Country Strong

    The movie Country Strong with Gwyneth Paltrow and Garrett Hadlund illustrates the old Biblical principle, "you can not serve two masters". The South has had its share of being a master and serving masters. Nashville being the country counter part of tinsel town, seat of one of the dueling lords, has seen its slaves come and go. As much as it wants to remain family it dishes out the poison of fame and glory gone bad as well as any of Binsfield's Princes of Hell.  Its latest story of a star being driven to her death down highway 31 sings the too familiar song of the price paid for "choosing poorly". The story is less about the strength of country than its weakness. Of course this echoes the warning of the Book that taught the South how to sing and gave to it the Christian audience for launching nearly all of its singers before most have taken the wrong road cruising in the blue caddy down the highway of honky-tonks, bars and the Opry.
    The warning so blatantly broadcasted by Christ the true country singer is found in Matthew 6:24. "No man can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon" (KJV). I love this rendition of the ancient wisdom, handed down from the Syrians, because Christ breaks out the reason you can not serve two masters, "he will hold to one and despise the other...." 

 Evelyn Morgan

     What defines "despising"? John Stevens in his teaching on Prophecy, quoted Paul who tells us  "do not  despise prophecy". How does one despise prophecy, by not doing it. How does one despise God? Ignoring Him, not "doing" what he asks. It is very simple. A slave is present for the biding of his master. To say you are a servant (less repugnant than slave) of Christ and not do his bidding is to despise Christ. "You can not serve God and mammon." 
      What is country strong? In the end, a classic "like a statue on his pinto" Hutton  (Hadlund) sits in his rusting pickup truck. He reads a parting letter left by the overdosed hand of Kelly Canter (Paltrow), she says " If you want my advice, if you have a chance to choose between love and fame, choose love". Sad but true. The same song second verse, we are told again, and again modeled out by lives many live and die, "you can not serve God and mammon." In these days of the god of mammon showing us his weakness its best we not despise our Lord and Master and learn to do his biding. The swan song of Passover is obedience, let us sing it loud and clear and not have that whine of country music! 
     I tip my hat to Hank Williams Jr. who summed it up so nicely for his family (and that is "Country Music's" royal family) namely his daddy when he sang about this Family Tradition and the choices that are made. 

Verbs to Nouns or vice versa

      A noun is often turned into a verb or vice versa. Many times with similar structure. This is particularly true in English since we rely on the placing of the word in a sentence for its contextual clues and not necessarily on its inflection. When one catches fish he may be called a fisherman. The fisherman may say "I fish for a living."  We have become very adept at this in modern times. Twitter, twittering, twittered, or twatted? No its twittered. I twittered yesterday and I will twitter today. I am following you on twitter. Can a bird like Tweedy twitter on twitter or do birds twitter? I thought they were the first to do so.

Applying the Blood

     The same morphing of words from nouns to verbs also takes place in Greek. The word lithos meaning stone can become lithos + ballw (to cast) and you get the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:59). The stoners' activity is related to what they do and who they are. So Greek carries on the same way other languages do because language is an out growth of life. What we are doing we want to express to others and they want to talk about us, so they connect the activity to the person, "the stoner dude". Hopefully you are getting the idea.
     The word Passover in English, pesach in Hebrew, and pascha in Greek, has had the same etymology. Originally it was used as a verb in which case the Hebrew would be pasach meaning the death angel passed over (vb) the Children of Israel. The verb, the doing, became the noun the institution. The angel "passing over" became the institution, Passover. Now we write "Passover" with capital letters and explain the noun by using it as a verb. "Passover is the celebration of when the death angel passed over the COI." Originally it was the other way around. The verb created the noun. A little different perspective if you get what I am saying. Here finally is the point.

    I was looking at the Greek word pascha as I was reading about the Passover. Remembering for Christians the Passover is about the Lamb's suffering, being slain for our salvation. The word for suffering in Greek is, you might guess this if I haven't confused you completely, pascho. The word for Passover in Greek comes from the Septuagint's translation of the Hebrew. I am not sure how they got this word, but since the words are so similar, it may be that the suffering of the lamb in preparation of the feast was tied in originally with the COI. The death of the lamb and its blood may be more central to the Hebrew story and pasach became the noun Pesach, the result of the suffering lamb. The same may be said of  the etymology of the word in the  Greek for Passover. It may not be a transliteration as some assume. I think the Seventy -odd, that wrote the Septuagint were looking for the right verb as well as the nuance for the feast. Whether that is the case or not, God certainly worked this word in the Greek Pascha, to carry the connotation of Suffering. Jesus said "With desire I have desired to eat this Passover before I suffer"(Luke 22:155).  The connection is undeniable. The lamb slain since the foundation of the world is our suffering servant Jesus Christ. His greatest suffering pascho came during the Pascha. At this time of year our remembrance of His suffering will allow the angel of death to Passover us.
   A parting shot: The "last supper" may have been the preparation of the lamb dinner not the seder.

