Monday Morning Music Ministry

Start Your Week with a Spiritual Song in Your Heart

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.

1-16-23

There is an old description of untruths or falsehoods – “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” It is, of course, more of an accusation against statisticians than everyday, garden-variety liars; and my own assessments of that profession is: “Statistics don’t lie, but statisticians do.”

We see this proven most glaringly in politics and public-opinion polling, but it is everywhere, in every sphere, used at every possible opportunity. I will assert that 78 percent of people agree with me.

Having disposed of that, we are left with lies, a subject or at least a practice with which most of us are familiar. But I rather mean for us to think about “damned” lies, and I hope nobody is offended by the word, but it is chosen and should be considered carefully.

To employ the “D” word, as earlier generations liked to politely clothe it, involves one of the most serious matters, with the most serious consequences, of all things. There is a heaven and there is a hell, even if contemporary society denies the existence of both. Even modern – or I should say post-modern – churches tend to deny hell; at the least we can note that many denominations avoid the subject of hell; many churches ignore the consequences of hell; many preachers deny the existence of hell.

And when the Bible, when Jesus Himself, spoke of hell and its reality, the contemporary world in its denials, finds it easy, or in fact, logically incumbent, to dismiss heaven – the desire for heaven, the reality of heaven, the existence of heaven. Besides, contemporary life and paternalistic governments bring us heaven on earth, right? So what’s the need?

When people, much less denominations, say that they know more than the Bible, and better than Jesus, their “faith” is no faith at all.

But damnation is real. It is a severe caution, and it is a literal threat. To state the previous point another way, if there is no hell and no damnation, God had no reason to become incarnate, to have Jesus come to earth, suffer, and die. If there is no hell to be saved from, there is no heaven to hope for, and then God Almighty is flawed, and His Son Jesus was a fool – worse, a liar.

There’s that word – Liar. God cannot lie. It is not in His nature. But one of the Bible’s several names of Satan is “Liar.” Further, his job description, pictured most fully in the Book of Job but elsewhere too, is “Accuser.” We can say it is his job description.

Whether literally true – I believe it is true, but I mean whether every minute or daily or in a physical setting – we are not told and I do not care about such details. God knows all, but nevertheless it is written that Satan accuses the saints (us). As I said, God knows everything anyway, so there must be a point to our being reminded in the Word that our sins are seen in unseen places, known to God and the heavenly host and even the devil… perhaps as Satan’s final effort (his job description again, according to the Scripture) to “steal, kill, and destroy.”

Jesus told us, “If you believe in God, believe also in Me.” So as night follows day, what God said and Jesus taught about heaven and hell should keep us aware. Hell and damnation are not things casually to dismiss, and certainly not things to talk about lightly. “Damn this,” and “damned that,” and “Go to hell!” — when we say such things, we are playing with fire.

There is one more thought about lies, and the devil accusing us before the throne of God. Whether literal or Scripture’s way of helping us picture reality is not as important as this truth:

If Satan is a liar, I don’t care so much about him accusing us, lying about us, to God.

What we should be concerned about – tremble with fear, actually – is that the devil would tell the truth about us.

Why? If we are sinners, we have already condemned ourselves. If we have accepted Jesus, however, our robes are clean.

We must not be concerned with what the devil claims, but Whom our hearts have claimed.

And that’s no lie.

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Satan, the enemy of our souls, roams about and among us seeking whom to devour, as the Bible says. He might rant and roar against us before God… yet let us remember that softly and tenderly Jesus is calling.

Click: Softly and Tenderly

Who’s In Charge Here?

6-14-21

Do you ever have the feeling that life has slipped its moorings? Not necessarily your personal life, but the world today; tradition and stability. Sanity! Do events sometime seem out of control? Or… maybe more than “sometimes”?

Do not check your personal “check engine” light. Life has slipped its moorings.

There are times we are in charge of our own fates. And many more ways in which we are not. It has always been thus, and always will be. I am not a defeatist, nor fatally pessimistic. Mathematically, we are individuals in a big world, crowded with people. If we are, in many ways, pilgrims and strangers, or a leaf in a stream, we can feel helpless… but never should feel hopeless.

We balance – or we must balance – the secular and the sacred. This world is not our home, we believe; we are only passing through. Yet, even with the Celestial City in view, the passage can be rough. We have been warned; hard times should not surprise us.

