“God has a plan for your life,” has become a popular Christian saying. It is often aimed at the unbeliever or new Christian who is still uncertain that God loves and cares for them, so it can be a useful statement to strengthen their faith. Yet it is shorthand for a larger biblical truth, and shorthand has the propensity to be misunderstood or improperly viewed as the full picture. Like a signboard at a crossroads, it is only useful if you go in the direction it is pointing rather than sitting next to it.
This pithy saying is easily misunderstood in our current self-centred and self-glorifying culture. One simply places the emphasis in the wrong place: “God has a plan for your life,” where the most important factor is the life that you are living. With this emphasis, God becomes a helpful life coach to get you through some difficult patches, or worse, a magical genie that carries out all your wishes.
This is not how the God of the Bible reveals Himself to us, so the real danger in this little saying is for the new Christian to develop a wrong idea of God. The title of this blog is my attempt at improving the shorthand, but the article itself is about going beyond the signboard and exploring the truth it points to.
God does indeed have a plan – one that stretches out beyond time and incorporates the whole universe. The broad outline of that plan as it concerns humanity is sketched out for us from Genesis to Revelation. If we dwell on the immensity of God’s plan for the universe, earth and mankind, we may feel that the little life that we are given cannot possibly feature. If the rise and fall of empires is part of God’s plan, then aren’t we too insignificant for His attention?
This is the opposite error to the one I highlighted earlier, but it also creates an incorrect view of a limited God. If He could only see the big picture and not the individual lives within that picture, He would not be the omnipresent God revealed in the Bible. In reality, He is interested in the lives of each of His creatures, most especially of those made in His image (Matt. 10:29-31).
The critical point is to have the right perspective of God, His plan and our lives. This is one of the lessons we find in the book of Job, where God ultimately gives Job the right perspective – one that we would do well to study. In this book, we see that God is intensely interested in Job’s life. He knows what Job is doing and how he is living, and uses him as an example of a “blameless and upright man” (Job 1:8).
God then allows Satan to take this righteous, good life and turn it upside down. This decision made no sense at all to Job at the time, and has likely puzzled Bible readers through the centuries! In his discussions with his friends, Job maintains that he is still righteous, but that this rough treatment deserves an explanation – why would God allow him to suffer?
The answer was that God had a plan. Although Satan tried his best to derail Job’s faith, God knew that this period of testing would benefit not only Job and his friends, but also every reader since this story was penned. The life of one man from an obscure tribe living thousands of years ago has thus provided encouragement to millions of people down through the ages. This amazing outcome was achieved by temporarily ruining that life; leaving Job sitting on a pile of ashes, scraping off painful sores whilst wallowing in deep emotional distress after losing his entire livelihood and all of his children.
In answer to Job’s desperate question: “Why me, Lord?” God did not explain the big picture to him. God didn’t sit Him down and say: “I’m sorry about all of this, but I wanted to strengthen your faith”, nor did He explain that untold numbers of people would read this story as a testament of faith during trial. Instead, God answers the question with many questions (Job 38-41) – each one challenging Job to show his credentials that give him the right to ask God such a question in the first place.
This incredible monologue was all about perspective. God revealed Himself to Job in just some aspects of His glory and power, all of which were already there for Job to see in creation. Before this meeting, it seems that Job had not been fully in awe of the God he served. We all fall into this trap by viewing the natural world as simply normal parts of daily life, rarely stopping to consider the incredible power, intelligence and glory of the Creator. When Job was snapped out of his complacency, he responded appropriately. Not by asking the unanswered question “Why me?” again, but by repenting for not giving sufficient glory to God (Job 42:1-6).
This story does not sit at all well with the idea of God helping us to live our best lives by providing us with a beautiful plan tailored to our needs and wishes. Yet if we are willing to learn from Job’s story, we can gain the correct perspective of God’s plan and our role in it.
First, we see that God’s plan extended far beyond Job’s life on earth – angels, devils and millions of humans were watching Job suffer and listening to (or reading) his mini-sermons as he struggled with his unsympathetic friends and with God. What we often miss is that God works in us at the same time that He works in those around us. Our lives – especially when they are not going according to our plans – can bring others to salvation or encourage Christians to keep up the good fight. For all we know, the trials that God allows in our lives could be part of a demonstration before heaven and hell of the faithfulness of His children.
Second, we see that God was personally involved in the story – He instigates the chain of events by singling Job out as a righteous man and finalises everything with one of the most powerful speeches recorded in Scripture. Even during his loneliest hours, Job was never ignored. In the same way, God gives individual instructions regarding the lives of His children and is closely involved from beginning to end. Even in our darkest times, we need to remember that whatever mysterious things God may be doing, He is not ignoring us.
Third, we see that although God was working in Job’s life, He did not do it in ways that Job expected or wanted. God certainly had a plan for Job’s life, but the plan did not revolve around Job, but around God’s will and purpose. When we are seeking God’s will for our lives, this is critical to understand. God will not provide a tailor-made solution to keep us happy and healthy. He will provide a role that we can play in a plan so grand and glorious that we will only see it in full when we get to heaven. Until then, He answers “Why me?” questions with “I AM.”
Finally, God revealed Himself to Job as sovereign over all things, including Job’s life. It is difficult for us to understand how we can willingly play a role in God’s plans: surely He can just do with our lives as He pleases, without our active consent? Yet even the story of Job is not started with God unilaterally deciding to test him. It starts with Job living righteously and serving God. Only Job’s life could fit into this part of God’s plan, because it was a faithful life that could withstand severe trials. God wants specific people to be willing to play special roles within His plan. If we are unwilling to surrender our little lives to His great plan, then we will miss out on being part of God’s bigger picture.
Knowing that Job’s righteousness was a key reason for the suffering he faced may make us shrink back from doing God’s will. If we stay lukewarm in our faith, or if we don’t give our lives to Him at all, we are likely to have an easier life on earth. It may also leave us feeling that God didn’t really care about Job’s suffering, since He had a bigger plan in mind. If we surrender our lives to God’s plan, will we be treated as a pawn on a chessboard that can be sacrificed at any moment in favour of the overall strategy?
This is another incorrect view of God, who is love and therefore cares for each one of us more than we could possibly imagine. Further, He not only understands suffering in an abstract way – He lived through it on the cross (Heb. 4:15). Jesus knows what it is like to suffer, but he also knows that all of the suffering that the Father put Him through was worth it (Rom. 12:2). When we seem to suffer pointlessly here on earth, we must remember that God’s perspective is eternal. As Paul declared: For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. (Rom 8:18). Giving our lives up to God’s plan will thus produce boundless benefits and rewards, both here on earth and throughout eternity.
God has a plan – a truly marvellous one that extends far beyond our comprehension or our lifespans. Although He could accomplish it without us, He has stooped down to invite us to surrender our little lives and experience the immense privilege of being a part of His plan. Instead of leading a purposeless existence that revolves around ourselves, we can dedicate our few years on this planet to the glory of our Creator – the only life that is truly worth living.
