Tag Sin

Church is Not a Shopping Mall

Todd R 3 Comments

I recently had a very strange dream, which occurred (kind of) in the church I went to as a kid.  This church, in Washington, D.C., has been around for over 130 years and meets in a stone building and has an amazing pipe organ in the main sanctuary.  The appearance and structure of the church communicates permanence and tradition.

In this dream, I was roughly a teenager on one end of the church building but had to meet up with my family at the other end of the building.  I started out in a place that seemed like the church I knew, but as I travelled to the other end, things got really bizarre.  First, the size of the building seemed to keep expanding and the number of people in it kept multiplying.  Soon I noticed that there was a gift shop selling all sorts of kitsch that had nothing to do with religion.  I kept going in the same direction, trying to find my family, but the building just kept growing as I went, eventually having many levels, with huge moving walkways and escalators.  The dream ended with me still in the church, but this end of it had become a very upscale, very massive, shopping mall.  I remember wondering “how did the church turn into this?”

What to make of this?  Consider what a shopping mall is.  Yes, it’s a large collection of stores in one place, but not a random collection.  Those stores were chosen to be as diverse as possible.  The more of our desires and wants the mall can meet by having different types of stores, the more economically successful the mall will be, and that’s what matters to the mall operator.  People want fancy clothes, jewelry, entertainment, snacks and candy, toys, and many other things.  So, a mall can represent our “do whatever you want” culture.

I wonder if the seed of the dream was something I saw on Twitter a few days before: “There are infinite ways to be non-binary.”  What they were saying is that not only are there not just two genders, but that we can endlessly create new ones with no limit at all.  It’s like a sexual version of the shopping mall, and also a denial that there’s any real right or wrong or that there’s any such thing as an inappropriate desire.  But can we really make ourselves into anything we want to be without consequences?

Consider this: no competent computer engineer would tell us that we can just arrange a diverse group of components any way we want and end up with a working computer.  The engineer isn’t being intolerant or mean, they just know what it takes to make a computer do what it’s supposed to.

Likewise, when Jesus says “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few,”[1] He is not being intolerant or mean by saying we can’t do whatever we want to, He just knows that we were designed, what we were designed to do, and also what will ultimately satisfy us.

Christian churches are supposed to teach us how to follow Christ, not tell us to do whatever we want to, but now many churches, just like in my dream, have turned into proverbial shopping malls.  In many cases, we’ve forgotten that people are not accidents of random circumstances in nature, and we’ve forgotten that our Creator knows what’s best for us.  We’ve decided to pursue “the way that is easy” forgetting that it “leads to destruction.”  Too many churches, now including the one I went to in DC, say that Jesus will meet whatever needs we think we have, rather than saying that Jesus knows what we need better than we do; that it’s our idea of need that must be changed.

It’s our idea of need
that must be changed

When Jesus said, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life,” the “world” He loves is the one where we’ve come up with infinite ways to reject Him.  Where we’ve come up with infinite ways to deny that He made us and knows better than us what’s right and wrong, what “leads to life” and what “leads to destruction.”

When God gave His Son, His sacrifice was sufficient for all sin and can cover all the infinite ways we decide to ignore what’s good for us.  Because God loved this world, it’s also true that His people should communicate His love and grace at all times to all people, by word and action.  Yet it’s also true that church is not a shopping mall regardless of what people can imagine in their dreams that it should be.  The church is called to a higher standard of living, a holy standard informed by our Creator’s knowledge of what works.

So, in these troubling times, pray that people will continue to find Jesus, both within and outside the church and what much of it has become.  That God’s people will love holiness, but also love sinners.  Pray that we find the way that is hard but leads to life and that God’s church is a beacon calling people to it.

Amen.

[1] Matthew 7:13-14

We’re All Little Pharaohs

Todd R 2 Comments

Anyone who knows the story of the Exodus knows who the bad guy is: Pharaoh.  As the leader of Egypt, he is primarily to blame for the enslavement of Israel.  Eventually, through Moses and Aaron, God tells Pharaoh to free the Israelites from slavery, and time and again Pharaoh refuses.  Clearly, Pharaoh is God’s enemy.  However, in his resistance to God, I think Pharaoh fell into some habits any of us could fall into.

First, Pharaoh admitted his need for God only when things were going wrong but shut God out when things were going well.  In Exodus 8:8, Pharaoh asked Moses to “Plead with the LORD to take away the frogs from me and from my people” but once the frogs were gone, Exodus 8:15 tells us that “when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite, he hardened his heart” and refused to do God’s will.  The same thing happens in chapter 9, during the plague of the hail.  Seeing the destruction caused by the hail, Pharaoh says “Plead with the LORD, for there has been enough of God’s thunder and hail” in verse 28, but in verse 34, “when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned yet again and hardened his heart.”

Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash

Next, Pharaoh repeatedly negotiated with God to define the scope of His influence.  Faced with the plague of flies, Pharoah said to Moses and Aaron “Go, sacrifice to your God within the land.”[1]  But staying “in the land” was not what God wanted His people to do.  In response to the plague of locusts, Pharoah said “the men among you” could leave and worship God, but he wouldn’t let the “little ones”[2] go.  Also, after the plague of darkness, Pharoah said “Go, serve the LORD; your little ones also may go with you; only let your flocks and your herds remain behind.”[3]  In these 3 responses, Pharaoh insisted on limits to where the people should worship, which people should worship, and what they could (and couldn’t) use in worship.

Third, Pharaoh also tried to limit the scope of his own sin, and which sins he would be accountable to God for.  In Exodus 9:27, Pharaoh said, “this time I have sinned” and in 10:17 said “forgive my sin, please, only this once.”  In reality Pharaoh was sinning every time he refused to listen to God, but he wasn’t willing to admit that.  He only admitted a minority of the times he disobeyed.

If you’re like me, this all might sound familiar.  Often our prayers are more fervent and sincere when we need help than they are when we have something to praise God for, or when times are good.  Often, we allow God to govern some parts of our life, but we keep other parts for ourselves, to do what we want with.  Also, we often only admit some of our sins and choose which ones to care about.  We’re all a bit like Pharaoh, the bad guy in the Exodus story.

Fortunately for us, we have something else in common with Pharaoh: the true, Almighty God will defeat all of the “gods” we follow.  Every single one.  Behind the battle between Moses and Pharaoh was a contest between our God and Pharaoh’s gods.  As the Life Application Study Bible notes: “As each gloomy plague descended upon the land, the Egyptian people realized how powerless their own gods were to stop it. Hapi, the god of the Nile River, could not prevent the waters from turning to blood. Hathor, the crafty cow-goddess, was helpless as Egyptian livestock died in droves. Amon-Re, the sun-god and chief of the Egyptian gods, could not stop an eerie darkness from covering the land for three full days.”

When we choose not to obey God, we harden our hearts against Him and follow the “gods” we choose for ourselves, but God will ultimately defeat them all.  God’s purpose in saving us is to deliver us from all other gods, as He delivered Israel from Egypt.  He will deliver us from our slavery to every sin that binds us and make us not follow Him wholeheartedly.

We may be more like Pharaoh than we’d like to admit, but the Pharaoh in us has been killed, nailed to the cross with Jesus. When we reach heaven, all of our other “gods” will be gone and we will be perfected in our obedience to the one, true God, for our good and for His glory!

That’s a deliverance worth looking forward to and praising God for!

Amen.

[1] Exodus 8:25
[2] Exodus 10:10-11
[3] Exodus 10:24

We Don’t Understand God

Todd R 2 Comments

Several chapters at the end of the book of Acts in the Bible detail how Paul was destined to share the Gospel in Rome and how God preserved his life in order for him to get there.  One such story happened when Paul was shipwrecked on the island of Malta.  The people on the ship carrying Paul were welcomed by the people of Malta, but when Paul had gathered sticks to add to their fire, “a viper came out because of the heat and fastened on his hand.” (Acts 28:3). The next verse is where things get interesting:

“When the native people saw the creature hanging from his hand, they said to one another, “No doubt this man is a murderer. Though he has escaped from the sea, Justice has not allowed him to live.””

Notice that “Justice” is capitalized.  Why?  The people weren’t thinking of justice in an abstract, impersonal sense, but this “Justice” in the original Greek was “Δικη”, or “Dike.”  Dike, in Greek mythology, was “the goddess of justice and the spirit of moral order and fair judgement as a transcendent universal ideal”[1]  This “Justice” was personal.  In Greek mythology there were many gods and each of them oversaw or represented some aspect of the world.  In the case of Acts 28:4, the “native people,” instead of seeing Paul’s snake bite as a random event, saw as its cause an intervention by one of their gods against someone who must have deserved justice.

Paul, “however, shook off the creature into the fire and suffered no harm.” (verse 5). Seeing this, the people “changed their minds and said that he was a god.” (verse 6).  Because they thought a god was trying to punish Paul, they had to further conclude that Paul was powerful enough to overcome Dike and therefore must be a god himself.  Modern readers know this is all just superstition, but what’s interesting is how superstition builds on superstition.  The belief in one false god led to the belief in another.  This story is an example of lies building on lies.

