Month: October 2012

The New Age Has Come

Does it involve Eastern thinking? Kind of. Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

We’re talking about the difference the resurrection makes and one aspect we’re looking at today is that the new age has come. Now when we hear about the new age, we often think of those in the east. In a sense, we are correct. However, to talk about the true new age movement, we need to stop long before we get to areas like India. We need to stop at the Middle East. The modern new age movement has us going back to the old lie of “You shall be as gods.” The real new age movement began in the area of Jerusalem. Our modern movement is simply behind on the times and living with an old view that has been replaced.

Many Jews believed in a coming age of the Messiah that would have the reign of the Messiah. There are many references in the Bible that some think refer to the end of the world but in reality, they refer to the end of the age. For instance, in the Olivet Discourse, Jesus is not giving signs of the end of the world. Instead, he is giving signs that the age is coming to an end. What would be the next age? It would be the age that has the ruling of the Messiah. The Jews had something else wrong. Jesus would not be ruling in Jerusalem creating just another earthly monarchy. Instead, he would be ruling from Heaven by the side of the Father over all the Earth and His kingdom would be spreading. (This is something we will be touching on later on.)

This means that everything has changed. When Paul converts on the road to Damascus, he does not just have a worldview where the idea of “Jesus is not the Messiah” has changed to “Jesus is the Messiah.” He has to change his view on creation, Israel, the Law, righteousness, justification, forgiveness, the Messiah, suffering, etc. The reason for this is that the action of God in history was central to Jewish thought and they based their identities on it. They spoke of God who brought them out of Egypt. They spoke of God who rescued them from exile. The next new movement then would be to speak of God who acted in Christ.

Picture it as if you had a set of beliefs that could be seen as a spider web. Suppose one of your beliefs is “The grocery store is 20 miles from my house.” Then, you do some measurements in your car with your odometer and realize that the store is actually 18 miles away. Okay. That’s a small belief that you can change and it doesn’t affect you too much. You realize your math was off and that’s that. Now suppose instead that you come to the conclusion “The grocery store never even existed.” This is a belief that would more likely have you check into the mental hospital wondering what was wrong with you.

It’s the same today with people who often apostasize from Christianity and don’t change their worldview much. If you leave the faith, the degree to which your worldview changes is the degree to which Christianity affected your worldview prior. If it played a small part, it will not change your worldview as much. If it played a major part, you will have to totally change everything that you see in your worldview. This is something that explains how serious the situation was for Paul. Everything changed.

If the resurrection of Jesus does not change everything, then something is wrong.

Now to be fair, this could be more difficult for us in America since we have grown up in a society where Christian theism has always been in the background at least and we live in an age where the resurrection has normally been seen as the reality. We can find it hard to appreciate how different the world was before Christianity came along. This is why we need to often drop our modern Americentric understanding of the world and try to see how it was before Christ came. It’s also why we should be doing reading in other areas relevant to biblical studies.

For now, let us rejoice. The new age has come, the age of Christ. Hopefully the modern new age movement will learn to keep up with the times.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

The Resurrection and Joy

Do we have reason to rejoice? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

We’ve been looking at the resurrection lately and what a difference it makes for the Christian. For tonight, I think of what N.T. Wright has said about comparing Judaism of the day before Christ to the time of Christianity. The Jews lived in a time of hope. It was the question of if God was going to come and bring about the promises that He said He would do. Would God conquer their enemies? Would God rescue His people? When would God fulfill His end of the covenant?

Nothing wrong with that of course. In the time before Christianity, one could have joy of being a member of the community of God, but it still was looking forward to something important. One was still in bondage. As we know from John 8, Christ did come to set us free and that was what we had really been waiting for. Christ did not come for a patch of land. He did not come for one group of people. He came first of all for God. He came to do the will of the Father. He came second for the world. He was not interested in a land but the planet. He was not interested in a group of people but every tribe and nation.

That hasn’t changed.