02 January, 2023
03 July, 2022
Are Christians Aborting God’s Mission?
This is possibly the last topic on earth I want to write about. If outpourings on social media are anything to go by, it is personally painful for many people and terribly political. I would much rather stay silent on the issue, and it would be easy to do so because the recent political decision about abortion involves the USA and therefore has no impact on my life. This blog is likely to upset most of the people who read it – unbelievers and Christians alike. I would much rather not write it at all.
So why write about abortion? I am writing because God is being slandered in the process of political wranglings over the matter. Additionally, addressing this issue from a biblical view reveals something of who God is in both His perfect holiness and His everlasting love. You may not like His holiness, but without understanding that you will never experience His love, and God’s character cannot be divided up into little packages that let us pick and choose.
With that introduction, let’s talk about the unborn child from a biological point of view. On a purely physical level, the first unique double helix of DNA formed during conception is part of a developmental process that will result in a unique human body being formed. While the developmental process has stages that we can identify and categorise (e.g. embryo, foetus, new-born baby, toddler, child, adult), it is really just one long process of development. Any fatal disruption in that process, for whatever reason and at any stage, will end that particular unique human life. Abortion is therefore the end of a unique human life prior to birth. Whether there are good reasons or bad reasons to end a human life at this early stage in development is a different question, and one that is the current subject of controversy.
The mind-boggling complexity of reproduction and development is an incredibly strong argument for the existence of an extremely intelligent, creative Being who is the ultimate source of DNA itself and the creator of the intricate processes involved in development. Another strong argument for His existence is that one particular species of animal on this earth has an innate sense of right and wrong – the human. This sense has led to people creating standards of morality by which they strive to live, thus making them feel ‘right’. We don’t all agree on what the standards are, and our disagreements over this issue have defined much of human history.
If you doubt that humans have an innate sense of right and wrong, just wade into the debates about abortion and you will see that they all stem from this unique human characteristic. In the Christian worldview, human morality ultimately comes from God who provides an objective standard of right and wrong. God does not force humans to adhere to His standard, but He has told us what that standard looks like and what the consequences are for not living by His standard – eternal separation from Him that will cause us immense pain and suffering.
Biblical Christians have voluntarily surrendered their preferred standard of living to God’s standard, and seek to live accordingly. People who do not live that way have rejected God’s standard and live according to their own preferred rules, which may be self-defined, societal or religious. In instances where our personal rules of life contradict the laws of the country we live in (even if our rules match God’s rules), we either have to submit to that law or break it and hope we don’t suffer the consequences. In the same way, when we break God’s laws we are in danger of suffering the consequences, which we may experience to some extent in this life but will certainly experience after death.
In the Old Testament, God taught the people of Israel what His standards of morality are and He created national laws for them based on those standards. In the New Testament, God’s moral standard remains the same, but He no longer demonstrates His standard through Israel’s laws alone (although they are written down for us to study). Instead, people throughout the world who willingly submit to His standard in their own lives ought to provide a living demonstration of God’s will for humanity. These people are further commanded to tell others about God and His invitation to all people to leave their former ways of living and reconcile themselves to Him through Jesus Christ. This is God’s mission for His people today.
In the Bible, we find that God views taking a human life seriously. In its simplest form, one of the Ten Commandments is: You shall not murder (Ex. 20:13). The penalty for murder in Israel was death. There were other reasons one could take a human life under these national laws and not be sentenced to death – e.g. manslaughter, meting out the death penalty (those who executed the criminal were not killed), and during war with Israel’s enemies. Consequently, we see mercy for killings that were not planned or desired by the killer (I would put abortion to save the life of the mother in this category), and allowance for killing based on the guilt of one who is killed. In Israel, then, murder was deemed as one person deliberately taking the life of another who did not deserve death, and with no other valid reason.
In the New Testament, God’s views on murder have not changed. Yet Jesus goes beyond “You shall not murder” and says that people who are seeking to live by God’s standards should not only avoid murdering anyone, but they must not even hate anyone. Even further, those who truly want to walk in God’s ways and reflect His character to the world should love people who hate them. Since we are not living in Old Testament Israel, Christians do not have the mandate to enforce or live by the detailed laws given to Israel. Instead, we have the mandate to “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you,” (Matt. 5:44) thus fulfilling God’s moral law.
Our mission as Christians is to live out God’s standards, but the full meaning of this goes far beyond not getting or committing an abortion, just as it goes beyond not murdering anyone. Is our mission to stop other people from getting abortions? Since an unborn child is an innocent party by definition, preventing abortion could save an innocent human life. From another angle, one could say that preventing abortion is preventing sin – on the part of the mother and the doctor who will perform the procedure. But is saving human lives from physical death the actual mission that Jesus gave Christians when He left earth? Or is our mission to prevent non-Christians from sinning? Or is it something else entirely?
The Christian’s mission on earth has many aspects to it, but the clearest summary is found in the Great Commission – what Jesus said to His disciples after His resurrection and before He finally left earth. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:19).
Notice that teaching people to follow God’s commands is included in the Great Commission, but it is the last point in a sequence. Also note that nothing at all is said about saving people’s lives. Saving a life is a noble act, but it is not what Jesus told His disciples to do. The first and most important thing is to go and make disciples, which involves telling people the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ. One of the best things about this good news is that it is meant for people who have committed sin (i.e. all of us), including the very worst sins we can imagine.
This news is for the unmarried fornicators, the adulterers, the abortion doctors, the women who have had abortions, and for the hypocrites who condemn abortion publicly but live in sin privately. Our mission is to proclaim that no matter how awful your sin may be, God’s grace through Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is sufficient to wipe away that sin and make you righteous in God’s eyes. You may still suffer the consequences for your actions in this life, but the way for you to enter God’s presence and dwell joyfully with Him now and forever is open.
Campaigning to change the laws of a country to make it appear to be ‘more Christian’ because there is somewhat less overt sin being committed is not a shortcut to fulfilling the Great Commission. This is trying to do something with a national law that can only be done by proclaiming the gospel. On the contrary, I would argue that this legal effort is an obstacle to the gospel. We are in effect aborting the mission that God gave us in the first place.
When Jesus came to earth He was inserted into a wicked society run by evil rulers. Soon after His birth, Herod ordered that every child under the age of two be put to death in Bethlehem and its surrounding districts, with the aim of killing Jesus (Matt. 2:16). God did not prevent this great evil from happening and did not intervene to save the lives of all those children.
Jesus was the only truly innocent Man ever to walk the earth, and yet His death was a consequence of numerous sins committed by those around Him. The Jewish leaders envied and hated Him, Judas betrayed Him, Pilate unjustly condemned Him and the soldiers assaulted and killed Him. God did not prevent any of those sins from taking place, and instead Jesus offered His life to save those very same sinners.
