Getting hungry for God. Literally.

FAST fast verb. Go without food [for God].

2. noun. A period of going without food [for God].

Whenever I talk to people about fasting, their knee-jerk reaction is “No food? No food? No FOOD? You’re outa your [profane adjective] mind.” After all, this is the United States, where a 20-ounce soda is called a “small.” In this nation, the stomach rules.

This is why so many Christians are quick to redefine the word “fast.” My church, fr’instance, frequently does this 21-day “Daniel fast.” I’ll explain what that is elsewhere; for now I’ll just point out it’s not an actual fast. Nobody’s going without food. They’re going without certain kinds of food. No meat, no sweets. But no hunger pains either.

Fasting, actual fasting, is a hardcore Christian practice. The only things which go into our mouths are air and water. In an “absolute fast” you even skip the water. Now, we need food and water. If we don’t eat, we die. And that’s the point: Push this practice too far and we die. But God is more important than our lives. That’s the declaration we make when we fast: Our lives aren’t as important as God.

Why do we do such a thing? For the same reason Jesus did it, when he went to the desert for the devil to tempt him. Mt 4.1-2, Lk 4.1-2 Fasting makes people spiritually tough. It amplifies our prayer and meditation by a significant factor, which is why it’s a common prayer practice. When we deprive our physical parts, and shift our focus to the spiritual parts, those parts get exercised; they get stronger.

We reject our culture, which teaches us we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of anything. We recognize God, not food, is our source of life. Our minds get better attuned to God’s will. We hear him better, because our bodies physically feel our need for him. We detect spiritual things faster. We discern the difference between good and evil better.

Yeah, fasting does all that. That is, when we’re praying as well as fasting. If you’re fasting but not praying, it’s time wasted.

Don’t get me wrong. Other forms of self-deprivation do it too. Dieting for God, or going without certain beloved things and hobbies, because God’s more important than our desires, will also achieve the same things fasting can. Just not as quickly; not as intensely. The stakes just aren’t as high. Fasting is hardcore, remember? Going without bacon, as hard as that might be for you personally, isn’t life-threatening. (In fact it’s better for your health.) But though a small thing, it’s still a sacrifice, and part of the proper mindset: “God is more important than my palate.”

Read your bible, go to church.

Yesterday I wrote about resolving to be religious, and how reading one’s bible and attending small groups simply won’t be enough.

Problem is, among American Evangelicals, that’s what we’re taught whenever we talk about getting more religious. “Oh, you wanna get closer to God? Then you need to read your bible and go to church.” And pray, but y’might notice not as many Evangelicals will bring up prayer—partly because they presume you’re already praying for more God; partly because they themselves do the bible thing and the church thing, but not so much the prayer thing. Usually because their prayers are still unidirectional… but that’s a whole other tangent, and best you just read the article on that.

But as you’re fully aware, plenty of Christians already read bible and go to church… for all the good it does ’em. You might already read bible and go to church, and you know firsthand it’s not doing it for you. You know more bible trivia and doctrine, but you want Jesus, and the fan club meetings are fun, but they’re most definitely no backstage pass.

The key, like I said, is obedience. You wanna grow closer to Jesus? Do as he teaches. Don’t just memorize it, then just find excuses for not doing putting it into practice. Do it. Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow him.

That said, you know how Evangelicals say we gotta read bible and go to church? They’re right. Read your bible. And go to church.

Because once you’re actually obeying Jesus, you’re suddenly gonna find bible and church become way more useful and profound. See, bible and church can be good in and of themselves, but if you wanna activate them, you gotta start living the Christian life. It’s like buying a microwave oven and refrigerator, but you never plug them in, and you’ve been using them as storage cabinets. “Why is my food never hot nor cold?” Um… y’know that electricity stuff you’ve been using for the lights?

Resolve to be more religious.

