Eternal Perspective vs. Instant Gratification

Our church's current teaching series is covering the message of the entire Bible in 12 weeks. We're explaining how all 66 books work together to say something: God's message to us. One of the points we've made repeatedly during this study is that the Bible is unified: the Old and New Testaments fit together and, contrary to popular opinion, they paint the same picture.

One example of the unity between the two Testaments is their perspective: the cast of both is forward-looking and gratification-delaying. Now, this is perhaps expected in the Old Testament, which looks forward to the coming of the Messiah. But surprisingly, despite the fact that the Messiah has already come in the New Testament, it too is forward-looking and gratification-delaying.

This similarity in mindset throughout the entire Bible, and the way it works itself out in our current instant gratification culture, is the subject of an article I wrote for the Colson Center for Biblical Worldview. You can read more here.

Worship Giver

I very briefly touched on Judges 21:25 during last Sunday's message, and the significance of the point being made there has really hit me these last few days. The second half of that verse is often quoted: "everyone did what was right in his own eyes." We see a relativistic, God-rejecting, me-centered culture around us and cite this verse as an apt description of our own world. And it is. But more is going on here.

Narcissism's Cause
The first half of the verse tells us why , and the reason is surprising to modern ears: "In those days there was no King in Israel," This is what explains the statement about everyone being their own boss. The people were not faithful to God because there was no king.

There Is No "I" In "Follower"
But this seems strange! It would make more sense to say something like, the people did what was right in their own eyes because:

• they were selfish
• they misunderstood God
• they suffered from inappropriate pride
• etc.
  

But all of these modern-minded explanations have one word in common: "they." The focus of this thinking is on the broken people. But the focus of Scripture is elsewhere - it is on God who promises to fix the brokenness.

The Royal Repairman
The "king" mentioned in Judges is the Messiah - the one whom God said would crush evil, reverse the Curse of Genesis 3, and transform the human heart from rebellion to faithfulness. Humanity's problems began with a "we'll be our own God" mentality, and that mentality can never change itself completely. The solution to the problem isn't inside us. "They" is the wrong place to start looking for a fix.

Enter the King. The Messiah is the one whom the Bible says will repair the "we'll be our own God" mentality. He'll do it for us, from outside of us. He'll give us a "heart of flesh" toward God instead of a "heart of stone," as God puts it in Ezekiel 36:25-27. It is the Messiah who will enable us to follow God rightly, enjoy his benefits, and worship him. He is the Worship Giver.

Not Very Postmodern!
Which brings us back to Judges 21:25. The reason everyone did what was right in his own eyes is because there was not yet a king. Only when The King came could God's people have a new heart that would stay faithful to him. They could not fix this problem themselves. We are completely dependent it seems on God; not only to worship him, but to even want to worship him.

This runs contrary to our current postmodern tendency to think that we are our own best gauges of right and wrong. It also undermines the idea that if I as a Christian detect residual rebellion in my heart, I need to redouble my efforts to eradicate it. As if I could remove the things in myself that impede full worship. Messiah is the Worship Giver.

Arrival Of The Worship Giver
And that makes this forthcoming Christmas season a significant event. As I head toward the holidays this year I find myself reflecting on the bleak picture of Judges 21:25, and knowing that I am in that boat apart from God's promised King. As we approach the celebration of Jesus' birth, I find myself thinking not just about worshiping him for what he's done or even for who he is, but worshiping him for enabling me to worship him.

This year I worship the one who gives me the heart to worship in the first place.

The Siren Song of Status

Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit serves as the inspiration for an article I recently wrote, which is about the inner fight we all have with wanting to please and impress people - often more than we want to please God. Drop by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview and see the results of listening to the call of The Siren Song of Status.

I greatly value the feedback I've already received on this article and I invite yours too, either as a comment here or on Facebook.

Book Review - Why You Think The Way You Do by Glenn Sunshine

This book addresses something I think is important to know: how the way we think has changed over the centuries right up to the present day. In fact I once fantasized briefly about writing this book myself, but the thought went away when I realized how much research I'd have to do to lay it all out correctly. Fortunately Dr. Glenn Sunshine, who as a history professor has a better background for this book anyway, had been compiling the research for a few years already and chose to put it in book form. I've gotten to know Glenn over the past couple years, and have learned to appreciate his insights as a historian, a thinker, and a Christian.

In this book Sunshine describes what the dominant worldview in the West has been, starting with the Roman Empire. He explains that the well-known decadence of the Romans, from slavery to sexual license to infanticide and more, was the result of the basic assumptions about life in the Empire. He also shows how the gradual flourishing of Christianity introduced an entirely different view of life - one based on the Bible - and how this Biblical worldview not only counter-acted many of the evils of Roman society, but became the basis for Western societies into the Middle Ages. He provides a good summary of how Naturalism (the belief that there is no God of any kind; the physical world is all that exists) became such a force in the West just in the last couple centuries, as well as explaining the popularity of postmodern thinking today.

