Standing Firm in an Age of Compromise

Should charitable Christian organisations sanitise their institutions of the distinctive truths of their Christian religion in order to receive tax concessions and subsidies from the government?
And How should Christians respond to government regulation that interferes with our ability to freely exercise our faith?
Today when reviewing charities to support, I came across Mission Australia's website. What I read, or I should say what I didn't read, provoked my ire. There is little else that raises more indignation in me than Christians compromising their faith. And in an age of high government regulation it seems many Christian organisations are all too happy to sellout to receive government subsidies.

Below is the email that I sent to Mission Australia in response to what I see as invertebrate compromise.




Hi, I just thought I would send you guys a quick email regarding why I felt that I can not support Mission Australia. I have in the past been a regular supporter, but had to cease supporting financially due to my own tight fiscal circumstances. However, God has recently restored my financial position with even greater blessings than before, thus I have been able to start tithing far greater amounts to use in ways that glorify His great name.

After initially going to your website with great enthusiasm to setup a regular donation, I thought I would review why I wanted to support Mission Australia, and whether your organisation aligned with my goals in donating. So after having read through the main ‘About Us’ page, I quickly became thoroughly disappointed. Did you know that not once are the names God, Jesus or Christ mentioned? Neither are the terms of sin, salvation or grace? I would have expected that the goals and vision of a “Christian community service organisation” would be to spread the Gospel and the good news of salvation through your service, yet there is no hint of that on the webpages that I viewed.
I am sure you aware that these essential themes of Christianity must be part of every Christian’s mission. All of Mission Australia’s stated goals are pointless if they are not rooted in Christ. ‘Pathways to strong families and healthy, happy children’; ‘successful youth’; ‘pathways away from homelessness’; ‘life and work-ready skills’, ‘sustainable employment’. No one can gain salvation through these things, and without salvation these things are pointless. It is only through Christ that these things are of any value.

Maybe you have sacrificed the essentials of Christianity in order to comply with this Government's excessive and intrusive regulations? But where is this approach taught in Scripture? Never did the first Christians water-down their operations to appease the Romans. That is exactly what the Jews did and were duly condemned by Christ for doing so. Instead Christians preferred to face the most horrid of persecutions rather than compromise their faith. The Romans authorities didn’t ask for much, just a bit of harmless incense burning here and there as an act of submission to the sovereignty of Rome, all without having to give up their worship of God. Yet those Christians wouldn’t compromise even that little bit.
But what I see from Christian organisations these days, which Mission Australia seem to be of the same mould, is a willingness to compromise to whatever extent possible to show submission to the sovereignty of the Australian State.

Unfortunately Christ seems to be a distant number two in your allegiances. How else do you explain the total absence of Christian truths in your mission? This is the reason why I can not support your organisation. Christ and His gift of salvation must be the first and primary goal of any Christian organisation, and unfortunately I do not see a hint of that in Mission Australia's website.

Judeo-Christianity as a Syncretistic Phenomenon

I have just finished reading 'Primitive Christianity in its Contemporary Setting'.
It is of the 'historical-critical' mould of theology. The type that attempts to explain how the Judeo-Christian God merely evolved from a mixture of various other neighbouring cultural traditions. So it's actually more like anthropology than theology. The historical-critical method aims to demystify God and reduce religion down to a social phenomenon that has merely evolved from the social environment. It basically denies that God actively reveals Himself in people's lives over history, as well as denying the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture.

I have always steered clear from this type of liberal theology in the past, not necessarily because I was scared that it would destroy my faith in a personal God, but primarily because these scholars seemed to be mostly motivated by the desire to justify their atheism by rationalising God out of existence. After all, no God = no consequences for one’s choices in life.

