CommonChristianity: April 2020

Monday, April 27, 2020

702 - Letting Truth Out of the Bag

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Spirituality Column #702

April 28, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Letting Truth Out of the Bag

By Bob Walters

“When the Counselor comes, who I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me.” – Jesus, in John 15:26

A little more than a year ago I inherited the teaching duties in our church’s Thursday morning seniors “Mustard Seed” Bible study fellowship. At age 65 I am the “kid” in the group, and I can barely describe how enriching it is to share scripture with this weekly group of seasoned, Bible-savvy saints.

Currently we have not met since Thursday, March 12, which was pretty much the last open day in Indiana before everything, including our East 91^st Street Christian Church, area schools, and public meetings started shutting down Friday, March 13.

Mustard Seed – no argument there – is the kind of group that especially needs not to meet when a pandemic like COVID-19 is an evident danger to older folks.

But what I wanted to talk about this week is not the dire, dour, and depressing isolation of our nation’s and indeed the world’s present situation. Nor can I think of anything new to say about our individual and largely home-bound circumstances. To all those folks still out there working every day in hospitals, grocery stores, gas stations, and other life-saving and society-sustaining endeavors, I say “Thank You!”

What I do want to discuss is the plain-as-the-nose-on-my-face fact that perhaps the greatest joy-robbing, hope-jangling feature of this unprecedented time is the utter absence of what I would call reliable truth about virtually anything having to do with the reporting, media narrative, and politics surrounding the pandemic. Who can we trust?

From China to Washington state to New York City to Washington D.C. to Italy to my home here in Fishers, Indiana, I wonder who is pushing which social, political, or economic agenda. What is the real danger: the disease or our reaction to it? Since “tomorrow is guaranteed to no one,” let’s not panic about the presently more intense vagaries of “tomorrow.” What we all need are facts and truth, not fear and spin.

I started by talking about “Mustard Seed” because our past several months have been a study of “The Words of Jesus.” Especially illuminating to me personally, in the Last Supper and Gethsemane sections of John 14-17, is Jesus talking through these four entire chapters about God’s unwavering righteousness, eternal truth, boundless love, infinite glory, their relationship … and his disciples’ responsibilities going forward.

This truth – His truth – marches on. In His last hours it is virtually all Jesus talks about.

When we can’t see truth – in anything, whether particular or whole – our human misery most likely is in our inability to see God, relate with Jesus, and listen to the Holy Spirit. The world, for unrighteous reasons in times like these, prefers our focus to be on fear and anxiety. These are man’s evil shackles that choke our free breath in Christ.

I listen carefully for God’s truth. I know that’s what Jesus brought into the world – freedom not just from our own sin and the wiles of wicked men and women, but toward faith, hope, love, peace, creativity, and joy that our trust in God’s eternal truth assures.

What a better world we make, and what joy we reap, when we believe in and testify to God’s truth. The fallen world controls us in fear, but Jesus by his life, death, resurrection, and sending of the Spirit let God’s righteous, saving truth out of the bag.

Sometimes we have to fight for that truth, but our joy always is in knowing it.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) watches little mainstream news but stays informed and prays big sincere prayers … regularly.

Labels: Covid-19, God’s truth, joy, media narrative, Mustard Seed class, trust | 0 comments

Monday, April 20, 2020

701 - Humble New Beginnings

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Spirituality Column #701

April 21, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Humble New Beginnings

By Bob Walters

“… because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.” – Luke 19:41

Jesus very famously wept quietly at the tomb of Lazarus – “Jesus wept” – but He absolutely howled as He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

Jesus "weeps" twice in the Bible – tenderly (Greek edakrysen, John 11:35) for Lazarus’s sisters’ sadness, and a second time loudly (Greek eklausen, Luke 19:41), “As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it.”

While we could spend this entire column discussing how deeply Jesus was moved – and somewhat miffed – at the reactions of Lazarus’ family and friends before Jesus brought Lazarus out of the tomb, that’s a common story we’ve all studied before. Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life,” (John 11:25). And He meant it.

Bible scholars mostly agree that “Palm Sunday” was a few days later on the first day of the following week when Jesus rode a donkey into Jerusalem to the palm-waving Hosannas of all the believers who knew of Lazarus and had heard of Jesus’s many miracles. They welcomed him to Jerusalem as their holy and promised Messiah.

