Chapter One
The High Cost of Dishonor
Of all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit either rotten or ripe....
For every ill deed in the past we suffer the consequence.
—T. S. Eliot1

The priest thoughtfully poured soil back and forth between his cupped hands, sifting a rhythm to his silent prayers. If soil could speak, this soil would weep. This was the tenth massacre site the prayer team had visited in the past two days—ten places where God Himself had cried. It was here the Yamassee Indians ceased to be a people, their life extinguished through ethnic cleansing by settlers desiring more land. While no race has a franchise on sin, and history is complex, it was clear to those present that something unspeakable had happened here.
The small band of intercessors, who were visiting this site to repent of the obliteration of the Yamassee nation, were midway through an eight-hundred-mile prayer journey that retraced Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman’s trail of pillage, burning and rape through Georgia and the Carolinas.2
Fern Noble, a prayer-reconciliation leader, paced back and forth, weeping, with her Bible open in her hands. For Fern, the desecration of this site was not just a historical fact. The blood of her own Native American people had saturated this soil. In deep anguish of spirit, Fern asked God a question she had been asking for many years: “Why do so few of my people believe You?”
The numbers are pitifully few. Less than 5 percent are Christians. Most, in fact 90 percent, have suffered from alcoholism. Suicide is five times higher for Native Americans than for any other ethnic group, and the average life expectancy is only 40.1 years.3
As she prayed and walked, Fern noticed a peculiar sight. A stack of papers seemed to grow on top of her open Bible. She asked the question again, “Why do so few of my people believe You?” The papers grew until they were a thick pile, obscuring the Bible laying flat in her hands.
“What does this mean, God?” she asked once again, waiting with childlike expectancy. Understanding came quickly. The growing stack of papers represented the treaties of the white man, which in essence had said to the Indian, “This is our covenant to you; this is our promise. You can trust what we say, for we have signed it. This is the word of the Great White Father in Washington. He cannot lie. You can trust that he will keep his word to you.”
Some historians say that as many as eight hundred times we broke treaty after treaty with the Indians. In many cases the treaties were broken with unspeakable brutality. History records that the Sand Creek massacre, ordered by Colonel John M. Chivington, an ordained Methodist minister, slaughtered and mutilated over three hundred Native Americans, most of them women and children and some of them futilely clutching a white flag.4 Other stories tell of a chief holding a treaty to his chest as he was mowed down by government troops.
In the hostile actions against tribe after tribe, in the confiscation of land, in the repeated lies of treaty upon treaty, the Great White Father’s words were not honored.
When those who loved God came to the Native American and showed them the Bible, saying, “This is the covenant of God; this is His promise. You can trust what He says because He signed it in blood. This is the Word of the Great Father in the sky. He cannot lie. You can trust Him. He will keep His word to you,” it was too late.
God’s answer to Fern’s question was unmistakably clear. Few Native Americans believed God because they couldn’t see the Bible for all the broken treaties laying on top of it. To them the Word of God was just one more treaty, one more covenant, one more word of the Great Father that was never intended to be kept. The Native American would not be fooled twice.
Can our actions so misrepresent God that future generations do not trust or even consider Him and His claims? Can we destroy future receptivity to the gospel by our dishonor of people today? I believe the answer is a well-documented and agonizing yes. History is shot through with examples. In 1878, Janitin, a Kamia Indian from San Diego, gave this eyewitness account:
I and two of my relatives went down...to the beach...to catch clams.... We saw two men on horseback coming rapidly toward us.... My relatives fled.... I was too late.... They overtook me and lassoed and dragged me for a long distance.... They locked me in a room for a week; the Father told me that he would make me a Christian.... One day they threw water on my head and gave me salt to eat, and with this the interpreter told me I was a Christian.... Every day they lashed me because I did not finish my work.... I found a way to escape...but I was tracked, and they caught me like a fox.... They lashed me until I lost consciousness.5
Our dishonor toward the Native American is not simply a matter of the past. Even as recently as thirty years ago, Native American children were dragged from their families and placed in “residential schools.” They were forbidden to speak their own language or observe their own customs.6 In these schools, children were beaten and shamed for being Indian, many times in the name of Christ.
At the age of five, Lynda Prince, a Carrier-Sekani of Canada, was taken to a residential school where she was not allowed to speak her native language. “Assimilation taught us to become ashamed of who we are,” she says. “Basically, it said, God made a mistake when He created you.” Some children were carted off in a garbage truck, crying as they were torn from weeping parents, and taken to schools hundreds of miles away. My Canadian Cree friend, Carol, has told me of one former United Church residential school near Edmonton, where there are little crosses of children who died at the school. Carol believes that some of them died of a broken heart.
