Obeying The Truth

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am the voice over for a ministry provided to you by Jim

Pugh at God's Government called your daily bread, taken from Christ's teaching of the

Lord's Prayer in Matthew chapter 6 verse 11.

This is a daily devotion ministry focused not only on uplifting Scripture, but Scripture

that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ.

We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly,

advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures.

Today's focus discussion will be on obeying the truth.

If you just pick up the book of Ephesians and read that you might stop and say, well,

why in the world would he contrast drunkenness with being filled with the Spirit?

What is the point here?

When a person is drunk, they have lost control of themselves, and they wander around in

an out of control kind of behavior.

Is he saying, I want you to be out of control, but not by wine, but by the Holy Spirit?

What is he saying here?

I want you to yield up the control of your faculties to the Holy Spirit, rather than to

wine, wine makes such a comparison.

Well the answer is found in a bit of the historical context.

Let me give you a little bit of background.

Ephesus, of course, was in Asian Minor and was dominated by Hellenistic or Greek culture,

called Hellenistic from the Greek word Hellen, which means Gentiles.

But the Greeks believed that the Great God Zeus, they of course had a pantheon of gods,

and Zeus was one of the formidable ones.

They believed that the Great God Zeus had given birth to a son.

And that it has occurred in a very unusual way, and I'll give you a little of the background.

They believed that the child was snatched from the womb of its mother, and the mother's

name in Greek mythology is Semile.

And the child was snatched from the womb of Semile, while Semile was being incinerated

because she got to close to the burning glory of Zeus.

I don't know how Zeus produced this child in her, in the mythology, but in some way,

he did it without destroying her.

But when she sought to get to close to him, she became incinerated, and in order to preserve

the child of Zeus, the child was snatched out of her womb during her incineration.

The child God, who had not yet come to full term, was then sewn into the thigh of Zeus,

and kept there until time to be born.

That stretches your imagination.

So here is Zeus with this fetus, in some point of formation, sewn into his thigh.

The infant God destined by Zeus to be the world ruler was born, eventually out of the thigh

of Zeus, and then kidnapped by the envious Titans.

Titans were called in Greek mythology, Sons of Earth.

They took the child, the Titans did, this child of Zeus tore the child limb from limb

and cooked it and ate it.

Zeus found the heart, according to the mythology revived it, and it was reborn as Dionysius.

Now if you ever study Greek mythology, you come across the name Dionysius quite frequently.

Zeus found the heart, swallowed it, and eventually the heart formed into the personality of Dionysius

and was reborn.

Zeus then blasted the Titans with lightning, incinerating all of them from whom ashes

all of humanity came.

So that is their creation story.

Dionysius was then, really someone beyond humanity, because all of humanity just rose out

of the ashes of the Titans, and Dionysius along with Zeus was a God.

Dionysius then, according to Greek mythology, spawned a religion, a religion of ecstasy,

ecstasia and emotionalism, and the Dionysian cult, this religion of ecstasy and emotionalism,

this frenzied kind of religion saturated the Greek and Roman world.

The Dionysian cult was a deborched form of worship and a popular, a dominant form.

The worshippers committed atrocities with human organs.

They engaged in orgies of sexual perversion, along with music and dancing and feasting.

But there was one common element to all of the Dionysian debacle, and that was drunkenness.

In fact, if you ever circulate in the Middle East or in the ancient Roman world, you will

see Dionysius associated with grapes.

When there is a statue of a tribute to Dionysius, some monument to Dionysius, it is always marked

out by clusters of grapes, because he became known as the God of Wine.

The Greek name of Dionysius became in the Roman language Latin, Bacchus.

And Bacchus is the Roman God of Wine.

When people engaged in these unbelievable drunken brawls, they were called bacchanalian feasts.

And if you have studied any of that, that's a familiar term.

Even today, take your dictionary out and look up bacchanalia, and it will say a drunken

orgy.