The Pharisees were not so thrilled. As Jesus approached (Luke 37-44) the crowd joyously praised but the Pharisees viciously harangued: “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” (v. 39). Jesus noted that if his disciples were quiet, then the “stones would cry out.” (v. 40). Seeing the unbelief of the Pharisees and their blindness toward God, Jesus knew it meant Jerusalem’s eventual destruction. He wept bitterly because of it.

Clearly nobody except Jesus had any idea what the rest of that week held, or how history after that would be forever changed. The reality was, Jesus on that donkey was God returning to Jerusalem – as God told Abraham, Moses, and the prophets He would – to initiate His Kingdom on Earth. It’s what Jesus had been saying all along.

What the Pharisees saw – in their blindness and anger – was a troublemaking blasphemer who would pull down their temple, negate their authority, threaten their social positions, and not least of all threaten Jerusalem’s tenuous peace with the Romans. The Pharisees “did not recognize the time of God’s coming.” (v. 41)

Something else they didn’t perceive, and I’d never thought of either, was looking at what we call Holy Week as a perfect, poetic replay of the Creation story in Genesis.

It was just a brief note in N.T. Wright’s The New Testament in Its World I’m reading, but, Lord of lords, how poignant. In Genesis 1, God labored for six days, rested a day, and His perfect Creation was in motion. Jesus here spent six days in Jerusalem (Sunday to Friday), finishing his work of salvation, service, obedience, and love on the cross on Friday – the sixth day – and in his death rested on the seventh day Saturday.

Right here, let’s not worry too much whether on that “Holy Saturday” Jesus descended into Hades, battled Satan, freed the saints, or whatever else He might have done; there is only thin and much debated scriptural evidence for that. What we know is that on the cross Jesus said, “It is finished.” On the seventh day, why not let him rest?

Jesus’s resurrection on the first day of a new week was breathtaking and glorious for those who believed. It signaled the new beginning of humanity’s eternal life in God’s Kingdom through the humility of the cross of Christ.

Creation, humbly, was renewed.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) looked up the Greek for “wept” at Biblehub.com.

Labels: Creation, disciples, Greek, Holy Week, Jesus Wept, John 11:35, Lazarus, Luke 19:41, N.T. Wright, Pharisees, seventh day, The New Testament in Its World | 0 comments

Monday, April 13, 2020

700 - When Empty is Good

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Spirituality Column #700

April 14, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

When Empty is Good

By Bob Walters

“ … and in Christ you have been brought to fullness.” – Colossians 2:10

What an irony that an empty grave was humanity’s first sign of salvation when what salvation means is humanity’s fullness in Christ.

In the Jesus-generated hubbub of Holy Week – the triumphant entry, trashing the temple, his teaching, the last supper, new commandments, Jesus’s arrest, trials, horrible death on the cross, entombment, arisen and bodily seen on the third day, humanity’s forgiveness and salvation at last! – easily overlooked is the sure reality that Jesus was the human, divine, tactile proof of God’s existence and truth.

The disciples were frightened, disillusioned, and dispersed during the crucifixion. The empty grave confounded everybody. The believers were then stunned Jesus was no longer dead; many saw Him, talked to him, touched him, ate with him. He was real.

And as for what it all meant, initially, to the believers, it meant joy mixed with confusion. Over the years we have come to talk about Easter and perhaps over-focus our faith on the gracious forgiveness of our sins by the cross and, by the empty grave, the gift of eternal life with God through faith in Christ. Sins forgiven; death defeated.

But we mustn’t stop there. It took even the disciples a while to figure it all out.

Everything the disciples needed to know about Jesus’s resurrection, who He was – God in the flesh – and what their task would be going forward, Jesus had already told them the past three years and especially in that eventful final week. Little of His infinite significance – what “Son of God” actually meant – truly sank in, at least not right away.

Even we today are often distracted by the Good Friday misery of death and the joyous Easter-morning relief of life revived. “He is Risen!” For the most part we have figured out, believe, and cherish the gifts of divine grace, the big “whew!” of our sins covered and behavioral debts canceled, and the secure knowledge that heaven, eternal life, and our adoption into God’s family and Kingdom are the sure goals of our hope.

That’s all great, but really it is only fullness for us. What about fullness for God?

That fullness is the life we are to give to others going forward. That is the glory of God Jesus brought to mankind. Jesus had fully briefed the disciples how His presence, life, death, and resurrection would define their mission ahead. And for a couple of obvious reasons, it was not the disciples’ mission to accompany Jesus into death. They were dispersed after Jesus’s arrest because 1) they had to be around later to tell about Jesus, and 2) death was something Jesus had to go through … rejected and alone.

