For new readers, I was in the middle of a series I called The Lost Doctrine and was interrupted by a nasty work schedule last April. I had done four installments and you can read them here. If you pick up this series here without reading the first four installments, you won't get the entire picture. So please read the first four. Pay particular attention to the definition of holiness and how that affects the definition of God.
WHAT'S A COROLLARY?
The Bible is a miraculous book. Written by dozens of authors over centuries, it is nonetheless logically consistent, a seamless whole. The doctrines presented in Scripture don't stand alone like stalks of wheat so that one may be pulled and the others remain. They aren't independent ideas that can be mixed and matched. If you change grace, you change sin or the nature of God. If you change sin, you change the atonement. If you change the atonement and sin, you change the sin nature and, therefore, regeneration. And the doctrine of holiness isn't any different. The octrine of dholiness has a direct affect on what we believe and how we behave in the here and now.
So far, we've looked at the doctrine of holiness, a doctrine purposely abandoned and lost to most church goers in today's churches. And so far, we've primarily looked at the holiness of God. And the holiness of God, like all other doctrines, has logical consequences that can't really be avoided. If God is truly unique, radically other, completely separate, how can we be His progeny and still be just like our neighbors, but simply go to a particular place we call "church" one day a week.
In this installment I'd like to begin explaining four doctrines that are corollaries of the doctrine of the holiness of God. Because these four doctrines are logical outcomes of the doctrine of the holiness of God, and because we have abandoned the holiness of God in my generation we have four corresponding deficiencies in our lives.
1. WE HAVE NO ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. (The Lost Doctrine of the Ownership of God)
The problem of evil can be succinctly stated this way: If your God is good and if He is all powerful, then evil things shouldn't happen to us. Or, why do bad things happen to good people?
As I often hear or watch "Christian " leaders in the media being asked questions and responding to situations, I am alarmed and saddened by how little they know of God. For instance, I recently read in my local paper an article written by an ME (Modern Evangelical) college professor who claimed that Jesus healed everyone He met who was sick or lame. Did he read the gospels? Or you will hear ME preachers on the national stage say that God could not possibly have meant some disaster as a judgment on an evil people. Why? Why does the world have to ask the church if God might be judging them when calamity comes? Don't they already know? They certainly already know what answer they want. And if, in their hearts, they didn't already know that it's likely that human evil just might be a cause for God's wrath, they wouldn't be asking. After all, the whole point of asking an expert is to get the comforting answer they already decided upon. And if the expert gives the wrong answer, we'll just ridicule him and ask another who, by now, certainly understands that to please us he'd better say God doesn't send disaster anymore.
There's a technical theological term for this sort of thing:
HOKEY, HOKEY HOGWASH!
I won't take time to get into this right here, but let me say that this is so unbiblical that it's actually heretical and it wasn't preached that way by Evangelicals even 50 years ago. Folks were actually told to be scared of God's wrath. Not now. In fact, it's official. Their god has purchased and donned a brand new poodle dress.
Recalling what I wrote in the previous installments, God's holiness is His uniquesness, His apartness, His otherness, and here is the reason we have no answer to the problem of evil: Going back we saw that on the holiness of God was a major theme of Genesis 1:1. Remember that? When the Scripture introduced God as the Creator, and the rest of all things as created, it was also a claim of differentness, apartness. Some of thoses differences include non-contingency vs. a completely contingent and dependent creation, Author of all that is vs. small beings that can only discover what is, Be-er of good because good is what He is vs. small beings that must be told moral principle and follow it or suffer the consequences, Owner vs. the owned, eternal vs. small beings closed into and dependent upon the space-time God created graciously for us.
There are two ways a Christian can answer the unbeliever when the objection to God is the problem of evil. One is to defend God. He didn't cause the evil...He caused the evil but for very good reasons...etc. Arguments of this first type may or may not be valid. In particular, the argument that God didn't cause the evil can be dangerous. Currently most of our leaders have opted to defend God. (I'm sure He's glad to have us on His side!) That would be okay if it was combined with the second type of argument, and if it was a biblical defense. It's often neither. The defense is often simply that God doesn't send judgment anymore.
Really? Where do you find He stopped hating and punishing evil in Scripture?
The second type of argument is foreign to us but is common in the Bible and Jewish thought. This second type is basically just one argument. In a nutshell this is it:
God owns you, so get used to it. After all He created you and lends you the air you breathe.
Until the last few decades and the appearance of MEism (Modern Evangelicalism or the New Evangelicalism) we preached a God who was a consuming fire. We preached a God so different from ourselves that the very idea that God should be measured by the same moral code we measure ourselves would be considered ridiculous. I contend it is ridiculous and the problem of evil, rather than being insightful and profound, is just whining in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.
In the Scripture we have the common analogy of the potter vs. the clay. The clay simply has no right to complain. Every decision is the prerogative of the potter. Any decision the clay is allowed is a gift, not an obligation on God's part. The clay has no standing to sue the potter.
The Scripture is a Jewish book. The Messiah is the Jewish Messiah. The One True God is the Jewish God. So how do (or did) the Jews see God and His relationship to men?
Let's finish with a passage of Jewish tradition written hundreds of years after Christ. This is oral tradition called Midrash, or exposition of Scripture, not recorded in writing until at least the second century. It comes out of the Jewish idea that God owned the creation, Israel, and each individual. Here it is:
"The Holy One, blessed be He, created days, and took to Himself the Sabbath; He created the months, and took to Himself the festivals; He created the years, and chose for Himself the Sabbatical Year; He created the Sabbatical Years, and chose for Himself the Jubilee Year; He created the nations, and chose for Himself Israel...He created the lands, and chose for Himself the land of Israel as a heave-offering from among all the other lands, as it is written: 'The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof.'"--Midrash Tehellim 24:3. (1)
Please notice a number of things. First, notice the title "Holy One". Imagine going to church and talking about "the Holy One of Israel"! Your peers would, no doubt, think something was wrong with you. You'd not be welcome. Yet, the unsaved Jews have traditionally thought this way. Why don't we? Second, notice that even before modern physics, the Jews saw time as finite and created, just like Augustine. All other worldviews have seen time as circular and infinite in duration. Some theories of modern physics and the Scripture agree that time had a beginning. God even owns time. That means He owns our lives.
God, then, has the right to end your life when He is pleased to do so and you have no right to call it evil.
That is the lost doctrine of God's ownership of each and everyone of us. The lost doctrine of the holiness of God effects everything. It is the cause for us losing God's ownership and explains why so many of us have no answer to "the problem of evil".
The next installment, God willing, will start dealing with three more lost doctrines that are the direct results of our sinful abandonment of the doctrine of the holiness of God.
In Christ,
Phil Perkins.
(1) Johnson, Paul; A History of the Jews; Harper and Rowe; New York, NY; 1987; pp. 18-19.
NEXT TIME:
2. WE DON'T UNDERSTAND THE SINFULNESS OF OUR SIN. (The Lost Doctrine of Our Moral Filth and Our Spiritual Hopelessness)
3.WE ARE NOT HOLY. (The Lost Doctrine of Personal Holiness)
4. WE FAIL TO SEPARATE FROM FALSE TEACHERS. (The Lost Doctrine of Corporate Holiness)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment