God’s Agents?

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Christians are agents of God or so we’re informed. I’ve tried to locate where in the Bible it says that the Lord appoints fallible humans to be his 007s, but alas, I can’t find it anywhere. The best I can do are the claims in the fourth gospel that Jesus was God’s agent on Earth, but that’s not the same thing.

What about the idea then, also touted by Christians, that they are somehow God’s ‘partner’? No, that’s not there either. God regards himself as so far above us, his creators, that it would be like you or I partnering one of the ants crawling around in our gardens.

So how does the Bible describe the Christian’s relationship with God? It refers to it as master and servant. The word usually translated as ‘servant’ however, is doulos, which actually means ‘slave’. God doesn’t want you as an agent, partner or servant. He expects you to be his slave. Christian blogger, Sam Storms, explains what this means:

I, in the totality of who I am, have been purchased by Jesus Christ. He literally owns me. I belong to him, body, soul, spirit, mind, affections, abilities, talents, heart, will, and emotions. There is nothing in me or about me that belongs to me.

As a slave of God you are stripped of the very agency other Christians claim they gain from aligning themselves with the divine despot. And when you’ve done all he requires of you he’ll barely acknowledge you. As Jesus puts it in Luke 17:5-10:

Suppose one of you has a slave (doulos) ploughing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the slave when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? Will he thank the slave because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have only done our duty.’”

Whatever you do as God’s or Jesus’ slave won’t be enough, they’ll still regard you as a worthless slave.

I didn’t know about you, but this isn’t for me. I have more self-respect than to submit to a life as a slave. So have you. So in fact has everyone.

Most Christians agree. Almost all of them disregard the expectation that they become slaves. We know this because –

  • The majority don’t act as if they’re slaves, serving their fellow human beings till they’re fit to drop (Matthew 25 etc).

  • Most seem unaware even that Jesus insists they must be slaves when successive translators have deliberately altered the unsavoury ‘slave’ to the more palatable ‘servant’.

  • Those who are aware of his expectation seem to regard it as a metaphor; always a good get-out. And doesn’t Paul remark in his letters that believers are sons of God? That’s much more acceptable.

  • They omit the slavery element from their evangelising because no-one is going to be attracted by the offer of life-long servitude; far better to present Jesus as a would-be friend, big brother and all round good guy with whom people can be in ‘partnership’ or a fellow special ‘agent’.

  • They talk about free will when a slave, either of sin (John 8:34) or of Christ’s, has no freedom and no free will to exercise.

  • They convince themselves that sitting at a computer arguing with atheists online is the kind of slavery Jesus had in mind.

  • They turn a blind eye to the fact that the Bible teaches slavery is what they can expect not just now but for all eternity (Revelation 22:3-4).

It’s almost as if they don’t really believe such self-abasing, masochistic nonsense themselves.

 

 

47 thoughts on “God’s Agents?”

  2. deliberately altered the unsavoury ‘slave’ to the more palatable ‘servant’

    And that is only ONE example where the “Holy Scriptures” have been oh-so-subtly altered to make them more palatable.

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  3. “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Mark 10:45

    “Blessed are those slaves whom their master finds alert when he returns! I tell you the truth, he will dress himself to serve, have them take their place at the table, and will come and wait on them!” Luke 12:37

    I suppose you have forgotten those.

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      • Paul said that we are all slaves – including you – slaves to sin or slaves to God. Romans 6:16. If you are going to write on slavery in the Bible, don’t forget that passage.

        I prefer to be a slave to God and righteousness.

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      • Funny you should mention it. I wrote yesterday’s blog in conjunction with next week’s, addressing just this point.

        You be a slave to whichever fantasy figure you like, Don. I choose not to be one at all.

