King

Yesterday at this time I was watching the memorial service of "the king of pop." There has been an incredible outpouring of grief and love in the wake of Michael Jackson's death, and I have personally come to have a much more positive view of him than I've had probably at any other time in my life. I think Michael was a person with a compassionate heart who did much to relieve suffering wherever he saw it. I also think that among his friends were a number of very vocal believers in Jesus, and I feel certain that he had many chances to hear the Gospel and hope to see him in Heaven one day.

As I was watching the ceremony, a few things impressed me. One was the sight of the coffin... basically a "king" in a box. It's humbling to think that a person who shook the world with his music and dancing and humanitarian work, the person who spawned what might almost be considered a music empire... that person was right there, in a metal box, and would never leave it again. Funerals are always a sobering thing, and this one maybe more than many because of the impact that Michael had on the world.

I was watching the coverage on CNN's Web feed, and along the side of the video was a place where people could post comments via Facebook. One person posted that Michael is "the King of Kings". Presumably that person did not know that saying that is near blasphemy, because "King of Kings" is a title reserved for Jesus Christ (see 1 Timothy 6:13-16, Revelation 17:14, and Revelation 19:16). Michael Jackson was extremely influential, and putting all opinions about his personal life aside, the man made some catchy tunes... and he had the whole world moon-walking! But he wasn't a political leader at all, and I have no idea which "kings" the person considers him "king" of (the king of the king of rap? the king of the king of dancing?) I know the person was expressing appreciation for Michael's accomplishments, but it kind of shows how easily people will appropriate religious imagery, even names of God Himself, when they feel emotionally moved.

Something one of the commentators mentioned stuck with me. She said that the memorial service might possibly be "the most viewed event ever." In this day and age, television signals go around the world, both via satellite/wires/TV signals and Internet streams. There are places in the world where people could view this memorial where they would not have been able to view the funeral of the King of Rock & Roll, or even the funeral of Princess Diana which occurred much more recently. The Internet has basically made it so that people almost literally everywhere can watch an event unfold. It seems like prophecy is on its way to being fulfilled in ways never before possible. Revelation 13:1-4 tells us that in the last days, the person best known as "the Antichrist" (represented in those verses by a "beast") will have a "mortal wound" on "one of its heads," but instead of dying, the "beast" is healed, and "the whole earth marveled as they followed the beast" (emphasis mine). When in history has it been possible for "the whole earth" to experience something at once?

Another incident in the book of Revelation where the whole world participates in an event at one time occurs in Revelation 11:7-13, where two witnesses who are speaking of the true God are killed (by the "beast") in the streets of Jerusalem, and left to lie there for three and one-half days. During that time "some from the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies." The whole world will know what's going on (and presumably the whole world will know it when, at the end of the three and a half days, God raises them both from the dead!) It is only relatively recently in history that the whole world could actually even know about a single event within three days... in the time of John the Revelator it would have taken longer than that to get word of an event from one end of the known world to another.

I hope it doesn't seem like I'm equating Michael Jackson to the Antichrist, because I am absolutely not. Michael was a good guy, and in the wake of all this, I wish I had gotten a chance to know him personally. But the "spirit of antichrist" (which is actually just rebellion against God) is out there now, and the person who will become the Antichrist may well be out there too... the pieces are falling into place. Maybe the event that will one day eclipse the memorial service of the fallen King of Pop will be the memorial service for a world leader who died of a bullet, a blow, or slice to the head, or a brain aneurysm... but then gets up out of his coffin! If you see that day come, I pray that you will turn to Jesus Christ and make Him your Lord; the days that follow that event will be a lot less fun than the days following the funerals of beloved rock stars. Will people call him the "King of Kings" when that happens? Will they believe it when they say it?

Will that day supplant yesterday as "the most viewed event ever?"

Sick

I was reading this article about the legal aspects of faith healing cases and a thought occurred to me. I'll preface this by saying that I believe that God does heal people miraculously when they are prayed for. But I also believe that God has given us tools in nature that allow us to make medicines that relieve suffering and can speed healing, and those tools should be taken advantage of when they are needed. I take a 'prophin when my head hurts. I take Claritin when the pollen counts are high. And when children are involved, parents should always have the common sense to take them to the doctor. Pray for them, yes. Then take them to the doctor unless they immediately lose all sign of the symptoms of their sickness. If you pray for a child and they still are obviously experiencing the sickness, to not take them to a doctor is child abuse, no matter what your religious beliefs are.