So after some initial discomfort towards the critical assertions by the author at the start of the book, I started to open up to the ideas within it. Assertions such as; “Jahweh, the God of Israel, started out as a tribal god, like the other Semitic deities.” ”Hebrew thought, in it’s initial stages, was not monotheistic” ”Israel, like other nations, had it’s creation myths.” “Such creation myths lie behind the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2.” These are just a handful of examples from the first few pages, but enough to give an impression of the general tone of the thinking in the book, a tone that zaps the wonder and awe that most Christians view the Scriptures with.

The discomfort that such irreverent statements causes stems from some serious questions that are raised about how we view God and Scripture. It is easy to dismiss such authors as godless cynics, but such rash judgements aren’t necessarily warranted. For the first time I’ve started to see some sense in this type of liberal criticism. It’s not that this thinking necessarily dismisses the reality of God and the inspired nature of Scripture (although liberal scholars do go this far), rather it questions the modern beliefs of how the Patriarchs of old came to know God.  Was God known to the Patriarchs as we know Him now? I tend to think that Abraham, Moses and the prophets all had radically different ideas of who God was. And their knowledge of God would certainly be determined by the different surrounding religious and philosophical beliefs, just as Christians now are influenced by Islamic, darwinist, materialist and other prominent philosophies that pervade our zeitgeist.

So is it really sacrilegious to suggest that the various individual books of Scriptures each hold their own narrow and myopic view of God, if the authors of these books themselves had their own narrow and myopic views of God? Certainly not. In fact it makes perfect sense, because it was only with advent of the Messiah’s teachings that all of the individual teachings in Old Testament were pulled together by Christ to be fulfilled as a cohesive whole.

 

But the key point to keep in mind in light of all this, which the scholars who practice historical-criticism don't seem to get, is that none of this diminishes the awesome nature of God as we now know Him. So it's not that God is a just phantasm of the mind which evolves through the millennia from surrounding cultures (as many liberal scholars would conclude), but rather it was God’s purpose to reveal Himself over time through various influences of neighbouring cultures. God uses the influences of other cultures to build His ‘religion’.
Liberal scholars would recoil at this suggestion, ridiculing it as a desperate attempt of religious people to hold on to God in a scientific age where there are fewer and fewer unexplained aspects of reality to hide Him. But this is not so. Just as these scholars think they have eradicated the reality of God by eliminating the mystical places for Him to fill, God shows the awesomeness of His omnipotence and power by being the force behind the even greater complexity of life and reality that we are uncovering through science.

God doesn’t just work in miraculous ways, rather He primarily uses the natural things of this universe to affect His will. For example, the atheist would say that a religious person's happiness isn't a mystical gift from God, rather it is merely just a result of neurochemistry, a purely ‘natural’ phenomenon. Yet what the atheist doesn't realise is that God uses the natural neurochemistry of our brains to cause the emotion of happiness. This is far from a weak answer, which at first seems to move God’s actions into the realm of the untestable. How, the atheist must answer, would God affect happiness without activating the 'happiness' neurochemistry in the brain? Neurochemistry and the brain are God's creation, thus logic demands that He would use it to cause any emotion He so desires.

 

 

God has never been hiding in the inexplicable and miraculous aspects of the physical universe, rather He has always been the power behind the physical 'laws' of the universe.
Just when atheists and liberal scholars think they have gotten the upper hand on God in eliminating Him from rational existence with their historical-critical and scientific methods, God then uses these exact same methods of His critics to prove the magnitude of His reality!!! God drives the dynamics of societies to produce Christianity just as much as He drives the dynamics of physical nature such as neurochemistry. That's how big this God is!

God is behind it all, every atom, every thought and every action!

 

"Heaven is where God is, and God is everywhere" ?!!

Which religion would you associate the following statement with?

'Heaven is where God is, and God is everywhere'

 

To me it sounds like a typical brain-fart from a crystal waving New Ager. But would it surprise you that it was on a billboard in front of an Anglican church? This certainly shocked me. It seemed like quite a feeble and nonsensical, but more importantly non-Christian, statement to me.

So after ruminating on all the illogical paths that such a statement could lead, I decided to send the church an email. You just can't say such innane statements in public like that without having to explain yourself!
So below is the email that I sent to the church.

