WHAT WESTERN ELITES DON’T UNDERSTAND ABOUT MARY’S BOY-CHILD & THE COMMANDER OF THE ARMY OF THE LORD

In a few weeks we will once again celebrate the incarnation of Mary’s boy-child. Mark Lowry’s famous 1984 song, Mary Did You Know imaginatively asks Mary whether she knew who it really was who she had given birth to?

Did you know that your baby boy
Has walked where angels trod?
When you kissed your little baby
You’ve kissed the face of God

Did you know that your baby boy
Has come to make you new?
This child that you’ve delivered
Will soon deliver you

Mary, did you know that your baby boy
Will give sight to a blind man?
Mary, did you know that your baby boy
Will calm a storm with His hand?
Mary, did you know?

Mary, did you know
That your baby boy
Is Lord of creation
Mary, did you know that your baby boy
Will one day rule the nations?

Did you know that your baby boy
Is Heaven’s perfect Lamb?
This sleeping child you’re holding
Is the great ‘I Am’
Mary did you know?

It’s a beautiful song that was set to the music composed by musical genius, Buddy Greene, in 1991. Mark Lowry contemplated what it would have been like to have asked Mary—after her son had returned to His Father—whether she had realised what He was going to do after He was born? The song invites listeners to join in the contemplation of these questions Lowry asks. But some fussy theologians think that the questions in the song are unnecessary because both Mary and Joseph were told by angelic messengers who it was who Mary would give birth to (Matt. 1:20; Luke 1:31-35). However, I think Mark Lowry’s song is more profound than many realise because if the same questions were reposed to many people today – 

• Do you know why Jesus really died?

• Do you know that Jesus performed many public miracles in front of hundreds of eye-witnesses?

• Do you know that Jesus took all that was wrong with the world and began to set it on a path to complete restoration?

• Do you know that Jesus had all of the sins of his mother, and the world placed on Him, and bore the divine wrath of punishment in our stead that we could all be given the opportunity to accept God’s forgiveness?
  

• Do you know that Jesus was the eternal Son of God who created all of Heaven’s angels?

• Do you know that when Jesus was a newborn baby He was the One who was holding the fabric of the entire universe together by the power resident within Him?

• Do you know that the baby born to then virgin Mary was the very God who had created her?

I fear that the answer to most of these reposed questions would be: No. And I particularly suspect that the largest segment of the population that would be unaware of who Mary’s baby-boy really was would be Western cultural elites. My suspicion is reinforced by how I have observed this group respond to the current events in Israel-Gaza.

 

WHO ARE THESE WESTERN SECULAR CULTURAL ELITES ANYWAY?

I was listening to a discussion between Shane Morris, from the Colson Centre, and Rev. David Pileggi, the rector of Christ Church Jerusalem, on the Upstream podcast where David Pileggi stated:

“Probably at its heart there is a religious underpinning that most secular people in the West don’t understand because many Westerners, especially Western elites, can’t take religion seriously. And so, they focus on land, or refugees, or human rights, etc., etc. And I don’t want to deny that any of these are important, especially to the Palestinians. But there’s something a lot deeper that’s going on.”

Fr. Pileggi has served as the pastor of this church in Jerusalem for over thirty years. He clearly loves the Palestinians and the Jewish people among who he ministers. But his critique of how Western secular cultural elites: politicians, academics, media personalities and journalists, and performing artists is worth considering and learning from. Political leaders have generally responded to the situation in Gaza as if it were a political problem about territory. But as Pileggi states, this political focus on land completely misses the point. Academics, inexperienced-journalists and celebrities who view and present the conflict in Gaza as an oppressor/oppressed human rights issue also fail to recognise what is actually happening. This is almost entirely because these various Western cultural leaders have a bias against religion. They assume that atheism is a neutral and unbiased position. They regard the religious as irrational unenlightened and superstitious. Thus they often dramatically fall short of understanding the importance of religion in society – especially when it comes to the situation in the Middle East. This leads them to fail to distinguish between Palestinians and the Islamist Jihadi group Hamas – and in so doing are blinded to the sinister agenda hiding in plain sight. This failure inevitably leads them to naively and incorrectly assume that Israel’s fight is actually against Palestinians per se.

