Central Church - Who We Are

Question: : Jeremiah 26:3,13,19 in the King James Version talks about God himself doing evil while in all other versions, the words disaster or wrath are used. What is the original context? What is the original word that goes there and how is it properly translated. If "evil" is correct, how do we justify our God doing evil as punishment for evil?

Answer: The words translated evil in Jeremiah 26:3, "If so be they will hearken, and turn every man from his evil way, that I may repent me of the evil, which I purpose to do unto them because of the evil of their doings," all come from the same root and can refer to that which is bad in the sense of bringing physical or emotional harm, or to that which is morally and ethically evil. Consequently, various translations use the words disaster or evil respectively to convey these meanings. In our passage, man's "evil" way (we may presume ethical evil is meant here) results in God's bringing physical and emotional harm or punishment (we may presume God is not claiming to bring ethical evil, the very thing He is punishing men for). Hence, for our present day usage of the term, the modern versions make more sense than the King James.

It is interesting, however, that God does not shy away from declaring that He is the cause of certain forms of physical and emotional harm to people. He questions Moses saying, "Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, Yahweh?" (Exodus 4:11). But at every turn God blames humans for evil, even though He has so moved in their lives that they have committed evil (Romans 9:17-21). Paul makes it clear that two things are always true: God is the source of all things, the moving cause of even man's decisions, but that humans are always responsible for their decisions and so God will judge them to be responsible. As long as we keep these two truths in mind we will fairly represent the Biblical perspective.

Randall Johnson

Question: I believe that Sunday is the day of the Lord and because of that we have services on this day to worship Him but I don't believe it is required to go to all the services offered at church, to one is sufficient every Sunday. My friend tells me that we must go to all services (morning, afternoon and evening) because is the DAY of the Lord not just part of the day. Can you tell me more about this?

Answer: God does not mention any requirement in Scripture as to how many services we need to attend in one day, whether Sunday or any other day. Paul says in Romans 14:5, "One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord." The important thing, I believe, for us to consider, is what do I need in order to grow the way the Lord wants me to grow? Do I need more than one service a day? Are there aspects of what the Lord wants me to do that I would be neglecting if I go more than once or don't go enough? As you listen to the Lord, what is He saying to you about how He wants you to grow spiritually? Where do you need correction, strengthening, teaching, fellowship and accountability, practical experience in ministry, etc.? Listen to His direction and see how going or not going to however many services fits in with that.

Randall Johnson

Question: In the book of Exodus(33:11, NIV) it says, "The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend." Then in the same chapter in verse 20 it says, "But, 'He said,' you cannot see My face, for no one may see Me and live." And in verse 23 it says, "Then I will remove My hand and you will see My back; but My face must not be seen." In John 1:18 it says, "No one has ever seen God, but God the One and only, who is at the Father's side, has made Him known." Can you explain how in one verse God speaks to Moses face to face and in two other verses in the same chapter it says that no one can ever see God's face and in Exodus it says that Moses would see God's back and in John it says that no one has ever seen God?

Answer: I believe that by "face to face" in Exodus 33:11 the author meant that God did not speak to Moses through more symbolic or indirect means such as dreams or visions but in direct conversation (Numbers 12:8). I believe that when God tells Moses that he cannot see His face but only His back, He means that to really see Him as He is will not be allowed, or perhaps is not possible, in Moses' present condition (without his being in a spiritual, resurrected body), but that He will let Moses see a representation of Him that Moses can handle. John states the ultimate truth, that no one has seen God at any time, only representations of Him that He adapted to the human eye.

Randall Johnson

Question: Often, when someone dies, the survivors say, "We'll get to see him/her again in heaven." Is there any Biblical support that Christians who knew each other on earth will recognize or know each other in heaven?

Answer: It appears that whether we knew each other on earth or not we will know each other in heaven and in the kingdom. I base this on the account of the transfiguration of Jesus in Matthew 17. Peter says in verse 4, "If you wish, I will put up three shelters - one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah." Now unless Jesus specifically told them who the two standing with him were when He was transfigured, Peter just somehow knew this. I get the sense that whatever identifiers we now use (outward physical appearance, voice, etc.) will be communicated more immediately to our spirits once we are confronted with each other in spiritual form in heaven or in our spiritual body/spirit forms on earth in the kingdom.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:12 that in the kingdom we shall "know fully" even as we are "fully known." Certainly this would include knowing one another. But even in the most unlikely event that we don't immediately recognize one another, we will certainly be able to identify ourselves to one another. I can tell you who I am and you can tell me who you are and we will be able to reminisce.