This pattern has been repeated thousands of times by followers of Christ down the ages – from the unjust killing of Stephen in Acts 7 to the most recent missionaries killed by the people they are trying to save. From a human point of view, entering a sinful society and doing absolutely nothing to change its laws or rules, but instead living by God’s rules yourself and suffering the consequences, is madness. We don’t want to suffer the consequences of living in a wicked world, so we try to make it more comfortable for ourselves by changing its rules to something that suits us. Yet even if the legal changes we strive for are in closer alignment with God’s law, we will have achieved nothing as far as the original Christian mission is concerned.
Although the law given to Israel was according to God’s standards and Israel voluntarily agreed to keep that law, it had a major weakness – it could not change the human heart (Rom. 7-8). Even people who seemed to keep the law outwardly were exposed as hypocrites (Matt. 15:7-9). If God’s law given to Israel could not change their hearts, how could we possibly bring anyone to salvation by changing human laws? In every historical situation where ‘Christian’ values have been forcibly imposed on people from the top down, disaster has resulted. Certainly, no more people have entered into heaven as a result of obeying ‘Christian’ laws that they detested. Sadly, history often repeats itself.
Christians have no mission from God to prevent other people from sinning through coercion or legal means; we only have a command to stop sinning in our own lives. Perhaps wanting to stop everyone else from sinning is evidence that we have failed to do anything about our own sin? (Matt. 7:1-5). Yet for them and us, God’s invitation to repent and be forgiven remains open. Let us rather use that invitation and invite others to do the same.
Christians have not been commissioned to save the physical lives of people around us (unborn babies included); we have been commissioned to save their eternal souls. Doing so starts with genuinely loving the people who currently reject God’s standard for their lives. Standing outside abortion clinics and hurling verbal abuse at the doctors is not showing love. Jesus modelled how to show love to sinners – He joined them for supper, He showed compassion for their physical needs through healing and feeding them, He prayed earnestly for them, and ultimately He forgave them for their sins against Him. He not only taught people about God’s love or His holy standards for human life, He demonstrated it every day.
So why write about abortion? I am writing because God is being slandered in the process of political wranglings over the matter. Additionally, addressing this issue from a biblical view reveals something of who God is in both His perfect holiness and His everlasting love. You may not like His holiness, but without understanding that you will never experience His love, and God’s character cannot be divided up into little packages that let us pick and choose.
With that introduction, let’s talk about the unborn child from a biological point of view. On a purely physical level, the first unique double helix of DNA formed during conception is part of a developmental process that will result in a unique human body being formed. While the developmental process has stages that we can identify and categorise (e.g. embryo, foetus, new-born baby, toddler, child, adult), it is really just one long process of development. Any fatal disruption in that process, for whatever reason and at any stage, will end that particular unique human life. Abortion is therefore the end of a unique human life prior to birth. Whether there are good reasons or bad reasons to end a human life at this early stage in development is a different question, and one that is the current subject of controversy.
The mind-boggling complexity of reproduction and development is an incredibly strong argument for the existence of an extremely intelligent, creative Being who is the ultimate source of DNA itself and the creator of the intricate processes involved in development. Another strong argument for His existence is that one particular species of animal on this earth has an innate sense of right and wrong – the human. This sense has led to people creating standards of morality by which they strive to live, thus making them feel ‘right’. We don’t all agree on what the standards are, and our disagreements over this issue have defined much of human history.
If you doubt that humans have an innate sense of right and wrong, just wade into the debates about abortion and you will see that they all stem from this unique human characteristic. In the Christian worldview, human morality ultimately comes from God who provides an objective standard of right and wrong. God does not force humans to adhere to His standard, but He has told us what that standard looks like and what the consequences are for not living by His standard – eternal separation from Him that will cause us immense pain and suffering.
Biblical Christians have voluntarily surrendered their preferred standard of living to God’s standard, and seek to live accordingly. People who do not live that way have rejected God’s standard and live according to their own preferred rules, which may be self-defined, societal or religious. In instances where our personal rules of life contradict the laws of the country we live in (even if our rules match God’s rules), we either have to submit to that law or break it and hope we don’t suffer the consequences. In the same way, when we break God’s laws we are in danger of suffering the consequences, which we may experience to some extent in this life but will certainly experience after death.
In the Old Testament, God taught the people of Israel what His standards of morality are and He created national laws for them based on those standards. In the New Testament, God’s moral standard remains the same, but He no longer demonstrates His standard through Israel’s laws alone (although they are written down for us to study). Instead, people throughout the world who willingly submit to His standard in their own lives ought to provide a living demonstration of God’s will for humanity. These people are further commanded to tell others about God and His invitation to all people to leave their former ways of living and reconcile themselves to Him through Jesus Christ. This is God’s mission for His people today.
In the Bible, we find that God views taking a human life seriously. In its simplest form, one of the Ten Commandments is: You shall not murder (Ex. 20:13). The penalty for murder in Israel was death. There were other reasons one could take a human life under these national laws and not be sentenced to death – e.g. manslaughter, meting out the death penalty (those who executed the criminal were not killed), and during war with Israel’s enemies. Consequently, we see mercy for killings that were not planned or desired by the killer (I would put abortion to save the life of the mother in this category), and allowance for killing based on the guilt of one who is killed. In Israel, then, murder was deemed as one person deliberately taking the life of another who did not deserve death, and with no other valid reason.
In the New Testament, God’s views on murder have not changed. Yet Jesus goes beyond “You shall not murder” and says that people who are seeking to live by God’s standards should not only avoid murdering anyone, but they must not even hate anyone. Even further, those who truly want to walk in God’s ways and reflect His character to the world should love people who hate them. Since we are not living in Old Testament Israel, Christians do not have the mandate to enforce or live by the detailed laws given to Israel. Instead, we have the mandate to “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you,” (Matt. 5:44) thus fulfilling God’s moral law.
Our mission as Christians is to live out God’s standards, but the full meaning of this goes far beyond not getting or committing an abortion, just as it goes beyond not murdering anyone. Is our mission to stop other people from getting abortions? Since an unborn child is an innocent party by definition, preventing abortion could save an innocent human life. From another angle, one could say that preventing abortion is preventing sin – on the part of the mother and the doctor who will perform the procedure. But is saving human lives from physical death the actual mission that Jesus gave Christians when He left earth? Or is our mission to prevent non-Christians from sinning? Or is it something else entirely?
The Christian’s mission on earth has many aspects to it, but the clearest summary is found in the Great Commission – what Jesus said to His disciples after His resurrection and before He finally left earth. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:19).
Notice that teaching people to follow God’s commands is included in the Great Commission, but it is the last point in a sequence. Also note that nothing at all is said about saving people’s lives. Saving a life is a noble act, but it is not what Jesus told His disciples to do. The first and most important thing is to go and make disciples, which involves telling people the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ. One of the best things about this good news is that it is meant for people who have committed sin (i.e. all of us), including the very worst sins we can imagine.