The social pressure that these cultural elites exercise through their various platforms – including news casts, classroom, lecture halls, ARIA awards nights, and Tik Tok – is particularly targeted at the young who have slowly but surely been undergoing a subtle conditioning to be taught what to think but not how to think. And this brings us back to Mary’s Boy-Child.

 

WHO THEN WAS THIS MARY’S BOY-CHILD ANYWAY?

Mark Lowry is normally comedic. But his now classic Christmas song is no joke! It presents baby Jesus as the eternal God the Son, the creator of heaven and earth, the Saviour of the world, the Redeemer of all humankind who turn to Him, the all-conquering Lamb of God, and the Great Judge of all people, the I AM. The event of His miraculous conception is known as the incarnation (God becoming human). But the incarnation was not Jesus the Christ’s first entrance into our world. In fact, it is as though He felt a divine right to enter our world any time He chose. These various appearances of Jesus prior to His incarnation are referred to as theophanies (appearances of God) or more particularly as Christophanies (appearances of God the Son). I want to highlight one of these in particular.

Joshua, the successor to Moses, was about to lead the second generation of Israelites who had come out of the Egyptian exodus into the Promised Land. He is then confronted by a rather terrifying military commander before Whom he bows in worship (something that Israelites were only allowed to do toward YHWH, the GOD). Because of the presence of the pre-incarnate Christ, the very ground that He and Joshua were on had become holy (this is what actually makes a land holy) Joshua was compelled to acknowledge the he was the presence of God).

¶ When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold,
a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand.
And Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?”
And he said, “No; but I am the Commander of the Army of the LORD. Now I have come.”
And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped and said to him,
“What does my lord say to his servant?”
And the commander of the LORD’S army said to Joshua,
“Take off your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.”
And Joshua did so.
Joshua 5:13-15

The presence of the Commander of the Army of the Lord gave Joshua the confidence that the Lord would be with him as he led the Israelites into battle to take possession of their land. Mary’s boy-child was more, much more than just a newborn baby. He was the Commander of the Army of the Lord. The relevance of pointing this out that Jesus was not just the Saviour, He was also the divine royal military commander who revealed Himself to Joshua that He was not just for Israel, He was for all people. Indeed, the most famous verse in the New Testament, John 3:16, is a statement underscoring God’s love for all people. So is God for the Palestinians and against the Israelites? The revelation of Christ as the Commander of the Army of the Lord reveals that God is available to all people – no matter what their ethnicity or their religious upbringing. David Pileggi states –

Being pro-Palestinian also means you don’t romanticize the Palestinian people. You see them honestly for their good points and their bad points, for their weaknesses, for their strengths. And the same goes for Israel, right? Our relationship with the Jewish people, it’s not based on certain romanticism or biblical fundamentalism.
… And by the way, neither should the basis of our support for Israel be some kind of Islamophobia or dislike of Arabs, whatever that may be.
… We look at Israel, we can see the good parts of the society and we can also see, you know, where the society is weak and perhaps fails ethically or morally.

 

THE WAY WESTERN CULTURAL ELITES IGNORE THE TRUE IDENTITY OF JESUS IS WHY THEY ALSO CAN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S HAPPENING IN GAZA

In Christopher Watkin’s award-winning 2023 Book of the Year, Biblical Critical Theory, he shows how secularists who reject God and dismiss all religions as basically the same, and as nonsense, actually owed their free-thinking to the very thing they opposed: Christianity. Tom Holland, in his epic book, Dominion – The Making of the Western World, makes a similar point – that it was Christianity which gave birth to secularism and its values – human rights, care for the vulnerable, respect for women and children, the rule of Law, the scientific method, democratic government, and religious plurality. 

When secularists turned their attention to Christianity, they challenged the authority of the Bible, the scientific claims of the Bible, the evidence for the existence of God, the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, and the cultural contribution of early Christians. The response of Christians gave rise to the modern apologetics movement within Christianity. What this reaction was not was a violent military reaction. Authentic Christianity has never used violence to defend Christian beliefs (despite what some have claimed about the medieval crusades). But the same cannot be said of all religions. And this goes to the heart of why there is the Gaza conflict.  

