After several decades of professional life I discovered from the thrust of Scripture, the clarification of biblical principles, and the discoveries of what worked in the maturing process of my personal life including both natural and spiritual meaning – that God is an affirmative person. He has no negatives. He can use negatives in his communications with mankind because, as many knowledgeable communicator knows, effective communication is in the terms of the persons receiving the communication. In such an understanding Moses set up the extravaganza of Mounts Ebal and Gerizim. The negatives (curses) were shouted from one mountain and were acknowledged from the other with Amen registering that both they and God know the message. The other mount shouted affirmatives (blessings) and they also were acknowledged from the other mountain. Moses, about to depart his mortal life, gave the trumpeting message to all: Choose life! The affirmations well lived need no cursing for understanding and experience. Cursers need the affirmations of those with blessings if they are to participate in the course of life. Failure is explained by the distortions or omissions of blessings. Alert persons find it so in the course of their own lives. In obedience to the God of blessing, we tend to move along quite well in the life course. We can become well-lived even if some matters go wrong. We reject them to ourselves so can flourish above the negative circumstances of mortal life. Affirmations to righteousness make a winning life context.
Our modern mountain of cursing emanates from our media, even conversations, in the style of cursing. We readily pass on the negative news. News reports are full of disasters, scandal, murder, carnality, war, crime, chicanery, death, anger, clashes of mankind with mankind. If we take time to measure the minutes given to negatives and those given to affirmatives through a half hour standard news report, we may get the sadness. So much of secular life is perceived in the negative giving rise to fear, doubt, worry, despair and perhaps to malaise (neutrality/surrender). In affirmations we are called to wonder, solutions, progress, joy – to normalcy in our expectations, especially related to family and/or relationships – even to hope. Hope in Christianity is related to the belief in immortality for the children of God in some fulfillment of award.
Many readers of the Old Testament do not orient the long narrative of world and tribal cultures in the Near East that dominated in the two thousand or so years before the arrival of Jesus. With the larger world view of the Greeks the old tribalism had already begun to fade for the eastern Mediterranean. The Roman power took even that continuity out with empire building but sometimes incorporated it, as was the case with Israel at the time of Jesus. However the tribal systems held in other parts of the world, and some continue to the present date. Europeans were challenged with tribal divisions in aboriginal in America, a system that remains at a miniscule force related to power and influence. Until tribalism is better managed in Africa, it will be difficult to find peace among tribes even in the same nation. The point for us is that even when working with the tribes of Israel God would, from time to time, make clear that what he was doing related to all people. Israel was warned on how graciously to treat strangers, even slaves, who were in their land. The point was so strong that Israel became something of a missionary people. The word used for converts was proselytes. Even Jesus noted it, especially as related to the distortions of Israel’s missionary efforts. A Gentile area was added to the Temple. Archaeology reports widespread studies made of synagogues in faraway places. The Apostle Paul would begin his ministry on his missionary journeys at the door of the Jewish place of worship in the cities across southern Europe. The Jews were well known and sometimes victimized then as now. In recognition that God was using a progressive plan to offer Christianity as the Messianic fulfillment appearing in the meaning of the worship (prophecies) of Israel, Christianity held tenaciously to the Old Testament for background in world meaning for God, in the yielding to Messiah, in fulfillment of the tribal history, and spiritual meaning of a special people. We are taught the work of God and the needs of mankind through the history from which Christ was born. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020