Changing the World

hile I often felt great excitement at new revelations, the amount of stress I underwent trying to rectify the kingdom of God whilst holding a full-time job was unsurmountable. I developed a pain in my neck that has yet to leave me and has me constantly moving my head trying to relieve pressure and stretch the tenseness of the muscles. I find that the more relaxed I am, the easier it is to overcome, but during stressful times I look a lot like a bobble-head on the dash of a pickup truck off-roading in the Rockies. The pain and uncomfortableness of this ailment has often left me wishing to give up. I have been to doctors, physical therapists, counselors, chiropractors, and even had Botox injections, ultrasounds, X-rays, MRIs, and an EEG trying to root-cause the issue. No cause has yet been found.

For a while I feared that God intentionally damaged my neck so as to call me a stiff-necked fool for not doing whatever it is he wanted me to do. Unfortunately, I had no idea what more or less I ought to do apart from continuing to reason out what is right and what is wrong. While I feared continually that my path might be the wrong one, I had no means of determining the proper path since logic with my known data points brought me to my current state of mind, and lack of logic certainly did not give any indication of which doctrines to blindly follow. Without God shouting from a fiery bush, I had no choice but to continue the same path I found myself on no matter how much of a literal pain in the neck it seemed.

Eventually, it occurred to me that I should not have to struggle as much as I did for the kingdom of God. If God wanted me to do something in particular, he should probably inform me. Or, if I actually came up with a worthwhile idea, I could put it into practice at that point rather than imagining that God required me to pull such an idea out of the depths of my despair. I should not need to beat myself up for having all this knowledge with no ideas on what to do with it. This moment of clarity helped me relax immensely. The weight of the world was no longer on my own shoulders. The neck issue remained, but all the global problems now belonged to God—not to me.

I greatly desired for God to use me, but I reasoned that I should not have the burden to figure it all out myself without God simply telling me. In such a way, I gave up on my own efforts while always being on the lookout for something more I could do. This helped, but I immensely feared that God would consider my relaxation as laziness, giving up, or not trying. Because of this, I continually tried to come up with ideas while simultaneously trying not to be too disappointed at my failure to derive anything and remembering that everything will work out in the end whether or not I succeed—I merely had to try.

The idea of writing a book came to mind yet again and a few more times after that. I loved writing and I felt as if God tried leading me down that path on multiple occasions. One such instance came from an email I wrote to my colleagues regarding going out to lunch on a regular basis. My writing apparently stood out from my fellow engineers even for something as mundane as inviting people to lunch. Someone responded in all sincerity that he thought I should consider writing a book just because he thought my lunch invite was so articulate. Having contemplated it many times already and even having tried previously, I felt rather strongly that perhaps I should write a book and that perhaps God led him to say this to me just like he must have done with the homeless man.

I went back to writing and started from scratch probably four or more times. My tone of writing often hinted at personal despair or disgust, demonstrated disgruntlement, or had an air of superiority in hopes of sounding smart rather than wishy-washy. When you see the church of your God being no better than a Nazi concentration camp, it makes it difficult to write in more uplifting overtones. Being given more to logical appeal than emotional argumentation, I found it difficult to understand the psyche of humanity that would make them focus on my tone more than the content. However, as I would later learn, content is often less important than one’s own preconceived ideas even with the perfect tone.

For one book attempt, I compiled many pieces of poetry I had written. I constantly feared being misunderstood, but even though poetry can be cryptic, I felt it gave me the license to be so without retribution. Most of my attempts at getting people to see what I saw left me alone, frustrated, and falsely accused. I had good reason to fear misunderstanding. I thought that perhaps poetry would enable me to be poetic and confusing without inviting insult for it and, like Jesus did with parables, it would enable only those trying to hear to understand. Being cryptic as it would be for some people, no one could be sure enough of what I might truly mean in order to ridicule my statements.

I truly hated trying to figure out how best to convince people of my ideas. There were too many variables and too many things that could be misunderstood or taken out of context. Such complexity overwhelmed me. I had hoped that poems could be memorable as little pieces of the puzzle and perhaps others could put it all together themselves at a later date.

