by John Mason | Sep 17, 2014 | Word on Wednesday
Michael Connelly in his 2013 book, The Gods of Guilt writes these words into one of his characters:
Everybody has a jury, the voices they carry inside… Those I have loved and those I have hurt. Those who bless me and those who haunt me.
Commenting on why he wrote Lord of the Flies, William Golding responded:
“I believed then, that man was sick–not exceptional man, but average man. I believed that the condition of man was to be a morally diseased creation and that the best job I could do at the time was to trace the connection between his diseased nature and the international mess he gets himself into.”
As every playwright knows, no one is perfect. Everyone has a character flaw.
The greatest problem on earth. All of us, even the best of us, are a strange mixture of good and evil. One way or another, in varying ways and varying degrees, we contribute to the world’s problems. Is there any hope?
The greatest news is that there is hope. And the most surprising thing is that the rescue comes from outside, from the one who created us. Paul concluded his speech to the Athenian academia by saying,
‘In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now God commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all people by raising him from the dead’ (Acts 17:30-31).
Human ignorance. Paul concludes by returning to his opening words – human ignorance. In setting up an altar to ‘The Unknown God’, the Athenians recognized that they actually might not know God. ‘Well,’ says Paul, ‘you might claim ignorance, but the reality is God has never left himself without witness.’ As Paul says in Romans 1, God has revealed himself through the natural order, but men and women have always tried to suppress that knowledge. ‘Well,’ Paul says to the Athenians, ‘God in his mercy is willing to overlook your past ignorance, but ‘now he commands people everywhere to repent.’
Justice. It is a matter of deep offense to God that we try to live without him, to say that this life is all there is, to think that there is no such thing as truth. Throughout history God has been revealing himself and now ‘he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice’. We may laugh at this, but if we think about it, judgment gives value and dignity to who we are and what we do. If people steal and hate, terrorize and murder and there is no final justice, life is meaningless.
The Judge. So we ask, ‘Can God find it in his heart to do anything to save us from the judgment we deserve?’ The answer lies in the person of the judge whom God has appointed. It will be God’s day, but the judge will be one of us – a man whose name we know: Jesus Christ.
If I had to make a choice and choose a judge for myself, he is the one I would choose! From God’s side, he is the Son of God equal to God, to be honored as God. But he is also the one who entered the world as a man; who dwelt among us full of grace and truth. He lived, he spoke and he acted in a way that was different from anyone else. He loved the outcast and brought joy and hope to people from all walks of life. The Gospel narratives tell us that this man died for us. His resurrection from the dead demonstrates that what he said was true and that his promise of forgiveness, restoration and new life, is real.
What should we to do? We need to prepare now for the day when justice will be done. We need to prepare to stand before the all-powerful, whose pure holiness is frightening to see. So how do we prepare? By repenting; that’s what God commands. Do I need to repent of all my sins and totally change my life? Yes, this is how we need to start. Our biggest sin is to trust any other god than God.
Will it mean a change? Yes! But what we are doing is finding God at last. We will be giving Jesus that central place in our lives that he deserves. It will mean discovering that this is what we were made for and that at last we have become what we were intended to be.
by John Mason | Sep 10, 2014 | Word on Wednesday
With the rise of militant Islam we may be tempted to wonder if there is a one true God and, if there is, we wonder whether he is still in control. Why does he allow the atrocities against his people that are occurring in Iraq at the hands of ISIS?
It is not my purpose today to address the question of suffering (I touched on that theme on Wednesdays, July 16, 23 and 30). Rather I want to continue to explore the gospel presentation of Paul the Apostle to the Athenian intelligentsia at the Areopagus (Acts 17:22ff).
From the starting point that behind the universe God exists (see last week’s ‘Word’), Paul develops the idea that God is also the ruler and sustainer of the nations.
“From one ancestor he (God) made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’…” (Acts 17:26ff).
Paul is saying that history and the rise and fall of nations are ultimately in God’s hands. His words echo those of Isaiah who, having prophesied God’s judgment of Israel, also spoke of the deliverance of his people from captivity (Isaiah 40 – 45). Isaiah said that God would raise up Cyrus, an insignificant prince to crush the great Babylonian empire. In turn Cyrus would free God’s people from captivity and allow them to return to Jerusalem.
Isaiah was saying (as indeed we find throughout the Scriptures) that God continues his work in the world, constantly using human decisions to work out his own greater purposes for men and women. It is because of this that Paul could write in Romans 8:28: And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good,…
There is always a purpose to God’s plan. He wants us to come to our senses and turn back to him – as did the prodigal son in Jesus’ parable. Tough times can be God’s wake-up call for us. It’s easy to blame him when things go wrong, but that is absurd for we are the problem. It’s easy to say that God is distant or uncaring. ‘Not so,’ says Paul to the Athenians: ‘God is near you – nearer than you think. And, quoting from a 6th century BC Greek poet, he points out, In him we live and move and have our being. He continues by quoting either Aratus or another poet, Cleanthus: For we too are his offspring.