This news is for the unmarried fornicators, the adulterers, the abortion doctors, the women who have had abortions, and for the hypocrites who condemn abortion publicly but live in sin privately. Our mission is to proclaim that no matter how awful your sin may be, God’s grace through Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is sufficient to wipe away that sin and make you righteous in God’s eyes. You may still suffer the consequences for your actions in this life, but the way for you to enter God’s presence and dwell joyfully with Him now and forever is open.
Campaigning to change the laws of a country to make it appear to be ‘more Christian’ because there is somewhat less overt sin being committed is not a shortcut to fulfilling the Great Commission. This is trying to do something with a national law that can only be done by proclaiming the gospel. On the contrary, I would argue that this legal effort is an obstacle to the gospel. We are in effect aborting the mission that God gave us in the first place.
When Jesus came to earth He was inserted into a wicked society run by evil rulers. Soon after His birth, Herod ordered that every child under the age of two be put to death in Bethlehem and its surrounding districts, with the aim of killing Jesus (Matt. 2:16). God did not prevent this great evil from happening and did not intervene to save the lives of all those children.
Jesus was the only truly innocent Man ever to walk the earth, and yet His death was a consequence of numerous sins committed by those around Him. The Jewish leaders envied and hated Him, Judas betrayed Him, Pilate unjustly condemned Him and the soldiers assaulted and killed Him. God did not prevent any of those sins from taking place, and instead Jesus offered His life to save those very same sinners.
This pattern has been repeated thousands of times by followers of Christ down the ages – from the unjust killing of Stephen in Acts 7 to the most recent missionaries killed by the people they are trying to save. From a human point of view, entering a sinful society and doing absolutely nothing to change its laws or rules, but instead living by God’s rules yourself and suffering the consequences, is madness. We don’t want to suffer the consequences of living in a wicked world, so we try to make it more comfortable for ourselves by changing its rules to something that suits us. Yet even if the legal changes we strive for are in closer alignment with God’s law, we will have achieved nothing as far as the original Christian mission is concerned.
Although the law given to Israel was according to God’s standards and Israel voluntarily agreed to keep that law, it had a major weakness – it could not change the human heart (Rom. 7-8). Even people who seemed to keep the law outwardly were exposed as hypocrites (Matt. 15:7-9). If God’s law given to Israel could not change their hearts, how could we possibly bring anyone to salvation by changing human laws? In every historical situation where ‘Christian’ values have been forcibly imposed on people from the top down, disaster has resulted. Certainly, no more people have entered into heaven as a result of obeying ‘Christian’ laws that they detested. Sadly, history often repeats itself.
Christians have no mission from God to prevent other people from sinning through coercion or legal means; we only have a command to stop sinning in our own lives. Perhaps wanting to stop everyone else from sinning is evidence that we have failed to do anything about our own sin? (Matt. 7:1-5). Yet for them and us, God’s invitation to repent and be forgiven remains open. Let us rather use that invitation and invite others to do the same.
Christians have not been commissioned to save the physical lives of people around us (unborn babies included); we have been commissioned to save their eternal souls. Doing so starts with genuinely loving the people who currently reject God’s standard for their lives. Standing outside abortion clinics and hurling verbal abuse at the doctors is not showing love. Jesus modelled how to show love to sinners – He joined them for supper, He showed compassion for their physical needs through healing and feeding them, He prayed earnestly for them, and ultimately He forgave them for their sins against Him. He not only taught people about God’s love or His holy standards for human life, He demonstrated it every day.
20 March, 2022
The Beauty of Simplicity
One of the things that surprised people most about Jesus when He started teaching on earth was the simplicity of His message. The intellectuals of the day were not only surprised, but annoyed that His simple message attracted simple people – like uneducated fishermen from Galilee. The Old Testament is full of complicated prophecies and mysteries that the religious leaders had spent their lives debating; they thought that the truth was something that only clever people could access. One of the many reasons why Jesus offended them was that his message was unerringly simple.
It was not only simple, however, it was difficult. Starting from John the Baptist through to the end of Jesus’ ministry, God’s message was “repent, believe, love”. For the self-righteous Jews who thought they already knew who God was and had no desire to love the simple, sinful people around them, this was an extremely difficult message. What irked them even more was that this message could actually be found in the Old Testament – the very scriptures they took so much pride in knowing!
While the Jews spent hours creating new laws that made keeping God’s law ever more complicated, Jesus declared that the whole law could be reduced to two simple commandments – ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind’ and ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matt. 22:37-40). These were not new laws – He quoted the Old Testament when stating them – but they cut right to the heart. The scribes and Pharisees enjoyed intellectual arguments that covered up their lack of real devotion to the God they claimed to serve. The simplicity of the message cut right through their cleverly crafted ‘righteousness’ and revealed the depravity of their hearts.
The simple people who had not spent years studying the scriptures or crafting clever arguments responded differently. John the Baptist’s simple message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” attracted tax collectors and soldiers who received the message and asked what they ought to do to show true repentance (Luke 3:10-14). John’s answers were simple – in essence he told them to “go and sin no more”, just as Jesus told those who came to Him for help (John 5:14; 8:11).
Besides the Jews who contended with Jesus, there was another group of clever people around at that time in history – the Greek philosophers. Paul encountered this group in his time at Athens; they loved a good debate so much that they invited him to give a public lecture about what he believed (Acts 17:16-34). Yet it seems that very few of them came away from that lecture with anything more than a few interesting ideas to debate further.
In first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says that many Greeks could not receive the gospel because they thought it was ‘foolishness’ – i.e. far too simple to be worthy of their attention (1 Cor. 1:18-25). Unfortunately, it seems that many of the Corinthian believers reverted to their Greek mindset and tried to make their faith more complicated than the simple message that Paul first preached to them. He therefore warns them in his second letter: But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ (2 Cor. 11:3).
The simplicity of God’s message is thus contrasted sharply with the intellectual cleverness of man and Satan. Two thousand years later, nothing has changed. The message of the gospel remains the same and mankind is still trying to get away from this simple, difficult message by making things complicated. As it was then, the problem manifests itself both in unbelievers and believers today.
Unbelieving philosophers and scientists heap up intellectual arguments that are ever more complicated and difficult to follow to try and prove that there is no God. Even unbelievers that attend churches, and therefore admit that God exists, use complicated religious rites and ceremonies to make themselves feel righteous. These intellectual arguments and religious rules are ultimately an attempt to dodge the first part of the gospel: repent and believe.
Although Christians entered into the simplicity of the gospel when we first believed, the threat of our human intellects smothering the simple message remains. The command to love one another, from which flows joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23) is simple, but difficult. It is much easier to debate each other about obscure passages of scripture, or discuss politics and other earthly matters, than it is to love as Jesus did. Paul especially warned Titus, whose job was to establish and strengthen churches, to avoid foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and useless (Titus 3:9-11).
Where does our insatiable desire to make everything complicated come from? If the way of true righteousness and joy is so simple, why don’t we just follow it? I think the answers to these questions are closely linked. Complicated ideas or ‘secret knowledge’ that only a select few understand appeal directly to our pride. By contrast, obeying a simple but difficult message humbles us, as we so frequently fall short of full obedience.
