Bad News From God

A couple nights ago my professor made the statement that "it is better to hear bad news from God than good news that is untrue."

This got me thinking to the common trend of our culture verses God's revelation of himself in the person of Jesus Christ. The trend of the culture is to mask our sin with relativism. Its mantras are: There is no real right or wrong, true and untrue. No one has the right to tell you you're wrong. Do what what feels good to you. Experience and feeling is more important than reality. You are your own god. Your own personal freedom of choice is more valuable than truth.

Compare this to what God reveals in Jesus Christ. The gospel (good news) is that Jesus did come, and with that comes bad news first. In fact, there is no good news without the bad news. The bad news is that we are wrong. There is One True God, and our entire beings are prone to wander. The bad news is that we are not god, and that one day, we will bow down before the King, whether willingly out of joy, or begrudgingly out of mandate. The bad news, as Romans put it, is that:

"For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools." Romans 1:21-22

"None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one." Romans 3:10-11

Just a reminder, this bad news is talking about us, not some other group of people. This is us.

But, this is a preface to the good news; the good news that Jesus Christ, who is the unique Son of God, has come to reverse this bad news. He has come to change it. Jesus bore our bad news, so that we could repent and receive the good news. Jesus took all of our unrighteousness, all of our evil, all of our foolishness and wickedness upon himself, so that we could receive his righteousness.

However, this is only possible when we accept the bad news. Receiving Christ means acknowledging the truth (often the ugly truth) about ourselves (as told in Romans 1 and 3). It is here that true freedom is found, true love experienced, and true life lived. 

Jesus: The True Hero

An excerpt from The Book That Made Your World by Vishal Mangalwadi. Here, Mangalwadi is writing about how the Bible completely redefined heroism, with Jesus being the true hero.

"Classical heroism with the Bible because while the former valued power, Christ's heroism prized truth. Other kingdoms fostered heroic deeds by cultivating racial, geographic, linguistic, religious, class, or caste pride and hatred. Jesus made love the supreme value of the kingdom of God. This love was not sentimentalism. It went beyond loving one's neighbor as oneself. Its supreme manifestation was the cross: sacrificing oneself for others, including ones enemies.

Jesus' heroism replaced brutality with love, pride with meekness, and domination over others with self-sacrificing service. He exemplified this when he humbled himself, took a basin of water and a servant's towel, and started washing his disciples' feet. This, he said, is what the kingdom of God is all about. He was the King of kings and the Lord of lords. All power in heaven and on earth, he claimed, was his. But he had come not to be served, but to serve, not to kill but to give eternal life. These were not homilies delivered by a guru who sat on a golden throne. These teachings changed history because they emanated from a live lived in the public arena."

Suppressing the Truth

"For the Wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.....

because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen."

Romans 1:18-19, 25

These verses capture the very essence of insanity. Paul gives us a swift kick to the face in these verses as he describes just how delusional our sinful, default worldview is. In our sinfulness, we suppress the truth about the Sovereign, Holy, Gracious God of the Bible. As R.C. Sproul puts it in his book, Defending Your Faith, the problem with Atheists is not an intellectual problem or a lack of information. Rather, it is a moral problem. We love ourselves more than we love God. Though God has made himself plain to us through the revealing of himself in nature, in the Scriptures, and in Jesus, we chose to deny him. Just as a child who is covering their ears and closing their eyes while shouting "NO! NO! NO! I DON'T WANT TO KNOW", so we too suppress the obvious truth of God's existence and character. We refuse to acknowledge God as God. In our ignorance, we love ourselves more than we love God. We want God on our terms.

And this has been our reality from way back. Ever since our parents, Adam and Eve, were deceived, so we too choose a self-centered worldview. God gave Adam and Eve everything, yet they thought they needed to find a higher, more divine meaning. They were created in God's image, that they might know their all-loving Creator. Yet, as the creatures, they wanted to fit God into their image rather than vice-versa. They wanted to flip the Creator-creature relationship. 

We still do the same thing today. At the heart of suppressing the truth, at the heart of sin for that matter, is  trying to fit God into our image. As Paul puts it, it is "worshipping and serving the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25). We know God exists, yet we only want God on OUR terms. We want God  as long as he fits our life, our image, our plans. We want Truth as long as its easy and godless. We will accept things as truth only if it allows us to continue our self-worship and unrighteous living. The second something demands change, we label it as intolerant.

