Revival: Our Great Need
Stephen Terry
Commentary for the July 6, 2013
Sabbath School Lesson
“Neither do people pour new wine into
old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the
wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both
are preserved.” Matthew 9:17, NIV
So often, we
hear calls for revival and reformation of the church. Those calls at times seem
to be little more than thinly veiled attempts to root out sin in the lives of
others. Like Old Testament prophets individuals will arise proclaiming the need
to return to some imagined state of perfection that pervaded the church of the
past. Revival and reformation perhaps becomes synonymous with perfectionism. If
we can only return to that earlier, more holy time then all will be well and
Jesus can come. We often overlook the fact that if Jesus would come if the
church was more like it was in the past then why didn’t He come then? Maybe a
more profound understanding of deity will help us to avoid that rabbit trail.
Centuries
ago, we tended to view Earth as the center of the universe. Even the Sun was
thought to revolve around our little Earth. In time we grew beyond that
understanding. However, as we learned to no longer view the universe from a
terracentric perspective, we did not move on in our understanding of God. We often
continue to view God in anthropocentric terms. While amorphosity might better
depict such a being, we continue to struggle with not forming an image of some benign
or benevolent, human-appearing being when we think of Him. Even feminism has
not relieved us of this tendency as referring to God as “She” is just as anthropomorphic
as “He.” But if we cast God with a human image, even in part, is He still God?
At times, primitive
peoples in the past resisted having their photographs taken because they believed
that the person holding their image would have power or control over them
through that image. Maybe this is central to our attempt to define God with
human attributes. Perhaps we feel a certain amount of control over a being that
we can define in this way because we can attempt to predict His character and
personality according to our understanding of how humans function. We might
even be able to predict future actions of such a deity based on these models.
But is this
realistic? By definition, God is omniscient and omnipresent. This means He is
fully present in every place and time. He also is fully conscious in that
infinite presence. He truly has no beginning and no end. When we draw an image
on paper in two dimensions, or sculpt it in three, in each case we can
visualize and recreate definitive boundaries. However, how does one visualize
boundaries with the infinite? As it is with physical form, so it is also with
the mind, personality and character. These things all have understood
boundaries in regards to human norms. When we visualize God or His attributes
in anthropomorphic terms, we may be defining Him by those norms even if that
was not our intent.
A good
example might be our need for theodicy. While such vindication might be
meaningless to a being both omniscient and omnipresent, we struggle with the
idea because justice from our perspective is important and necessary for
fairness, and we have been taught from childhood that an attribute of humanity
is fairness and balance. Each child must receive the same number of cookies.
Any disparity will tend to produce rage in the deprived and arrogance in the
blessed as we seek reasons for the differences. We find it difficult to accept
randomness as a reason. Our anthropocentrism predisposes us to look for the
reasons for the differences in ourselves.
As a result
our beginnings, our history, our technical achievements perhaps take on an
undue importance as we struggle toward an ultimate fairness. That fairness may
be more construct than reality. We are
confronted again and again with examples that challenge our understanding of
fairness. Whether it is a school-yard bully taking a smaller child’s lunch
money or a global corporation despoiling the planet at the expense of powerless
indigenous peoples, fairness can at times be hard to find. But we still yearn
for it, and sometimes we claim that God requires it, even though we may again be
attributing humanity to God.
When we
consider what we have been told of God, we have to ask whether fairness is of
primary importance to such a being. According to the Bible there was a war in
heaven.[i]
Once that war was over, the losers were gathered up and “hurled to the earth.” In
effect, the refuse was gathered up into the heavenly dust bin and then emptied
onto the earth. One might question the fairness of that if looking at it from a
human perspective. After all, with the entire universe at His disposal, and
perhaps even multiple universes, why here? Why the earth? Why not some
uninhabited hell-hole of a planet in some remote corner of the universe? Some
have even tried to salvage some form of fairness and justice from this by
creating the idea that the Devil and his minions are residing in some sort of
nether region, perhaps within the earth, where they are bound in torment with
all those who have died, having been unfair while living.
But let us
return to the idea of revival and reformation. How does this relate to our
understanding of deity? Perhaps we are viewing God and fairness like a heavenly
vending machine. If we do “A” then God will do “B.” If we purify ourselves
adequately, God will then do His part. Is God a puppet on a string that we can manipulate
in this way? While our desire for fairness causes us to act as though this is
the case, we know better. Sometimes when we put our coin in that vending
machine expecting a chocolate bar, we get licorice instead. Other times, we get
nothing.
Like the
child who got fewer cookies but does not want to jeopardize the possibility of
cookies in the future, we tend to blame ourselves. We tell ourselves that we
didn’t get what we wanted because the heavenly vending machine knew better and
gave us what we needed instead. However, this is simply rationalization. We do
not know. To stretch the vending machine simile a bit, perhaps someone loaded
the wrong snack in the wrong area of the machine, so we didn’t get what we
asked for. Also, perhaps the snack got caught in the machinery, and it was
impossible for us to receive anything at all. In any event, any attempt to
change our behavior to alter the outcome would be irrelevant. This may also be
true with revival and reformation.
Those who
call for such things imply a greater knowledge of God and His ways than the
rest of us. In reality, they, as we, must ultimately come to the understanding
that we do not control God and time. Why would an all-powerful God present in
every moment at every place even see the need to alter time in response to a
human generated revival movement? Wouldn’t such a response indicate that we
rather than He were in control of the timeline? Maybe such a position might be
justified by the fact that time itself is simply a constructed attempt to
understand dimensionality and perhaps has less relevance to God than to those
whose construct it is and who are trying to manipulate it.
Some might
cite Creation in an attempt to assign the creation of time to God. However,
many societies past and present have had differing concepts of time and
beginnings. This argues strongly for time being a human construct and not the
creation of a singular Creator. Seventh-day
Adventists and others who place a high importance on a particular time period would
probably find it difficult to accept that time is more relevant to us than to
God. However, Jesus came very close to saying exactly that when He spoke about
the Sabbath.[ii]
To those who
try to understand the world through the scientific method, this might also be
clear. As Einstein illustrated, time is relative. While it can be measured and
calculated it is not necessarily consistent. It is highly dependent on place
for its measurement. For instance, time does not flow at the same rate, even on
earth, at higher altitudes as at lower ones.[iii]
Also, according to Einstein’s “Theory of Relativity,” time is altered by our
rate of travel.[iv]
But apart
from this malleability of time from our perspective, an omnipresent God, who
again by definition is present at everywhere and every when has already come in
the Parousia in His person, even if not in our present. So there would be no
reason to alter that coming in response to a revival or reformation. Perhaps
doing so might even invoke a time paradox.
Perhaps a
more helpful understanding of the Parousia might be derived from apocalyptic
scenarios of the past as revealed in the Bible. God intervened with a flood in
the time of Noah when there were fewer than ten righteous people left on the
earth. He intervened again with fire when there were fewer than ten righteous
people in Sodom and Gomorrah. Could it be the proliferation of evil and not the
revival and reformation of the church that is significant for the Second
Coming?
