Terrorism - Living in a World Reserved for Fire

Preached on Sunday, November 15, 2015

Scripture readings: 1 Peter 4:7-19; 2 Peter 3:8-14

A man had just retired. He had big plans for landscaping around his house. He was out working in his yard one day, when his eighty-plus-year-old neighbor came by.

Photos at Desert Aire/Mattawa and Crab Creek WA
November 2015

The older neighbor was carrying a box of oak seedlings. He had bought the seedlings to plant in his own yard and he had some left over. He asked the new retiree if he wanted to plant some baby oak trees.

The younger man said, “No oak trees for me, thanks. I won’t live long enough to enjoy them.”

The older man gave him a sad look and said, “Son, I’m sorry to hear that. We’ll sure miss you!”

Which of those two old people was the wisest? Is it wise to say, “When you know you are approaching the end of your days, plant an oak tree”?

Is that wisdom?

The Bible has wisdom just like that. I think you could as well paraphrase what we read in Peter’s letters this way, “If you live in a world that is fit to be burned then spend your lives giving something good to that world.”

Peter said: “Love each other deeply… (1 Peter 4:8)

“Offer hospitality…” (1 Peter 4:9)

“Use whatever gift you have received to serve others faithfully…” (1 Peter 4:10)

“Be willing to suffer for doing good….” (That is: “Those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good.” (Peter 4:19)

This is how God asks us to live in a world that is fit to be burned. “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.” (2 Peter 3:11-12)

“Godly” is a word that is an adjective describing the quality of an action or process. Godly living means living a way of life that can be clearly seen to come from God and to be going to God and leading to God: the God who creates, and loves, and saves, and rules, and makes all things new. Godliness means living your life along these lines.

This is how God asks us to live in a world that is fit to be burned.

Peter wrote to people whose lives had been changed by Jesus coming into their lives. They were committed to live with purpose, and love, and generosity, because of Jesus.

At the time when Peter wrote to them, it looked as if the only good this was going to accomplish for them was to get them arrested, and tortured, and killed in a horrible death. This was not an absolute certainty, but it was always a lurking possibility.

It was something worth worrying about, if you believe in the power of worry. You could never know for sure when, and where, and if the axe might fall.

They knew this. Peter knew it too.

In fact, they had been in danger from the very moment they believed. They had entered a world of danger that was especially dangerous for people who stood out because of their commitments.

They had not been tricked into this. As Christians, they had never been innocent optimists. In fact, they had found God in the face of Jesus Christ who said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24; Mark 8:34)

In fact, the world had crucified their Lord, and that crucifixion was where their salvation and their new life came from. A new life was made possible by the fact that God himself became a human being, in Jesus, in order to come into this world that is so full of sin, and evil, and injustice, and violence, and hatred. God loved this world enough to die for it, as its victim, in Jesus.

Then Jesus rose from the dead. He proved that he could save us by facing this world at its worst and not being overcome by it.

The world has always worshiped power, and success, and ambition, and pride. It has always worshiped anger. It has always worshiped glory and the selfish self. That is where bitterness and hatred come from. That is where violence and victimization come from.

Some people claim that the existence of this evil contradicts the existence of God. Or, at least, it contradicts the existence of a strong God, or a good God. Since we were born collaborators with this world that so angers and scares us, we have enough of this world flowing through our veins to make us wonder about the contradictions. We are full of contradictions ourselves, and we have never fully learned how to take to heart this strange God whom we have learned to call our God.

So God wants to give you a greater experience of exactly who he is. God offers himself to you so that you may know him in a way that will contradict your doubts.

When you meet God, one of the things that will bring you to your knees is the fact that he is a God of contradiction. We see who God is because we see Jesus. Jesus is God living as a contradictory human.

In Jesus we see that God is the humble lamb who dies for the sins of the world, even though he is infinite in power and holiness. God’s ownership of the universe as it is, and God’s power of resurrection to make a new heaven and a new earth, in place of the old, is lamb power. God’s power is lamb power.

In the face of a world that is fit to be burned, the Lord Jesus died on a cross for the sins of the world. The world doesn’t contradict God. God contradicts the world. We are the people who follow this God.

The Lord has called us to be a contradiction to this world. Peter said, “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives….” “Holy” means set apart by God for a purpose. It means life with a purpose.

