Those Poor Pharisees

Image by Sweet Publishing/FreeBibleimages.org is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Sometimes I feel bad for the Pharisees.  Yes, they are the “bad guys” in the Gospels, and they do end up conspiring to kill Jesus, but when I read some of the Old Testament, I can’t help but feel a little sympathetic.  I think if  I had no access to the New Testament and I decided I wanted to obey God fully, I would probably have done it like them.

Take, for example, the Sabbath.  If you are familiar with the Gospel stories, you will know that one of the things that enraged the Pharisees the most was Jesus working on the Sabbath.  There is an often repeated pattern where Jesus heals someone on the Sabbath, the Pharisees confront him for breaking the law, Jesus says something offensive, and the Pharisees plot to kill him.  To our compassionate eyes, we can’t help but wonder what is wrong with them.  Can’t they see that Jesus is healing people?  Why get all anal about the Sabbath when miracles are being done?  But then I read Jeremiah 17.  I’ll spare you the whole chapter, but let’s look at a few verses, starting with 21-23:

Thus says the Lord: Take care for the sake of your lives, and do not bear a burden on the Sabbath day or bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem.  And do not carry a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath or do any work, but keep the Sabbath day holy, as I commanded your fathers.  Yet they did not listen or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck, that they might not hear and receive instruction. 

Ok, well that’s pretty explicit.  But maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal.  I wonder what would happen to people if they didn’t keep the Sabbath?  Let’s check verse 27:

But if you do not listen to me, to keep the Sabbath day holy, and not to bear a burden and enter the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, then I will kindle a fire in its gates, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem and shall not be quenched.

Yikes!  So scripture VERY CLEARLY tells them to not do any work or carry any burdens on the Sabbath, unless they want their city destroyed by fire.  Do you understand the Pharisees a bit better now?  If I took those passages literally, had no other context of understanding, and saw Jesus doing his thing on the Sabbath, I’m pretty sure I would join with the Pharisees and ask Jesus, “can’t you do these things on another day?”

How did Jesus deal with the contradiction? In Matthew 12:11-12, he says,

Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out?  Of how much more value is a man than a sheep!  So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.

  And in Mark 2:27, Jesus says,

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.

This is powerful, and a complete departure from previous interpretations of scripture.  Before, scripture was seen as the value holder, with people deriving their value from their obedience to what it taught.  Jesus flips this concept on its head by restoring value to the person.  If something has to bend, he would rather bend the law in order to love/help/heal a person than try to bend that persons needs around the commandment.  That doesn’t mean that the old commandments are meaningless.  But the reason that the commandments matter and the new lens through which we view them are rooted in the revelation that it is humanity that holds the greatest value in God’s heart.

Jesus never says the Sabbath is bad.  He says that the Sabbath was made for man.  While it was written down in commandment language, what if we revisited it with our new understanding?  I think it would read something like this:

You work very hard, and your work is important.  Especially when you are behind on what needs to be done, it can be easy to put everything aside and just keep working.  But you mean so much more to me than what you do.  I know it can be difficult to slow down, but I want you to make time and space for yourself to breathe.  Rest in me.  Remember my goodness.  Enjoy your family.  Recharge.  Your work will still be there when you are finished, but you will be able to approach it with a new energy that will actually increase your productivity without enslaving you to the rat race.  Trust me, I know what is good for you.

What do you think?  If God’s primary focus is not the Sabbath, or the Law, or Scripture itself…if WE are the value holders that God is willing to bend heaven and earth to reconcile with himself, how does that change how we see ourselves?  How does that change how we treat other people?  How does that change how we read scripture?  I would love to hear your thoughts!

The Cross: A Divine Conclusion

“Calvary” By Christopher Brown is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0

 

The death and resurrection of Christ is not a question mark, it’s an exclamation mark! Unfortunately much of modern Christianity fills our heads with abstract theologies and statements of belief that we are supposed to agree with, while leaving us unsure about what the cross really reveals.  Apart from being the password we use to get into heaven, we don’t really understand what the cross reveals about God, and as a result are unsure about what God’s feelings are towards us.

