The Mystery of Incarnation (9 of 9) — Art Katz

Christ’s Growth in Vocation and Knowledge of the Father

So, his growth in what he was and not simply what he might be, his unique relation to God was a relation to a free God and not to a mechanical or physical fate or to an invincible bias to good. There's a freedom here and a growth in the knowledge of his own vocation and of the Father who sent him to fulfill it.

It is here alone that we grasp God's real presence and rest on it forever. Valuable as speculative versions of the Incarnation may be, we only really have it and believe in it when we sit inside it by the saving action which sets us in Christ and assures us of the incredible fact that we are included by God's strange grace in the same love wherewith he loves his only begotten son.

That's why Paul could say, who could separate us from this love? Can persecution and terror and haunt? He makes a whole list of things. No, we're certain of this love because he who gave his son, will he not with him give us all things?

There's a knowledge of the love of God, the saving action which sets us in Christ. Salvation is not just a technical thing, you're saved. Next, there's a coming into something, a redemptive reality. Christ in us, the hope of glory, we're saved, the life of God has come in, that we are included by God's strange grace in the same love wherewith he loves his only begotten son.

We are only sure of the Incarnation only as those who taste the benefit of Christ's death in union with him. He's writing around 1909 at a time when the higher criticism was beginning to come out from German theologians and maybe Jesus is just an example and not really the son of God.

Salvation is just a mental attitude of reform by which certain principles now can be humanly conducted. He's fighting for the true faith and against an environment that was already becoming hostile and reaching out even into England.

The Church’s Decline and the Formation of Christ Through History

Now look at the Church of England, homosexuals and made bishops and scandal because what he saw already in his early time has now come full bore. So it doesn't begin as a finished article. It begins with certain possibilities with a destiny ingrained in the protoplast but it only passes from a destiny into a perfection through a career.

It only passes from a destiny into a perfection through a career. He's using the word career not as a piece of professionalism but through a history, through something tested in time, through actualities, through issues, through crises, through morals struggling, through groanings.

Now Jesus even came to the place of being perplexed with his own disciples. How long must I suffer you? There's a pain in his own humanity. So it comes to fulfillment through a walk in a history. So I'm often asking the saints, do you have a history with God?

Do you have to wait to be an old crock like me before you realize that you have a history? Ought you not to be conscious even at whatever stage you are in the faith that there is already a history and there will be and there is a continuing history with God that you need to, of which you need to be conscious and to cherish.

That it's yours uniquely. No one else has your history, your career so to speak with God. It is yours uniquely and he has set it up. He's brought the anger into your life. He's brought you to Nowheresville in northern Minnesota.

He's done this, he's done that. He calls for this, he calls for that. The struggles, the crises, it's all designed, it's all skillfully crafted. He's a master craftsman for the formation of sons. But you have a history and it needs to be a conscious history and a history of which you are appreciative and grateful.

I am grateful for my history with God. Just think of how many times I'm citing from my experiences to make a point here with you. But I've got the experience to cite. I have a history, a confidence, a knowledge of being sustained for 41 years and being on these grounds for 31 years in poverty and in the extreme arctic cold and all of the struggles with the Jesus freaks that came to Ben Israel and were wet behind the ears and brought their rusty old cars and said, here we're giving you this.

We're giving our all. But you now see to it that there's food on the table and heat in the houses and that there are houses. Your faith. Here's our rusty old junker and all the indignities. And to be told by these same ones later that you yourself are a traitor to the gospel.

One of these people heard me publicly in Texas a couple of years ago and she came up weeping. I mean heartbroken. And she said, Art, I never knew you. I was in the community for such and such a time. I glimpsed you in that context, but until I have heard you publicly, I never really understood or seen you.

She said, you need to tell all the Ben Israelites. They need to find some occasion where they see or hear you outside of this place in functioning in your call. So until she saw that, how did she retreat me?

Improperly, without due respect and because she's a young snot and she saw through the limitation of her own humanity and came to certain conclusions and you have to bear that. Okay. And Jesus suffered the same thing in Nazareth.

The Mystery of Christ’s Divine and Human Nature

Isn't this Joseph's son? So by having given due effect to each side, how can we have these apparent contradictions united in one historic personality? Absolute God and man? Absolute finality and growing attainment?

Absolute grace and growing in grace? The victory won and the victory to be won? The kingdom come and the kingdom coming? How are we to adjust the contradiction between the absolute and the merging in this concrete and crucial case?

