The need of the hour

You need a reason to start a blog at this time of verbal cacophony. We are surrounded by a storm of words, more than ever before - anyone can write an article, publish it, see it read, shared, tweeted and retweeted. Controversy and argument, radical idea and reactionary answer are the stuff of life. We align ourselves a dozen times a day - we like, we share, we comment, we refute.

This is the case in general conversation, but also within the church. Exactly the same patterns of divisive argument, of side-taking, of aggressive stances, lack of patience, kindness, self-control pervade in our discussions. 

I don't want to write a simply controversial and argumentative blog. I know that topical and provocative articles generate a lot of hits, but I want to be content to write without pretension to greatness, for whoever may happen to find a few words useful. 

And I think that the need of the hour is to hear Christian truth spoken quietly. To refamiliarise with the basic biblical message, the Bible's main themes. This may at times be prompted by a topical or current theme - last week's atrocity in Paris, for instance. And to state Christian truth is hardly to avoid controversy, in this day and age! But my starting place and basic mentality is to talk about Jesus and his love. 

I have not lost my courage or withdrawn from battle. It is my conviction that the only reason why anyone gives houseroom to so much of the wave of trendy, deconstructionalist, totally-committed-to-vagueness material currently popular, in the SA in particular, is simply unfamiliarity with the Gospel. The gurus of postmodernism have entered the church and found that no one knows enough Bible to spot what is actually poison. They have found seats and tables to sit at and a chance to even make a bob or two. 

And only the real Jesus will have the guts to oppose them. And only his gospel of grace will have the truth-power to throw them out. The church needs to be filled again with truth on fire, with the message of the Cross. 

Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand

Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. 

One of the perpetual pitfalls for the church in its preaching is the tendency to moralism. We love telling people to do this, to not do that, and to change. And we have so many biblical passages to clobber and coerce people with. One is the phrase here, as preached by John the Baptist and then by Jesus. 

The problem is that we tend to see the command to change, but divorce it from the "Kingdom of God is at hand." When we do that we flatten out the time dimension in the passage. God was doing something, or about to do something. The repentance was to be a reaction to what God was doing. The FACT of his work was to lead to the urgent COMMAND to change. Indicative driving imperative, if you like your grammar old fashioned! 

This is how true Christian proclamation is always to be, of course. Not moralism, but good news; God acts, and in the light of it, commands do come our way. Moral command without good news is not Christian preaching - as is communication of gospel facts with no imperative cutting edge, of course! 

"Repent" in John the Baptist's preaching is therefore not a command floating free of a context, a general urge to pull your socks up, turn over a new leaf and change. It is all about impending action and change that God is doing. 

What was God doing? Judging from the texts that the gospels quote as speaking about John the Baptist's preaching - Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40 - two great threads of hope were about to be fulfilled, and fulfilled together. God was about to step into history, with comfort and salvation on the one hand, and with judgement and wrath on the other. It was in the light of that just-around-the-corner action that John's hearers were putting their lives in order. They were baptised because, though they had longed for God's arrival in salvation, they realised they were unprepared for his judgement. After all, who can abide the day of his coming?? Submission to John's baptism was the recognition that you were under a terrible judgement which was about to fall, not a glorified New Year's resolution. 

This perspective really helps us with the oddity of Jesus' baptism by John. So long as we see John's baptism as part of a general repentance process for sinners, then we are flummoxed by Jesus' need of it. But his "fulfilling all righteousness", as he said to John, was not repentance. It was the recognition through baptism that God was about to act.  Judgement and salvation were arriving. The Kingdom of God was at hand! 

Of course, the Kingdom was arriving because the King had arrived. Jesus is the King of the Kingdom. People were preparing for his coming. The shock for John, and for us, is that instead of inspecting, commanding, judging and punishing, the King comes quietly, like a Lamb, and says, right from the start, "I'm under the soon-to-come judgement."

And that's how the salvation comes to the rest of us. 

The God of Christians and the God of Islam

I was challenged by a friend regarding the slightly muddled way in which I stated my trinitarian faith in the blog post on the Charlie Hebdo massacre. In conversation it struck home that it is precisely our trinitarianism which makes the distinction between the God of Islam and the God of Christians so vast. And it is a common lack of appreciation of the Trinity in our daily Christian lives that makes it possible to see God in such a way as verges on the Islamic.

The God who reveals himself in scripture is never a lonely Monad. Even in the Old Testament we may be mentally teased by the mystery of the plural in the word Elohim, the revelation of self consciousness and internal communication in Gen 1, or the strange multi-person and yet single person theophany of Gen 18. These and many more prepare the way for the dazzling New Testament light on the nature of God as Three-and-One. The OT doesn't teach the Trinity per se, but some things sure make sense once we have the NT revelation!