This is why the post-modern worldview is so attractive to a sinful people. Everything is true as long it doesn't bring a real God into the picture. An 'all roads lead to Rome' worldview is a prime example of us trying to preserve our own self-worship. If truth is completely relative, then I don't need to change, and I can continue worshipping the creature rather than the Creator. This is insanity. 

Post-modernity may mask itself in humility, yet it exemplifies pride in its most basic form because it gives us the position of god. This is the definition of insanity. On the contrary, the gospel returns us to a position of true humility. It brings us back to our role as creatures made in God's image. It brings us back to a position where we can worship and serve the True and Living God. To many, this might sound like oppression, like God is a bully who demands that we bow below him. However, this couldn't be further from the truth. As stated, we were created in God's image with the purpose to know and worship Him. This is what's best for us. God wants us to return to him, not because he's a bully, but because he loves us more than we could ever know. Our hearts will always be restless when we worship our selves, the creatures. Our hearts were meant to find their rest, peace, joy, life, worship in God. This happens when we turn from ourselves and to God. 

This is contradictory to our default nature of suppressing the truth, but this is exactly why Jesus said, 

"Whoever finds his life will lose it,

and whoever loses his life for my sake

will find it" Matthew 10:39

Characteristics of our Lord

Mark 12: 14a

"And they (Pharisees) came and said to him, "Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone's opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God."

....

The apostle Mark recorded some neat information regarding the person of Jesus. What I think is most interesting about these words is that they are from the mouths of Pharisees. Now, I don't know whether they were said in pretense or sincerity, but at the end of the day, they pin-point the character of this man, Jesus, dead on!

1. Do not care about anyone's opinion
2. Not swayed by appearances

How practical are these descriptions. I think about both of these things, other people's opinions and appearances, way too often. How subtly they can creep into my mind and rob me of peace and joy during the day. They are symptomatic of a chronic disbelief in where my identity lies. Throughout the book of Mark, Jesus knows his identity as the Christ, the Son of God, the Messiah, and everyone else refuses to see it and believe. As each chapter progresses, it seems bits and pieces of his identity are revealed to us, when in chapter 8, Peter declares He is Christ, and chapter 15, when the centurion declared He is the Son of God. Amidst all the animosity and hostility, Jesus perfectly remains true to his identity in every conversation and every teaching. Even the Pharisees saw it!

The two things listed above finely depict the culture we live in today: one that upholds truth as relative and appearance as something to be sought after. It actually might not be too different from the Pharisaic culture Jesus was surrounded by each day. Anyway, the story of the gospel is that we are handed, guaranteed, and already have been given the identity of Christ as our absolute truth and our real appearance, through faith in Jesus's life, death and resurrection, which we read about in Mark. Jesus walked through life for us already, so that when we do encounter similar situations that threaten our identity, we may have hope that the hostility we are sure to receive has already been defeated on the cross!

Tim Keller at Columbia University

Here's a 15 min video clip from Tim Keller at an open forum interview at Columbia University. I've never seen anyone who is able to answer hard philosophical/theological secular questions with such grace, truth and intellect. In particular, I think Keller does an outstanding job at addressing the homosexual question (2:30-8:00) by taking it back to the Gospel. 

God's love: Cultural perception vs. Biblical Truth

This is an excerpt from D.A. Carson's 'The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God'

"So now God comes to us and says, 'I love you.' What does he mean?"

"Does he mean something like this, 'you mean everything to me. I can't live without you. Your personality, your witty conversation, your beauty, your smile. Everything about you transfixes me. Heaven would be boring without you.' That, after all, is pretty close to what some therapeutic approaches to the love of GOd spell out."

"When he says he loves us, does not God rather mean something like the following? 'Morally speaking, you are the people of the halitosis, the bulbous nose, the greasy hair, the disjointed knees, the abominable personality. Your sins have made you disgustingly ugly. But I love you anyway, not because you are attractive, but because it is my nature to love.' And in the case of the elect, God adds, 'I have set my affection on you from the foundation of the universe, not because you are wiser or better or stronger than others, but because in grace I chose to love you. You are mine, and you will be transformed. Nothing in all creation can separate you from my love mediated through Jesus Christ."