Now the Jews and their land was the means to that. For the Jews, everything revolved around the Temple. Consider it if you will a gateway between Heaven and Earth. This is the best analogy I can think of, but some of us who grew up in the gaming sphere know about a scene where someone enters a place like a temple and ends up finding a gateway that leads to the place where the really good being or the really evil being lives. It is the idea that there are two worlds and this one place is the connection point between both worlds.

I want to be sure that you know I am not saying God lives in another dimension as it were and that that place is physical. I do not think that as God is not physical. I am saying that there was a place that He did make His presence known especially for the Jews and that was in the temple. As long as the temple was there, YHWH was there. God did not reveal Himself to everyone but made a plan to reveal Himself to everyone starting with a particular people in a particlar place.

For we Christians, this hope has been fulfilled and it was fulfilled in Christ. Now our lives are to be dominated by joy. I plan to get into this more in future blogs but let’s consider some points. First off, we have the ultimate reversal. When Christ resurrects, what happens is that death itself starts to work backwards. Christ is the first one to experience this but we are told that not only we, but all of creation will experience that resurrection. (There is nothing conclusive about animals in the new world, but the thought of something like this would be one of my main inclinations to think that God will redeem the animal life of His creation as well.)

Second, we have been set free. The Jews wondered when they would be set free from Rome, but their goals were too small. God was not coming to set them free from Rome but to set them free from sin. The problem is we Christians often make the same mistake. It is not that our wishes for our lives are too great for God to fulfill. They are often way too small. In Luke 12:32, we are told that God has given us the Kingdom for instance. It is quite amazing how much we ask for forgetting we have the Kingdom. We think that God does not give us anything when in reality, He has given us everything, namely Himself. What more can He give?

Finally, this means that we are forgiven. This is something else I will expound on later and I thank a good Christian friend for pointing this out to me in a similar sermon he did on the resurrection. It had the interesting thought experiment in it of imagining what it would be like to live in a world without forgiveness. None of us would want to live in that world, but to an extent, we all act like we do, though we don’t do so as seriously. We think of some sin that is so heinous to us that we cannot imagine that God would ever forgive it, all the while going through our lives committing X number of sins regularly that are smaller sins but still thinking “It’s no big deal.” If there is no forgiveness, there is no sin that is “No big deal.” If there is forgiveness, every sin is also in its own way a big deal when you consider the price that it took to grant that forgiveness. In the first world, we say mercy is not great enough. In the second, we try to say our sin is not great enough.

Consider this then as an entryway into a subset on the resurrection at this point and how the resurrection leads to Christian joy. I hope you’ll continue coming along. Also, for those interested, I am looking into upgrading the blog site talking to some people who know a lot more about this than I. I already know about the issue with the date of the blog entries. Feel free to let me know about anything else you’d like addressed.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

The Resurrection And Sex

Can there be any connection between these two? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

Generally today, if you talk about religion, you won’t get people’s attention too much. However, once sex enters the picture, people are suddenly interested. At a job I once worked at, I came into the break room one day reading the book “Smart Sex: Lifelong Love In A Hook-Up World” by Jennifer Roback Morse. The books I’d read hadn’t got too much attention but suddenly that day the talk in there was “Nick’s reading a book about sex!”

So what does the resurrection then have to do with the national obsession?

The first place is that as we learned recently, our bodies matter. That means that what you do with the body matters. Paul tells us about this in 1 Cor. 6. Some people were of the mindset that the body will pass away so it does not matter. What you do sexually is not much different from what you eat. Paul is aghast at the very notion! He tells the Corinthians that their bodies are part of the body of Christ. How can one join Christ with a prostitute?

In other words, in the resurrection, one’s whole being is to be caught up in the identity of Christ. It is not just that you give Christ your soul, spirit, what have you, and then your body doesn’t really matter. Your body matters because Christ rose in His body and your body is to rise one day and to be transformed to be fully like His body. Your body should be being prepared for that day just as your soul, spirit, etc. are being prepared. (I use different terminology since I’m sure people have different beliefs on the nature of man in that area. I do not wish to argue for any one at this point)

If your body is to be the body of Christ, you are not to join them with a prostitute. It is important to notice that right after this, Paul does go on to address questions on marriage and despite what some people say, he is not a prude. He does not condemn the coming together of the man and woman. In fact, he says that the husband and wife should only withhold themselves from one another by mutual consent and then to devote themselves to prayer and come back quickly lest they be led astray. In other words, Paul knows how strong the desire is between husband and wife and he does not condemn that desire.

