Spirits.

SPIRIT 'spɪ.rɪt noun. A non-physical being; a supernatural being.

2. A person’s non-physical parts (such as emotions or character), which are considered a person’s true self, survives physical death, and possibly manifests as a ghost.

3. [capitalized] The Holy Spirit.

4. Qualities, characteristics, or emotions of a person or thing, which are considered their defining attributes, like “the spirit of the plan.”

5. Emotion or mood, usually positive, as in “This’ll lift your spirits.”

6. True intentions or attitude, as in “the spirit of the law, not the letter.”

7. Liquor or another volatile liquid.

8. [verb] Taken quickly and secretly.

The bible regularly refers to non-physical beings. We call ’em spirits. Our English word comes from the Latin spirare/“breathe,” and the Hebrew and Greek words for spirit ( ‏רוּחַ/ruákh, πνεῦμα/pnéfma) likewise literally mean “breath” or “wind”—in general, air molecules pushed by an outside force.

No, the bible’s authors didn’t call ’em breath and wind because they literally believed spirit is made of wind or air. (In fact if you look at various ancient and medieval sources, a lot of ’em thought spirit is made of fire.) They figured spirit is invisible, yet we can see how things are affected by it. You know, like wind.

Of course if we wanna get scientific, the simile falls apart. Wind is made of air, which is made of atoms, and therefore is matter. In a gaseous state, and we can freeze it till it’s in a solid state, ’cause it’s a material substance. Whereas spirit is not material. Not that we know what spirit’s made of; we just know it’s not matter. Nor energy.

Therefore we can’t measure spirit with machinery, no matter what certain paranormalists might claim. There’s no way to gauge them scientifically. Science can’t speak about spirits, and spiritual things, at all. Social scientists might talk about the effects of spirits—what people claim they’ve done—and certainly an individual scientist can give you their opinion about what spirits are and what they do. But those opinions aren’t gonna be based on science. They’ll be based on personal belief—either for it, or against.

And if you wanna know what spirit is made of, you won’t find answers in the bible either. The bible’s about God’s relationship with us, not biology. Nor spirit biology.

Thing is, we live in a scientific age. (Or we’d like to imagine we do.) If we can’t study it with science, plenty of people presume it doesn’t exist at all. Nontheists like to argue if spirits can’t be measured, quantified, examined, dissected… well, they’re not real. No more real than elves and sprites.

It may surprise you to know a lot of Christians think just the same: They don’t believe in spirits either. They might believe in God—and maybe the human spirit, if they hope to survive death—and maybe angels and devils. But they refuse to go any further than that. Sometimes they dismiss angels and devils too, like the Sadducees did. Like nontheists, they figure spirits are superstition, or the fakery of false religions.

But the bible refers to all sorts of spirits. Some appear to be good. Some benign, or they have duties which have nothing to do with us. Some are unclean, the sort Jesus threw out of people. Some are evil, like the devil.

If spirits exist in the bible, stands to reason they still exist. We may not be aware of them, nor can we detect them scientifically. We may find it irritating when certain individuals and other religions emphasize them so much, and not just ’cause we think those religions are wrong. But we need to understand what Christianity teaches about spirits, and stay consistent with the scriptures.

Pagan and proud.

Whenever I share Jesus with pagans—same as when I talk to anybody about any topic—I run into two types: The open-minded and the closed-minded.

The open-minded are fun. They’re curious. They have tons of questions. I may not get ’em to believe, or convince ’em to set foot in church, but that’s okay. There’s still lots of room for the Holy Spirit to work on them, because they’re open.

The closed-minded wanna tell me about Jesus, ’cause they’re entirely sure they already know it all. (They usually share some version of Historical Jesus, who sounds either like a nice guy but horribly misunderstood, or no fun at all. And either way, dead.) They suck all the fun out of the conversation, dismiss or mock anything we consider important, treat all our God-experiences as irrelevant or delusional, and don’t care how insulting and condescending they come across. Jesus compares them to swine, and you can see why this analogy is so popular.

Yeah, they’re depressing. Why do they get like that? Pride.

Like I said, they already know it all. They think they have God all figured out. Or at least they have God figured out better than we Christians do. Sometimes they grew up Christian, so they actually do know a few things. Sometimes they didn’t, but they heard about Historical Jesus from a friendly antichrist, so that’s what they believe now: They figure they know who Jesus really is, whereas we Christians just swallow all our religion’s myths whole, and believe whatever our pastors and priests tell us. They’re woke; we’re not.

And sometimes they didn’t just dabble in “facts” which confirm their biases, like an antivaxxer finding new favorite sites. They studied a bunch. They took a religion class. They visited churches and temples and mosques. They still read every religion book on the bestseller lists. They follow some guru, or a variety of gurus, who purports to tell ’em how religion really works. Sometimes they’re actually in a congregation or fellowship of some sort. More often I find they constructed their own religion; they have the corner on the truth, whereas Christians and everyone else are just sheeple. “I don’t believe in just one guy; every one of them is a little right and a little wrong. I make up my own mind.” Isn’t that clever of them.

After all their research, they figure they’re an authority on religion and Christianity. They’re the experts. They’re right and we’re wrong.

And if you’re one of those Christians who doesn’t realize we too are wrong, such closed-minded pagans are gonna be particularly distressing, ’cause your pride is gonna butt heads with their pride. I’ve been there. The discussions can get mighty ugly. Humility is always the way to go. But even when we are humble, or strive for it, the know-it-all pagan will still get mighty annoying. And too often pleased we find them annoying: Some of ’em wanna bug Christians. It’s evil fun for them.

How do we deal with ’em?

The Good Samaritan Story.

Luke 10.25-37.

This is probably Jesus’s best-known story, almost universally called the Good Samaritan. Which… is a problematic name, ’cause I’m not sure how many people realize the reason he’s called the good Samaritan, is because the usual Jewish and gentile presumption is he wouldn’t be good; he’d either be apathetic or outright evil.

The story begins with a νομικός/nomikós, a person who specialized in the Law of Moses and its many, many Pharisee loopholes. The KJV translates nomikós as “lawyer,” and yeah, today’s lawyers are often just as expert at manipulating our laws so their clients come out on top. So I’ll go with that translation.

Luke 10.25-29 KWL

25 Look, a certain lawyer stands up to examine Jesus,

saying, “Teacher, what makes me inherit life in the age to come?”

26 Jesus tells him, “What’s been written in the Law?

How are you reading it?

27 In reply the lawyer says, “You’ll love your Lord God from your whole heart,

your whole life, your whole strength, and your whole intellect; Dt 6.4-5

and your neighbor same as yourself.” Lv 19.18

28 Jesus tells the lawyer, “Correctly answered.

Do this and you’ll live.”

29 Wanting to make himself righteous,

the lawyer tells Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Bibles tend to render what the lawyer was doing as “standing up to test Jesus,” as if he was trying to attack our Lord. In a way he kinda was: Pharisee rabbis taught their students the Socratic method. They’d make statements, and their students were trained to pick apart these statements every which way, to see whether they held up to serious scrutiny. Jesus must’ve made some statement, and this lawyer decided to pick it apart. It feels adversarial ’cause it kinda is, but it was an acceptable form of adversarial dialogue. This lawyer wasn’t doing anything culturally wrong. Or hostile—unless he chose to be hostile, and we’ve no real evidence from the bible that’s what he was up to.

So Jesus must’ve made some statement about what God’s kingdom will be like in the age to come, after Messiah takes over the world. The lawyer wanted to examine Jesus’s understanding of the kingdom; either to learn more, or to see whether Jesus believed what he hoped Jesus believed; again there’s no real evidence from the bible he was looking for something in Jesus to reject or condemn. If he, as a devout follower of God, is gonna inherit the kingdom, what ought he be doing in the meanwhile? Which is an entirely valid question—and one we Christians oughta be asking ourselves, because our behavior indicates we’re not asking it, and just taking our inheritance for granted.

Jesus asked him a question right back: “You know the Law, so you already know the answer. What’s the Law say you oughta be doing?” And the lawyer’s response is the very same that Jesus of Nazareth, Hillel of Babylon, and most Pharisees recognized were the two greatest commands:

Mark 12.28-31 KWL

28 One of the scribes, standing there listening to the discussion,

recognizing how well Jesus answered the Sadducees,

asked Jesus, “Which command is first of all?”

