I stumbled on the video a few years ago that was posted in March of 2015 by Maz, a woman who was raised in a radical, abusive home. She had just become a Christian, against her families’ wishes, and she feared for her life. Though she filmed the video alone, she spoke in hushed tones. The weight of her plight was evident in her demeanor, yet she was willing to face the consequences for her commitment to Christ. You can watch it for yourself below.
The video was hauntingly beautiful in its testament to the life changing reality of an encounter with God in Christ. Her own father sought to have her beheaded. The emotion of the moment was raw and real. She was leaving a testament to her love for God, knowing that her life might not end well.
I wondered about her and prayed for her years after she posted the video. She posted another video about a year later, and she was still doing well. She had matured some in her faith, but the darkness of her past and the threat that hung in the air seemed still present.
I searched a few times for a follow up video after that, wondering what became of her. Did she survive? Was she ok? Was her faith as vibrant after time had passed as the day she posted that first video?
Today, I don’t have to wonder anymore. I had subscribed to her channel. Today as I was going through my YouTube subscriptions her video that she did in March of 2019 was there on my computer. I watched it, and what a gloriously different demeanor she has now! She radiates the love of Christ.
See and listen for yourself her story in the first video. Her original story is amazing and compelling. She had trouble putting her encounter in words, but the love of Christ she experienced was overwhelming. She knew little about Christianity, but she knew the risen Lord.
“Telling people about Jesus is easier than living like him, but the latter will lead us to the cross. When we befriend those outside of the Church walls, we have to actually live out this whole Christian thing, not just talk about it.”[1]
I have often thought that Christians seem to become abrasive in “sharing the Gospel” out of motivation not to be ashamed of the Gospel. We don’t want God to be ashamed of us by being ashamed to share the Gospel, but that motivation, alone, isn’t what sharing the Gospel is all about.
We don’t earn our way to heaven by sharing the Gospel. Salvation is a gift.[2] We can’t earn salvation by sharing the Gospel.
Rather, sharing the Gospel should be the natural extension of who we are, born again as children of God, flowing out of the new life that is budding and growing within us.[3] Sharing the Gospel should be an extension of our lives as we walk with God – not simply something we say.
God is love.[4] Therefore, as children of God, having the lifeblood of God coursing through us, sharing the Gospel should be an expression of that love that He has for us and others.
Too often, it seems, that the stands we take for God evidence something other than love. It comes across as fighting to maintain political and cultural power and position. Or it seems like notching our belts in the category of “I am not ashamed”. Or, like the Pharisees that Jesus always confronted, it resembles self-righteousness.
To be sure, none of us, myself included, are immune from these vestiges of the flesh that live on and die hard within us. So, we need to be uncompromising and unrelenting – like Israelites were instructed as they entered the promised land to drive out the inhabitants – to expose and root out the sin that still lives within us.
Our example, of course, is Jesus, who demonstrated in his life the very nature of God in human form.[5] Jesus got the greatest push back from religious people, but he was a “friend of sinners”, as the great hymn acknowledges.[6] That phrase, friend of sinners, comes from an accusation leveled at Jesus by the religious leaders.
I wonder what influence Christians might have if we were more often called friends of sinners, rather than not ashamed of the Gospel?
“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!” Psalms 51:1-2 ESV
I have written about how we can’t throw out the Old Testament and accept the New Testament in its place, as modern sensibilities might suggest. (See, for instance, Jesus and the “Old Testament God”) The Old Testament is the seed for the New Testament. Everything revealed in the New Testament was first revealed in the Old Testament. The Old Testament finds its fulfillment in the New Testament.
It seems that 21st Century people tend to want to view “the Old Testament God” as something different from the God revealed in the New Testament by Jesus, but Jesus affirmed the Old Testament. Jesus says that the Old Testament also anticipates and points toward him.
“And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” Luke 24:27
The Bible verse of the day quoted above was prayed by David in Psalm 51. David expressed the desire of all of us when he asked God to have mercy on him, to “blot out” his transgressions, to wash away his iniquity and to cleanse him from his sins. We all have a conscience.
We all have failed our own consciences (let alone God’s standards), and we need cleansing and redemption. This is a deep longing within each one of us.
At the same time, we have the capacity to ignore our consciences and to deny that desire for cleansing and redemption. If we do that too often and too long, our consciences become callous and dull; the desire for redemption diminishes; and we no longer have the sensitivity God built into us that drives us toward Him.
C S Lewis talks about how our desires and our needs have a correlative reality in something that fulfills those desires and needs. He observes that we hunger, and there is food to meet that hunger; we thirst, and there is water to quench that thirst; we have sexual desires, and there is conjugal love we have with another person that fulfills that desire.
The satisfaction is only temporary, however. We have longings for more lasting satisfaction. That those desires are only temporally met and satisfied, says Lewis, suggests that there is something else, something more.
We also have a deeper and more fundamental longing within us to know God and to be known by God, for relationship with God and for eternal life. CS Lewis says that the reality we know, the satisfaction of temporary longings and desires, is some evidence of a more fundamental and satisfying reality that will fulfill our enduring and deepest longings.
The ancient writer of Ecclesiastes was, perhaps, thinking along these same lines when he said that God put eternity into our hearts, yet not so much that we know very much about it:
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11 NIV
Jerusalem: The Temple Mount from the time of the Second Temple
When I was in college, the first class I took was World Religions. Though I graduated with an English Literature major, I also had enough credits to be a Religion major. I didn’t need the dual major. I only took the religion classes because they interested me.