The pride of the unbeliever is boosted by intellectual arguments against God – they are too intelligent to be duped into believing the ‘foolishness’ of the gospel message. Yet even among believers, the issue of pride continues to stalk us. The Lord might have humbled us when we first repented and believed, but now our pet doctrine, special knowledge of the Bible, or clever interpretations of prophecy make us proud. We know things that other people don’t – just look at all those foolish people over there who haven’t figured it out yet!
Just as Satan used craftiness to deceive Eve into believing that she could be ‘wise’, false prophets and teachers exploit our weakness in this area to draw us away from the simplicity that is in Christ. Those spreading secular and political messages use the same tactics, because they work! In our modern world, we don’t even have to leave home to find people who will make us feel clever by revealing their secret knowledge to us and thus letting us into their exclusive club of enlightened people – they are just a click away on the Internet.
Since we engage with these people outside the traditional boundaries of the church, it is easier than ever for the false prophet or teacher to cover up any sins or lack of love towards people. They just have to deliver a message to a camera and perhaps a select live audience of their followers; no one joining online will know whether their lives reflect the character of Jesus Christ. Similarly, secular misinformation peddlers easily obscure their motives and character. We therefore face the same age-old temptations that Eve and the Corinthians encountered, but with a modern twist that plays into the hands of the ultimate tempter.
The danger that we face today is almost enough to make one want to switch off the WiFi altogether and go live in a nice little offline cave. Going offline for a bit might help in the short-term (like trying an Internet fast), but the Internet is part of the world that we live in today and is thus hard to avoid. Many of us use the Internet every day for work and cannot easily extract ourselves from social media and WhatsApp groups. The Internet also contains good things and opportunities to reach out to people we would otherwise not be able to contact. So if we keep using the Internet, how can we protect ourselves from getting sucked into these ‘enlightened’ clubs of online followers?
When it comes to Christian online content, I find that a useful first step is to put hard limits on the number of teachers you listen to. First prize is only to listen to people you know personally – like the pastor of a church you have attended, whose life you have had some time to observe. This is not fool proof, unfortunately, because people may change over time and if you are not in real fellowship with them then you may not be able to tell which way they are headed. Discernment must be applied to every teaching, even those delivered by people you trust – no one is infallible but God.
There are nonetheless opportunities on the Internet to find new ministries that might be difficult to find locally (e.g. apologetics ministries) and vast amounts of good information on secular topics of interest. If you venture out to look for these, be extra careful. If possible, get a second opinion on that teaching or ministry from another trusted source. If the information involves facts and figures, look them up using online fact-checking services. For Christian content, their use of scriptures must be checked carefully. Social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) rewards content producers that garner many followers, so exaggerating to make something seem shocking, even if it is not the main thrust of the message, is one way to increase your follower count. The first hint of exaggeration or misinformation should be a red flag – that person is gathering followers by exploiting our weakness to tell or to hear some new thing (Acts 17:21).
All of these practical tips may protect us from some of the more obvious online tricksters, but they can still fail. Our greatest defence is to return to the beauty of God’s simplicity that we knew when we first believed. One of the reasons why we are susceptible to these attacks is that we have a thirst for knowledge, yet God calls us to hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matt 5:6). Often we have enough knowledge in a situation to know what is the right thing to do – to forgive rather than hold a grudge, for example. More knowledge does not necessarily help us to do the right thing in God’s eyes.
This is not to say that following the Lord is to live without thinking. The intellectual atheist may think that believers operate without applying rational thought to their faith, but that is incorrect. God created our brains and minds and expects us to use them, especially by discerning between good and bad information. Logic and reason ultimately belong to God, after all. What the unbelieving Jews and Greeks did not understand, however, is that God’s simplicity (His ‘foolishness’) is wiser than men (1 Cor. 1:25).
The simple concepts of love, grace, joy and faith (to name a few) are like unfathomably deep wells. The person observing a well from the outside sees only the surface of the water. It is easy to measure the diameter of the surface and even take some water out to drink or wash. It takes no special skills to do so – even a child can do it. Yet if you dived into the well, you would realise that there is much more water down there than you could possibly have known if you had stayed at the top.
This is why children understand the message of the gospel – the idea of doing something wrong (sin), repenting and being forgiven for it, and then loving the one who forgave you is easy to grasp and simple to apply to your life. Yet after that first step is taken, God invites us to dive into the well and go deeper with Him, so that we can be immersed in love, grace, joy and faith, among others. Pursuing these simple, beautiful things is difficult, because we are still sinful people who want to occupy our lives and minds with easy, entertaining things. Yet if we set our minds on diving deeper into God, then the clever little theories and complicated intellectual ideas start to seem like unimportant trivia. When someone lets you in on some secret knowledge or shocking revelation, it won’t hold your interest because it is so clearly shallow and man-made when compared with the depth and beauty of God’s simple things.
Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men (1 Cor. 1:20-25).
It was not only simple, however, it was difficult. Starting from John the Baptist through to the end of Jesus’ ministry, God’s message was “repent, believe, love”. For the self-righteous Jews who thought they already knew who God was and had no desire to love the simple, sinful people around them, this was an extremely difficult message. What irked them even more was that this message could actually be found in the Old Testament – the very scriptures they took so much pride in knowing!
While the Jews spent hours creating new laws that made keeping God’s law ever more complicated, Jesus declared that the whole law could be reduced to two simple commandments – ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind’ and ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matt. 22:37-40). These were not new laws – He quoted the Old Testament when stating them – but they cut right to the heart. The scribes and Pharisees enjoyed intellectual arguments that covered up their lack of real devotion to the God they claimed to serve. The simplicity of the message cut right through their cleverly crafted ‘righteousness’ and revealed the depravity of their hearts.
The simple people who had not spent years studying the scriptures or crafting clever arguments responded differently. John the Baptist’s simple message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” attracted tax collectors and soldiers who received the message and asked what they ought to do to show true repentance (Luke 3:10-14). John’s answers were simple – in essence he told them to “go and sin no more”, just as Jesus told those who came to Him for help (John 5:14; 8:11).
Besides the Jews who contended with Jesus, there was another group of clever people around at that time in history – the Greek philosophers. Paul encountered this group in his time at Athens; they loved a good debate so much that they invited him to give a public lecture about what he believed (Acts 17:16-34). Yet it seems that very few of them came away from that lecture with anything more than a few interesting ideas to debate further.
In first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says that many Greeks could not receive the gospel because they thought it was ‘foolishness’ – i.e. far too simple to be worthy of their attention (1 Cor. 1:18-25). Unfortunately, it seems that many of the Corinthian believers reverted to their Greek mindset and tried to make their faith more complicated than the simple message that Paul first preached to them. He therefore warns them in his second letter: But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ (2 Cor. 11:3).
