A Prayer For Help

Why are you far away, Lord? Why do you hide yourself when I am in trouble? Proud and brutal people hunt down the poor. But let them get caught by their own evil plans!

The wicked brag about their deepest desires. Those greedy people hate and curse you, Lord. The wicked are too proud to turn to you or even think about you. They are always successful, though they can’t understand your teachings, and they keep sneering at their enemies.

In their hearts they say, “Nothing can hurt us! We’ll always be happy and free from trouble.” They curse and tell lies, and all they talk about is how to be cruel or how to do wrong. They hide outside villages, waiting to strike and murder some innocent victim.

They are hungry lions hiding in the bushes, hoping to catch some helpless passerby. They trap the poor in nets and drag them away. They crouch down and wait to grab a victim. They say, “God can’t see! He’s got on a blindfold.”

Do something, Lord God, and use your powerful arm to help those in need. The wicked don’t respect you. In their hearts they say, “God won’t punish us!” But you see the trouble and the distress, and you will do something. The poor can count on you, and so can orphans. Now break the arms of all merciless people. Punish them for doing wrong and make them stop.

Our Lord, you will always rule, but nations will vanish from the earth. You listen to the longings of those who suffer. You offer them hope, and you pay attention to their cries for help. You defend orphans and everyone else in need, so that no one on earth can terrify others again.

Psalm 10, Contemporary English Version

I’m not sure what led me to this psalm last week, but when I read it I was immediately reminded of many powerful people in today’s world that seem to fit the description of the “wicked” given here. And I recognised the frustration of the psalmist, wondering how and why God allows these people to apparently thrive.

But their “victory” is temporary, while God’s is eternal. Their “freedom” is an illusion, while freedom in Christ is deep and real.

We can cry out to God, and pray for justice. And we can do our part, large or small, in bringing it about. But no matter how dark the world becomes we can never lose hope, because the Light of the World has already overcome the darkness.

John 1:5, John 3:19-21, John 8:12, Ephesians 5:6-20

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Private Lives

I was browsing through some notes I’d written over the years, looking for some inspiration for a post, and I came across a document titled “Private Lives”. It turned out to be a complete article which I thought I must have posted here previously, but then I noticed that it had been written on 22 May 2011, predating my blog by nearly a year. So I thought I’d share it with you now. I haven’t edited it. There are a couple of lines I would probably change if I was writing it now, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea of rewriting history, so what follows is what flowed from my mind on that day…

I’m troubled by the Twitter/super-injunction drama being played out before our eyes.

It seems that some Twitter users feel that they have a right to total anonymity (privacy) at the same time that they are denying celebrities that same privilege.

Let’s look first at the legal side of this. Rightly or wrongly a court has ordered that the real identity of “CTB” should not be published. Contempt of court is a serious matter.

Twitter’s terms of service clearly state “We also reserve the right to access, read, preserve, and disclose any information as we reasonably believe is necessary to satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request…”

So the seeming uproar among the Twitter community at the news that CTB is seeking – through the courts – the name of the individual who has broken the injunction, is unjustified.

But there are even more important issues at stake here than privacy or freedom of speech. Read this well-known passage from John’s gospel.

At dawn Jesus appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Behind the headlines there is a broken family. There are hurting people. A sin has been committed, and sin has consequences. That is God’s way, and it is right. But the world’s way is to hound, ridicule, judge and condemn the sinner more than they would any ordinary person, because he is a celebrity. I don’t condone the adultery, of course not, but I don’t blame him for wanting to try and keep the details between the parties involved. All of us have sinned many times in our lives, and whether those sins were greater or lesser than CTB’s, who of us would want the details broadcast around the world? And what benefit has this pantomime been to any of us? A few cheap jokes, a few more newspaper sales or website hits. That’s all. Is it worth trying to destroy a family for that?

No, we should be praying for healing, and for restoration. We should hope and pray that CTB repents for what he has done, and that he can restore good, loving relationships with his wife and children. We should remember that in all likelihood it was for their sake as much as, or more than his, that he took out the super-injunction in the first place.

As I said, CTB has to face the consequences of his actions, but remember before you speak, write or act, there are consequences to everything you do too.

A Glimpse of Cross Vision

I would be very interested to read your comments on this article, Frank Viola’s interview with Greg Boyd:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/frankviola/gregboydnew/

It’s a lengthy interview, in which Greg discusses some of the ideas in his latest books, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God and its shorter version Cross Vision.

The principal argument of Boyd’s work is that when you read the whole Bible – specifically the Old Testament – through the lens of the cross, all kinds of problems we have with the picture of an angry, violent OT God can disappear. In Boyd’s words

On the cross, God stoops to meet us, and to enter into solidarity with us, right where we are at, which is in bondage to sin and to Satan. And he does this to free us and to bring us where he wants us to be, which is united with him in Christ.  The cross is thus the paradigmatic example of God mercifully stooping to accommodate people in their fallen conditioning.