Learning from Each Other
I was talking to Native American John Sanford, the author of The Elijah Task. 7 I said, “John, if we could rewind the tape of American history between the whites and the Native Americans, what could it have been? What would have pleased God?”
John said that among the Osage Indians, there was a tradition that was handed down, chief to chief. A chief, many years in the past, had a vision. In the vision he saw the white men coming in three stages. He saw white men with fire sticks, and they were trappers. The Indians were not to bother them. He saw white men come with picks and shovels (while there were no words for picks and shovels in the Indian language, he described their use). Even though these men would rape the earth, they were not to be bothered. Then the third group were the black coats. These, the Indian chief said, were people who knew the truth about God. They were to be listened to.
John’s point was that the missionaries came to a people with eternity in their hearts. If only the missionaries had sat down in mutual humility and said to the Native Americans, “We know Jesus Christ; tell us what you know.” Instead, they said, in effect, “You have nothing to offer us; we have everything to offer you.” We “castrated” an entire culture with our unmitigated arrogance. That wound is still fresh today.
Fault Lines of Historical Dishonor
Our legacy of dishonor has not been limited to Native Americans. The furrows of our error rake deeply through the heart of many generations and cultures. Most Christians, for instance, are unaware of the history of hate perpetrated on the Jews by the Church, yet almost every Jew can recall the facts in vivid detail.
Venomous hatred toward the Jews is strewn through the writings of respected Church fathers. In a vivid fantasy of the Last Judgment, Tertullian (c. 160–c. 230) gloats over the spectacle of the anticipated punishment of the Jews, at which time he will turn “an insatiable gaze” and taunt them with their rejection of Christ.8 John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), one of the most honored of the early theologians, whose writings are considered by the Eastern Orthodox Church to be second only to Scripture, seemed to hate the Jews even more than Tertullian. In his Oracions Against Jews, Chrysostom calls them godless, idolaters, pedicides...stoning the prophets and committing 10,000 errors.9 The Church’s past is understandably a huge obstacle to Jews considering the claims of Jesus Christ. For many Jews, the Cross is akin to a swastika.
William Nichols, in his book Christian Anti-Semitism, reproduces a table by Raul Hilberg that compares the historical Church’s canonical law, dating from a.d. 306 to 1434, with Nazi measures censoring the Jews, enacted from 1935 to 1942. The script appears to be written by the same diabolical hand.10 Notice the dates of these three examples of canonical law from the Christian Roman Empire and the medieval Catholic world:
Jews and Christians not permitted to eat together, Synod of Elvira, a.d. 306.
The marking of Jewish clothes with a badge, 4th Lateran Council, a.d. 1215, Canon 68. (Copied from the legislation by Caliph Omar II [634–44], who had decreed that Christians wear blue belts and Jews, yellow belts.)
Compulsory ghettoes, Synod of Breslau, a.d. 1267.
Examples like these led one historian to write: “The road from here [canonical law] to Auschwitz may not be direct, but one can get there from here.”11
The fault lines of dishonor spread through our history to other races as well. A friend of mine with a drywall business was repairing a wall when he noticed a picture with Japanese writing on it. He asked the lady who hired him about the picture. “You don’t want to know,” she replied. “Yes, I do,” my friend softly said, realizing he was touching a painful memory. The woman poured out her story. In World War II she had been separated from her husband and interned in a Japanese relocation center, where she was raped. Though now in her eighties, the dishonor she had experienced over half a century ago still scratched its jagged nails across her soul.
What about the African-American community? I saw an interview with the son of the late Jackie Robinson, and my heart was moved as this soft-spoken man talked about his father. He said the fact that his dad had been hit by more pitches than the rest of the team combined was something he remembered more than his dad’s batting average.
While our history as a Church has been at times glorious, and it is appropriate to honor Christians who have authentically loved others different from themselves, it is equally true that our history is full of dishonor and shame. The high cost of that shame is a terrible reality—entire cultures have been alienated from the welcoming grace and truth of Jesus Christ.
