3 May
SEEING THINGS AS THEY REALLY ARE
Years ago, when I was serving as one of the elders (pastor – a group of elders functioning as pastors) in a congregation, I shared with some in the church that I felt the burden of being a “watchman” like Ezekiel, to warn God’s people of the spiritual state of his people, and to ‘see things as they really are’ with regard to the times we live in, and with reference to the state of the church and God’s people.
Of course, I did not think of myself as an ‘Ezekiel’ but just as one of those God had given the burden and responsibility to look out as a ‘watchman’ and to warn of impending ‘disaster’ and call for repentance.
Ezekiel was a priest and prophet who was taken to Babylon among the first wave of captives from Judah in 509 B.C., and a younger contemporary of Jeremiah. Ezekiel warned of the inevitability of the fall of Jerusalem because of her sins, especially idolatry, the transcendent sovereignty of God as Lord of all the nations and of history. He also did reveal the loss and restoration of the land and of God’s presence among his people and the promise of life-giving Spirit as the key to covenant faithfulness.
“The word of the Lord came to me; ‘Son of man, you are living among a rebellious people. They have eyes to see but do not see and ears to hear but do not hear, for they are a rebellious people” (Eze. 12:1-2).
“They will know that I am the Lord when I disperse them among the nations and scatter them through the countries. But I will spare a few of them from the sword, famine and plague, so that in the nations where they go they may acknowledge all their detestable practices. Then they will know that I am the Lord” (Eze. 12:15-16).
The context is that of God’s people in Judah; God had allowed the ‘attack’ on Jerusalem (which the Israelites felt was impenetrable and would not fall as God was in the temple) by Babylon (with its ‘slaughter’, death) and the first wave of captives was taken to Babylon, Ezekiel being among them.
Those who still remained in Jerusalem continued to feel ‘secure’ and did not anticipate the final fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of God’s temple.
As I read the above passages, I am reminded of this burden I have to function as a ‘watchman’ and to fulfil my ‘calling’ to be faithful in our current context.
SEEING THE WORLD AS IT IS NOW
Ours is not a good time for any sort of realism about God, Christianity, virtue, relationships, death and dying, or anything else except matters of technology. Technical skills are wedded to an extreme emotional childishness and immaturity, which bogs us all down deeper in sin’s legacy of self-centeredness, self-absorption, and self pity than any generation has ever sunk since Christianity entered the world.
In this age, there is little sense of God, his holiness or greatness; we think of him as everyone’s grandfather, there to shower gifts upon us and enjoy us as we are. In the absence of any sense of our sinfulness, we expect VIP treatment from God all the time, and the sense of entitlement is in the forefront. It is our everyday habit to manipulate the idea of equality or fairness to ensure that we get as much of what we want as the next person does.
Sacrifice for the good of others – parents for children, husbands and wives for each other, business managers for their employees and shareholders, political leaders for the community they claim to serve – is almost unheard of nowadays. Society has largely become a jungle in which we all are out hunting for pleasure, profit, and power, and are happy to shoot others if that is the way to get what we want.
Christians today have shockingly little sense of the reality, pervasiveness, shame,and guilt of sin. We cherish shockingly strong illusions about having a right to expect from God health, wealth, ease, excitement, and sexual gratification. We are shockingly unaware that suffering Christianity is an integral aspect of biblical holiness, and a regular part of business as usual for the believer.
Do we see things as they really are today? Suffering is specified in Scripture as part of every Christian’s calling. Suffering must be expected, and even valued, by all believers without exception. Suffering is to be expected, and we must prepare for it. The believers in Ezekiel’s time thought that everything was fine because they were staying in Jerusalem where the temple of God was. Little did they know that, because of their sin and rebellion, God, in his love, would discipline them for their own good, and discipline includes suffering.
The world of course does not find value in suffering – it has no reason to. Christians are in a different position, for the Bible assures us that God sanctifies our suffering to good ends. Our suffering produces character (Rom.5:3)a; our suffering glorifies God (2 Cor.12:9-10). And our suffering fulfills the law of the harvest. Before there is blessing anywhere, there will first be suffering somewhere. Jesus first announced the law when he declared, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it does, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).
Suffering is allowed by God to effect repentance for all before it is too late; for the Christians, it is along the same line but principally it is God’s discipline because he is a loving heavenly Father.
As we ponder on the book of Revelation, we see ‘pictures’ of famine, pandemics, large scale calamities and catastrophes, suffering and death before the second coming of the Lord Jesus. For non-believers, God is calling for the last chance to repent, but Revelation records that many still refused to; for believers, it is a calling to remain faithful in the midst of pain and suffering, to continue to sound out the message of the gospel and not to fear even the loss of their lives.
As Ezekiel fulfilled his role as a ‘watchman’, a remnant did hearken, but the majority did not take God’s warning seriously.
“Therefore this is what the Sovereign God says: ‘I myself am against you, Jerusalem, and I will inflict punishment on you in the sight of the nations. …Therefore in your midst parents will eat their children, and children will eat their parents. I will inflict punishment on you and will scatter all your survivors to the wind. …I will not look on you with pity or spare you. A third of your people will die of the plagues or perish by famines inside you; a third will fall by the sword outside your walls, and a third I will scatter to the wind and pursue with drawn sword….And when I have spent my wrath on them, they will know that I the Lord have spoken in my zeal” (Ezek.5:8-13).
Notice that the above describes the wrath of God. Lest we think God cannot be responsible for famine, plagues, death and wars, think again. Take note also the similarity with the words used in Revelation….one third of the sea will become blood, one third of the world will be….this is in line with God’s wrath agaInst the world in the final days.
Paul warned in Galatians that the gospel was in effect being swallowed up by legalism; he wrote to the Colossians because there the gospel was in effect being swallowed up by polytheism. Both heresies sought to add to the gospel of salvation by faith in Christ. In answering, Paul asserted the sufficiency of Christ as Saviour and the completeness of the salvation that believers have in him.
Many congregations today outwardly seem to be faithful to God and the gospel but in fact, the “wall has been white-washed”. Remove the whitewash and we see the ‘ugliness’.
We must see things as they really are in God’s sight; we must evaluate our lives honestly before God (Believers and Non-believers alike). We are living in dangerous times, at the edge of eternity. The call is to see, hear and repent before it is too late.
4 May
THE DEEPEST ‘UNSOLVABLE’ PROBLEM OF MAN
In the previous sharing, I have shared the burden of being a “watchman”. This burden has grown more intense over the years, the Lord allowing me to print several books (although I am no writer) and to pen many ‘Reflections’ over this period.
The gospel message in the Bible declares that man’s root problem before God is his sin, which evokes wrath from the Lord God. Many unbelievers I talked to dismissed this, claiming that they are not as bad as others, and there are also others, including believers, who sigh and claim that they are just being human.
Some versions of the presentation of the gospel are open to blame for not going down to this level. The gospel has been presented as God’s triumphant answer to human problems – problems of our relation with ourselves and our fellow humans and our environment. Undoubtedly, the gospel does bring us solutions to these problems, but it does so by first solving a deeper problem – the deepest of all human problems, the problem of man’s relation with the Maker. And unless we make it plain that the solution of these former problems depends on the settling of the latter one, we are misrepresenting the message and becoming false witnesses of God!
No reader of the New Testament can miss the fact that the NT knows all about our human problems – fear, moral cowardice, illness of body and mind, loneliness, insecurity, hopelessness, despair, cruelty, abuse of power, and the rest – but equally no reader of the NT can miss the fact that it resolves all these problems, one way or another, into the fundamental problem of sin against God.
By sin, the NT means not social error or failure in the first instance, but rebellion against, defiance of, retreat from, and consequent guilt before God the Creator; and sin, says the New Testament, is the basic evil from which we need deliverance, and from which Christ died to save us.
The Bible declares: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Also, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). ‘Death’ here refers to physical death and spiritual death (separation from God who is the Author of LIFE).
Recently, I am saddened to hear of the demise of one of my medical classmates. I met him just some months back at our 50th Medical Graduation dinner; I recalled sharing about Christ in a song (sung by black Christian slaves in US years back) and this colleague, who took beautiful photos, put a caption under the photo of me singing – “Like real?” I took the opportunity to share that it is indeed real, to him and to my other classmates (the gospel is real and authentic and is the answer to our deepest problem).