From all eternity, Father, Son and Spirit have existed in perfect, loving relationship. The Creation did not occur because God was lonely; our creation as relational beings is rather the echo of an eternal relationship. Our own experience of relationship, starting in the family, is to be understood as an analogue for our approach to God as we are invited to call him Father. Obviously, all earthly fathers fall short of ideal, some very grievously so, but even in saying that, we reveal a common consciousness of what fathers ought to be like. With all compassion for those whose fathers were appalling, by calling God "Father" and inviting us to do the same, the Bible appeals to that common consciousness. And what a father should be, God is. Perfectly. 

The world was made by and for the Son; from the start the plan of God was that a divine Man would rule over his creation, and so it has been. If Adam, the first man, brought failure and shame into our story, the second and last Man was and is and will be all that Adam should have been and more. 

In the Incarnation, the eternal Son, without ceasing to be what he eternally was, became what he eternally was not. In his death on the cross the price for the redemption of rebel human beings was, at its heart, the hellish abandonment of the Divine Man by his Father; our sin so serious that it took a breach in the Eternal Fellowship to right it. In his resurrection, Jesus, the Man, is proclaimed to be both Eternal Son and the true Man, worthy and qualified to judge all human beings at the last day as Creator of and representative-yet-perfect member of the human race. In his glorification the dust of the earth - a living Man - is now sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. 

Through that victorious, Spirit-led progress of the Son through incarnation, ministry, arrest, torture, assassination, resurrection and glorification, the right has been won for all who are "in him" to have fellowship with God by the Holy Spirit. The initial joy of knowing God as one who is "close by" - the joy that Adam knew at the start - has been restored. Even though our own state of sinlessness is still future, God is with us in the present by his Spirit. His Spirit shows us Jesus at the start of our Christian life, the Spirit makes us aware of our own sinfulness, the Spirit draws us to faith, the Spirit helps in prayer, the Spirit prompts us to be more like Jesus, the Spirit works through us in the lives of others, the Spirit makes us useful with his gifts, the Spirit guarantees a future where we will be face to face with God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. We would be nowhere without the Holy Spirit. 

That is just a brief outline of some of the elements of Trinitarian faith. The Trinity - the fact that God is One, in Three persons - is not describable using human analogies, still less explicable using human logic. But the truth of the Trinity does pervade everything in the Christian life. That which is not Trinitarian is not Christian. And the concept of God within Islam is a very long way away. 

That is not to say that in conversation with Muslims it is necessarily unhelpful to say, "Let's talk about God" without pressing the distinction right at the start. But the distinction is there - as soon as we start to think seriously about Christian doctrine there is a chasm. We worship different Gods. 

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As a relative newcomer to the Salvation Army, my views are very much first impressions. But it seems to me that the Doctrines of the SA in general, and the Trinitarian one in particular, need to be remeembraced at a fresh level. At present there seems to be an almost self-conscious distance between personal belief and commitment to the doctrines. The Doctrine of the Trinity is affirmed at a formal level, but it doesn't dominate in general discourse, in our meetings for adoration or in what comes across of personal faith. It is only possible to even begin to swallow the "we follow the same God" line because in practice we are more Unitarian than Trinitarian. Some of what I have written above regarding the Trinity may even sound very odd, and yet it is pretty standard Christianity, if couched in provocative language! 

Our Doctrine is not to be a theoretical statement which we affirm on becoming soldiers or officers but which makes no practical difference. It is our faith - it is a brief description of actual truth about our actual God, and is to inform our gospel, our worship, our joy and our hope.

The day after the terror before...

Today the globe has been a mad village. With #killallmuslims trending on Twitter (both in favour of and against the hashtag, to be fair), everyone seems to be jumping onto the #jesuischarlie bandwagon in support of the murdered cartoonists, and simultaneously following the standard line that the few violent extremists are utterly unrepresentative of Islam as a whole.  

Here are a few thoughts:

Yesterday's killings were an outrage, a wicked, murderous evil which had no justification whatsoever. My thoughts and prayers throughout the day have been with the family and friends of those killed yesterday, with the injured, and with France as a nation. 

I believe in freedom of speech. I don't want to see magazines like Charlie Hebdo closed down by law or by the pressure of public opinion. 

I don't like some of the content of magazines like Charlie Hebdo. Satire is an important means of critique in our society, but offence for offence' sake (which I think is what some of their output actually was) is not desirable and is not the same as satire. I do not like gratuitous offensiveness towards Muslims any more than I like such offensiveness towards Christians; nevertheless, I defend the right to publish. 

I believe that Islam is a false religion, that Mohammed was a false prophet and that Allah is a false god. I worship the God of the Old and New Testaments, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, giver of the Holy Spirit. The distinction between our faiths is stark; to say they are both the same is ludicrous and disrespectful to both.  The distinction is too important for me to enjoy satirical, scurrilous or scatological cartoons at the Prophet's expense - I think it is more respectful to simply disagree and then be open to debate and discussion when we have the chance. 