Randall Johnson

Question: I have a friend I work with who told me that she doesn't believe in hell. She said that God is love and God is everywhere so how can there be a hell? She attends a Unity Church here in town and said they do not preach if you died today do you know where you would go. She said if this earth were all there was, she would be fine with it because she wouldn't know anything else. What do you think about this?

Answer: I think she is not doing justice to her own internal sense of justice. When she sees someone has used a child for pornographic purposes, abusing them sexually and videoing it for financial gain, what does she think love should do? I think she is not doing justice to her own internal sense that this world is not enough and that deep down she desires something better, because we were made for perfection. I think she is not doing justice to her sense of her own sinfulness, to her own capacity to do evil. Where did this come from? Did God create us this way or did we rebel from His original intent? If we rebelled, then what is the penalty for such rebellion? Does He just say, "Ah, it's okay. I forgive you." Then He is not very just Himself. And consequently, He is not very loving, because He lets people who have done unspeakable evil get away with hurting people who did not deserve to be hurt. Paul says, "Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God" (Romans 11:22). You are not a whole person if you do not possess both attributes. There are things worth getting mad about, and certainly things worth demonstrating kindness about. But if you are only one or the other you are neither emotionally healthy nor loving. Why would we expect God to be only one or the other?

Randall Johnson

Question: Somewhere in the Pentateuch God gave a certain set of laws for Moses to tell the Israelites. This list covered many subjects from incest to breeding animals. This got me thinking: I know that Christ came to fulfill the Law and that we do not obey it to justify ourselves but rather for the sake of showing love and obedience to God. So in order to do this, we should try to obey the law while keeping our faith in Him. However, there are many laws that we do not today obey such as the one saying we can't wear clothing made from more than one type of material. That puts 50% cotton, 50% wool out the window. This seems like a social custom so we generally dismiss it. However, it was a direct command from God so how can we simply shrug it off? Where do we draw the line between obeying God and assuming that what God was saying then no longer applies? It may seem to be okay because we judge it to not be a moral issue, but God determines what is moral, not us, even if we don't understand. Also there seems to be contradiction when the Old Testament Law says men's hair should be long and the New Testament when Peter or Paul says that men's hair should be short. How do we find what is necessary and unnecessary?

Answer: Paul very strongly says to the Galatians, "Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law" (Galatians 3:25). To the Romans he says, "You are not under law, but under grace" (Romans 6:14), and "You also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead" (7:4). In 1 Corinthians 9:21 he writes, "To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law." Jesus, on the other hand, says, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17).

Here is how I reconcile these statements. By fulfilling the Law and Prophets Jesus meant bringing to completion all the promises God had made concerning the restoration of all things under His authority. The way Jesus did this was by paying the price for our sins in His own body on the tree (a requirement of the Law, that all who sin must pay the price themselves or through sacrifice). Believers since Jesus are no longer required to obey the Law of Moses, which is a particular form of expression to God's law for a particular people who are living in covenant relationship to Him as a nation. The Church, on the other hand, is made up of believers from all nations, under separate governments that have requirements of them. But all believers are under the Law of Christ. This law includes some of the same laws as the Law of Moses (all ten commandments except the Sabbath are repeated in the New Testament letters). But it excludes some of the laws of Moses and adds others. This is what we would expect of any lawmaker whose people's needs change. A parent starts out with one set of rules and modifies them throughout the child's life. Some remain throughout the child's life no matter how old he is. The lawmaker has not changed, only the way He administers His laws.

Most of Israel's regulations were intended to set Israel apart from other nations as belonging to God. Some of the regulations imposed on them by God were not "moral" issues in themselves, but only as they served to show Israel's obedience to God. Circumcision is an example. There was a law that those males who devoted themselves to God under a Nazirite vow (Numbers 6), a voluntary vow, were never to cut their hair. The Law of Moses does not command that men wear long hair. The New Testament does not require men to have short or long hair, but Paul says, "Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him" (1 Corinthians 11:14). This obviously did not apply to the man taking the Nazirite vow.