One poem that I had written expressed everything I wanted to say on a single sheet of paper after I crammed it into four columns printed landscape and printed on both sides of the paper at about eight-point font. I had gone to Office Max and printed out two hundred copies of it. I had intended to put them out as flyers on the windshields of church-goers, but I ultimately decided against it. It seemed too preachy and I did not trust that anyone would give it much thought. I found it hard enough to convey ideas in prose let alone in poetry and being so short and to the point without actually allowing much room for interpretation, I feared it might invite all the more accusations of arrogance. My poem amounted to little more than a rhyming dissertation.

While I had all but given up on writing a book after too many unsuccessful attempts, I thought I might as well write down ideas on index cards so that I could better organize them into chapters in case I ever wanted to get back to it. In this way, perhaps God could slowly ease a book out of me. I also purchased multiple colored highlighters so I could try to pick out the main elements of the Bible and highlight them appropriately for easier searching and flipping through the pages when I might look for a reference later. I highlighted some verses as promises, some as admonitions, reprimands, theological statements, and some as lessons, parables, or words of wisdom. I had done some color-coding like this in the past, but this time I did it specifically for verses I found useful for explaining my main talking points and ideas for a book. Of course, I ended up thinking most everything proved my points and thus nearly everything in the New Testament began receiving a highlight until I realized the futility of it.

It turned out that the index cards proved fairly useless in trying to organize my thoughts because so many of them overlapped concepts, ideas, and logical proofs that I could not put one into any one category. They were like puzzle pieces where one would need to know the entire puzzle before being able to see how the piece fit. But one could not see the entire puzzle until they had first tried putting the pieces together. I could foresee that making one argument would immediately be met with a counter-argument steeped in disgust at my foolishness before I could explain how it truly does fit. People would give up long before I could make the entire case to demonstrate how everything fit together. A logical argument would not work with such a heated and emotional topic. I knew this from experience already. It could not be done when discussing things so near and dear to someone’s heart, soul, and identity. The cognitive dissonance would destroy all reason and turn them into a furious troll.

Still, I focused on obtaining understanding, clarity, and organization of thought for my own sake in case I would ever find a use for it. In the end, I only ended up with a bunch of cards, highlights, and notes that I could go back to on occasion and think, “Oh yeah, that’s a good one!”

In the quiet of my own studying, I felt that I continued to learn quite a bit. Unfortunately, I still lacked anyone to share my learning with. I decided to try to influence people more subtly without offering my heresy and religious infidelity outright. I began holding my own home church within my apartment without exactly calling it church. We saw it as more of a church-like small group which we then labeled “small church.” We had up to about seven or eight people at one point.

We got together to sing, to pray, and to discuss the things of the Bible and our faith in God. I would try my hardest to focus on righteousness—as in doing what is right and improving ourselves—while not dissing the validity of the Bible or the evil behind blood sacrifices. If people mentioned the sacrifice of Jesus, I would try not to nod in agreement but to stare somewhat blankly while not disagreeing at the same time. I wanted to give the impression that such statements were not something to throw around to feel accepted, but I did not want to push them off either. I shared my heretical ideas upfront with my friend Eric, but for everyone else I kept silent. I wanted to push righteousness alone in hopes that they would eventually come to their own conclusions as they benefited from a better life of love.

Jacque, who joined our group only once, threw me off guard when she decided to no longer participate after the very first meeting. The defection came soon after I sent an email for people to contemplate in order to discuss the points during our next gathering. I listed out the main problems I saw with Christianity while focusing, of course, only on the righteousness aspect.

Main problems Within Christianity:

The vast majority of Christians are not seeking righteousness
The vast majority of Christians do not know what righteousness is
The vast majority of Christians do not know the importance of seeking righteousness
The vast majority of Christians do not know the benefits of living righteously
The vast majority of Christians do not believe it is even possible to live righteously
The vast majority of Christians believe that Christianity is a belief in Jesus and "what he did" as opposed to faith in the truth of what Jesus taught to our own and others' benefit
Christianity is widely perceived as a religion or belief in a creator as opposed to a Godly lifestyle in faith of its rewards and the effectiveness of such living
People remain in pain and suffering both physically and emotionally due to the above misconceptions
The knowledge of God which could save us is replaced with something that hurts us and others instead
God's name is completely defiled by all the above
God mourns for his people because of all the above
God is angry with those who continue to propagate all the above
Those who recognize these issues quite often find themselves alone and weary making it much more difficult to press on which further perpetuates the problem

Jacque’s response, edited for readability, clearly demonstrated the truth of these issues perfectly:

Sean, I basically agree. However, I disagree with your underlying supposition that humans are capable of knowing and much less living or pursuing righteousness. I have come to believe that apart from Christ there is no righteousness and no hope of it. It's actually at the moment that we believe we can live or pursue righteousness that I think sin gets its first foothold. Thus, rather than pursuing righteousness, I think the goal should be to pursue the cause of righteousness: Jesus and God. Honestly, apart from this focus I utterly fail to live righteously which, for me, is most of the time. This is the current aim of my journey.

Despite making nearly zero logical sense, I found such a response to be quite common for many Christians which is what prompted my list of issues in the first place. Christians often do not want to focus on righteousness. Instead, they want to focus on thanking Jesus for dying for their sins because they, themselves, could not be righteous. Heaven forbid anyone try to be righteous for they are thus evil and narcissistic for thinking they could be anything but evil. This is literally the mindset of millions of Christians. They believe righteousness comes from accepting a gift of blood sacrifice and they falsely assume that Jesus condemned the Pharisees for thinking they could achieve righteousness. Heaven will be supposedly filled with people who knowingly believe they cannot nor should they attempt to achieve righteousness, and hell is reserved for those who think they can be good people and try to be such. Terrible labels, indeed. Personally, I would much rather be with the people who believe they can and should be good than with the people who do not even try and simply assume their righteousness through someone else’s efforts and some crazed blood sacrifice ritual.

This concept of pursuing God or Jesus as Jacque would rather do, is meaningless in and of itself. My idea of pursuing God is listening for how he would have us live our lives and making righteous decisions. Her idea evidently meant something else. Perhaps she felt that pursuing God meant more along the lines of praying, singing, and feeling happy in God’s supposed presence while giving thanks. I do not see how that is pursuing God, but that seems to be the gist of such people who give up seeking righteousness for seeking God instead.

Jacque very clearly demonstrated the futility of her own position in her response. She believed that sin got a foothold from trying to be good, and yet she very clearly said that she failed most of the time by not trying. She said she fails if she seeks righteousness rather than God, but then immediately followed up by saying she fails most of the time anyway. The typical Christian rhetoric is that we are terrible and evil, and we cannot be any better apart from God’s assumption of our righteousness through Jesus’ blood atonement. We can never be truly righteous of our own accord. But this conflicts with someone saying we ought to try for righteousness which they see as a bad thing. If we are already bad, then how could it be any worse to seek to be good? They simply know it is wrong to seek righteousness and they cannot consolidate that with the fact that they already fail anyway so it could certainly do no harm.

I responded to Jacque in hopes of expressing my position on righteousness more precisely. I would not negotiate when it came to righteousness since I believed it to be the key to the kingdom of heaven and the original gospel Jesus preached. People could believe what they wanted regarding the veracity of the Bible, whether or not Jesus was God, and whether or not his death meant anything more than that people are terrible, but I would not have the message of righteousness reduced to an opinion for our small church. The group must be founded upon the principle of self-improvement and seeking after righteousness. I wrote:

Indeed, we will probably (though I will leave that up to God) not reach perfection such that we never sin again for the rest of our lives. Similarly, Paul's struggle where he does the things he wishes not to do is not one long continuous event for all of life. The choice is always there, but the struggle does not always accompany it. We need to decide with every breath whether we shall be obedient to righteousness or sin. One breath of sin does not remove the opportunity to breathe the next in righteousness. If we walk in the Spirit we will not gratify the desires of the flesh. If we are constantly unrighteous in our walk, then we are constantly not walking in the Spirit of God. This is the main thing that Satan has corrupted to destroy true faith. The world focuses on faith that Jesus is the Christ as opposed to having faith in what Jesus taught in regards to living righteously and how the Kingdom of God operates. We believe that our belief in God counts as our righteousness in the same way that the Pharisees thought that cleaning a cup and performing prayers, rituals, and carrying scripture with them made them righteous.