Holiness also means to be set apart in a way that makes you different from everything else around you. Holiness makes you the contradiction that you are called to be: not weird in a weird way, but beautifully weird. In godliness you live your life along a line that intersects with God and his contradictory work. In Jesus, God himself lived a godly life in order to hold your life close to his, as friend to friend.

Jesus told his disciples, “He who has seen me has seen the Father. (John 14:9) What had they seen? They had seen a person who cared about a poor couple running out of wine for the refreshments at their wedding. (John 2:1-11) They had seen a person who protected a woman in danger of being killed for her sins. (John 8:1-11) They had seen a person who cared about the hunger of thousands. (John 6:1-15)

Looking at Jesus, they had seen a person who cared about sickness, and grief. He cared about the poor, and those who were outcasts and hated by others. And he did something about it, and what he said and did about it pointed to his Father. It was all godly, because it pointed to God. God, in Jesus, contradicted the way the world worked around him.

Most people would probably have to be almost twenty years old now to clearly remember the most shocking day of terrorism in modern times: September 11, 2001. Those who are able can remember the volunteers who went to Ground Zero to dig through the rubble of the World Trade Center with their bare hands. Those people contradicted this world and the world’s evil.

In this sense, what they did was very godly. So was the work of the firefighters and the police who climbed the stairs of the towers before they fell, or waited at the bottom for their work to begin.

In the last thirty days we have heard of the airliner full of vacationers that exploded over the Egyptian desert. We have heard that funerals in Bagdad were bombed, and that another neighborhood in Beirut was bombed. We have heard that well over a hundred people have been exploded or shot in Paris: over a hundred dead and hundreds more wounded. Our own country is on alert because of what happened in Paris.

Tomorrow people will work in office buildings, and they will go to airports and fly in jets, and they will work as police and fire-fighters and other first responders, and they will put on uniforms as members of our armed forces at a time when one of our NATO allies has declared the attack upon Paris as an act of war. And everyone here has some connection to these people, or we are one of these people, or we have been, or we could be.

We shop in shopping centers. We go to theaters and eat in restaurants. We drive on bridges. We live downstream from great dams and reservoirs. We go to work, or we know people who do.

And we listen, and we watch, and we talk about our lives in this world. Even in our own homes we shape this world we live in. We make this world less godly. Or we make it more godly.

We are people who live in a world that God came to contradict. We are all called to join together with God and contradict this world.

To live as free, and loving, and generous people in a world of fear and hatred is a contradiction against this world and all its evil. Can we be people who are not motivated by fear or hatred? This is the holy and godly way to live, even in a world that will only be purified by fire.

The God who has revealed himself to us in Jesus calls us to contradict this world together, and to live holy and godly lives together.

Peter wrote, “If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 4:11)

Sometimes God’s call for us to contradict the world makes me think of that dream I had, toward the end of 1964, right after my thirteenth birthday.

That angel came in the night and showed me some things. There was a pall, or a shadow, over everything I saw. There was a black cloud that was coming over the world.

I felt that war was in the cloud; and fear. It was raining on the world, and the rain seemed to bring misery on everyone. Some people were running from the cloud. Some people were walking. Some were too exhausted, too afraid, too confused to move. Some had made tents to shelter themselves from the cloud and the rain, but they were no real shelter, and I knew that they were all going to be swept away.

A voice told me that people would be in great fear, and confusion, and anger, and despair, and I was to speak to them for God.

I don’t know when the great cloud I saw will come. Maybe I have misunderstood its meaning. Maybe we are in it now. You might be surprised to know that I don’t think about it all the time, but times like the past few days makes me think about it.

The dream I had has nothing to do with a calling for me or for you to say or do great things, or to do things very well. My calling is not a call that requires me or you to make a good impression or to receive anyone’s special recognition.

The calling is just to be a contradiction to what you and I find around us. Even God’s own people don’t always understand what it means to live in contradiction to this world. To be a contradiction is my calling and it is yours.

This world needs more wisdom and more help than any human is able to give. But Peter wrote that you can be a simple person who speaks to this world for God, and you can be a person who serves others in this world with the strength that God supplies.

