Month: October 2018

Faith and Desire

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God knows your deepest desires and isn’t surprised by any of them.  I believe that He has an answer to them all in Christ both for this life and the next.

As believers one of the things we have to get used to is that the line between this life and the next is very thin indeed.  There is a major transition involved, we need to shake off this mortal body and put on an immortal one.  But apart from that nothing else changes – much!  It does take faith to look over that gap and see our lives continuing on.

However, one of the keys of living a contented Christian life here is to hope and believe in satisfaction and contentment throughout our existence.  Some desires will be satisfied here during this mortal life, many will be satisfied there during the immortal stage.

God commends this kind of faith.  In the letter to the Hebrews, the writer ends up his panegyric about the heroes of faith in chapter 11 by saying this:

“All these people earned a good reputation because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised.”

The saints of the Old Testament are still waiting for our time to come to a close before they will get all they desire.

So, if you are facing unfulfilled desires in this life, ask yourself whether God hasn’t planned to fulfil them in the next.  No, better still, ask God.  You might be surprised at His answer.

 

Basic Faith

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Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.

It is impossible to please God without faith.  Anyone who wants to come to Him must believe that God exists and that He rewards those that sincerely seek Him. (Hebrews 11:1, 6 NLT)

When people ask me what we have to believe I have often said the Gospel requires very little faith in reality, at least to start with.  All we need to believe is that God exists and that He is good.  Everything else can be logically built upon those two foundations.  If God exists and is good then it follows that He would do all that the bible says He has done.

No one can prove God is, but then neither can any of us prove that anything ultimately exists since we cannot know the basic materials on which matter is built.  The more we split the atom, the more there is to split.  So, rather than being unreasonable, we logically believe in some basic building blocks (atoms, nucleus, protons, neutrons and electrons) and our engineered inventions (everything from fridges to freight carriers and beyond) are built on those beliefs.  They work because the things we believe about materials are true, i.e. God made materials the way we have found out (Proverbs 25:2).  We then build our lives on these beliefs even though we cannot see the basic building blocks of anything.  Depending on what we work at and, to some extent, what we want to find out, we know these things at different levels.

Take the example of a microwave oven.  You can “know” a microwave at different levels.

  1. A user might just know how to turn it on and what level to set it at to heat up the food he puts into it.
  2. A curious person might get to learn that a microwave works because it heats up the water in food using a specific type of electro magnetic wave.  This might help them to understand why some things shouldn’t be put in a microwave.
  3. At a deeper level someone else might understand the size of a water molecule and the wave length of the electro magnetic wave used in a microwave.  The connection between the two is what causes the water to heat up.
  4. The manufacturers of microwave ovens may need a team of people with different understandings of how it works and how to improve the design to stay ahead of the competition.

And so it goes on.

In the same way, the bible tells us to be reasonable.  Believe in some basic things: God is and He is good.  After that, everything God has caused to be written in His book is reasonable and makes sense.  And you can go as deep or be as shallow in knowledge as God and you want to be with that book – and Him.  Whatever about knowledge (1 Cor. 8:1-3) just make sure you are not content with being shallow in His love (Eph. 3:19).

God says: “I AM” (Exodus 3:14).  He is.

The bible goes onto say that God gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).  He is not willing that anyone should perish (1 Tim. 2:4).  In other words He is good.

Start there.

Faith

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“Faith, according to St. Paul, is the means by which the whole being of the believer—his intellect, his heart, and his will—enter into possession of the salvation which the incarnation of the Son of God has purchased for him. Jesus Christ is apprehended by faith, and thenceforth becomes every thing for man, and in man. He imparts a divine life to human nature; and man thus renewed, disengaged from the power of selfishness and sin, has new affections, and does new works. Faith (says Theology, in order to express these ideas) is the subjective appropriation of the objective work of Christ. If faith is not an appropriation of salvation, it is nothing; the whole Christian economy is disturbed, the sources of new life are sealed up, and Christianity is overturned at its base.“

D’AUBIGNÉ, J. H. MERLE. HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY (All 20 Volumes In 1 Complete Book) (HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION by J. H. MERLE D’AUBIGNÉ) (Kindle Locations 947-953). http://www.DelmarvaPublications.com. Kindle Edition.

The above was written by a French man in the early 1800’s.  

Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life.  He is the source of new life .  If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation.  Christ in us is our hope of glory.  Apart from Him there is salvation in no one else.  God has proven His love for us in that, while we were still sinners, He sent His One and Only Son that He might die for us and give us eternal life.  He made Him who knew no sin to become sin for us that we become the righteousness of God in Him.

Hopefully you can see why it is so important to immerse yourself in the Holy Scriptures which are able to make us wise unto salvation.

Have you been transformed by the renewing of your mind?  It is by faith we are saved, through grace. It is a gift of God.  However, the way we get faith is by hearing the living Word of God. 

Listen to Jesus – the Word – speaking to you through His Scriptures first and foremost.

Scriptures:

John 14:6; John 4:13-14; 2 Cor. 5:17; Col. 1:27; Acts 4:12; Romans 5:8; 2 Cor. 5:21; 2 Tim. 3:15; Romans 12:2; Eph. 2:8; Romans 10:17; John 10:27, 2 Tim. 3:16-17.

 

Understanding the Closeness of God

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When we are dealing with the God who made everything, including every cell in our physical bodies and all the space He inhabits within our atoms – in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28) – there is every justifiable reason why we might get confused about hearing His voice or experiencing His presence.  He is so close!  In fact the English word “close” does not do justice to the amazing interaction of God with those He has an intimate relationship with.

So we can often think we are just imagining things when it is in fact God speaking to us.  One of the great things to learn how to do is to recognise that still, small voice that speaks to us out of the chaos and noise of everyday life (see 1 Kings 19:11-13).  To know His presence is even more intricate.  It is so intangible, so outside of, and yet works through, our emotional state.  We forget that we were made, designed, to know these things.  God’s voice and His presence can seem so natural we can just dismiss them as our imagination.  But even our imagination was made to enhance and help us understand the voice and presence of God.

“Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.” (Hebrews 3:7, 15).  Actually, this is the nub of the matter: Do you really want to hear what God is saying to you (see John 7:17)?  Might He be saying, get out of the way and let Me work?  Possibly, though He will say it, if He has to, more graciously than that.

Mesmerised

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2250 AD Martin was in front of the four living creatures and had fallen over onto his face again.  “I thought you said he would be able for this,” an angel said. “He will be ok it’s just that even in his new body he finds it hard to cope with things that don’t relate to anything else he has experienced before,” Jesus responded.

Martin began to come around.  As he regained consciousness he remembered to prepare himself for the shock.  He didn’t want to go into that catatonic state or whatever it was he had just experienced again.  So he concentrated hard and managed to get a hold of all the various impulses coming to him through all his senses and extra sensory perceptions.  The flood of impressions coming at him from the four living creatures this close up was the closest thing to pain he had felt this side of the rapture.  He could feel himself wobbling again and getting giddy.

“Look at Me.”  It was Jesus saying the only sensible thing to do.  So Martin looked into Jesus’ eyes.  Strength and power flowed through his new body and he found he could stand firm.  His admiration for John, Ezekiel and Daniel grew.

Patricius, the angel, asked Martin if he was ready for a short journey to the regions beyond.  Martin thought he was so he went with the angel into the living creatures.

Family Values

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Dr. Carle Zimmerman, a Harvard sociologist who examined the rise and fall of empires through the centuries, paid close attention to the correlation between family life and national life. His book Family and Civilization concludes that deteriorating civilizations follow a reasonably definable pattern and that “atomistic families” dominate the social landscape in decaying cultures. When civilizations began to unravel, they had five characteristics in common.

  1. Marriage lost its sacredness, divorce became commonplace, and alternative forms of marriage were accepted.
  2. Feminist movements undermined complementary and cooperating roles as women lost interest in mothering and pursued personal power.
  3. Parenting became increasingly difficult, public disrespect for parents and authority increased, and delinquency and promiscuity became more commonplace.
  4. Adultery was celebrated, not punished; people who broke their marriage vow were admired.
  5. There was increased tolerance for incestuous and homosexual sex, with an increase in sex-related crime.

Carle C. Zimmerman, Family and Civilization (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008)

Zimmerman’s conclusions are so current, they’re frightening. He appears to have observed the United States in the twenty-first century and then summarized his findings. In fact, he wrote them in 1947.

The whole above passage is copied from Charles Swindoll’s book: “Abraham: One Nomad’s Amazing Journey of Faith” (Kindle Locations 2229-2239). Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Sodom and Gomorrah

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I am reading a book by Charles Swindoll called: “Abraham: One Nomad’s Amazing Journey of Faith.”  In it Charles includes a very convicting chapter on Genesis 19 and the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah.  It is a word for today’s church.

I am a firm believer that things are improving in many ways but I don’t think anyone could say that things have been improving over my lifetime morally.  There has been more concern for social justice expressed among the richer young people, more eradication of absolute poverty, more education, better living standards for nearly everyone and a less polluted environment in many places.  All these things are good and can in large part be ascribed to charitable impulses arising from Christians who have been reading their bibles, listening to God and making changes to their lives and the lives of those around them accordingly, often empowered by the Holy Spirit.  It is good to see accounts of people like Desmond Doss in the Mel Gibson film “Hacksaw Ridge”, and Abraham Lincoln in “Lincoln”.  There are good men & women out there, we know many who are giving their lives selflessly in many places around the world, some at great cost to themselves.

However it is also impossible to deny that many forms of immorality are on the increase.  Things that my ancestors would have thought gross immorality are now lauded as virtues by the peers of my descendents.  The continuous and unrelenting destruction of innocent life by the hands of their mothers and colluding medical staff – if you had told someone at the beginning of the 20th Century that such behaviour was going to be protected by the law at the wishes of the majority of the people, very few would have believed you.  If you had also told my ancestors that we would have a openly homosexual Taoiseach and an openly practicing lesbian (and witch) as our Minister for Children – well no one would believe you 100 years ago.  Or even 50 years ago.  Most young people would laugh at the idea that having sex before marriage was somehow wrong and they don’t know what fornication means.  Adultery is so common no one remarks on it much.

The inevitable consequence of our continuing tolerance of this downward slide among our people here in Ireland and across the western world is judgement.  It cannot be otherwise.  Somewhere along the line God is going to say “Enough” and end it all.  He did it at the Flood, at Babel, at Sodom & Gomorrah and He will do it again.  Most likely in the next 20 years or so He will usher in a new age during which He will rule the nations with a rod of iron (Psalm 2:9, Rev. 2:27, 19:15).  You won’t want to be on the wrong end of that rod when it comes.

On our part we need to be sure we are not becoming like Lot, desensitized, perverted and too fond of the comforts that the improvements are bringing about to want to lift our heads above the parapet and call a spade, a spade.

Why would anyone believe the Pope is the Anti-Christ!?!

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People believe all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons.  Many people believe everything they read on the Internet, others believe everything Trump says.  A lot of people believe the Bible literally including when it says the world was created in 6 x 24 hour days.

So it should come as no surprise that for hundreds of years, millions of people believed the Pope was the Anti-Christ.  These people were called Protestants or Reformers and from the 16th to the beginning of the 19th Century they all agreed on this one thing while disagreeing on many other things.  Many well known names agreed that the Pope is the Anti-Christ, people like Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and the Wesley brothers.  In fact it wasn’t until the beginning of the 19th century that any significant branch of Protestantism began to dispute this position.  J.N. Darby of the Brethren movement was among the first.

Of course now hardly any Protestants believe that the Pope is the Anti-Christ except a few die-hard Ulster Unionists from the DUP and other cranks on the Internet with small readership.  It is not exactly a popular position among Evangelicals or Pentecostals either.  A lot of people would take the view, understandably, that there is little value in adopting such a position.

Be that as it may I still think it is worthwhile looking at why this position was so universally held by so many significant people for so long.

One obvious reason was they were normally in countries that were at war with countries that allied themselves with the Pope or they were in countries where their lives were in danger because they had a bible.  They had plenty of historical precedent to know they were up against a mortal enemy.  One of the Crusades was sent against a group of people in the South of France whose only crime was to not submit to the Pope. There had been many martyrs before Luther pinned up his famous 95 theses.