 

WHY WOULD MEEK AND MILD JESUS ALSO BE A MILITARY COMMANDER? 

In a remarkable twist, the closing book of the Bible, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, for the first nineteen and half chapters of its twenty-two chapters, Jesus is almost entirely depicted as the Lamb. The particular Greek word used in this final biblical book for “lamb” is the word arnion which means little lamb. In other words, the lamb described in the Book of Revelation is depicted as the weakest and the most defenceless of almost any creature. Yet, from Revelation 19 verse 11, our view of the Lamb of God suddenly and dramatically comes into view as we are shown what was always there in plain sight – that what we were looking at all along was never just an arnion, but was in fact the Almighty Commander of the Armies of Heaven! We are now given a glimpse – a revelation – of who Jesus really was, and still is:     

¶ Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The One sitting on it is called Faithful and True,
and in righteousness He judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire,
and on His head are many diadems, and He has a name written that no one knows but Himself.
He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which He is called is The Word of God.
And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following Him on white horses.
From His mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations,
and He will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.
On His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.
Revelation 19:11-16

But what kind of military campaign is the Commander of Heaven’s Armies waging? A physical and bloody violent war against infidels with cutlasses, bullets, and bombs? Absolutely not. The war that Christ leads His followers into is a spiritual battle whereby hearts are conquered by the love and grace of God through the gospel! The apostle Paul describes these soldiers of Christ being armed with the helmet of salvation, the shield of faith, the sword of the Word of God in their hands, the breastplate of righteousness that comes as a gift from Christ, with the belt of truth around their waist, and their feet shod with the preparation of the gospel message! This is starkly different how some other religions attempt to advance or defend their causes through the use of subjugation, suicide-bombers, and terrorism. Make no mistake about it, Mary’s boy-child is out to win this war for the hearts, minds, and souls of all Palestinians, Muslims, Jews, and Israelites through the gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit!  And until Western cultural elites can see past their anti-religious biases and come to realise that this is the only way this devastating war of bombs and missiles being waged in Gaza can come to a peaceful end, the better off we and the whole world will be.

You know, people tell me, “Well, what’s the answer to this Middle East problem?”
The answer is Jesus. Right? Jesus is the answer.
And I think one of the things that we’ve learned over the years
[is] that saying you believe in Jesus,
saying you admire Jesus, doesn’t get you very far.
… If there’s going to be transformation in the lives of a community,
or transformation in a family or a society,
[we] have to put the teachings of Jesus into practice.
Fr. David Pileggi

And the teaching of Jesus doesn’t end with the Great Commission, but for many, it is where it begins.

Your Pastor,

Andrew

Let me know what you think below in the comment section and feel free to share this someone who might benefit from this Pastor’s Desk.

YOU HAVE HEARD THAT IT WAS SAID

THE HISTORY OF REFRESH

Kim and I arrived in Tasmania in 1995. We arrived unknown, uninvited and for many – unwanted. Having recently resigned from our church in Melbourne after sensing God’s calling us to finish up there, we arrived here a little uncertain of what our future held for us, except that we knew God had called us here. Within a week of arriving I was invited to become the pastor of Legana Assembly of God and was appointed in September. This was a church of 17 members with around 40 in attendance on an average Sunday. So when most of the congregation advised me that they weren’t going to be around for the coming Easter, because they were going to their ‘shacks’, I was facing the pastoral nightmare of having no-one turn up for what is the most important event on the Christian calendar and one of the two most likely dates on the church calendar when non-Christians are most likely to accept an invitation to attend church. This is why I devised a counter-Easter program to attract an appropriate crowd to honour Christ. This counter-Easter initiative became our annual Easter Refresh Convention.

Commit your work to the LORD,
and your plans will be established.
Proverbs 16:3

THE PRE-CURSER TO REFRESH

Easter 1996 was held in our own building. We had no electricity, no carpet, no toilets, no water, and no car-park. It would be another 4 months after this event, on Saturday August 31st, when we would actually open our building. We borrowed electricity from a neighbour. We hired in some portable toilets. Our first Easter guest speaker was someone named, Maddog. We had 750 people attend over the course of 5 days. Each year since then, we have fought hard to keep Easter in its rightful place in the Christian and Cultural calendar. Our guest speakers have included Mike Berry from Annapolis, Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson, Stand To Reason’s Greg Koukl, former Superintendent of the Assemblies of God, Andrew Evans, Reasons To Believe’s Kenneth Samples, Dr. Fazale Rana, and Dr Hugh Ross.

Every Easter we have strived to bolster the faith of believers by helping thinkers to believe and believers to think. We have reached out to those who might never have any interaction with Christians any other time year apart from attending our Easter Refresh meetings. On one occasion this involved six of the twelve Tasmanian senators, members of the state and federal parliaments, and local mayors. Over the years we held these meetings as dinners at York Park and breakfasts at the Tailrace Centre. Our Good Friday evening outreaches were, for three years, held in the Albert Hall, with around 990 attending the Hugh Ross meeting.

A COLLECTIVE EASTER WITNESS

One of the reasons I have strongly urged our church family to give the Easter long-weekend to God rather than simply treating it as an opportunity to go camping is that when we come together as the church to commemorate the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ togetherwe provide the world with a collective and attractive witness. Despite the rampant secularisation of society, the world still expects Christians to treat the Easter season as sacred occasion for the Church gather. Just as when we gather together over Easter it amplifies our witness, when we don’t, it potentially injures it. Little wonder then, that a few years ago, one of the most secular of our State politicians, when discussing the place of Easter, declared in Parliament that “Christianity was no longer relevant”. In a personal conversation with our State Governor, Prof. Kate Warner, I made mention of our new church auditorium. She expressed surprise that a church could be growing in this day and age. (I often meet this kind of response from secular political leaders who each make it clear that they consider Christianity to be irrelevant to our State as was made abundantly evident in the recent proceedings in our Legislative Council!)

 if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.
First Timothy 3:15

Dr. Jeff Zweerink, speaking at our Good Friday evening event 2016

EVANGELISTIC, PROPHETIC, APOLOGETIC

And Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by Me.”
Matthew 11:4-6

Our first few Easters were largely evangelistic. Evangelism does two powerful things. It articulates the Christian message to those who have never heard it before in a way that helps them to see their need for a Saviour from the eternal peril that awaits them and their immediate brokenness that currently afflicts them and to see that Jesus the Christ is that Saviour and the Healer for their soul. Secondly, it reminds believers of that which we all too readily forget: the gospel. We need to be reminded that Christ came, ministered, died, and rose from the dead, to redeem people and make the way for people to enter in the bliss of having their sins forgiven, their orphaned lives adopted by the King of kings, their brokenness healed, and their paradisical eternities secured.

Whenever the church lapses into apathy about its responsibility to evangelise the wayward, or uphold the Lordship of Christ in every arena of society, God raises up prophetic ministries to heal this breach. This is why, for a number of years, we had guest speakers who were prophetic. For those of us who were in attendance at the Easter Dinner where several politicians had our visiting American prophetic ministry prophesy over them, to then witness over the coming months the fulfilment of those prophecies (one of them even published a book in which he referred to how significant this moment was in his life) it will be very hard to forget what we heard and saw. There remains one outstanding prophecy to be fulfilled from that night. The prophetic ministry at these Easter Refresh meetings achieved the goal of strengthening the faith of believers and bolstering our confidence in the God Who Speaks.

But sometimes, before evangelism can begin to be effective, the obstacles to surrendering to the Saviour need to be removed. This seems to be one of the points in Christ’s parable of the sower. In 2010, our guest speaker, Kenneth Samples, was from Reasons To Believe. He showed the compatibility between faith in Christ and logical thinking. Two years later, we host Dr. Fazale Rana, also from RTB. Then in 2014, we hosted Dr. Hugh Ross. As a result of Dr. Ross’s visit, many thinkers came to faith in Christ over the ensuing months. Two years after this, we hosted our third RTB speaker, Dr. Jeff Zweerink, an astrophysicist who presented scientifically credible reasons for faith in the God of the Bible.

I hope by now you can see that over the past 23 years or so, the annual Refresh Easter Convention has set about to refresh believers’ confidence in the God of the Bible and to refresh people’s understanding of what it means to be a Christian. This past Refresh convention also sought to respond to the urgent challenge that Christianity is facing in the public square and to address those who have only ever had Christianity misrepresented to them. It featured two speakers, and here’s what they said.

APOLOGETICS IS NOT SAYING SORRY

At our Annual Influencers’ Breakfast, where a hundred guests gathered, including political leaders, business people, and community leaders, we heard one of our keynote speakers share why Christianity was unique and how the teaching of Jesus Christ differed markedly from that of Islam’s founder, Muhammad. For example:

Teaching	Mohammad	Jesus the Christ
Use of swords	Used swords and commanded their use for those who opposed Islam (Q. 22:25; 47:4)	Taught that swords should be put away and not used (Matt. 26:52).
treatment of enemies	Should be put to death (Q. 8:39)	Should be loved (Matt. 5:44)
blindness	Ordered people to be blinded (Hadith 520)	Healed blindness and opened the eyes of the blind
lameness	Ordered people to be made lame (Hadith 520)	Jesus healed those who were lame (Matt. 9)
withered hands	Cut people’s hands off (Q. 5:38)	Jesus healed withered hands (Matt. 12:10-13)
adulterers	Adulterers were hit, whipped, and stoned (Q. 24:2)	Jesus forgave the woman caught in the act of adultery (John 8:7)
the dead	Killed the living (Hadith 369)	Jesus raised the dead (John 11:1-45)
responding to opponents	Ordered his opponents to be killed (Hadith 248)	Jesus excused His opponents (Lk. 23:34)
rape	Encouraged his men to rape enslaved women (Q. 4:24)	Never encouraged rape. Never encouraged enslavement.

We heard that today there are people who have spoken out against the inconsistencies, factual errors, and human rights abuses of Islam based on the example and teaching of Muhammad, and have since been convicted in the European Court of Human Rights for defamation for doing so. For example, an Austrian woman, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was found guilty of human rights violations and fined $600 after stating in a private seminar that the founder of Islam, when in his 50s, married Aisha, a 6 year old girl at the time, which he then consummated three years later, had committed, what is considered today, to be a serious crime by Western standards. 

At our Maundy Thursday dinner, we heard from both our speakers as I interviewed them. Samuel Green told us that shortly after his conversion to Christ, while a university chemistry student in Sydney, he encountered Muslims who were particularly opposed to Christianity. In reading the Qur’an he discovered why. Samuel went on to learn Arabic and study Islam and has for the past few years been debating and challenging Muslims about the claims of Islam in very public settings. He shared why this was so important since Muslims have a misrepresentation of Christianity, and Christians generally do not know what Muslims believe or how different Biblical Christianity is from Islam. 

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,
First Corinthians 15:3

On Good Friday, Samuel shared “Jesus, Islam, and The Gospel” showing how the teaching of Jesus offered the means for the forgiveness of sins and salvation with God, and how this differed markedly from Islam. In our Good Friday evening service, Samuel demonstrated that, unlike what Islam taught, Jesus Christ clearly claimed to be God, the co-equal and co-eternal, divine Son of God. In between our Refresh meetings we had a team of children’s workers reaching out to hundreds of children and families in City Park.

On Easter Sunday we heard that resurrection of the Christ demonstrated Jesus’ claim to divinity and that on the day of Pentecost recorded in Acts 2, Peter announced that the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus was prophesied in the Old Testament as the only means salvation for mankind. Our Easter convention culminated with our keynote speaker sharing stories of how many muslims around the world have been coming to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour. What was particularly pleasing, and something which most who attended were unaware of, was that there were a number of Muslims present in our first service who returned in our evening service and were very attentive to what was shared.

If I haven’t done so already, I want to thank everyone who worked so hard to make this Easter so successful. Many many people worked tirelessly to make everything happen. Some of them were noticed but most weren’t. I especially want to thank each one who did give their Easter to God and helped our church to be an attractive witness this Easter. Your faithfulness deeply touched me. Thank you. Long after I’ve gone I hope that our church will still bear a bright witness each Easter which will puzzle political leaders and cause them to wonder. And I hope that the seed which we have been sowing over these past 23 years will bear much fruit by a future generation of Christ followers.

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.
Galatians 6:9

Pastor Andrew.