Christ is the resounding revelation of a divine conclusion. If there was ever a time for God to send us to a fiery pit, it was at the crucifixion of Jesus. While the record of sin against humanity was already burdensome, at the cross we made it infinite. There can be no greater sin than to put to death God in the flesh. In the cross, we find the failure of all flesh. All levels of society had their own part in his death.

For the religious hierarchies, Jesus was a threat to their monopoly on God. His love of all people and refusal to let even the most wretched sinner be crushed under the wheels of religious authority was unacceptable. Better to sacrifice one man than to see the whole structure of religion topple, so they killed him.

For political powers, there was little hate for Jesus. While religion actively persecuted Jesus, politics was merely doing what politics does best. It made a cold calculation and decided it was more strategic in the long run to maintain the status quo and to pacify the religious leaders by allowing for Jesus’ death. If religion represents the hate with which man persecutes love, then politics represents the indifference that washes its hands of guilt while allowing evil to have its way.

For the common people, there was blindness. When Jesus filled their tummies and healed their bodies, he was celebrated. When Jesus said something offensive that they couldn’t understand, he was abandoned. When it looked like Jesus could rid them of foreign occupiers, he was welcomed as a king. When Jesus rejected political ambition and was arrested and slandered, they became a mob that shouted, “crucify him!”. With eyes only for instant results and with no deeper understanding of what Jesus actions meant, they represent the foolishness of humanity’s thinking that leads us to trade what is priceless for things of little value.

In the disciples, we see a lack of faith. As Jesus followers and radicals, they had experienced daily miracles and learned incredible wisdom at the feet of Jesus. They had also known Jesus as friends, getting a close glimpse at the love that he had for them. But when bad times came and Jesus suddenly didn’t appear to be in control, their faith and hope fell like dominoes. They ran, they hid, they denied.

It was on this day when religion, politics, the people, and the Jesus lovers together demonstrated the absolute darkness of their thinking and together turned their backs on the Son of God; it was on this day that judgment should have fallen. And it almost did! With the death of the Lamb, dark clouds rolled in, thunder struck, and the earth shook in anger, almost as if creation itself was pleading with God to end humanity once and for all. But instead, the temple curtain tore in two. Instead, Jesus rose from the dead. Instead, God released his Holy Spirit. Instead, the Spirit inspired men to travel the earth, live, and die to declare the reconciliation that Jesus blood transmits!

While a thousand books could never fully explain the cross in all it’s glory, sometimes it is with simple eyes and the heart of a child that we can see it most clearly. There are ways of seeing it within the context of Jewish law, in which Jesus becomes the lamb and the pleasing sacrifice that cleanses us from sin. This is a very good way to see it, and worthy of exploring! There are ways of seeing it in the context of messianic prophesy, in which Jesus fulfills prophecies about a great rescuer and leader who would save his people, becoming salvation for all who believe. This too is a deep well of refreshing water worth much attention! But perhaps it is in the simple context of love that we find our greatest security. For while we can see how Jesus set us free according to Jewish legal requirements, laws are always up for reinterpretation and there may be some loophole by which we could potentially find ourselves condemned, or at least lose our confidence. Likewise, while the fulfilled prophecies about “the man of many sorrows” is a spring of hope, there are other biblical prophecies that are less clear, and leave room for humanity to be discarded and condemned. But it is when we strip away our sophisticated understanding and simply perceive the love of God expressed through Jesus that fear loses its last foothold.

Because beyond legal necessity and prophetic fulfillment, there is the heart of God. It is a heart so joyfully expressed in the healings and miracles that Jesus performed. It is a heart that welcomes the children and the sinners and the failures alike. It is a heart that places no value on position and influence and the opinions of men, but which gladly communes with any and every soul that draws near. Jesus’ life is a compelling chronicle of love, but it is in his death that its full glory is exposed. Far beyond the limits and conditions most humans put on love, Jesus loved to the bitter end. He allowed himself to be whipped, beaten, and nailed to a tree to show you this love. To show you that even when mankind is at its worst, he still cries out “forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing!” To allow your guilt-ridden soul the realization that it doesn’t matter how great the record of wrongdoing is against you. God’s opinion is unshakably fixed in your favor.