On the threshold of such inquiry, let me remind you once more that it is only in the illogical, that which is not logical, unity of a person for whose action and growth they are necessary that we find the harmony of several antinomies that defy rational adjustment.

You know what our problem is? Our English is not adequate. This is perfectly coherent and well-written. So here he's talking about the infinite with the finite, the humanity with the deity, the absolute God and relative man, growth in grace and the absolute grace, the victory won, the victory yet to be won, the kingdom come, the kingdom coming.

How are we to adjust the contradiction between what is absolute in God and what is merging and forming in this concrete and crucial case? Do you realize that the faith is a tension? It's not cut and dried.

The faith is a dynamic and you know that tension is a suffering? And that many people refuse to say yes to the Lord because they intuit that they don't want to come in to this kind of reality that requires of them a continual tension of faith.

They like it in the world where they have it cut and dried, they know and they live by their own understanding and it's their baby. They don't want to enter a realm where the modus operandi is faith. Faith is a tension of apparent contradiction.

Marriage between a Jew and a Gentile, a sophisticated university graduate and a simple village girl is a contradiction. But in that contradiction, in the contradiction toughing of it out comes revelation and depths of growth that could not be obtained in any other way.

So that even our own life is a minuscule version of the mystery of the faith itself and we would not be willing to suffer it if we did not glimpse it in the faith itself. See what I mean? If we did not realize that suffering is intrinsic, that contradiction is fundamental, that something is not cut and dried but it's a dynamic and process of formation to which we need to give ourselves interest.

Meanwhile, suffering the scandal of the thing that is not yet formed. Because the greatest, one of the greatest things we've had to bear, how can Ah be in a place of authority when his marriage da da da da da and his family da da da is not together?

And who can give answer? That we're living out something of a prophetic kind. This reconciliation of Jew and Gentile, the prophetic man with the church in his present carnal condition and that it's not going to be done overnight in the waving of a magic wand.

But doesn't it say that you have your house in order? How do you answer those things? And if people want to be rejecting of both of the men and his word they can find grounds. So you suffer not only the struggle in attaining but you suffer the accusations and the indictments and the way in which you're perceived by others.

You live the scandal. Jesus was a scandal. The cross is a scandal. The gospel is a scandal. But Paul was not ashamed of it. Because in that scandal is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes, especially to the Jew first.

So Jesus was a scandal. The cross is a scandal. The gospel is a scandal. But Paul was not ashamed of it. Because in that scandal is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes to follow. So we are at the threshold of such an inquiry that we need to be reminded that it is only in the illogical or the non-logical unity of a person.

How is this mystery and tension presented to us? It comes in a person who is both truly God, truly man, for whose action and growth they are necessary. He would not have come to his career. He would not have come to the fulfillment of his vocation except through the walking out of these contradictions.

And there we find the harmony of the several contradictions that defy rational adjustment. That cannot be classified and categorized in a neat little doctrine. That's why I chafed by watching that video of those guys.

Formulaic Christianity and the Loss of Spiritual Reality

They have it all together. There's something so smart and so smug in the way they talk about the gospel and the faith that doesn't give any indication of groaning, of struggle. It's a nice formula that they've learned and they can market and market it well and live comfortably, if not lavishly on that basis.

But I don't sense in them, even in their voice, their attitude or their speaking, a sense of the wrestling with this faith of contradiction. But that they have reduced it to a formula. It's a formulaic Christianity and they have it all together and prospering at it.

Why then are we knocking about? And I'm chafed by that easy similitude called Christianity to which to give your seed faith that you might receive. Even that's reduced to a formula that accounts for their great prosperity.

And there's something, you know, do you have to be doctrinally false to be false? No. Maybe the most dangerous deception and the worst kinds of falsity, of deception is those who speak the technical truth of it without the spirit of its truth and have reduced it to a sterile thing that robs it of its beauty and its glory.

That's a more dangerous thing than actual heresy. This is the danger of the last days. Those that are technically correct and miss the glory of the faith. And all they have to do is add the music, the worship, the themes, the acoustics, the amplifiers, a happy guy or woman on the platform leading and all that and they'll come in droves.

That's a cheap alternative. It's an idolatry. It's a version of the Golden Calf around which they dance nakedly. Okay, coming to a conclusion, Forsythe says, he grew in the grace in which he always was and in the knowledge of it.

