When the heavens are brass?

Deuteronomy 28.23.

Depending on whether a Christian grew up with the King James Version or the New International Version, we’re sometimes gonna talk about how sometimes “the heavens are brass,” or “the heavens are bronze.” No we don’t mean the sky’s looking kinda gold or yellowish, like a nice sunset or a looming dust cloud. We’re talking about when we talk to God… and we feel like we’re getting back nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Deuteronomy 28.23 KJV

And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.

But the actual context of this verse isn’t even about prayer. It’s part of a curse Moses spelled out for the Hebrews who were about to enter their promised land: If you dismiss what the LORD tells you, and do evil instead, he’s gonna withdraw his blessings and things are gonna suck. Hard.

Deuteronomy 28.20-24 NLT

20 “The LORD himself will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in everything you do, until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and abandoning me. 21 The LORD will afflict you with diseases until none of you are left in the land you are about to enter and occupy. 22 The LORD will strike you with wasting diseases, fever, and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, and with blight and mildew. These disasters will pursue you until you die. 23 The skies above will be as unyielding as bronze, and the earth beneath will be as hard as iron. 24 The LORD will change the rain that falls on your land into powder, and dust will pour down from the sky until you are destroyed.”

Sound familiar? Pandemics, climate change and freaky weather, massive drought? No? Well, this was a warning to Hebrews not Americans. But it wouldn’t hurt to shape up a little.

Anyway when Moses spoke of the “skies above will be as unyielding as bronze,” he meant a sky which produces no rain. In his day, the ancients believed the sky, or firmament, was a solid wall holding back the waters of heaven—but it was porous, so occasionally rain would get through. Well, a bronze shield isn’t porous… unless your opponents have iron arrowheads. But if you were hoping to dig wells in the ground, and get water thataway, guess what that’s gonna be like. Yep, iron.

So yeah, whenever you talk about not hearing back from God, do not make the mistake of saying, “Like when the bible says about heavens like brass.” The bible does refer to that, but it’s about literal drought, not a spiritual one.

Now if you wanna talk about unanswered prayer, the bible does actually have passages on the topic. Quote them. Not the “heavens are brass” part; this ain’t one of them. Capice?

The Sheepfold Gate Story.

John 10.1-10.

A lot of reference materials claim Jesus only shares parables in the synoptic gospels, and that there are no parables in the gospel of John. Seriously, a lot of them. I grew up hearing it all my life. And it turns out it’s rubbish, because John straight-up states,

John 10.6 KJV

This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understood not what things they were which he spake unto them.

It’s not a mistranslation either. True, John didn’t use the word παραβολή/paravolí, the word from which we literally get our word “parable.” He used παροιμίαν/parimían, which literally means “nearly like it.” But that’s what a parable is: It’s an analogy. A comparison. Something which is nearly like something else, so you can slip people some wisdom in a memorable format.

Other bibles have rendered parimían as “figure of speech” (ESV, NASB, NIV, NRSV) or “illustration” (NKJV, NLT). But again: Parables are figures of speech and illustrations. This is a parable. I suspect the translators were hesitant to use “parable” because it’s so widely believed and taught that John contains no parables. I still call rubbish. This is obviously a parable, and you gotta go through some weird logical gymnastics in order to claim it’s not.

It comes up in John 10, right after Jesus cured a blind man in John 9—whereupon the local Pharisees put the newly-cured guy on trial for heresy and excommunicate him. Jesus calls ’em blind. That’s a figure of speech; this next bit is a parable.

John 10.1-10 KWL

1 “Amen amen! I promise you,

one who won’t enter through the sheepfold gate,

but goes over it some other way:

That one is a thief, a looter.

2 One who enters through the gate is the sheep’s shepherd.

3 The gatekeeper opens up for this shepherd.

The sheep hear the shepherd’s voice.

He calls his own sheep by name, and leads them out.

4 Whenever the shepherd drives out his own sheep,

they go in front of him, and the sheep follow him,

because they’ve known his voice.

5 The sheep won’t follow a stranger,

but will flee from him:

They’ve not known the stranger’s voice.”

 

6 Jesus tells them this parable,

and they don’t know what he’s telling them,

7 so again Jesus says, “Amen amen! I promise you,

I’m the sheepfold gate.

8 Everybody who goes over me is a thief and looter.

But the sheep don’t heed them.

