Now for those of us who
believe that salvation is a matter of faith and grace from God, it placed that
program outside our area of interest.
For no one who believes in salvation through knowledge can be taken
seriously as far as the Gospel of Jesus Christ is concerned.
“For by grace you have been
saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of
works, lest anyone should boast” (Eph. 2:8-9).
Gaining salvation through knowledge
would shift the focus from God to the individual, and from grace to works. The
more knowledgeable one would become, the more merit he would acquire, and the
surer he would be of salvation. Thus, the wise of this world, the wealthy, the
high fliers, the inheritors of titles and positions, would be in a good
position to ensure for themselves a nice place in the
Luke 24:19 And He said to them, "What things?"
So they said to Him, "The things concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a
Prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how the
chief
Luke 24:20
priests and our rulers delivered Him to be condemned to death, and crucified
Him.
So, when it came to the most
important decision of their life, the wise of this world, the rulers, the
Pharisees, the priests, failed abysmally. They claimed that they knew the law,
yet they killed the Prince of life contrary to the law. Even those who believed in Him refused to
confess Him before the people, lest they should be put out of the synagogue:
“for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God”. If you think that this was a problem
peculiar to the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, you do not know what has been
happening in the world ever since. How
many wise, how many academics, how many rulers, confess Jesus Christ before the
people today? We know of none. That is, we know of none who confess the Christ
of the Gospels, for there are some who confess a christ
which is foreign to the Scriptures.
If an academic were to
confess Jesus Christ in one of their forums today, and said that he believed in
God and in His word, the Bible, he would be ostracized from their midst and
never asked to speak before them again.
He would most likely loose his job too, for universities have no room
for those who confess God in their midst.
Tertiary institutions –
universities, colleges, seminars, institutes of higher studies – are supposed
to be the repositories knowledge in our time, yet they treat with derision and
contempt the very source that would grant them the wisdom of God, the one and
only wisdom worth striving for. Jesus
Christ, the disciples, the prophets, gained that wisdom by obeying God and by
meditating on His law. Such is the
nature of God’s law, that it imparts wisdom to those who mediate on it and seek
to understand it.
Psa 119:97 Oh, how I love Your law! It is my meditation
all the day.
Psa 119:98 You, through Your commandments, make me wiser
than my enemies; For they are
Psa 119:99 ever with me.
I have more understanding than all my teachers, For Your testimonies are
Psa 119:100 my meditation. I understand more than the ancients, Because
I keep Your precepts.
Psa 119:101 I have restrained my feet from every evil
way, That I may keep Your word.
Psa 119:102 I have not departed from Your judgments, For
You Yourself have taught me.
Yes, God personally teaches
those who keep His commandments and are receptive to His wisdom. He makes them wiser than their enemies, and
wiser than their teachers. The Pharisees
of Jesus time wondered how He acquired such wisdom and authority when He had
not been one of their pupils and never attended any of their rabbinical
colleges.
Mat
Mat
Mat
Instead of inquiring how
they too might acquire that kind of wisdom and authority, they were angry that
they had been bypassed in the process.
Later, they had a similar problem with the Apostles.
Now how did these
“uneducated and untrained men” gain such power and wisdom? They gained it
through the Holy Spirit. And why is no
one receiving this power and wisdom today? Because they don’t seek it the right
way, don’t believe in the Holy Spirit, and don’t meditate on God’s law anymore.
Jesus Christ said: "I
must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming
when no one can work” (John 9:4). This
is that night. This is the darkest spiritual hour in all of human history. Yet
judging by the number of religious books and programs that are available today,
one could easily think that we live in the greatest spiritual age ever. A spiritual age it is indeed, but by the
wrong spirit.
Seven
years ago we wrote:
“Human beings have
an uncanny ability to discuss things when they get to a crisis point, then
leave the problems to others to resolve.
This time, however, the problems will not be resolved by others. The world is no longer facing temporary local
problems, but intractable worldwide problems.