This strength comes when you have experienced the most miraculous contradiction of all: that the designer and creator of all things (the Lord of heaven and earth) has died for you, and that he lives in you, and that he loves this world, and that he wants to love this world through you. This is how you and I are to live in such a world as ours.

A New Kingdom - It comes with Birth Pains

Preached on Sunday March 22, 2015

Scripture readings: 2 Peter 3:3-16; Matthew 24:4-31, 36-44

Various Unrelated Photos that Are Signs or Warnings

There is a friend of mine who is a faithful church elder and a great Christian and he’s lots of fun. He takes Christian fellowship, and the Christian virtues, and prayer, and the Bible absolutely seriously. He takes the truth of the return of Jesus very seriously, but he doesn’t take all the talk and the books about the return of Jesus seriously. More than once David has said to me, “What the Bible tells us is that our side wins.” I have to agree with him.

I’ve been re-reading bits of the first systematic plan of the return of Christ that I read when I was a young Christian. It is the book “The Late Great Planet Earth” and its author is Hal Lindsey. The book and the author were famous. I devoured all his published books when I was in college. I confess that I loved his ability to put so many complicated details into a comprehensive and comprehensible form.

But at the same time I began to read other similar books full of comprehensible and very detailed plans. I found that the plans were different: sometimes only in little ways, sometimes in bigger ways.

So about forty years ago, I prayerfully and studiously decided that simple was best. I believe that we have made Jesus’ answers about his coming, and the rest of what people call Bible prophesy, more complicated than it is meant to be. I believe that this is because the experts, and the people who love the experts, read so much into all of it.

The disciples asked Jesus two questions. One was about the destruction of the temple. The other question was about the coming of Jesus in glory, which will be the end of the age of fallenness: the end of the age of rebellion, and darkness, and suffering. About the coming of Jesus in glory, the disciples wanted to know the signs. They wanted Jesus to give them, in advance, some sort of warning signals, or attention signals, to give them a heads up so that they would be ready for him.

Jesus gave them a long answer. Most of his long answer is really more about what their mission and purpose should be, while they waited for him to come in glory.

It’s about our mission and purpose too, while we wait for him to return, no matter what happens in the meantime. Jesus’ answer included some details that would be clear to anyone living in the Holy Land in the first century. And that’s our problem. We’re not first century people. That is our main handicap in understanding Jesus’ answer.

But think about this. When the question turned to signs, Jesus gave them only one sign of his coming. I mean, the question was about a sign and he only mentions one sign by name. He only uses the word “sign” to describe one single thing. This is what he says: “At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.” (Matthew 24:30:31) That’s the only sign of his coming, according to the simple words of Jesus.

Notice that, according to Jesus, we will all be there when that happens. When everyone sees Jesus coming, and when everyone hears the trumpet call, then all who love and trust and wait for Jesus (whether in heaven or on the earth, whether living or dead) will be gathered together to join with Jesus when he returns to change the world.

Paul wrote about his confidence of being caught up with Jesus, if Jesus came during Paul’s lifetime: “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”

When the Lord comes with lots of noise and glory; that’s when the dead will rise and that’s when we who are living on this earth will meet him. Paul wrote about himself and his friends, “we who are alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord.” (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17)

The Lord’s plan is simple. It’s all one big thing. The world is what it is and what it will be until Jesus comes. It will be what it is, but going from bad to worse until he comes. Jesus said, “Don’t be deceived. Don’t be alarmed.” That is because, in this world, as Jesus describes it, we need to beware of the dangerous and deceitful thought that says, “It can’t get any worse.”

The coming of Jesus and our being caught up with him to join him in his return to change the world will be one, single, great event. The people of Jesus, living and dead will all be part of the great victory dance: dancing with Jesus in the end zone with the whole world looking on and taking it all in. Notice that Jesus and Paul agree and they make this very basic and simple.

I tell you. I love to make things complicated. Some of you are learning about this. I do it because that is when I tell myself that I finally understand everything. But then I get all wound up and crazy and that doesn’t do any good. Then I get tired and I end up leaving lots of things untended and undone; just like Jesus tells us not to do. So I like to keep Jesus and his coming simple. It’s beautiful.

