If Satan took control of a city

On Sunday night, the pastor at Red Mountain Church in Birmingham spoke on the seditious nature of the gospel. He read a quote from longtime pastor of 10th Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Donald Grey Barnhouse, that rocked me. Barnhouse was asked on radio in the 1950s what it would look like if Satan really took control of a city. Over a half-century ago, this was his reply:

All of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say, "Yes, sir" and "No, ma'am," and churches would be full every Sunday...where Christ is not preached.

What is the Bible Basically About?

Real Beauty Changes Everything

"I can't see my reflection in the water,

I can't speak the sounds that show no pain,

I can't hear the echo of my footsteps,

or remember the sound of my own name."

-Bob Dylan, "Tomorrow Is A Long Time"

The other night, as I was driving home after one of those memorable and valuable late night conversations with good friends, I heard this song and these lyrics (performed more beautifully by Nickel Creek) struck me. Dylan is basically saying that he is so wrapped up in his "true love" that he is completely unaware of himself. The first line references Narcissus, a Greek mythological figure who fell in love with his own image reflecting off the water, could not stop staring at himself and eventually wasted away to death. Bobby D is saying that he is so in love with something other than himself that he can't even see his reflection, can't even remember the sound of his name, etc. In other words, true love causes us to be so wrapped up in something other than ourselves that we forget ourselves, not thinking about what we can get from our true love, but simply delighting in it.

What struck me was that I should identify with Dylan's description, not in terms of romantic feelings for a woman, but in the way view Christ. The truth is that I have rarely, if ever, felt this way about Jesus, who is more worthy to receive my praise than myself of any other creation (Rev. 4:11). Certain moments, when I have been acutely aware of his presence, I have lost all sense of self and worshipped him unaware of self, but has God not promised to be ever-present? (Ps. 46:1, Matt. 28:20, Jn. 14:16, Heb. 13:5) So, too often, I fail to live a life of Christ-consciousness. This always carries over to the way I treat others, for the Bible consistently teaches that it is impossible to love God and not love your neighbor (Is. 58:1-14, Matt. 25:31-46, Mk. 12:29-31).

Harvard Literature Professor Elaine Scarry wrote a book called On Beauty and Being Just, in which the thesis is that overwhelming beauty takes an individual away from himself and allows him to distribute his attention elsewhere, outside of himself. When we stop being narcissistic, stop staring at ourselves all the time, and start to realize that there is something out there much more beautiful, then we can live for something besides ourselves.

Tim Keller defines beauty as "a satisfying thing in itself, a delight in itself." Something is beautiful if it is the end, not the means to an end. For example, I might call a thick, juicy cut of steak beautiful, but what is really beautiful is the taste of it in my mouth and the feeling of it satisfying my stomach. A beautiful melody or landscape, on the other hand, doesn't give us anything. These things, and others, are simply beautiful in and of themselves. Would we truly have God at the top of the list of beautiful things? Would we even include God on that list? As C.S. Lewis once asked (and I paraphrase), "What if you died and went to a place where all the blessings of God were, where there was no pain, no sorrow, no death, but Jesus wasn't there?" Would you still want to go? Could you be happy without Jesus?

So many of us view Jesus based on what he gives us. Our end is the blessings of Jesus and that makes Jesus the means to our end. Don't get me wrong; it is natural and Biblical for a Christian to praise him for spiritual and material blessings, but we are not to seek these things first (Matt. 6:33). Many people talk about treasures in heaven, and the Bible talks about this as well (i.e. Lk. 18:22). What if the treasure it is referring to is Jesus himself? How many of us would be secretly disappointed? But he is to be our treasure, both in this life and the next (Matt. 13:44-5). We are to treasure and worship him for who he is, as revealed in Scripture (Ex. 3:14). As if his very being isn't enough to be worthy of worship, he became nothing and was slaughtered that we might have every spiritual blessing in him (Phil. 2:5-11, Rev. 5:9, Eph. 1:3). The crux of the Biblical revelation of his character is the cross, the moment at which all his attributes were exhibited at once; He is just and the justifier (Rom. 3:26).

May you and I be so consumed with his beauty that we forget ourselves and adore the Beautiful One, first with our hearts and following with our deeds!

It's Not About Us

The lie has been passed down from the beginning. The lie is, as Matt Chandler put it, that "my life is a story about me." Our natural, sinful, selfish tendency is to believe that in some way, shape or form.

The first chapter of Stephen Neill's History of Christian Missions illuminates the probable motives of the first-century Jewish leaders in a way I had never before considered. But we must first understand something I did not until fairly recently, that God's ideal for Israel was to tbe a light to the nations.