It is no longer a question of survival, but one of salvation. But science cannot save; only God can.
Human beings,
however, have decided that there is no room for God in their
deliberations. Even when the world is
crumbling around them, when it is becoming obvious that life itself is in
danger of extinction, they will not turn to the only source that can save
them. They seek immortality through
"scientific" methods such as cryogenics (deep-freezing of the corpse
in the hope that one day scientists will discover the secret of immortality,
cure their diseased bodies and revive them to eternal life), and perpetual
replacement of body parts with robotic devises or genetically cloned body
parts. That is the kind of immortality
science offers humanity.
That educated
people can come up with such absurdities is a witness to the bankruptcy of our
educational system. That is the effect
of compartmentalizing our tertiary studies in rigid disciplines without any
relation to each other. It should be
obligatory for all university students to study humanity subjects. As it is, we get medical graduates without
ethics, lawyers without morals, and scientists with distorted visions of the
future. They need to study not just any
humanity subjects, but the good old fashion classics, philosophy, and
religion.
During my
University studies, the head of the Religious Studies Department once said that
"time was when in philosophical studies people talked about God and the
meaning of life, about ethics and values, but no more." These days they
have a "Theory" that if people understand what they study, it is not
worth studying. Searching for truth,
God, and a moral purpose in life does not go well with evolutionary
thinking. In the struggle for survival
there is no room for compassion, altruistic feelings and transcendental
goals. Hedonistic materialism and the
pursuit of mindless pleasures are the things that count in our
"enlightened" society. That is
why humanity finds itself on the brink of catastrophe.” (The Christian
Herald No 3, p. 4)
Have things changed since
then? Surprisingly, the one institution
that we thought would be immune to such suggestions, given its history and
pedigree, the
Three years ago, my wife of
fourteen years said that she could no longer cope with the demands of this work
and wanted a divorce. The Jewish side of
her family, who never quite came to terms with the fact that I was preaching
Christ, prevailed over her in the end.
So I was asked to go to court one day to settle the question of our
property. But about a month earlier, I
received a court subpoena from her solicitors, demanding all documents,
receipts, and writings, associated with this work, from the very beginning up
to that time. I did not understand why
they needed everything, instead of just the documents pertaining to our
finances, but I had no choice, I had to comply with their request for you
cannot disobey a court order. So I
handed over to her solicitors five boxes of documents.
I always assumed that the
courts would settle the question of property on the basis of each one’s
contribution, benefits from marriage, and future earnings potential. I had
never been in a court before, and I did not know that in the adversarial
system, which operates in this country, and much of the English speaking world,
justice is not the main aim of the game, but determining winners and losers.
Once you begin a case, lawyers take over, and you become a pawn in their hands. The problem is, their aims seem to be
completely different from yours. They
have no notion of fairness or respect for the other person’s dignity. Their
only concern is to win at all costs.
That’s how they get a reputation for themselves.
I went to court alone,
believing that the judge would be able to deliver a fair verdict based of the
facts before him. Instead, he ignored much of what I said, and paid much
attention to what my wife’s high powered legal team said. For my wife, who herself was a lawyer,
brought along another solicitor and a barrister. Obviously she knew something about the
justice system which I didn’t. For two
whole days they grilled me on just about everything they could think of. They wanted to know what were my beliefs,
what I wanted to achieve, what was the purpose of this work, why I wrote what I
wrote, and dozens of similar questions.
When they finally got to our finances, they could not believe that in
seven years our donations amounted to less than a hundred dollars.
I tried to explain to them
that everything we did was for free, that we never requested contributions from
anyone, that we followed the Apostles of Jesus Christ who preached the Gospel
for free, that this work was in fact prophesied to be done by poor people (people
“clothed in sackcloth”, as the Scriptures put it), but the more I tried to
explain these things to them the more incredulous they became. They could not believe that after sending
out thousands of letters and magazines over many years we received so little in
reply. They concluded that I was not telling the truth and that I must have had
secret bank accounts. And so they sent
out subpoena to the local banks asking them to provide details of all accounts
in my name and the name of this Foundation. When the results came in, and they found
nothing, they concluded that I was mad. That suited them well, for then they
could claim that I squandered money on a work of no value, and therefore my
wife was entitled to much of what was left.