9 I’m the gate. When anyone goes through me, they’ll be saved.

They’ll enter and exit, and they’ll find pasture.

10 A thief won’t come in—

unless it’s to steal, murder, and destroy.

I come so they might have life,

and might have superabundance.”

So. At the end of chapter 9 he was speaking of blindness; now he speaks of sheep? But it’s not a total non-sequitur. Blind or not, people oughta be able to identify their master by voice. The sheep don’t need to identify their shepherd by sight: They can hear. And strangers aren’t gonna sound right.

And yeah, Jesus is also the shepherd, and a good shepherd. But that’s actually another analogy, in the next few verses. We’ll get to it; it’s another of the parables in John. Yep, there are a few of ’em. I’ll get to them all. Meanwhile, in today’s passage, Jesus is the sheepfold gate.

When Christian leaders become control freaks.

Some years ago I read an article, written to Christian leaders, about how to make sure your small groups don’t go heretic. I guess that was a big concern for the author.

I don’t know how valid a concern it is; when you put people in charge of a small group, shouldn’t you have pre-screened ’em to make sure they’re not heretics? But then again, when we’re talking about the H-word, you do realize there are a number of Christians who are really loose with that definition: They think every error we make about the bible and Christian doctrine is heresy. And, yes, they actually wanna police every error.

This is why you’re sometimes gonna find a church with no small groups at all. Or a few—but every single group is either led by the head pastor, or must have the head pastor in attendance. It’s not that the church doesn’t want (or need!) small groups; it’s that Pastor must be there to directly supervise, because “the shepherd’s job is to protect the flock.”

Yep, it means Pastor’s a control freak.

And there are a lot of churches run by control freaks. Because they don’t believe it’s the Holy Spirit’s job to lead us to truth; Jn 16.13 they’re pretty sure it’s the pastor’s job. They might acknowledge it’s the Spirit’s job… but either the pastor’s pretty sure only he knows how to hear the Spirit correctly, or he doesn’t actually know the Holy Spirit ’cause he thinks the age of miracles is over. So either he, or his wife, or some very trusted lieutenant, has to be at your small group meeting. As your “covering.” Just to make sure.

Yeah, this behavior is far more fearful and cultlike than Spirit-led.

Two of the Spirit’s fruits are gonna be fearlessness—you’re not gonna worry about every little thing, ’cause you trust God to have your back—and self-control. Not pastor-control, self-control. The Spirit’s trying to develop our ability to govern ourselves. When others won’t let us do that, and insist they gotta wield the reins because no one else can do it properly, it doesn’t help the Spirit any!

Control-freak behavior is a character flaw, and if your entire church leadership is structured in such a way that the pastor controls absolutely everything, it means your pastor is deficient in self-control, grace, patience, and often love: They’re too afraid of what may happen, to love the people they gotta serve. You may realize these character defects disqualify people from leadership; you might also notice these defective pastors are pretty good at concealing this fact, or changing the subject (or even the definitions) whenever it comes up.

So if you’re part of a church like this, what can you do about it? Sadly not much. Control-freak leaders rarely listen. So yeah, you’re gonna have to start looking for a better church, whose pastor trusts the Spirit to handle the reins. And the whip.

Cults: When churches go very, very wrong.

CULT kəlt noun. A religion centered on one particular individual or figurehead.

2. A group (usually small) whose religious beliefs and practices are outside the norm: Too controling, abusive, devilish, or just plain strange.

3. A misplaced devotion to a particular person or thing.

4. A heretic Christian church.

[Cultic 'kəl.tɪk adjective, cultish 'kəl.tɪʃ adjective, cultism 'kəl.tiz.əm noun.]

Since I throw this word “cult” around a lot, I’d better define it. First, what other folks mean by “cult,” all of which are included in the above definition:

• Sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists whose job descriptions end in -ist, tend to use definition #1: A cult is any religion with a guru in charge. Not necessarily controling, abusive, or devilish; just a group which follows a person. Technically Christianity falls under this definition: We follow Jesus, right?
• Popular culture leans towards definition #2: A cult is any creepy religion. If it weirds people out in any way, they just call it a cult. Even if it’s Christianity. If we trust Jesus a little too much for their comfort, they call us cultish.
• And popular Christian culture leans towards definition #4: A cult is any heretic church.

