A sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, 16 May 2010
Mark Twain wrote a short story about “Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning.” The story begins with Mr. McWilliams waking up to the cries of his wife who is inside the closet: "You ought to be ashamed to lie there and sleep so, and such an awful storm going on… What are you doing? -- lighting a match at such a time as this! Are you stark mad? … Put it out! put it out instantly! Are you determined to sacrifice us all? You know there is nothing attracts lightning like a light. [Fzt! -- crash! boom…!] Oh, just hear it! Now you see what you`ve done! … Did you say your prayers to-night? … [Fzt! – boom…! Bumble-umble bang -- SMASH!] Oh, we are lost, beyond all help! How could you neglect such a thing at such a time as this? … Your voice sounds as if -- Mortimer, are you actually standing in front of that open fireplace? … Get away from it, this moment. You do seem determined to bring destruction on us all. Don`t you know that there is no better conductor for lightning than an open chimney? Now where have you got to? … by the window[?] … Oh, for pity`s sake, have you lost your mind? Clear out from there, this moment. The very children in arms know it is fatal to stand near a window in a thunder-storm. Dear, dear, I know I shall never see the light of another day. Mortimer? ... What is that rustling? … What are you doing? … [your] pantaloons[?] Quick! throw those things away! I do believe you would deliberately put on those clothes at such a time as this; yet you know perfectly well that all authorities agree that woolen stuffs attract lightning. Oh, dear, dear, it isn`t sufficient that one`s life must be in peril from natural causes, but you must do everything you can possibly think of to augment the danger. Oh, don`t sing! What can you be thinking of? Mortimer, if I have told you once, I have told you a hundred times, that singing causes vibrations in the atmosphere which interrupt the flow of the electric fluid…”
In time, Mrs. McWilliams consults a book on lightening and has her husband stand on a chair, with the legs of the chair all set on glass tumblers (for insulation), and him wearing a much metal as possible on his person. Then she instructs him to ring the dinner bell to ward off the lightning while she hides in the closet again. “Quick, Mortimer dear; we are almost safe.”
Mr. McWillaims continues from his perspective, “When I, mounted on the chair, had been clanging that dreadful bell a matter of seven or eight minutes, our shutters were suddenly torn open from without, and a brilliant bull`s-eye lantern was thrust in at the window, followed by a hoarse inquiry:-- "What in the nation is the matter here?" The window was full of men`s heads, and the heads were full of eyes that stared wildly at my night-dress and my warlike accoutrements. I dropped the bell, skipped down from the chair in confusion, and said,-- "There is nothing the matter, friends, -- only a little discomfort on account of the thunder-storm. I was trying to keep off the lightning."
"Thunder-storm? Lightning? Why, Mr. McWilliams, have you lost your mind? It is a beautiful starlight night; there has been no storm." I looked out, and I was so astonished I could hardly speak for a while. Then I said,-- "I do not understand this. We distinctly saw the glow of the flashes through the curtains and shutters, and heard the thunder." One after another of those people lay down on the ground to laugh... One …remarked,-- "…What you heard was cannon... You see, the telegraph brought some news, just at midnight: Garfield`s nominated, -- and that`s what`s the matter!".[1]
Some of the things we do when we are frightened may seem silly to others. The McWilliams in the story thought that superstitious practices and hiding would keep them safe from lightening, but none of what they were doing was really going to make a difference. But when we are afraid, we instinctively turn to whatever we think will make us safe. This is instructive, because the fourth and final function of deity is to provide safety – to save us from whatever is bad. When you are threatened, what is your first impulse? Despite whatever you say you believe, whatever you instinctively turn to for safety is acting as a god for you.
The issues of salvation are closely tied to the issues of ethics, for it is not until your god has defined for you what is wrong with the world that you can proceed to a consideration of what to do to be saved from whatever is wrong with the world.
