In the thirteenth century, the height of medieval Christian civilization in Europe, there may have been more Christian believers on the continent of Asia than in Europe, while Africa still had populous Christian communities. Philip Jenkins
Scripture
For the law never made anything perfect. But now, we have confidence in a better hope, through which we draw near to God.
Observation
The perfection which God required could not be achieved under the old priesthood of Levi. Instead, God instituted a different priesthood with a priest in the order of Melchizedek.
If the priesthood is changed, the law must also be changed. Our Lord came from the tribe of Judah, and the law of Moses never mentioned priests from that tribe.
Jesus became a priest, not by belonging to the tribe of Levi, but by having a life that cannot be destroyed. The old law never made anything perfect, but we now draw close to God through our great high priest.
Application
The law of Moses could not make a person perfect. Like any law, all it could do is tell you what to do and warn of a consequence if you did not do it.
In Christ we have a better hope, a better priesthood. He is making us perfect and he opens the way for us to draw close to God .
Firstly, Jesus declares that our sins are forgiven. There is no punishment, or fear of punishment, where there is no trespass. If the judge declares that we have not broken the law, we will not be punished.
Secondly, the sin that separates us from God is removed. Therefore, I can enter into God’s presence at any time. Under the old covenant, only the high priest could enter the Most Holy Place, and then only once per year. We can enter God’s dwelling place at any time.
Thirdly, the Holy Spirit is transforming us to be perfect. This will not be completed in this life, but every day, as we seek to follow Jesus, the image of God in our souls is being restored.
Prayer
Thank you, Lord, that you are making me perfect and sinless. Amen.
At so many points, the living Christianity of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Ethiopia, and Armenia takes us back to the earliest centuries of the faith, a time when the followers of Jesus were developing cells of believers within a still vibrant Roman Empire. Philip Jenkins
Scripture
The priests who collect tithes are men who died, so Melchizedek is greater than they are, because we are told that he lives on.
Observation
The previous chapter ended with the statement that Jesus is an eternal high priest in the order of Melchizedek.
Melchizedek was both the king of Salem (Jerusalem) and also a priest of God. Melchizedek met Abraham after a battle. Melchizedek blessed Abraham, and Abraham gave him a tenth of all that he had captured in the battle.
The law of Moses required the priests of Levi to collect a tithe from the rest of the people of Israel. Melchizedek was not a descendant of Levi .
Melchizedek blessed Abraham, demonstrating that he was greater than Abraham .
The Levites who collected the tithes die, but Melchizedek is still alive. He is therefore greater than they are.
Application
The author of Hebrews is making the point that the priestly order of Melchizedek is greater than that of the priestly order established by the law of Moses. It is this order, Melchizedek’s order, to which Christ’s priesthood belongs.
The writer is using comparisons and analogies which were understandable to his readers, although we may struggle with them.
The crux of the message is this: Christ is greater than any human religious system, even the Old Covenant system established under Moses.
We do not have to go back to offering sacrifices or obeying the Old Testament law and requirements. Christ has set us free from all of this.
Because Christ is a higher priest, his sacrifice is effective for all people and covers all sins.
Prayer
Thank you Jesus for dying for me and for atoning for all of my sins. Amen.
From godreports.com
By Charles Gardner —
Queen Elizabeth based her entire life, and her extraordinary 70-year reign, on Jesus, the Jew, the rock and guide of her long reign. Yet though she has travelled the world more than most, she never set foot in Israel, the land which gave birth to the Christian faith she so devoutly followed.
Every year at Christmas, in a broadcast to the nation watched by millions worldwide, the Sovereign shared her personal Christian faith as key to all she does.
Some years ago, for example, she quoted a verse from a well-known carol, In the bleak midwinter: “What can I give him, poor as I am, If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb, If I were a wise man, I would do my part, Yet what I can I give him, give my heart.”
As a true evangelist in the spirit of Billy Graham, she encouraged millions of viewers to give Jesus their heart. This was our Queen, and we are all so proud of her! Only today I heard of a conversation she held with an acquaintance in which she is said to have stated: “I wish Jesus would come back in my lifetime.” Asked why, she reportedly replied: “Because I would place my crown at his feet.”