It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth. (Isaiah 49:16)

But instead of seeking to be used by God for this purpose, most of the Jewish leaders in Christ's day were seeking to use God for their purposes. They believed the Messiah would come and conquer their oppressors, the Romans, and give them positions of honor and power (even the disciples believed this, consider James and John asking to sit on Christ's right and left). Two verses from the Old Testament that were very popular in this day and were used to justify this belief were as follows:

And many peoples shall come, and say: "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths." For out of Zion shall go the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. (Isaiah 2:3)

In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, "Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you." (Zechariah 8:23)

As Christians, we should seek to understand the entire Bible in light of the cross (the gospel hermeneutic), and it doesn't take much imagination to see that these two verses are referring to the time of Jesus. But how would a first-century ruler of the Jews had viewed such verses? I imagine a pious, religious elite daydreaming of some Roman oppressor or Greek scoffer coming to him and pleading, "Now that your Messiah has conquered us, please teach me how to be more like yourself. You and your people were right all along, so I consent now to follow the law and do whatever it takes to become Jewish."

Stephen Neill says it better than I could: "The death of Jesus, and the resurrection which followed it, determined the whole future destiny of the people of God. Jesus alone, by his obedience to God to the uttermost, fulfilled the destiny of Israel...The purpose of God was now to go forward through a new Israel, called into being through faith in Jesus Christ, the chief characteristic of which was to be its willingness to die and to rise again with him. The day of the Gentiles had come. The door was still open to all Israelites who would accept and believe; but, for Jew and Gentile alike, the only entry now was through faith in Jesus Christ."

In other words, one of the things that was so offensive to the religious leaders of Jesus' time was the thought that the Messiah would come to put Jews and Gentiles on an even plain. They had assumed that the Messiah would raise their religious status, not (in their eyes) lower it. So, in the gospels, the religious leaders angrily fight against the Kingdom Jesus is proclaiming. In Acts and the Epistles (especially Galatians), we see that even those Jews who had accepted the resurrection as true still struggled with what was required of Gentiles to become part of the people of God. The disillusionment of the Jews is apparent when they finally realized Gentiles did not have to become Jewish as they were. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Gal. 3:28)

The disillusionment of the first century Jewish leaders was that it wasn't about them; it is about Christ. They were a chosen people, chosen to bring salvation (the Hebrew name for Jesus, Yeshua, is derived from the word salvation!) to all the nations of the world.

Lest I sound anti-Semitic, let me go back to the beginning: the lie that it's about us has been passed down from the beginning, and continues to be. We see this in history with the abuses of the church in the Middle Ages, asserting its own authority as opposed that of Christ. We see this lie played out in the historical tendency of Christians to want to reign over culture by means of national government. These tendencies sadly still persist today. In fact, there is perhaps no culture that has swallowed this lie more enthusiastically than our own. I will consider three ways, besides those just mentioned, that Christians today, specifically Western, Evangelical Christians (for, if anyone reads this, he/she will likely be such) have believed the lie that it is about them.

The error of the religious leaders is nothing more than a first-century prosperity gospel..."the Messiah will come to bring your best life now!" The prosperity gospel is not new, and Jesus did not come so that you could have power or glory or wealth at your disposal. He came that to himself he might reconcile all things (Col. 1:20). Seek to be used by God for his purposes and stop using God for yours. The ironic thing is that when we do "seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness", we will be most fulfilled and blessed by God. But it is impossible to seek first the kingdom of God in order to get the blessings of God, for that would be to seek first the blessings of God.

We make it about us and not about Christ when we start to believe we are worthy or bettern than others due to our good works. A young preacher (I don't even know his name) said something several years ago that stuck with me..."God is not impressed by the sins you abstain from." I would add that God's not impressed by what you do either (see Isaiah 64:6). So often, the tendency is to compare our sins and good deeds to those of others and think that God is impressed. The reality is that God himself came to earth, was "made like his brothers (mankind) in every respect" (Heb. 2:17), and in every respect conquered where we failed. Next time you feel you are pretty righteous, compare yourself to that example. Then, with a broken spirit and a contrite heart (Ps 51:17), trust in the perfect life Christ lived on your behalf (2 Cor. 5:21).

The last way we have made American Evangelical Christianity about us and not Christ is by focusing on our role in salvation. The vast majority of self-identified Christians I talk to believe they are going to heaven, "because I...". If you are going to heaven, it is "because Jesus" died on the cross for your sins. What did you do? Nothing. You had faith, which Ephesians 2:8 explains is a gift from God. So many Christian youth center their theology on a few memorized phrases, all with the emphasis on what they did..."I made a decision to follow Christ, I accepted Christ, I prayed to receive Christ." I'm not saying these concepts aren't in the Bible; I'm saying the emphasis is in the wrong place, on us and not Christ, what John Piper calls "man-centered theology". When this is the emphasis for their salvation, it will naturally be the emphasis as they attempt to live out their faith. They will see their right standing before God based on what they have done or have not done.

When we start thinking it's about us and not about Christ, we risk missing the Kingdom of God altogether, as was the case for many of the Jewish leaders. The beautiful thing about the cross is that it covers all sins, should we truly trust in the one who bore it, including our own selfishness and self-righteousness, and changes our perspectives of who we are and who He is so to rid us of these evils.