The simplicity of God’s message is thus contrasted sharply with the intellectual cleverness of man and Satan. Two thousand years later, nothing has changed. The message of the gospel remains the same and mankind is still trying to get away from this simple, difficult message by making things complicated. As it was then, the problem manifests itself both in unbelievers and believers today.
Unbelieving philosophers and scientists heap up intellectual arguments that are ever more complicated and difficult to follow to try and prove that there is no God. Even unbelievers that attend churches, and therefore admit that God exists, use complicated religious rites and ceremonies to make themselves feel righteous. These intellectual arguments and religious rules are ultimately an attempt to dodge the first part of the gospel: repent and believe.
Although Christians entered into the simplicity of the gospel when we first believed, the threat of our human intellects smothering the simple message remains. The command to love one another, from which flows joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23) is simple, but difficult. It is much easier to debate each other about obscure passages of scripture, or discuss politics and other earthly matters, than it is to love as Jesus did. Paul especially warned Titus, whose job was to establish and strengthen churches, to avoid foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and useless (Titus 3:9-11).
Where does our insatiable desire to make everything complicated come from? If the way of true righteousness and joy is so simple, why don’t we just follow it? I think the answers to these questions are closely linked. Complicated ideas or ‘secret knowledge’ that only a select few understand appeal directly to our pride. By contrast, obeying a simple but difficult message humbles us, as we so frequently fall short of full obedience.
The pride of the unbeliever is boosted by intellectual arguments against God – they are too intelligent to be duped into believing the ‘foolishness’ of the gospel message. Yet even among believers, the issue of pride continues to stalk us. The Lord might have humbled us when we first repented and believed, but now our pet doctrine, special knowledge of the Bible, or clever interpretations of prophecy make us proud. We know things that other people don’t – just look at all those foolish people over there who haven’t figured it out yet!
Just as Satan used craftiness to deceive Eve into believing that she could be ‘wise’, false prophets and teachers exploit our weakness in this area to draw us away from the simplicity that is in Christ. Those spreading secular and political messages use the same tactics, because they work! In our modern world, we don’t even have to leave home to find people who will make us feel clever by revealing their secret knowledge to us and thus letting us into their exclusive club of enlightened people – they are just a click away on the Internet.
Since we engage with these people outside the traditional boundaries of the church, it is easier than ever for the false prophet or teacher to cover up any sins or lack of love towards people. They just have to deliver a message to a camera and perhaps a select live audience of their followers; no one joining online will know whether their lives reflect the character of Jesus Christ. Similarly, secular misinformation peddlers easily obscure their motives and character. We therefore face the same age-old temptations that Eve and the Corinthians encountered, but with a modern twist that plays into the hands of the ultimate tempter.
The danger that we face today is almost enough to make one want to switch off the WiFi altogether and go live in a nice little offline cave. Going offline for a bit might help in the short-term (like trying an Internet fast), but the Internet is part of the world that we live in today and is thus hard to avoid. Many of us use the Internet every day for work and cannot easily extract ourselves from social media and WhatsApp groups. The Internet also contains good things and opportunities to reach out to people we would otherwise not be able to contact. So if we keep using the Internet, how can we protect ourselves from getting sucked into these ‘enlightened’ clubs of online followers?
When it comes to Christian online content, I find that a useful first step is to put hard limits on the number of teachers you listen to. First prize is only to listen to people you know personally – like the pastor of a church you have attended, whose life you have had some time to observe. This is not fool proof, unfortunately, because people may change over time and if you are not in real fellowship with them then you may not be able to tell which way they are headed. Discernment must be applied to every teaching, even those delivered by people you trust – no one is infallible but God.
There are nonetheless opportunities on the Internet to find new ministries that might be difficult to find locally (e.g. apologetics ministries) and vast amounts of good information on secular topics of interest. If you venture out to look for these, be extra careful. If possible, get a second opinion on that teaching or ministry from another trusted source. If the information involves facts and figures, look them up using online fact-checking services. For Christian content, their use of scriptures must be checked carefully. Social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) rewards content producers that garner many followers, so exaggerating to make something seem shocking, even if it is not the main thrust of the message, is one way to increase your follower count. The first hint of exaggeration or misinformation should be a red flag – that person is gathering followers by exploiting our weakness to tell or to hear some new thing (Acts 17:21).
All of these practical tips may protect us from some of the more obvious online tricksters, but they can still fail. Our greatest defence is to return to the beauty of God’s simplicity that we knew when we first believed. One of the reasons why we are susceptible to these attacks is that we have a thirst for knowledge, yet God calls us to hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matt 5:6). Often we have enough knowledge in a situation to know what is the right thing to do – to forgive rather than hold a grudge, for example. More knowledge does not necessarily help us to do the right thing in God’s eyes.
This is not to say that following the Lord is to live without thinking. The intellectual atheist may think that believers operate without applying rational thought to their faith, but that is incorrect. God created our brains and minds and expects us to use them, especially by discerning between good and bad information. Logic and reason ultimately belong to God, after all. What the unbelieving Jews and Greeks did not understand, however, is that God’s simplicity (His ‘foolishness’) is wiser than men (1 Cor. 1:25).
The simple concepts of love, grace, joy and faith (to name a few) are like unfathomably deep wells. The person observing a well from the outside sees only the surface of the water. It is easy to measure the diameter of the surface and even take some water out to drink or wash. It takes no special skills to do so – even a child can do it. Yet if you dived into the well, you would realise that there is much more water down there than you could possibly have known if you had stayed at the top.
This is why children understand the message of the gospel – the idea of doing something wrong (sin), repenting and being forgiven for it, and then loving the one who forgave you is easy to grasp and simple to apply to your life. Yet after that first step is taken, God invites us to dive into the well and go deeper with Him, so that we can be immersed in love, grace, joy and faith, among others. Pursuing these simple, beautiful things is difficult, because we are still sinful people who want to occupy our lives and minds with easy, entertaining things. Yet if we set our minds on diving deeper into God, then the clever little theories and complicated intellectual ideas start to seem like unimportant trivia. When someone lets you in on some secret knowledge or shocking revelation, it won’t hold your interest because it is so clearly shallow and man-made when compared with the depth and beauty of God’s simple things.
Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men (1 Cor. 1:20-25).
03 January, 2022
Being God’s Sheeple
Goats, especially hand-raised or tame ones, can be both infuriating and endearing. They are known for their cleverness and have a distinct rebellious streak – if they are aware of a rule (e.g. they must stay in the goat pen) they seem to spend a great deal of time trying to break it. Yet we often find their antics quite hilarious and their independent characters fascinating.
Sheep, on the other hand, are relatively uninteresting. Most breeds like to flock together and do what other sheep are doing. If all the sheep are staying in a pen where there is food and shelter, none of them will think of trying to escape. If they happen to get out accidentally, they try to get back to join their flock in the comforting pen. While they are easier to look after than goats, sheep are not exactly inspiring.
