There is always more to the Most High

Being sympathetic to the emerging/emergent (I'm not sure which is what) church has become one of my little things, recently. I became tired of listening to the attacks against the community a long time ago, when thought it better to have their view in line with hundreds of years of tradition instead of allowing things to change their mind. I don't say this because I agree with everything this "new" church is saying, most of I think is ridiculous, but they are trying to understand God, and seeking Him with Jesus in mind, rather than a general "sincere faith" so many want to cling to.

Sympathetic has to be the right word, because they are trying to be heard so they can find out how people respond, but they are being trampled by BIG names, like John Piper and Mark Driscoll, who made a decision that they weren't doing things right, and ex-communicated them from their social network. Of course I'm making sweeping generalisations so you can hear my point, instead of trying to keep things inoffensive to some readers.

Most evangelical Christians, I've noticed, have two major characteristics: first, they are obsessed with the death of Jesus in such a profound way, even though He did rise from the dead (which is the important bit of the growth of the church), and they like to claim Jesus enjoyed the cross, when Hebrews definitely says He "endured the cross for the joy set forth before Him" and that joy before Him wasn't the cross it was us. Secondly, if they can't have ideas of God boxed up into nice sections (although these will sound quite silly), like omnipresence, omnipotence, the trinity, holiness, glorious-ness, then they get a bit upset. Doctrines seem to be very important.

Israel, after much winging and moaning, finally enter the promised land, or before that are freed into the wilderness, or before that are miraculously provided for by a brother who happens to be prime minister of Egypt, or before that have a family miraculously born out of a barren woman. They live their whole national life as a life full of experiences of God. They live in faith of that. Wandering through the wilderness they have food fall out of the sky every day for 40 years, and have a pillar of smoke during the day to shade them from the hot hot Egyptian sun, and have a pillar of fire by night to keep them warm in the cold cold Egyptian desert. They experience God entering the promised land, with miraculous victories over great people groups who worship foreign gods. They experience God in exile, when one man refuses to bow to anyone but YHWH and gets thrown to the lions, only to be casually asked the morning after "Did your God save you?" and He had.

God interferes with Israel at various stages of their disobedience, but it is because God wants them to experience Him. His main interference is through prophets, and that voice crying out is only that powerful message that God cares far more than you know, and will use His people to speak to His people. Even in the 400 years of silence from the end of Malachi to the arrival of John the Baptist, there was an expectation of God breaking in, because 400 years is the longest God has ever gone with being silent. By the time Jesus had done what He'd come to do, ascended into glory, and left His Spirit to empower His New People to do greater things that He had done, there are more and more accounts of God being experienced, and that changing lives. With God, there is never a dull moment. Experiencing Him is something He is hungry for us to do, and He wants us to be pursuing Him to do great and mighty things.

The Psalms are filled of praise of the work God does on earth, in equal measure to the characteristic of God which aren't simply titles, but demonstrated among His people. The Israelites didn't have doctrine they had experience calling to mind the wonders of God. Why should we decide knowing about God is the real way to meet with Him? Isn't that the arrogance of man to say, "you've done enough, God, leave us to summarise You in our own words."?!

I'm hungry for, maybe even craving, some of this spiritual milk, this tasting of the goodness of Jesus in profound new ways in our churches. I get the feeling He wants to break in more powerfully than we ever allow when He meets with us in our meetings together. Community should be more than enjoying a personal comfort, it should be God turning lives around, making miracles an everyday occurrence, and seeing churches grow through the wonderment of this Great God: Jesus Christ.

Let me reason with you

It's not enough to argue a creator based on morality. If there is a God, He has surely revealed Himself through this creation, it would resemble part of Himself, just as I can't write something objectively. There are always reflections of ourselves in our creations. I think that mentioning beauty and ugliness in my previous post briefly should have caught your attention, although, again, I'm not going to elaborate any further than that.

To draw onto all of the 'religions' in the loosest sense of the word and look at their concepts of creation, they all resemble a 'Big Bang' of some kind far more than the Christian account. By this I mean that they all describe as the world coming together out of chaos, whether it be a war between 2 gods where on wins and the others destruction is used to create life, or the more classic and (apparently most widely accepted fact among scientists) convincing idea of 'The Big Bang Theory' where something verytinyindeed exploded for no obvious reason at the exact speed needed to have everything neatly form after everything has been colliding for billions of years.