He grew in the knowledge even of his own calling. As his personal history enlarged and ripened by every experience and as he was always found equal to each moral crisis, the latent Godhead became more and more mighty as his life's interior and asserted itself with the more power as the personality grew both in depth and scope.

This guy has a handle on something. And in fact he says, the more his divine soul renounced his immunities, the more he acquired his glory. He said that something came in gathering power through growing humiliation came to a growing exaltation.

That in German, er starb und wurde, he died and he became. That the greater deity emerged not by his insistence on his God origin, but on his forsaking. That he went up by going down. That he grew by dying.

That he acquired his divine soul as he renounced the immunities that he could have employed as being God as well as man. And so the more he acquired his glory. How is it that P .T. Forsythe sees it and the Copeland's do not?

I'm not making an issue of a particular man, but what he represents in his static, cut and dried, get it all down to a formula, personality and toothy grin and the best of all worlds and happy am I. How is it that that's how he interprets the faith as against how Forsythe interprets it?

Same faith, same data, but to one it's been reduced to a glib formula and to the other it was a coming inside the mystery of living it out and understanding and wrestling and seeing the implications for his own humanity and seeing that God was demonstrating immutable and eternal principles.

That you attain glory not by grasping and clutching, but by forsaking and letting go. I remember in one of our trips to Israel we visited a congregation that had both Palestinian Christians and Jews and there was a fight on over a menorah that was on the platform.

The Jewish believers wanted to retain it and the Palestinian Christians wanted to remove it because it was too ostensibly a Jewish symbol and they were in the heat of conflict over that thing and we were just stupefied to learn about it.

We came back into the bus, I'm walking to my seat and one of the ladies in our group pulled my sleeve. She said, you know what the answer is? I said what? She said, relinquish. Relinquish. What a golden word.

The Jews have to relinquish their insistence and the Palestinians need to relinquish their animosity. Relinquishing is the key to glory, not insistence and it's been demonstrated by the Son of God in becoming a son and it's our way also.

The more his divine soul renounced his immunities, the more he acquired a glory. More and more as he laid by what he eternally was, he came to be what he began by being. The eternal son learned by suffering the sonship he had never forgotten and this was the positive process of the long act of our salvation.

Our redemption was the achieving also of his old incarnation, the growing involution of these two movements, descent and ascent, was the process of the reconciliation of God in the world. The consummation came, it was all secured where it could never be undone but it must be forever unfolded for what it is and not to what it might be made to become.

It always needs to be unfolded for the glory that it is and never allow it to settle into a formula. That's our jealous keeping of the faith lest it will become a formula because formulas are convenient but the mysteries of faith are difficult and painful both to understand and to fulfill.

So thus the sinless growth of Christ's character is in the very act growth also of his objective achievement for us. It is the moral process of man's salvation, the gradual act of God, Christ's perfect progress to perfection, the achieving of his finished work is the detail of God's act of our redemption of his absolute and holy love and his holy son.

His self-sanctification was ours also. Christ worked out the salvation he was. It was only in history and its conditions that he could realize all that was super historic within him. He was exercised unto the godliness he brought with him.

The deepening of his faithfulness was the emergence of his deity. He was not acquiring deity, he was unfolding it and in his lowest limits his divinest mastery shows. In the lowest limits, where was that?

At the cross. His divinest mastery shows. The glory of the deity that was his, that he forfeited and acquired by process of growth is shown not in its most powerful demonstration but in its weakest. And that's why the centurion at the foot of the cross seeing this man writhing in excruciating pain but not condemning his persecutors but praying their forgiveness and then giving up the ghost.

He said truly this was the son of God. Something was revealed in the lowest limit of Jesus' obedience unto death of his divinest mastery. And don't forget we operate equally in that same absolute freedom.

Freedom, Moral Responsibility, and the Formation of Sons

We are not compelled to walk in the works that were established before the foundations of the earth were laid. And if they are going to be fulfilled it will not be something compulsory but something free.

God is not going to allow anything that pertains to his glory in the earth to be obtained by anything other than the means by which Jesus obtained it and made himself a candidate in his freedom, voluntary and free, which is a great responsibility and an anguish to be responsible in your freedom.

And how many of us are forfeiting that moral aspect of our life by not acting in it and coming to a place of indifference neither up nor down, neither yes nor no, neither with it nor against it but in limbo.