29 Jesus gave this answer: “First is, ‘Listen Israel: Our god is the Lord. The Lord is One.

30 You’ll love your Lord God with all your mind, life, thought, and strength.’ Dt 6.4-5

Second is, ‘Love your neighbor like yourself.’ Lv 19.18

No command is higher than these.”

Jesus singling out the greatest commands, wasn’t anything new. Really, it’s self-evident. Love God; love your neighbor. Once you recognize God is love, it stands to reason loving God and our neighbor is of greatest importance. Jesus knew it; this lawyer knew it. We should know it.

But this lawyer wanted to play around with what Jesus meant by neighbor. Most of us kinda skeptically interpret Luke’s statement that the lawyer was “wanting to make himself righteous” Lk 10.29 —we’re not sure he really wanted to be righteous, or that he was looking to do the bare minimum and still feel righteous. Same as us, there were no doubt certain neighbors this lawyer had whom he didn’t wanna recognize as neighbors. Just like racists do with people of other ethnicities, Americans do with ex-convicts and illegal immigrants and beggars, and Jews and Palestinians still do with one another.

I figure you already loosely know the Good Samaritan Story; we put the twist ending in the title, for crying out loud. Jesus doesn’t do loopholes, and makes it quite clear that “your neighbor” includes everybody in our homeland. Family members, strangers, the rich, the poor, the unwanted, the folks we imagine ought not be there. Everybody. We’re to love everybody. No exceptions.

So to teach this, Jesus tells a story. Let’s get to it.

“Jesus sightings” in the Old Testament.

From time to time I hear Christians claim Jesus makes appearances in the Old Testament.

And he does. All the time, really—because Jesus is YHWH. When God created the universe, when the LORD singled out Abram ben Terah and renamed him Abraham and relocated him to Canaan, when the LORD had Moses lead the Hebrews out of Egypt and give ’em the Law and covenanted to be their God and they his people: This is Jesus. This isn’t just the God the Father person of the trinity doing stuff, while the Son and Holy Spirit hid in the background, and peeked out once or twice, and made minor appearances. This is the triune God. And Jesus is this God.

John spelled it out in his gospel: It wasn’t the Father, and the Father alone, who created the universe; it’s God. And Jesus is God.

John 1.1-3 KJV

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

Because in the beginning God created the heavens and earth, Ge 1.1 a verse all John’s readers knew quite well; and stating the Word of God created everything means Jesus created everything. But no, this doesn’t mean God the Son alone created everything, instead of God the Father: Again, this is the triune God. The LORD God created everything.

So yeah, when you read about the LORD in the Old Testament, that’s Jesus. And when you read things into the LORD’s character and motives, which are inconsistent with Jesus’s demonstrated character and motives in the gospels, you’re misinterpreting the LORD. Jesus came to earth to show us what God is really like. Jn 1.18 He’s our lens. Don’t use others.

Okay, but back to these Christians who claim they’ve sighted Jesus in the OT. Rarely, if ever, do they mean they recognize Jesus is the LORD, and recognize Jesus’s character and motives in the LORD’s actions. Nope; they’re claiming one odd figure or another in the Old Testament is Jesus.

Fr’instance that one time the LORD had lunch with Abraham. Ge 18 That’s gotta be Jesus, they figure, ’cause he appeared as a human, and Jesus is human. (Nevermind that he hadn’t become human yet.)

Or the story of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah… but since we’re gonna insist on using their slave names, okay; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Daniel 3.23-25 KJV

23 And these three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell down bound into the midst of the burning fiery furnace. 24 Then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonied, and rose up in haste, and spake, and said unto his counsellors, Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? They answered and said unto the king, True, O king. 25 He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.

Oooh, we Christians respond, it was the Son of God. It’s Jesus!

Thing is, would this truly be what the pagan Nebuchadnezzar meant by his statement? The original Aramaic, בַר אֱלָהִֽין/var Elohín, can either mean “son of God” or “son of the gods,” which is how the ESV, NASB, and NIV chose to put it. The NLT has “looks like a god.” Remember, Nebuchadnezzar didn’t yet know God, much less Jesus, and had no clue what he was seeing.

