Full Contact Christianity

Consider Daniel 9, the prayer of the just man Daniel. Go ahead and read it; I’ll wait.

Did you notice that Daniel identifies fully with his people?  “We have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in His laws,” he says — although Daniel himself did, in fact, keep them.  “We have not made our prayer before the Lord our God” — although Daniel did so daily, even at risk of his life.  “Neither have we heeded your servants the prophets,” he says — although he himself was a close student of the prophets, especially Jeremiah.

How can Daniel say these things?  He can say them because “we” is a real category to God.  If the corporate body of which you are a part is mired in sin, you cannot simply say, “But I had nothing to do with that.”  No one knew this better than Daniel and the other righteous exiles.

Habakkuk’s Judah was wicked and required harsh judgment, and that was Daniel’s native land; the men of Judah in Habakkuk’s day were Daniel’s people.  God promised judgment, and Habakkuk passes on that promise. However, there were also just men living in Judah, just men who would suffer with the unjust when the judgment came.  Habakkuk also passes on God’s promise to them: “The just shall live by faith.”  Daniel suffered this judgment, as did his three friends.  They were ripped from their homes as young men, dragged into captivity, and destined to die in exile.  Yet they lived through peril after peril by their faith, as God had promised.

We are Christians.  We are required to think of corporate and individual, and the relationship between the two, the way God thinks of them.  As in Daniel’s case, Scripture shows us time after time that being part of a sinning corporate entity has consequences that a righteous individual cannot dodge, and the righteous thing to do is own the sins of one’s own people.  Simply saying “But I didn’t participate” – even if it’s true – doesn’t mean that “we” didn’t do it.  You can’t extract yourself so easily, which is to say that your people are your people.

What really brought this home to me was several years of pastoral leadership.  It’s one thing to be part of a group; even that is tougher to get out of than we think.  But it’s another thing altogether to be responsible for that group’s spiritual well-being as the one who gives account for their souls.  You can’t just leave because it turns out the sheep really need a shepherd — what are you there for, anyway?

***

Some commands can only be kept corporately.  If there’s a particular way to observe the Lord’s Table, for example, you can only keep it with other people – because the Lord’s Table is something we do together. A group can either keep those commands, or it can disobey them.

If you find yourself part of a group that is disobeying a corporate command, obeying the command individually is often not an option, and even if you can, you remain part of a group that is breaking it.  Like Daniel.  What ought you to do?

Like Daniel, you should walk with God.  Like Daniel, you should fulfill God’s will in those things that are up to you.  And like Daniel, you should pray, “We have sinned” without any riders, or addenda, or excuses.  These people are your people; their sins are your sins, and you can’t separate yourself from those sins simply by disapproving.  You may, like Daniel, find yourself suffering the corporate lack of blessing – or even punishment – as a result of corporate disobedience.  But like Daniel, you can trust God to watch out for you through the trial.

Maybe, if God is kind to your people, you’ll be given a chance to call them to repentance.  Maybe not.  Sometimes it’s not your job; God will raise up someone else.  There were many in Israel who walked with God in the days of Jeremiah, but only one was called to, well, be Jeremiah.  Other times, the season for repentance is past, and God is moving in a different fashion, as He was when He called Isaiah.  Many times, there is nothing you can do but hunker down and wait, trusting in the faithfulness of God.

Regarding such times, I once heard an experienced pastor advise praying in this way: “Lord this is sin.  It is wrong.  Please bless it; the only alternatives available right now are far worse.”

Amen.

I have a moonstone sitting on my desk.  It’s an ordinary-looking hunk of milky-white rock, smaller than a quarter, and a little investigation confirms the ordinariness of it.  Moonstone is feldspar, which is arguably the commonest rock on the face of the earth.  Maybe 60% of the earth’s crust is feldspar.  Even the name indicates its commonness: it’s from the German feld (field) and spath (rock without ore) — in other words, “worthless field rock.”

Which is exactly what it looks like…unless the light hits it just right.  As I sit at my desk, the moonstone is sitting at just the right angle so that the light from the window makes one end of it glow a brilliant blue.  If I hold it up, domed side toward me, I’ll see a reddish-orange plane deep inside the stone, if I can catch the light just so.  The effect, in both cases, is called adularescence, and occurs because two different types of “worthless field rock” have intergrown in layers, internally reflecting and refracting the light.  But you have to get the angle just right to see it–any little movement makes the colors change and shift like a tiny aurora borealis, or vanish altogether, and it’s back to being an irregular milky-looking lump of rock.