The tragedy is that this happens far more often than we think.  What we see as a superstitious instinct – bad things happen to people who deserve justice because there is a god of justice – also was (and is) believed by people who claim to believe in the true God.  In John chapter 9, disciples of Jesus asked Him regarding a man blind from birth, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”[2]  These disciples believed in a God of justice, and so when they saw something bad happen, they attributed it to a direct intervention by God against someone who surely deserved it.

Christians believe that God is a God of justice, and yet Jesus corrected His disciples and said, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”[3]  Jesus then healed this blind man, and God was glorified in a way that couldn’t have happened if the man had not been blind.  Likewise, when Paul shook off the snake in Acts 28, God was glorified in a way that couldn’t have happened unless Paul was bitten by a snake.  The lesson is that if something bad happens to someone, it doesn’t mean there is some specific sin in that person that deserves a specific act of justice in the form of punishment.

God’s ways aren’t that easy for us to understand, “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?”[4]  If we believe God acts in easy-to-understand cause-and-effect relationships that we can see and understand (or even predict) we are just as superstitious as the people who believed in Dike.  And if we believe this, we are more likely to add to this belief just as the people did who thought Paul was a god.  We draw more conclusions from our own false conclusions, thinking it’s “logical,” although our starting point was off.  As Mark Twain wrote: “It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”

When Proverbs 14:12 and 16:25 said “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” an important point was being made that needed to be repeated: our own logic can lead us down the wrong way, even to death.  Our logic sometimes begins with a misunderstanding of how God works, and often with us thinking we can understand God completely.  We can believe God is just (and it is true that He is), but that doesn’t mean we know everything about how He accomplishes justice in the daily events of our lives and of the world.

So, what do we do about this?  We will never be perfect in this world, but I find that the way to move in the right direction is constant fellowship with God.  Constant prayer, daily Bible study, regular meditation on the Word.  Cultivation of a humble heart that knows it is flawed and can always be made better.  Repeated questioning of why we believe what we believe and do what we do.  Can we trace everything back to His Word?  All of our thoughts and actions?  Do we ask Him to show us where we’re wrong?

Pray that we may know God truly, even though we can’t know Him completely.  That God will better reveal Himself and His will to us, today and every day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dike_(mythology)
[2] John 9:2
[3] John 9:3
[4] Paul in Romans 11:34, quoting Isaiah 40:13

God is at Hand

Todd R Leave a comment

The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah lived in a time full of false prophets, where the true word of God was rarely heard.  It was also a time where idolatry and sin ran wild among the people of Judah, Jeremiah’s audience, a nation headed for destruction by Babylon, God’s chosen agent to discipline them.  Yet the false prophets told the people: “You shall not see the sword, nor shall you have famine, but I will give you assured peace in this place.’”[1]  Later, “They say continually to those who despise the word of the LORD, ‘It shall be well with you’; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, ‘No disaster shall come upon you.’”[2]

These false prophets were essentially telling the people they can do whatever they want, so they don’t need a savior since God was not going to judge them.   The false prophets also said that the people don’t need God as Lord, since there would be no negative consequences no matter what they chose to do.

Jeremiah fearlessly confronts these prophets and worked hard to get the people to take him seriously.  At one point, God tells Jeremiah to proclaim: “Am I a God at hand, declares the LORD, and not a God far away?”[3]  With this question, the LORD lets the people know that they can’t just set him aside as if He doesn’t exist.  While God is a God of love, He is also a God of justice, and sin will not be ignored.

Both the Old and New Testaments warn that those who ignore God can infect the broader population.  In Deuteronomy 29:18-19, Moses wrote: “Beware lest there be among you a man or woman or clan or tribe whose heart is turning away today from the LORD our God to go and serve the gods of those nations. Beware lest there be among you a root bearing poisonous and bitter fruit, one who, when he hears the words of this sworn covenant, blesses himself in his heart, saying, ‘I shall be safe, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart.’ This will lead to the sweeping away of moist and dry alike.”  [emphasis mine]. The whole church, the “moist and dry alike” can suffer from the influence of members who cast God aside as irrelevant or inconvenient.  People who stubbornly insist on their own way.

The New Testament picks up the “root” image from Deuteronomy in Hebrews 12:15 – “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled”. This verse is in the context of God’s discipline, of understanding that when He judges His own people, it is not a final judgement, but one that is meant to refine them and make them holy.  But it is also a reminder that we need to accept God as Lord, by His grace, in order for Him to be our Savior.