Pursuing righteousness could never be done on our own any more than pursuing a rose could be done without flowers since God is righteousness. Similarly, claiming the existence of roses and praising flowers for encompassing them by no means constitutes seeking roses nor becoming like one. A word study on righteousness yields some rather non-mainstream concepts of true faith—some spoken by Jesus himself. The Old Testament gives many examples of people considered righteous, but again, this does not equate to perfection. We can seek righteousness, live righteously, and yet still fail on occasion. This does not, however, indicate that we should not pursue righteousness, but rather we should seek it all the more. And as we pursue, and as we grow in Christ, we will become closer and closer to our goal of ultimate righteousness.

I then included many verses which you can find in the Scripture section of this book regarding righteousness. I continued:

There are a lot of other verses (in Romans especially) that I know appear to contradict these verses, but I assure you they do not. Romans is actually attempting to fight this exact same battle but from a different perspective. When he speaks of being justified by faith, one must first define: faith in what? In context of the letter itself as well as in conjunction with other letters that mention things like "Faith without works is dead," it is obvious that they are not referring to a simple faith in the existence of Jesus, but rather in what He preached as demonstrated by action in such teachings. Similarly, works do not encompass doing good and living righteously; they encompass the works of the law such as cleaning cups, holding festivals, and being circumcised. Again, one does not have to reach perfection to be considered righteous any more than our children need to be adults to make some good decisions and reap our praises for it.

Jacque responded:

Sean, thanks for your wealth of knowledge on the subject. Clearly you are an expert. However, your ascetic way of proving your expertise has been offensive to me. I think I will pursue Jesus/God (aka righteousness) in a slightly more grace-filled and loving environment. Basically, I'm afraid I'll be brow beaten when I unintentionally stumble instead of encouraged to accept God's forgiveness and grace then try again. Thanks for letting me join your group a few weeks ago. With Respect, Jacque

Such responses which disregarded the contents of my arguments and focused only on my supposed character were commonplace. Too often could I very precisely explain myself and yet be accused of all kinds of heinous things such as instigating fear of brow-beating or being a Luciferian. In cases like this, I tended to worry that I had said or done something wrong and offensive and would err on the side of my own failures rather than those of the person I am dealing with. After looking up asceticism and learning that it applied to people self-inducing severe discipline such as whipping oneself and the denial of indulgences, I responded hoping to make nice. Experience left me without much hope of reconciliation, however.

Jacque,

I sincerely apologize if that is the manner in which I came off as. I assure you I am no ascetic and I beat no one for their ideals. It sounds as if you have had bad experiences with this in the past. I am not one to create rules and force anyone to obey them. This is just the opposite of living righteously and is very much in line with Pharisees as you mentioned. You will find that I am just the opposite as I am rather opposed to rules. People need to make their own decisions whether right or wrong and we need to allow them to experience whatever consequences come from it while continuing in love toward them. On that note, I am not going to impose what actions you or anyone else should take to be considered righteous in MY eyes because each person is responsible to his own master. Simply seek righteousness and I trust God to reveal what is right and wrong without my enforcement. I certainly do believe what I speak to you is correct, but I in no way intend to force you to agree. If you truly believe just the opposite then it should matter not what I think and you can stand before God unashamed. If we both are seeking truth then we can trust God to correct us over time and in the meantime we should deal with each other in patience and love. In our group there are indeed differences of opinions. We all state our case and we can agree to disagree if necessary. I am more than comfortable doing that in this case as well.