Too many conservative Evangelicals have been fed the false idea religion is a dirty word—that it means dead religion, where we only go through the motions instead of loving Jesus. So here’s the obligatory paragraph where I remind you: Religion is all the stuff we do to facilitate loving and following Jesus. If loving Jesus isn’t the whole point, it’s bad religion; if following Jesus isn’t happening, stop doing it!

With this in mind, one of a Christian’s resolutions—not only for the new year, but for all time—is we oughta get religious. Or more religious. Where we are isn’t good enough. Nor should we ever think of it as good enough. We must always strive to follow Jesus better.

Yeah, lemme throw in this caveat for the Evangelicals who get all paranoid about works righteousness: I’m not talking about being good enough for salvation. I’m fully aware salvation is by God’s grace; it’s a free gift we don’t earn. The point of being more religious is not, and never should be, so we can rack up more good-karma points so when we stand before Jesus at the End, we can tell him, “See Lord?—I did this, that, and t’other thing. Jewels please.” Frankly this idea of doing good deeds only to earn heavenly rewards, is just a variant of Mammonism and needs to be denounced more often. We don’t practice religion so we can get stuff. We do it for Jesus—we love him and wanna be closer to him, and the only way to do this is by obeying him.

So we need to obey him! And obey him more often. Not just when we remember, “Oh yeah, didn’t Jesus say something about this somewhere in the red letters?” Not only when the pastor brings up a random Jesus verse in a sermon. Not solely when we already want to behave a certain way, but we need a bible verse to support the behavior, so we’re proof-texting a defense. Preferably we obey Jesus all the time.

But obeying Jesus requires self-control. Self-discipline. Which means we gotta develop self-control… which because it’s self-control, means we gotta do it. Won’t just happen on its own.

We gotta get disciplined about how we follow Jesus. We need to practice the things which encourage good fruit and goodness in general. We need to love our neighbors better; certainly better than the apathetic “Well I don’t wish them harm” we practice more often. Way better than the toxic “tough love” bullpucky which too many Christians fall into.

The usual way Christians encourage us to follow Jesus better, is by getting involved in a small group and following a bible-reading plan. As if going to bible study, and reading lots of bible, is gonna trigger goodness. While I’m all for interacting with fellow Christians and reading lots of bible—the better to get familiar with it!—of course it’s not gonna trigger good deeds. Plenty of Christians go to small groups and read bible… and are the same royal dickweeds they’ve always been. Didn’t make ’em better; it only made ’em think, “Well of course I follow Jesus, ’cause I read my bible and go to a bible study.”

Nope; reading isn’t enough. We have to obey it.

TXAB’s bible-reading plan.

Whenever the new year approaches, Christians resolve to read the bible. The entire bible, not just the parts we like best: Genesis to maps, as the old joke goes. (See, when you buy a bible in print, most of them have maps of Israel and the Roman Empire in the back. Yes, explaining the joke makes it less funny. Yes, deliberately making the joke less funny is ironically funny. Yes, this is metahumor. I’ll stop now.)

Christians tend to pick up a bible-reading plan of some sort, and most of the time it goes through the scriptures in a year. Which, I insist, is far too long. I prefer you do it in a month. Yes it’s totally possible; the bible’s a big fat inspired book anthology, but it doesn’t take an entire year to read. What book do you take an entire year to read?—unless you chop it into bite-size bits so small you’re spiritually starving. No wonder so many Christians lose track and lose interest.

Now if a month seems too extreme for you (especially if you don’t read), y’know what you could do: Read the bible at your own speed. Read it till you’re done. However long it takes you to get it done. Might be three months. Maybe two. Then again you might surprise yourself and finish it in one.

That’s where TXAB’s bible-reading plan comes in. It’ll help you read it at whatever speed you’re going.

Pinpointing Messiah’s birthplace.

Matthew 2.3-6.