        Liked by 3 people

      • According to Paul, you cannot choose not to be a slave at all. He said that we are slaves to the one we obey. By your words you are obeying the zeitgeist of this age. That makes you a slave to that idea or philosophy of independence from everything. And I see that almost everywhere in your writing. I see independence as being without obligation to anyone or anything and as destructive of community and civilization. I see it on the streets of our cities as people choose to do whatever they wish including smash and grab robberies and drugs and violence. Are those good things for society? I do not think so, but if you sow the wind you reap the whirlwind.

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      • ‘According to Paul’. Says it all. And what authority does a religious fanatic, prone to hallucinations and possessed of an excess of apocalyptic fervour, have to do with anyone today?

        Your conclusion that I’m caught up in the current zeitgeist, demonstrates, yet again, your propensity for jumping to unfounded conclusions.

        Poor, Don. Poor.

        Liked by 2 people

      • I replied to Nan this way: It does not matter who said it. It is observable to anyone who pays attention. We all are captivated by something, and that something rules our lives. The zeitgeist of this age is independence. Most westerners are in its thrall. How do I know? Just look around, or look at yourself. Independence is the watchword.

        That has not always been the case. There was a time when responsibility was the zeitgeist. And there was a time when obedience to God was the zeitgeist. You are a literature student and instructor. You can follow those different trends through the history of literature. It doesn’t take Paul.

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      • Two points:

        First, where is your evidence that the zeitgeist is ‘independence’? Is this one of your magical, spirit-led intuitions?

        Secondly, would it be so inappropriate if independence were the spirit of the age? Did you not encourage your children to be independent, especially as they got older and started out on their own lives? I know I did and I’m now working on my grandson, who’s staying with us, to assume some independence in his life.

        But I’d dispute that independence is the prevailing zeitgeist. Dennis and I regularly go to the movies and every one from – A Man Called Otto to Barbie (groan) and Blue Beetle – regardless of genre, is invariably about the importance of family and friends. Every contemporary book I read is the same, every TV show – from Young Sheldon to How to Get Away with Murder – whatever it is ostensibly about, emphasises the importance of family and loved ones.

        It’s much the same with the numerous blogs I read, where discussions invariably end up stressing the centrality and importance of family and friends. This, it seems to me, is the zeitgeist, along with a couple of other possible contenders: saving the planet and wokism.

        Interestingly, though, despite what today’s Christians preach, your beloved savior decried family. He said you should hate them if you wanted to be part of his cult (though I’m willing to bet you think he didn’t really mean it.)

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      • First, where is your evidence that the zeitgeist is ‘independence’?

        The nightly news, the dominant themes in entertainment, burning man, a guy named Neil.

        would it be so inappropriate if independence were the spirit of the age?

        Independence is not a negative thing in normal dosages. But we are overdosing.

        family and friends.

        I think that is a correction to independence.

        I’m willing to bet you think be didn’t really mean it.

        He had a larger family in mind. And he eventually included his immediate family in that larger family, though there is every reason to think his mother and Joseph already were.

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      • First, where is your evidence that the zeitgeist is ‘independence’?

        The nightly news, the dominant themes in entertainment, burning man, a guy named Neil.

        That’s it? Despite the fact I presented evidence the entertainment industry emphasises family and friends?
        I don’t think I’m fixated on ‘independence’, though I’m happy to think I can be an independent thinker. You, sadly, aren’t capable of it; all you do is repeat 2000 year old superstitious nonsense.

        But we are overdosing. We are? Where? Present your evidence, Don.

        I think (family and friends) is a correction to independence. That’s nice, though again where’s your evidence it’s a correction of anything?

        I’m willing to bet you think be didn’t really mean it.

        He had a larger family in mind. And he eventually included his immediate family in that larger family, though there is every reason to think his mother and Joseph already were.

        I win my bet then. He meant what you say he meant and not what he actually said.
        How do you know what ‘he had… in mind’? Have we waited 2000 years so Don Camp can enlighten us on what Jesus (or his script writers) ‘had in mind’? Seems so.

        He eventually included his larger family.
        Was this before or after he disowned his family in Mark 3? Or round about the time he disrespected his mother at Cana? (Asking for a friend.)
        Where, I repeat, is your evidence he suddenly became a family man?