I invite us all, having framed these thoughts, to take a long look at humankind’s history, a very long overview. Civilizations and societies have had distinctive periods, and “we” have responded in very different manners to some challenges that are very similar in nature.

In primitive times, up through pre-Modern civilizations, when societies felt helpless, they turned to superstitions, or to religious hopes, and finally to reliance on the revealed God.

In subsequent Post-Modern and Enlightenment eras, societies tended to become reliant upon “progress” and science, education and literacy.

In the Post-Christian, self-oriented, nihilistic age we now endure, societies have become reliant on “self” (instinct and appetites) and chance – which really means trusting to blind luck, the inertia of daily life, seemingly confirmed by prosperity.

The next stage, whenever we slide there, cannot bring anything but unprecedented dislocation, change, and misery. And, probably, expressions of surprise from those who ought to have known better.

Anyone can reckon that in a state of such drift, something – a nation, a movement, a philosophy – will fill the void. Secularism? Communism? A revanchist and aggressive China? It will be something malign: we cannot assume, as many observers have done, that through all history’s changes, one thing that evolves positively is a steady “progress” – a march toward ever-expanding personal freedom and profitable responsibility.

This is self-swindling nonsense. Every phase of humankind’s history, whether in small primitive pods or in continent-wide empires, has revealed a common impulse whose name is Domination.

And, I suggest, stronger than the need to dominate is humankind’s ultimate need to be dominated. It is a genetic imperative, a cultural inclination, a social excuse… a choice, even if inchoate. Of course, this trait is universally and rhetorically denied.

People look toward, and for, leaders. Humans organized under caesars and kings; they needed space, and placed rulers over themselves. When restive, they reorganized as serfs and subjects, but loving to love a sovereign. The spread of churches was quickly under control of popes, bishops, and metropolitans. In Post-Modern times, organization and centralization were behind the facades of freedom and liberty. Constitutions drafted to protect citizens from government are being used to enable government intrusion and control. America, having “thrown off the yoke” of royalty, reveals in uncountable ways – celebrity mania, hero-worship, blind trust placed in the “influential” – that we are a people eager to find a boot to place upon our heads. The internet heralded unfettered freedom, but is, rather, intrusive, agencies of spying, favoring lackeys but censoring everyone else. The web and Dark State know what we think, and tell us what to desire. Things to crave. And whom to hate.

This is not moral progress; nothing at all resembling a positive evolution toward freedom and responsibility.

We must acknowledge the mechanistic truth that humankind instinctively does not seek liberty. Subconsciously, I believe we all desire to choose, if we can, whom we will serve; not really that we be free from servanthood. Whether the boot will be velvet-covered, or full of hobnails. Like infants as they grow, actually desiring discipline and direction? Yes.

We all desire a leader; and we all need a Savior. In that way humankind has not changed over the world, over the millennia.

If it were possible, in the world’s current state of moral anarchy, toxic materialism, and social anarchy, to throw this vehicle called Western Civilization in “reverse” gear, there would be a chance. It is a slim chance, of course, because the evolution-chart indicates that human beings do not usually make choices in our own self-interest. When we don’t… we invent terms and philosophies and lies to fool ourselves that we have learned lessons.

The general solution has been available for many millennia; and specifically available for 2000 years. We know that.

The God of Judgments can seem harsh (He is not, but His judgments are; your choice). And His Son, the Creator of the Universe and Savior of your soul, softly and tenderly is calling us home.

It is returning “home,” to God’s teachings and promises; and not charging off toward new promises, philosophies, and chimeras, that will have us secure in our moorings – where we, subconsciously perhaps, have always wanted to be.

“Know today whom you will serve.”

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If you can tolerate the Alberti Bass, let Will Thompson’s old musical plea, and Jesus’, touch your heart:

Click: Come Home – Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling

Let’s Revisit Slavery.

7-27-20

By suggesting that we revisit slavery, I do not mean to try it a second time. Of course not. I do mean the topic of slavery, a hot topic in America, as slavery and its legacy were the sparks that ignited the tinder of current, prolonged, anarchic, bloody riots throughout the land.

To revisit the facts, rather, about slavery requires a simultaneous confrontation with the implications and legacy of slavery, beyond facts, statistics, and numbers. Slavery over periods of history and various cultures; reflections of human nature; what it says about us.