What is the cure for all this self-absorption? Find something better, more valuable, than yourself. Tim Keller describes worship as "ascribing infinite value to something." In the quote from Stephen Neill earlier, he identifies the chief characteristic of faith as the "willingness to die and rise again with (Jesus)". We will only do these things when we realize that Christ is of infinite value! Read of him in God's Word, pray for the Holy Spirit to reveal him and to allow you to see him as he truly is! My prayer for you all is that you "may have the 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 the fullness of God." (Eph. 3:18-19) To comprehend his love, we need look no further than the cross.

Seeing Through The End

I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:2-5)

Not all great films include an element of surprise or a paradigm shift at the end, but some films are great for this reason. Yesterday, I watched a movie called The Illusionist that I would not own if not for its brilliant ending. Knowing the ending, I watched the film quite differently than the first time I saw it. This is also true of movies like The Book of Eli, or, more famously, The Sixth Sense and Fight Club. In these films, knowing the end not only changes the way you see the rest of the story the second time, but the way you interpret the rest of the story. You attribute different motivations and feelings to certain characters when you have a full knowledge of the story. In the Illusionist, for example, Eisenheim the Illusionist (the main character/Edward Norton) appears in the middle of the film to a first-time viewer to be a broken and desperate man due to the loss of his lover. However, one aware of the ending knows that Eisenheim is appearing a certain way as part of a masterfully woven plan.

As Christians, in faith we know how things end. We can’t predict the day or the hour, or the exact events leading up to it (those who spend a great deal of time trying to predict these things are very foolish and perhaps I will argue this in another post), but Scripture does show us the end of this world, and it is in the text above.

To be sure, God dwelling with man is the direct result the removal of sin at Calvary. Earlier in Revelation, this is made clear through the worship of Jesus: “Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood your ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.” (Revelation 5:9-10).

The Bible must always be interpreted with the end in mind, and with an understanding of what secured the end, the cross. The Revelation 21 passage above should not be taken independently from the gospel, for it is part of the gospel. It is the consummation or culmination of the gospel! It is part of the glory for which Christ endured the cross.

Looking back at the movie, Eisenheim is asked by the chief inspector what he wants. His reply is, “to be with her.” This appears desperate and maniacal to a first-time watcher, but makes one who knows the ending think, “Why did I not get it before!?” And this is one reason Christ went to the cross, to be with her, his bride, the Church.

The Bible needs to be interpreted through this lens, and we need to keep in mind that the Bible is not merely some great, classical story. Revelation 21 is not merely the end of the Bible, but the reality that all who trust Christ will see with their own eyes. Thus we not only interpret the Bible through the lens of the entire gospel, but we interpret our lives the same way. When life is difficult and discouraging, we must have the end in full view. We have to believe the Bible that the end is more glorious because of our suffering (we certainly see this in the cross of Christ!).

The hard thing is that we can’t see how God will work all things together for our good (Rom. 8:28), but not seeing is no reason not to believe, for is faith not the “conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1)? The practice of faith in our daily lives is to see our daily circumstances through the lens of the gospel, including the end or consummation of the gospel. Only with this end in full view is it possible to rejoice in our sufferings (1 Pet. 4:13).

But the end is not the end. I have used the term "end" out of mere convenience. God coming to dwell with men is not the final end, but a new beginning. So Semisonic was correct in singing, “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” What we see in Revelation 21 is the completion of that which began in Genesis 1:1, the first time God created. But for his recreation in Revelation 21, there will be no end. As C.S. Lewis closed the Chronicles of Narnia, "not all the books in the world could contain the stories which will come from that world." May you live every day for forever and with forever in full view.

Personal Mission Statement

I exist to know and make known the glory of God, to sacrifice myself for others in light of the understanding that I am chosen, loved and redeemed by the atoning work of Christ;

To love the Lord my God with all my

heart: to treasure Christ supremely; to love and be lead by his life-giving Spirit and commandments; to guard my heart from sexual thoughts and images

soul: to rest on the sufficiency of the cross; to boldly live the adventure for which God has called me; to firmly trust that God has a plan for my life and that he will work all things together for my good

mind: to diligently study first and foremost God’s holy Word so that I might be a well-informed servant-leader for the Kingdom; to guide others in Biblical doctrine that the Gospel might become a single passion in their lives; to always be reading and learning new things

strength: to be a warrior with the courage to fight for the well-being of those I love and for the oppressed and marginalized; to boldly proclaim the gospel everywhere I go in word and deed; to work as to the Lord in all things; to avoid wasting time watching TV and idly perusing the internet; to eat healthy at least 80% of the time and exercise at least 5 days a week

and to love my neighbor as myself: to be intentional in building relationships with those who don’t know the Lord out of compassion for them and a desire to spread his renown; to intentionally pursue a multi-generational church community, especially older men that they might provide wise counsel; to pursue strong friendships with current friends, seeking fun activities and deep conversation; to hold accountable my friends in love and to respond well when they do likewise; to keep in touch with old friends; to be a considerate and faithful listener; to never look down on those who do not believe, think, act or look like me, but to always consider others better than myself that the supremacy of Christ might be on display through me at all times in all places.