The key element then, the key element in pagan worship, was drunkenness.

That's how they got their inhibitions out.

That's how they dealt with their normal restraint.

That's how they dealt with normal feelings of guilt.

That's how they dull their sense sufficiently to quiet their conscious.

That's how they dispelled their anxiety and fear and guilt over such vile behavior as

they engaged in.

That's how they induced a kind of giddiness that substituted for real joy and just catapulted

them into this kind of horrible behavior.

They did it by getting drunk and losing all their inhibitions.

So they believed that drunkenness was simply the door into ecstasy, the door into religious

expression, and that such drunkenness elevated the believer, the worshipper, to total communion

with the deities.

So drunkenness was the key to worship, to communion with the deities.

The more inebriated they were, the more likely they were to get into the ecstasia and in

Thousiasmus, two Greek words, ecstasy and enthusiasm that spoke about these horrifying, often

demonic kind of activities.

A number of years ago when I made a trip to Israel, I had the privilege of taking a special

trek up through Lebanon, up through Beirut, back east of there, in a fascinating journey

to the city of Damascus.

Damascus is pretty deep into the Middle East at this particular point, and when we went

into Damascus, fascinating opportunity on the way to Damascus, we went to the city of

Balbek, which was the easternmost point of the Roman Empire.

The great Roman Empire extended way to the Middle East, east of Israel, and we went to

the city of Balbek, because there are some of the most marvellous ruins that have been

preserved there and restored, and they have some obelisks that are almost impossible to

understand.

They, to understand how they made them and how they moved them, is an ongoing dilemma,

massive, massive pieces of stones.

There also has been reconstructed there an incredible temple, and all across this temple

it was devoted to Jupiter, but all across this temple there are great vines hanging on

the columns, and across the colonnades at the top.

And you are told by the guides who take you through there that this is representative

of Bacchus, that the Romans erected it at the most eastern point of their empire, a temple

to Bacchus, and there they carried on their orgies.

What is fascinating about it, for example, is that in the very centre of this large place

where they did this, there is a decorated area, and then a hole, a deep hole, and that

was in order that the people might vomit in the process and go back and indulge themselves

even more.

An unbelievable kind of conduct in which they believed, and they did it in temples that

they were ascending to communion with the gods.

That's what Paul has in mind.

Now go back to verse 18, it takes on different meaning in the light of that context.

He is saying to them, do not get drunk with wine.

All that does is produce dissipation.

All that does is take you down.

If you want to commune with God, be filled with the spirit.

Our religion is not brought about in its fullness and its richness, and its reality by drunkenness,

but rather by the filling of the spirit.

Don't be filled with alcohol, be filled with the Holy Spirit, literally be being kept

continuously filled by the spirit.

If you want true religion, if you want true communion with God, if you want true worship

to take place, if you want godly living, if you want to please God, then you must be

filled with the spirit.

Not controlled by alcohol, but controlled by the Holy Spirit.

The parallel to this is in Colossians 3.16, wherein saying be filled with the spirit,

Paul says, let the word of Christ dwelling you richly.

Because that's really the same thing.

When the word of Christ dominates your life, and you respond in obedience to it, it's

the same as being controlled by the Holy Spirit, of course, who is the author of Scripture.

Christ to the word is being filled with the spirit.

It's not some kind of mystical experience.

It's not some kind of ecstatic thing.

It's not something that comes over you and catapults you into some unconscious behavior.

It's not being knocked over into a dead faint as you see so often on television.

It's not launching off into some ecstatic speech.

It's not going out of yourself or being beyond control.

It simply is to be continually controlled by the spirit who does it through the word,

and that means we are obeying the truth.

So we have to start at that point.

Thank you for joining us in this exploration of obeying the truth.

Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light

in the world.

To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to GodisGovernment.com.

Goodbye, and may your faith always leave the way.

Thank you for joining us in this exploration of obeying the truth.