If your worldview tells you that death from lightning strikes and other natural disasters are what is wrong with the world, then suddenly the field of salvation is defined for you as a consideration of ways to keep from being killed by natural disasters. If, on the other hand, your worldview tells you that the greatest problem in the world is doing things that upset the spirit world, then you will look for salvation from retaliation by the spirits world by doing things to appease spirits, and that will look rather different from seeking safety from natural threats.
This progression from Epistemology, Ontology, and Ethics to Soteriology is also a Biblical progression:
o So far we have come epistemologically to the Bible as the source of truth,
o then we have opened the Bible to the first book to see ontologically that God is the source of everything that exists,
o then we moved on into Genesis and into the second book of the Bible to study ethics and see that God is the one who decides what is right and what is wrong.
o Now we move later into the book of Exodus and on into the third book of the Bible, Leviticus, where the sacrifices for sin are laid out, and we consider soteriology, the study of how to be safe from what is wrong with the world.
We also see this progression in Jesus’ teachings: In John 14, he said, “I am the way (that’s ethics), the truth (that’s epistemology), and the life (that’s ontology), no one comes to the Father but through me (there we have the way of salvation!).” In that short, but powerful statement, Jesus claimed to fulfill all four functions of deity.
Once again, I want to compare and contrast different worldviews – particularly the worldviews of Secular Humanism and Biblical Christianity – as touching soteriology, or the study of salvation.
As I just mentioned, you have to know what’s wrong with the world before you can fix it – you have to know the danger to know how to be saved from it, and that goes back to the topic of ethics.
Remember that in the Ethics section, I maintained that determining right from wrong is inherently personal – it is about what a person likes and doesn’t like. Even people who say they don’t believe in a personal god resort to personal determinations of good and bad based upon what makes them feel threatened and what makes them feel happy.
This means that the problem with this world is also personal. All methods of salvation have to do with restoring and preserving a positive relationship with their god. If you believe that you can determine what is right and wrong, your method of fixing what is wrong with the world and being safe will involve reconciling the world to yourself and protecting yourself from what threatens you in the outside world. If, on the other hand, you are a Biblical Christian, you believe that the God of the Bible determines right from wrong, and your life will revolve around reconciling yourself and others to that God and opposing whatever threatens His honor in the world. So the problem is personal, and salvation comes through a right relationship with deity.
There are many ideas out there as to what the problem is:
o Many of us define life’s problems in terms of people not liking us, so our lives become consumed with weight loss, beauty treatments, workouts, and becoming likeable and attractive to other people. And one way to reconcile the world to yourself is to teach against intolerance. Princess Diana has been quoted as saying, “The greatest problem in the world is intolerance.[2]” Now if everybody were tolerant, then there would be nobody to dislike you and everyone would be in the right relationship to you!
o On the other hand, many people believe that poverty is the problem. In the early 20th Century, Senator William Edgar Borah said, "The greatest problem in the world today is the constantly increasing poverty of the masses.[3]” And so he worked to bring in the New Deal and the growth of socialism in America, because it was believed that poverty is the result of unequal sharing of wealth. Many of us believe this is the problem and that money is the answer – especially other people’s money. If only we could win the lottery; if only we could get on that government program; if only we could get that higher-paying job; if only we could get those new clothes, etc. This, by the way, is what the Bible calls coveting – the vain belief that if you had more stuff you and the world would be at peace.
o For others, the problem is ignorance. "There is no energy crisis, food crisis or environmental crisis. There is only a crisis of ignorance,” said Bucky Fuller, 20th Century philosopher, and inventor of the Geodesic dome. “Education is the answer to all humankind’s problems.[4]” But of course, every educator has a personal agenda to educate in terms of what he or she believes to be true about the world, in order to reconcile the world to the “right” worldview.
o For frazzled parents, the problem may be defined in terms of raising the next generation of children. If chemically-induced hyperactivity in boys is the problem, then more chemicals to calm those boys is the answer.
