What is the thing with smacking children for doing wrong? If someone smacked me every time I did something wrong, I’d have to wear body armor.

Not long ago, while sitting in a restaurant with a few others, there was a table across from us with a family who had a small child eating with them. The little boy was probably less than two-years-old. On the table beside the baby lay a flyswatter, and each time the baby did something wrong, the woman sitting beside him would pick up the flyswatter, look intently at the little boy, and give a stern, NO! If the child stopped, the woman would put the flyswatter down. If the little boy didn’t stop, the woman would swat his hand with the flyswatter.

I’m pretty sure that we weren’t the only other family that was feeling uncomfortable about the situation. None of us like to see someone constantly threatened by authority with a hovering punishment tool sitting beside them as a constant reminder of the penalty for every mistake.

Why do so many Christians place the gospel beside people and use it as a reminder of punishment for sin?

 Jesus taught of the Kingdom of God. Jesus taught about mercy, forgiveness, and grace. Jesus shared that the wages of sin is death, and that those who do not do the will of God are in danger of being eternally separated from God. Jesus spoke of hell, though he didn’t use the word “hell.” Jesus used the words:

1. Tartaroo - a word borrowed from the Greek world which was a reference to the place where angels were punished in the world of mythology.

2. Hades - A Greek translation of the Hebrew word Sh’ol - only word used for hell in the Old Testament and refers to the world of the dead, grave, pit, and sleep (not a place of punishment). The Gates of Hades is a physical place in the Decapolis where the pagan God, Pan, was worshiped.

3. Gei-Hinnom - A reference to the Valley of Hinnom. 2 Kings 23:10, “He (King Josiah) desecrated Topheth, which was in the Valley of ben Hinnom, so no one could use it to sacrifice his son or daughter in the fire to Molech.” The valley of Gei-Hinnom was still used as a garbage dump in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus. The people would have been very familiar with the constant burning of the trash and the fighting dogs that battled over the food, weeping and gnashing their teeth as they fought.

Jesus’ teachings of hell were a reminder that the useless things in our lives are only good for the town dump, and that those who do not serve as a part of God’s purposes are the useless things of God and are only good for God’s dump.

However, Jesus did not lay hell on the table when he ate with sinners, reminding them that they will be smacked with fire and brimstone every time they get out of line.

Jesus ate with sinners, and lying on the table beside every one of them was mercy, forgiveness, empathy, compassion, and love.  

Here is some food for thought: Those whom Jesus dangled the flyswatter around were the religious people who loved lifting their flyswatters instead of handing out compassion.

Blessings,
Johnny

© 2007 Jonathan P. Gainey and Flock’s Diner.
All Rights Reserved

There is a great deal of debate over whether or not the Bible has been preserved in its original state. The fact of the matter is that we don’t have a complete Bible in its original state. In fact, the Greek New Testament that is used by Bible students and scholars is known to be put together by Erasmus using many different portions of many different ancient scripts.

According to Bart Ehrman’s studies in his book, Misquoting Jesus, even Erasmus was forced to add fillers to complete the Holy text (Mark 16:9-20, for example).

The point that those who held the only copy of the Scriptures in their town and having the ability to change the texts by adding or subtracting is well-founded. Even our beloved NIV has many passages of Scripture which have been removed, placed in the footnotes, or have added explanations stating “The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have (fill in the passage).”

One particular passage of Scripture that my feeble mind has a hard time accepting as original is found in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church.

“Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them” (1 Cor. 15:29)?

I would give two explanations for this very strange portion of Paul’s letter, which is found nowhere else in the Bible or any of the ancient Jewish or Chirstian writings:

1.  This was added by a very Greek-minded individual who wanted to justify the practice of doing religious rituals in honor of those who are already dead.

2. There is a major misunderstanding of Paul’s teaching.

Baptism was a very Jewish ritual to prepare someone for being in the presence of God at the Temple. There were dozens of baptismal wells around the Temple for folks to be cleansed. John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance for believers who had not been living in God’s Will, and were genuinely repentent and wanted to re-enter the Kingdom of God and make a renewed commitment to do as they had been taught to live in the Will of God.

The second suggestion that I gave would allow the aforementioned passage to make sense, coming from a very Jewish Pharisee like Paul, if he were speaking of a baptism of commitment to follow God by imitating the faithful followers of God who had come before them.

