A Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, Manhattan, KS, 02 May 2010
We are right about in the middle of this sermon series on what it means to be God and how we as Christians can combat the postmodern American view that people can be God.
1. We started with Epistemology and studied how God defines truth from falsehood – reality from fiction.
a. When people start trying to do that for themselves, we make wrecks of our lives and other people’s lives because we know way too little and are too easily deceived.
b. We need the all-knowing God of the Bible to reveal to us what is true and real.
c. We must therefore submit to God and live according to reality as He defines it.
2. Secondly we looked at Ontology, considering the claims of Materialism vs. the claims of the Holy Bible.
a. We saw that science has failed to prove the belief that everything came into being through natural causes, and we read in the Bible God’s claim to have created everything.
b. We also saw that only by being created in the image of a personal God can we have any meaningful thought, morals, or justice.
c. So, if God made you, you are not God.
d. And if God made the world, we should not treat the world as though we owned it.
e. Furthermore, that means you must submit to God as your master.
3. And now in this third subject area we started last week, we’re exploring Ethics.
a. So far, I mentioned that our understanding of right and wrong comes from what some person likes and doesn’t like – be it ourselves or some group of people or some spirit-being, or the God of the Bible – ethics is based on the character of some person, and that person plays the part of god in everybody’s worldviews.
b. We also noted that whoever gets to make the rules also gets to judge everybody’s compliance with the rules.
c. I pointed out problems with worldviews that try to come up with a system of right and wrong without God:
i. Autonomism (“Morality is a private matter; everyone make up their own rules”) inevitably leads to fights and infringements on the rights of others, there’s also:
ii. Darwinianism (“Might makes right; let the fittest survive.”),
iii. Utilitarianism (“Trust the experts to decide what’s best for everybody”), and
iv. Marxism (“Whatever advances the cause of socialism is right; the end justifies any means.”)
d. In contrast, we saw how God gave laws to Adam, Noah, the Israelite nation, and continued to give commands through Christ Jesus, and how the Bible describes the return of Christ to judge the world.
e. Finally, I explained that embracing the God of the Bible as the standard of ethics means that:
i. We will enter a system that is just and fair,
ii. The rules won’t change because God doesn’t change
iii. You don’t have to be afraid of anybody anymore, because they aren’t making the rules and they can’t judge you, and finally,
iv. You will experience blessing for walking in the commands of Jesus.
In today’s sermon, I want to warn you about ways that you may be tempted to compromise on ethics:
1. When enough people put pressure on us to call something evil, even if our ethical standard does not call it evil, we have a tendency fudge and call something evil when it isn’t really evil.
i. Because slavery is socially unacceptable in America, and because we have been told all our lives how evil slavery is, Christians tend to unequivocally call slavery evil.
ii. However, God did not call slavery evil. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that slavery is wrong.
iii. It is the worldview of humanism that determines slavery is wrong, for subjecting one human being to another human being is demeaning the god they worship, which is the human being.
iv. In the Bible, however, God teaches something different:
1. He teaches us in Exodus 21 that slavery was a valid course of action for someone who had experienced economic failure,
2. Furthermore the Bible teaches us that debt is slavery (Prov 22:7),
3. and that slavery is a tool that God used to discipline His people (Gen 15:13, 2Ch 12:8, Jer 25:14).
4. Jesus did not speak out against slavery – almost all the good guys in His parables owned slaves (Mat 8:9-10, Mat 10:24-25, 13:27-28, 21:34, 22:3ff, 24:45ff, 25:14ff, Lk. 15:22, Lk 17:7ff).
5. Paul likewise told slaves who had become Christians to remain slaves unless and until they could purchase their freedom, although he taught Christians to avoid having to become a slave if possible (1 Cor 7:21ff, Rom. 13:8, Eph. 6:5, Col 3:22, 1 Tim 6:1, Titus 2:9).
6. Slavery is a necessary part of any economic system in this fallen world, but in order for it to be good and not bad, it must be done according to the rules God gave in the Bible (Ex. 21:1ff, Ex. 23:12, Lev. 25:39ff, Deut. 23:15-16, Job 31:13, and Col 4:1). Following God’s standards regarding slavery, such as not kidnapping people and selling them but rather making the years of slavery a matter of mutual agreement between the prospective master and slave (Ex. 21), would keep it from becoming sinful and abusive.
v. So, Biblically speaking, a Christian should not give in to other people’s opinions and make the unequivocal statement that slavery is bad.
vi. Please understand, I am not campaigning to reinstate slavery as it was in the Confederacy, but what I am trying to do is use one example to challenge you not to allow other people’s opinions of what is right and wrong to influence you into calling something wrong which God never said was wrong.
i. In one Christian community I lived in, it was considered wrong for a woman ever to cut her hair. But did they all have extremely long hair? No. They found a loophole: they reasoned that if it’s a sin to cut their hair, then it must not be a sin to shorten their hair by some other means than cutting! So, most of the women in that community shortened their hair by burning the ends off, and thus they considered themselves good Christians.
ii. Reaching a little further back in history, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his historical fiction book about the medieval White Company, tells the humorous story of a monk who was exiled from his monastery for rescuing a drowning woman because it was considered a sin to touch or even look at a woman, and he had obviously touched her in order to lift her out of the river. Sometimes it’s humorous the rules we try to impose on each other.
iii. Legalism was alive and well back in Jesus’ day, too: When Jesus healed a man’s withered hand during a synagogue meeting, the Jews legalistically tried to accuse Jesus of breaking the Sabbath, because He had performed the healing on a Sabbath day when God had said to do no regular work (Mat. 12:10). Jesus said, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat… and they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger.” (Mat 23:2&4)
iv. Christians are guilty of a million other ways of adding on to God’s rules: Three that come immediately to mind are 1) prohibitions that some Christians have against dating someone of another race, 2) prohibitions of some Christian organizations against all alcohol use, and 3) prohibitions of whole denominations against certain ways of doing Christian baptism. Usually the people that came up with these practices were trying to avoid significant problems by being more restrictive than the Bible allows, but God’s word tells us that He wants us to learn “not to be above the things which have been written” (1 Cor 4:6).
i. This does NOT mean that we should abandon all attempts to decide whether certain things are good or bad by God’s standards, for we are told to be discriminating in 1 Cor. 2:15.
ii. What it DOES mean is that God will hold us accountable to the same standards that we enforce upon other people. Furthermore, we should not add rules to God’s word and judge other people by the extra rules we have created. Sometimes our convictions are based on assumptions and inferences that other Christians will never be convinced of, and when that is the case, we need to extend the benefit of the doubt.
i. The fundamental ethical problem with statements like this is that they steal from God the right to decide what is right and what is wrong. It is a way of saying, “I don’t trust you to make choices in discerning good from bad; I want my preferences to decide what is good and what is bad.”
ii. It’s like the toddler in the kitchen saying, “Mom, I hate green beans, I don’t trust you to feed me good food anymore; I’m just going to eat from the candy jar from now on.”
iii.
Was it bad that Joseph in the Bible was kidnapped and sold
as a slave by his brothers? Yes.
Was it bad that Joseph was thrown in jail for year because he was accused of
taking advantage of his master’s wife in Egypt when he had done nothing wrong?
Yes.
Was it bad that Joseph was separated from his family and sent to Egypt? No.
Joseph himself said to his brothers later, “You meant it for evil, but God
meant it for good.” (Gen 50:20) Joseph recognized that even though evil was
intentionally done to him, God was intentionally going good to him and
ultimately to his entire family and the Jewish nation that came out of them.
iv. Like Joseph, we can compare what God says in the Bible with the actions of people and declare whether or not they are doing what God says is right, but we must not say that God has done what is bad, that would be to usurp the place of God and stand in judgment over Him. We don’t know all the good that God will bring from the painful things that are happening to us right now.