o For more hard-core idealists, there are other problems. Last week, I watched a show on Animal Planet about wildlife in Siberia. The photography was breathtaking, but the message came through loud and clear: Man is a threat to the lives of these fragile creatures and ecosystems. If extinction of species is the problem, then saving animals and trees from human encroachment is the answer. Both materialistic and spiritist environmentalists see nature as ultimate and something to be worshipped in their own way, so they see the solution to the worlds problems in terms of a right relationship with the environment that does not disturb the earth and its creatures.
o Down in India, the outlook is still different. A guru known as Osho has put out a movie you can rent at Blockbuster entitled, The Greatest Problem in the world and the Only Solution. The problem, he asserts, is individuality, and the solution is oneness. He rejects the idea that humanity needs saving and advocates a form of Hinduism with a spiritual – but impersonal – god that embraces all things in the universe. Denying yourself and spending time meditating on this impersonal god is what brings reconciliation and wholeness.
o As you may have noticed, we have quite a lot of opinions out there as to what the problem is, and we haven’t even scratched the surface in listing all the opinions. How is one to decide who has identified the problem and the solution correctly? This is a problem, because if you focus on the wrong problem, you’ll only come up with solutions to what really isn’t the problem, and you won’t be any better off.
o In fact, the celebrities who have found fabulous numbers of admirers, billionaires who have earned fabulous amounts of wealth, doctors who have acquired fabulous amounts of knowledge, and activists who have achieved fabulous goals do not find that their lives have fewer problems as a result of getting more fame, money, education, and achievement. Not only are their lives more complicated, but they still face frustration in not attaining their goals, because one can never get enough friends, wealth, knowledge, or accomplishment without wanting more, and then you die or are killed.
o The problem and the solution are not physical in nature, they are spiritual in nature, and they can only be found in a self-consistent system of absolute truth (covered in the epistemology section). My thesis is that the problem and the solution can be found in the Holy Bible.
o But apart from the Biblical solution, I see five ways that people seek to gain security or salvation:
This is probably the most common way of thinking. Save yourself.
“[H]umans are naturally free and powerful, but somehow manage to lose these qualities by the time they become adults... Two-thousand-five-hundred years ago the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu recognized that the greatest problem in the world was that individuals lacked personal power. Today the lack of personal power is still the biggest problem in the world.[5]” These are the words of a modern philosopher by the name of Mark Lindsay. His solution is to brainwash yourself into thinking you can solve all your problems on your own power.
We often think that if we could just control our situation more firmly, we could deal with the threats we face. In his book, The Trouble with Paris: Following Jesus in a World of Plastic Promises, Mark Sayers wrote, “The TV tells us the same thing the serpent told Eve, “Grab control yourself – it’s the only way!’ Sadly, in an attempt to escape anxiety, we walk away from God, the only real cure to our worry… So our life is spent walking through a world of things that offer us securities apart from the reality of God. Welcome to slavery – slavery to self. This is a form of slavery that trades in meaning, community, identity, and relationship for the myths of freedom, choice, and control. We secretly enjoy our slavery; we know the rules, how to play the game.[6]”
But our pitiful attempts to control our world and save ourselves backfire. I’m reminded of a story told by the late George Bascom of his friend’s wife who was so consumed with a fear of her house catching fire that she had fire alarms installed all over her house. Ironically, one of those fire alarms had a short and the house burned down shortly after all those fire alarms were installed. I’m not saying to get rid of your fire alarms, now, but I am saying that if you trust in yourself you will not be saved. Paul comments on this self-security strategy in 2 Cor 1:9 “…we have had the sentence of death within ourselves, so that we would not trust in ourselves, but rather in God who raises the dead!”
Well, if you can’t trust yourself, our next natural recourse is to trust our friends. Have you ever seen what chickens do for self-defense? We used to have a bunch of chickens, and it was really pitiful what they would do when they were threatened with a predator. They would simply bunch together in a group and hope that the predator would take one of the other chickens. We humans tend to be a lot like chickens when it comes to dealing with our problems. We bunch together and hope that being in a group will somehow save us.