Like the false prophets of Jeremiah’s day, modern preachers can also teach that we don’t need Jesus as Lord and Savior.  Some of them declare that we are free to do whatever we want because He is a God of love and therefore will never judge us no matter what.  These ministers fail to see God’s loving, disciplining hand in our difficulties, feeding the “root of bitterness”.

Other preachers declare that God is a God of love, and therefore if we follow Him, we will be showered with blessings.  These ministers see suffering not as discipline, but as a failure on our part to love God, thus making God’s love conditional.  This also feeds the “root of bitterness” because there is no way we can meet God’s standard.  We will always fall short and without grace all we can experience is frustration.  There will never be enough material blessing to keep us satisfied under this theology.

However, we do need Jesus as Savior, and we do need Jesus as Lord, and we also have Jesus as Savior and Lord.  We need to live like God is “at hand” and not “far away.”  R.C. Sproul used to say Christians need to live “coram Deo” which means “before the face of God” in Latin.  Always knowing that we live in God’s presence, that He is “at hand” reminds us not only of our need for Him as Lord and Savior, but also that He more than meets our need because He is a perfect Lord and Savior.

So, when Jeremiah tells us that God asks, “Am I a God at hand, declares the LORD, and not a God far away?” we can reply that we know we always live coram Deo because He is near.  Only then can we pull up bitterness by its roots and experience true joy in His presence.

Live coram Deo today.

Amen.

[1] Jeremiah 14:13b
[2] Jeremiah 23:17
[3] Jeremiah 23:23

Sin and Calamity

Todd R 1 Comment

Mahatma Gandhi apparently said this: “I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”  Unfortunately, sometimes I think he had a point.  For example, someone I know with diabetes was told by members of their church that it happened because he was such a sinner.  What?  It’s shameful that church members would treat the unfortunate this way, but it happens, and it is one of the most inappropriate and discouraging things I can imagine.

In this post, I’ll share 2 examples from the Gospels that show Jesus would never speak, or even think, this way.  In fact, His attitude was almost the exact opposite.

The first story comes from John 9:1-7, which says:

“As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth.  And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.  We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work.  As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”  Having said these things, he spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.”

This example is relevant to my story about the diabetic because the disciples in the story are making the same connection between a person’s specific sin and their specific illness that the people talking about the diabetic made.  Jesus gave a surprising answer to why the man was born blind – to glorify God by showing His healing power.  Although people are too often hasty to assign blame, Jesus’ answer shows that there’s an alternative to drawing a straight line from specific sins to specific problems.  And interestingly, the answer could apply to any disabled or sick person: all sicknesses will be gone in paradise, and God will be glorified by all of it.  Illness is not evidence of sin; there could be other causes.

Another story comes from Luke 13:1-5, which says:

“There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.  And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way?  No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.  Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem?  No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.””

In this story, Jesus is questioning the assumption that very bad things happen to very bad people, and that if something very bad happens to you, you must be a very bad person.  The lesson Jesus is illustrating is that we should never think that the punishment of other sinners should be worse than the punishment we deserve ourselves.  Put another way, if we think someone was punished with diabetes because of their sin, what makes someone think they don’t also deserve diabetes (or worse)?

As John Calvin wrote in his commentary on this story:

“This passage is highly useful, were it for no other reason than that this disease is almost natural to us, to be too rigorous and severe in judging of others, and too much disposed to flatter our own faults. The consequence is, that we not only censure with excessive severity the offenses of our brethren; but whenever they meet with any calamity, we condemn them as wicked and reprobate persons.”

Or as the late pastor and author James Boice said about the story:

“We are asking the wrong question.  We are saying, ‘God, how could you let this happen to them?’  When the real question should be, ‘God, why hasn’t it happened to me?  Why am I still living, sinner that I am?’”

Whether a person suffers calamity or doesn’t isn’t because of anyone’s righteousness, and Jesus doesn’t offer us an explanation about why.  He doesn’t have to.  Instead, he said “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish”, and implied that one of the things to repent of is thinking that others are “worse sinners” than we are.

Some people who appear righteous end up suffering terribly in this world, while some who are flagrant sinners live prosperous lives.  Which brings me to another quote by our Lord Jesus, from Matthew 9:12b-13.

“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.  Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Jesus showed mercy to those who are sick, both physically and spiritually, and so should all of His people.  Jesus went out of His way to seek and love the sick and the lost, and so should we.

Amen.