The Biblical basis for their beliefs about the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church were also well thought out and convincing.  Apart from several passages in Revelation the main passages in the Bible that talk explicitly about the Anti-Christ can be found in 2 Thessalonians Chapter 2:

  1. In verse 3 the writer (Paul, Silas or Timothy) says that the “man of lawlessness .. will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.”  In the other letters they saw that Paul was very consistent in calling the body of believers corporately (i.e. the Church) God’s temple.  So they understood that the Anti-Christ was going to be someone sitting in the middle of the Church, calling himself God (Vicar of Christ is one of the Pope’s titles which means “in place of Christ”).
  2. In verses 5-8 the writer says this: “5 Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? 6 And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. 7 For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.”  The common understanding of these verses during Reformation times was that the power that was restraining the Anti-Christ at the time of the first century (when the letter was written) was the Roman Emperor.  Their reasoning went that the Anti-Christ could not achieve world dominion or the secular power that he had during the centuries before and during the Reformation if Christianity was being persecuted and kept underground.  They could also look back on history and note something that was a very striking fulfilment of the verses.  When Constantine became the first Christian Emperor of Rome in the middle of the 4th century he did the most unusual thing.  He moved the capital of the Roman Empire a thousand miles away from Rome to a new city called Constantinople (now Istanbul) on the Bosphorus Straits in present day Turkey.  Once he was moved out of the way, the stage was set for the government of the City of Rome to be taken over by another.  Since there was no separation of Church and State that person was the first Pope.  They also used to say that the reason the writer did not come out and explicitly say that the restrainer was the Emperor was so as not to get people receiving the letter in more trouble than they already were with that power.

There are lots of other verses and passages the Reformers used to back up their position which I will explore in further blogs.

Of course they could have been wrong.

Historical Eschatology

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Eschatology is the fancy name for the study of the end times.  There are quite a few theories out there about how things are going to work out usually involving a rapture, a great tribulation, a millennium and an Anti-Christ.  One of the popular theories includes a significant tribulation to come at the end lasting 7 years out of which the Christian church will be raptured, usually before the great tribulation starts (conveniently).  There was even a film called “Left Behind” starring Nicholas Cage produced recently based on this particular view of the end times.

However, had you been born into a Protestant family anytime in the 3 hundred years following the start of the Reformation in 1518 your ideas of the end times would have followed a different tack, one that is not at all popular these days.  In those days the Anti-Christ and the great tribulation were in your face and unmistakable.  A pre-tribulation rapture was not even a consideration.  Your country was possibly in a war with the forces of the Anti-Christ.  If not you were quite possibly struggling to survive in a country under his control.  In those countries the Bible was a banned book and if you were found with one you could be imprisoned or killed.  These are times that many Protestants today seem eager to forget.

But pick up a King James Version of the Bible today from your shelf and you will read these words in the preface:  “…by writing in defence of the Truth, (which hath given such a blow unto that man of sin, as will not be healed,)”

The man of sin referred to here was the pope of the time.  There was very little disagreement among the reformers as to who the Scripture said the Anti-Christ was, i.e. the popes of Rome since about the 4th Century.  They had ample evidence in front of them to come to that conclusion and there are several Scriptures which support this assertion.

The Reformation was an amazing move of God affecting hundreds of millions of people which changed the course of history.  One of the expectations of the Reformers (as mentioned in the KJV preface) was that the Reformation would prove to be a fatal blow to the Anti-Christ but this didn’t happen.  In fact, the papacy has somehow survived that fatal blow (see Revelation 13:3) and spread even further abroad afterwards.  However, it has been much weakened by the Truth that the Reformation and the accompanying printing press made abundantly available through the Bible. It has not the civil power it used to be able to wield but its nature hasn’t changed.

There are several places in the Scripture to which the reformers would refer when it came to explaining the mystery of the Anti-Christ to their listeners.  Here is an institution – the Roman Catholic church with the pope at its head – which ran the lives of the people from birth (baptism) to death (final unction) and all stages in between.  It took their money, ran their schools and hospitals, determined who their kings were and, if required, would withdraw all or any of these services in response to an order from their hierarchical heads based in Rome.

Their adherents considered Canon Law (as laid down by the pope) of greater authority than the civil law (as laid down by their parliaments and kings) and used it to justify the most immoral behaviour.  And if you think that was for then and not now just remember what the Bishop of Cloyne John Magee did when he covered up for paedophile priests in the Diocese of Cloyne during the early part of this century.

And, if you can, read a few good books on the subject.  Here are a couple of my favourites:

  1. D’Aubigne’s History of the Reformation (try and get an unedited and unabridged version) originally written in French with lots of Latin in the notes.  This is a massive work (thankfully available on Amazon) which has been translated into English by Henry Beveridge.  If you are from a Roman Catholic background like me or just need to get a good understanding of what happened during the Reformation from a believer’s standpoint these volumes are the best reading I know of out there.
  2. His Waiting Bride by Edgar F. Parkyns (out of print but there are a few copies available on Amazon).