A World Apart – People of the Word

I’m going to try and keep these posts short but potent, a concise burst of information for the short attention span of the modern world. I could write for hours on this, but you wouldn’t be able to stand reading it, I think.

Question 4 of the Westminster Larger Catechism is this:
‘How [does] it appear that the Scriptures are the word of God?’
‘The scriptures manifest [make obvious] themselves to be the word of God, by their majesty and purity; by the consent of all the parts, and the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God; by their light and power to convince and convert sinners, to comfort and build up believers unto salvation; but the Spirit of God bearing witness by and with the scriptures in the heart of man, is alone able to persuade fully to persuade it that they are the very word of God.’

To paraphrase: Why can I, or any Christian say that the Bible is the inspired and true word of God? I can say it because it is historical, complete in its contents and clear in its arc and scope, and by it people have had their lives changed; the Holy Spirit, spoken of in its pages, is the agent of conversion and the means by which people receive what it has to say, and with which people learn more about the person, nature, power and sovereignty of Christ, and the untainted benevolence of the Father.

How many times have we questioned the things that we have always received as true? How many times have we looked at what we see on television, hear on the radio or read on the internet as less than factual? For that matter, how many times have you questioned the Bible, questioned yourself or examined the nature of your faith and its reality? I’d wager that such self-reflexivity is not a natural feature of the human, but something that has wormed its way in to the heart and mind since the Age of Enlightenment. It’s second-nature to the postmodern person to question the reality within which they find themselves working , living and moving, but in living apart from the world, as people of the Word, Christians should no longer be bound by such painful insecurity. Not to say that they aren’t…God knows I’m not…but the truth and the hope of the matter is that it’s no longer necessary.

Next time – Christ writes himself out of the pages of the Word, into the hearts and minds of those who love Him.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

Conviction

This is a blog about beliefs, absolutely.

It’s also a blog about questions, mine and many others. Representatives began to cover that.

It’s a blog about the tenuous things of faith, why they seem to make no sense in a world that has moved inside of itself, isolating one from another. We’re not solitary creatures, despite whatever conspires to make us that way. But by the same token, we’re creatures that seek community.

Somewhere along the way, we lost what it meant to sit by an oil lamp and share the closeness of a storm with family. We lost the support of friends, brothers and sisters in arms who want to bear our burdens with us. And we lost the greatest treasure of all.

The knowledge that there is more, that this is not the way it’s supposed to be, that there is something greater.

We lost what it means to have Christ. For many, such a treasure has never been in their lives. For some, the rank and file of a consumed life has dulled and deadened the keen edge of faith. I certainly include myself in the mass of men at work, lost in the morass of more, and out of a sense of the renewed waiting upon Christ the advent season brings to Christians I’ve been struck by how important it is to stop, to assess, the reflect, to act in love.

The most important thing to have is a sense of task, of purpose, of project. Not the mindless labour of the undirected soul, nor the busyness of the soul lost in service. I began the Fathers and Sons posts because I was touched by the Lord’s charge to Solomon to build His house for Israel, but I have not recently revisited that initial passage, and as I think about it now, I realize that what strikes me about that passage, in addition to the test of manhood, the charge of a father to his son, and of a Father to his child, is the simple fact that it is purposeful work, and it is work blessed and ordained by God. He will support it; he promises David and Solomon that Solomon’s reign will be one of peace and rest.

In all of the hustle to work, we sometimes forget to do, to act as the Lord commands. In fact, to be honest, that is the default mode of our lives. To simply fill our days with stuff, with things that are going to have no significance in the long run. They will not last.

So what this blog is really about, then, is the need to accomplish, to connect with a greater and more hopeful sense of work, and an ever more crucial need to hope for the Lord’s mercy and grace to a culture lost in its own purposelessness.

I wrote these words when I ushered in blog 2.0. I revisit them now with an understanding that these…these are the purpose of what I do here:

“I write to bring the Word to a culture where words define life, where life defines truth, rather than Truth defining life.
I write to a culture that has given itself over to a search, an endless search for meaning in words, in thoughts, in actions, in deeds.
I write because I know there is more.
I write because I know that there is a hunger in the minds and the hearts of those who are being turned out into a wild world without any understanding that they are not alone, and that that hunger can be filled.”

I write for myself, yes. I believe that in this sharing I glorify my Lord in one of the ways He has gifted me to do. But I write because hungering and thirsting after righteousness, and being satisfied, are a promise. And they are a promise to this generation, and to this time, and to me. They are a promise that I need to share.

I hope you will see it too.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

Structure

An oath in court is a false one to those who can no longer believe in the solemnity of swearing on the Bible. Truth, then, becomes a travesty because if there are no consequences, there are no incentives towards holiness.

This is the essence of the new machinery of life. Why swear on the Word of God if you can’t believe that that Word holds any consequence in your life? Why should it be true in a culture of relativism, and in which justice can be decided on the flip of a coin, as Two-Face so strikingly portrays?

Buy the right people, entice them with extravagance, and you have the courts on your side. Press the right button, edit the right words and truth becomes an artifice of fiction. This is the structure of the world.

Assume nothing. Believe that the knowledge of good and evil – that which we sinned in when our first parents were kicked out of paradise – is no longer the ultimate goal, and you’ve got to start really questioning where faith stands in relation to itself. Go one further, and take a look at what has become the new pinnacle of aspiration – Self-actualization, self-creation, self-delusion. If we can create ourselves anew with new clothing, new scents, new products, what point does a Creator have, and what point does the fact that we are image bearers of God have? What’s the new ultimate goal?

Let’s look at what I’m really saying here.

Moral absolutism is essential to the Christian life. We need definition of what constitutes good and evil, and where those definitions come from. So the first step in building a worldview in right relationship to God is this:

He is good.
We are not.

We are sinful, poor people, wretched in spirit and drowning in need.
He is sufficient, rich in provision, abundant in joy, and seals us up against the evils of the world.

He is right.
We are wrong.

And in all of our sinfulness, only He can save. Only He is the way, the truth, and the life. Begin with this, and there’s hope.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer