Baby Kissers, Enemies, and a Time for War
Better is open rebuke
Than love that is concealed. Proverbs 27:5
This is another hard verse. This one you can read many times, I believe, and never totally really understand it. You can definitely read it many times and never never like it. I don’t believe anybody who says they like this verse. I do not like this verse, but it is not about what we like. You see, our society has been reduced down to the church signs that I saw when I was growing up as a kid. The signs used to say: Go to the church of your choice. That is already wrong. You don’t go to the church of your choice because that means it is the church you like. You don’t come to Dove World Outreach Center in the first place because you like it. You might end up liking it. But you should go because you think God has called you to come here. Because sooner or later you are not going to like it. Sooner or later you may like it, but don’t go to the church of your choice. Hopefully God has brought you here, and if God has brought you here then stay.
Better...you would think if God starts a verse with better, it would be a good verse. Better is the ice cream on the cake. Better is the extra cheese on the pizza. Better is the brownie with the broccoli. Better always makes you think something better is going to come. But “Better is open rebuke…” ? That is one mean God. That means someone rebukes you openly, not even privately, not even nice, not even: call you in to the office and speak nice to you and smile real big. You know if someone calls you in to the office and is real nice to you, they are just building up for the kill. You know something is coming. That is usually the good way to do it. That is usually the correct way, the wise way. But it says here, open rebuke! Right here in front of everybody I just rip you apart and I would be scriptural.
That is one weird verse, but it is still in the Bible. Not better for your feelings, obviously not. Not better at that moment. At that moment it must be very embarrassing, it must make you very angry, it must make you say, “Why did you do that? Why now? Why here? Why like that? Couldn’t you have done this? Couldn’t you have done that?” But somehow it is better for you. One thing it does do, it changes something. It either makes you mad, bitter, and you leave. Or maybe it shakes you, some kind of reality hits you. Maybe after you are done being mad and angry and throwing a fit, and saying, “I am never going to come back here again,” you think about it. You go, “Well, maybe it’s right. Maybe I need to do that. Maybe I need to stop that. Maybe I need to think about that”
Faithful are the wounds of a friend, But deceitful are the kisses of an enemy. Proverbs 27:6
Not that we have to go around cutting one another up. That is not the object of Christianity either, but it is in the Bible. A wound does, of course, not feel good. If you get wounded, you get shot, what is always associated with wounds? Blood and pain. In other words, somebody has cut you deep enough, hit you hard enough, shot you good enough to make you bleed. And to cause pain. You cannot have a wound without pain. The Bible says here that the pain, the blood, the hurt from a sincere friend is batter than many kisses from an enemy.
Don’t trust the baby kissers, those smiling politicians who are charismatic and can talk and tell you what you want to hear. They are all Absoloms. Absolom runs out to meet David, kisses him and says, “Oh my king,” and the very next chance he gets, he betrays him. Don’t trust those people. If we could ever get a politician who would tell the truth, but we won’t because we would not vote for him, yeah, that’s a person we could trust. A person we could trust who would tell us, “No, actually we cannot afford to do that. No, that policy costs us too much money. No, I cannot add anymore jobs. We have to cut jobs, cut our cost. No, I can’t give anymore welfare, because we are already giving enough. No, we can’t do it anymore. No, we’ve got to do something different. We’ve got to get some jobs, create some jobs. You’ve got to work. You’ve got to do something.”
Ha, you ain’t never gonna to get elected like that. Of course that would be, actually, the truth. That would be the truth, because not even the government can keep going in a hole for these people.
A time to love and a time to hate;
A time for war and a time for peace. Ecclesiastes 3:8
This is a good one. This is another one of those smorgasbord, pick and choose verses. The church has taken two of them and has forgotten the other two. They took the first part and the last part: There is a time for love and a time for peace. Those are the two things they use against us: love and peace. God loves everybody and you are a church of hate. You preach hate, you do hate, you are hate. You are not peace, you are not promoting peace.
Jesus did not promote peace. You don’t kill someone who promotes peace. I don’t know. I don’t know if winning the Nobel Peace Prize is a good thing after all. Basically it just says, “I did nothing. I didn’t defend anybody. I didn’t make anybody mad. I walked right down the middle of the road. I didn’t disturb anything. I didn’t shake up anything. And now I’ve got me a peace prize!”
There is a time for love. That is right. The highest form of love is truth. It is always good to say the truth nicely. It just most of the time works better. But the truth is still truth. The church is to tell you the truth. You see, if you are a lazy person, you have a bad attitude, the church should tell you. They should smile, but they should still tell you so you have a chance to change - that’s love. That says you really care. If you don’t really care, just let them go.
Time to love and a time to hate. That’s what the Bible says. We should hate. Then again, the Moslems, they’ve got that down. They hate. They hate, of course , the wrong thing and the wrong people, but we should hate. We should of course not hate one another. Hate people, but we should hate. We should definitely hate the Devil. We should definitely hate what he does. We should hate that he has deceived so many people into believing so much weird, weird stuff. You people are at the top of that list believing weird things.
A time for war. One thing about war, it is probably never good but sometimes absolutely necessary. Innocent people die, bad things happen, mistakes are made - not a good thing. But sometimes it is just the only way, the only way to stop it. It should not be, but because of laziness, because of apathy, it is just too late and nothing else can be done but that. Our recent history proves that. Germany, the Nazis, could only be stopped by war. Probably not before. If something had been done at the beginning, if somebody would have stepped in, if that is even possible in the affairs of another country. But it reached a point where it was simply too late, where it had gone too far. That is probably what will happen in Islam. It has probably gone too far that the only way it will be stopped is a type of civil war. It is just out of control.
And I am sorry, but with some people you cannot dialogue. Some people do not understand sitting down, talking, making a decision. Some people do not think like westerners do, sometimes it just does not work. History has made that clear to us. Time for war and a time for peace.
For us, peace is many things. Right now we have peace. No one is hollering and screaming. Nobody is going to shoot you, although they have threatened to kill us because of our stand, but as of right now everything is pretty secure. That is a good peace, worth living for, dying for, worth investing in. But there is a greater peace, especially for us as Christians, and that is knowing - not even succeeding or failing, but the peace of knowing and doing what God has called us to do. No matter how hard it is, no matter how easy it is, no matter how many hours it takes, no matter how many things actually work, or how many things actually don’t work. We are doing what God has called us to do. But sooner or later, when we die, we will have that assurance. We did not waste our life. We did not sit in the lounge chair. We did not have a wasted life and end up at the end of our life absolutely meaningless. We have done nothing, we have influenced nobody. We cannot end up like that. You cannot end up like that.
