For people who grew up in the Christian tradition, and who consider themselves Christians, the proposition that one God created the world is elemental. If you believe that God created the world, certain consequences flow from that fact.
For people who grew up in the Christian tradition, and who consider themselves Christians, the proposition that one God created the world is elemental. If you believe that God created the world, certain consequences flow from that fact. Continue reading “If God Created the World…”
All people have a sense of ethics, a sense of right and fairness, regardless of the place a person was born on earth, regardless of access to books.
The Stoics valued virtue, virtue hammered out with self-control and achieved through self-will. The Epicureans valued happiness, and they determined that happiness was found in virtue. Others have championed virtue couched in different terms. Aboriginal people also have codes of conduct. By their philosophies and their conduct, people demonstrated knowledge of the nature of God, which is knowable and, indeed, known by people everywhere. God’s invisible attributes are known and understood. Jews or Christians do not have a corner on the trusth. When people do what is right, they demonstrate that the law is known to them; it is in their conscience. (Rom. 2:14-15)
Do we not clamor for justice when a wrong is committed? We are even more concerned about justice when a wrong is committed against us! The fact that we have such a sense of justice is a testament to God’s justice that is evident to each one of us, whether we believe or not. That sense of right and wrong is written on our hearts; it is in our consciences. (Rom. 2:14) God is just.
At the same time, we tend to excuse our shortcomings, usually by comparing themselves to others. Who has not thought, “At least I am not like s/he is!” No doubt, some people are more virtuous than others. God, however, can not be anything other than what He is: just and right. Justice and righteousness (rightness) is the nature of God. While we seek to justify ourselves in comparison to other people, God’s nature is utterly just and virtuous. He can not and will not be anything other than what He is.
All people, on the other hand, are imperfect. Who has not lied, been selfish, been lazy, etc? Every single person on the face of this earth has fallen short of the standard of virtue, regardless how it is measured. After all, “to err is human”. (Alexander Pope)
If God is utterly virtuous, His nature is nothing but virtuous, how can a person remain in His presence? Like one pole of a magnet repels the other pole, how can we stand in God’s presence with our sinful selves?
It is written that all have sinned and all have fallen short of the glory of God. (Rom. 3:23) All people are sinful; not one person is righteous as God is righteous. (Rom. 3:8-9)
If heaven were the distance of Japan from California, and we had to swim the ocean to reach it, the distance would not be greater than the distance between a righteous and holy God and ourselves. Thinking that any one of us could swim the ocean is foolishness. Some people are better swimmers than others, to be sure; but none of us, not the very best of us, could make the swim to the other shore. So it is with God and ourselves. We would be repelled like the wrong end of a magnet in the presence of an utterly virtuous, righteous, holy God.
We who have sinned, and sinned against God, are deserving of that justice. That means all of us. Who among us in perfect? We are, therefore, alienated from God, repelled from Him.
The Good News, the Gospel, is that God made a way for us! He provided a remedy for the problem of our sin. Through Jesus, and his sacrificial death on the cross, we are reconciled to God. (Col. 1:20)
“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor. 5:21) Jesus paid the price that justice demands! We are utterly unable to stand before God in our own flesh because of sin; but God the Son, who became man, and who was blameless, stood in our place to fulfill the requirement of justice.
We accept that sacrifice and the mercy of God shown to us in that act by simple faith. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation [atoning sacrifice] by his blood, to be received by faith.” (Rom. 3:23-25 ) “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Eph. 2:8-9)
Now is the time for repentance. There is no excuse. Right and wrong is known to all of us. (Rom. 1:20). If we confess our sinfulness, he is faithful to forgive us! (John 1:9) He forgives us not because we deserve it, but because He desires it. God became man, fulfilling the prophesies given to the Jews; He proclaimed the message, performed miracles, healed the sick; and commanded the attention of the World. Then He died for our sins; and He was raised from the dead to reconcile us to Himself.
Jesus is/was the “image of the invisible God….” (Col. 1:15) He is the “firstborn from among the dead.” (Col. 1:18) As sin came into the world through the first man, Adam, and along with it, death, so that all became sinners; so righteousness has been introduced through Christ, and along with it life, so that all who believe shall be deemed righteous and shall have eternal life. (Rom. 5:12-19) “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God who through Christ reconciled us to himself.” (2 Cor. 5:17-18)
The bad news is that we are imperfect beings separated from a perfect God by the very fact of our imperfection, like the opposite poles of a magnet. The good news is that God has provided a way for us to be reconciled, to flip our magnetic pole. And once we have been reconciled, nothing can separate us from God! (Rom. 8:38-39)
Post script
(John 5:24-29):
’Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.’