We are not acting as sons because the act is a statement of a freedom of choice and a decision to be obedient so we can guard ourselves from even that necessity and allow a structure of life to be formed around us by which we are kept from the necessity of acting in freedom.

There is a great classic of sociology, Eric From Freedom, Escape from Freedom, came out in the 1960s or 70s in which he says totalitarianism, the rise of Nazism, fascism, communism is a statement that modern man rejects his freedom.

He's afraid of it. He doesn't want to act in responsibility. He wants a welfare state. He wants those things decided for him and provided. He doesn't want to take the initiative of being a man. He wants a system from the cradle to the grave that will secure his existence and make unnecessary his requirement to act.

You think that that's a finished issue? Or is it the issue of the age? And if the church will not exercise its freedom and its sonship what do we call the world? What is our example? What is our challenge?

If we ourselves are in flight from freedom, choosing not to or even to be phrased, we want an environment that frees us from the necessity to have to choose and to have to act. And isn't that the reason why we've grown up a church system where the man on the platform does it all?

And what he is really is a CEO that the most impressive ministers of our generation are executives who make the decisions. And all we have to come out on Sunday is put a few bucks on a collection plate and sit passively, we're entertained, and we go home.

We don't want the responsibility of being a saint. I was talking with Bill the other day where Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14, when you come together everyone has a tongue and interpretation, a prophecy, a hymn, a revelation.

That's why Paul could leave those fellowships and they would nourish each other by their own freedom and yielding to the gift that God had given them. And when he came back two years later, they were still functioning and flourishing.

And then he would recognize who it is that has risen to the place of authority by their freedom to take responsibility. That's how you identify an elder. And then he would just set them in before the congregation with fasting and prayer.

And that's how the church was formed. But how does the church now continue? It's crippled, it's languishing, it's underfed, it's malnourished, it's lost its participation. It's an audience, it's a theater of performance of the platform and passive acquiescence in the congregation for which we gladly pay the bill so long as we are freed from the necessity to have a tongue and interpretation, a prophecy, a hymn or a song.

Freedom is the name of the game. And that's what Ben Israel has been in its history. And you would say, why don't you make these guys clean up? Why don't you make these guys do this or do that? I said, we could easily do it, but what would it be?

It would be like a training camp? They're not going to become mentioned. They're not going to become persons and sons except by a free choice. They need to see, they need to act, they need to do. Anyone can tell you.

They need themselves to see and to act. And of course, what does that mean? It's going to take a long time. The garbage will grow up until you have to step over it to get out of the house. Until they see it, my God, they're Jesus freaks who've lived in garbage and they don't even know.

But for a woman from Denmark with Ordnung, the German word of order, for her it was chafing to have to live with people in that condition. Why don't you just do it? Why don't you establish it? Where's your authority?

Well, we have it, but if we rob men of their freedom, we rob them of their humanity. We rob them of their sonship. We just make mechanical dolts out of them. Of course, they'll do it, but there's something more than doing, it's being in the form of the Son of God, who is entirely free in every aspect of his life, as are we.

So the total bearing of his action or speech means that his action arose ethically out of what he was, and that his carriage expressed his soul, that his vocation rested on his position, that his receptivity is the greatest human activity, that he was first and foremost the ever-receptive Son of the Holy Father, and that he only did the things which were shown him of God.

His manhood was in his perfectly active, free receptivity. His subordination was no inferiority. His obedience was his divinest achievement. His obedience was his divinest achievement. And out of that obedience grew his vast, creative, commanding effect upon the world.

His kingly rule is the upper side of his filial sacrifice as a son, of the obedience which put him by man's side while he was on God's. Something about his humanity, his relations to a holy God, his manhood, consists in the moral reality of his experience, his conflict and his growth.

It means his true ethical personality growing in an actual historic situation. I don't know about you guys, but I love this. That there's a real context for the life of Jesus that was not a glass house, what do they call it, a greenhouse, an ivory tower situation.

It was grim, it was real, it was authentic, it was actual. He was born into a certain place and time of a historic situation in which he had to live and work out his being and his destiny. So also are we.

We are called to the last days. We have a context that's historic and real and in it we work out our salvation with fear and trembling as also did he. It means that his true ethical personality grew out of an actual historic situation.

