Taken from "The Spirit Filled Believer’s Handbook" (1993) by Derek Prince. Nelson Word Ltd (1994).
The effect of God’s Word upon the mind, no less than its effect upon the body, has been made real for me in personal experience. I was privileged to receive the highest form of education that Britain had to offer in my generation. This climaxed with seven years at Cambridge University, studying philosophy, both ancient and modern. Always I was seeking something that would give real meaning and purpose to life. Academically I was successful, but inwardly I was still frustrated and unfulfilled.
Finally, as a last resort, I started to study the Bible simply as a work of philosophy. I studied it sceptically, as one who had rejected all forms of religion. Yet before many months, and before I had even reached the New Testament, the entrance of God’s Word had imparted to me the light of salvation, the assurance of sins forgiven, the consciousness of inward peace and eternal life. I had found what I had been seeking: the real meaning of life. (p. 67)
During World War II, while working with the medical services in North Africa, I became sick with a condition of the skin and nerves for which medical science, in that climate and those conditions, could provide no cure. I spent more than one year in the hospital, receiving every kind of treatment available. For more than four months at a stretch I was confined to bed. Eventually, I was discharged from the hospital at my own request, uncured.
I decided to seek no further medical treatment but to put the promises of God in Proverbs 4:20-22 to the test in my own case. Three times a day I went apart by myself, shut myself in with God and His Word, prayed and asked God to make His Word to me what He had promised it should be – medicine to all my flesh.
The climate, the diet and all other external circumstances were as unfavourable as they could be. Indeed, many healthy men all around me were falling sick. Nevertheless, through God’s Word alone, without recourse to any other means of any kind, I received within a short time a complete and permanent cure.
Let me add that I am in no sense criticizing or belittling medical science. I am grateful for all the good that medical science accomplishes. Indeed, I myself was working with the medical services. But the power of medical science is limited; the power of God’s Word is unlimited.
Many Christians of different denominational backgrounds have testimonies similar to mine. I received a letter from a Presbyterian lady who was asked to give a word of testimony in a service in which there were a number of sick people to be prayed for. While this lady was testifying and actually quoting the words of Proverbs 4:20-22, another lady in the seat next to hers, who had been suffering excruciating pain from a crushed disc in her neck, was instantly healed – without any prayer being offered – simply through listening with faith to God’s Word. (p. 64-65)
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Sunday, March 4, 2007
His way of being Israel
Taken from "The Challenge of Jesus" (1999) by N.T. Wright. InterVarsity Press.
If Christianity is not rooted in things that actully happened in first-century Palestine, we might as well be Buddhist, Marxists or almost anything else. And if Jesus never existed, or if he was quite different from what the Gospels and the church's worship affirms him to have been, then we are indeed living in cloud-cuckoo-land. (p. 18)
The Jews of Jesus' day, as is well known, were living under foreign rule and had been for several centuries. The worst thing about that was not the high taxation, the alien laws, the brutality of oppressision and so on, awful though that often was. The worst thing was that the foreigners were pagans. If Israel was truly God's people, why were the pagans ruling over her? If Israel was called to be God's true humanity, surely these foreign nations were like the animals over which Adam and Eve were to rule.(p. 36)
With a certain oversimplification we can trace easily enough the three options open to Jews in Jesus' day. If you go down the Jordan valley from Jericho to Masada, you can see evidence of all of them. First, the quietist and ultimately dualist option, taken by the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran: separate yourself from the wicked world and wait for God to do whatever God is going to do. Second, the compromise option taken by Herod: build yourself fortresses and palaces, get along with your political bosses as well as you can, do as well out of it as you can and hope that God will validate it somehow. Third, the zealot option, that of the Sicarii who took over Herod's old palace/fortress of Masada during the Roman-Jewish war: say your prayers, sharpen your swords, make yoursevleves holy to fight a holy war, and God will give you a military victory that will also be the theological victory of good over evil, of God over the hordes of darkness, of the Son of Man over the monsters. (p 37)
Jesus' opening challenge as reported in the Gospels was that people should "repent and believe." This is a classic example, which I mentioned in the previous chapter, of a phrase whose meaning has changed over the years. If I were to go out on the street in my local town and proclaim that people should "repent and believe," what they would hear would be a summon to give up their private sins (one suspects that in our culture sexual misbehavior and alcohol or drug abuse would come quickly to mind) and to "get religion" in some shape or form - either experiencing a new inner sense of God's presencce, or believing a new body of dogma, or joining the church or some sub-branch of it. But that is by no means exactly what the phrase "repent and believe" meant in first-century Galilee.
How are we to unlearn our meanings for such a phrase and to hear it through first-century ears? It helps if we can find another author using it at around the same place and time as Jesus. Consider, for example, the Jewish aristocrat and historian Josephus, who was born a few years after Jesus' crucifixion and who was sent in A.D. 66 as a young army commander to sort out some rebel movements in Galilee. His task, as he describes it in his autobiography, was to persuade the hot-headed Galileans to stop their mad rush into revolt against Rome and to trust him and the other Jerusalem aristocrats to work out a better modus vivendi. So when he confronted the rebel learder, he says that he told him to give up his own agenda and to trust him, Josephus, instead. And the word he uses are remarkably familiar to reader of the Gospels: he told the brigand leader to "repent and believe in me," metanoesein kai pistos emoi genesesthai.