One of the biggest ways we do this is through insurance. We fear the loss of our possessions, so we buy insurance and hope that somebody else will pay for our loss. We fear the loss of our health, so we buy insurance, hoping that someone else will pay for our medical treatments. We fear being sued, so we buy liability insurance - further increasing our chance of getting sued! We wouldn’t actually come out and say it, but we really think that part of Job’s problem was that he hadn’t bought enough insurance. I can just see God appearing to Job in chapter 40 and saying, “Job, Job, know you not that if thou hadst but put a little money in the bank, the loss of all thine flocks would have been compensated unto thee (that is, if the bank were FDIC insured!). And hadst thou but cut a covenant with the health insurance company thou wouldst have but to pay a single shekel and receive in return all the remedies of physicians for this thine illness. And moreover I say unto thee, in the warnings of a Weather Radio couldst thou have comforted thyself that thou might take refuge, thou and thy family to find safety when I send forth my storms. And now, Job, behold what is it to thee that thou didst not enroll in Social Security, for now thou wouldst have been able to receive paychecks in this thine unemployment. No, Job, it was not from wisdom that you forsook the aid of man to trust in me alone.” But that’s not what God said, is it?
Please don’t take this wrongly. What I am criticizing is not the use of any of these human means of security per se; what I am criticizing is the reliance upon these human means to provide security. I believe there is a place for human labor and the wise use of security measures in the physical realm, and we’ll get to that in a little while.
Many people look to their government for their security. A few weeks ago, Glen Beck commented on Fox news about this: “Why is the government the answer for jobs, healthcare, education, for food? Besides the military, tell me what the government does well. I'm here until 6:00. The president wants you to derive your hope from having faith in the government to be charitable, to provide everything to everyone. That is your hope. To have faith that they will be charitable. I don't trust the government to be charitable. I trust them to be weasels. They proved it over and over again… No government program in existence can or ever has or ever will provide faith, hope and charity.[7]”
Psalm 20:6-7 says, “Now I know that it is Jehovah who causes to save His anointed one. He will answer him from His holy heaven with the saving might of His right hand. These men bring to mind chariots, and those, horses, but as for us, we will bring to mind the name of Jehovah our God.”
Time does not permit me to go into detail on the other three secular security strategies, but let me mention them briefly:
If, however, the problem is ultimately spiritual, no amount of material wealth will solve the problem.
The hope that some good actions – perhaps saving some whales, or helping some sick people, or going to church – will ultimately do you some good is ultimately a bid to stand in the place of God and determine good and evil and what their consequences should be. Again, this is not to say that doing any of these things is bad – they’re generally good things to do; I’m just saying that they will not save you.
Like Mrs. McWilliams in the Mark Twain story, we can simply chose to hide in a closet and hope our problems will go away. People who choose this strategy know that they don’t have the power to save themselves, so they give up to despair. Often they will mask the despair with drugs, alcohol or entertainment and refuse to interact much with the real world. But this really is not a solution and it doesn’t bring salvation.
At the beginning of this talk, I mentioned that the Sacrificial system of Leviticus – the third book of the Bible – was the Bible’s introduction to soteriology. How can Christians claim that this bloody ritual is the answer to the world’s problems and the way to reconciliation with God?
It starts with a broken relationship with God. In Genesis 2, God told Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and evil, and He told Adam that the penalty for breaking that rule was death. In chapter 3, Adam and Eve ate from the tree anyway. They violated God’s standard of right and wrong, so everything went wrong from there. All the problems of the world can be traced back to that initial broken relationship with God. God, as the divine lawgiver and judge, brought into force the consequences that he had decreed for sin: death, toil, pain, and enmity in relationships.