I have touched human ashes in the ovens of Auschwitz; I have listened in Jerusalem to a portion of the names read of over 1 million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust. As a Christian, my hands are not entirely free of blood. I can not selectively own history. Do I trust that two thousand years ago, on Golgotha, the Son of God intentionally died for humanity, and that event has present-day power? Absolutely. Do I believe that a long history of God’s people dishonoring God when they dishonored others has ramifications today? I do.
Dishonor Toward Gender
The dishonor of which I speak is not simply a matter of dishonoring race. We have equally excelled in our dishonor of gender. Church father John Chrysostom called women “whitewashed tombstones,” saying that inside they are full of filth, and that marriage was given to men to keep them from submitting to prostitutes.12 Epiphanius (a.d. 315–403) claimed that the female was “easily seduced, weak and void of understanding. Masculine reasoning will destroy this female folly.”13 Tertullian blamed women for the death of the Son of God. “You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him who the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man.”14
Not long ago I was one of several facilitators of a gathering of prayer leaders in Southern California. The weekend was humming along when all of a sudden I suggested to the women leaders in the room that they join me in repenting of our attitudes toward male leadership. There was momentary silence.
When we all resumed breathing, God gently swept into the room. People cried and confessed their lack of trust and their feelings of being used and never taken seriously. One major leader wept as he washed the feet of a woman leader, confessing on behalf of men the attitudes of male superiority. He had identified with those pastors who viewed women in the Church as only potential volunteers for menial tasks.
God has a controversy with His people. We have significantly dishonored those whom God loves, and we may no longer sweep our dishonor under the rug. We cannot hide behind the skirts of ignorance. God is serious about exposing and correcting our error. The list of our grievous sins toward one another—culture to culture, gender to gender—could fill a well-stocked library. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, there is no race or gender with a franchise on sin. We have all sinned, and we have all been sinned against.
We could spend the rest of our lives trying to pin fault on one another, nursing our own woundedness and capitalizing on our victimization. We could live mired in bitterness and accusation. But God has not left us to ourselves. He is giving us strong courage to face the error of our ways. Like a skilled surgeon, He is revealing and removing our deep-seated malignancies. He is grooming a new generation of men and women who are committed, in humility, to a two-word command in Scripture: “Honor all.”These two words could arguably encourage the openness of future generations to the splendor and power of Jesus Christ.
God’s Command to Honor All
It is hard to imagine two simple words changing the way we live and think. But God can pack a universe into a sentence, a world into a word. God has given us two words in 1 Peter 2:17 that I believe are slated to become the modus operandi for the Church in the third millennium. In some versions of the Bible, the words are translated, “Honor all.” The application of this bold command could significantly shatter hell’s viselike grip on individuals and cultures and drastically affect how future generations view Christ and His claims.
Honor is a dynamic with spiritual potency. When honor is unleashed, it can reveal the heart of God to hardened individuals and to whole cultures, opening them up to their intended destiny of eternal intimacy with God.
Honor all. Like the command to pray without ceasing, it sounds hopelessly impossible to do. A whole swarm of questions hover like mosquitoes at a family picnic. Does God expect us to honor people who are not honorable? Can honor reveal the grace and truth of Jesus? What does honor have to do with Native Americans or Jews or Japanese or African-Americans, women, or any dishonored people? These are all good questions. Before we begin to answer them, we should define precisely what honor is and what it is not.
Honor Defined
The word “honor” in the Greek means “to highly value, to prize, to not take lightly, to esteem, to give weight to, to ascribe worth.” It is significant that the word “glory” in the Old and New Testament often shares the same definition as the word “honor.”
The Bible gives us three levels of honor that are applied to man.15 The first level is intrinsic honor. It is honor possessed by God and given to every human being. This honor is an attribute of God, and He freely bestows it on us simply by creating us in His image.
The second level is honor based on character.
The third level is honor based on performance.
Because there is so much unexplored terrain on the subject of honor, we will limit ourselves to the honor God gives to every person, regardless of merit, character or performance.
What Honor Is Not
There are lots of inaccurate or incomplete ideas about honor. For instance, in America, we think of honor primarily in terms of merit. Honor classes are for the bright and academically motivated. We worship attractive film and television stars. We heap honor on skilled athletes, exalting them to godlike status. We honor successful businessmen and envy their savvy. We have borrowed frail (little g) gods from the Greco-Romans—gods of youth, beauty, and success—and we spend our money and time worshiping at their fickle altars. Inaccurate and incomplete notions of honor will never help us to obey God’s command to honor all. Honor runs much deeper throughout the universe than receiving an Oscar or a Most Valuable Player title.