The Christian idea of creation is, unfortunately for some, best described by Genesis, where the world comes together in sections, an order that is all good and made to be the place where everything works together. This is the only, I repeat ONLY, account of the creation of the universe where everything comes out of harmony, love, and peace. So, if we are to reason my last post into this post, morality (or at least the sense of the good, the bad, and the ugly) must come from a starting of harmony, rather than a starting of chaos. We want the world to become better, which would come from it once being that very thing, rather than wanting and willing it to get worse, which is what the motivation would be if that is where we had come from and where we were headed. (We are not headed for total annihilation as I believe, at least, see this post.)

There's not much more I can say to flesh this out. The bones are there and it's up to you to really decide if what I am saying is good enough to explore Jesus further. The fact is, if we were not from this ordered creation, our sense of morality wouldn't be as it is. Our very nature points to an ordered and loving God. Our frustration with the world matches His. The release that comes from knowing there is a hope is the great sense that Jesus death bore the pain forgiveness brings, and His life brought to life the hope needed to carry this life through to completion. His life, a prototype for ours, has moved forward to show in many ways how our need to improve the world is grounded, perfectly, in an eschatology (eschatology literally means the study of the last days, but I really just mean the certainty of our future) that brings to birth a new heavens and new earth. The old earth is burned up by fire, destroying what is perishable, the evil, and ugly, and all the things that have come from the frustration of the whole world; and leaving only what is imperishable; the things God called good in the beginning, and those works and motivations that brought the hope closer, working with Jesus on His great project. This brings renewal and the future of God's people is carried on. (More on God's people next time.)

Who is this God of which I speak?

I received a book in the post recently that has a commentary on Romans; a book of the Bible that I studied about 18 months ago. One of the verses in the first chapter says something along the lines of "they know God exists but reject that knowledge." It's interesting that I've also been reading another book by a guy, Tim Keller, who recently released his book "The Reason for God; Belief in an age of skepticism." He spends the first half of the book answering common objections to Christianity, and the second half of the book on the offensive, showing how Christianity is the set of beliefs that makes the most sense. I have a few things to say on one of his chapters, chapter 9 'The Knowledge of God.'

It all, and always, boils down to morality. In the past 200 years the foundational assumption of God has been steadily removed from society and state as a whole, leaving an unfounded moral principle that avoids God. The fact is, morality is based on a higher set of principles that can then be filtered down to application in society. I am, of course, referring to human rights. Laws of the road only have as much to do with God as to say anyone who drives badly probably shouldn't have a fish on the back of their car. Human rights assumes the dignity of all beings, and it appears to have been most fully recognised, although I can't say that with absolute certainty, in Western culture, where "freedom" of speech, religion, etc. equal rights, and discouragement of segragation is, on the whole, established and held to. The trouble with it is that this freedom, especially of religion, says that there is a clear need to keep your faith in whatever it is we can't see in your private home and don't bring it to work thank-you-very-much, when, as a driving force of one's life, it is practically impossible to do.

So, then, the comments on Tony Blair's decision to start going back to church on a more committed basis after his term as PM makes us wonder where he was getting his ideas from before that. Maybe there is an element where we, as the English, think ourselves better than the US because they like to have their religion stated next to their name. It makes me wonder why, if our human rights realisations are good and right, why we would then try and make them universal when there are a number of cultures where even murder is socially acceptable if it's used to save face. What is our trouble with morality, on the one hand, and God, on the other, that makes us avoid so much of communication between the two, when the only explanation for either of them is the other one. For reasons sake the two ideas (morality and God) support each other.

Where am I going with this?

The underlying problem with morality is that it exists, but if God does not exist it actually shouldn't. I am talking more of a moral awareness (of right and wrong, good and evil, ugly and beautiful - just to throw another idea in the mix) than of a set of legal standards. The simple fact is that we have shelves and shelves of books outlining laws for this that and the other, but we don't know where it comes from. It's as if a decision is made and it agrees with everyone, but if anyone were asked why, they wouldn't have the slightest idea what just happened.

At this point I have been talking about God as the idea (a greater more substantial force that at least started this whole life thing, even if he didn't sit there and decide what colour a fox would be, and how many stomachs a cow should have.) The reasoning, however, cannot end there.

I wonder. If there were one question I were to ask the world, it would be this.

How would you describe the God that you do or don't believe in?

Answer? That's up to you.