In his sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in June, Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell said she was “someone who has been able to serve our nation faithfully because of her faith in Jesus Christ”. And then he added this challenge: “Perhaps there is no better way of celebrating her Platinum Jubilee than by doing the same ourselves.”
On this point, it is truly exciting to witness how the entire nation, led by the secular media, is being taken up with the wonder and reality of our late Queen’s faith.
Referring to the Apostle Paul, the Archbishop said he was only worth following because he was following Jesus, adding: “For me, the best leaders – like Paul, like Jesus – are those who know how to be led.”
The UK’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis testified: “I recall how, on one occasion, she showed me and my wife items of Jewish interest and value in her private collection at Windsor Castle, including a Torah scroll rescued from Czechoslovakia during the Holocaust. Her affection for the Jewish people ran deep, and her respect for our values was palpable.”
The long exile from the modern Jewish state by British royalty is perhaps complex, but seems to reflect Foreign Office policy, which generally amounts to appeasement of the surrounding Arab nations.
The Queen’s affection for the Jewish people ran deep. But it was her faith in Jesus, the Jew, that proved the light and strength of her long life and reign.
The Queen’s mother-in-law, Princess Alice of Greece, was honored with the title of ‘righteous among the nations’ for her bravery in hiding a Jewish family during the Holocaust, and is buried on the Mt of Olives.
In 2018, significantly 70 years¹ after the rebirth of Israel, British royalty ended their ‘exile’ from official visits to the Holy Land when Prince William, the Queen’s grandson (now the Prince of Wales and first in line to the throne) toured the country.
The Queen’s eldest, now King Charles III, had already visited Israel twice to pay respects at state funerals as well as fulfilling a longstanding wish to visit his grandmother’s grave, but these were not considered official tours.
However, in what was seen to contribute to a positive new era in British-Israeli relations, Charles then attended the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem in January 2019. Charles has shown constant support for Holocaust survivors over the years, regularly inviting them to lavish teas, as one of them has shared with me.
In 2017, a rumored visit by Prince Charles was reportedly cancelled by the Royal Visits Committee on the grounds that it would “upset Arab nations in the region who regularly host UK royals”.²
The Queen’s late husband Prince Philip’s only trip was in 1994 to attend a ceremony commemorating his mother, Princess Alice who, as Princess of Greece, hid Jewish widow Rachel Cohen and two of her five children in her home. Rachel’s husband had in 1913 helped King George I of Greece, in return for which the king offered him any service he could perform, should he ever need it. When the Nazi threat emerged, his son recalled this promise and appealed to the Princess, who duly honored her father’s pledge.
1 The period spent in Babylon by the Jews of old.
2 Daily Mail, 2 March 2018
A beautiful spring morning. Even the magpies were mostly congenial. Somewhere in the photo there is supposed to be a flag flying at half mast.
From The Spectator:
Ross Pomeroy, editor of RealClearScience, calls it “one of the most surefire findings in all of social psychology, repeatedly replicated over almost five decades of study: American conservatives say they are much happier than American liberals. They also report greater meaning and purpose in their lives, and higher overall life satisfaction.”
Given their recent embrace of lockdowns and masking as a societal ideal, drag queens as role models, abortion as a good career move, and sanctions against “misgendering,” it might not surprise you that American liberals are much more prone to neurosis, depression, and anxiety, and, as one recent study cited by Pomeroy pointed out, “have become less happy over the last several decades.” Their unhappiness “is associated with increasingly secular attitudes and actions.”
Think about that for a moment. “Attitudes” and “actions” imply that liberals might be people who choose to be unhappy.
That may sound flippant, but it’s a reasonable conclusion, especially given that social scientists often assert that conservative happiness rests on three “attitudes” and “actions” that pretty much anyone can adopt.
The first attitude is religious belief. Now, “religion” is a broad word — sort of like saying “politics” — but in our context, what we’re really talking about is Christian belief, and the action is going to church.