In quoting from non-biblical writers Paul lays out an important principle for us: to reach a cynical audience with the things of God, look for ideas or words in the culture that illustrate a gospel truth – not all human utterance is wrong (after all, we are still image-bearers of God, albeit distorted ones).
To return to Paul’s point: he is saying that all men and women are God’s creatures. All of us not only receive our life from him, but our very existence is dependent on him. ‘Your poets agree that we are God’s offspring,’ he continued. ‘How ridiculous it is, therefore, to reduce God to something less than we are – gold or silver or stone.’
‘What’s more, when you create an idol, you are in fact trying to reverse the roles of yourself and God. You want to make yourself God’s creator, not God your creator.’
We have this assurance: despite the suffering and evil in the world around us, God is still in control, working out his greater purpose. We have every reason, therefore, to ask him to restrain wickedness and vice and direct our leaders to exercise their responsibilities wisely and justly for the benefit of all.
And, like Paul, let’s constantly look for points of connection with the culture so that we can more effectively reach the minds and hearts of people around us with God’s good news.
by John Mason | Sep 3, 2014 | Word on Wednesday
The Castle is a classic Australian film, much lauded because of its understated handling of a blue-collar suburban household. One of the lines that catches our attention is, “Tell ‘im e’s dreamin’” – in response to a quoted price for a supposed bargain.
I was thinking about this recently in the course of a conversation about the existence of the universe and whether it has all originated simply by chance. My mind also turned to the words of Paul the Apostle to the intelligentsia in Athens (that we read about in Acts 17:22ff).
“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else,” Paul said (Acts 17:24-25).
The view that we live in a world that has been created by one God who is Lord of all was a very different world-view from the Epicureans with their belief in chance and the pursuit of pleasure. It was very different from the pantheism of the Stoics and their stiff upper-lip approach to life. It is a very different world-view from the Hindus, the Buddhists and scientific atheists of today who all reject the notion of a creator God.
Yet it is a world-view that many highly intelligent and capable scientists today would support. For example, Charles Townes who won the Nobel prize for his discovery of the laser has stated: “In my view the question of origin seems always left unanswered if we explore from a scientific view alone. Thus, I believe there is a need for some religious or metaphysical explanation. I believe in the concept of God and in His existence” (quoted by H. F. Schaefer III, ‘The Big Bang, Stephen Hawking and God’).
The universe in which we live did not come into existence by random chance. There is a creator God and logically he can never go away. All this is a rather frightening thought, for it reverses what we want to think about God. We would rather have a God who did our will and who turned up only when we wanted him.
The Athenians thought that they were independent, free spirits, able to make their own decisions without reference to any God. Nothing much has changed has it! Paul won’t have any of it: God is the one who continues to sustain the life that he has created. It’s absurd to think that he needs to be sustained by us. And yet we want to domesticate God, reduce him to the level of a household pet. We build grand church buildings and put him in there. We don’t let him loose on the street let alone in our lives. ‘No,’ says Paul, ‘we depend on God, not he on us.’
Our capacity to deceive ourselves is endless. We tell ourselves that what we think must be true, but, think about it, wanting a win in the lottery never created a win. To say that there is no creator God is a sign that we have lost touch with reality and inhabit a dream world of our own. Perhaps it’s time we started to spread the line in a different context: Tell ‘im e’s dreamin’.
by John Mason | Aug 27, 2014 | Word on Wednesday
Anti-intellectual? Christianity is often dismissed as being anti-intellectual: ‘No-one with half a brain could be a Christian’. Many in the West reject Christianity, not because they think it is false, but because they think it is trivial. If they think at all about the meaning of life, they want something that hangs together and makes sense of the complex cluster of their ideas, their longings and their experiences. Many simply want a world-view that makes them feel good.
And if we raise the subject of God, people tell us they don’t like the idea of ‘God’ because he would want to interfere with their life and be a kill-joy. ‘God is all right,’ they say, ‘as long as he doesn’t intrude into my space. I’ll call you, God. Don’t you call me!’
We live in a society where there is a complex set of ideas – longing for freedom, belief that this world is all there is, and a relativism of ‘your truth and my truth’. Yet in the cities of the West there is a lingering memory of the God of the Bible. Most people still agree that, if there is a God, there is only one God and that he exists as a spirit – without a body. People also agree that, if God exists, he is love – not someone filled with hate.
