by John Mason | Oct 23, 2014 | Word on Wednesday
What’s in a name? According to Shakespeare’s Juliet in Romeo and Juliet “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The names of things don’t matter, only what they are.
But when we turn to the pages of the Bible we discover that name is closely aligned with the essence of the person named. This is especially true for the name of God. In the model prayer Jesus gave his disciples, he taught, “Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…” – ‘may your name be honored’. Yet how often do we forget the honor of God’s name in our prayers.
The honor of God’s name. In the great prayers in the Old Testament we see how jealous for the honor of God’s name men like Moses and Daniel were. For example, in Daniel 9:15f, in a prayer where Daniel freely acknowledged the failure of his fellow Israelites, he pleaded for God’s mercy for the sake of his (God’s) name. We read: Lord our God, who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand… You made your name renowned even to this day—
God’s name. Daniel is bold to pray for God to rescue his people because he wanted to see God’s name honored. Because God freed the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, his name was revered in Moses’ day. People came to know you didn’t mess with this God – He did what he said he would do! That is why Daniel prayed: Lord, we have sinned, we have done wickedly.
Today. We live in a society that gives little thought to God, let alone the honor of God’s name. Our society has concluded that God is not there. Yet the reality is, the evidence for his existence has not changed. Many scientists agree that we are not here by chance, and historians consistently acknowledge that Jesus of Nazareth existed. The truth is, we have attempted to put ourselves in God’s place.
Arguably, the economic problems we face are often a result of our insatiable demand for the immediate gratification. The social problems that concern us are typically the outcome of our collective repudiation of the law of God that we’ve known for centuries. We do not deserve any good thing from God.
Consider how Daniel continued his prayer: Lord, in view of all your righteous acts, let your anger and wrath, we pray, turn away from your city Jerusalem, your holy mountain (9:16). He didn’t ask God to put aside his righteousness and overlook the faults and failings of Israel. Instead he asked God to act because of his righteousness. This was Israel’s only hope. Daniel knew his Bible and understood that the Exodus from Egypt took place, not because God’s people were worthy of God’s intervention, but because God had made a promise.
Daniel knew that because God is righteous he keeps his promises. Like Moses, he appealed to the honor or name of God: ‘Lord, you promised; We don’t deserve mercy, but you promised’ Now therefore, O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his supplication, and for your own sake, Lord, let your face shine upon your desolated sanctuary. Incline your ear, O my God, and hear. Open your eyes and look at our desolation and the city that bears your name (Daniel 9:17-18).
Daniel was humble and contrite about his own and Israel’s sin. But this did not prevent him from praying on the basis of God’s character and God’s promises. One of the great encouragements of Daniel’s prayer is that God is a God of mercy. The glorious thing about God is that he is always willing to receive us back on the basis of our repentance and our willingness to start anew.
We live on the other side of the cross of Jesus Christ where God demonstrated his perfect righteousness and mercy. We have greater reason to pray with confidence for God’s mercy for our world today – including our loved ones, our friends and work colleagues – so that God’s name might be honored.
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…”
by John Mason | Oct 15, 2014 | Word on Wednesday
In times when you feel your prayers are not being answered have you ever wondered whether you are praying correctly? How encouraging it is to discover that Jesus’ disciples were aware of their need to know how to pray. Without their request we might not have the model prayer that Jesus gave them!
‘When you pray’ we read in Luke 11:1, ‘say, “Our Father in heaven”.’
The words “in heaven” are striking. They remind us of the understanding of God that we find in the great prayers of the Old Testament, for example, those of Moses, Isaiah, Job and Daniel. All of them understood God’s awesome holiness and majestic power. So, when Isaiah saw the vision of God in the temple, high and lifted up, his first response was “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips.” Jesus’ opening words in the prayer he gave his disciples, remind us of God’s awesome majesty.
But there is a breath-taking new dimension that Jesus introduced with his first two words:
“Our Father…” For his first followers these words would have been electrifying. While the Jewish people understood the notion of the fatherhood of God and had heard prophets like Hosea speak of God’s people being his sons and daughters, the idea of calling God, ‘Father’ was quite unknown. Nowhere is this found in the Old Testament.
When we think about it, the idea of calling God ‘Father’ is one of the surprising distinctions between the Old and New Testaments.
In his, Knowing God, Dr J.I. Packer asks the question, ‘How would you define a Christian?’ He answers with, ‘Someone who knows God as ‘Father’.
To know God as Father is an even more important and richer idea than our being justified! Yes, justification is essential to our relationship with God – we can’t reconcile ourselves with God by our own efforts, church-going or charitable-giving. But, as Packer rightly notes, it is not the highest idea of Christian teaching. What is most important is our being adopted by God as his sons and daughters.
Through his death on the cross Jesus has provided the legal and just way for God to adopt us. That is our highest privilege. And in this model prayer Jesus tells us what this meant when it came to speaking with God. It is the greatest privilege of all, to be able to call him, ‘Father’. From now we can approach the great, majestic God of the universe in a very personal way.
These first words of the Lord’s Prayer encourage us to see that this big, exciting God delights in us knowing him personally and intimately as his children. When I think of this, I for one, want to pray, “Our Father in heaven…”
by John Mason | Oct 8, 2014 | Word on Wednesday
A friend of mine here in New York once asked me why it was that some Australian friends of his hadn’t expressed thanks following an event to which he had invited them at some cost to himself and his wife. I assured him that most Australians are not like this.
However, in not expressing gratitude, these Australians not only revealed a lack of gratitude for what they had received, but gave the impression that what they had received came as of right. Were they selfish, arrogant or simply bad mannered?
Now, I have to be the first to admit that I don’t always write a formal note of thanks using pen and paper, as has been my past practice, to express my thanks for someone’s kindness. I tend to write my thanks these days via email. But expressing our thanks to others for their generosity or kindness to us is important, isn’t it. In giving thanks we recognize someone’s thoughtfulness and generosity, often at cost to themselves – their gift to us.
When we think about this, isn’t it all too true that we often fail to thank God?
In Psalm 103 David lists the goodness of God, setting out in some detail the ways God had blessed him. David may have done this, not only to express his thanks to God, but also to protect himself from the temptation to be depressed (something which he experienced). He may also have decided to reflect on God’s goodness to prevent himself from forgetting the source of his success and prosperity. He did not want to take God’s grace for granted.
This is an exhortation we need to hear. Consider for a moment the way we tend to treat God. He has been good to us in so many ways – he is never over-indulgent; he disciplines us when we need it; he doesn’t give us everything we want when we want it; and yet his kindness is great. He often gives us unexpected and good things – far more than we deserve (see Ephesians 3:21).
The sad reality is, most of us simply forget to thank God for all his goodness. We take it for granted.
And if we think about it, people who are often ungrateful are, underneath it all, thoughtless, selfish or even discontented. In their eyes, other people who receive good things don’t deserve them. A discontented spirit is simply an ungrateful spirit. To be thankful is to accept the situation you are in – to accept it as part of the loving providence of God. A thankful heart trusts God in every situation and thankful people are happy people and contented.
When we turn to the New Testament we read in Paul’s Letter to the Colossians that as God’s people we need to be grateful to God:
Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him (Colossians 3:17).
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’.
