Stephen
Terry, Director
The
Biblical Worldview
Commentary
for the December 17, 2022, Sabbath School Lesson
" Therefore, as God s chosen people, holy and dearly loved,
clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance
against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues
put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Let the peace of
Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to
peace."
Colossians
3:12-15, NIV
If we accept that the central
theme of the Bible is encapsulated in the gospels and consists of the person
and the message of Jesus, we immediately find ourselves at odds with the
contradiction between the Jesus who said, "Love your enemies" and the vengeful,
and at times arbitrary, violence of the petulant God of the Old Testament. How
could God, in the person of the Father, be so different from God in the person
of Jesus, the Son? This is especially puzzling when Jesus told his disciples,
"I and my Father are one," and "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father."
Jesus also referred to himself as the Truth. But truth is always consistent.
This is what troubled the
religious leaders of Jesus time. They knew God from the Torah as someone who
was willing to commit genocide if people disobeyed and made him angry. In the
Hebrew, when they say someone is angry, they say his nose burns. God s nose
seemed to burn a lot in the Old Testament. Jesus was gentle and kind, a
compassionate healer and life giver. He might be a prophet, but as far as they were concernd, his claims of
divinity by using the divine name in reference to himself were out of order if
not downright blasphemous. He was not the thundering deity they all knew and
accepted. He threatened their religion with his statements about "you heard it
said, but I tell you..." He was challenging the very foundations of belief. He
had no right. He was just a poor carpenter s son, and even that relationship
was surrounded with doubt. For all they were willing to allow, he could be the
village idiot's son. As a result, they rejected his person, and they rejected
what he taught during his three and a half years of itinerant ministry. And
since he stubbornly refused to see the light of the Torah, they murdered him.
They fully expected that to be the end of the matter, but too many others did listen
to what he taught, and the vision of God that he shared, a vision vastly
different from the one their religious leaders taught, was compelling and many
carried that vision in their hearts, sharing it with those who were open to a
God of love, hope, and compassion, a God who hears the yearning of their hearts
for a light of hope in this dark world. The light he brought into the world had
shone into their hearts, and they no longer wanted the darkness and despair
they had before.
We can be like those religious
leaders of Jesus time. We can live lives of fear of the disapproval of an
angry God who is waiting for us to slip up to provide an excuse to char us to
ashes. There are some who take comfort from living in fear. This is not because
it is without pain, but because they appreciate the fact that the rules are
clearly defined. They have a measuring stick in the Torah to see how they are
doing. But it is misguided for the follower of Jesus. When we keep track of our
righteousness with the statutes of the Torah, our focus is not on Jesus and his
ministry. It is on our sins. It is like we are checking our watch every few
minutes to keep track of how long it has been since we committed a particular
sin. We are fearful of failure in our obedience and the horrific consequences
we imagine will come. We fear we will be condemned to die via whatever horrible
tortuous, painful death God can dream up.
Those who feel this way are not
alone. Paul struggled with his failures as well. He shared that struggle in
chapter 7 of his letter to the Roman Church. Many do not find
their way beyond that struggle to be perfectly obedient. Condemnation hangs
over them like the sword of Damocles, ever threatening to fall, ending both
their life and whatever scant pleasures they may have had in life. But Paul
found his way beyond that struggle. He declared in the opening of chapter 8,
"There is NO condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." I have added
emphasis to the word no, because I imagine that is exactly how he felt when
he discovered Christ had set him free from that heavy burden. He came to
understand what Jesus meant when he said, my burden is light. Like Christian
in Bunyan s book Pilgrim s Progress, he discovered that the cross removes our
burdens. It doesn t add to them. Even so Christian was later tempted to wander around
Mount Sinai because of the simplicity of black letter law as opposed to the
vagueness of loving others and what all that loving means. But rather than give
him the freedom the cross offered; on that trip to Mt Sinai, he would be again loaded down with the
weight of concerns as to whether his righteousness was adequate in God's eyes.
John tells us in verse 17 of
chapter 3 of his gospel that Jesus did not come to judge the world, but to save
it. Despite that we choose to labor under a judgmental condemnation when we
could be free of that condemnation, free to hope, to love, to grow into the
character of Christ. The religious leaders considered Christ a great sinner,
but they had been laboring under self-imposed condemnation for so long, even
their idea of what constituted sin had become distorted. Love had ceased to be
the guiding principle. That is if it ever was for them. It is this loss of love
that has distorted our natures so badly. We are disabled, disfigured by
suspicion and hatred, both born out of fear. Because we teach God is a vengeful
tyrant, we assimilate that character and project it onto others as well. Mental
illness can be one of several sad results of such fear and guilt.
So, what is the truth about the
biblical world view? It is really very simple, and it brings a lightness to our
being that comes from our relationship to God. John tells us in his first
epistle that God is love. Those three words are the foundation of everything
concerning the relationship between God and man, both in the Bible, and in our
personal experience. It likely breaks God s heart to see that some are unable
to recognize that, to receive his love. He did not create us to be that way. In
the very first chapter of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, it says God made
us in his image. He created us with the same loving, caring heart he had. We
were not created to murder one another, to lie to one another, to take
advantage of one another for our own selfish gain. Sadly, we soon developed
those traits, and just as we projected our own selfish nature onto others, through
the ages, we also projected it onto God. Our picture of God had become so
distorted by the time Jesus came we had lost our perspective. Even though Jesus
pointed out that old photo of God we were holding was cracked, torn and yellowed with age, we
chose to keep the tarnished, barely discernable picture instead of
recognizing the actual character of God standing before us. He didn t look like
our faded picture, but then the picture did not look like it originally did
either.
God calls us to restore what was
lost, to allow him to recreate the love within us that we were created to have.
He does not call us to follow the law. He calls us to love. The Apostle Paul
wrote several times in his letters to the Roman and Galatian churches that love
fulfills the law. If we pray to God for it and open our hearts to become what
he meant us to be, we will not need to try to become perfect in obedience to
the law in order to be chosen for heaven. We will become more and more loving,
more and more Christlike in our character. Those who focus on their sins tend
to look down on others who have not overcome their sins as though their
remaining sins are not as bad as those that they feel they have conquered but
others have not. This breeds arrogance, hostility, and division within the body
of Christ just as it did when some challenged Paul s teaching of grace, a
challenge that caused him to travel to Jerusalem to lay things before the
brethren at what is often called the First Jerusalem Council. Despite those who
wanted to impose stricter burdens on new converts, love reigned, and those
burdens were not supported by the council. Paul was able to take a message of
love and hope back to those he was teaching.
When we think about it, what
sounds more heavenly, a heaven where love is in everyone s hearts or one where
we are watching each other closely to catch out any flaws that would cause us
to question their right to be there, just as we treated others in this life.
There is a reason God wants us to be open to restoring the loving character he
gave us at Creation. He wants to be able to walk with us through the gardens of
paradise then as he did in the beginning when he created humanity. Doubtless it
must have broken his loving heart just as Jesus wept over the death of his
friend, Lazarus.
Enoch understood how precious walking with God could be. It is
said that they were so close that when walking God said to him that they were
closer to God's house than Enoch's, so he invited Enoch to come home with him.
What a beautiful thought. What a loving God. What a blessed hope.