A sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, 16 May 2010, 2 June 2024. Scripture quotes are either translations by Nate or adaptations of the ASV by Nate.
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 tonight? … [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 starlit 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 [been] nominated [for President], -- and that’s what’s the matter!".1
Some of the things we do when we are frightened may seem silly to others. The McWilliamses in the story thought that superstitious practices and hiding in the closet would keep them safe from lightening, but none of what they were doing was really going to make them any safer, and in fact, they had totally misdiagnosed the danger! Mark Twain’s story underlines the importance of understanding correctly what is wrong with the world and the importance of understanding correctly what will bring safety.
When we are afraid, we instinctively turn to whatever we think will make us safe, based on our assumptions about what is wrong. 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) is all that 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 spiritual harm by doing things to appease spirits, and that will look rather different from seeking safety from natural threats. The study of safety, or salvation, is called Soteriology.
This progression from Epistemology, Ontology, and Ethics to Soteriology is also a Biblical progression:
So far, we have come epistemologically to the Bible as the source of truth,
then we have opened the Bible to the first book to see ontologically that God is the source of everything that exists,
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.
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, we saw 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 problems are personal. All methods of salvation have to do with restoring and preserving a positive relationship between a person and 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:
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. Another way to try 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” If everybody were tolerant, then there would be nobody to dislike you, and everyone would be in right relationship to you, right? (Well, there’s always the problem of our intolerance against intolerant people!)
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 was the result of unequal distribution 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.
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. He defined salvation in terms of education, saying: “Education is the answer to all humankind’s problems.4” But of course, this begs the epistemological question: “What is it that people are ignorant about and therefore what is the truth which should be taught?” Mrs. McWilliams may have been passionate about educating her husband in the folklore of staying safe in a storm, but that didn’t mean she was doing any good.
For frazzled parents, the problem might be defined in terms of raising the next generation of children. Any worldview worth having for more than 20 years must address the issues of the next generation. Once again, what we believe about Truth and Life and Ethics will affect our solutions for the generational problems. For instance, if we believe that the material world is all that exists, and if we believe that our children are nothing more than an organization of chemicals, and if we believe that socially-acceptable behavior that doesn’t embarrass us is the goal, then perhaps we will find the solution for hyperactive children by feeding them chemicals that calm them down. Perhaps we would go so far as to believe that drugs can solve all our problems!
For other idealists, there are other problems: 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. That is a religious message about Soteriology. Both Materialistic and Animistic environmentalists see nature as ultimate and something to be worshiped (although the worship of a Materialist might look different from the worship of an Animist). Both see the solution to the world’s problems in terms of a right relationship with the environment that does not disturb the earth and its creatures.
Around the world, there are many more assessments of what is wrong and what to do about it. For instance, in India, a guru known as Osho produced a movie entitled, The Greatest Problem in the world and the Only Solution. The problem, he asserted, is individuality, and the solution is oneness. He rejected the idea that humanity needs saving and instead advocated 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, said the guru, is what brings reconciliation and wholeness.
So there are a lot of opinions out there as to what the problem is. How is one to decide who has identified the problem and the solution correctly? This is imiportant, because if you don’t identify the problem correctly, you aren’t likely to come up with a solution that actually makes you safe. I’m reminded of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where Calvin expends enormous effort in building an elaborate snow fort to keep him safe from Suzy throwing snowballs at him, only to be hit by a snowball from his own buddy Hobbes from inside the fort! He wasn’t as safe as he thought he was, because he had not accurately identified the person from which the threat would come!
Is the problem really that we don’t have enough money, education, fame, or achievement? If we look at history, we can see that the celebrities who found fabulous numbers of admirers, billionaires who earned fabulous amounts of wealth, doctors who acquired fabulous amounts of knowledge, and activists who achieved fabulous goals did not find that their lives had fewer problems as a result of getting more fame, money, education, and achievement. Not only did their lives become more complicated, they still faced frustration in not attaining their goals, because one can never get enough friends, wealth, knowledge, or accomplishment without wanting more... and then you die. So it’s a reasonable to question whether those things really are the solution to life’s problems.
The Holy Bible teaches us that the problem and the solution are not physical but spiritual in nature, and they can only be found in a self-consistent system of absolute truth. 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 train your mind to think that 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 the story7 about the woman 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 developed an electrical short which caught the house on fire! Now, I’m not saying there’s anything necessarily wrong with fire alarms, just that if you trust in yourself you will not be saved.
The Apostle Paul repudiated the strategy of saving yourself in 2 Corinthians 1:9 “…[W]e 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 we can’t trust ourselves, 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 property insurance and hope that somebody else will pay for our loss.
We fear the loss of our health, so we buy health insurance, hoping that someone else will pay for our medical treatments.
We fear being sued, so we buy liability insurance – which makes us an even-more-lucrative target for 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. 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 thou forsookest 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. (The wisdom literature in the Bible clearly shows that there is a place for human labor and for the wise use of security measures in the physical realm.) My point is that trusting in other people for security is not going to save you.
Another source of corporate security that many people look to is the government. I got a chuckle out of this quote from Glen Beck on Fox news: “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 prove it over and over again… No government program in existence can or ever has or ever will provide faith, hope and charity.8”
Psalm 20:6-7 says, “Now I know that Yahweh causes to save His anointed one; He will answer him from the heavens of His holiness with the saving mightinesses of His right hand. These keep in mind the chariots and those the horses, but as for us, we [keep] in [mind] the name of Yahweh our God.” This is the Holy Bible’s word on who we should trust to save us. Not tanks and armies – not other people or governments – but the one true 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 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 for yourself.
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.
Earlier 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 those bloody rituals are 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 one prohibition, 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 for salvation. 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 them. He further promised that there would be a time when a descendant of the woman would be crushed, bringing an end to sin.
And so for some 4,000 years, worshipers of Yahweh-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 worshiper’s place to take the punishment for their sins so that the worshiper 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).
This simple act includes an acknowledgment that Jesus died on the cross in our place to take the punishment of death for our sins so that He will be our source of life,
it also includes an acknowledgment that we will trust Him to save us from all that is bad,
and believing in the Lord Jesus also includes an acknowledgment 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 the comprehensive nature of God’s salvation in my next sermon, 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 our faith. “Believe in the Lord Jesus [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
5http://www.buildfreedom.com/learned_permission.htm
6Sayers, The Trouble with Paris, pp. 95-97.
7Dr. George Bascom, in the story entitled “Gravity,” Deep Creek Stories, MA/AH Publishing- Sunflower University Press, Manhattan, KS. A hilarious read!
8http://www.livedash.com/transcript/glenn_beck/5202/FNC/Tuesday_March_16_2010/170882/