Bus Conversations

True conversation snippet from the bus:

Q: "So, which group of Baptists did you train with?"

A: "The crazy ones."

John 10:10 (again) - "came"

Many moons ago, I started going through John 10:10, Christ's self-given mission statement, "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly." Unfortunately, because I was still in school at that point and thus even more distractable than I am now, it got left by the wayside before I'd gotten very far (the old posts are here and here). I'm going to try taking it up again.

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So, having discussed the subject of the sentence, the rooted and authoritative "I", we are presented immediately with the associated verb, "came". Although, of course, finding a verb here is quite natural, the particular word is rather interesting. "Came" is a word based on change, both in place and, because of that, in time. In other words, it it says that something that was there is now here.

This is rather natural for human beings, since our actions routinely require movement in time and space. However, God is not a human being. In fact, we know from the Bible that God is eternal and omnipresent – in other words, He is at every time and every place in the universe at the same time. Thus, it isn't strictly possible for Him to "come" at all, since He's already here.

However, being present by definition wasn't enough, and so He became a man. The movement wasn't one of moving from point A to point B, but instead was from a position of inaccessibility to one of absolute accessibility. As John wrote, "No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side [i.e., Jesus], He has made Him known." (John 1:8) Prior to the Incarnation, we had very little information on what God was like. The Old Testament records a few conversations with God, and some of His actions, but the level He generally acted on left mankind with a very incomplete portrait of Him. When Christ came, God was suddenly accessible, both because He was visible, and because He had to act within the constraints we understand, things like time and space. Although the difference is generally greatly overstated, it's almost understandable how some people see the OT God as a God of power and wrath and the NT God as one of love; wrath and power can be seen from miles away, but love must be demonstrated to someone close-by.

Because of this, it is no coincidence that in both the commissions of Matthew 28 and Acts 1, Christ made a very clear requirement of going to preach the gospel. What Christ started is what we are to continue as His church, and so, since He came visibly and purposefully into the world to give it an example and ultimately to transform it, He calls us to do the same. The gospel could never be effectively spread by a few men who stayed hidden in a room in Jerusalem; nor can it be spread by people today sitting in their homes and church buildings. The church down the street may be "present", but the work can only begin when the people in it actually go into the world, not just to visit and then hide again, but to live with and in front of that same world.

So, if you want to participate with Christ in His mission, you will have to go into the mission field to do it. Luckily the mission field is right outside your front door. The task calls for patience, humility (see Philippians 2:4-8), creativity, and longsuffering (John 15:18) – in short, it requires us to seek after extreme Christ-likeness, so that others can see, understand, and come to follow Him (1 Corinthians 11:1). And, for that, we must have the Spirit (see Acts 1:4-5, Romans 8:1-17). Thankfully, Christ has promised all that we need, and more!

A Good Friday Poem

O Man nailed here upon a cross,
Raised up for all to see,
Why do you bear the curse of God,
For what this agony?

Why do You gasp out words of grace
For those who hang you there?
How can You think to offer hope
As pain Your body tears?

Dear God! How can it come to pass
That You'd forsake Yourself?
What poor wretch suffers here below
Bereft of that last help?

Oh Christ, what has been finished now–
Your life, Your days, our hope?
If the best Lamb is led to death,
Then whither shall we go?

And why, oh sinful self, here stand,
And gaze upon this sight?
Dear Lord, the punishment is mine!
If I but had the might.

But yet a wonder, as He dies:
He trusts the Father still.
He breathes His last, and as He does,
Commits Him to that Will.

And so He dies, but yet 'tis strange
To see within a man
Such peace in meeting deathly doom
As if in full command.

The sacrifice is now complete,
The perfect One is slain.
My pardon cost the Son of God,
How can I count that gain?

Oh foolish me and sorry Death,
The Living One will rise;
He'll show new life to all mankind
When Easter morning shines!

Minor Organizational Updates

Yesterday, I was browsing about the blog and elsewhere, and noticed that some things needed to be updated here. So, I've done so. The changes are mostly small and boring, like changing the display of the post archives (that list was getting rather long) and updating the copyright date on the bottom. However, I did make some changes to the "Other Blogs of Note" list. On the sad side, the Rensselaer Christian Association has not updated their blog for almost two years now, so I've pulled them off. The group itself and the RCA website are still alive and well, though, which is good. Taking its place in the list is Curious Cognitive Content, which I found had put up a link to the Post. It's always nice to be able to reciprocate, and Elle writes a very good blog, to boot (she even updates it regularly, unlike me!). So, it works out well.

One thing I thought about updating, but didn't, is the author description. It turns out I'm doing a lot right now, and keeping the summary short wasn't working out very well. This level of activity is probably also why I don't post as often as I'd like. Thanks for continuing to read what does make it up, though, and I hope that they're worth the wait. Until next time, God bless!

Foolishnes! (1 Corinthians 1:18-31)

Sorry for the long gap in writing - the new year has found me officially in a second ministry, and, while it is a blessing and a thrill, it makes it even harder to find time and energy for writing. But, I had the opportunity a couple weeks ago to preach at church, when the pastor was out of town. Since I wrote out my first draft, I thought I might update that and share it. It's perhaps a bit more stream-of-consciousness than usual because of the genre, but I hope it comes across well enough. Enjoy!

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It was the year 1781, and the Revolutionary War was drawing to a close. The main British Army had been trapped on a peninsula in Chesapeake Bay in Norfolk, Virginia. On the land side, they were cut off by an American and French army, under the command of George Washington. By sea, they were blockaded by a fleet of French warships. The British held out for a few days, but they were soon starved into submission, and the surrender documents were signed on October 19, 1781, effectively ending the war. To mark the occasion, the British military band (don't be besieged without one!) played a song that was both rather popular at the time and strangely appropriate, called “The World Turned Upside-Down”. And, in fact, when an army of the most power empire in the world was surrendering to a ragtag group of colonists, the world must have seemed just that way.