For some reason the multiplication of signs and details make the other versions sound very knowledgeable and convincing. If it takes so much study and so many brain cells to spell out the plan we are tempted to think it must be right. When I was reading these books (in 1971 through about 1973) I knew of quite a few guys who were planning to go to seminary, but the timing of the plan in “The Late Great Planet Earth” clearly suggested to a lot of us that Jesus was coming forty years after the founding of the nation of Israel, which happened in 1948. That would set Jesus’ return at 1988. Subtract seven years from that for the rapture, if the rapture happened before Jesus returns and not during his return (the way Hal Lindsey and many others teach), and that would make 1981 the end of our time as Christians on this earth.

At least a couple of these guys decided that it wasn’t worth it, spending so much time preparing for the ministry, when there would be so little time left to serve in the ministry. So they gave up their sense of calling, and maybe they were right to do so. Maybe the Lord wanted them to serve him another way.

Jesus didn’t call anything else a sign: only his actual appearance. He said that no one knows when it will happen, except his Father. It’s as if God is very humble, and childlike, and loves surprises. He even likes to surprise himself and to be surprised by himself.

In the Trinity, the Son is a servant and a servant is willing to be surprised. It’s the job of a servant to never be surprised by surprises. In the life that the Son gives to us, we are servants. It’s not a bad thing to be surprised. And God enjoys it so much, so why don’t we just let him do it that way?

There was the question about the destruction of the temple. I believe there is a relatively simple way to look at this: a simple way with a long answer that I will give you now.

It has a relationship with the idea of birth pains. How many birth pains does it take to birth a baby? Do you think a mother has ever successfully counted her birth pains? I wonder: how many birth pains should it take for God to complete his purpose for this world; before he makes a new world?

Peter, in his second letter, said that people will make fun of how long it takes. They will use the delay as an excuse for not believing.

The destruction of the temple is something oddly like a birth pain, especially if we expand it slightly to apply to all the desecrations of the temple: every crisis that made the Temple unholy. Jesus only hinted at the destruction of the temple, but he did talk about a strange thing from the Old Testament Book of Daniel, called the “abomination of desolation”. (Daniel 9:27) Eugene Peterson calls this the “monster of desecration”.

For us, the shedding of blood in a church would desecrate it. That church would have to be rededicated, or re-consecrated, or re-blessed. Desecration makes the holy unholy.

The Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt for the first time when the people of Israel returned from exile in Babylon and Persia. A couple hundred years later, the Greeks conquered the Holy Land, and one of the Greek kings decided to make the Jews into Greeks, and he decided to make them worship the Greek gods.

This king’s name was Antiochus, and he actually claimed to be the incarnation of Zeus, the king of the gods. He conquered Jerusalem in 167 BC and set up a statue of Zeus in the Temple. The statue looked a lot like Antiochus. Antiochus tried to make the Jews sacrifice pigs on the altar of Zeus. The Jews rebelled and rededicated the Temple and, after a lot of fighting, they beat the Greeks. The abomination of desolation was undone.

The Romans conquered Jerusalem in 63 BC, and the victorious Roman general Pompey insisted on going inside the holy of holies, the inner room that represented the presence of God. Only the high priest could enter that room (and only one day a year on top of that) without making it unholy, so there would have been the need to rededicate the desecration and the desolation of the Temple after that.

When the Jewish radicals rebelled against the Romans and started the war that ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, again, they started their rebellion by killing the high priest, who was too friendly to the Romans. That was in the year 66 AD.

They killed him inside the temple. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus wrote about this and he called it the abomination that makes desolate. The holy place had been made unholy again. The Temple had to be reconsecrated.

The Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD. They took their military standards that held the image of the divine Caesar into the remains of the temple, and they offered sacrifices to Caesar there: worshipping a man as a god in the Temple. This time the Temple was not reconsecrated.

In the second century, the Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Roman city. The emperor Hadrian had his people build a temple dedicated to Jupiter, the king of the gods, on the Temple Mount. When the Roman Empire became Christian, the temple of Jupiter was torn down, and the Temple Mount was used as a dump. When the Muslim’s invaded they hauled the trash away and built the Dome of the Rock.

Between the prophet Daniel and the disciples, the Temple had been desecrated, more than once, by humans who claimed to be stronger than the God whose Temple stood in Jerusalem. Since then, this has happened on the site of the Temple quite a number of times. Each time it has happened, it has caused someone, somewhere, great distress and anguish. Many times it has happened in war and with a staggering destruction of life, and hope, and beauty.