After 2,000 years of Christian witness and theology, and pro- and anti-Christian polemics, it’s reasonable to conclude that on the question of whether Christianity is true, there are respectable arguments on both sides. The odds are at least fifty-fifty that there is a God — a prime mover, a creator, a designer — that the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are reliable historical documents, and that our lives have an eternal purpose. This is against the belief that the universe is the product of chance and random evolution, that the New Testament is a conspiracy theory, and that our lives have only such meaning as we give them.
If it’s a fifty-fifty proposition — and, frankly, it would be easy to calculate the odds much more in favor of Christianity — why would one choose a path shown by the science, albeit the social science, to be the path of neurosis, depression, anxiety, and unhappiness?
Marriage is the often proposed second pillar on which conservative happiness rests. Marriage might be less easily willed because it requires a willing partner, but conservatives are nevertheless much more likely than liberals to want to get married and have children. Liberals apparently see marriage as an inhibition to their freedom. The science tells us that this is the freedom to be unhappy.
The generally cited third source of conservative happiness is “personal agency” or what you and I might call the can-do spirit. Conservatives are much more likely than liberals to believe they can improve their circumstances through hard work. While conservatives revere the past and tradition — where they find examples of American grit and pluck — they are, in fact, future-oriented, focusing on achievement, supporting a family (the next generation), and one’s eternal reward. You could call it: the purpose-driven life.
Yet just as liberal cosmology denies free will, so too does it deny the idea of meritocracy (at least in its popular formulation). We live, in the liberal view, in a world shaped by an oppressive white, male, Christian patriarchy that needs to be overthrown. To that end, we should sort ourselves (if we are not conservative Christian white males) into a wide variety of alleged oppressed minority groups — a rainbow coalition, if you will. Or, if one is a liberal straight white male, one must be an “ally” of alleged oppressed minority groups.
In practice, this sorting leads to a relentless pursuit (intentional or not) of immiseration, pessimism, grievance, and anger — not to mention the creation of ever more obscure (and perverse) group identities. This, again, is a choice.
In the 1970s, a time oft-compared to our own — with its foreign policy disasters, energy crisis, skyrocketing crime, and social upheaval — a tribe of liberals packed up their tents, moved to the right, and proclaimed themselves “neoconservatives” or “liberals who had been mugged by reality.”
But today’s liberals are not much interested in reality — no matter how often it mugs them. They have prior ideological commitments.
If you think we live in a crazy world, it’s because we live in their world, a world where liberals who have lost reason and faith dominate every institution and use their bully pulpits to impose their neuroses on the rest of us.
Luckily, however, there is a cure. The ballot box is one part of it. Making the right choices ourselves is another.
Egypt offers a telling example of Christian persistence. Partly, the Egyptian church retained such a mass following because of its enthusiastic adoption of the native Coptic language. At least the Gospels and Psalter were already available in Coptic by around 300. Elsewhere in North Africa, the church’s insistence on speaking Latin meant that it never evangelized far beyond the cities, so that Christianity did not long survive the Muslim conquests. Philip Jenkins
The Spectator has some great news coming out of Canada!
I’m a native-born Canadian. When it comes to politics I virtually never say, ‘Look at the good news coming out of Canada!’
The left-wing Liberal Party has dominated Canadian federal politics for most of the last century. Recent national Conservative (nickname ‘Tory’) party leaders have been inept; they’ve been afraid of being conservatives or of voicing any conservative policies; they have seemed to function without any value-based anchors (think Scott Morrison); they have regularly adopted the Textor approach to politics for conservatives, which is to park your party a centimetre to the right of the left-wing main party.
All up it has been a disaster electorally as the left side of politics in Canada wins and wins and wins again.
Last weekend, the Conservative party selected a new leader in Pierre Poilievre. This MP would have had zero chance of winning the leadership in Australia because many of his fellow MPs (mostly ‘moderates’) would rather have eaten broken glass than vote for him. But some time ago, the decision of who would be party leader was wholly taken out of the hands of the partyroom and given to the paid-up party membership.