In other words, Paul would be saying, “Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who have committed themselves to mimicking the godly lives of those who came before them and are now dead? If the saints of God who are now dead will not be a part of God’s eternal Kingdom, why would people commit themselves to imitate eternally dead people?”

Forever learning,
Johnny

© 2007 Jonathan P. Gainey and Flock’s Diner.
All Rights Reserved

Kids, children, offspring, dependents….they are so important and so valuable to the world. Even the ancient Jews would say that the world exists by the breath of school children.

Most of us have seen the encouragement that is given on car bumber stickers that say something like, “Proud parent of a terrific kid!” Wow! That must be encouraging to the children in that family, if they even notice it.

Society gives us so much advice about encouraging our children. Millions of book titles share the insights and wisdom of great doctors like James Dobson who share there highly educated, and desperately needed advice for raising healthy children.

There is everything right with the idea of encouraging our children.

Maybe there is also something to be said for children being taught how to encourage the adults and parents in their lives. Maybe there could be a class for kids on how to empower healthy, happy parents.

Children often become frustrated when they are held to strict rules and rigid boundaries. However, those rules and boundaries are usually based on the measure of trust afforded by a particular child. The more a parent or other adult in authority trusts a particular child, the less constricting the rules.

In the spirit of Deuteronomy 5:16a, I would appreciate seeing some new bumper stickers that encourage parents.

“Proud kid of terrific parents!”                                       

Blessings to all  of the parents and guardians of the world!

Johnny

© 2007 Jonathan P. Gainey and Flock’s Diner.
All Rights Reserved

Gossip! Is anyone immune?

If you’ve ever been the victim of gossip, then you know the frustration that is brought on by such an accusation. If you’ve ever been wrongly accused, then you really know the frustration, especially when the accuser has already handed down a guilty verdict.

“The ancient Jews considered slander to be the fourth of the four cardinal sins. There was a phrase for the sin of slander which was, the third tongue. The ancient Jews used this phrase because they said ’gossip slays three persons: the speaker, the spoken to, and the spoken of’” (Arach. 15b)(Abraham Cohen, Everyman’s Talmud, 99).

When reading the story of Eve and the serpent, we can learn a lot about how gossip hurts. Eve accepted that God was being less than honest when he told Adam about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Therefore, she accepted the deceitful words of the serpent as true rather than taking the time to go directly to God to question the words of the serpent.

This is usually the case with those of us who gossip; we don’t expect the one to whom we are gossiping to go to the source of our slander and check the story. And because those of us who feel a sense of partnership with the gossiper don’t want to offend the one sharing the slander, we don’t take the time to check the story.

The next time we are tempted to gossip, let us remember that slander hurts even the one who is gossiping. If we will remember that, we will have one less self-inflicted pain to worry about.

Blessings,
Johnny

© 2007 Jonathan P. Gainey and Flock’s Diner.
All Rights Reserved

“We do not have to discover the world of faith; we only have to recover it. it is not a terra incognita, an unknown land; it is a forgotten land…There is no one who has no faith. Every one of us stood at the foot of Sinai and beheld the voice that proclaimed, I am the Lord thy God” (Abraham Joshua Heschel, God In Search of Man, 141).

Our struggle with faith is obvious as America long ago lost its place as the center of Christendom. The Western world is now one of the places that the rest of the world sends its missionaries to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As we ebb and flow in and out of our need for God, we come closer and closer to walking on land with no holy ground.

Many of us thirst for a God-centered world of people who respect God and recognize our needs and responsibilities as created beings. However, instead of the self-centered infants who were to grow out of their selfishnesss and recognize that they require more than bread on which to live, many of us never grew out of our demanding behaviors. We continue to cry out to the detriment of others in order to have our bellies filled, our minds entertained, and our backs rubbed. And all of this is an attempt to find what we know is out there…satisfaction, contentment, happiness.

 We live in a paradox trying to get to one place by going to another.

As Isaiah prophesied about a voice that would cry out for God’s people to prepare a straight path for the Lord in the desert (Isaiah 40:3), we, like John, are to cry out for the world to stop wandering around and head for the Promised Land (Matthew 3:1-3). 

As Heschel points out, the Hebrew word for repentance is teshuvah, which has two meanings: return and answer.

Returning to the Lord is the answer we are scrambling to find.

Blessings,

Johnny

© 2007 Jonathan P. Gainey and Flock’s Diner.
All Rights Reserved