Genesis 3:14-19 “And Jehovah God said to the serpent, ‘Because you did this, you are cursed… and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: He shall bruise your head, and you will bruise His heel.’ Unto the woman He said, ‘I will greatly increase your pain in your childbirth; you will bear children in pain, and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.’ And to Adam he said, ‘Because you heeded the voice of your wife, and ate of the tree of which I commanded you, saying, “Do not eat of it,” the ground is cursed on account of you. You shall eat of it through toil all the days of your life… you will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the dust... [in death].’” and then it says that “Jehovah-God made skins and clothed them.”
In this action, God set the pattern. He had an animal killed and used that animal’s skin to cover the people who had sinned against Him, and thus He made a way to stay in fellowship with mankind. But He promised that there would be a time when a descendent of the woman would be crushed, bringing an end to sin.
And so for some 4,000 years, worshippers of Jehovah-God sacrificed animals to acknowledge that the consequence of breaking God’s standard of right and wrong was death and to grasp for themselves the principle that God would allow a substitute to die in the worshipper’s place to take the punishment for their sins so that the worshipper could walk in a right relationship with God.
Then at the climax of history, around 30AD, God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, born of a woman to be crushed for our sins and to establish a newly-reconciled relationship between man and God. The prophet Isaiah put it this way: “He was being pierced from our rebellion - beaten from our iniquity. Chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes there is healing for us. All we like the flock have strayed, each has faced toward his own way. But Jehovah interposed in Him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and He Himself was afflicted, but He did not open His mouth, like the lamb is led to the slaughter… He was torn away from the land of the living, from the rebellion of my people, the stroke went towards Him.” (Isa. 53:5-8)
That rebellious disobedience against God that resides in the hearts of every person is the problem. The Apostle Paul summarized the problem in Romans 3:23, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Furthermore the threat that every one of us should be most concerned about is the stroke of justice that God promises against us for rebelling against Him. Romans 6:23 summarizes it thus: “The wages of sin is death.” And this is not just a death in which you cease to exist. It is eternal existence under the wrath of God. The Apostle John describes it in Revelation 20:10-14 as “the second death” the “lake of fire” where all who are not found in the book of life “will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” This is what’s wrong with the world as the God of the Bible sees things, and this is what humans should be seeking safety from, according to the Bible.
And according to the Bible, the way to find salvation from the wrath and curse of God, the way to be reconciled with God after being estranged from Him, is to “Believe in the Lord Jesus” (Acts 16:31).
o This simple act includes an acknowledgement that Jesus died on the cross in our place to take the punishment of death we deserve for our sins so that He will be our source of life,
o it also includes an acknowledgement that we will trust Him to save us from all that is bad,
o and believing in the Lord Jesus also includes an acknowledgement that we will worship and obey Him as God, that we will submit to Him to define truth and reality for us and decide what is right and wrong for us.
I hope to explore this whole topic of salvation more in depth next week, but for now, consider the way you live your life? Are you living out a belief that more money, knowledge, friends, or activities will solve your life problems? Are you despairing that your problems can be solved? It’s easy for Christians to be syncretistic and act in ways that contradict their faith. Believe in the Lord Jesus – and keep trusting Him, and you will be saved.
[1] http://enrichmentfellowship.org/documents/classes/MrsMcWilliamsAndTheLightning.pdf
[2] http://www.dictionary-quotes.com/index.php
[3] HTTP://BOOKS.GOOGLE.COM/BOOKS?ID=J00EAAAAMBAJ
[4] http://www.examiner.com/x-43100-Buckminster-Fuller-Examiner~y2010m4d27-Education-is-the-answer-to-all-humankinds-problems-There-is-an-abundance-of-all-resources-video
[5] http://www.buildfreedom.com/learned_permission.htm
[6] Sayers, The Trouble with Paris, pp. 95-97.
[7] http://www.livedash.com/transcript/glenn_beck/5202/FNC/Tuesday_March_16_2010/170882/