Because the magi brought Jesus three gifts, Mt 2.11 people presume there were only three magi. We’ve no evidence of that. It seems way more likely there were a lot more magi than three. Three rich foreigners in Jerusalem would’ve caused a minor stir, ’cause rich people came to Jerusalem every day to go to temple. People therefore assume these guys came with massive entourages—dozens of camels per guy, hundreds of servants, as befit an oriental sultan. But again, these weren’t kings; they were magi seeking a king.

The actual king, Herod bar Antipater, wanted to know what this was all about, so he consulted his own wise men—the leaders of the Judean senate. This’d be the head priest, whom he appointed personally: Either Simon bar Boethus, Herod’s brother-in-law, who died that year; or Matthias bar Theophilus, who only served a year before Herod replaced him with Simon’s brother Joazar. The priests, whose field of expertise was the temple, not the Law, brought scribes with them.

Matthew 2.3-6 KWL

3 Hearing this agitates King Herod,

and all Jerusalem with him.

4 Gathering all the people’s head priests and scribes,

Herod is asking them, “Where’s Messiah born?”

5 They tell Herod, “In Bethlehem, Judea,

for this was written by the prophet:

6 ‘You, Bethlehem, land of Judah,

are in no way the least of Judah’s rulers.

For a leader will come from you

who will shepherd my people Israel.’ ” Mi 5.2

For centuries, Pharisees had been collecting bible passages which they considered Messianic prophecies, which they believed foretold a great king who’d take over Israel, conquer the world, and inaugurate God’s kingdom. True, some of these “prophecies” were great big stretches. This one, which comes from Micah, isn’t really a stretch. Yeah, there are gonna be people who insist Micah was really talking about King David ben Jesse, who was also born in Bethlehem; that was the leader—a literal shepherd!—who eventually shepherded Israel. But no, Micah wasn’t speaking of David. He was speaking of a king like David, who’d rule till the end of the world. Mc 5.4 A much greater king.

Pharisees believed in a coming Messiah, but Sadducees didn’t—and the head priest, his family, and the chief priests who worked under him, were almost entirely Sadducee. But they weren’t unaware of what Pharisees believed, so when Herod asked ’em about Messiah, they could easily tell him what the Pharisees claimed: “Oh, he’s gonna be born in the next town over. In Bethlehem.”

The magi show up.

Matthew 2.1-3.

A fact too many Christians forget is our words Messiah and Christ both mean king. We tend to translate these words literally—as “anointed [one]”—and forget what Jesus was anointed to do, and presume he was only anointed to save us from sin. He did that too, but he didn’t need any anointing for that. Anybody can do great things. But Hebrew and Christian custom is to anoint people to lead.

Because Messiah means king, you couldn’t just wander ancient Israel and call yourself Messiah. It’s a loaded title. It means you’re king. It also heavily implies the person who currently holds that job (unless he’s your dad and he arranged for your anointing, like King David ben Jesse did with his son Solomon 1Ki 1.32-40) is not king. Not the legitimate king, anyway. He’ll have to be overthrown.

In 5BC the king of Judea was Herod bar Antipater, and a lot of people were entirely sure he wasn’t the legitimate king. For the past century and a half the head priests had taken over the role of king, but 32 years before, the Romans made Herod king. He was neither a priest nor related to King David; he was an Idumean (i.e. Edomite) whose people had been grafted into Judea, and whose father worked for the Romans. God didn’t anoint him king; Marc Antony had.

And Herod was super paranoid about anyone who might try to overthrow him. ’Cause many had tried, and failed. Herod’s own family members, including his own kids, tried and failed. He knew the Judeans didn’t want him there. It’s why all his palaces were fortresses, in case he had to defend himself from his own countrymen; it’s why most of his bodyguard were Europeans, not fellow middle easterners. So you don’t wanna get on Herod’s bad side. Caesar Augustus used to joke he’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son. (Herod executed three of his sons, and since Judeans didn’t eat pork, Augustus’s comment was quite apt.)