These are all birth pains. In our fallen world it takes a long, long labor of birth pains before the time for a new world comes. And yet, Jesus says, “Keep watch!” (Matthew 24:42)

It’s very simple. There is harassment, persecution, evil, lovelessness, danger, injustice, cruelty, violence, humans setting up humans and governments higher than God, and it goes on and it gets worse, until Jesus comes, for all the world to see and hear. Then Jesus will bring the new world.

Jesus’ warning about the abomination tells us that the church will be around to see people and governments setting themselves up in the place of God many times. The lesson about getting away from the places where people are playing God is that, no matter what outrages are committed in this world, if we listen to Jesus, if we are faithful to him, we will get through it. He will take care of us, and we (and the church) will survive to stand and see him come in glory to make the earth new.

Each birth pain is outrageous. Each one hurts. Each one may hurt millions and tens of millions of people, and more. Jesus says: “Don’t be alarmed. Don’t panic! Don’t act like it’s the end of the world.”

I remember my dad telling me many times: it’s not the end of the world.

To avoid being alarmed, when Jesus warns us against being alarmed, Christians seem to have created the ability to combine two strange substances: joy and calculation. Christians live in a state of joyful calculation so much of the time. I believe this comes from reading too much into what is relatively simple. Some people count earthquakes, and wars, and calculate their increase, or their rate of acceleration, in order to create a sign that Jesus is on the threshold.

When Jesus said not to be alarmed at the birth pains, we manage to make our calculations into a sign, even though Jesus didn’t say that the elements of our calculation were a sign. We claim we are not alarmed, but we make our joyful calculations, and so we get around the warnings of Jesus.

I recently heard about some cases, in the Pacific northwest, where school kids have been told not to wear crosses to school. We are living in America, where we have freedom of religion and freedom of expression. We have the right to resist, and go to court, and have our representatives make laws to remedy stuff like this. But I sense outrage and not love in this.

It can be done in love and it should be done in love. Where cross wearers are outraged they are not acting like Christians. They are showing alarm at the birth pains just as Jesus told us not to do.

Jesus said, “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.” (Matthew 24:12) Jesus warns us not to be deceived. (Matthew 24:4) But here is a case where the world is deceiving us and making us not the people who stand firmly in the love of Jesus. And then, again, it also proves that we have not really stopped being alarmed. We have only disguised our alarm.

Sometimes Christians will talk about being taken up to be with Jesus before the trouble gets too tough. But why should any Christian want that? Why except for the fact that we don’t want to get hurt. We don’t want to suffer.

Some of the families of the Egyptian Christians whose relatives were recently killed in Libya were thankful for one of the things that the ISIS executioners did. The people who recorded the execution did not mute the shouts of the Christians, about to be killed, praising the name of Jesus. Their families at home were thankful for this.

That is real Christianity. What we call “The Great Tribulation” will be a great honor. Paul would agree, because this is what he wrote to his friends in Philippi, “It has been granted to you, on behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him.” (Philippians 1:29)

Remember, this was on behalf of Christ, who suffered for our sins on the cross. His suffering is our salvation. It also “leaves us with an example that we should follow in his steps.” (1 Peter 2:21) Of course it is a gift to suffer for Jesus.

I don’t think I’ve made this too complicated. But I’ve said more than enough for now.

We live in a world full of birth pains. Those pains have been going on for a long time. It is a long, long labor. It is not a labor for one child, but for a whole new world where everyone will be there by patience, and by repentance, and by endurance. It will be a safe world at last, shaped by the timing of the Father, and by the servanthood, and the cross, and the resurrection of the Son.

Don’t be alarmed. Don’t grow less in love. Don’t let your love grow cold. Don’t be deceived into losing your Jesus-way of thinking. Don’t lose your Jesus-say of responding to the world, and to others, in patience and love.

Keep reading Jesus’ long answer to the end and see the simple way he wants you to be ready. Be ready to wait. Be ready to put what Jesus gives you to good use. Be ready to live in a world that doesn’t love you and makes it hard for you. And especially be ready to care for the people who seem to count the least, because those are the people whom Jesus calls his brothers and sisters.