This is about the world being turned upside down; however, in a different way. For the past several weeks, the church has been talking about the prerequisites of evangelism, the important things that we need too understand, both in theory and in practice, if we're going to be engaged in sharing the gospel in the areas around us. This continues that line of discussion, but in a different direction. I want to consider our understanding of the Gospel itself, as described in 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 (which you may want to read).

The ancient church at Corinth was a rather troubled place. If you read through Paul's letters to them, or some of the writings of the early church fathers, it's evident that they tended to do a lot of infighting, mainly over matters of status and power. In this case, factions had been formed over which teachers should be honored the most – Peter, Paul, Apollos, even Jesus. Paul's immediate response to this was to go back to the basics of their belief – not restating the gospel, which they all knew well enough, but restating the context in which it was given. In so doing, he described three important, but non-obvious, attributes of the gospel that we can forget all too easily, to the peril of both ourselves and those whom we would bring to meet Jesus.

The first important thing that Paul tells us about the gospel is that it's purposefully counterintuitive – it's designed to be easily dismissed. Consider its focal point: a man dying naked, nailed to a couple of pieces of wood, meeting a cruel but far-too-common end to a short life. It's exactly the sort of end that should have prevented any sort of movement from starting, amongst either Jews or Gentiles. On the Jewish side, they knew what the Messiah would look like: he'd be the one riding in on the stallion, setting up a kingdom and ruling the earth for them. That's a far cry from a man crucified by their Roman conquerors, and in fact cursed by virtue of dying on a tree. So, it was plainly obvious that this must have been the wrong guy. Similarly, the Greeks knew all about logic and the supremacy of the gods, and would have been equally unconvinced by this god coming voluntarily to be a man, and then allowing himself to be killed. It's about as foolish as you can get. From the standpoint of everybody, then, this Christ is either impossible or lunacy – neither of which sounds like a very good belief option.

Now, of course, those of us who have believed this message may not see a conflict; we have answers that, to us, address the issue. For instance, we could reply to the Jewish objection that Christ did establish a kingdom, but it's invisible and not all here yet. He was cursed by dying on a tree, but that curse bought our pardon and then was canceled. We can agree with the Greek logician that it was crazy for Christ to die, but then again it was downright audacious for Him to rise again. And these are good answers. The problem is, they still don't prove anything. Indeed, they ask the scoffer to believe even more than he or she had to before! This is the problem, in fact, if I may be so bold, with the Christian obsession with apologetics, logical arguments and proofs of Christian beliefs. It's good to be able to answer genuine questions from people willing to believe, obviously. However, the gospel isn't designed so that you can take that same knowledge and argue someone into the Kingdom when their thinking is stuck in that worldly framework.

This brings us to our second important point. Why, you might ask, did God make make the gospel counterintuitive? Well, Paul gives us a very good answer – to humble us. No one could have guessed or figured out God's plan – even the disciples, who knew Jesus and were told the plan multiple times, weren't ready for it! Instead, if we are to understand it, it all has to be of God, so that it is God that is glorified, God that is followed, and God that is known. And this is how we come to faith, and through it obtain “a righteousness that is by faith from first to last.” (Romans 1:17 NIV) And, so, this humility is for our own good. Indeed, God's working of shame in people's lives in verses 27-29 ended up benefiting both the lowly and, apparently, a few of the wise, powerful, and noble. For both groups, the gospel can't be understood and accepted until the hearer is humble enough to accept it on God's terms, not their own.

Third, the gospel forces us to become radically Christ-centered. As was said above, the gospel is counterintuitive, requiring us to accept a new interpretation of God and the world. To do that, God must humble us to accept His explanation, even though it may not make sense. Once we've done this, we're suddenly in a rather alien place – an “upside-down world”, in fact. It's a place, as we read elsewhere [in the service], of camels jumping through needles (Matt. 19:23-26), of the first being last (Matt. 19:30), of men being honored with the angels (Psalm 8:3-8), and of mortals with eternity testified to in their hearts (Eccl. 3:11) – a world that defies understanding. Paul gives us one thing to cling to: Christ, and Him crucified (v. 23). He is the embodiment of God's power and grace, the only answer to sin, and the only thing we can boast in. Solomon said a similar thing back in Ecclesiastes (see Eccl. 3:9-15), that it's God who establishes, God who plans, and God who gives work. In other words, He and His word are the only way to understand how to live in God's “foolish” kingdom. It's a kingdom that involves, among other things, self-denial (Matt. 16:24), cheek-turning (Matt. 5:39), and enemy-loving (Luke 7:27-36). And these are things that He not only taught, but demonstrated in His time on earth.

To wrap this up, there's one fallacy in the this idea of “the world turned upside-down,” as it relates to the gospel: the world out there is already upside-down. When the gospel flips the world, it becomes not upside-down, but finally rightside-up. Or, to take it out of the metaphor, embracing the gospel means embracing the world, and ourselves, as God originally made us to be, instead of as the broken human beings we were born as due to sin. We are healed people, sent to still-broken people who often don't even know that they're broken. If we are to convince them, we need to first learn what it means to be a “little Christ”, through both relationship and study, and then, as we are able, begin to live and share it. As we do that, our lives themselves become the testimonies that will make the gospel make sense to other people. In other words, we are called, not to just preach the gospel, but to be it, through Christ working in us (Phil. 2:12-13). I pray that each of us would strive to reach that mark!