The reason I think it's important for Christians to understand this is basically twofold. First, it helps us understand that all ideas come from somewhere: they come from a worldview. For example, the notion that science has dis-proven God's existence is a one popular today, but it's not a brute fact. Rather, it's a philosophical assumption (ie. an opinion) rooted in the Enlightenment. Learning to recognize the worldview roots of such ideas we encounter increases understanding, helping us sort out fact from opinion. Secondly, knowing why certain ideas have gained traction helps us dialogue more effectively with people who hold other, different worldviews than we do.

This book is written for the layman. It describes the flow of thought in the West for the past 2,000 years as a story, making it easier to grasp. In the process, it explains how Christianity is the foundation for virtually all of the good aspects of Western society, from human rights to science & technology, to personal liberty and representative government. And by implication then, it describes what we stand to lose if Christianity is completely dislodged from the Western worldview by Naturalism and/or postmodernism.

Along those lines, Sunshine ends the book with a list of eye-opening parallels between modern America and ancient Rome. He argues that after two millennia we have come full circle, and that the American worldview is now looking increasingly like the Roman worldview during the decline of the Empire. And he suggests several things Christians and churches can and should do about it. Worth the read.

To get a sense of what's in the book, here's an audio interview with the author.

Another Good Question - Bible Codes & Hidden Messages

We just wrapped up a very cool series of messages at Harvest, where I basically let the congregation determine what we were going to teach on. They submitted a bunch of really good questions, touching on Bible, theology, ethics, current events, and a lot more. I addressed them during our Sunday worship services, suggesting how we can think Biblically about each question. It was a blast!

One of the questions I didn't get to on a Sunday was as follows: "What do you think about The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin? I heard about it but it sounded a little weird…”

Well, the writer of this question has a good instinct. The general idea behind Drosnin’s books (I understand there’s a Bible Code 2 and even a Bible Code 3 now) is that by looking at the Hebrew text of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) one can apply a complicated encryption method and discover secret messages that are hidden within the text. These messages can then be de-coded, and are generally said to be able to predict future events. Sounds cool huh? Anyone curious enough to go buy a copy?

Save your money.

I could elaborate on lots of reasons why Drosnin’s idea is nonsense, including the fact that he’s a journalist (not a scholar), that others have also alleged such things before so this is nothing new, and that every time someone like Drosnin makes these kinds of claims they always stand to sell a lot of books and make a boat-load of money. Curious.

But the most important reason has nothing to do with this particular book or its author. Rather, the really important issue here is how Christians should read the Bible. Simply put, God’s word is not a magic book from which we divine mysterious and elusive secrets. Nor is it some deep conspiracy riddle that needs to be solved.

A secret message in the Hebrew Bible? Don't bet on it.

Instead, the Bible is God’s very plain and understandable explanation of the way the world works, and how we fit into it. He intends that when we read it we would understand what he’s been up to in human history, and how we should live in light of that. God didn’t embed secret codes in the Bible that predict future events, reserved only for the select few who are insightful enough to successfully complete some mysterious scavenger hunt. Nor did he encode messages that could only be deciphered by modern cryptography, leaving centuries-worth of his own followers in the dark. In the Bible, God has spoken to all people at all times, plainly.

How can I say that with such certainty? Because of the example of Jesus and the apostles, who never looked for secret messages and hidden meanings in the Bible. Instead, they followed the plainly evident flow of thought in God’s word. They looked at what the Bible says and how it's put together, and in so doing they understood its real message: it points to a coming Messiah who would be the centerpiece of God’s plan of redemption.

How did they come to that conclusion? What were they looking at that helped them see what the Bible’s message was? I will describe that in our Fall sermon series at Harvest. We’ll look at the way God put the Bible together, and we’ll see what message it sends. And I think I can demonstrate convincingly that Jesus and the apostles read it the same way, and thus understood it the same way. Don’t miss it!

And don’t be surprised when the Bible's flow as I describe it this Fall has nothing to do with secret codes, hidden meanings, or selling tons of books to make me rich.

The Bible As Jesus Read It

The Bible Jesus read (sometimes called the Hebrew Bible) was identical to our modern Old Testament in every respect, except one. Rather than beginning with Genesis and ending with Malachi, his Bible began with Genesis and ended with Chronicles. And many of the books in between were also arranged in a different order. This particular arrangement of the books is important because it helps readers understand the message of the Hebrew Bible.