He loves you. He loves you to death. He loves you when it is your own hatred, indifference, blindness and faithlessness that kills him. No matter what you have done, where you have been, or even where you are now, the cross is a deafening shout of love unfailing. It is a clear and unambiguous declaration that God will not condemn you. He will not cast you off. He will not look at your record of wrong to decide what to do with you! Humanity at it’s worst met Divinity at its best, and Divinity won….for the benefit of all humanity! You are forgiven…the cross proclaims it so! You are accepted…the cross declares! No possible failure on your part could undermine the success of the cross because it was not merely a legal or prophetic success; it was the success of unquenchable love against all else!

His mind is made up about you. He will not change. So why not leave your fear and guilt at the foot of the cross? Why not embrace the Love that is already embracing you? You cannot imagine the deep well of life that you will discover when you do!

Hyper-Grace?

I am always saddened when I see attacks on “hyper-grace” or “radical grace”. If there are people teaching that we should go out and sin because of grace, they are wrong!…but that is not the message that I have heard from hyper-grace preachers (and it is not what I believe, and I’m as “hyper-grace” as they come!).  No, we are going through a grace revolution because we are finally waking up to the reality of our own weakness in changing ourselves.  We don’t preach “the law is bad”, we preach “the law is ineffective”!  We don’t believe that Jesus is an example of what we can do when we try to follow the law; He is the bridge that unites us once again with our loving Father, and if an example, then an example of what a person in perfect union with the Father looks like!

The reality is that both sin and attempts at self-perfection are rooted in the same lie.  Sin says, “Do _____, then you’ll be happy”, and self effort says “Do ______, then God will be pleased with you.”  Both are rooted in the lie that God is withholding good things from us.  Both believe that we ourselves can fix our unhappiness or lack with effort.  What the Self Effort crowd doesn’t understand is that it is the freedom of being loved and rescued entirely separate from our behavior (grace!) that uproots the powerful lie that holds us captive to sin and religion.  We find that happiness isn’t found in sinning, and it’s not found in trying not to sin; it is found in communion with Jesus!  Even more surprising, we discover that genuine love is not a fruit of trying to love.  Genuine love springs up in our souls when we aren’t even looking for it — when we are lost in the eyes of Love Himself and discover that we are 100 percent free from every law and burden.  It is exactly the freedom and unconditional love that the Legalists so fear that is the birthplace of genuine, unadulterated love!  It is this love that will produce beautiful fruit in our lives…we just may be to busy enjoying Jesus to realise it!

Think about.  How would you respond if someone pointed out a girl that you had never met before and told you, “You must fall in love with her!”  Does that commandment actually produce any love whatsoever?  You may out of fear ACT like you love her, or TRY to love her — but no amount of effort will create a genuine heart response of love.  Then how do we get people to love God?  Just like with meeting a girl you don’t know, the only way to genuinely fall in love is to get to know the person.  The reality is that Jesus is shockingly, overwhelmingly, heart-meltingly BEAUTIFUL.  I don’t love Him because I have to.  I don’t try to love Him at all.  Seeing who He is, is enough to draw me in!  The reality is that Jesus is the sum total of all our hearts desires!  We have searched for love, intimacy, affirmation, pleasure, security, hope, excitement, meaning, etc. in so many places, not realizing that our hearts were made to find all fulfillment in Him!  It is totally possible to find the religion of Christianity without experiencing who Christ is for you, but when you actually discover Jesus Himself…you will find a home for your soul, and the true source and fulfilment of all your passions and desires.  So don’t listen to anyone who is trying to burden you down with rules as a way to please God, and don’t listen to that voice that says “If only I do _____ then I’ll be happy!”.  Listen to the voice of your heavenly Father, experience his abundance of grace (you might even say “hyper-grace”!) that meets you exactly where you’re at, and discover the Substance, the Person, the Hope that you’ve always dreamt about but never thought possible!