On Saturday, the party membership decision was announced and Poilievre received over two-thirds of the vote. His nearest rival, the establishment ‘moderate’ aka ‘don’t rock the boat’ candidate won just 16 percent of cast ballots.
The first thing Poilievre made clear is that he will not now pivot to the centre.
He has said the Governor of the Bank of Canada will be fired on the first day after he wins an election because of his money printing incompetence these past three years.
Poilievre then repeated his attacks on the bias of the CBC (which is actually a tad more balanced than our ABC). The new Tory leader said he would significantly defund the national broadcaster and that it is not remotely balanced (which is a true statement). Poilievre even went down into the detail of the sort of commentators the CBC brings in and noted they almost all just parrot the left-wing Liberal worldview. Half of the country that disagrees should not have to pay for this.
After winning a few days ago, Poilievre stated that he expected the CBC to come after him – for marching with the truckers whose civil liberties were taken away; for articulating clear conservative policies; and for making clear that the national broadcaster will face financial repercussions from a Conservative government led by him. The strategy is perfect if you believe that the national broadcaster is going to attack any real conservative party and leader anyway.
To quote Shakespeare, Poilievre is making a virtue of necessity.
His other policies include a promise to wind back the regulatory state, to get oil and gas pipelines finished, and to take real steps against politically correct, Woke bureaucracies and even companies.
To say that he has painted the biggest target imaginable on his chest is no exaggeration. And isn’t this splendid… As it happens, the Liberal Party is petrified of Poilievre. He is an adopted baby who grew up with no wealthy parents or any noticeable life advantages. His wife is an immigrant from South America (who has the political advantage of being extremely pulchritudinous).
So, he hates Woke cancel culture. He dislikes the regulatory state. And he is prepared to engage in a front-on battle with the public broadcaster, making that plain before the next election.
Poilievre, despite the name, grew up in Alberta (the most conservative of Canada’s provinces) and only learned French later in life. But his name and now excellent language skills make him a big threat to the Liberals in Quebec. His willingness to stand up against the lockdownistas is now starting to pay significant benefits – he does not concede that the welding people in their homes strategy was a good one.
Friends I know back in Canada who have despondently but correctly predicted a left-wing Liberal win, one after another after another, say that the Tories will win the next election. They are starting to make real inroads into the working class vote. This is the political realignment that benefited both Trump and Boris and that is happening throughout the anglosphere and democratic world.
Rich people now vote left, in general terms. The upper-middle-class, university graduate caste is about the most Woke and left-leaning part of the electorate there is. And another sign of how fighting on values works is that the Green party in Canada is now imploding. You can’t get better news than that.
Anyway, even though Justin Trudeau leads a minority government the other left-wing parties have pledged to prop him up so it could be over two years till the next election. No one knows what will be happening then or who will win. But the omens are good for Conservatives in Canada for seeing a real Conservative party led by a real Conservative win office at the next election. And I cannot remember when I last said that.
Scripture
This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls. It leads us through the curtain into God’s inner sanctuary.
Observation
God promised with an oath to bless Abraham with descendants beyond number. Abraham waited patiently to receive what God had promised.
When people take an oath, it is considered to be binding. So God bound himself with an oath so that the recipients of His promise can be sure that He will never change His mind.
We who have fled to God for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong anchor for our souls because it leads us into God’s presence.
Application
We use the word hope in a very weak sense – we hope things will happen without any great certainty or expectation that they will.
In the Bible, the word hope means a confident expectation based on God’s promise.
God has promised that everyone who calls on the name of Jesus will be saved. Because God is trustworthy and does not lie, we can be confident that we will go to heaven.
The promise and the hope are more than a future event. This hope leads us into the presence of God now. Jesus is with God, and we are with Jesus, so we are in God’s presence.
This is a hope that anchors the soul. I don’t have to be pushed to and fro by emotions or circumstances. No, my status with God is secure. He loves me and will not abandon me, ever.
I can walk with calm confidence in every situation, trusting in the power and grace of my heavenly Father.
Prayer
Thank you, Lord, for this strong hope that I have in you. You are my rock and my shield. Amen.
New Life Narrabri 