How’d baby Jesus get on Herod’s bad side? Well, you might know parts of the story, and if you don’t I’m gonna analyze the story a bit. It begins with some people whom the KJV calls “wise men.” Contrary to the Christmas carols, these weren’t kings.

Matthew 2.1-3 KWL

1 At the time Jesus is born in Bethlehem, Judea,

in the days of King Herod,

look: Magi from the east come to Jerusalem,

2 saying, “Where’s the newborn king of the Judeans?

For we see his star in the east,

and we come to worship him.”

3 Hearing this agitated King Herod,

and all Jerusalem with him.

Triggering Herod was dangerous, but the magi didn’t know any better. More about Herod later, though if you want his backstory I already wrote about it.

These wise men are magi (Greek μάγοι/máyë) whom our nativity crêches tend to depict them as two white guys and a black guy, wearing either turbans or European-style gold crowns. Matthew states they came from the east, so they were Asian, not European and African. (“But they could’ve been Europeans and Africans who went east study with the magi!” Yeah, unlikely.) There’s also a common western assumption they were kings, but there’s no evidence of this.

King Herod the Worst.

When Jesus was born, Judea was ruled by “Herod the Great,” as he’s commonly called. I don’t know who first gave him the title “the Great,” and loads of people—myself included—have pointed out the man was far from a great human being; he was a murderous tyrant. As achievements go, he did get way more done than the subsequent members of the Herod family. But in terms of character he’s the worst. Hence the title of this piece.

Lemme backtrack through history by way of introduction. So Isaac ben Abraham had two sons, Esau and Jacob. Jacob’s descendants became Israel, and Esau’s descendants became אֱדוֹם/Edom, a nation located just southeast of Judah, which likewise spoke Hebrew and likewise did a rotten job of worshiping the LORD. And yes, they did know and worship the LORD; one of Edom’s more devout examples was Job. Yes, that Job. The guy with the book about him. (No he didn’t live before Abraham’s day; that’s just a weird young-earth creationist belief. All the names in his book are Edomite, and his book was written in sixth-century Hebrew.) Edom had a really long history of being subservient to Israel: First it was conquered by King David ben Jesse, 2Sa 8.14 and made a tributary state to Israel. When Israel split into Ephraim in the north and Judah in the south, sometimes Edom was ruled by one, sometimes the other; either way they weren’t big fans of Israelis. They rejoiced when Babylon conquered Judah in the early 500s BC, and were annoyed when the Babylonian Jews returned to found Judea in the 400s.

In the 300s BC, the Edomites themselves were exiled from their land—shoved out by the conquering Nabatean Empire. They were forced to resettle west of their old land, in southern Judea. This land became Ἰδουμαία/Iduméa—which is simply the Greek word for Edom. In 110BC, king and head priest John Hyrcanus 1 of Judea decided to take the land back, conquered Idumea, and told the Idumeans—who are ethnically the same as Judeans, y’know—they could stay there only if they followed the Law. Historians like to describe it as forcibly assimilating them, but the Idumeans could’ve fled to Egypt you know. But they didn’t; they stayed. By Jesus’s day they had largely assimilated into the rest of Judea. They’re Jews now.

(Yeah, there are various Christians who claim Jordanians are descendants of the Edomites. They’re not. They are descendants of Abraham; just not through Esau.)

Anyway 37 years after the Judean conquest, an Edomite named ܗܶܪܳܘܕ݂ܶܣ/Horódos was born to a former governor of Idumea, Antipater bar Antipas, in 73BC. Herod (Greek Ἡρῴδης/Iródis, Latin Herodes) was Antipater’s second son. His mother was Kyprós, a Nabatean noblewoman related to King Aretas 3 of Nabatea. Historians sometimes call Herod an Arab because they confuse Edomites with Arabs, or speculate the Idumeans weren’t really Edomites, but only claimed to be so they could relocate in Judea. Conspiracy theories regardless, Herod was a descendant of Abraham on both sides.

When God became human.