For these reasons, it is not surprising that many of us would prefer to be compared to goats rather than sheep. Being independently minded, strong-willed and possessing a mischievous or rebellious streak is admired in society. The goat nature is interesting and quirky, associated with daring adventure and creativity – doesn’t being a goat sound like fun? By contrast, the relatively new term ‘sheeple’ was coined as an insult to people who are perceived to follow the crowd because they are too dim-witted to think for themselves. The sheep nature is dumb and pathetic, associated with boring security and a lack of imagination – who wants to be a sheep?
As with many of society’s ideas and values, the Bible presents a very different idea of sheep and goats. In Jesus’ description of judgment day in Matthew 25:31-46, He calls the people who know and obey Him His sheep, while those who reject Him and His commands are described as goats. In many other places, Jesus refers to people as sheep and Himself as the Good Shepherd (e.g. John 10:1-6). This confirms a theme throughout the Bible, which includes the famous Psalm 23 where the author takes the place of a sheep that relies on the Lord as his Shepherd.
Of course, God knows the natures of sheep and goats, and He knows the nature of people too. Considering our natural aversion to the idea of being sheeple, could Jesus not have used other animals as metaphors for the saved and the lost? I believe that His choice was deliberate. Willingly seeing oneself as a sheep is one of the greatest hurdles for people who are considering Christianity, and the challenge does not end with salvation. Being a sheep means obeying the rules; it means submitting your thoughts to a greater Mind; it means giving up your own plans; it ultimately means surrendering your will and your life, thereby losing all independence and control. By choosing sheep as a metaphor for people, Jesus is laying down the same gauntlet that He describes as denying yourself, taking up your cross and following Him (Matt. 16:24).
The struggle that we face in deciding to become God’s sheeple is made more difficult by false ideas in society, which are ultimately seeded by Satan’s lies. When we see through those lies and lay hold of the truth, we finally understand that our struggle is both foolish and harmful.
The first set of lies all serve to glorify ‘goat-hood’ – being strong-willed and independent – as an admirable way of life. Yet the very idea of being independent is an illusion. Human beings have a free will, but this does not make us truly independent. We are still created beings who need everything else that God has created in order to survive. Even those who believe that there is no God still use the oxygen, water and food provided in His creation. By His grace, God makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust (Matt. 5:45). The lie of independence suggests that God’s gifts of free will and grace were somehow created by humans. If we truly were independent, we would be able to live by our will power alone without using anything external to us for survival. In reality, the self-styled ‘goats’ are really just lost sheep – just as dumb as any other sheep, only much more vulnerable because it is far from the Shepherd (Isaiah 53:6).
Being rebellious is also falsely glorified as being “strong-willed”. Boundaries of morality, ultimately set by God, are seen as unnecessarily suppressing our creativity and spoiling our fun. Since it is difficult to reconcile immorality with the other (false) belief that we are ‘good’ people, we either try to move the boundaries between good and evil to suit us, or pretend that these things don’t actually exist. Ultimately, we want to rebel against God and still gain the approval of man. The real lie behind rebellion is that it will give us something that God either cannot or does not want to give us – a truly fulfilling life. God’s rules are thus perceived as barriers towards such a life that must be cast away or circumvented in order to find ‘the good life’.
Sadly, there are many examples around us, particularly among the rich and famous, that show that living this kind of ‘good life’ is as illusory as true independence. I read and watched interviews of two world famous musicians recently that were tinged with sadness and regret that are all too common amongst celebrities. Ruined marriages and other fractious relationships, deep depression, utter loneliness, struggles with addiction and anxiety were common themes of these interviews. Honest biographies of many other actors, musicians and wealthy businesspeople are full of the same themes. The ‘good life’ that involves rebellion against God simply does not exist.
Another attraction of the rebellious ‘goat nature’ is the idea that you can be unique or different. I think this is why so many creative, highly talented people fall into this trap. Because their extraordinary talents set them apart from those around them, they are frequently misunderstood and lonely during their early years. Yet when their talent is ‘discovered’, they start to believe that they can make their own way in life on their own terms – they can cast off all restraints and blaze their own trails, both in terms of creativity and morality. This is why so many admire them – they seem to be so different; they stand out from the crowd. But a rebellious nature is far from unique. Indeed, it is a trait that all humans have in common. For all their talents and abilities, creative geniuses are still flawed human beings like the rest of us.
Thus we find that being a goat is not all that it is cracked up to be. What about being a sheep? Is it really so bad as we are led to believe? If we surrender our lives to God, just as Jesus describes, what do we really stand to lose? If we would believe what the world tells us, the price seems much too high. The price has been artificially inflated, however, through yet more lies.
The first is that depending entirely on God like a sheep is weak and pathetic. As we saw earlier with the myth of independence, we like to think that we are strong. Admitting the opposite is embarrassing and therefore to be avoided. But are we really strong? Compared with some other people, maybe, but compared with the God of the Universe we really are pathetically weak. Submitting to Him is simply acknowledging the reality that His strength is infinitely greater than ours. Submission to God further grants us access to a strength of spirit and character that is far beyond our natural reach, thus enabling us to endure absolutely anything that life can throw at us (2 Cor. 12:10). It turns out that God’s sheeple have a secret Source of strength that the goats do not know about.
The second lie about the sheep life is that it is boring and unimaginative. This grossly underestimates God’s creativity and is easily debunked through simple observation. Consider the diversity of form and function in nature – each landscape is different, inhabited by millions of different living things, and each of those things contains a unique blueprint within it (a.k.a. DNA). The same God that created our rich, diverse world that is populated by unique creatures wants to create a new life for you – do you think that He would make something unimaginative or boring? Our ideas and creativity are highly limited by experience and our mental capacity – God knows no such limits. If you need further proof, read biographies of Christians who committed themselves fully to God – George Müller, Hudson Taylor, Corrie ten Boom, Brother Andrew, and David Wilkerson, among many others. The lives of these sheeple were anything but boring and unimaginative!
Another misunderstanding that must be addressed is that becoming like Jesus will mean that we are no longer individuals in our own right. The distinction between Creator and created beings will remain forever in heaven, even after we become perfectly “like Him” (1 John 3:2). In heaven we will all be individually recognisable just as we are here on earth. We will nonetheless share a passionate love for God that extends to a perfect love for everyone else. Until that time, God is creating that kind of character within His sheep, using Jesus as the blueprint. This does not mean that He overlooks our uniqueness as individuals and makes us all exactly the same. As we found earlier, God is the ultimate reason for diversity in creation, and He is just as interested in maintaining diversity among His people (1 Cor. 12). Since He is the ultimate Source of the talents and creativity found in humans, is it not reasonable to think that He will further amplify these gifts when we submit them fully to Him?