It means that he counted in the public of his age. It wasn't just an idle laboratory for his perfection. He made an effect. He was present. He counted. There was a consequence for his being there. We need to ask is there a consequence for our being there?

Are we having an effect? Is something happening because we are in this historic context? Are we making our weight felt? Do we have something to say? Is our presence commanding? Does it make the world to sit up and take notice?

Are we writing letters to the editor as I did when the Star Wars thing came out and they had six, seven feet tall cardboard cutouts of these ridiculous otherworldly creatures and they hung them in the supermarket.

You couldn't go in and buy a loaf of bread or a can of tuna fish without having to see these hanging effigies of extra-terrestrial creatures. And when the Star Wars film came out, the kids were in their sleeping bags outside the door of the theater all night long to be the first one to see it.

And I wrote a letter to the editor, which was a letter to the public. Scandalous! Are your kids outside the doors of their church waiting for it to open? Who are these companies that sell the rights to use their images from their films to the Pepsi-Cola company and hang these effigies in stores that you're compelled to brush them by?

It's an intrusion into our life and into our privacy that we haven't asked for, but that commerce compels. And I'm raising a voice of complaint and dissent. I refuse to have my life ordered by the Pepsi-Cola company because they paid two and a half billion dollars for the rights of Star Wars.

I mean, who read that? And what difference did it make? But if I had not written it, it would have made a difference to me. I would have forfeited a moral occasion that required a response from a Christian man who was in a place of leadership into the society in which I've been plunged, whether it's heard or not.

That's what Forsythe is saying here. He really inhabited its spiritual milieu, the public of his age. He filled a mighty place in the social situation of his land and time. What a statement that is for the church.

The Church’s Public Witness and Human Dignity

Are we fulfilling as the church a mighty place in the social situation of our land and time? And in fact, in previous generations, the church did exactly that. Anything that's called women's rights and even the elevation of women to any kind of dignity would not be, had it not been for the history of the church in the world.

Women would be, what's the word? Baggage. They would be accessories to the lust and whims of men as they are everywhere in the world that is non-Christian. But in the Christian world, they have a dignity and a recognition as persons that only comes by virtue of the gospel and the presence of the church in the world that demands it.

What's the message in Africa? You have an obligation, church, to stand for what is made in God's image. I'm just driving through the streets of the capital city there. Without traffic lights means that when you come to an intersection, every vehicle and motor scooter and motorcycle gushing clouds of smoke are edging for a position to come and get through to their place where they make a right or left.

And so you have to take in gallons of fumes because for the want of a stinking traffic light and order. I said, church, that's an indignity to what is made in God's image. You need to go to the legislatures and say we represent a Christian committee of moral concern and we demand the most elementary provision that pertains to the dignity of men, like traffic lights.

We insist we have an obligation to stand for what is made in God's image. And once the legislature, that's because they come with authority from heaven making a requirement on earth, and when they begin to give them traffic lights and bring elementary order, the principalities and powers of the air suffer an enormous defeat and setback because they thrive on chaos and confusion and the degradation of men rather than their dignity.

Got the idea? It's a struggle in a country where if a journalist dares make any criticism of these fat calves that are feeding their fortunes by running the country, they're in a fraternity of glut. You ought to see their homes.

Here and there they're little castles with barbed wire rooftops and armed guards to preserve their little privacy and their advantageous lifestyles while the poor slobs down on earth drink gallons of fumes day in and day out without any concern on the part of those in power.

That ought not to be, and I said to the church, you cannot be moral without being political. And you cannot be political without causing a ruffle. Be prepared for prison. Be prepared for opposition if you begin to assert the issue of God with men in your nation and in your continent.

That was the message and made men fear to hear it. And a man, one of the leading pastors in our community, whose church I gave that message, he said later, every word you spoke on was a fire in my heart.

I burned internally with every word that you spoke. It was from the throne of heaven and I received it as a personal mandate. Whatever the consequence of the cost, I'm now under obligation because that word has come.

Because that word was a work to walk in before the foundations of the earth were laid. But it had to be spoken out of a freedom of obedience to the God who gave it. By a white man, why are they under obligation to hear him?

And because others have come to teach them about church growth and so on. And all of the racial tensions of former colonial history that makes them dubious about anything that comes from a white man. So that what they hear has got to come from a man beyond the issue of race and nationality.

He's not coming from America, he's coming from the throne of heaven. He's a sent one with a sent word. That means that we ourselves have got to rise above our own culture, our own civilization, our own ethnic and racial origin.