        Enough, Don. I’ve better things to do than respond to your half-baked defence of your fantasy.

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      • I choose not to be one at all.

        Exactly. But that makes you a slave to independence. (Which when it comes to God is sin. And that is what Paul said.)

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      • I can be a slave to flyfishing. You can be a slave to independence. We are slaves to anything that drives us.

        In America, we have a whole gang of people who are slaves to independence and white supremacy.

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      • But slavery and fly-fishing are not contradictory. Slavery and independence are.

        Your country makes much of its independence (see Declaration of Independence). Are you saying you think this a bad thing, given your disdain for independence?

        You also equate independence with white supremacy. I think you’ll find they’re not the same at all, except in your religion-addled mind.

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      • In dependence and slavery to independence are two different things. Slavery as I am using it and as Paul uses it is a passion that drives our lives to the point that it consumes our attention and becomes the direction of life.

        So, independence in America, I think, WAS something the founding fathers of the United States had a passion for that drove their actions.

        I do not think we needed to break away from England in a war of independence. King George was a bit crazy, yes, but kings die. Give it time. We weren’t exactly oppressed by England anyway. Like Canada, time would have given us independence.

        We’ve made something of an idol of independence in America. Notice the popularity of the western genre of our films. The independent strong cowboy hero. For many in my generation he was our idol.

        As for flyfishing, I enjoy it and even more the time outdoors, but I really do not get out often and I can live without it, so am not a slave to it.

        Atheists may be atheists without being possessed by independence from God. But atheism can become Anti-theism when it becomes a passion that drives them.

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      • Why didn’t you make it clear you were using slavery in the sense nobody else uses it?

        It’s no good referencing Paul either. No-one here accepts his authority. He was a zealot, prone to hallucinations and making stuff up. A bit like yourself when you say atheists are demon possessed and slaves to independence (using your special definition of both words.)

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      • He wasn’t? Demonstrate, please, how he wasn’t making stuff up. Where did his ideas come from?

        Don’t try telling us his ‘revelations’ (Paul’s word) and his convoluted, contradictory theology were from God. Claiming to have been told things by a non-existent supernatural entity is exactly the same as ‘making stuff up’.

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      • No, it isn’t. If I claimed I had an invisible but magical unicorn in my garage, would the onus be on you to disprove it or on me to prove it?

        Same with your God. Provide evidence of him, independent of the human imagination. Oh. I forgot, we’ve been here before and you can’t. Until you, or anyone, provides that evidence, the only reasonable conclusion is that YHWH/Heavenly Father doesn’t exist. Like my invisible magical unicorn.

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      • I suppose we have the same opinion, though in reverse. I find the idea of a universe without God logically absurd. You find the idea of God absurd. If we were to take a poll, the whole of humanity would be similarly divided.

        By far most people through the millennia have fallen on the side of a Creator God, and that is true among both the most sophisticated and the most primitive. It just seems more logical and the better supported by evidence. Few have chosen to see the universe as wholly material. Most of the latter in the past have made that choice based on the absence of a god who they can see in contrast to a world they can see. I might add, that criterion was never particularly compelling and still is not.

        There are a significant number of “nones.” By that I mean people who are really none of the above and who don’t really spend much brain power on the subject. They just take what is before them. We might call them Secularists.

        My experience over years of pastoring in a small cowboy town in rural Oregon is that most secularists are not Secularists with a capital “S” but simply by inattention. When push comes to shove in a crisis they would show up at my doorstep hoping that God might have the answers that would make sense out of life.

        When they did, I did not have to start from the beginning proving the existence of God. It was intuitive.

        Now you ask for evidence. Again. Though I have provided it and in kind and degree far greater than any attempted justification of the idea of a Godless universe I’ve ever heard. So, it seems to me that the ball really is in your court. If you believe that there is no God and that Paul is making things up, you should be able to prove it. And to do so more logically than merely repeating Carl Sagan’s mantra: “The cosmos is all there is.”