This does not, of course, mean that Josephus was challenging the brigand leader (who confusingly, was called "Jesus") to give up sinning and have a religious conversion experience. It has a far more specific and indeed political meaning. I suggest that when we examine Jesus of Nazareth forty years earlier going around Galilee telling people to repent and believe in him or in the gospel, we dare not screen out these meaings. Even if we end up suggesting that Jesus meant more than Josephus did - that there were indeed religious and theological dimensions to his invitation - we cannot suppose that he meant less. He was telling his hearers to give up their agendas and to trust him for his way of being Israel, his way of bringing the kingdom, his kingdom agenda. In particular, he was urging them, as Jospehus had, to abandon their crazy dreams of nationalist revoltuion. But whereas Josephus was opposed to armed revolution because he was an aristocrat with a nest to feather, Jesus was opposed to it because he saw it as, paradoxically, a way of being deeply disloyal to Israel's God and to his purpose for Isreal to be the light of the world. And whereas seen as compromise, a shaky political solution cobbled together with stiky tape, Jesus was offering as a counter-agenda an utterly risky way of being Israel, the way of turning the other cheek and going the second mile, the way of losing your life to gain it. This was the kingdom-invitation he was issuing.This was the play for which he was holding auditions. (p 43-44)
If Christianity is not rooted in things that actully happened in first-century Palestine, we might as well be Buddhist, Marxists or almost anything else. And if Jesus never existed, or if he was quite different from what the Gospels and the church's worship affirms him to have been, then we are indeed living in cloud-cuckoo-land. (p. 18)
The Jews of Jesus' day, as is well known, were living under foreign rule and had been for several centuries. The worst thing about that was not the high taxation, the alien laws, the brutality of oppressision and so on, awful though that often was. The worst thing was that the foreigners were pagans. If Israel was truly God's people, why were the pagans ruling over her? If Israel was called to be God's true humanity, surely these foreign nations were like the animals over which Adam and Eve were to rule.(p. 36)
With a certain oversimplification we can trace easily enough the three options open to Jews in Jesus' day. If you go down the Jordan valley from Jericho to Masada, you can see evidence of all of them. First, the quietist and ultimately dualist option, taken by the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran: separate yourself from the wicked world and wait for God to do whatever God is going to do. Second, the compromise option taken by Herod: build yourself fortresses and palaces, get along with your political bosses as well as you can, do as well out of it as you can and hope that God will validate it somehow. Third, the zealot option, that of the Sicarii who took over Herod's old palace/fortress of Masada during the Roman-Jewish war: say your prayers, sharpen your swords, make yoursevleves holy to fight a holy war, and God will give you a military victory that will also be the theological victory of good over evil, of God over the hordes of darkness, of the Son of Man over the monsters. (p 37)
Jesus' opening challenge as reported in the Gospels was that people should "repent and believe." This is a classic example, which I mentioned in the previous chapter, of a phrase whose meaning has changed over the years. If I were to go out on the street in my local town and proclaim that people should "repent and believe," what they would hear would be a summon to give up their private sins (one suspects that in our culture sexual misbehavior and alcohol or drug abuse would come quickly to mind) and to "get religion" in some shape or form - either experiencing a new inner sense of God's presencce, or believing a new body of dogma, or joining the church or some sub-branch of it. But that is by no means exactly what the phrase "repent and believe" meant in first-century Galilee.
How are we to unlearn our meanings for such a phrase and to hear it through first-century ears? It helps if we can find another author using it at around the same place and time as Jesus. Consider, for example, the Jewish aristocrat and historian Josephus, who was born a few years after Jesus' crucifixion and who was sent in A.D. 66 as a young army commander to sort out some rebel movements in Galilee. His task, as he describes it in his autobiography, was to persuade the hot-headed Galileans to stop their mad rush into revolt against Rome and to trust him and the other Jerusalem aristocrats to work out a better modus vivendi. So when he confronted the rebel learder, he says that he told him to give up his own agenda and to trust him, Josephus, instead. And the word he uses are remarkably familiar to reader of the Gospels: he told the brigand leader to "repent and believe in me," metanoesein kai pistos emoi genesesthai.
This does not, of course, mean that Josephus was challenging the brigand leader (who confusingly, was called "Jesus") to give up sinning and have a religious conversion experience. It has a far more specific and indeed political meaning. I suggest that when we examine Jesus of Nazareth forty years earlier going around Galilee telling people to repent and believe in him or in the gospel, we dare not screen out these meaings. Even if we end up suggesting that Jesus meant more than Josephus did - that there were indeed religious and theological dimensions to his invitation - we cannot suppose that he meant less. He was telling his hearers to give up their agendas and to trust him for his way of being Israel, his way of bringing the kingdom, his kingdom agenda. In particular, he was urging them, as Jospehus had, to abandon their crazy dreams of nationalist revoltuion. But whereas Josephus was opposed to armed revolution because he was an aristocrat with a nest to feather, Jesus was opposed to it because he saw it as, paradoxically, a way of being deeply disloyal to Israel's God and to his purpose for Isreal to be the light of the world. And whereas seen as compromise, a shaky political solution cobbled together with stiky tape, Jesus was offering as a counter-agenda an utterly risky way of being Israel, the way of turning the other cheek and going the second mile, the way of losing your life to gain it. This was the kingdom-invitation he was issuing.This was the play for which he was holding auditions. (p 43-44)
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