40:6
Isaiah 1:11-17;
Jeremiah 7:3-7,11,21-25
Hosea 8:11-13,
Amos 5:21-25
Micah 6:6-8
luckylarrysilverstein
2 May, 2013 at 7:47 pm