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      • You’re not really offering anything here, Don, other than a spot of obfuscation (‘some believe in God, some don’t’).

        The fact remains the onus to demonstrate that a magical supernatural being exists lies with those proposing him/her/it, not with those who see no evidence for such a being.

        Having said that, I wrote a series of posts a few years back, starting here https://rejectingjesus.com/2020/04/30/god-probably-not/ that looked at the evidence for your God, found it wholly unconconvicing and his existence highly improbable. You commented at the time. I redirect you to those.

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      • I don’t have a ‘god’. No evidence exists for my non-god. That’s why it’s a non-god and why I don’t believe in it.

        I don’t think I can make this any clearer.

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      • I should have added “deciding evidence.” All the material evidence I have heard for Materialism is equally applicable as evidence for God. So, what seals the deal for you?

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      • As I make clear in the posts I directed you to, the improbability is the deciding factor for me.

        Materialism, or science as the rest of us prefer to call it, explains all that we’re so far able to explain, without recourse to ‘God’. The fact ‘he’ is not needed to explain anything is pretty convincing evidence he doesn’t actually exist.

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      • Though I don’t think that science can really explain the extremely improbable combination of fundamental forces and events that led to beings like us, the deciding factor for me is that Materialism cannot explain a beginning.

        It is left with something from nothing or infinte regress. Both are absurd.

        BTW science is not Materialism. Materialism is a philosophy. Science is not.

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      • Why do you suppose ‘the beginning’, whatever it was like, was the handiwork of your God, the tribal YHWH? Because billions of years later members of that primitive tribe said it was? Now that’s what I call absurd, as absurd as crediting it to Ra or Zeus or Allah or any one of thousands of other gods.

        Materialism is a philosophy, but it is science that has demonstrated the universe can be explained without recourse to gods.

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      • a Creator God … just seems more logical and the better supported by evidence — SURELY you jest!!

        We DO NOT know how the world we live in came to be. Period. Both believers and non-believers have attempted (and failed) to come up with bona fide answers for centuries. Unless or until an unquestionable and PROVABLE discovery is made, we simply cannot know. To try and pin it on some invisible entity is simply a display of caveman ignorance.

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      • We DO NOT know how the world we live in came to be.

        Pretty much there are two options if you eliminate God as Creator. One is that everything came from nothing by itself. I don’t think anyone believes that. The second is that something – matter or energy – is eternal. Given what we know about the universe and the universal law if you will of cause and effect, it violates all we know to think that there can be an eternal sequence of cause and effect without a beginning. It is simply absurd.

        But perhaps you have a third option.

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      • I guess my “third option” is I really don’t care. I’m here … and one day I’ll leave. In the meantime, I try to enjoy what life has to offer.

        While death in itself carries an element of fear, I’m not at all worried what is going to happen “afterward.” I left that particular concern many years ago.

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      • And why should anyone believe Paul … an individual who lived in the far distant past and has NO credentials beyond his words in a HIGHLY contested two-thousand year old book?

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      • Because in this case there is common sense and plenty of real-life experience that bears him out.

        That’s the thing about the Bible; for the most part it is common people experiencing life and matching it to what God said to either their spirits or to others. It simply rings true to life. And it provides wisdom gained by the experience of others and by what God says to and through common men and women.

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      • You are seeing things through a religious POV … but MANY of the same things you point out and attribute to religion/Christianity are also present in the natural world. You just want to attach them to your “god” because to do otherwise would be taking away from what you have chosen: to believe. It’s those rose-colored glasses that you wear that filter our REAL life.

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      • Don:
        “The zeitgeist of this age is independence. Most westerners are in its thrall. How do I know? Just look around, or look at yourself. Independence is the watchword.”

        Independence?
        Over 50% of evangelicals in the US support Trump…after all he’s said and done!
        And I’ll bet the majority of your church does too…what, you’re going to try and tell me you’d ever vote for a “woke” liberal?