The judge’s verdict was so
outrageously skewed in her favor, it became obvious that the intent had little
to do with equity and justice, and everything to do with bringing this work to
an end.
About a year earlier, I was
pensioned off from my work as Teacher/Librarian after injuries received in a
car accident six years earlier caught up with me and I was no longer able to
stand up for hours in front of students.
With the money received as
compensation from that accident, I immediately paid off the mortgage on our
house. Yet my wife, who was due to
inherit a property worth in excess of a million dollars, whose salary was ten
times the size of my pension, who could have purchased a bigger and better
house in less than three years, was given the lion share of our house too. During our marriage, I supported her while
she obtained three university degrees. Yet none of that had any bearing on the
judge’s final verdict.
That decision forced me out
of
Like Pilate, at the time of
Jesus Christ, he knew that he was delivering an unjust verdict, but did not
have the moral strength to stand up to his peers and say: “look, this is not
right, what we are doing here is wrong, this is not justice but a mockery of
it, so let’s do things right.” Instead,
he looked at me and said: “I am sorry to do this to you, Mr. Sbarcea”. He understood how crooked and painful his
decision would be, yet he still went ahead with it. I then replied to him, “You are doing it to
yourself, Sir”.
It took me two whole years
before I recovered sufficiently to produce another edition of The Christian
Herald.
But my case is not unique.
About the same time, another famous case was doing the rounds in the
media. A woman had won a property
settlement against her husband for the value of $500,000. Then she received a bill from her solicitor
for the amount of $480,000. She took him
to court and asked him to prove how he acquired such a bill. He couldn’t. He
told the judge that he kept the expenses all in his mind. You guessed it, he won the case, and she had
to pay additional legal costs.
Hardly a week passes by
without the media highlighting more cases of gross miscarriage of justice. It
is as if the judges have declared war on society and on decent citizens. A huge front page headline titled, ROUGH
JUSTICE, told the case of a shop owner who apprehended a thief and held him
bound until the police arrived. He was a
repeated victim of this thief and his gang, yet the court charged the shop
owner with assault and let the thief go free (The Daily Telegraph,
Astonishingly, although
everybody seems to know the truth about the justice system, no one can do
anything about it. A cartoon in a mass
circulation newspaper, has a man lying on a bed in a doctor’s surgery. The
doctor assesses him and says: “High IQ, no ethics, chronic liar. . . have you
considered law?” (The Sun-Herald, July 20, 1997). Another cartoon has two women talking in a
waiting room. A sign above them says,
“How to recognize a psychopath in your workplace”. One of them pointing furtively to a man behind
them says: “Apparently he’s a corporate lawyer in his spare time” (SMH,
Given such appalling
reputation, you might think that universities would have a hard time filling
quotas in their law faculties, when in fact the opposite is true. Law schools are bursting at the seems, while
education, humanities, and others, must lower their entrance marks in order to
reach their numbers.
This profession is good at
making money, but not so good at delivering justice. They are rich in the wisdom
of the world, but extremely poor in the wisdom of God. When I looked into the Scriptures, I was
really surprised at what I found there about this profession. God knew what would become of these people
from the very beginning. Here are some
examples.
Isa 59:4 No one calls for justice, Nor does any plead
for truth. They trust in empty words and speak lies; They conceive evil and
Isa 59:5 bring forth iniquity. They hatch vipers' eggs and weave the spider's
web; He who eats of their eggs dies, And from that which is crushed a viper
breaks out.
1 Cor 6:1 Dare any of
you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unrighteous, and not
before
1 Cor 6:2 the saints? Do you not know that the saints will judge
the world? And if the world will be judged by you, are you unworthy to judge
the smallest matters? Do you not know
that we shall judge angels?