So that’s the answer to the question, “What is it?”  But…why is it?  What sort of world do we live in, where God takes two different types of the commonest rock on earth, and combines them to make a gemstone?

Heh.

What sort of world is it, where God takes two different types of ordinary people and combines them to make a reflection of Christ and His Church — a marriage?

The sort of world where the ordinary stuff was spoken out of nothing, is sustained by that same Word, and is, well, magical.  It’s the sort of world where an irregular lump of white rock is a means of grace, an aurora borealis that I can carry in my pocket to remind me how I should treat my wife.

***

Hematite is not as visually interesting as moonstone.  Even with a high polish on it, it’s still a uniform, opaque, reflective grey.  But if you can get it hot enough, you can separate out the impurities, and shoot air through it to make steel.  Steel makes all sorts of useful things: springs, hinges, hammers…you name it.  I have a little hammer I inherited from my grandmother.  It can’t weigh more than 5 or 6 ounces, but she was a small woman, and she wanted something she could keep in a kitchen drawer for small household tasks: driving a tack, tapping in a small nail to hang a picture, like that.  I also have a 20-ounce Estwing straight claw hammer with a steel shaft and a blue rubber handle.  It was a birthday gift, back when I was doing construction work.  I wanted something that would suit the type of work I was doing, and that was it.  That hammer swung like it was part of my arm, and I could sink 16-penny nails, tap-Bang-BANG.   If I’d had to use Grandma’s kitchen hammer, I could drive maybe five nails a day.

It’s the sort of world where having the right tool for the job makes a difference.

***

I still have that blue-handled Estwing.  I’ve owned it for more than half my life, and it’s stained and a little rusted from use and abuse, but it still works as well as it did the day I first picked it up.  It lives in my tool kit, which lives in my bedroom closet.

Suppose I’m out somewhere without my tools and I need to drive a big nail?  A quick inventory of my pockets turns up a cell phone, notepad, two pens, wallet, pocketknife, and that little chunk of moonstone.  Not promising, is it?

Suppose I decide, well, rock is hard like a hammer, let’s give that a try.  So I try to drive a 16-penny nail with that little piece of moonstone.  How is that going to work out?  When I’m done, the nail won’t have moved very much.  On the other hand, the stone will be chipped and cracked at least, if not shattered into pieces, and its value as a gemstone lost.

It’s the sort of world where trying to substitute one means of grace for another often doesn’t do the job, and damages your ability to enjoy what you do have.

Obedience brings blessings, but sometimes we are unable to receive them.

Psalms 149 and 150 both say to praise the Lord with the timbrel and dance. This is not a cheeky suggestion from a Bible college sophomore; it is a Holy Spirit-inspired picture of exuberant worship, and it is a command.  It is a command that we must sing as we sing the Psalms — a thing we are also commanded to do.  Ought we then to dance before the Lord?

Well, yes. If we must sing the command to dance, then surely we ought also to dance.  If there is “a time to mourn and a time to dance,” then there is a time to dance.  Obviously not every day and every occasion, but there will be times when dancing is appropriate, and when it is, we ought to do it.

If we were equipped to obey that command today, then dancing before the Lord would be a blessing to us all.

But in the overwhelming majority of North American churches, we aren’t equipped.  If we all got up and tried to dance in church today, it would most definitely not be a blessing.  Some of us wouldn’t have a clue what to do.  Some of us have done all our dancing in nightclubs, and would bring a form of dance that’s not really well suited for worship.  Some of us would be rightly scandalized by dance moves better suited to the bedroom than the house of God.  Some of us would be wrongly scandalized that there was dance at all.  Some of us who actually have talent would be badly scandalized by the well-meaning antics of those of us who don’t. It would be an utter disaster.  Whatever “praise His name with the dance” means, surely that is not it; “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.”

So to sum up: there’s a biblical command to obey, and we are falling woefully short of it.  We ought to obey, and yet we dare not; making the attempt would produce utter chaos — and there are also commands against that. Our pietistic, individualistic upbringing in the faith tells us that God’s commands, once understood, must be immediately obeyed.  And yet this is clearly impossible in this case.  What are we to do?  How are we to think about such a situation?