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In closing, this is my prayer for you!

“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” -Ephesians 3:14-21 (ESV)

There’s Grace, But…

As far as I know, most Christians believe in grace.  We know that when we accepted Jesus into our hearts, it was a work of His grace. Most of us are familiar with the following scripture:

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9

While we may know that it is important for salvation, and may be able to read quotes about it from the Bible, most of us quickly become uncomfortable with grace when confronted with sinful behaviour, or Christians who fail to “walk the walk”.  I have read several posts on Facebook recently from people who are clearly fed up with the low moral standards of their brothers and sisters.  Like many Christians when dealing with bad behaviour or hypocrisy, they love to pull out the “there’s grace, but…” card.  It’s as if everything they’ve previously said about God’s mercy and steadfast love needs to be put on hold for a minute — we’ve got to deal with a bigger problem; sin.  I mean come on, you didn’t really think that God’s free gift was 100%, totally, free, did you?  You must know that there are some conditions on His….er…..unconditional love, right?  I mean, grace is nice when we only screw up occasionally, but chronic sinners and hypocrites need stronger medicine, right?  They clearly need somebody to lay down the law!

Unfortunately, grace has been so misunderstood and under-applied, that we have actually began the think of it as a sin enabler.  We have this perception (whether we realise it or not) that real change only comes from threats and fear of negative consequences, and grace just doesn’t have that edge; so we apply grace sparingly to ease the pain of our failures, then (assuming we’re devout) get back to the hard work of trying to conform ourselves to the law.  But is grace really just a spiritual pain reliever that deals with the symptoms, but leaves the person unchanged?  Is it — like physical painkillers — only to be used in moderation?

No, grace is the strongest possible medicine!  It is not something that merely makes sick people better; it is something that brings the dead to life!  Contrary to popular (though usually only subtly communicated) opinion, it is the law that is too weak to bring lasting change.  The Israelites had approximately 1500 years to figure out how to keep the law before Jesus came.  Under the Old Covenant, God had his part of the deal, and we had our part….and not a single person ever managed to live up to their end of the deal!  While many of the “grace, but…” preachers today would not claim that they are preaching the law, the burdens they place on people to pray harder, give more, love better, sin less, etc. have the same damning effect.  The problem with man is not that we fail to try hard enough; it’s that we think trying hard is what makes us acceptable to God!  The law isn’t just insufficient because we haven’t given it our best shot, but because a person could theoretically live up to all of the commandments (but one) without ever walking in the intimacy God desires to have with us!  Our checklist of good deeds could be full, but our hearts remain empty and distant from our Father!  Our efforts are only useful in bringing us to the end of ourselves; back to that place where we are broken, confused, and ready for a handout of divine mercy!

Believe it or not, the wishy-washy, lukewarm, half-hearted Christians you know aren’t that way because they haven’t heard enough law preached.  Most of them are lukewarm because they have yet to encounter the radical love of Jesus!  They may say the word “grace” to excuse their behaviour, but they have never yet been drawn into a love encounter with their Saviour!  You can guilt them, condemn them, and try to place all sorts of conditions on this grace that they’re “abusing” — or you can pray for them, love them, and lead them into an encounter with Love Himself.  You can “lay down the law” and either chase them away or enslave them to an inferior view of God “The Punisher”, or you can patiently show them grace and draw their hearts towards the Good Shepherd who would leave the 99 sheep to look for the one!

We all need a covenant where we are wholeheartedly and unconditionally loved.  We all need a forgiveness that is relentless in cleansing us from all our shame and guilt.  We all need a God who would come down from His throne and plunge into the depths of human despair to bring us back to His heart!  We all need a King like Jesus, who — though God — came to serve us rather than to be served!

So next time you’re tempted to “lay down the law”, why not show grace instead?  And next time you find yourself exhausted from your efforts to live by a higher standard, why not open your heart to the divine satisfaction of being loved and accepted anyway?  It will truly transform your life from the inside out, and you will see the fruit that you’ve tried to produce for so long begin to come naturally!

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 “For on the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect); but on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.” Hebrews 7:18-19