We don’t do tenure in New Zealand: all positions are either fixed term or permanent. Including the clerical staff and cleaners. At my employer, academics are initially on a five-year contract that turns into a confirmed, long-term contract when you meet certain goals. Which most of us meet well before that time is up.

Does that mean that I am one of the bishops of this secular religion? God forbid.

We do have Bishops on the payroll, of course. We just called them tenured Faculty. But because of the low-church, voice of the people, nature of the Progressive religion, they have no interest in, and in fact would find it quite heretical, suppressing the progressive holiness spirals of the people.

For the words we say matter: but we can say good things and be rotten inside. Judge by the consequences of the words, by the effect of the life.

So they said to him, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

(John 6:30-33 ESV)

“The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the LORD swore to give to your fathers. And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.

(Deuteronomy 8:1-3 ESV)

Why, then, can we rely on the word of God? Because, unlike us, God does not do hypocrisy. He is faithful to his covenant: he keeps his word. Although we are broken, God is not.

And that this world cannot stand. When Christ arrived, the authorities, knowing they were damned by his very presence, had him nailed to a crossbar and suspended until suffocation. And when we stand in front of the throne, and the hateful throw accusations at us, then Christ will defend us.

At that time, it will his words that preserve our life. For the word of God is greater and more faithful than any action that any creating being can make.