1 Cor 6:3 How much
more, things that pertain to this life?
James 2:1 My brethren, do not hold the faith of our
Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with
James 2:2 partiality.
For if there should come into your assembly a man with gold rings, in
fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes, and you pay attention to the one
James 2:3 wearing the fine clothes and say to him,
"You sit here in a good place," and say to the poor man, "You
stand there," or, "Sit here at my footstool," have you not shown
partiality
James 2:4 among yourselves, and become judges with evil
thoughts?
James 2:5 Listen, my beloved brethren: Has God not
chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom
which He promised to those who love Him?
James 2:6 But you have dishonored the poor man. Do not
the rich oppress you and drag you into the courts?
James 2:7 Do they not blaspheme that noble name by
which you are called?
James 2:8 If you really fulfill the royal law according
to the Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you
James 2:9 do well; but if you show partiality, you
commit sin, and are convicted by the law as transgressors.
But in the end,
righteousness, truth and justice will prevail over the whole earth.
Zep 3:5 The LORD is righteous in her midst, He will do
no unrighteousness. Every morning He brings His justice to light; He never
fails, But the unjust knows no shame.
Isa 60:17 "Instead of bronze I will bring gold,
Instead of iron I will bring silver, Instead of wood, bronze, And instead of
stones, iron. I will also make your officers peace, And your magistrates
righteousness.
Isa 61:8 "For I, the LORD, love justice; I hate
robbery for burnt offering; I will direct their work in truth, And will make
with them an everlasting covenant. For
as the earth brings forth its bud,
Isa 61:11 As the garden causes the things that are sown
in it to spring forth, So the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise to
spring forth before all the nations.
If you have a concordance,
look under such terms as, justice, judges, rulers, priests, and the like, and
see what you can find, for there is a lot more in the Bible about them. This is what Jesus Christ thought about
lawyers too.
Luke 18:2 "There was in a certain city a judge who
did not fear God nor regard man.
Luke 18:3 "Now there was a widow in that city; and
she came to him, saying, 'Get justice for me from my
Luke 18:4 adversary.’ "And he would not for a
while; but afterward he said within himself, 'Though I do not
Luke 18:5 fear God nor regard man, yet because this
widow troubles me I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary
me.” Then the Lord said, “Hear what the
unjust judge said.
Luke 18:6 “And shall God not avenge His own elect who
cry out day and night to Him,
Luke 18:7 though He bears long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily.
Luke 18:8 Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes,
will He really find faith on the earth?"
Jesus Christ knew that
judges had no “fear of God, nor regard for man”. That is why He warned them:
"with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure
you use, it will be measured back to you” (Mat 7:2).
Our current affair programs
have reported several times that many of our country towns are in the grip of
an unprecedented crime wave mostly by roving youth gangs of Aboriginal
descent. They terrorize the population,
steal, break into houses in full daylight, even bash people in their own homes,
yet when they are apprehended and brought before the courts many are let free
because the level of proof required by the courts is almost impossible to
achieve. No one is more frustrated at
this state of affairs than the police, who often put their life at risk to
arrest these lawbreakers only to see the courts let them go free. Too many are in custody, we are told, and so
the judges find all sorts of excuses for not incarcerating any more. They fear more bad publicity from that
meddling institution called the United Nations.
“The Immigration
Minister, Mr. Ruddock, forced to defend
Our Government would do well to come out of that
institution altogether, and stop wasting money on it for its days are
numbered. Remember what they did six
years ago? This is what we wrote
then.
“The slide into the precipice has been accelerated by the recent
decision of the United Nations to become the moral and spiritual policeman of
the world. Not in upholding God's law,
but Satan's rule.
The case of the Tasmanian
homosexual who took his case to the United Nations is well known. The UN Human
Rights Committee demanded that the Tasmanian Government overturn its anti-gay
provisions from its Criminal Code because they violated "basic human
rights".
"'I am amazed that a UN human rights committee would consider it a
basic human right that people should be able to commit sodomy,' said the
Tasmanian Attorney-General, Mr Ron Cornish.