Sinfonia Sirenum

        Since we are in the Passover/Easter season, we sung the song, "The Strife is Over",  in our church on Sunday and it gave me a moment or two of  "pause".  Hearing this old song brought back a memory of another Sunday from my youth. I was sitting in the den of my family's country home with my dad who was finally letting down after a morning and a half of preaching and ministering. We had just finished a large Sunday dinner (outside the South this would be called lunch) and it was taking its toll on dad.  I had been talking with him about his war years and he was reminiscing about General George Patton's funeral. He was falling asleep on the couch in the warm sunlight of that sleepy summer afternoon as he told me this story.

Wife, Beatrice Patton
(my father pictured immediately
over Beatrice's left shoulder)

         Dad was a Chaplain during WWII. He got several field promotions and by the end of the war became the head chaplain in the European Theater. He had formed a choral group that traveled throughout Europe singing for the soldiers. At the end of the War General Patton died in Germany. Mrs. Beatrice Patton called my dad and asked him if his "chapeleers" would sing at her husband's funeral in Heidelberg. The only song that 'Old Blood and Guts' requested was  "The Strive Is Over... the battle done". Dad, like most of the people in our church last Sunday, did not know the song. He and his choir learned it in the back of a troop carrier as they drove the autobahn to the funeral. He said that his group sang great and the funeral was amazing, brass was everywhere. Heidelberg's Christ Church had a huge pipe organ and the song "The Strife is Over" was made for it. Dad said it was majestic.
      Good story, huh, but I wonder about that song. To this day it bothers me. How much of the battle is really over, even when you die?  May be it's the battle that is over but not the war. My Bible tells me there is still spiritual warfare going on. It took an archangel 21 days to break through to Daniel fasting and praying in Babylon. Sounds like tough resistance to me. Patton had to battle nearly as long to break through to liberate Bastogne (he may have been a god but he was no Archangel). And the war was not over when he arrived at the gates of the city,  at head of the 4th Armored. Neither was it over when he arrived at door of heaven, probably to his delight, he was a warrior.

"Hang In Tough, Bastogne 1944"
by John Shaw 

       We are warriors as Christians. We win our battles. And we want to go to heaven and rest but a restful heaven seems odd to me at times. Is Christ resting in heaven? Are the saints resting with Him? Christ ever lives (and never sleeps) to make intercession for the saints. If He is doing that and some saints under the altar are crying out , "How long, O Lord, holy and true, will you not judge and avenge (from dike - to return harm for harm) our blood on them that dwell on the earth (Rev. 6:10)?" Avenge? That sounds like a war cry to me.  If all that is happening then what the hell are people doing taking R and R by the pearlie gates?  Granted the battle is suppose to be over for us who pass to the other side, but the war still rages and creation is waiting for the manifestations of the sons of God. Hurrah! (that's suppose to be the sound the Marines make?). John Stevens put it this way in his sermon "Earnest Expectation":


"God’s people are in an end-time spiritual battle against the satanic spirits that are warring to prevent the revealing of the sons of God. The very first breakthrough into the revealing of the sons of God will be like pushing over the first domino. After that a whole string of events and breakthroughs will start happening. The whole Kingdom will come forth. We do not realize the importance of the focus that the Lord wants us to have in spiritual warfare. As we aim at a target, focusing on it, the Lord will bless us.... Once the Lord truly reveals this to us, we will never stop interceding and pressing the battle because we will see what we are in", p.113. 

Josiah and the Passover Reading

      So I guess Passover/Easter is awesome with the Victory over death but the enforcement of it is left to the sons, and that is still in play. The sons must be obedient to what the Lord asks, just as Christ was during His great Passover experience. This could be like the Passover of Josiah in Kings (2Kings 23:23-24) where he battles against the evil forces of his day and the people pledged themselves to the covenant of the Lord.  Deliverance even for Israel from Egypt on that first Passover was not without much battle. In battle you always assign someone to pick up the Flag if the carrier is shot. So it is for the sons to raise the standard (mental flash to Iwo Jima), because there is definitely no "Peace in the Valley".  I feel more like one of those grunts freezing in Bastogne waiting for deliverance. They call my Dad's generation the "greatest" generation and it was awesome. But I think the Greatest Generation is going to be the generation that shows up as the "Sons of God" and liberates this tired old earth, then I"ll  "live and sing to thee" with faith "The Strife Is Over".