February 2026 – Perspectives

What are we to think

Posted on 10th February, 202610th February, 2026
by Martin Scott
Posted in Personal Perspectives

I am currently reading a whole bunch of chapters about Solomon, ever so wise, Mr. Temple builder etc. Now in what I write he is a whole lot wiser than me… however, how are we meant to read some of the stuff? How many wives? And how many palaces? And how many foreign gods? And how many…? Silver was a nothing and everywhere gold; along comes the Q of Sheba who is well impressed… and on we go. Some very smart proverbs, but leaves me thinking – and that seems to be the thing with so much of Scripture that we just can’t figure out. Gets you thinking – cos it ain’t really about Solomon but about me aligning to what I believe. I used to say to people – listen to me and you will discover what I think (or what I hope you think) I believe. Come stay with me, go ask my spouse, even neighbours – then you will discover what I really believe. True doctrine seems far more to do with how I live than how I can string a few Scriptures together. People like Paul said – ‘imitate me as I imitate Christ’. OOOFFFF. He also suggested that we simply give a couple of considerations concerning anyone entering leadership – how is that thing called family working out and go ask a few neighbours (specifically those who don’t have faith) and get their opinion. Too practical all of that! ‘Jesus began to do and to teach’. We like to teach and tell people what to do – could it be we have got it the wrong way round? Never, I hear myself say…

Anyway back to the aforementioned king. The era of success has arrived; started by David then brought to another level with Solomon. The borders are at the largest; the army at the strongest; the order… OK wait a minute. The order – all things flowing to the centre to maintain the centre. Maybe now a question just enters. Surely Solomon has not organised things to rival that place the earlier generations escaped from – that place known as Egypt with a king known as Pharoah? And the next king of the northern tribes, Jeroboam, comes up out of… Egypt… erecting 2 golden calves… Yes it is the rebellious northern tribes that did not stay loyal to the house of David, but maybe we are to think maybe the prosperous days of Solomon were not so healthy after all.

Success. We have growth, we have influence; everything is testifying to ‘we have never seen anything like this’. Good or bad?

Small is no better than big; failure certainly no better than success!!! But the successful centre – big or small is probably more the issue. Scaling up nearly always ends up confusing us – we have done something amazing; now God can take a nap we have this. Scaling out – that is something different. Where is the centre? Bit like asking post the last Supper as to where Jesus is? Cos if each person ‘eats’ and ‘drinks’ him he is wherever the eaters and the drinkers are. It seems to make sense of Jesus botanical answer to the Greeks who wished to meet him (Jn. 12:20-26). His reply of ‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies…’ Strange request for an interview. Want to visit the centre? Advice… wait a while cos you don’t need a Jewish Jesus, you need a Greek one – so hang on till there are many Jesus-es (yes I know they will be inadequate and you would really like to see the proper one, but…)

Time to wrap this wandering blah blah up. Success and growth and recognition – well what a set of dangers arise. We move from being dependent on God to we pretty much got this. I advocated a whole number of years ago that a corporate exorcism would not go amiss if done once a year. To take a stand and to say to whatever we need to: ‘I am / we are not here for your success. We will not serve you, nor defend you. We will declare you and any resources you have are here to serve God’s kingdom, and that kingdom will not exalt any one person… so any spirit seeking to attach to us we renounce…’ and so on.

I’d rather not go the way of Solomon. And I kinda think that there is a squeeze on right now, for without the squeeze we have such a tendency to think we have really done something quite amazing.

And the children

Posted on 3rd February, 2026
by Martin Scott
Posted in Theology

Some 18 months ago Gayle had a very long and impactful dream that ended with her addressing ‘Mr. Banks’ pleading that he take off his banking clothes, his shoes and go play with the children in the grass. ‘If you can do this everything will follow.’

Everything will follow!

That is quite a statement. Navigating this world is not an easy task. We live in but not ‘of’ this world. The kingdom of Jesus is not of this world otherwise the methodology of this world would be employed. Living in the world requires compromise for it is how do we engage with an imperfect world. But compromise has to be that of redemptive compromise – taking less than perfect action as it at least stops the bigger picture sliding further backwards or at best leaves a better ‘after’ picture than the ‘before’ one.

God or mammon? The two that Jesus put in opposition to each other. Money is not mammon, but so much of the financial world has been colonised by mammon, and mammon is a source from which society can live. The voice of the Old Testament prophets can be reduced to challenging Israel over two issues: is God your Protector and is God your Provider. They rebuked Israel repeatedly over those two issues.

Child sacrifice was an abomination that was never to be part of the life of Israel. Understandably so. But what lay behind child sacrifice. The foundational belief was that of appeasement of the gods (why with certain views of the atonement NT Wright has described them as pagan). One sacrificed to get the gods to bless, and to get the gods to bless the harvest today, in this season, there was no greater sacrifice than to sacrifice the future. The next generation offered to the gods guaranteed blessing today.

Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “The word of the Lord that you have spoken is good.” For he thought, “There will be peace and security in my days.”

Isaiah rebuked Hezekiah for his naive behaviour and said that he had messed things up for the next generation; Hezekiah’s response is that he was happy because things would go well in his lifetime. Happy… but the future sacrificed.