Even more radically, he says that a man’s body belongs to his wife. Of course, that goes the other way as well, but such a thought would have been unheard of in Paul’s time. It was the man alone who were in charge. Now I do hold to the position that a man does lead his household, but the man does not live for himself alone. The man is to live for his wife and that includes living bodily. His sexual energies are to be spent on her.

Just shortly before writing this, I was even debating this with someone who was telling me I should not worry about fantasizing and looking elsewhere. Faithfulness should be a choice and not an obligation. If you are married, faithfulness is an obligation you have chosen. It is not an added bonus. It is essential to your marriage. What good is it for you to say “I have remained sexually faithful to my spouse” in your body, but have not done so in your mind and fantasy life?

Does this take hard work? Absolutely, especially for us men who tend to look for many partners by nature. When we are out together, the Mrs. knows that I will regularly look away at times just so I can make sure that my mind stays pure. I have to be very careful with what I watch on TV and if a program is getting to be too showy at one scene, I can look away or else just cover my eyes at that point. Faithfulness is a choice, it is an obligation, it is a battle, and it is totally worth it.

The resurrection also shows us that sex is not to be avoided as a punishment like the Gnostics would have thought. There is no harm in bringing new life into the world. This does not mean that every married couple will do so or even want to do so, but it certainly means that the Gnostics were wrong in their position. Even those Christian couples who choose to not have children would not say that other couples are ipso facto wrong for wanting to do so.

It also means that since this is part of the creation, and since God is in the business of re-creating through the resurrection, a point we will get to lately, we should celebrate the good gift that He has given. Christians are not to be prudes about sex. There is a time and place to talk about it of course, but we Christians have often acted like we cannot say anything about it. The reality is the non-Christian world has a message about sex just as much as we do and if we do not share our message, then a questioning world will only get one message and it is a message they will be quite eager to hear and obey.

If anything, we should be leading the world in this just as we should in environmentalism. I am not saying we go to results alone, but if the message is true from Christ, the results should be good. If we are the ones that uphold sex as the good gift of the creator, then we should be the ones who treasure and value it the most and treat it as the sacred activity that it really is. We often can watch TV and movies thinking the world is really getting in some exciting sex. Would that they heard about what goes on in our marriages and thought “Dang. The Christians really know how to get the most out of sex.”

If the body is good, then what is done with the body in marriage is also good when done rightly. (No. I am not talking about technique here, although I am not objecting to that) Keep in mind however that this requires more than just the physical aspect of sex. It has been said that sex begins in the kitchen. What this means is that a marriage that enjoys God’s gift of sex should be shown in all aspects of that marriage. It should be the case that the husband is seeking to love and honor the wife in all ways and the wife is seeking to honor and respect the husband in all ways. (Men appreciate more the language of respect than love. Vice-versa for women)

We dare not have the idea that we are just to have sex and not worry about everything else. Being a faithful spouse as has been said is more than just something that happens in one room of the house. It’s more than just something that happens in the house. Being a good spouse is something that takes place wherever one is and no matter how far away the other person might be at the time. If I, for instance, am one day speaking at a conference while my wife is home for some reason, and though I cannot call her or receive a call from her at the time, I am still to be a good spouse just as she is to be to me.

For those of us today who are concerned about defending true marriage and seeing what the world has done to it, let me say as I’ve said several times before, that if we complain about the way the world is treating marriage, I firmly believe it is because the church led the way. We dropped our guard and made our own justifications and what a shock that the world around us followed suit. (For those who wonder about how the new atheists abandoned rationality as another example, it is also because the church abandoned its intellectual grounds first)

Perhaps the world will treat marriage more seriously when the church does the same thing?

For now, celebrate sex as if the body matters, because it does, and your body and the body of your spouse are good things. Both of you will enjoy resurrected life together some day. You might as well enjoy your life together right now!

In Christ,
Nick Peters