But we have a clue as to what he was seeing. And let’s be fair; maybe it was God. He hadn’t yet become human, but same as he appeared to Abraham as a human, he appeared to Nebuchadnezzar as a human, ’cause he can do that of he so chooses. If it was God in the fire beside them, it’s Jesus, ’cause Jesus is God.

But more reasonably it was an angel. Same as God later sent an angel to rescue Daniel, Da 6.22 or sent an angel to rescue Simon Peter Ac 12.7 instead of showing up to the prison personally. Yeah Jesus could have done it himself, but he seems to delegate this duty to angels—all of whom were probably really eager for the job anyway. Wouldn’t you be?

Why must Christian apologists argue?

To argue means to give reasons or cite evidence in support of one’s ideas, actions, or planned actions. Like when you argue your case in court: You’re trying to convince the jury, judge, or justices to take your side, and giving good reasons why they oughta. Sometimes they’re gonna challenge those reasons with reasonable questions, and we oughta be able to reasonably answer those questions. If we can’t, we lose.

Then there’s the other definition of “argue”: To fight. With words, although in these types of argument, what they’re really going for is a win. By any means necessary. Reason has little to do with it; in fact they’d much rather hurt your feelings than offer a reasonable response.

The biggest problem in Christian apologetics is the temptation to stray from reasonable arguments, and start fighting. ’Cause once we do that, we lose.

Fighting turns the person we’re just talking with, just having a discussion with, into the enemy. Now we’re no longer trying to win them over. Now we’re trying to win. And when we do that, we stop caring about their feelings, stop displaying love and patience and grace, turn into those clanging cymbals Paul and Sosthenes wrote about, 1Co 13.1 and stop worrying about whether we might hurt their feelings. An opponent with hurt feelings is never, ever gonna agree. Oh, they’ll call a cease-fire; they’ll stop fighting for a time, when they think things aren’t going their way. But that’s only so they can retreat and come up with better arguments. They never surrendered, and never intend to. Because they’re hurt.

And if they’re never gonna surrender, we’re never gonna win them over. So we lose.

That tendency to fight, to do battle for Jesus instead of share the gospel, is argumentativeness. It’s a work of the flesh. Ga 5.19-21 Unfortunately it’s a common reason why Christians get into apologetics: They wanna fight. They wanna “do spiritual warfare,” and think it means fighting skeptics instead of resisting temptation. Not study and share good reasons for why we believe as we do, and answer skeptics’ doubts; to fight them and defeat them and win.

There’s a proper form of arguing your case, and a wholly improper form, and too many Christians don’t realize there’s any difference. And don’t care either. Hey, Christian apologetics lets us indulge our fleshly desires to beat people up—and use words and scriptures to do it! Nice.

So why must Christian apologists argue? To offer reasonable explanations for why we believe as we do. And only that. Any other form of argumentation is unacceptable. If you catch Christians doing it, rebuke them.

And yeah, they’ll claim, “But I’m doing it for Jesus!” as if it makes the fleshly behavior all right. Does not; never does. So call ’em out on their fruitlessness. The unloving, joyless, angry, impatient, graceless, out-of-control, intemperate, and vengeance-seeking behavior is a sign they’ve gone way off the path, and are fighting for their own honor instead of for the gospel and God’s kingdom.

Eventually everyone will understand Jesus’s parables.

Mark 4.21-25.

When Jesus explained to his students how parables work and why he uses them, he told them this.

Mark 4.21-23 KWL

21 Jesus told them, “Does the light come in so it can be put under a basket or under the couch?

Not so it can be put on the lampstand?

22 It’s not secret except that it may later be revealed.

It doesn’t become hidden unless it may later be known.

23 If anyone has hearing ears, hear this.”

Too often Christians quote this passage as if it applies to every secret: Everything we say in secret is gonna eventually come out in public.

And y’know, Jesus did say something like that, in Matthew and Luke. But he did so in a different context. There, it was part of his Olivet Discourse, his last talk to his students before his arrest and death. At the time he spoke about when people persecute Christians for proclaiming the gospel, and how their evil would become public, in time. And all Jesus’s other, private teachings would also become public, in time. Everything becomes public… in time. The truth will out.