Every era and every society in every land is stained with slavery of some sort. In ancient Egypt, the Jews were slaves for hundreds of years. In ancient China, entire ethnic groups were assumed to be inferior and therefore destined, or doomed, to slavery. In Central and South America slaves built mighty cities and temples. In Biblical times, slaves were written about matter-of-factly, just as they were considered in Athens and ancient Rome. The Irish of the 4th century served almost naturally as slaves to Romans in Britain. Europe itself went through periods of slavery, feudalism, serfdom – only vague distinctions to the lowly. Many Irish who emigrated to the United States traveled as indentured servants, their liberties restricted, and virtually owned by masters until they labored their way to “freedom.”

The word-association of slavery to most Americans refers to Africans. Sold and then transported, mostly as field laborers, frequently assigned new names, separated from families, and physically bound. These conditions attended many slaves in many cultures through history. The majority of Africans in the “New World” were repopulated to the Caribbean and South American, actually only a percentage to North America.

Colonists and settlers, and later planters, seldom enslaved Native Americans, but Africans were in bondage, and that is why, despite the universal, and shameful, practice of slavery, Americans of all colors today associate “slavery” with Africans.

Did all European-Americans congenitally regard Africans as sub-humans? It is not borne out by the facts. Abraham Lincoln was appalled to his core when he encountered a slave market, and said “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” The thrust of his career and life – and death – was to eradicate slavery. Slavery was a burning topic at the founding of the United States, and all but a few of the Framers knew that they were compromising with evil to let it continue for a time. In one way or another the sin of slavery was an issue at both the highest and most local levels of American society for two generations – little comfort to those who still suffered under the lash – until a war was fought to free slaves.

I am something of a Civil War buff, and in my overflowing library I have a complete run of Harper’s Weekly, the landmark newspaper through which I get a sense of everyday realities and people’s feelings. The “Revisionist” historians contend that the Civil War was an economic conflict; agrarian vs. industrial; state sovereignty vs. a national system. These facts are true but insignificant compared to the reason Northern soldiers fought. Over and over soldiers agreed that slavery needed to be abolished, and this view was held by farmers from prairies and fields, farmers who had never seen a man with black skin; and by thousands of recent immigrants from Europe, who swore opposition to slavery. They too suffered and died, for four years.

With the same determination, of course, Southern soldiers died, sometimes to uphold slavery (although few of them owned slaves, or lived much better), sometimes for a fealty to their region’s traditions. Again, however, most of the bondsmen toiled in servitude as the war ground on.

Great Britain’s end to slavery was attended by little acrimony. As in many other countries, the legacy of slavery’s end was more benign than in America. Of course economic disparities endured with almost all freed slaves around the world in every situation; but the “racial divide” as well as economic and social stratification is more pronounced in the United States than almost anywhere else.

The descendants of slaves as a lot surely are better off by many standards than 150 years ago, when emancipated. But in the 50 years since the monumental array of programs first known as the War on Poverty, the same can hardly be said. The legacy, in contemporaries’ focus – not that of Booker T Washington or Martin Luther King – is disillusionment, bitterness, and resentment. At the moments its goals seem to range from reparations to impositions of new forms of segregation and preference.

We know these things if we have televisions or see newspapers, or leave our windows open a crack. It is a condition, not a theory, that presents itself as resentments find expression in fallen statues, looted stores, obscene graffiti, attacks on police, and, sometimes, murder. Long in the making, as I have limned, the angry violence has manifested itself, to the current degree, almost overnight… and will not recede overnight.

My purpose in “revisiting slavery” is not to roll out a history lesson; and as I said not to entertain an idea to return to its evil horrors. Of course not.

But I implore you to realize that slavery has not disappeared from this earth. There are more slaves today, studies say, than at any time in history. There are white slaves (prostitutes), sex slaves, child slaves. Arabs are involved in trafficking Africans. I was involved 20 years ago with the work of International Justice Mission, which fought slavery, mostly of children, in India – everything from sex to cigarette manufacturing. Just this month, leaked drone videos of Uighurs in China – rounded up by the thousands to work in fields and factories – in bondage. Slaves.

Finally, please consider the slave drivers, the masters, those who enable the system. It is you and me.

When you buy a range of products – we cannot hide behind ignorance – we often subsidize slave labor. What has made Walmart the biggest retailer in the country, and Apple the richest corporation, is products made cheaply in China and other Pacific and Latin countries; also along the Indian rim and in Africa. Shoes, shirts, electronics – you know.