v. God is not helplessly standing by, wringing His hands and wishing the people would quit being so mean. Psalm 2 paints a rather different picture, “Why do the nations rage, And the peoples plot vanity?... He who sits in the heavens will laugh… Then He will say, ‘I have set up my king on my holy hill…’” (Ps 2:1-6)
vi. Paul also teaches that God is a sovereign Lord, despite the floggings, stonings, shipwrecks, imprisonments, and other injustices in Paul’s life, he still confidently stated, “God works all things together for good” Rom 8:28 – and by the way, I think there’s a problem with the translations that say, “all things work together for good,” because the subject “God” is there in the most ancient manuscripts, and the context clearly implies that God actively works all things together for good, not that blind chance somehow results in events working out for good.
vii. Often, painful things in our lives are God’s method of discipline. No one is so perfect that they could not use some refining. Suffering is God’s way of maturing us; forcing us to leave our remaining idolatries and cling to Him alone. We may feel that the refining suffering is far more intense than we would expect for ourselves or for our loved ones, but who are we to judge what is just in our own discipline? Does your toddler have a good sense of how many licks it takes to set him straight when he gets into the forbidden candy jar?
viii. Hebrews 12:6-11 “For whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and whips every son whom He accepts... Furthermore, we had our fleshly fathers to discipline us, and we gave them respect. Shall we not much more be in subjection to the Father of spirits, and live? For they indeed for a few days chastened us as seemed good to them; but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness. All discipline seems for the present not joyous but grievous; yet afterward it yields peaceable fruit unto them that have been exercised by it, even the fruit of righteousness.” Just because something painful happens does not mean that God is cruel; He may be bringing discipline out of love.
i. The ancient Greeks took it for granted that their many gods were powerful and capricious and sometimes did mean things to people. In Homer’s Odyssey, it is taken for granted that if the sea-god Poseidon had a bone to pick with the main character, Odysseus was going to have a difficult trip on his boat, and there was little he could do about it.
ii. Similarly the animistic cultures of our modern world who recognize the power exercised by the spirit world on the natural world, accept as a matter of course that sometimes the spirits want things that are undesirable to the human community. Sacrifice a woman and her child in order to end a drought? Well, if that’s what must be done, then it must be done.
iii. The Hindu religion has a similar mindset with its doctrine of karma, and the Muslims submit to the will of Allah, for after all, the word Islam means “submission.”
iv. However, these other religions do not have a doctrine of sin, discipline, and righteousness like what God teaches in the Bible, so when something bad happens, it just happens, “it is the will of God,” you can’t stay the hands of a god when he’s got a bee in his bonnet, or you should not disturb the cycle of karma in Hinduism by helping a poor or sick person because bad things just have to be endured so that maybe a future life will be better.
i. Abraham expressed it correctly when he was horrified to hear that God was about to wipe out an entire town that his nephew lived in. He begged God to withhold this severe judgment for the sake of the righteous people still living in the city, but at the end, he stated his faith that God knows what is best, saying, “Will not the judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen 18:25)
ii. In the book of Job, after chapters of struggling to trust God despite a host of troublesome events, God says, “Shall he that finds fault contend with the Almighty? ... And Job… says, “…I put my hand over my mouth.” (Job 40:1-4) But Job spoke up and reprimanded his visitors when they said things that weren’t true.
iii.
David, despite the elaborate justification he may have
worked up to feel that he did not deserve to be punished for committing adultery
with Bathsheeba said in Ps. 51:4 to God, “Against You, You only, have I sinned,
and done that which is evil in Your sight, for you are just when You speak, and
right when You judge.”
In other words, as my Hebrew professor, Dwight Zeller, paraphrased it, “It is
against you, God, especially you, that I have committed this sin and done evil
– and you are the one calling the shots, that it is indeed evil. All of which
(my confession, your determination of what is evil, and my petition for
forgiveness) will ultimately demonstrate that you are the just One, when you
speak condemningly, and you are entirely without blame, when, and in the way,
you judge… I am the king of Israel and do often judge, but in this case, you
alone are my judge, and I have done sinfully, and you are the one who will be
vindicated, not me.[2]”
But for now, let me close by affirming the basic truth that God is good.
[1] You can decide for yourself by listening to the debate at http://www.brianauten.com/Apologetics/mcdowell-corbett-debate.mp3