Matthew 10.26-27 KWL

26 “So don’t be afraid of your haters, for nothing has been covered up which won’t be revealed.

Nothing is secret which won’t be made known.

27 What I tell you in the dark, say in the light.

What you hear in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.

 

Luke 12.2-3 KWL

2 “Nothing undercover exists which won’t be revealed.

Nothing is secret which won’t be made known.

3 As much as has been said in the dark about it, say in the light. It’ll be heard.

What was spoken in your ear in an inner room, will be proclaimed from the roofs.”

But that’s a whole ’nother lesson, and today I’m only discussing Jesus’s parables. And in Mark’s context, Jesus was only talking about his parables. Not everything.

Yes, Mark’s wording is the same as when Jesus taught about the light of the world:

Mark 4.21 KWL

Jesus told them, “Does the light come in so it can be put under a basket or under the couch?

Not so it can be put on the lampstand?”

 

Matthew 5.15 KWL

“Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket,

but on the lampstand, and it shines on everything in the house.”

 

Luke 8.16 KWL

“Nobody who grabs a light covers it with a jar, or puts it under the couch,

but puts it on a lampstand so those who enter can see the light.”

 

Luke 11.33 KWL

“Nobody who grabs a light puts a cover on it, nor under a basket,

but on the lampstand so those who enter can see the light.”

And again: Whole ’nother lesson. Jesus had no trouble using the same metaphor to teach a bunch of different things. The problem is we presume he’s teaching the same thing; that parables are secret codes. They’re not. Context, folks; the parables are always properly interpreted in context, same as the rest of the bible. There is no cryptography key which unlocks all the codes the very same way. That’s gnosticism, not to mention lazy thinking.

Nope, the reason Jesus said these things in Mark was ’cause he wanted his students to know that this bit—

Mark 4.11-12KWL

11 Jesus told them, “God’s kingdom’s mysteries were given to you.

To those outside, everything comes in parables.

12 Thus seers might not see—and realize.

Hearers might not hear—and be forgiven things.” Is 6.10

—is meant to be temporary. In time, outsiders get to understand what everything means. But when Jesus first shared these parables, it wasn’t yet the right time. His hour had not yet come.

Love one another.

John 13.34-35 KJV

34 A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. 35 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

Lest we miss the point, Jesus says “Love one another” thrice. It’s not unimportant to him. It is unimportant to Christians however. We’ve really pooched this one. On a global level.

We don’t love our fellow Christians in our churches. They’re family, and sometimes we acknowledge they’re family… but they’re kinda like the family we barely tolerate for family reunions. We don’t interact with them outside our church buildings. We don’t know what’s going on with their personal lives. We don’t care, either. We’re too busy.

We don’t love our fellow Christians in the other churches. In many cases we convinced ourselves half of them aren’t real Christians anyway. Their denominations teach weird, inappropriate things. They’re too legalistic to really love Jesus, or they’re too loosey-goosy with God’s righteous standards to really love Jesus. They’re not Spirit-filled enough… or they think they’re more Spirit-filled than we are, but really they’ve just confused their weird fleshly impulses with the Spirit.

We don’t love our fellow Christians in far-off lands. If the nearby Christians aren’t Christian enough for us, foreign Christians definitely aren’t. Their customs are too bizarre. Their people are dirt poor, and we wealthy Christians are so unconsciously used to social Darwinist and prosperity gospel thinking, we suspect they can’t have a proper relationship with God if he’s abandoned them to their poverty like that. We assume their so-called Christianity is really their country’s version of Christianism: It’s a cultural and ethnic thing which everybody does by rote. It’s not a living relationship, but dead religion. Shame they’re getting persecuted though… which can’t possibly be because they really do know Jesus, and would die for him.

We barely love our neighbors anyway. And besides, we’re busy! We have jobs. We have kids to raise, and drive to their afterschool activities. We have dates to keep, buddies to stay connected with, movies to watch, teams to support, video games to play… We “have lives.” Jesus understands; he knows all, and knows how busy we are. We haven’t time. We’ll do it once we finally have time, like when we retire, or after we’re resurrected.