I recognise that the vast majority of Muslims deplore what took place in Paris yesterday, and that there is no warrant whatsoever for a general backlash against people of that faith. Nevertheless, I believe that Islam does demonstrably hold within it an emphasis on revenge and on this-worldly punishments to fall on those who insult Allah or his Prophet. It is in marked distinction from Christianity, for which being mocked and insulted is to be a fundamental part of following our mocked and insulted  Saviour. For more on this, see John Piper's excellent article from 2006 http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/being-mocked-the-essence-of-christs-work-not-muhammads

I believe that the particular cul-de-sac that the West has driven itself into with its pluralism and multi-culturalism is utterly unsustainable and will, tragically, produce many more outrages of this type. We are in a process of painful change, and where that process will end, culturally and politically, is anybody's guess. Certainly the absolute inability of western governments to be able to comprehend revealed religion of any type does not bode well.  Things are going to be tough - for people of any serious faith, and Christians may well find themselves hurting alongside Moslems in the future.  

I believe that the fatal flaw in Islam (as in other world religions, and in much folk Christianity) is the inability to understand let alone preach grace. Religion always says, "Do!" In Jesus Christ God says, "Done!"  The Prophet never died for his people's sins - but that is what we all need. The finished work of Jesus is the basis for assurance (not vague, trembling hope) of heaven, it is the basis for a transformed life of love, it is the basis for being able to handle mockery, persecution, violence and death and still pray for those who are hurting you. I suspect that we may be heading into just such a time of fear and terror; may God give his people grace to live out the grace in difficult times. 

A religious four year old and the problem of maintaining Grace.

A young lady of 4, a relative of mine, has a fairly high opinion of her moral standing. In the light of the frequent tantrums displayed by her sister (Terrible 2) she believes herself to be perfect. Along with this lack of acknowledged guilt goes more. She is religious. 

Their mother was recently reading to the girls: the story of Jesus welcoming the little children. She asked 4 and Terrible 2 if they thought that Jesus checked on who was good or naughty before he welcomed them. Clear and firm came the reply from 4: "Yes."  

She has never been taught that. That concept has come entirely from inside herself. It is as much an early manifestation of a toddler's original sin as disobedience, greed, selfishness or lying. She is religious, in the sense that she innately sees acceptance by God as being based on merit, that we are able in some way to make the grade, and (miniature Pharisee that she is) that she is one of those who would be welcomed. 

The incident got me thinking. Grace is such an amazing thing, but it is also alien to our basic human, proud, sinful mindset. As such, it is always under attack, from one direction or another. In the first place, the simple fact of unconditional acceptance at the point of entry into Christianity is so different to our inborn religiosity that it is always hard to maintain.

If Jesus receives us just as we are, then he leaves no room for our natural tendency to oneupmanship in general and especially for oneupmanship as we come to him. In fact, such a moral pecking order will hold us back from ever really coming - if I think that God would accept me more easily than my little sister, then I haven't really understood what his acceptance means and I have never really run to him. Tragically, the church is full of replicas of the four year old - glad they have made the grade. They make the world want to spew. (Interestingly, such decent religiosity apparently makes Jesus want to spew too.)  

Jesus doesn't ask what we are like before he welcomes us. That is grace. You come as you are, and you don't need to look at yourself and how bad you are (or how "good" you are), still less at anyone else, but only to him. 

But the church also faces another challenge to grace. Having welcomed us in simple acceptance, the idea is around that Jesus never asks us about our lives or lifestyle, and that he certainly never asks us to change anything at all. And that is not the case. 

Grace is the open welcome to those who have done wrong, treating us lavishly with unmerited kindness and mercy. It does not deny or even ignore the fact of our wrongdoing - rather it pays the price for it. It is that costliness of acceptance, that fact that grace is free to the sinner but bloody expensive to the Giver, that challenges me to look at my forgiven wrongdoing and be determined and delighted to change. There is to be no hard examination of myself at point of entry, as if my goodness or badness could alter my possibility of acceptance, but, once arrived, the fact of being accepted, and being accepted through the Cross, shines a light onto and into my life like never before: I see my sin in a dreadful new way, and I find I must change.

Grace accepts me as I am - but it doesn't leave me as I am. It challenges me to the core - my pride, my selfishness, my deceit, my greed, my perversion, my lack of love and honour to my Creator.

Of course that process of gracious acceptance, challenge and change, is not linear. If it were, we would certainly end up with a vicious pecking order firmly entrenched among all who have come to Jesus: "I've made more progress than her...!" But it is a circle. I come to Christ... am accepted... grace challenges my bad stuff... I try to change... see how bad my bad stuff really is... and come to Christ afresh for the unconditional acceptance which is my only hope. Because of that cycle, a Christian is never more than a heartbeat away from coming to Jesus empty handed. Break the circle, start to pride yourself on your "progress", and you will find yourself back in religion with a much loved four year old.

 

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Jesus calls us to come to him. Not because we are good, but because even the feeling of being good enough to come (or to not need to come!) is a symptom of our bankruptcy. So come and receive his forgiveness. 

You will never be the same again.