The article references James 5:14-15 as a common justification for prayer-without-medicine: "Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven." I fail to see how that passage of Scripture prohibits use of medicine. In actuality, not even medicine truly heals the sick, as any doctor can tell you... the medicine simply helps your body to heal itself. Pray, believe God, and then if you need it, take some medicine. Get a procedure done, get surgery, take a pill or a shot. My pastor just got knee replacement surgery. You can bet that he has been praying, his wife has been praying, and his whole church has been praying for him. It is not a lapse of faith to allow clever medical practicioners to do what they do best in addition to praying in faith. You may just find that after your procedure, God "raises you up" and you recover so quickly that even your doctor is surprised!

The thing that actually came to mind, though, was a parable Jesus told, recorded in Luke 10:25-37. It's a very familiar story... a man gets robbed and beat up, and two religious people see him but refuse to help him. A non-religious person comes along and helps the man, and is commended by Jesus. I don't think there is anyone who would argue that the "Good Samaritan" did anything sinful or wrong in helping the man; again, Jesus basically commended him for his actions. What did he do that was so great?

[The Samaritan] came to where [the injured man] was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.

The Samaritan was commended for administering first aid! He gave the man medical attention! He didn't "pray in faith" and then put the man in the hotel to wait for his miraculous healing... he "poured on oil and wine" (first aid with medicine) and then "took care of him" (additional medical attention).

[Jesus asked the man He was telling the story to,] "Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy." And Jesus said to him, "You go, and do likewise."

Speaking of radio silence...

This week Tulsa lost yet another Christian radio station. Let's review this decade so far, shall we?

2001: a new Christian Rock station turns up in place of an underappreciated and undernoticed pop/rock station. Live 101.5 is on the air for about a year and a half, and then in July of 2002 suddenly Christians all over Tulsa wake to their clock radios unexpectedly playing foul-mouthed hip-hop songs. Thanks for that, Clear Channel. I'll bet those urban beat fans were surprised one day a couple of years later when suddenly they tuned in their station to hear people speaking Spanish! Ha ha, ha!

2003: the same people who run the local Christian pop station, KXOJ, introduce The Kross, a new Christian rock station. Signal isn't that good in certain parts of town, but it gains a lot of popularity... until April of 2007, when, citing lack of advertising revenue, the station is converted to a repeater station for the programming on the mother station. Oh well... at least it wasn't Coolio this time.

2006 - A new competitor in the Christian pop market turns up. Spirit 102.3 plays the same kind of stuff as KXOJ. My family likes Spirit 102.3 better than KXOJ, but sometimes we jump back and forth a little. I have a Spirit 102.3 sticker on my car. Last Monday, suddenly Spirit 102.3 turned into a repeater for a sister station, formerly AM-only talk radio KRMG. So Cox Radio can't see their way clear to keep a Christian station on the air either, huh?

So now we're back where we were at the turn of the millennium... KXOJ or nothing. Well, not quite... we have some Air 1 stations now. They're national stations, so it's not like having a local Christian rock presence, but at least it's something. And if you're really desperate, there's that Southern Gospel station with the preachers during the day. :)

R.I.P, Spirit 102.3 and The Kross and Live 101.5 . You were on our station presets when you were with us. We hope now you're in a better place!

Breaking Radio Silence

It's been a while since I've posted... reason being, I haven't "felt like it." And it's been over a month since I've made a real post to my family blog... the one where I post about family events and stuff like that. Things like birthdays (my daughter's was five weeks ago, and my dad's was last weekend) and Christmas (it was... well, you know when it was). I've actually posted here once since I've posted there, and written about half of another post for this blog that I haven't completed yet.

I haven't "felt like" posting because, frankly, I haven't had the time to catch up on rest. Ever have a time when you feel like you haven't had a full night's sleep EVER, much less recently, and caffeine is the only thing that keeps you from falling asleep whenever you sit down? That's me right now. Part of it is probably still some post-holidays slow-down, too... you run and run, and then in January there's nowhere you need to run and you have to get back to paying your bills and the regular mundane stuff. It can be a rather uncomfortable shift of gears. Today it's 8am and I'm drinking Coca-cola, which I do not normally do this early in the day, but hopefully it will help me keep alert until lunchtime.

