Monday, January 08, 2007

I began this post on Monday and am publishing it on Saturday, thus the date is wrong on the top.

What a week from hell! I had a lot to say, no time to say it. I'm going to try to catch up tonight while I root for the Eagles!

It's kind of ironic that seconds after my post on Monday evening regarding minimum wage I received the following excerpt from Sojourners:

Dear Jason,

"... my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain...” --Isaiah 65:22-23

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote on Wednesday, January 10, on a bill to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 over two years. This bill is consistent with our Covenant for a New America and its focus on making work "work" for individuals and families. A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in it.

It went on to urge us to call so and so and say this and that, it's fine, it's what I expect from this organization, and I have no problem with their right to email me and ask for my support, even though I abhor the mixing of politics and religion in such a way that Sojourners exhibits.

However, what caught me right away was their use of the Isaiah Scripture to promote their agenda. Do they think we are that stupid? Are there that many out there that have absolutely no biblical concern for proper exegesis and interpretation that they think they can just throw out any Scripture and draw people in? It makes me sick, I knew right away without even looking that this text had nothing to do with the topic, but to be sure I double-checked and sure enough, it is clearly an eschatological Scripture in a section entitled "New Heaven and New Earth." One day, this will come true, until then, unfortunately, we do have to toil and labor, in vain, we don't always reap what we sow in the physical sense. It's part of the curse. I just get enraged that our church culture has become so dumbed down that we will accept anything that tickles our ears without being a solid Berean and searching Scriptures to see if what we are hearing is true.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amen! And to answer your question, yes, they do think we are that stupid.

You know why? Because most people who claim to be Christians ARE that stupid and ARE that Biblically illiterate and ARE lost in a persoanl quagmire of experiential reasoning and moral relativity. They are easy to deceive.

Also, I would imagine that the majority of people who support Sojo's and receive their material have absolutely no problem reading their own traditions into the Biblical text. They have no problem starting with a belief that a minimum wage is moral and economically sound (neither of which is true BTW) and only THEN go to the Bible and seek verses that would seem to support their already held belief. Sad.

7:32 AM
edluv said...

i find that many Xian groups engage in this sort of activity, so i'm not all that surprised when i see it happen. but, sometimes i am surprised by how out of context the material can be. i wish i could remember the exact references, but when i was @ the ccda conference in 2005 i remember some of the speakers just throwing out crazy references that were so far away from the intention of the text.

sometimes i think of it as turning bits of the bible into soundbytes, or maxims. we create a matrix of sayings to illustrate our worldview.

5:30 PM

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