What we have before us is the result of a long, long disobedience.  Once upon a time, Our People knew how to dance before the Lord.  By the Red Sea, Miriam and the women went out with timbrels and dances.  David danced before the ark. Today, we’ve lost touch with the ability to praise the Lord with the dance. At some point in our history, we decided that it wasn’t that important, and a generation that knew how didn’t pass it on to the next generation.  It’s not just about dancing, either.  We’ve been worshiping God with our brains alone for so long that we’ve forgotten how to kneel, raise our hands, bow down, and so on — all things that the Psalms also talk about doing. Now we’re so far removed from obedience that the very idea of dancing or other physical action before the Lord  — an obviously biblical idea — seems so strange to us that we don’t know where to start.

But this is exactly what happens with long disobedience.  What you do shapes how you think, until the habit is so ingrained that doing it another way — in this case, an obedient way — is unthinkable.   We have been neglecting our bodies’ role in worship for so long that our disobedience has warped us.  We’re so far gone that we are unable to receive the life-giving blessings of obedience as blessings, which is to say that the wages of sin is death.

The solution?  Simple, but not easy.  We start heading back the right direction.  Maybe we can’t dance in church this week.  Or next.  Or next year.  Maybe the first step is a cautious lesson on Exodus 15.  Maybe that’s too much; maybe a cautious lesson on kneeling, from Psalm 95.  Maybe it’s the worship leader inviting people to lift their hands during one part of one song.  I don’t know what it would be in your church.  But whatever it is, we need to start moving back in the direction of obedience.

As we move wisely, and God blesses our efforts, we will begin to experience the first glimmerings of the blessings of obedience.  With that encouragement, we will need to continue, and just be faithful to do the next thing, as God gives opportunity.  The project may take a year, or a decade.  Maybe a century — but so what?  The goal is to be as faithful as Providence permits in the situation Providence has placed us in.

*****

Meanwhile, we ought not to be surprised that we have unmet needs.

This is not punishment; it’s not God being vindictive.  God made our lives rich and multifaceted, and made us to need His grace and provision in every last facet of our lives.  To that end, He makes us aware of our needs, and He fulfills those needs.  He does this through means — and different means for different needs.  We need to talk with Him, and He has given us prayer as a means of grace in that area.  We need to eat, and “He has caused vegetation to grow for the service of man, that he may bring forth food from the earth.”  But when you need to talk to God, eating a potato doesn’t meet that need; likewise, when you need physical nourishment, praying does little to ease the ache in your stomach.  When we cut ourselves off from God’s grace dispensed through a particular means, we are cutting off an area of our life from His blessing.

So when we neglect the commands having to do with using our bodies in worship, we are refusing to receive grace in a particular area of our lives.  That area will suffer, because God is trying to give us something good, and we won’t take it.

But then you’re thinking, “I never kneel in worship, and I certainly never dance!  But I’m doing fine.”

No.  No, you’re not.  You’re willfully falling short of something God explicitly says to do; in what universe is that going to be okay?  This dynamic — thinking you’re okay although disobedient — is what it means to be “hardened through the deceitfulness of sin,” and it’s another consequence of long disobedience.  Let this go for a while, and the Chinese proverb becomes true: “The fake becomes real; the real becomes fake.”  The truncated and distorted spirituality that eventually results from refusing to say “Yes” to God’s good gifts becomes “real” spirituality in your mind.  You grow accustomed to starvation in certain areas of your life, and deeply suspicious of anyone who tells you that those pangs of hunger and thirst for righteousness really could be satisfied.  The real thing becomes “fake” to you; you don’t believe it anymore.  At best, this leads to a needlessly painful and truncated life; at worst, to abandoning the faith because it doesn’t work.

Again, the solution is simple, but not easy: obey.  We obey to the best of our ability, paltry as it may be, incrementally if necessary, as wisely as we can.  We look forward to the blessings of obedience, and to becoming the sort of people who can experience them as blessings.  And in the meanwhile, we cry to God for mercy; it’s a prayer He delights to answer.

God is in the business of growing His children, maturing us both individually and corporately into spiritual adulthood.  This means that when God speaks to us, He is often calling us to change.

But how will you hear a word from God that calls you to change?  That depends on your heart.