To understand honor, we must begin with this primary fact: The essence of honor is found in the personality and character of God. We can never understand honor apart from God because honor, like love, is defined in Him. He is honor personified. In fact, heaven can be described as one continual round of honor.
On the other hand, Satan personifies dishonor. He presides over a dominion of dishonor. He has much at stake in making sure our concept of honor remains radically skewed. For example, in Pakistan, “honor killings” take place daily; converts from Islam to Christianity are murdered by their families in order to retain the “honor” of the family.
Oriental societies live much of their lives ruled by the tyranny of “saving face,” nervously measuring every action for the amount of honor or dishonor it will bring to the family.
In Mediterranean society, there is great concern with honor and shame rather than with individual guilt.16 
In the Middle East, the honor of the extended family, its ancestors and its descendants is the highest social value. If the loss of honor (particularly of a female member) is widely known, other members of the family may feel “honor” bound to cleanse the family name. This cleansing can require the death of the offender.17 Newspapers in Cairo and Saudi Arabia frequently carry stories of runaway sisters gone bad and the revenge that brothers or cousins pursue in the name of family honor.
Is it possible that “honor” has been so ill-defined because it is such a powerful, overarching spiritual dynamic? Has Satan so badly distorted the concept of honor because he is jealous of the honor God alone deserves and has bestowed on men? I think the answer is an unqualified yes.
What Honor Is
Honor is a holy feature of the heart and mind of God. It is something God uniquely possesses and personifies. In looking at Him, we recognize complete and utter worth. Honor is an attribute of God that commands recognition and is the most appropriate response to a genuine encounter with Him,18 and it is a response that He alone deserves.
Those who know God, prize Him; they do not take Him lightly. Those who know Him best take great delight in speaking honor of Him.
There is no one else in the universe worthy of honor but God. He, whom hosts of heaven worship and demons grudgingly acknowledge as Lord, is without equal in glory. He is indescribably great. He is unexcelled in goodness. In the presence of God, all superlatives blush with inadequacy.
“To whom then will you liken Me that I should be his equal?” says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these stars, the One who leads forth their host by number, He calls them all by name; because of the greatness of His might and the strength of His power not one of them is missing (Isa. 40:25,26).
All beauty, all goodness—everything that we have learned to understand as desirable—originates in the personality and character of God.
Is someone particularly kind? We only know kindness because God has been kind to us. Do we admire someone’s generosity? We recognize it as generosity because we understand true generosity in the nature of God. Is someone’s behavior especially marked by humility and servanthood? Jesus defined humility and servanthood by laying down His life for us. In honoring an admirable quality in someone, we are simply acknowledging a hint of the full and perfect attribute found in God.
God does not have gunny sacks of love, joy, peace, patience and gentleness heaped around the throne. He doesn’t hear your prayer for truth and then take a big scoop and dip it into the truth sack and pour it down from heaven. He gives you Himself.
Truth is not an objective set of suppositions. It is a person. Love is not merely an emotion, it is a person. What are we honoring when we honor the wisdom of an individual? Jesus is the wisdom of God, and there is no wisdom apart from Him. Is someone honorable? It is important to realize that apart from Jesus, all notions of honor are nonsense. Make no mistake: Apart from God, our virtue has no context. Everything, including the way we think and act with each other, is meaningless.
My son, Joel, attends a public school where they emphasize a different character trait each month. Joel’s teachers love kids, and we have been blessed to have them as a part of his education. Yet it hasn’t seemed to dawn on anyone that character traits apart from God are pure mumbo jumbo. If there is no God—no good—who’s to say that being discourteous is worse than being kind? If there are no moral absolutes, who’s to say that Stalin or Mao or Hitler was wrong? If there is no God, no transcendent authority, where do we get the idea that some actions are right and some are wrong? Who’s to say what behavior is desirable?
If nothing is absolute, then we are left with absolutely nothing. You might as well do as you please. If nothing is absolute, then hedonists are the only practical realists.
But if there is God, and He is the source of all excellence and honor, then all our ideas about what is good must originate from and be defined by Him. Scripture says, “Every good thing bestowed and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation, or shifting shadow.”19 Everything we know to be good and perfect comes from God. He is the absolute source of all we know to be pure, clean, lovely, desirable.