Jesus finished His mission on the cross; their mission was then to tell the world.

Think of the whiplash juxtaposition: on Friday the disciples thought they had seen their hope turn into a cruel lie and their mission into an empty hoax. On Sunday, hope became proof of God’s surest truth, and their mission would come to change the world.

Much, much more happened, of course. It took many years and many people to put those amazing events into the fulfilling context of truth and salvation for all mankind.

But that empty grave?

It will remain empty forever, and thankfully, it is one we will never occupy.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), who won’t be surprised if his own grave is a tad itchy, notes that the stone was rolled away not to let Jesus out, but to let us see in.

Labels: Colossians 2:10, death, disciples, Easter, empty grave, forgiveness, fullness in Christ, glory, Holy Week, life, mission, theology | 0 comments

Monday, April 6, 2020

699 - I Am ... Sure

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Spirituality Column #699

April 7, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

I Am … Sure

By Bob Walters

“… on earth as it is in heaven …” Matthew 6:10, words of Jesus in The Lord’s Prayer

The surface-scratching Christians, in other years, head to church on Easter.

They know a little. God reigns in heaven and Jesus judges our sins on earth. We celebrate the forgiveness of our sins by Jesus’s death on the Cross of Good Friday and we praise salvation into heaven’s eternal life by His empty tomb on Easter morning.

And then the barely-clinging, slightly faithful let loose with a shallow cry of “Amen! Great! We are done with church for another year!” Their distancing murmur upon exit echoes a self-cleansing sentiment akin to, “I’ll be back to church next spring. Until then, please don’t bother me with any of this Jesus or church ‘stuff.’ I’m a good person and don’t need religion or church for God to know it. Like the Bible says, ‘Don’t judge.’ Bye.”

That’s what the outside world seems to think of Easter. It’s roughly what the media and the domestic left – particularly the academics – promote as Easter. It’s this religious “thing” about sin, forgiveness, salvation (whatever that is) and getting into heaven. Its real purpose is to quiet the irrational fears of the superstitious masses.

But this year, nobody will be going to church. Easter without church will be like Christmas without presents. And yet like the Whoville “Whos” who found the true meaning of Christmas when the Grinch tried to steal it; this year I pray outsiders and Christians will know the true meaning of Easter because of the virus that couldn’t kill it.

It’s nothing new for most of the world to look the other way at the coming of Christ. The Apostle Paul was among the first to fully realize and proclaim that God fulfilled His ancient promise by sending to Israel the Messiah Christ, and for the most part, Israel looked away. God identified himself to Abraham as “I AM”, Jesus frequently used the telling construction “I am…”, and Israel utterly missed the divine connection.

Israel sought deliverance from the Romans, not from themselves. Hence Israel refused to see Jesus for who He was/is: Israel’s true God in the flesh. As God has His Kingdom in heaven, so the Messiah Jesus delivered God’s promised Kingdom on Earth.

In Jesus’s most extensive teachings – the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-6-7), the “Olivet Discourse” (Matthew 24-25, Mark 13, Luke 21), and the lengthy section of John 15-16-17 as Jesus led the disciples from the Last Supper to the Garden of Gethsemane – do you notice what’s all but left unmentioned in these major, even final teachings? Sin, forgiveness, sacrifice, wrath, payment, punishment, and salvation – themes that create focus on ourselves. Jesus focused solely on God’s glory.

Jesus taught about identifying who He, Jesus, was; about his infinite faith and obedience, God’s glory, the true Messiah inaugurating God’s Kingdom on Earth, and what the Disciples and believers were to expect and to do after His death. Jesus spoke of God’s love, the power of divine truth, the reality of hope, the assuredness of faith, and that He’d be back. Jesus’s message was “Identify God with love,” not, “Do this or else!”

Easter is about God’s love and faithfulness, and about Jesus’s identity and obedience. Many want Easter to be about “me,” even if it is my fear, guilt, and sin; it’s a common blunder.

No, Easter is about God’s truth, Jesus’s obedience, and our faith.

I am sure of it.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes: sin is all about me, not about God’s glory.

Labels: Bible teaching, Christmas presents, Easter, Gethsemane, Grinch, Identifying Jesus, Israel, Matthew 6:10, Messiah, Olivet Discourse, Sermon on the Mount, Whoville | 0 comments

702 - Letting Truth Out of the Bag

701 - Humble New Beginnings

700 - When Empty is Good

699 - I Am ... Sure

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