“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:7-9) The time has come, and the time is now for us to turn from sin and turn to God. We have all sinned. We have all fallen short. His mercy is great towards us nevertheless! Even while we are sinners, and dead in our sin, Jesus died for us. We certainly did not and do not deserve such mercy, but He is faithful to forgive our sins. Indeed, that is God’s intention. He created us in His image and desires for us to have fellowship with and partake in God. In order to accomplish that, we had to have a choice, a real choice, to choose harmony with God or to choose our own selfish way. Sin, death, all of it is a necessary consequence of God creating us in His image. If we could not choose to sin, we could not really choose to love Him. We could not choose God and his righteous without knowing unrighteousness. In the end, we cannot accomplish any of God’s plan without God giving us what we need, accept for the faith and heart to accept it. We can not make ourselves right; we can only receive the salvation that God freely provides to us to bring us in right relationship with God; but we must choose to receive it. To receive it we must come to the end of ourselves, and there, utterly helpless, reach out to God like a child reaching out to its parent. In that moment, God’s perfect plan is accomplished. We are welcomed into His kingdom as sons of God, having freely chosen God, and we become partakers of His nature! We are born again, not of this world, which is sinful and dead, but of the spirit. We become partakers of His eternal life with the assurance that, just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so shall we be raised to eternal life with Christ who was the firstborn from among the dead.
In the first Century AD, the Samaritans lived in the land of the former kingdom of Israel, but they were of mixed Israeli and Arab descent. (Wiki) The Samaritans had somehow escaped the exile to Babylon, and they were shunned by the Jews who returned to the land of Israel after the exile. (Ehow) The Jews did not consider them Jews, the people of God.
When Jesus encountered a Samaritan woman by a well, the woman knew he was a Jew. When Jesus asked the woman to draw water from the well for him to drink, she questioned why he, a Jew, would ask her, a Samaritan, for a drink. (John 4:9) In that day, Jews would not do that and would not drink from a cup used by a Samaritan.
Jesus turned the encounter into a gospel message. (Gospel literally means “good news”). He replied, “‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.'” (John 4:10) At first blush, the answer seems to be a “Jews are better than Samaritans” response. Jesus, of course, was speaking of Himself. It was an introduction to her. It was an invitation to her. Jesus is always extending an invitation to people to engage Him.
Jesus was at the beginning of “his ministry. He was unfolding his message. Paul would later say, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28) Paul, formerly known as Saul, was a zealot Jew who fiercely defended the Jewish faith against the early Christian influence by dragging professing Christians off to prison. (Acts 8:3) Paul was there for the stoning of Stephen and approved of it. (Acts 7:58 & 8:1) No one understood the Gospel message like Paul after his conversion, and the remainder of his life was devoted to bringing the Gospel to the Gentiles (non-Jews). The good news is meant for everyone.
In the story of the Samaritan woman, she responded with sarcasm, “You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and his herds?” (John 4:11-12) she highlighted the rift between Jew and Samaritan, who both claimed the same ancestry and heritage as God’s people, and both thought the other wrong in their adherence to that heritage.
Undeterred, Jesus kept on with the proclamation and invitation: “‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.'” (John 4:13-14) Equally nonplussed, she kept on with her sarcasm: “‘Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.'” (John 4:15) Knowing her heart and playing along, Jesus told her to get her husband and come back, to which she confessed she had no husband; and Jesus confirmed that she had five previous husbands. She lived with a man not her husband. (John 4: 16-18)
Significantly, this woman was not religious. Far from it. Yet, she was keenly aware of the deeply held beliefs of her people and the Jews, and the differences that wedged between them. It seemed to define her, as it was the subject of her response to a simple request for water. She seems hardened and sarcastic, disillusioned and skeptical. She had rejected devotion to that belief in her life, but it was still defining her relationship to others, and ultimately to God. It was, perhaps, as much cultural as religious to her, like so many people today who claim some affiliation, at least in name, to a religious and cultural heritage and system of beliefs, even while decidedly rejecting the relevance of that belief in their lives.
Jesus’ intimate knowledge of her personal situation must have pierced the façade of her hardened pretension. I can imagine that her response was this time sincere: “I can see that you are a prophet”; and her next statement I suspect was spoken without sarcasm, but with a real desire for an answer to the divide between the Samaritan people and the Jews, people so closely affiliated, so closely linked in location, ancestry and religious heritage, but divided by doctrinal and cultural differences. She laid out the problem: “Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” (John 4:19-20)
In that statement she summarized the discord between her people and the Jews. She was obviously not interested in a doctrinal answer. She was not a religious person. She was looking to make sense of her situation. When the Jews returned from exile in Babylon, the Samaritans who had never left worshipped God on Mount Gerazim; the Jews, however, believed the only place to worship was in Jerusalem. The Jews shunned the Samaritans. In turn, the Samaritans attempted to thwart the Jews construction of the temple in Jerusalem. (Ehow) (John 4:19) Does that not sound familiar?
In the wake of the presidential election, it is clear that the tendency of people to develop factions and exclude others who do not share the same views is as real today as it was two thousand years ago. Religious factions are no different, and are probably worse than political factions. Those differences often involve matters that are relatively meaningless, though they seem paramount at the time.
Jesus responded by saying, “a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem….” (John 4:21) The point that divided the Jews and Samaritans was meaningless in God’s design. Jesus said, “[A] time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the worshippers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” (John 4:23-24)
God looks at the heart. People focus on external things. Jesus cut through the cultural differences that divided the Samaritans and the Jews, and spoke to the heart. The Samaritan woman, proclaiming, “He told me everything I ever did!” (John 4:40), became a believer and many Samaritans became believers. In Jesus, there is no Jew or Samaritan, no Jew or Gentile. The good news is available to everyone.
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