        That’s not independence…that’s blind allegiance.
        That’s you!

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  4. Don: Paul was not making stuff up.

    As the supernatural has never been demonstrated to exist, any supernatural claims made by Paul (or anyone) can be dismissed as fiction, fabrication, fake news, fantasy, bullshit, or made up.

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  5. Don gives us a condensed version of his master class in Christian dishonesty. I’ll pull just two examples from his recent ramblings.

    The first starts off screen where I have often and repeatedly asked Don to demonstrate the supernatural so that I can believe in it. These requests were always dismissed as unreasonable (and no demonstration was forthcoming). Then today scolds us for restricting our beliefs to the physical (which has been demonstrated). Dishonest Don starts by denying us a demonstration of the supernatural and then derides us for not believing what hasn’t been demonstrated.

    Our second example has Don declaring – by fiat – that the universe can’t be eternal. To solve this self-created problem, Don gives us an eternal god. This god is, of course, not subject to the “nothing can be eternal” rule that Don pulled out of his ass. Dishonest Don has fixed everything with special pleading! Well done, Don.

    With extremely clever “evidences” such as these, no wonder a recent survey of professional philosophers showed only 19% believed in a god or gods.

    Repeating failed arguments ad nauseam does’t make them any less vapid, Don. Maybe buy a new book and get some new arguments.

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  6. There is no “your God” or “my God.” If some know God by the name of Yahweh (the I Am) or by no name at all, does not matter. God is God.

    The beginning can only be adequately explained by a Mind that is not part of the universe. (Science does not explain the universe without recourse to God because it does not and cannot explain “WHY” and is yet unable to even explain “HOW.”) It might be that the Creator is a cosmic child with a universe creation set like one of our kids with a Lego set. But probably not. The Creator is not capricious like a child. There is intention and purpose in the universe. And there is wisdom. It is not an accident. The creation is complex and yet organized to be efficient and harmonious. Like a wonderfully complex machine, the universe works by the coordination of all its parts.

    It is also purposeful. The end product has function that implies that purpose.

    But like a living thing the universe also grew and developed from the very simple to the complex. Mere chemical reactions will not create anything like the complexity of the universe.

    None of that seems possible or reasonable by natural means.

    Of course, you might just take it as it is, like Nan. Stars and Flowers and rocks just are. You just are. But the universe invites us to more than that. And the most amazing thing of all is that we have both the capacity and the drive to know more than that. We, in fact, have the capacity to conceive of God and to know him in a person-to-person way. That seems to be a significant feature that in itself demands explanation, so we ask WHY?

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      • I would venture to say insecurity in oneself — and not just Don. Some folks just don’t seem to have the wherewithal to face live on their own. Sad.

        Liked by 1 person

      • That is a common theme here, Nan: people believe in God because they cannot face life on their own. And that may have been your experience or impression during the time you were part of the church culture. It was never my experience as a Christian.

        I was driven as a young teen to make sense of the world and my life. I was willing to take whatever was the truth. If life ended in the cemetery just a few hundred feet up the hill from my grandparent’s house where many of my family were buried, so be it. If the cowboy life of my rural western town was life for me, so be it. I could be happy with that. I actually looked forward to that.

        But if that was a mistaken view of what life was about, I wanted what was real. I was not thinking about eternal life at the time. I had hardly heard of that idea. I just wanted to live in reality. And I believe I am.

        Liked by 1 person

      • It’s a common theme ‘here’? Where, Don? I can’t find it. Certainly we’ve noted that for some people they believe because they fear the prospect of their own non-existence. But this isn’t what you’re refuting here. You are so good at reinterpreting what we say so that it fits your own preconceived notions.

        Unfortunately, the reality you think you live in, with its cast of Messiahs, Gods, spirits, angels and demons, in which God speaks to you and has written a book of magic, is, alas, not reality at all.

        Liked by 3 people

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