INCARNATE 'ɪn.kɑrn.eɪt verb. Put an immaterial thing (i.e. an abstract concept or idea) into a concrete form.

2. Put a deity or spirit into a human form, i.e. Hindu gods.

3. ɪn'kɑr.nət adjective. Embodied in flesh, or concrete form.

[Incarnation ɪn.kɑr'neɪ.ʃən noun, reincarnation 're.ɪn.kɑr.neɪ.ʃən noun.]

Most of our christology lingo tends to come from Greek and Latin. This one too. Why? Because that’s what ancient Christians spoke… and over the centuries westerners got the idea Greek and Latin sound much more formal and sanctimonious than plain English. But they absolutely weren’t formal words in the original languages. When you literally translate ’em, they make people flinch. Incarnate is one of those words: In-carnátio is Latin for “put into meat.”

Yep, put into meat. Nope, this isn’t a mistranslation. And it’s an accurate description of what happened to Jesus. The word of God—meaning God—became flesh. Meat.

John 1.14 KJV

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

This isn’t a temporary change, solely for the few decades Jesus walked the earth. When Jesus was resurrected, he went right back to having a flesh-’n-bone body. When he got raptured up to heaven, he still had, and has, his flesh-’n-bone body; he didn’t shuck it like a molting crustacean. It’s who he is now. God is now meat. Flesh, blood, spit, mucus, cartilage, hair, teeth, bile, tears. MEAT.

God doesn’t merely look human. Nor did he take over an existing human, scoop out the spirit, and replace it with his Holy Spirit. These are some of the dozens of weird theories people coined about how Jesus isn’t really or entirely human. Mainly they were invented by people who can’t have God be human.

To such people, humanity makes God no longer God. It undoes his divinity. He’d have to be limited instead of unlimited. And these people, like most humans, define God by his power. Power’s what they really admire, really covet, about God: His raw, unlimited, sovereign might. Not his character, not his goodness, not his love and kindness and compassion. F--- those things. God has to be mighty, and they can’t respect a God who doesn’t respect power the way they do.

So that, they insist, is who Jesus really is. Beneath a millimeter of skin, Jesus was secretly, but not all that secretly, all that raw unlimited power. He only feigned humanity, for the sake of fearful masses who’d scream out in terror if they ever encountered an undisguised God. He pretended to be one of us. Peel off his human suit, and he’s really omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omni-everything.

To such people incarnation dirties God. It defiles him. Meat is icky. Humanity, mortality, the realness of our everyday existence, is too nasty for God to demean himself to. Sweating. Aching. Pains and sickness. Peeing and pooping. Suffering from acne and bug bites and rashes. Belching and farting. Sometimes the trots from bad shawarma the night before. Waking up with a morning erection.

Have I outraged you yet? You’re hardly the first. But this, as we can all attest, is humanity. Not even sinful humanity; I haven’t touched upon that at all, and I needn’t, ’cause humans don’t have to sin, as Jesus demonstrates. I’m just talking regular, natural, physical humanity. When God became human, he became that. And people can’t abide it.

Yet it’s true. God did it intentionally. He wanted us to be with him. So he made the first move, and became one of us.

Christology: What we understand about Jesus.

Christology is a branch of theology, and the christ- prefix should give you the hint it specifically has to do with Christ Jesus.

Historically, christology has been about who Jesus is. Because Jesus came to earth and said some profound things about himself, and it took us Christians a few centuries to hash out those ideas.

I know; plenty of Christians insist they’re pretty self-explanatory ideas. They read the bible, and it’s plain as day! But that’s because they, like most people, greatly lack self-awareness: It wasn’t plain as day when they first became Christian. (It certainly wasn’t plain as day before they became Christian—which is why they weren’t Christian!) It became plain as day after they were exposed to Christians who explained Jesus to them, and after they were exposed to the Holy Spirit who made ’em stop rejecting every little thing they heard, stop insisting they knew it all, shut up, and listen, dangit.