Great parts of money and the economic system has been colonised by this same spirit. And I would go as far as to suggest that a continual pattern of borrowing from the future for blessing today is of the same spirit as Hezekiah embodied, and is on the spectrum heading into Moloch (child sacrifice) territory. Whole financial structures are based on money as debt. Remove debt and the current financial world would collapse! Imagine running one’s own finances on that basis (leveraging).

I think this relates to Gayle’s dream. Play with the children in the grass. Get the dew of creation on your toes; be committed to the next generation on their terms. Play – their terms; their world.

Compromise… but redemptive compromise. Disengaging from the world and living the life of the hermit might be the call for some, but the call for the majority is to be present within; the call on all who follow Jesus is not to be ‘of’.

Compromise but moving toward, making signs of, a fresh economy that might or might not affect ‘money’ but has to break the alignment to mammon and refuse to sacrifice tomorrow for the desire for blessing today.

From:

buying and selling to giving and receiving.
reversing the ‘harvest before sowing’ to ‘seedtime and (then) harvest’.
refusing to set ‘profit’ as the bottom line.
refusing to maximise what can be earned / harvested.

This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy.

‘Your sister Sodom’. The family DNA, hence in Revelation the city where the Lord was crucified was termed ‘Sodom’ and ‘Egypt’. The Reformers gave us justification by faith and for that we should be (and will be!) eternally grateful, however adding the word ‘alone’ (justification by faith alone) has not helped us and flies in the face of the one Scripture that explicitly uses that phrase: ‘You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone‘ (Jas. 2:24)!

A child will lead them (Isaiah 11):

The wolf shall live with the lamb;
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
    on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.

And he set a child in the midst:

He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me (Matt. 18:2-5).

But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did and heard the children crying out in the temple and saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they became angry and said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read,
‘Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies
you have prepared praise for yourself’?” (Matt. 21:15,16).
Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
to silence the enemy and the avenger (Ps-. 8:2).

Take off your uniform / shoes and go play

In a world that calls us to conform find the crack where some redemptive seed can be sown… and make sure that it is about a better tomorrow than today. Do something to restore seedtime and harvest… even if ever so small. A movement where everything will follow.

Desiring blessing today at the cost of tomorrow finds its ultimate expression demonstrated at the cross. Judas is there with his money to be gained; the religious system makes it plain that the only way to keep the ‘blessing’ of Imperial favour was to sacrifice Jesus (‘If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation… You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed’ – John 11:48,50).

At the cross was the breaking of the power of mammon for even Judas threw back the money into the temple system; the ‘place’ and the ‘nation’ were destroyed, but a new way of life was released, with an invitation to follow.

Amidst crisis in the charismatic world where will the children be found? They will lead and ‘all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.’

Apocalypse… and hope

Posted on 2nd February, 20262nd February, 2026
by Martin Scott
Posted in Personal Perspectives

I wrote a post ‘Time for an update’ and Anne commented on the post. I was very struck by the comment so I asked if I could publish it here with her permission. Permission granted!

Anne commented:

I am just finishing a book titled: Apocalypse, How catastrophe transformed our world and can forge new futures, by Lizzie Wade. No not a theological perspective but an anthropological one. She examines different societies and civilizations in the past and how they survived and were changed by their own apocalypses. From climate change along the north coast of Peru to the plague in Europe. And lots of other places. She ended up writing this during the Covid pandemic, our most recent global apocalypse.

A few of her conclusions:

Apocalypses have always revealed and exploited societies’ weak points, from an unsustainable relationship with a changing environment to an overly rigid and oppressive social hierarchy. Because of that, apocalypses are also the best chance our societies have for change. . . . apocalypse can reveal the failures of old systems and inspire the creation of new ones.

We can harness the energy and potential of apocalypse to create a new world. But first we have to accept that the apocalypse, with all of its horrors, is here to stay. Only then can we see its opportunities. . . ‘

Embracing apocalypse doesn’t mean resigning ourselves to the worst-case scenario, or giving up on the idea of progress. It means believing that destruction can be a gateway to that progress, societies can and should change, and endings are also always beginnings. It means recognizing that just because we’re used to something doesn’t make it right. It means prioritizing values and ways of life that allow us to adapt and change rather than shoring up brittle social structures that crumble at the first hint of challenge or pressure. It means looking forward with clear eyes rather than scrambling backward toward an illusion of safety that has already disappeared or perhaps never really existed. It means mourning what we’ve lost while also imagining all the things we could create next. It means choosing hope, not instead of fear but alongside of it.

People have prayed the Kingdom come for millennia. Perhaps this is the moment. Not to look back and try to resurrect a structure that was ungodly in the first place – Christendom – but to look forward to connection back to community and to the land (and yes, that involves it’s history) as we face the challenges and opportunities ahead of us.

And to quote the Canadian Prime Minister in his recent comments at Davos: ‘Nostalgia is not a strategy’. It’s time to move on from what is over and find/create our new homes.

Rather than wish I (Martin) had such wisdom I am eager to learn… nostalgia is not a strategy and again I am reminded by Martin Luther’s reply to what he would do if he knew the world was ending tomorrow. He replied ‘I would plant an apple tree’. A sign of the future. The world as we have known it is ending; it will just take a little while before the powers acknowledge it. Whether the parousia takes place ‘soon’ (those words uttered some 2000 years ago) or not, we are called to sow in the light of the future. The soil has changed, the bag from which we draw the seed is different but the seed to be sown remains. Hope is within the seed and nostalgia certainly is not.

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