God created a very boring version of "Rock, Paper, Scissors". You see, the Law of Love always trumps the Law of Condemnation. This was brought home to me tonight as I read Acts 10 to my eldest daughter and it jumped into relief against a verse that I'd quoted to my band of brothers on Friday.
In Matthew 23:15 Jesus lambastes "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross the sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves."
But here in Acts, we see the new "Law" in action. This Law of Love shatters the old expectations of Jews and the old law by tearing down the old law's requirements for citizenship in the Kingdom. It grants citizenship to Gentiles who feared God and participated in charity. All of the old requirements collapse in the face of the two greatest commands: 1) Love God and 2) Love your neighbor (everyone really) as yourself.
To my previous post today: if our churches stuck to these two simple commands and tried to figure out how to apply them today, the Body would amaze all, Christian and non.
Food for thought: is it loving our neighbor in low lying cities (half the world population is on the coasts) to condemn them to flooding? Do we love the hungry by condemning them to greater hunger as climate change sparks droughts interspersed with flooding to the world's bread baskets? As we push the world to the point that climate change's nasty feedbacks kick in, are we loving the next few thousand generations that we are condemning to massive die off, starvation, war, flooding and worse?
We probably less than 10 years to get moving by the best estimates that I've read. The longer we wait, the harder and more expensive it gets. Tick, tock.
Get moving.
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