[But] a
Of course! All that is needed is for the ground to be broken in one
country and the floods of hell are opened everywhere. People may well remember that the first
public demonstrations by the "gay liberation movement" took place in
The day the UN Human Rights Committee decided for homosexuality, the
Australian public broadcasting network - the ABC - presented a lengthy panel
discussion on the plight of the transvestite people ("transgenders",
as they like to be called). They were complaining that the UN decision does
nothing for them. Being free to do whatever they want in private is not enough.
They want to be able to go out in public, tell people about their gender
preferences, and be loved for it. But
when they do that, they say that they usually get bashed, and they wonder why?
Now, they want the United Nations to do something for them too. And, nice and obliging as those at the UN
are, they will no doubt find a way to uphold the transgenders'
"basic rights" too. (The Christian Herald No 4, p.2).
No institution that takes as
its role the imposition of Satan’s rule upon the world, can expect to survive
very long. God has not recorded the
example of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible for nothing.
Now they take issue with
mandatory sentencing laws. Such laws
operate in many countries of the world – the United States, Wales and
Scotland, being only some of them – yet the United Nations has singled out
Australia. Why? Because
certain radical elements from the Aboriginal community don’t like it. They can no longer get away with a slap on
the wrist for repeated crimes, but are locked up behind bars as they
should. These laws are not directed
against Aboriginal people, but against all lawbreakers. Interestingly enough, these laws are popular
even in Aboriginal communities, who more often than not, suffer more at the
hands of unruly people than the while people.
But these laws are not popular with United Nations. Why? Well, would Satan like to see people living
safely, peacefully and in harmony with each other? He does his work through his servants, and
anyone who thinks that homosexuality is good for people, and protects
lawbreakers against the community of decent citizens, is his servant. It may surprise people to know this, butt the
mandatory sentencing laws – “three strikes and you are out” – are in fact based
on Christian principles.
Mat 18:15 "Moreover
if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him
alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother.
Mat 18:16 "But if he
will not hear, take with you one or two more, that 'by the mouth of two or
three witnesses every word may be established.’
“And if he refuses to hear them, tell it to the church.
Mat 18:17 But if he
refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax
collector.
In Islamic countries where the Sharia
law is enforced they do not have “three strikes and you are out”, but one
strike and you are out. Even to the
point of losing one’s head. But has the UN railed against that? No! Instead it has taken Australia to task, a
Christian country with a great democratic tradition. As one might have expected, anything
Christian is anathema to this organization.
By forcing homosexuality on the world, and taking the side of
lawbreakers, the UN has revealed its true colors and the master it serves. A
leading Aboriginal figure understood the true causes of his people’s problems,
and delivered an astonishing lecture recently.
But would the UN leaders take note of this? We doubt it.
“Aboriginal
leader Mr Noel Pearson has lashed out at much
“progressive” thinking on Aboriginal issues, saying it is destructive and
compounding misery. He attacked treating
substance abuse as a symptom of disadvantage, and said high levels of
Aboriginal incarceration require the restoration of social order and law
enforcement rather than just legal aid. Mr Pearson said the indigenous experience of the welfare
state has been “disastrous”. “A rule of
thumb in relation to most of the programs and policies that pose as progressive
thinking in indigenous affairs is that if we did the opposite we would have the
chance of making progress,” he said.
Delivering the
“Light of the Hill” Ben Chifley Lecture in Bathurst
at the weekend, Mr Pearson said people who wanted to
be progressive today “are in objective fact regressive in their thinking. This is especially and painfully obvious if
you know the situation in the Aboriginal communities of this country.” “Petrol sniffing is in some places now so
endemic that crying infants are silenced with petrol drenched rags on their
faces. In one of our communities in Cape
York, among the less than 1,000 people there were three murders within one
month a few months ago. And we don’t know what to do.