Jesus alluded to the arrangement of the Hebrew Bible when he walked with two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection. There he explained to them everything the Old Testament taught about him as Messiah. And then notice how Jesus describes this message (Luke 24:44): "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled." Here Jesus is referring to the three-part structure of the Hebrew Bible:

• Law of Moses ("Torah" in Hebrew) refers to the first 5 books of the Bible
• The Prophets includes Joshua, Judges, Samuel & Kings, along with most of the prophets we traditionally recognize
• The Writings (called here "the Psalms" since this section begins with the book of Psalms) includes everything else in the Old Testament.

But it's not just that there are three sections. It's the deliberate way those sections are attached to one another. They were put together with intentionality, to send the message God wants to send. It's almost as if they are sewn together. And the text in the "seams" where these sections come together emphasizes the dual themes of trust in God's Word and the coming Messiah (which I blogged about below).

So the structure of whole Hebrew Bible looks something like this (click for a larger view):

OK, so... what's the point?
The point is that this is the Bible as Jesus and the apostles read it. And this is HOW they read it. It turns out that the Old Testament is not about law and works while the New testament is about faith and grace. No! The New Testament writers got their understanding of faith and grace from the Old Testament. They recognized that the entire Hebrew Bible was about God's plan to redeem all of creation through the coming Messiah. That's why Jesus said, referring to Deuteronomy, "Moses wrote about me." (John 5:46) He learned what his role as the Messiah was all about by reading the Hebrew Bible.

And so did the apostles. As they were preaching the gospel, writing the New Testament to explain Christian doctrine, and laying their lives down for the kingdom of God, it was this understanding of the Old Testament that informed their theology and inflamed their hearts. And it still does so today.

The way we've changed the order of the Old Testament books masks its overall message to a degree. But the more I learn about how clearly and consistently the Old Testament teaches about the importance of faith in Jesus for ultimate redemption, the more in awe I am of what God has done. I have literally been brought to tears numerous times these past couple weeks of studying these things more closely, as I think about my love for my Savior: the Messiah who was talked about all the way back in Genesis.

We're going to look at these things more closely this Fall at Harvest, so for those of you who attend or who listen to our sermon series online we're going to have a great time! I hope you'll let me know as the series progresses if the material we're teaching makes sense, and if it has the same effect on you as it does on me.

Stained Glass Bible

I've always liked big stained glass windows. So many different shards of glass, each unique in its size, shape and color. And with the sun shining through, each piece is bright and beautiful in its own way. But of course we don't pay attention to the individual shards when we look at a stained glass window. We want to see the big picture they add up to. We're transfixed by the way all those varied and unique pieces fit together to form an artistic image that carries within it a message.

I've learned a lot about the Bible from an Old Testament scholar named John Sailhamer. He says the Bible is in many ways like a stained glass window. Each of the Bible's 66 books has its own unique content and form, like individual shards of stained glass. But those shards have been fit together to form a complete picture. As beautiful as each separate verse and book of the Bible is, the greatest beauty of God's Word is in the picture of reality that it forms when viewed as a whole.

Here's just one example: the Old Testament historically consisted of three major divisions: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. These are the same 39 books we have in our OT today, but they're in a different order than we see them in our Bibles. And the order matters! Because when you put them in their ancient Jewish order you notice something: there are transitions in the text between each of the three groupings:

• Section 1 (the Torah) ends with Deuteronomy 34, which talks about a coming great prophet.
  
• Section 2 (the Prophets) starts with Joshua 1, which is about meditating on God's Word
  

Now hang with me here:

• Section 2 (the Prophets) ends with the end of Malachi, which talks about a coming great prophet (sound familiar?).
  
• Section 3 (the Writings) then begins with Psalm 1, which talks about (you guessed it) meditating on God's Word.

The transitionary material is parallel in each case, and this points to a deliberate message in the Old Testament: from start to finish the Old Testament advances the dual themes of faith in God's Word and the promised Messiah king. These are not New Testament concepts! In fact, Jesus and the New Testament writers saw these themes in the Old Testament and realized that faith in the Messiah was the core of God's plan from the very beginning.

And there's so much more! These transitions are just one of many examples of how the entire Bible is far from a loose collection of random religious writings. Rather, it's a whole, cohesive, master-crafted work of art! And this is what we're going to unpack this Fall at Harvest Community Church. We'll spend time backing way up and seeing how the whole of the Bible's 66 books form a cohesive view of the world, and thus forms the basis of our own view of the world. And I hope everyone's appreciation and love for God's Word increases dramatically, as mine has as a result of learning these things.

Long ago, in many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" Hebrews 1:1-2