God does not desire ‘death’ for man (and woman) – he desires a deep vibrant relationship with man eternally – but man died (physically and spiritually) and the only way he can restore the relationship with fallen man is to “die for man in his Son Jesus, taking our penalty for sin, taking the wrath for sin on himself, and freeing us from the guilt and power of sin, and making us alive in him, and adopting us (those who believe by faith) as his children with the promise of the ‘new heavens and new earth’ for all those who believe, culminating with the return of the Lord Jesus (subsequent to his resurrection and ascension).
I recall that some of my classmates were unhappy with my sharings but I want to assure them that it was done with love and concern for their welfare. Some others however, believers, were encouraged by my sharing of the gospel and my personal testimony. I am so glad that I had the opportunity to share, even with the dear classmate who just passed away. Death is not the end that God desires for us (Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus). But as he raised Lazarus from the dead, he would raise all those who believe in him unto eternal life – that is his promise and the promise of the gospel.
I know that I have agreed to refrain from sharing on the “reunion apps” after the disagreement by some classmates (but I have pointed to my website:”livinginthelastdays” for those who are interested to hear more from me). I apologise for writing this sharing and forwarding to my classmates as one of the responses to the demise of our dear classmate of 1973 graduation. My concern is that this may be perhaps my last opportunity to share how the gospel of Jesus Christ has thoroughly changed my life. I trust that it may also do so for you.
7 May
THE TWO THREATS FACING THE CHURCH
We have noted in the previous sharing the two threats facing the church – Antinomianism and Legalism
The antinomian spirit cannot see the law as a wonderful gift of God and it dislocates God from his good law, finding ways to argue that God does not require obedience. (An off-shoot is Hypergrace – one of the foundations of their message is that the moment you were saved, God forgave not only your past and present sins but your future sins as well – this means, according to them, that it is wrong to ask God to forgive you when you sin today, and it is very wrong to think that your forgiveness is based on your forgiving others. They claim that believers are already completely sanctified by faith and that we do not need to pursue holiness, let alone be disciplined in our pursuit of holiness).
On the other hand, the spirit of legalism sees the law as a covenant of works rather than a way to honor and give pleasure to the One who saved them by grace. We will recall that the NPP claims that the pattern of religion found in Jewish writings indicated that first-century Judaism was not a religion of legalistic works righteousness. However, in many of the Jewish writings in the first century (reviewed by many scholars) and also in Paul’s epistles, it is clear that the Judaism in the first century understands works as instrumental in salvation, or as the ground of salvation, not simply as the response or evidence of saving faith, as in classic Protestant theology. The crucial issue is not whether a pattern of covenantal nomism can be detected, as it is whether legalism has been excluded.
In Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, we can sum up the problem in Galatia as ‘legalism’ or ‘the gospel plus…’ The issue is that justification by God’s grace alone, through faith in Christ’s atoning sacrifice alone, is not sufficient ground for our acceptance with God, according to the legalist. Something else has to be added – extra beliefs, particular patterns of behaviour, unusual experiences – these are the things that will ensure you are really in the light with God. There is no doubt that even from the epistle and writings of Paul, the problem facing first century Judaism is legalism. although NPP seeks to deny this.
But what is relevant is to recognise that legalism still poses a threat to the church today – the problem can appear in ‘different clothing’ according to time and place but the issue underneath remains a challenge to the church in every generation.
Some time back, I was taken aback when a beloved Christian brother shared that he had to leave the church he worshipped in for some years because “he was not rich enough” although I am aware that he was not poor and he even drives a car, even today.
The problem actually is that he did not belong to the ‘elite club’ in that congregation – the club may be marked by wealth and prosperity, super-spiritual experiences, keeping the letter of the Law in the traditions of the elders or a whole range of additional ingredients to the New Testament gospel. They may sound extremely plausible and look very attractive. They will always prove very popular, but none of these are the criteria by which they should be assessed. That role belongs to the apostolic gospel alone. Anything which adds to Christ actually subtracts from him. He is no longer the fully sufficient Resculer and Lord. But not only is Christ dethroned by adherence to additional man-made rules and practices, the Christian who pays the club subscription is strait-jacketed by that commitment and ends up serving the new guru, rather than the risen Lord.
It is only understanding and tasting union with Jesus Christ himself that will lead us to a new love for and obedience to the law of God.