Response? How then do we respond to such a cluster of ideas? In Acts 17:22-31, Luke records Paul’s address to the Areopagus in ancient Athens. In Acts 17:16 we read that when Paul first came to the city he was deeply distressed to see that it was full of idols. John Stott commented, ‘Paul saw that the city was smothered with idols. He felt deeply distressed and provoked by the idolatry because it dishonored the name of God.’
Luke records what Paul did: he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and devout persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. We can’t help but admire Paul – not content just to be an intelligent tourist, taking in the sights and the culture of one of the most remarkable cities of the ancient world.
Paul’s response was to argue for and defend the gospel of God. It is evidence of his impact that the Athenian philosophers wanted to ask him questions: ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’
Two groups took him to task. The Epicureans, ‘philosophers of the garden’, reckoned the gods were so remote that they had no interest or influence on human affairs. Life was a matter of chance. Men and women should pursue pleasure for there would be no judgment, and no life after death. The Stoics, ‘philosophers of the porch’, said there was a supreme god that they confused with a pantheistic ‘world soul’. They emphasized fatalism, submission and coping with pain.
Into this shopping mall of ideas and beliefs Paul came. When asked what he taught, he stood up at the Areopagus and said: “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:22ff).
It was a brilliant opening to what became both a defense and apresentation of God’s gospel before the Athenian intelligentsia. Without quoting from the Bible yet drawing from what it reveals about God, he engaged with contemporary ideas within Greek thought. He pointed to five features about this ‘unknown God’ – features that I will identify next Wednesday.
In the meantime, you might like to consider the world-views held by people you know. You might also consider questions you could ask them, to get them thinking about the larger issues of life and their place within it all.
by John Mason | Aug 20, 2014 | Word on Wednesday
‘Peace’ is a word that goes to the heart of the Christian message. It was the theme of the angels’ song on the night of Jesus’ birth. It is something we all long for. Yet ‘peace’ is one thing the world does not have.
In fact, with the constant news of war and brutal terrorism, in the Middle East, Syria and Iraq, and so many other places, we can be tempted to ask what the angels meant when they sang of peace and goodwill at the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. It is one of the criticisms about the Christian faith from cynics and genuine enquirers. It’s one of the questions that can tempt professing Christians to doubt the reliability of God’s Word.
The key is in the second part of the angels’ song: “Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace among those whom he favors”. They were speaking about the peace God’s people would know – personal peace with God (John 14:27) and peace with one another as God’s people (Ephesians 2:13-18). In Colossians 3:15, St Paul says, Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. When we, or others ask, ‘Where is the evidence of the fulfillment of this ‘peace’, the answer is, ‘The people of God’.
But Paul knew very well that this peace doesn’t happen automatically. In Colossians 3:12-17 he identifies attitudes and actions we need to develop. He begins by putting his finger on attitudes that can constantly cause tension and conflict. So, instead of indifference towards the pain, suffering and exploitation of others, he says, put on compassion and kindness; instead of arrogance or pride that thinks only of self, be humble and gentle; instead of impatience or resentment, practice patience.
Indifference, pride and impatience. How often are we impatient because we are not prepared to put up with the faults or perceived failures of others? And, how many of us are indifferent to injustice and exploitation – unless it touches us, or our loved ones? We are rightly upset with the atrocities perpetrated by ISIS, especially against people who refuse to convert to Islam, but what of our concern for the teenage girls still hostage to Boko Haram in Nigeria? Or Christians in Palestine, South Sudan, or Afghanistan? And, turning to another example, what concern do we have for the extensive sex-trade networks that are proliferating around the world?
‘Freedom’ a new film (being released in Australia tomorrow) tells a story of the 19th century ‘Underground Railroad’ in North America that brought freedom for tens of thousands of slaves. But it is not just an historical narrative for it opens up a story of Christian faith and courageous compassion for the sake of others. It alerts us to the reality of sex-trafficking today and the need for gospel-motivated action for those being exploited.
At the heart of our attitudes towards one another should be a willingness to work for peace. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus said. This does not mean that truth is subsumed in the cause of peace. Rather, as Paul goes on to say in Colossians 3:16, we should allow the truth of God, revealed in his Word, to fall upon and direct our relationships, with one another and with the wider community.
The angels song. Returning to the night Jesus was born, the contrast of the shepherds carrying out their work in the dark and the angels doing their work in the brilliant light of God’s glory could not be more vivid. Glory to God in the highest, they sang, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased (2:14).
Three themes are set in parallel: Glory and peace, highest and earth, and God and men and women with whom he is pleased. The supernatural realm echoes with joy and honour at the outward manifestation of God’s love (glory). Now men and women to whom God has come can experience the reality of the peace we all long for.