Think of complicated ear bugs or calculators that sell for two dollars, or ten dollars; think of the many components, the plastics and wires, the making of them, the packaging, the shipping to the US, the distribution from ports to warehouses, the stocking of store shelves – and everyone making a profit along the way. You know that the women and children working 12-hour days back in those factories, “earning” perhaps 20 cents a day… are slaves by another name.

We are all complicit. Many people, confronted with these truths, hide behind excuses that “they probably are better off now than when…” No, that does not cut it. That is what Northern factory workers and purchasers of clothes said before the Civil War. “Oh, they are better off than in Africa.” Slavery is slavery is still is slavery.

American workers lost jobs because of foreign competition, and went to the Walmarts across the landscape for cheap goods – made by the foreigners who took their jobs. Suicidal insanity.

I am not arguing for a kinder sympathy for those who once profited from blatant field-slavery. No; of course not.

But I am arguing that we wake up to slavery in the world today. All of us. And whether tempted by radical politics, or deciding to tear down statues and destroy shops and set fire to police stations – let us instead direct our energies to eradicating modern-day slavery.

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Click: Softly and Tenderly

Good Is Called Evil, and Evil Good

1-28-19

“Start Your Week With a Song in Your Heart” is the slogan of these essays. I hope always to do that – never failing, that is, to reinforce news of the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Lately, however, the subjects we address point to the many unfortunate tendencies in contemporary life – individual failings we all need to correct; and the crisis in our culture.

Varied examples abound, but all pertinent, especially in recent days. Brutal examples – seemingly trivial things are revealing.

The recent dust-up around Catholic school kids and clashing protesters who tried to intimidate them, is a clear example. The instant interpretation, and the flim-flam of the “Indian” “elder” were hungrily taken up and spread far and wide by the media. When the kids were profiled as kids, indeed; and the nature of the Indians and the black racists exposed, there was a 24-hour period of unusual mea culpas served up by the media.

Then, of course, life went on, the incident virtually disappearing, like Soviets who fell out of Stalin’s favor. Good was called evil… then a reality-check… then good was called evil, hour after hour, all over again.

A news item that is more indicative of the back-story than the actual headlines – horrible as they are – is New York State’s legalization of aborting babies up to the minute before birth. “If its life is in danger,” a ridiculous and cynical addendum; or “the mother’s life,” that tired and never-occurring condition. Babies barely born can be “terminated” too; in the way that lynching “terminated” Black people. What polite terminology.

The nominally Catholic Gov Cuomo of New York praised the passage of this new law. The Empire State Building was lit in pink to celebrate. The worst spectacle was the cheering of crowds at Cuomo’s announcement ceremony. Blood lust by crazed proponents of murder, it seemed to me. I once was in favor of abortion; but thank God, through my shame I see it for what it is.

More than an emblem of our Culture of Death, I see it frankly as even more than mere infanticide. It is cultural Infant Sacrifice. Pagan societies of old sacrificed children to pagan gods. Legalized abortion is sacrifice to the contemporary gods of selfishness, indolence, sloth, hedonism, and convenience.

Old pagan societies sacrificed individual babies at certain ceremonies; even in ancient Rome, babies born with disabilities were left to die outside the city walls. In America, we have killed tens of millions of babies. A death toll surpassing numbers from any other cause. Murdering babies is a “cause” in itself.

The law reportedly allows abortions with “no medical supervision” — that is, possibly by amateurs or hustlers like Dr Gosnell of Philadelphia. He is now in jail, having profited from the assembly-line of death he ran.

What “no medical supervision” means — in effect — all these years after Roe vs Wade, is that those dreaded, red-herring “back alley, coat hanger abortions” have simply become legal, enshrined in law. The law has outlawed shame, not abortions. A neat trick, ushering in infanticide and doing away with conscience all with one legislative vote and one Governor’s signature.

New York State, and much of America, brags that it has abolished the death penalty. So people who have been found guilty of heinous crimes are spared, while innocent babies are sentenced to death. And people not only assent; they cheer.

In truth, abortion is also a death penalty, plain and simple.

The various segments of the Establishment almost unanimously applaud and anoint such things. The masses are deluded… but, frankly, our society has allowed itself to be deluded by such heresy. Our leaders, our teachers, our celebrities (“role models”) and – tragically – many church leaders call good evil and evil good. This was predicted about the End Times… but whether we green-light the End Times, or not, I believe is still in our hands.