I also became a believing Christian during my college years. It was a transition that took place between that World Religion class and the summer between Sophomore and Junior years. It’s a long story that I might tell in detail some time, but the point for now is that I did a lot of reading and thinking about these things in those years and in the decades since. It doesn’t make me a theologian, but I have more than a passing interest.
Early on I learned that the creation story and flood story in Genesis, among other things, have counterparts in other religions, including other religions in the same area of the world – the Ancient Near East. Phoenicians, Assyrians, Persians, and other people groups had similar myths that have been uncovered from that general time period.
I learned that Zoroastrianism shared attributes similar to the ancient Hebraic view of the world, including the idea a singular creator God, a dualistic cosmology of good and evil, the ultimate destruction of evil, judgment after death, etc. The scholarly understanding when I was in college was that Zoroastrianism predated Hebraic thought and influenced it.
It occurred to me at the time, not having any reason to doubt what I was taught, that Abraham may have been particularly open to his encounter with God if, indeed, he had lived in an area of the world and in a time in which there was this kind of influence. It made some sense. He was the right guy in the right place with the right influences setting the table for an encounter with God, the Creator of the world. Perhaps, Abraham brought the influence of monotheistic Zoroastrians into the pagan, polytheistic world of Canaan.
Recently I did some research on Zoroastrianism. Wikipedia acknowledges that Zoroastrianism has “possible roots dating back to the second millennium BC”, though the “recorded history” of Zoroastrianism dates back only to the 5th Century BC. (Wikipedia). The conjecture that Zoroastrianism dates back further to the second millennium BC is has no present support in the historical record.
If we date the accounts of Abraham and his descendants according the biblical chronology and references, that history goes far back into the second millennium BC, but the consensus of modern archaeologists and theologians reject that dating in favor of first millennium BC dating. (See Wikipedia, for example) Modern scholars don’t take the Bible at face value. In fact, they presumptively dismiss the Bible as historical record.
Scholarly views are not universal on this issue, of course. Not by a long shot. Modern archaeological and written evidence exists to suggest that the modern consensus is wrong about the timeline for the life of Moses, the Exodus and other things. (See for instance Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy) The Patterns of Evidence theory is that historians and archaeologists who assume a particular timeline for certain events are not apt to see the evidence for those events if they occurred in a different timeline.
The Patterns of Evidence thesis is that evidence for the events described in the biblical narrative is there if we use the right timeline and look for them in the right time periods. Specifically, the biblical accounts of Moses, the Exodus, and entry into the land of Canaan are apparent in the archaeological record and historical data on the biblical timeline (second millennium BC), but they are not evident in the first millennium timeline applied by modern, skeptical scholars.
Certain archaeological finds, like the Ebla Tablets, also raise questions about the modern scholarly consensus. The importance of “looking” in the right places according to the right timelines is explored in Timing the Walls of Jericho.
Back to Abraham, though. He was reportedly from the area of Ur (in modern southwest Iraq), which is quite a distance from the area of Canaan (later Judea) where he ended up – about 1600 miles in fact. In Ur, he may have come in contact with Zoroastrians and similar influences. That idea intrigued me in college, and it still does. So I revisit that thought journey again today.
Many of the things we do have become so traditional and commonplace that we don’t think about when they started and why. One of those things is the practice of Christians gathering on Sundays for “worship” or “church.” After all, Christians have been gathering on Sundays for almost 2000 years!
But why? What is the history? And why is that important?
We are approaching another Easter, so the death of Jesus and the resurrection is top of mind this time of year. That is the Christian story, or course. These central components of the Christian narrative give us the context to explain why Christians gather on Sundays.
Christians gather on Sundays because Sunday was the day of the resurrection according to the Gospel accounts (all four of them). While we take the Sunday gatherings for granted, the first followers of Jesus gathered on Saturdays.
Their people – the Jews – had always gathered on Saturdays – the Sabbath. The Sabbath was sacred to them going back hundreds – as many as fifteen hundreds – of years. The change from Saturday gatherings to Sunday gatherings by the first Christians (who were Jewish), therefore, was a watershed change that we might not appreciate so many years later.
Christianity grew out of Judaism, of course. Jesus was a Jew and so were all of his first followers. The Sabbath (from sunset of Friday evening to the appearance of the stars in the sky on Saturday evening) is holy in Judaism. (See Wikipedia) The Sabbath is the 7th day of the calendar week for the Jews and represents the day God rested from creation.
Keeping the Sabbath as a holy day of rest was first commanded by Moses as reflected in in the Torah (Exodus 16:26, 29) after the Exodus from Egypt. (Exodus 20:8-11) It is one of the Ten Commandments. The Sabbath continues to be faithfully and diligently observed in Jewish communities around the world to this day.
The Sabbath had been faithfully and diligently observed for many centuries up to the time of Jesus, but the followers of Jesus began a new tradition of gathering on Sundays. The relatively sudden change, after such emphasis on the Sabbath for so many centuries marks a pivotal, historic change that is best explained by a significant, historic occurrence.
According to those early Christ followers (and all Christ followers today), the resurrection on Sunday is the explanation for that sudden change in the First Century after fifteen hundred centuries of Saturday observances.
We have learned to be skeptical of biblical, historical claims since the Enlightenment, existentialism, modernism and post modernism have done their deconstructive work. People have posited that the resurrection didn’t happen and only developed as time and embellishment gave rise to the idea in the vein of a legend.
But the sudden change from Saturday observance to Sunday observance in the First Century is historical fact that few (if any) would challenge. It tells its own story about the historicity of that reason why the change was made.
Navigating by Faith 