Heaven’s Main Preoccupation
Because of God’s unsurpassed excellence, it is only natural that heaven’s sole pleasure is to give honor to God. Honor is the native language of heaven. As Steve Hawthorne observes, heaven is one mighty preoccupation with honor.20 In the book of Revelation, we see the Bride heaping honor on the Son, the Son on the Father, the Father back to the Son and the Son back to His bride. And then the whole process marvelously begins again and continues forever. It is one glorious circle that never ends.
Like mighty bagpipes, honor thrums unceasingly through eternity, sweeping up into a mighty crashing chorus, “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for you created all things, and by Your will they exist and were created.”21 
The four and twenty elders can’t help themselves. Every time they get a glimpse of God’s majesty, His worth, His value, His weightiness and dignity, they find themselves once again facedown on the floor. Each glimpse is like a new revelation. Each time they see Him it’s as if they’ve never seen Him before. The perfection of His beauty and glory can never be fully taken in.
The wonder is that this glorious, honorable God does an astounding, heart-stopping thing. He also crowns us—tragic, shattered earthenware that we are—with glory and honor. In a sweeping display of His generosity He gives us what He alone deserves. And He invites us to give this marvelous gift to each other.
Jesus,
You truly are the desire of the nations. You are the supremely honored One of all worlds. All heaven declares Your glory. All creation shouts your worth. Every good and perfect thing finds its genesis in You. Nothing we desire compares with You. Riches, influence, pleasure—all of them heaped together do not equal the bliss of a moment with You. You are honor itself. And You have surprised us by sharing Your honor with us. We are speechless with awe. Amen.
Scriptures for Meditation
Psalm 8:5; Isaiah 40:25,26; James 1:17; 1 Peter 2:17; Revelation 4:10,11
Questions Worth Asking
•   How does Peter’s vision of the unclean animals in Acts 11:5 relate to this chapter?
•   Is there any group of people or culture that you find difficult to honor?
•   God has crowned man with glory and honor. Is this a universal statement or does it only apply to a few select people? How does it apply to you?
•   In what way is the God of the Bible different from the gods of myth and legend?
•   Is there a relationship between honor and pleasure?
•   Every good and perfect gift comes from God. What are the good and perfect gifts God has given to you?
Notes
1.     Quoted in Philip Yancey, Praying with the KGB (Portland, Ore.: Multnomah, 1992), p. 7.
2.     Access the full report of the Operation Restoration prayer walk at          http://www.geocities.com/heartland/Hills/6230/or.html.
3.     John Dawson, Healing America’s Wounds (Regal Books: Ventura, Calif.: 1994), p. 152.
4.     Ibid., pp. 145-48.
5.     Alvin M. Josephy Jr., 500 Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 343.
6.     In America, the forced removal of Native American children from their families was for the purpose         of sending them to what were euphemistically called boarding schools. In Canada, the schools were    called residential schools.
7.     John Sanford, The Elijah Task (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1977).
8.     David P. Efronymson, “Tertullian’s Anti-Judaism and Its Role in His Theology,” Ph.D thesis, Temple      University (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1977).
9.     John Chrysostom, Orations Against Jews, 6:2.
10.  William Nichols, Christian Anti-Semitism: A History of Hate (Northvale: N.J.: Jason Aronson, Inc.,                 1995), pp. 204, 205. Also see Raul Hilberg’s book, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York:              Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 5ff.
11.  Efronymson, “Tertullian’s Anti-Judaism,” Ph.D. thesis, p. 186.
12.  Leonard Swidler, Biblical Affirmations of Women (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminister Press, 1979), p. 343.
13.  Patrologia Graeca (New York: Adlers Foreign Books) volume 42, col. 740.
14.  Swidler, op. cit., p. 346.
15.  For an excellent overview of these three levels of honor see Tom Marshall’s pamphlet Explaining                Honour and Respect (Kent, England: Sovereign World, 1991). Distributed in America by Renew Books,    Ventura, California.
16.  Julian Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Schechem; or The Politics of Sex (New York: Cambridge University Press,         1977).
17.  Elizabeth Fernea and Robert Fernea, “A Look Behind the Veil,” Human Nature magazine, January              1979.
18.  Marshall, op. cit., p. 5.
19.  James 1:17.
20.  Personal conversation in my home with Steven Hawthorne, on the subject of honor. Steve is the                 coauthor, with Ralph Winter, of Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, published by William             Carey University, Pasadena, California, and cowriter, with Graham Kendrick, of Prayerwalking:               Praying On-Site with Insight (Lake Mary, Fla.: Creation House, 1993).
21.  Revelation 4:11, NKJV.