4 posts tagged “christ”
Sorry I have been gone for...about 4 months. School this semester is much more time than I expected, and an xbox in my dorm room...doesn't exactly help my productivity. But I'm back, for now.
One thing that really has caught my attention as of late is the prevalence of tv shows and commercials promising salvation and redemption. It is as if everyone is allowed to talk about their hells, but Christians can't talk about the real Hell because it would offend people.
The first place I noticed this theme was on a commercial for people who were going bald. But let me do a quick rabbit trail. The opposite of Christianity is not atheism. It is idolatry. And in idolatry, we define for ourselves a hell. For instance, in this example, bald hell. You don't want to be in bald hell. No one will like you, you will have to buy your kids sunglasses if you live in California, because your head is SO shiny. You have to spend more money on hats because you are so embarrassed. Bald hell is a BAD place. And so what is the savior for this hell? Well, some hair product that will give you thicker hair, and cover up all those bald spots of course. And so that becomes your functional savior. You sacrifice time for it. You ascribe glory to it. You worship it and tell all your friends how great HAIRY hair worked for you (I made up the name, just as a place filler). Because it gives you salvation from bald hell.
And the commercials are just ridiculous. People claiming that their life is so much better because of this or that product, and that they have more peace and joy now that they aren't bald. The thing is that they aren't too far off the mark. They are praising a god for saving them, and giving them peace and joy. What they don't realize is that God has died for their salvation, if they would have it, and that He waits with opens hands, peace in one and joy in another.
Or take the tv show MADE on MTV (yes, sometimes I watch MTV...deep dark secret of mine). They take people who are unpopular and different from others. Then they make them into popular kids and people like them and one guy won the prom king crown, others have lost tons of weight. And they say that Eddie George, the host trainer ex-NFL running back, has just changed their life for the better forever. But they are essentially, at the core of it, still the same. Just as I am a wretched sinner, so are they. We are all wretched sinners. The Liberals who cry out for equality have it in Christianity. We are all equally horrible people, at our very core. We seek redemption. We seek improvement of life. We seek true "life-change," just like all the people on the show Beauty and the Geek and every other reality show, especially ones that are competing for money, where all the contestants claim that the million dollar prize will change their life forever.
Reading over this, it isn't very coherent. So I figure I will be coherent here instead. We seek salvation: let us seek Jesus. We seek peace: let us run after Jesus. We seek joy: let us long for communion with Jesus. For true salvation lies at his feet. Every other pursuit of a savior, outside of Jesus, is a form of idolatry. So let us fall to Jesus' feet, and worship him, for he is worthy to be praised. The him to be the glory for ever and ever, Amen.
I was recently watching Larry King Live (yes, I know it seems like I am 50 years old...but I am not), and he was interviewing Joel Osteen. Now, I don't have a problem with the fact that he has a huge church, and maybe he smiles all the time just because he is blessed with joyfulness. However, his "gospel" is very dangerous. You see, Joel Osteen was asked about why he doesn't "pound the pulpit," preaching fire and brimstone. Joel Osteen retorted that he thinks that people don't need that, but that they need to be told that the good news is that Jesus loves us and wants us to have a good life and a healthy life. Now this is GOOD. Certainly, God wants all these things for us, and gives us these things. But this is not the Good News.
If Joel Osteen's message is elevated to the Good News, we have a serious problem. While a good life is a great thing, without any atonement for our sin by the death of Jesus on the Cross, our "Best Life Now" will be worth nothing. In fact, every single time the words "good news" show up in the New Testament, it is always attached to some declarative verb (e.g. to preach the good news), and is always referring to Jesus. For Jesus is our Good News, and what Jesus has done for us.
In fact, J.I. Packer refers to this problem in his book, Knowing God. He writes in his book, "The type of ministry that is here in mind starts by stressing, in an evangelistic context, the difference that becoming a Christian will make...he will be able to overcome the sins that prviously mastered him...[God] will enable him to fin a way through problems of guidance, self-fulfillment, personal relations, heart's desire...Now, put like that, in general terms, these great assurances are scriptural and true - praise God, they are! But it is possible so to stress them, and so to play down the rougher side of the Christian life...as to give the impression that normal Christian living is a perfect bed of roses."
Joel Osteen preaches the Christian life like this. Differing from orthodox theologians, he preaches US as victors instead of Christus Victor. He preaches a good life instead of the good news.
The ONLY thing that is different between Christianity and every other religion is Jesus. We have a Saviour who dies for our sin, propitiating God's wrath. Because of Him, anyone who is in Christ no longer stands in judgment. This is our good news. Nothing less than that.