If it is not so much the message that you disagree with, but rather my delivery of it, I apologize for that as well since my writing is generally more rigid than others and, to be honest, I do not know how to correct this. I am perceiving it is more what I write than how I write it, however, that has offended you. The decision is obviously yours if you wish to continue despite our differences given the clarification that I will not beat you :-).

I never heard from Jacque again. Perhaps I was “excommunicated” by yet another acquaintance. After having many such conversations, I began to realize that perhaps the word righteousness did not fully encompass what I personally felt it meant. In the Bible, righteousness really does not hold much meaning on its own. Christians believe themselves to be righteous for their faith and so any verses uplifting righteousness, to most Christians, are merely uplifting faith as opposed to uplifting moral behavior. Yet, when talking about trying to achieve righteousness as a way of life, the meaning is suddenly shifted toward religious works and rites of passage such as circumcision or else it somehow means perfection.

Many Christians love quoting Paul in Romans 3 when he said “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” They use this to indicate our own worthlessness. Then they tend to couple this with Isaiah 64:6 “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” They put together this wonderful display of how terrible humankind is and how innately evil we all are and that we are disgusting in God’s sight which makes it all the more amazing and loving that he died for us. Yet these verses are so far removed from their original context that it makes me wonder if anyone at all even reads their Bibles. In Romans, Paul was actually quoting Psalm 14 where David lamented that everyone had turned from God and he expressed hope that God would restore his people. David did not proclaim for the entirety of the planet and for all time that all people were terrible, evil, and could do no good. He lamented the specific time he lived in because he recognized it as wrong and not as a permanent state that could not be changed.

This is the exact case in Isaiah as well. Isaiah lamented that everyone had turned from doing good and instead resorted to evil. Just before the verses stating that their righteousness was but filthy rags, he very explicitly stated that God rewards good deeds: “You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways.” He continues to express how God did not help them because they chose evil ways instead. They were so evil, in fact, that the greatest good they could muster was still an act of evil—merely filthy rags. Isaiah did not proclaim the state of humanity as a whole; he expressed displeasure in the current state of affairs. And yet, these verses are continually used within Christianity to mean that we as a people are disgusting in God’s sight and we are to take joy that he saved us anyway and loves us despite our grotesqueness. How delightfully repulsive the whole story is.

This idea that we cannot be righteous is mingled with the misconception that the Pharisees were actually trying to be such. Together, it makes an enemy of anyone proclaiming that we ought to be righteous. The average Christian believes that the Pharisees tried to be righteous and this is something we should certainly try to avoid. Rather, we should consider ourselves righteous due to Jesus’ bloody atonement. Anyone trying to proclaim otherwise is clearly under the hand of Satan himself just as the Pharisees. With such false indoctrination, it is too easy to translate “the righteous” into “Christians” rather than understanding that it refers to someone actually behaving in a decent and proper way. Thus, such verses focusing on righteousness are incapable of enlightening anyone to their error.

All my efforts to uplift righteousness led people to assume I wanted to be like the Pharisees or to devoid myself of pleasures as an ascetic and whip myself if I do wrong. They see it as brow-beating or futility rather than something good that we ought to all strive for. We can all use improvement at all times and we should all be cognizant of this fact while trying to better ourselves. It does not matter if we achieve perfection, but we certainly ought to strive for improvement in the areas of kindness, love, patience, and so on—both for the good of others and even of ourselves. Christianity started out with this concept in mind just as Judaism did as evidenced by the admonitions and complaints of the major prophets.

Realizing the meaninglessness of the word, I came to the conclusion that I needed to refer to righteousness in a different way if I wanted any Christian to take me seriously. This misunderstanding of righteousness made me all the more certain that Satan had hijacked Christianity and switched even more labels. Seeking righteousness now meant seeking vanity. I certainly could not sit idly by while Satan ruled Christianity. I had to figure out how to get the message out to the rest of Christendom and restore it to its rightful understanding of listening to God, putting away the traditions of man, and focusing again on sacrificially loving one another.