So, consequently, we are not to shrug off the commands of God but to obey the ones that He means us to obey, those contained in the New Testament as the Law of Christ. We may voluntarily obey the Law of Moses as long as it does not conflict with the laws of our land. No law obedience will gain us eternal favor with God. Only faith in Christ and His sacrifice will accomplish that.

Randall Johnson

Question: Is it possible that God did not intend for the Gentiles to be "under the law" (Rom 2:14). I only ask because "the law" was given to the Hebrew people and I wonder if it were somehow a response to their bad behavior in the wilderness. Considering that in the New Testament Christ summed the law up into two commands and Paul wrote that those under the direction of the Spirit are not bound by the law, is it a possibility?

Answer: When God was dealing with Israel before Christ it seems He did expect the Gentile convert to submit to the Law of Moses. I say this because Old Testament laws seem to encompass the "alien" in Israel, someone who came to their commonwealth from another country and race. Ruth submitted to the law. Rahab did, etc. But the Law of Moses was not intended as the form of law that God would expect His people to be under forever. Both Jew and Gentile believers are free from the Law of Moses (not free from the Law of Christ, 1 Corinthians 9:19-23), though they are also free to observe it if they choose (Paul observed it in regard to some men taking vows while he was in Jerusalem, Acts 21:17-26, though ironically this is what got him arrested), but not to require any one else to observe it or observe it as a means of salvation (which it never was). The Law of Moses was intended as an observance before Yahweh that demonstrated that they belonged to Him and were unique among the rest of the nations. Once the gospel took on more communicable form in the person and work of Jesus, the need for strictly nationally oriented laws evaporated. Every person who believes in Jesus can be subject to the Law of Christ and to the laws of their nation as long as they don't contradict the Law of Christ. The Law of Christ is what He teaches us to do through His own teaching and that of His apostles. There are some aspects that are the same as in the Law of Moses (love God and one another) and some that have been changed (sacrifices, etc.).

Randall Johnson

Question: I noticed in a book I'm reading that authority and inspiration for both the OT and the NT are credited to the spoken word as well as to the written word. Knowing that there was a strong Jewish tradition of handing down teaching orally and that the Catholic church often runs to 'oral traditions' to explain their interpretation of the Scripture as well as to support some of their practices, where does that leave us protestants? I've been trained to rely solely on the Bible as the basis for authority. Do we have room for both oral and written authority? Is consideration of oral traditions and teaching merited? I know that the Bible is sufficient in all ways but I also know that there is much more out there, so to speak.

Answer: We believe that the oral words of the prophets that God meant for us to have as authoritative direction from Him were recorded in the Scriptures. Inspiration technically refers to the written text. There may have been other sayings of Jesus that circulated or those of other prophets or apostles. But unless we have them in recorded Scripture we cannot be assured that they have been accurately recorded and are therefore to be obeyed. There are teachings that have come down by tradition that may have benefit for us to consider, but again, unless they are in Scripture, they are not authoritative directives for the church or our lives.

Randall Johnson

Question: Where did we get the word "Easter"?

Answer: Religioustolerance.org offers this explanation:

The name "Easter" originated with the names of an ancient Goddess and God. The Venerable Bede, (672-735 CE.) a Christian scholar, first asserted in his book De Ratione Temporum that Easter was named after Eostre (a.k.a. Eastre). She was the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe. Similarly, the "Teutonic dawn goddess of fertility [was] known variously as Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Eostur, Eastra, Eastur, Austron and Ausos." Her name was derived from the ancient word for spring: "eastre." Similar Goddesses were known by other names in ancient cultures around the Mediterranean, and were celebrated in the springtime. Some were:

Aphrodite from ancient Cyprus

Ashtoreth from ancient Israel

Astarte from ancient Greece

Demeter from Mycenae

Hathor from ancient Egypt

Istar from Assyria

Kali from India

Ostara, a Norse goddess of fertility

An alternative explanation has been suggested. The name given by the Frankish church to Jesus' resurrection festival included the Latin word "alba" which means "white." (This was a reference to the white robes that were worn during the festival.) "Alba" also has a second meaning: "sunrise." When the name of the festival was translated into German, the "sunrise" meaning was selected in error. This became "ostern" in German. Ostern has been proposed as the origin of the word "Easter". Many, perhaps most, Pagan religions in the Mediterranean area had a major seasonal day of religious celebration at or following the Spring Equinox. Cybele, the Phrygian fertility goddess, had a fictional consort who was believed to have been born via a virgin birth. He was Attis, who was believed to have died and been resurrected each year during the period MAR-22 to MAR-25. "About 200 B.C. mystery cults began to appear in Rome just as they had earlier in Greece. Most notable was the Cybele cult centered on Vatican hill ...Associated with the Cybele cult was that of her lover, Attis (the older Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, or Orpheus under a new name). He was a god of ever-reviving vegetation. Born of a virgin, he died and was reborn annually. The festival began as a day of blood on Black Friday and culminated after three days in a day of rejoicing over the resurrection." Wherever Christian worship of Jesus and Pagan worship of Attis were active in the same geographical area in ancient times, Christians "used to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus on the same date; and pagans and Christians used to quarrel bitterly about which of their gods was the true prototype and which the imitation." Many religious historians believe that the death and resurrection legends were first associated with Attis, many centuries before the birth of Jesus. They were simply grafted onto stories of Jesus' life in order to make Christian theology more acceptable to Pagans. Others suggest that many of the events in Jesus' life that were recorded in the gospels were lifted from the life of Krishna, the second person of the Hindu Trinity. Ancient Christians had an alternative explanation; they claimed that Satan had created counterfeit deities in advance of the coming of Christ in order to confuse humanity. Modern-day Christians generally regard the Attis legend as being a Pagan myth of little value. They regard Jesus' death and resurrection account as being true, and unrelated to the earlier tradition. Wiccans and other modern-day Neopagans continue to celebrate the Spring Equinox as one of their 8 yearly Sabbats (holy days of celebration). Near the Mediterranean, this is a time of sprouting of the summer's crop; farther north, it is the time for seeding. Their rituals at the Spring Equinox are related primarily to the fertility of the crops and to the balance of the day and night times. Where Wiccans can safely celebrate the Sabbat out of doors without threat of religious persecution, they often incorporate a bonfire into their rituals, jumping over the dying embers is believed to assure fertility of people and crops.

Infoplease.com has this explanation:

According to the Venerable Bede, Easter derives its name from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. A month corresponding to April had been named "Eostremonat," or Eostre's month, leading to "Easter" becoming applied to the Christian holiday that usually took place within it. Prior to that, the holiday had been called Pasch (Passover), which remains its name in most non-English languages. (Based on the similarity of their names, some connect Eostre with Ishtar, the Babylonian and Assyrian goddess of love and fertility, but there is no solid evidence for this.) It seems probable that around the second century A.D., Christian missionaries seeking to convert the tribes of northern Europe noticed that the Christian holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus roughly coincided with the Teutonic springtime celebrations, which emphasized the triumph of life over death. Christian Easter gradually absorbed the traditional symbols.

In Medieval Europe, eggs were forbidden during Lent. Eggs laid during that time were often boiled or otherwise preserved. Eggs were thus a mainstay of Easter meals, and a prized Easter gift for children and servants. In addition, eggs have been viewed as symbols of new life and fertility through the ages. It is believed that for this reason many ancient cultures, including the Ancient Egyptians, Persians, and Romans, used eggs during their spring festivals. Many traditions and practices have formed around Easter eggs. The coloring of eggs is a established art, and eggs are often dyed, painted, and otherwise decorated. Eggs were also used in various holiday games: parents would hide eggs for children to find, and children would roll eggs down hills. These practices live on in Easter egg hunts and egg rolls. The most famous egg roll takes place on the White House lawn every year.

You can see that there is some discrepancy between accounts, but it is quite possible that Christians invested the practices of pagan rituals with new Christian meaning and kept some of the trappings. This reminds us, however, that we need to emphasize the correct meaning of Easter with our children and those who ask us what Easter is about. It is not wrong for us to celebrate the changing of season, but we would not want this associated with any God but the true one, and would not see our need to re-enact a pagan mythology in order to get God to bring spring about.

Randall Johnson