In a similar way, every time we prove ourselves incapable of living up to God’s ideal behaviour, God will Himself “stoop to accommodate” us. This even extends to allowing Himself to be portrayed in the Bible as something other than His “true” self, because culturally His people have been conditioned to believe that this is what a god is “supposed” to look like.

In fact, many passages that exalt Yahweh as a warrior contain phrases from songs that Israel’s neighbors sang to their own warrior deities. The biblical author just switched out the name of the pagan god and replaced it with Yahweh.

After reading the whole interview a few times I’m left with several thoughts. The first is that I want to read Cross Vision, and understand the reasoning – scriptural, cultural and logical – that lies behind Boyd’s claim. Because I very much want this to be true. To finally have a solution to one of the most troubling issues of Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) faith would be beyond exciting.

And that leads me to my next thought, which is that when something seems to be too good to be true, it usually is. This lens of the cross, while on the surface it seems totally Biblical, is surely just too simple. I find myself returning to Isaiah 55.

‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,’
declares the Lord.
‘As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.’

Isaiah 55:8-9

And the most troubling thought of all is this: if I can use God’s “stooping to accommodate” as an explanation for the particular “atrocities” mentioned in the book, why can’t I use it to explain anything at all that I don’t like? And how can we tell the difference between the times that God is pleased with an action and the times that he is accommodating us? And how does this then apply outside of scripture, in our daily lives? What can we trust to be God’s genuine will? Do we just follow the 10 commandments and for everything else do our own thing, confident that God will accommodate us?

There are answers to these questions, the simplest one being that if the Holy Spirit dwells within us we can have confidence in what He says to us. But nevertheless I think Greg Boyd’s ideas are just as likely to unsettle as to comfort us, and if I can be sure of one thing, it’s that his books will not end the debate about the “Old Testament God”.

But I’m very much looking forward to reading more.

The Light In The Darkness

Lord Jesus,

When a shadow is cast over my life,

When my energy drains,

When my joy fades,

When nothing in this world satisfies me,

I look to you,

My soul cries out to you,

I long for you,

I speak to you,

In my weariness,

In my sadness,

In my frustration,

In my anger,

I call to you,

I reach for you,

I kneel before you,

I worship you,

Too many burdens weigh me down,

Too many voices fill my ears,

Too much pain distracts my mind,

Too many dreams disturb my sleep,

I lay it all before you,

I confess it all to you,

I open my heart to you,

I trust you,

Lord Jesus,

You are my strength,

You are my truth,

You are my companion,

My friend,

You take the strain,

You point the way,

You understand,

You make sense of the world,

You walk with me,

You cry with me,

You lift my head,

You calm my heart,

You are my shield,

You are my rock,

You are my saviour,

You are my life,

You are,

You are,

You are.

---

Hebrews 12:1-2, Psalm 23, Matthew 11:28-30, Isaiah 50:10, John 8:12

Freedom In Christ

I thought I’d share an insight I had last week while discussing “freedom” with my small group. It was a fascinating evening, with so many different ways of looking at the word itself, its meaning(s), and its consequences. I expressed this particular thought in a couple of sentences. I’ll expand slightly here – not much – and I hope it will bless you. It’s a very simple idea, but with huge significance. It was new to me, but I’m sure it has been explored at length elsewhere and I would love to be pointed in the direction of some of those explorations.

We think about freedom most often as “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants.” Paul wrote much in his epistles about freedom in Christ, but often spoke at the same time of being a slave to righteousness. In fact, it seems that slavery rather than freedom seems to be his main focus. For example, read Romans 6:20-23, at the heart of a lengthy discussion on the nature of sin, law and grace:

When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

You can choose to be a slave to sin or a slave of God – where is the freedom in that? As Bob Dylan put it in his song Gotta Serve Somebody:

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody

But Jesus said the truth will make us free, as he also described our slavery to sin (John 8:31-36). So how does this work?

I think the answer lies in the call for us to be Christ-like (see scripture like John 13:13-17, Ephesians 5:1-2 and 1 Peter 2:21).

Because Jesus Christ is God, is the Truth, and is Good. He did not sin. He was tempted but chose not to fall for those temptations. Jesus is able to do whatever He wants to do, and so by the definition I gave previously He has total freedom. The key is in our minds. As we seek to become more and more like Christ, our minds are continually transformed and our slavery to sin is continually diminished. If we could just become totally Christ-like, then we too would be totally free, able to do whatever we want, because it would be good. In this world our sinful nature keeps that ultimate goal just out of reach, but somehow, in a way that remains to me beautifully mysterious, when we are gathered together to dwell with God at the culmination of His plan, we will experience that perfect freedom. Until then, we can keep striving, and enjoy the glimpses of spiritual freedom with which He blesses us all, even in the most difficult of earthly circumstances.