The popular Christian definition originated when Charles S. Braden used it, in his 1949 book These Also Believe: A Study of Modern American Cults and Minority Religious Movements to mean

any religious group which differs significantly in one or more respects as to belief or practice from those religious groups which are regarded as the normative expressions of religion in our total culture. Braden xii

And that’s the definition Walter R. Martin went with in his popular book The Kingdom of the Cults. It’s a book I oughta plug, since it’s mighty useful: It explains how certain churches deviate from orthodox Christianity.

But thanks to these guys, when an Evangelical Christian says “cult,” they typically mean “heretic.”

• Jehovah’s Witnesses and Oneness Pentecostals don’t believe God’s a trinity. So they’d be cults.
• Latter-Day Saints say Jesus (and for that matter the Father) is a created being. So, cult.
• Christian Scientists claim death is an illusion, and therefore Jesus didn’t literally die: Cult.
• Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists don’t even believe Jesus is God: Cults.

Yep, doesn’t even matter if these groups don’t identify as Christian at all. Evangelicals easily slap that label “cult” on any religion they consider wrong. Depending on how Fundamentalist they get—by which I mean how narrowly they define orthodoxy—everything can be a cult but their own group. I grew up in such churches: If they strongly believe women shouldn’t wear makeup, yet your church lets ’em, they’ll actually call you a cult. Their religion is so strict, makeup is orthodoxy, and you aren’t orthodox. Today it’s foundation, eyeshadow, blush, and lipstick; but tomorrow you’re denouncing God and kissing Satan with tongue.

Of course if your church is that strict and controling, the cult is sorta on the other foot. (If you don’t mind me mixing a few metaphors there.)

Those who no longer think prayer works.

There’s a blog I follow. A few years ago, its author wrote a post about how he no longer believes prayer works—at least not the way we imagine it does.

He no longer believes prayer involves asking God for stuff. Nor asking questions of him, and getting answers. Nor calling on him for help. Forget about God meeting our needs and granting our wishes. Forget about asking this mountain to move over there, and it will.

Prayer, he states, is only about empathy. We pray for others because we love and care about them. It brings us closer to them. It expresses our love for them. It expresses our love for God too. It’s kind.

But otherwise prayer doesn’t do jack. And y’know, he says he’s okay with that.

I’ll take his word for it that he’s okay with that. But man alive, I sure wouldn’t be.

Back in my early twenties, I told God he needed to either do something, or I was gonna quit being Christian. Because I was tired of following a God who, according to my bible, does stuff… yet going to a church where, according to them, he doesn’t do stuff. They were cessationist, and believed God no longer answers prayer. Not for miracles, anyway.

Now, fortunate coincidences: He’d do those, from time to time. If a friend of yours had cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy and you prayed real hard and the tumor shrank, they felt it was wholly legitimate to give God the credit… for permitting the chemo to work, I suppose. Or say a different friend got into a road accident, and a dozen friends coincidentally happened to be on the scene, and helped rescue her, call an ambulance, call the auto insurance company, call a tow truck—why, such coincidences have to be a “God-incidence,” as Christians I know tend to call it. Such things don’t just happen.

But that’s as far as they’d permit God to act. Anything more than that—like actually getting cured of cancer only minutes before the chemotherapy—and they’d doubt the person even had cancer to begin with. Any incident where God told a person in advance, “Hey, be at this intersection; I need to you help somebody; you’ll see it when you get there,” and they’d claim, “Well that can’t be God, ’cause he doesn’t do such things. But Satan does.” According to their worldview, God’s powerless—and Satan’s not. Seriously.

I’m not claiming this blogger is this kind of cessationist. I’m pretty sure he’s not; I suspect if you asked him about Satan, he’d say the devil’s more of a malevolent human attitude than a literal being. But he has determined God doesn’t answer prayer, doesn’t cure the sick, doesn’t act. So, same as the cessationists I grew up with, he thinks prayer’s only about training us to pursue God’s will. Not teaching us to depend on him. We can’t. He’s sitting things out. He’s abandoned us to our fates. Bye kids; see you in heaven!

You can probably tell I disagree with him. A lot.

And no, not because I’d like to imagine God as caring and interactive. It’s because he answered my twentysomething prayer: He did something. Still does. He answers my prayers. Therefore I see no reason he can’t answer yours.