We can't come as middle class whites to the Africas of this world. We have to come as the messengers from heaven who are transcendent and above the conditions of our own nation and culture. How do you do that?

You're separated. That's what God was waiting for in Acts 13. Separate unto me, Paul and Barnabas from work unto which I've called them. Separate unto me separated men who are separated from the fact that they're Jews and have no vested interest even in their own ethnic identity, nor will they employ it, nor will they seek to be recognized, nor will they intimidate Gentiles by coming as Jews.

They come as transcendent sons, sent, and therefore the Gentiles can receive them and their message. And when they're told later that they will see their face no more, they hang on the neck of that Jewish man and weep.

Jesus was sent, but he was not a man under compulsion and obligation because the Father required it. He chose to be sent. It's an act of the Father and the Son in complete freedom and love. If Jesus was just under obligation, the glory of what is represented in his coming to the earth and his suffering would have been lost.

He was the man of freedom. He grew in stature and grace through free, voluntary obedience, both in being sent and in acting out all that was needed. And we ourselves, issue by issue, moral issue by moral issue, face the responsibility of freedom and obedience.

And that's how we grow in sense. So when we're faced, for example, with the discipline that the church needs, or to allow that malefactor to continue, or someone in sin of whom we're conscious to remain, something is going to corrupt the entire body.

When I lived in St. Cloud, maybe I shouldn't even mention the place because it happens everywhere, one of the young studs of the congregation fornicated with one of the young girls. He was a charmer and it became known to the pastor and the way it was dealt with, he was sent off to California and the girl was patted on the back and made nice.

And the church went on. It wasn't long before the pastor's own daughter became pregnant out of wedlock. And I said to him, and we've never been friends as much since when I said to him, your daughter's pregnancy was the result of your failure to identify that moral issue and deal with it publicly before the entire congregation.

You swept it under the carpet, but it emerged for the fall of your own daughter. Why do men sweep it? Why don't they identify it? Because it's difficult to deal with moral questions and we'd rather look the other way.

So we did not exercise our freedom, our responsibility by which we would have grown in grace as Jesus did, by never forfeiting an occasion that came to him to act freely and responsibly in behalf of the father in righteousness.

That's how sons are formed saints. It's not a formula. It's not an automatic thing. It's a process of growth. It's fearful, but there's a grace that God gives for righteousness that we can say in Africa, righteousness exalts a nation.

You want to prosper? Don't look for loans from the UN or relief organizations. Start practicing righteousness and God will exalt that because exalt means to prosper. It's not dependent on your raw materials or your manpower or their skills.

It's dependent on your faith because Africa is shot through with unrighteousness, with bribery, with corruption, with every violation, the most elementary things that we in the West take for granted as being reasonable and right.

So to insist on righteousness in an environment like that is to run across the whole grain of a dark continent but God says he'll honor it. Okay, the cross is ever before us and it's a principle of growth and reality if we submit to it.

The Church as a Moral and Spiritual Environment

There's a suffering but there's a glory and that glory is growth as sons, which is not automatic and will not take place under hothouse conditions, but takes place under the grit and the reality of the situations in which God has placed us in this world and in this community, in this locality.

It raises the question of what was the environment in the church itself that was conducive to this young man taking that liberty? How much of it is the issue of the church itself rather than just the act and how much are we responsible for that atmosphere that was condescending and even encouraged lust?

There's such a thing as spiritual lust, the desire for experience, the enjoyment of experience for which we'll run to Toronto or who knows where if we can get it and how great a difference is it between a lust for experience spiritually and a lust for experience sexually?

So we need to really get to the root of the problem. We have a moral obligation and the church has a moral obligation to raise the issue of the history of the nations in which it exists. Why has the nation suffered so and so?

Why is it suffering now? Where are we failing God and bringing a consequence and indifference to him that we are interpreting as economic failure or social failure, but the root of the problem is spiritual failure.

If the church doesn't raise those questions or press them, how can we expect the nations themselves to do it out of their secular mindsets? So we're not living in our time and in our history as Jesus was.

We're not making our way filled. So a church is more than services. So he lived a true man's life in his identity with humanity, in his own voluntary act of self-identification with it, going down into the Jordan and identifying with the sins of Israel was his first act that pleased the Father, though he had no need to be baptized.