Since he'd spent his life serving as an interim pastor, I wondered if Larry was a normal interim, or a good one. Asking him how he handled longterm conflicts he discovered in churches he was asked to serve as interim pastor, Larry said it was his habit to expose the church's conflict right out of the gate.

"How," I asked?

"The first thing I do is change the order of worship. That brings the power players out into the open."

Couldn't believe he said or did that.

If we belong to Christ, certainly we didn't enter the Kingdom of Heaven by hearing pastors condemn and expose other men's sins.

No, but rather, we confessed Christ after having the work of the Holy Spirit in the power of the preaching of God's Word and Law expose our own sins so thoroughly that we stopped thinking of anyone else's sins but our own.

Of course caring for our own children is to be reciprocated by our children when their parents grow old. These fundamental familial duties are commanded by God as the first obligations of the Second Table of the Law. Yes, without obedience to these first fundamental duties of the law of love, no other fulfillment of that law will ever be honored, nor even likely to be sincere.

But where are the harder parts of the Second Table of the Law which extend far, far beyond “providing for our own” ever expounded by our conservative Christian influencers? Why do such men never speak or preach commands of Jesus in this vein:

So how does God decide who is a murderer?

When God weights acts of murder, He doesn't go easy on those who kill very young and very little babies. He doesn't decree an intermediate condemnation for those who murder these very little ones not yet attached to their mother's womb because they only have "intermediate moral value."

The murder of the very young or very old is not more or less evil based upon the pain others do or do not suffer at his loss. Man is not the measure of all things.

God is. And what has God decreed concerning murder?