It’s still not plain as day to a lot of Christians. For all sorts of reasons. They lack the humility to listen to other people or the Spirit, try to figure out Jesus for themselves, invent some “clever” ideas which are really just old heresies that’ve been tried and rejected ages ago, and won’t listen to anyone who tries to correct ’em. Some of ’em simply never read their bibles—never read the gospels, never read the Sermon on the Mount, presume Jesus thinks exactly the way they do and shares all the same prejudices, and proclaim that instead of Jesus.

Yeah, much of the reason Christianity has a thousand denominations is because Christians don’t agree about Jesus, what he teaches, and what he emphasizes. They’re not seeking Jesus’s input; or as theologians are gonna put it, they have a weak christology. They don’t value who he is, and don’t care what he’s about. They have their own ideas.

So let’s look at christology. Which examines a few particular areas of Christian theology:

• What Jesus teaches and does—both in the first century, back in time before he came to earth, in the future during the End Times and millennium and New Earth, and of course what he’s doing right now.
• Sin, how it affects humanity, and precisely how Jesus conquers it.
• God’s kingdom, ’cause Jesus is after all its king. Also how he’s its king.
• Jesus’s family. Particularly his mom, who’s a person of huge interest within Roman Catholicism. Likewise what she did and is doing.

But most of our focus in christology is how Jesus is the primary lens through which we understand God himself. Humanity doesn’t understand him correctly without Jesus.

Jesus, our Immanuel.

Isaiah 7.14, Matthew 1.22-23.

In the middle of the Joseph story, the author of Matthew inserted this comment.

Matthew 1.18-19 KWL

22 (All of this happened so it could fulfill

God’s message to the prophet, saying,

23 “Look, the maiden will have a child in the womb,

and will birth a son,

and they will declare his name to be Immanúël,” Is 7.14

which is translated “God is with us.”)

So let’s jump from the first century of our era, to the eighth century BC, for that story.

If you’re not familiar with the nation of Ephraim, that’s because the writer of Kings preferred to call it “Israel.” It’s the nine northernmost tribes of Israel, which split from Jerusalem and were run by the king of Samaria. Back round the year 735BC, the king of Samaria, Peqákh ben Remalyáhu (KJV “Pekah the son of Remaliah”) joined forces with Radyán of Damascus, Aram (KJV “Rezin the king of Syria”) to attack Jerusalem. 2Ki 16.5 This was one of the first campaigns of the Assyro-Ephraimite War… which eventually destroyed Samaria. The Assyrians dragged all the cities of Ephraim into exile, and all the country-dwellers left behind either moved south to Jerusalem, or evolved into the Samaritans.

While Jerusalem was under seige, the prophets Isaiah ben Amóch and his son Sheüryahsúv had come to King Akház ben Yotám (KJV “Ahaz son of Jotham”) with good news from the LORD: Ephraim and Aram’s plans would ultimately come to nothing. But Akhaz—who wasn’t the most devout of kings—really didn’t know how to take the encouragement.

Isaiah 7.10-17 KWL

10 The LORD’s word to Akház, saying,

11 “Request a sign from your LORD God.

Make it deep as a grave,

or make it high as outer space.”

12 Akház said, “I won’t ask.

I won’t test the LORD.”

13 Isaiah said, “House of David, listen please.

It takes little for you to tire people,

because you also tire God.

14 For this, my Master himself is giving you a sign.

‘Look, a pregnant maiden gave birth to a son.

She declared his name Immánuël/‘God with us.’

15 He’ll eat curds and honey,

and learn to reject evil and choose good.

16 But before the boy learns to reject evil and choose good,

the nations you fear are laid waste

before the face of these two kings.’

17 The LORD is bringing upon you, your people, and your father’s house

days which haven’t been

since the days Ephraim turned away from Judah to Assyria’s king.”

God had Akház’s back. Proof? Little Immánuël. And Matthew quotes this prophecy because Jesus is like little Immánuël.