“Progressive”
thinking about substance abuse, such as alcoholism, held it was “only a symptom
of underlying social and psychological problems”. “But addiction is a condition
in its own right, not a symptom. It must therefore be addressed as a problem in
itself.” The “symptom theory” absolved
people from their responsibility to deal with addiction. “Worse, it leaves communities to think that
nothing can be done to confront substance abuse because of its purported
causes: dispossession, racism, trauma and poverty, are beyond reach of social
resolution at present.” The
“progressive” response to the level of Aboriginal jailings
had been to provide legal aid. “This
progressive response – providing legal aid support services – has not worked .
. . In fact Aboriginal legal aid is part
of the criminal justice industry . . .
It is like a sausage machine, and human lives are processed through it
with no real belief that the statistics will ever be overcome. The truth is . . . the real need is for the restoration of social
order and the enforcement of law.” On
welfare, he advocated its reform, not its abolition. A new consensus was needed about welfare
built on the principles of personal and family empowerment and investment and
the use of resources to achieve change.
Our motivation to reform welfare must be based on the principle that
dependency and passivity are a scourge and must be avoided at all costs.
Dependency and passivity kills people and is surest road to social decline.
Australians do not have an inalienable right to dependency; they have an
inalienable right to a fair place in the real economy”(SMH,
Aug.16, 2000).
This lecture is almost like the sermon of a good
Christian. His forthrightness and courage
in delivering such a speech in the current environment can only be
applauded. Mr. Pearson understood that
the current situation in which justice is being administered with regard to “underlying social and psychological
problems” does not lead to harmonious relationships between Aborigines and
white people. Decent and honest citizens, whites and Aborigines alike, have
little incentive to obey the law when they see that lawbreakers go free and
justice is being delivered with partiality. Communities suffer when criminals
go unpunished. As Mr. Pearson noticed,
the justice system is now part of the problem rather than offering solutions to
it. Yes, the justice system and the United
Nations are now two good bedfellows. Few
people realize that the current social problems in Australia and around the
world are a reflection of the prophecies spoken by Jesus Christ for our
time.
Mat 24:12 "And because lawlessness will abound,
the love of many will grow cold.
Mat 24:13 "But he who endures to the end shall be
saved.
Yes, because lawlessness
abounds most people have become insensitive to what is happening around
them. But that is something Christians
cannot afford to indulge in. They cannot despair, cannot allow their love to
grow cold, and cannot lose faith in God’s ultimate judgment. We must endure to the end if we want to be
saved. For God does take note of what is
happening in the world at present, as He has always done.
Mal 4:2 But to you who fear My name the Sun of
Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings; And you shall go out and
grow fat like stall-fed calves. You
shall trample the wicked,
Mal 4:3 for they shall be ashes under the soles of
your feet on the day that I do this," says the LORD of hosts.”
At the end of my court case,
I went before the Almighty, as I often do, in supplication and worship, asking
Him whether I should appeal to the High Court, believing that I had a good case
of getting a better result there. But
the Almighty answered that I should get back to the Scriptures and not even
think of going before their courts again. So I went back to the Scriptures and,
as usual, I received yet more revelations. The day they sent me their court
subpoena, was exactly seven years since I mailed out the first edition of The
Christian Herald to the world (that
is, three and a half years by two). The
prophecies of Daniel 12, follow those of Revelation 11, and that is why the
prophecies of Matthew 24 did not quite follow the pattern we expected.
If you do not know which
prophecies we are talking about, or how to look at them, wait for our next
edition when we will write about them in detail. What is important to know now is that the
world has been granted a few more years in which it could mend its ways and
draw closer to God or be plunged into the greatest tribulation ever. It cannot
afford to waste this opportunity for there will be no other chance.
Humanity has simply not
learned the lessons of the past. Two of the most important lessons recorded in
the Bible for posterity were in relation to the abominable practice of
homosexuality. The case of Sodom and Gomorrah is well known to the world, but
what is not so well known is the case of the Israelite tribe of Benjamin. It is
a fairly long story, but very instructive for the time in which we live.