I was driving a friend home from a new year's get together tonight when I mentioned a certain denomination's doctirnal error of backing away from the exclusivity of Christianity. We then got into a very intense discussion, of length about 8 blocks of snowy road, about Christ's exclusivity. She brought up the fact that Christ taught that we ought to love everyone and accept everyone. Like any good lie, this is a half-truth. Christ did teach that we ought to love and accept everyone. The problem lies in our modern defenition of love. As C.S. Lewis writes, in one of his books (Four Loves, Mere Christianity or Problem of Pain?), we wish for a senile love, that approves of anything and everything. But this is not the love that we live: if we love a spouse, as Christ loves the Church, we love it as it is, but we also wish its change for the better. In theory, if I was a dad, I would love my kid no matter what when he was trying to learn how to walk. Indeed, I would be delighted at the slightest stumble. But when he is a full grown man...I would be not be satisfied with a son who could not walk. But maybe that is incomplete. Let's consider the far out theory that someone would marry me: now I would love her when she woke up in the morning, with hair that looked ridiculous, kind of like mine does in the morning (because I have long hair). But I would also wish her to comb it. The idea to "love me for what I am" does not apply in the Christian tradition and doctrine: God does not, cannot, love in that manner. He loves, but he loves with the wish to perfect us, to make us better, not that we would stagnate.
Also, a lot of the misunderstanding has to do with the misunderstanding of Christ and his purpose. As Mark Driscoll mentioned in a sermon recently, from the series Vintage Jesus, Jesus came to fulfill three different roles: Prophet, Priest, and King. If we omit Prophet, we lose the condemning message of Jesus. He continually said, "repent." He called people to come to him. His teachings so impacted his disciples that probably only months after he ascended into heaven, Peter spoke in front of the Jewish courts, saying, "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." Christianity is exclusive. There is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved. There are many religions, but one God. If people say that this exclusivity started with the Christian tradition, I would point to the Shemah, a daily Hebrew prayer derived from Deuteronomy 6:4, which says, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one." There is only one god. You can go to college and know big words, but Christ rules over all. He died for that exclusivity. When asked if he was the son of God in Matthew 26, he says, "it is as you say." He died for the exclusivity of the gospel. He could have said something trite like "we are all children of God in one way or another," but he instead stood for what is true. Christ was painfully exclusive.
If people say that this is offensive, I never said it wasn't. The cross is offensive. The word of God is offensive, as the prophet Jeremiah says, "The word of the LORD is offensive to them; they find no pleasure in it." If some people are offended, I know I am doing my job. The cross stands as an affront to the world because it declares to the world, "everything you are doing is not good enough. You need more. You need Christ."
I think the most ridiculous thing is that the world is quite exclusive. Try to not recycle in Seattle - see what happens. Try to smoke in a resturaunt in Denver, Portland, or any number of places - see what happens. We are exclusive, and it is absurd that we insist that only Christianity shouldn't be. We are by nature exclusive.
And so Christ stands exclusively. There is no other name by which men are to be saved. No other name. It doesn't get much more exclusive - and yet anyone is welcome to come through the gate.
Let us lay our crowns at Christs feet at the beginning of this new year. And let us remember this day as the day in which we were restored by God.
Kyrie Elieson. Christe Elieson.
I can rest assured in the fact that when God chooses people, he usually chooses jacked up ones. Jacob ripped off his brother twice and then God decided to make him the head of Israel. Rahab was a whore, and a descendant of Jesus.
I have been pondering, or even more to the quick, meditating on the meaning of Jesus' charge to take up our cross and follow him. It has always confused me, and there are a lot of layers to it. But this fall, I finally got to a place where I have a handle on the passage. He says, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." (Mark 8:34)
A couple meditations on this passage:
First, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself." In order for anyone to follow Christ, we must deny a few things about ourselves that we, in our sinful nature, hold self-evident. We must deny our importance in the world, as compared to God. We must abdicate our throne, and step down to bow to God. We must deny our "birthright" to running our own lives. This American obsession with rights is absurd. We have no rights, we have no choice, except that come from God. Using them apart from God means they dissolve in our hands. God gave Adam and Eve an entire garden to enjoy God in, but they used their rights and choices apart from God, and so lost everything. We must also deny our righteousness. We have this idea that we will be good enough. In polls, people in general subscribe to some concept of heaven, and also think they are going there. We think we will be good enough for God-which is absurd. In mathematical terms, (this is me being nerdy), our goodness is a point of zero width as compared with God. How can we ever be good enough, if not through Christ, our mediator. The beginning of the journey is abdicating our rule over our lives. The next step is to deny our own self-saving power.
Second, "take up his cross and follow me." To take up a cross is not to sacrifice oneself - it is to declare yourself a criminal. Not just a criminal, but the worst of criminals. Crucifixion was reserved for the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes. And what crime is more heinous than denying God what is rightfully his? Than claiming to not need God, to be better than God? With the Apostle, we must declare that we are the "worst of sinners." (1 Tim 1:16) We then follow Christ. I had thought for so long that this meant that we follow Jesus in the traditional sense, of then following his teaching. But we must take the cross somewhere. And so we follow Christ to Golgotha, the place of the skull, for he was killed with sinners. And so we follow him, to die, that we might be buried and then be remade.
Let us abdicate. Deny our own righteousness. Embrace our criminality. For in our weakness, God is glorified. And we must live for God's glory, because through glorifying God, we receive life. Let us die, that a new man might rise. Kyrie Elieson.