 

"I just thought I’d send a short email in regards to the content of the church’s display sign out the front of the building. It read; ‘Heaven is where God is, and God is everywhere’, as I remember it.

I don’t frequently travel past your church nor am I familiar with Anglican doctrine, so I’m not sure what context to read this message.

 

"To be honest my initial reaction was dismay, not just because of the unorthodox nature of such a statement from a Christian source, but also because of the ostensibly illogical nature of it. Does it mean that heaven is also in Hell, because if God is omnipresent then He must be in Hell too? Maybe it’s implying that there is actually no hell or heaven as the Scriptures teach, and they are only a state of mind? Or maybe even that God doesn’t literally exist, but He is merely the mind’s personification of the heavenly state of being?

The statement is so open-ended that there is no limit to the logical ends that it would lead to.

 

"So rather than endlessly speculate, I was hoping to get the author’s opinion on exactly what it means."

 

My feeling is that this message is just another example of the sycophantic nature of modern liberal Christianity, which is so scared of offending people in our plural society, that the Truth of God’s Word is purposely sacrificed in favour of pursuing the ecumenical policies of some denominations.

 

I’ll see what their response is!

Bearing Good Fruit

Over the past year or so my mind has been periodically harassed by a nagging guilt of not producing enough 'good works'.

The New Testament undoubtedly puts a lot of emphasis on not neglecting our duty of good works:
"And already the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." Matt 3:10
"'I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’ His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant!'.....'So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags....And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’" Matt 25:24-30

I know quite well that salvation is not a remuneration for good works, but still, such verses do give the grim impression that the slothful servant is in danger of being tossed into the fiery pit of perdition.

But much to my joy, God, according to His relentless benevolence, pacified my conscience with this realisation:
It's that producing 'good fruit' isn't strictly just performing outward work like philanthropy; but rather it also includes the inner 'work' of behaving in a virtuous manner.
For example, behaving in accordance with the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23) is certainly also what God considers to be in the sphere of what is defined as producing 'good fruit'. It also seems that this inner work is probably an even more important part of producing good fruit than purely just outward philanthropic work.

I think it would be safe to deduce, without diminishing the importance of our philanthropic duty, that living our lives in accordance with these spiritual fruits for the non-believing world to observe, is also a significant part of the Christian's evangelistic duty. In fact I'm sure that if we were to adhere to only one of these two duties, that God would much prefer us to have the spiritual fruits than the philanthropic fruits. I could scarcely imagine that the later would be at all effective without the former anyway.


So whenever that nagging guilt rears its ugly head again, I've got to be sure to remind myself of all this!

Worshipping Angels?

The following passage in Revelation has always puzzled me a little:

"And I John saw these things, and heard them. And when I had heard and seen, I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel which shewed me these things.
Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren the prophets"
Revelation 22:8-9

The traditional interpretation of these verses never made too much sense to me; that St John made the foolish mistake of worshipping an angel. Surely a man of such high standing with God and so learnered would never make such a schoolboy error. Maybe a neophyte in the faith may make such a mistake, but one of the Apostles?!!
Then I read somewhere a much more cogent explanation (I think it was in David Chilton's 'Day's of Vengeance'): It's that back in those days angels were considered to be superior beings to us wretched humans, and it was customary that we were to automatically bow (the bible sometimes translates this as 'worship'. The Greek word translated as worship in this verse specifically means to fawn or crouch, or to literally prostrate oneself in homage) to any superior person as a sign of submission (Gen 18:2).

But what it seems that John was getting at in this verse is that Christians have been washed clean of their sins and are perfect in the sight of God, so are no longer are lesser beings than angels. We are equals, or as the angel said "for I am thy fellowservant", thus bowing in their presence is no longer required!

I was reminded of all this this morning when meditating on Psalm 8, where verse 5 says that humans are lower than angels; "For thou hast made him [mankind] a little lower than the angels"
But no more! We have been fully restored by Christ!