As we descend into hell, we step on the wasted patrimony of workers and martyrs who preceded us; step over millions of slaughtered babies; and trample the dreams of the faithful who never imagined this degradation. And yet people cheer.

Hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs – beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity (Matthew 23:27, NLT).

Since I first posted this essay, Linda Traitz has shared that New York is not the only state that permits full-term abortions. Also in Hall of Shame:
Oregon
Vermont
Colorado
New Hampshire
District of Columbia
Alaska
New Jersey
New Mexico

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But… Start Your Week With a Song in Your Heart.

Click: Softly and Tenderly

Ye Who Are Weary, Come Home

11-26-12

I have become aware of the condition of a friend who has experienced some trials lately. None of the experiences are, perhaps, unusual in themselves, but their almost simultaneous visitations might test anyone’s spirit. He is trying, not to make sense of these sorts of life-happenings – because everything makes sense or nothing makes sense; and “time and chance happen to all men,” as Proverbs says – but to cope, simply to cope. Have you ever been there?

In less than a calendar year his special-needs niece died; his nine-day-old granddaughter died; his wife, after multiple long-term illnesses, is to choose between dialysis and hospice; and his sister, who lost her home in Hurricane Sandy, is losing a battle with HIV that was long held at bay. My friend says he keeps fighting the seduction to moan about his own condition, his own emotions and reactions to these matters.

But he knows – that is, he too infrequently remembers – that it is not about him. It is about these loved ones. And about God. Usually, when nothing makes sense to us, and God seems to be somewhere in the story, it means that God is EVERYWHERE in the story. The man’s wife, for instance, has been cited by many, many people through the decades as an inspiration: encouraging people to faith and endurance as her faith helped her to endure. And his sister, after years of rebellion, has come to know Jesus, drawing closer to God.

Why do we find it so hard to see the silver linings to the dark clouds? Why are we always surprised at the grace that infuses every “crisis”? Why do we forget that the sun shines, not only after the storm clouds pass – but all the time, even when the storm clouds temporarily are overhead and blot the sun from view?

Just like the natural tendency to be sad when a loved one dies, such emotions are a brand of selfishness. Not the nasty schoolyard selfishness, but self-ish focus on one’s own condition. Rather, or I should say in addition to the unavoidable, we should direct all the emotions we can toward the loved ones in their difficulties, and to God on their behalf.

We should not believe that God is in control only when the course of events magically follows our own scripts. God wants us, more than anything else, to trust in Him. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith is not summoning patience until God does what we want. Faith is, sometimes, stopping our obsession to understand everything.

And faith is humility. Obey His commands, trust in His love, accept His plan. My sister, newly a friend of God, is blessed not just by the power and balm of the act of praying, but of praying on her knees, specifically. There is a language of prayer, in some gifted circumstances; and, surely, there is also an attitude of prayer.

And sometimes, my friend has discovered anew, there is the biblical concept of the “sacrifice of praise” – when you don’t feel like praying, and even less feel like praising, is when to do it. Loudly and confidently, or softly and tenderly, do it.

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If you never have clicked on a music video after one of these messages, please do watch this one, the completion of this message. The classic hymn “Softly and Tenderly” was written a century and a quarter ago by Will L. Thompson on similar reflections, and among its verses, “Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing, Passing from you and from me; Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming, Coming for you and for me.” But followed by: “Oh, for the wonderful love He has promised, Promised for you and for me! Though we have sinned, He has mercy and pardon, Pardon for you and for me.” And the promise in the chorus: “Come home, come home, Ye who are weary, come home; Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, Calling, O sinner, come home!” Sung by RoseAngela Merritt of NewSpring Church, Anderson, S.C.

Click: Softly and Tenderly

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... Rick Marschall is the author of 74 books and hundreds of magazine articles in many fields, from popular culture (Bostonia magazine called him "perhaps America's foremost authority on popular culture") to history and criticism; country music; television history; biography; and children's books. He is a former political cartoonist, editor of Marvel Comics, and writer for Disney comics. For 20 years he has been active in the Christian field, writing devotionals and magazine articles; he was co-author of "The Secret Revealed" with Dr Jim Garlow. His biography of Johann Sebastian Bach for the “Christian Encounters” series was published by Thomas Nelson. He currently is writing a biography of the Rev Jimmy Swaggart and his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis. Read More