God does not prohibit things because He is the enemy of all fun.  God does not say “Don’t play.”  God says “Don’t play in traffic.”  He steers us away from things that will hurt us.  Every good and perfect gift comes from God; if God is steering you away from something, then it’s not a good gift (at least, not for you, now.)

Likewise, when God commands something, it is not so He can watch you jump through hoops for His own private amusement.  No.  When God says “Do xyz,” God is saying “I have a blessing I want to give you.  Hold out your hand.”  Again, every good and perfect gift comes from God.

If your heart is right toward God, then you hear an invitation to life in the command, and deliverance from death in the prohibition.  Alas, this is not always the case….

The temptation, of course, is to think that God is being mean to you, or at least cheap with you — that He’s steering you away from something good, or toward something bad.  Instead, of course, you ought to simply trust God.  If He commands a thing, you should set out to do it, expecting the blessings of obedience.  This is true even when you can’t see what that blessing might be, as is often the case.  Remember, the command is God saying “Hold out your hand; I want to give you something good.”  When you can’t see what the good thing might be, God is saying “Close your eyes and hold out your hand; I want to give you something good.”

When you rebel against the command of God, you are folding your arms firmly, tucking your hands in your armpits and scrunching your shoulders up to your ears, and saying “No!  Show me what it is first.  Then maybe I’ll obey.”

Doesn’t usually work like that, in my experience.  I find that the experience of obedience forms me, causes me to develop eyes to see and ears to hear.  Apart from that experience, I could not have become the sort of person that can enjoy what God is seeking to give me.

And besides, how can we expect God to bless us with anything, even understanding, when we are knowingly rebelling against His expressed will?

***

Of course, there’s a problem.  We can’t keep the commands.  We may delight in them, we may see the life that keeping them would bring–but we simply don’t have the wherewithal to get the job done.  Sin rises up in us, and we rebel.  We may hate the sin that we’re doing, but that doesn’t seem to stop us from doing it.

What can we do to solve the problem?

Nada.  Zip.  Nechevo.

There is no action, no arrangement of mental furniture, nothing you can do to defeat sin.  Until the resurrection, you’re stuck with sin dwelling in you, and it’s stronger than you are.  You can’t think your way to victory.  Until the last day, when you’re delivered from death, you are doomed.

But the last day has come.  In Christ, the last day broke into history, and the resurrection has already begun.  Jesus, son of Adam, is ascended to heaven and sits on the mercy seat at the Father’s right hand, crowned Lord of heaven and earth.  In His absence, He sent us the Spirit, and dwelling in us, the Spirit gives us a glimpse — the firstfruits, as it were — of the resurrection.  This body is dead because of sin, but through the Spirit, God gives life to our dead bodies. It’s absurd, contradictory.  It doesn’t make any sense.  A bit like a man walking on water…

Which is to say, it’s a miracle.

We still wait eagerly for the resurrection, but right here, right now, we live resurrected lives by the daily miracle of the Spirit operating in our lives.  In one way, this is not something we do so much as something we get out of the way of.  And then again, by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, and thereby, we live.  Synergism is a curse word in some theological circles, but that’s exactly what this is.  The Spirit takes your hand and says, “There’s a part of you that needs to die.  Come with Me; we’ll kill it together.”  The power is God’s, as is the glory, but He would like to incarnate them in us.

This is an invitation to life. Can your ears hear it?

Ho! Everyone thirsty,
Come to the waters;
And if you have no money,
Come, buy and eat.
Yes, come, buy wine and milk
Without money and without price.
Why spend money for what is not bread,
And your wages on what does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good,
And let your soul delight itself in abundance.
Incline your ear, and come to Me.
Hear, and your soul shall live;
And I will make an everlasting covenant with you —
The sure mercies of David.

This day, of all days, is a time to consider how we might love one another.  A time to step aside from petty disagreements and quarrels, a time to abandon the works of the flesh that make themselves all too evident among us.

The Lord of glory died on a cross, and we want to insist on justice.

Christ has died.

Christ is risen.

Christ is coming again.

Like Him, we are called to take up our respective crosses and follow Him.  This is not simply an exercise of unworthiness, of suffering for the sake of suffering.  Baptized into Him, we die to rise and walk in newness of life.

Hallelujah!  Christ is Risen!