Feeling like this starts affecting you emotionally, too. You start wondering about things, second-guessing yourself. Did I make a mistake with the car I'm driving, with the job I'm working at, with the town I live in, with what I ate for breakfast? With my house? With my church? Should I change any of those? Those are things I would probably never question when I was my non-tired self, but at the moment some of them seem like valid questions. And I don't like to air my muddled questioning thoughts before just anyone on the Internet! (Plus, it's kind of hard to keep a thought going long enough to even complete a... hey look, a butterfly!)

But you know what? If this blog is "Christian Life With Michael" then it should be representative of the real life of a real human being Christian, and doubting yourself is sometimes part of that. So I thought I really should share a little bit of my life with you today. I know once I get a good 8-10 hours of uninterrupted sleep (hey, it could happen!) those thoughts will evaporate... I know good and well that they are magnified by what my body is feeling. Until then, maybe say a quick prayer for my weak body to become strengthened. Next time hopefully I'll have some complex profound truth from the Word to talk about. For now, staying awake is about as profound as it gets!

All Through The Year

This morning I came in early and was taking down the Christmas tree in my office, and I got to thinking about something. I remembered a song by Christian artist Terry Taylor (the evil genius behind Daniel Amos, The Swirling Eddies, and one of the evil geniuses behind The Lost Dogs) about holding on to "the season's inspiration" and letting the birth of Jesus stay part of your life 12 months out of the year and not just one. There are tons of CCM Christmas songs along those same lines. Then I realized that there are tons of non-CCM songs out there with similar themes:

Keep Christmas with you all through the year;
When Christmas is over, save some Christmas cheer.
These precious moments, hold them very dear
And keep Christmas with you
All through the year.

Okay, so that one's the Muppets, but you get my drift.

What is it about Christmas that seems to make people want to hold onto it, but they never do... so the next year there is melancholy about the Christmas they left behind and a new resolve to "hold on" to it this time?

Is it time with family?

Is it the "spirit of giving?"

Is it the chance to see Pac-Man save Santa just one more time?

Is it that we just love "Up On The Housetop" so much?

Is it Jesus?

...

(If it's Jesus, how come people who don't believe in Jesus often feel the same way?)

...?

Fearless

Last night on the news we saw a story about a young man who had just become a Christian. He was so excited about it that he started telling all of his friends. Apparently he told one of them about it one too many times; the guy was found shot to death at an apartment complex.

So my 8-year-old son was there listening to the story and I wanted to see what he thought; you have to make sure your kids aren't scared by something like that. So I asked Mikey, "What do you think of that? Is that scary, that a guy got killed for telling someone about Jesus?"

Mikey didn't hesitate, and he didn't blink an eye. With total honesty, in answer to the question "Are you scared about that?" he told me, "No, not if it's the Word of God!"

Lord, please teach me to be as fearless as Mikey!

Do Angels Sing?

A few days ago I was at choir rehearsal, practicing for the Christmas production coming up in a few weeks, and someone told me that there is nowhere in the Bible that it says that angels sing, despite Christmas carols misrepresenting this passage (which, you will notice, says the angels were praising God and saying, not singing). I immediately thought of a passage I recently read in Revelation which I knew had an awful lot of praising in it, but as it turns out, in my ESV it only mentions singing one time, although they do a lot of "saying" in that passage.

So who is singing? Well, it's "the 24 elders" who sit around God's throne, and four "living creatures." Apparently there are folks who believe the 24 elders are angels, but I don't really buy that... if they were angels, how could there be "elders"? I've never heard anything that would lead me to believe that any angels are older than any others. On the other hand, what about those creatures? The description of them in Revelation resembles descriptions in Isaiah (who specifies that he is describing seraphim, a kind of angel) and Ezekiel (who also calls them "living creatures"), but neither of those prophets exactly describes the creatures as John describes them in Revelation, so I'm not sure we can consider them seraphim, or even angels at all. It could be argued that they actually are just some very unusual creatures that live in Heaven!

So that's no good, so I asked the almighty Google for answers. Here are some scriptures that people use as proof that angels sing:

Job 38:4-7 - assuming the "sons of God" are angels, which I think is iffy given this.

Jeremiah 51:48 - assuming that angels are either in the heavens or on Earth, which seems like a fairly good bet to me.

Isaiah 49:13 also mentions "the heavens" singing.

I would consider all of these good college tries at it, but I can't see any of them as being conclusive. So are angels melodious, or tone-deaf? The Bible doesn't seem to care enough to clear it up for us. I guess we'll just have to wait and see! And while we're waiting, there are plenty of places where it encourages us to sing our praises to God!