Cruz control in the fast lane...

"Why have we fasted, and you see it not?
Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?’
Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure,
and oppress all your workers.
Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to hit with a wicked fist.
Fasting like yours this day
will not make your voice to be heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day for a person to humble himself?
Is it to bow down his head like a reed,
and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?
Will you call this a fast,
and a day acceptable to the LORD?" (Isaiah 58:3-5 ESV)

[I spent most of yesterday in the yard with my wife pruning, raking, and mowing away the last vestiges of winter, so I didn't have the chance to sit down at the computer and opine. Did you miss me?]

Some things in life, in my world, in the world-at-large, just beg me to blog about them! Consider this headline from today's newspaper:

Ted Cruz campaign asks supporters to fast on behalf of voters in Tuesday’s primary states

On this third Super Tuesday (and for the second time in recent weeks):

An email from Cruz’s prayer team urged “fellow prayer warriors” to bow their heads and abstain from food on behalf of voters in Tuesday’s contests.

“Many of you have prayerfully interceded and fasted on your own for our nation and for Ted Cruz, the candidate we believe God will use to reignite the promise of America,” the email read. It urged voters to do so again, and pray that “each person would discern the difference between [God's] wisdom and the distraction of false messages.”

I'm not entirely certain that Ted Cruz' campaign is a cult (or at least cult-like); however, his handlers are absolutely certain that he is the right man to lead the country-- God says so. Maybe so. Who am I to argue whether Cruz and his followers see his run for the White House as a divine calling? Maybe if more candidates saw it the same way, the process would be more civil (in the decorum sense) and appeal more to a broader band of Americans than overly vocal right-wing Evangelists, Tea Party patriots, and Open Carry Wackos. But this call to fasting bothers me. Maybe it shouldn't?

Dr. Raymond F. Surburg, professor emeritus of exegetical theology (Old Testament) at Concordia. Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, IN (where I'll be headed in four months), wrote in a paper called The Biblical Doctrine of Prayer that prayer (my underlining) to the true God must be conditioned by the will of God. In Gethsemane, as Jesus faced the great crisis of His life, he prayed "not My will be done but Thy will be done (Matt. 26:39)." John assured his readers in his First Epistle: "Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us" (1 John 6:14). About fasting: During the Middle Ages the Roman Catholic Church viewed prayer not so much as communion with God, but as a meritorious act along with fasting and almsgiving.

St. Augustine has been quoted as saying, “Do you wish your prayer to fly toward God? Give it two wings: fasting and almsgiving.”

Christian author and professor of Biblical studies at Biola University in La Mirada, CA, Curtis Mitchell, noted about fasting (in an article published in Dallas Theological Seminary's Bibliotheca Sacra in 1990): Amazingly Christianity quickly departed from the personal, inward, and spiritual emphasis found in the New Testament. Fasting is a case in point. The earliest hints in post-New Testament writings indicate a return to the external, legalistic, ritualistic practice of fasting. Evidently as time elapsed after the death of the Apostles, the church succumbed to the religious pressures of the Jewish and pagan world around them, and fasting became a full-blown practice. This is not to say there was no objection to such a system, but from the second century on, “there is no longer any clear awareness of the way in which Jesus viewed fasting.” Almost all the church fathers encouraged the practice of fasting.

Fasting should not be used in the manner of a shoehorn or a call to arms in an attempt to accomplish our will, nor should it be used as a meritorious work before God, to atone for our sins and obtain grace (neither fasting nor prayer is a means of grace). Moreover, fasting in hopes that by doing so God will favor one particular candidate in a secular presidential election and smacks more of an Old Testament approach (fasting during instances of impending death or God’s imminent judgment), rather than New Testament (Jesus’ command to keep our fasting from the attention of men in Matthew 6:1, 16-18).

But, if we must mingle fasting and prayer with politics, then let's go whole hog, as proclaimed by President Adams in 1799: a National Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer (excerpted below):

For these reasons I have thought proper to recommend, and I do hereby recommend accordingly, that Thursday, the 25th day of April next, be observed throughout the United States of America as a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer; that the citizens on that day abstain as far as may be from their secular occupations, devote the time to the sacred duties of religion in public and in private; that they call to mind our numerous offenses against the Most High God, confess them before Him with the sincerest penitence, implore His pardoning mercy, through the Great Mediator and Redeemer, for our past transgressions, and that through the grace of His Holy Spirit we may be disposed and enabled to yield a more suitable obedience to His righteous requisitions in time to come; that He would interpose to arrest the progress of that impiety and licentiousness in principle and practice so offensive to Himself and so ruinous to mankind; that He would make us deeply sensible that "righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people;" that He would turn us from our transgressions and turn His displeasure from us; that He would withhold us from unreasonable discontent, from disunion, faction, sedition, and insurrection; that He would preserve our country from the desolating sword...

I wouldn't go so far as to call a fast called by Cruz' camp, in the words of Martin Luther (from a sermon on Matthew 4:1-11), "a stench and so blasphemous and shameful, so that no drinking and eating, no gluttony and drunkenness, could have been as bad and foul"; but I think there is more spiritual ROE in fasting as an aid to personal prayer, not an essential part of corporate prayer. We have been commanded by Jesus to pray-- there is no command to fast.

And the call to fast so that God will give us a king or high priest who will save us from the perils of a lesser candidate calls to mind God's own words in Isaiah 58:4 ("Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high."). It's a political phylactery.

This call to fasting bothers me. Maybe it shouldn't?