Finally, obedience to God’s moral rules is falsely presented as a burdensome and dreary way to live. God’s sheeple are restricted in terms of what they can do – no drunken parties, no sexual immorality, no envious gossiping, no selfish ambitions, and no unclean behaviour of any kind (Gal. 5:19-21). According to society, such a life is no fun at all. Yet this is the path that leads to true fulfilment – the life characterised by love, joy, peace and the other wonderful fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23). These are the things that are lacking in the lives of those who have been deceived into thinking that a sinful life is somehow ‘the good life’. When they have finally had their fill of ‘fun’ they realise that none of it was real. All they have left is a few good memories and many painful regrets. By obeying their Shepherd, God’s sheeple are spared the regret and have glorious memories of His blessings in their lives.
The price of becoming one of God’s sheep is certainly not too high, while the rewards are unimaginably greater than we think they are. We simply cannot create a truly fulfilling life, whereby we maintain and grow beautiful relationships, fully develop all of our talents and come to experience real joy and peace, without God. The wonderful news is that not only can He fulfil our deepest desires, but that He actually wants to do so by drawing us into a relationship with Himself. Our Good Shepherd has made all of this possible by laying down His life for us. Are you willing to take up His offer and become one of God’s sheeple?
Sheep, on the other hand, are relatively uninteresting. Most breeds like to flock together and do what other sheep are doing. If all the sheep are staying in a pen where there is food and shelter, none of them will think of trying to escape. If they happen to get out accidentally, they try to get back to join their flock in the comforting pen. While they are easier to look after than goats, sheep are not exactly inspiring.
For these reasons, it is not surprising that many of us would prefer to be compared to goats rather than sheep. Being independently minded, strong-willed and possessing a mischievous or rebellious streak is admired in society. The goat nature is interesting and quirky, associated with daring adventure and creativity – doesn’t being a goat sound like fun? By contrast, the relatively new term ‘sheeple’ was coined as an insult to people who are perceived to follow the crowd because they are too dim-witted to think for themselves. The sheep nature is dumb and pathetic, associated with boring security and a lack of imagination – who wants to be a sheep?
As with many of society’s ideas and values, the Bible presents a very different idea of sheep and goats. In Jesus’ description of judgment day in Matthew 25:31-46, He calls the people who know and obey Him His sheep, while those who reject Him and His commands are described as goats. In many other places, Jesus refers to people as sheep and Himself as the Good Shepherd (e.g. John 10:1-6). This confirms a theme throughout the Bible, which includes the famous Psalm 23 where the author takes the place of a sheep that relies on the Lord as his Shepherd.
Of course, God knows the natures of sheep and goats, and He knows the nature of people too. Considering our natural aversion to the idea of being sheeple, could Jesus not have used other animals as metaphors for the saved and the lost? I believe that His choice was deliberate. Willingly seeing oneself as a sheep is one of the greatest hurdles for people who are considering Christianity, and the challenge does not end with salvation. Being a sheep means obeying the rules; it means submitting your thoughts to a greater Mind; it means giving up your own plans; it ultimately means surrendering your will and your life, thereby losing all independence and control. By choosing sheep as a metaphor for people, Jesus is laying down the same gauntlet that He describes as denying yourself, taking up your cross and following Him (Matt. 16:24).
The struggle that we face in deciding to become God’s sheeple is made more difficult by false ideas in society, which are ultimately seeded by Satan’s lies. When we see through those lies and lay hold of the truth, we finally understand that our struggle is both foolish and harmful.
The first set of lies all serve to glorify ‘goat-hood’ – being strong-willed and independent – as an admirable way of life. Yet the very idea of being independent is an illusion. Human beings have a free will, but this does not make us truly independent. We are still created beings who need everything else that God has created in order to survive. Even those who believe that there is no God still use the oxygen, water and food provided in His creation. By His grace, God makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust (Matt. 5:45). The lie of independence suggests that God’s gifts of free will and grace were somehow created by humans. If we truly were independent, we would be able to live by our will power alone without using anything external to us for survival. In reality, the self-styled ‘goats’ are really just lost sheep – just as dumb as any other sheep, only much more vulnerable because it is far from the Shepherd (Isaiah 53:6).
Being rebellious is also falsely glorified as being “strong-willed”. Boundaries of morality, ultimately set by God, are seen as unnecessarily suppressing our creativity and spoiling our fun. Since it is difficult to reconcile immorality with the other (false) belief that we are ‘good’ people, we either try to move the boundaries between good and evil to suit us, or pretend that these things don’t actually exist. Ultimately, we want to rebel against God and still gain the approval of man. The real lie behind rebellion is that it will give us something that God either cannot or does not want to give us – a truly fulfilling life. God’s rules are thus perceived as barriers towards such a life that must be cast away or circumvented in order to find ‘the good life’.
Sadly, there are many examples around us, particularly among the rich and famous, that show that living this kind of ‘good life’ is as illusory as true independence. I read and watched interviews of two world famous musicians recently that were tinged with sadness and regret that are all too common amongst celebrities. Ruined marriages and other fractious relationships, deep depression, utter loneliness, struggles with addiction and anxiety were common themes of these interviews. Honest biographies of many other actors, musicians and wealthy businesspeople are full of the same themes. The ‘good life’ that involves rebellion against God simply does not exist.
Another attraction of the rebellious ‘goat nature’ is the idea that you can be unique or different. I think this is why so many creative, highly talented people fall into this trap. Because their extraordinary talents set them apart from those around them, they are frequently misunderstood and lonely during their early years. Yet when their talent is ‘discovered’, they start to believe that they can make their own way in life on their own terms – they can cast off all restraints and blaze their own trails, both in terms of creativity and morality. This is why so many admire them – they seem to be so different; they stand out from the crowd. But a rebellious nature is far from unique. Indeed, it is a trait that all humans have in common. For all their talents and abilities, creative geniuses are still flawed human beings like the rest of us.
Thus we find that being a goat is not all that it is cracked up to be. What about being a sheep? Is it really so bad as we are led to believe? If we surrender our lives to God, just as Jesus describes, what do we really stand to lose? If we would believe what the world tells us, the price seems much too high. The price has been artificially inflated, however, through yet more lies.
The first is that depending entirely on God like a sheep is weak and pathetic. As we saw earlier with the myth of independence, we like to think that we are strong. Admitting the opposite is embarrassing and therefore to be avoided. But are we really strong? Compared with some other people, maybe, but compared with the God of the Universe we really are pathetically weak. Submitting to Him is simply acknowledging the reality that His strength is infinitely greater than ours. Submission to God further grants us access to a strength of spirit and character that is far beyond our natural reach, thus enabling us to endure absolutely anything that life can throw at us (2 Cor. 12:10). It turns out that God’s sheeple have a secret Source of strength that the goats do not know about.
The second lie about the sheep life is that it is boring and unimaginative. This grossly underestimates God’s creativity and is easily debunked through simple observation. Consider the diversity of form and function in nature – each landscape is different, inhabited by millions of different living things, and each of those things contains a unique blueprint within it (a.k.a. DNA). The same God that created our rich, diverse world that is populated by unique creatures wants to create a new life for you – do you think that He would make something unimaginative or boring? Our ideas and creativity are highly limited by experience and our mental capacity – God knows no such limits. If you need further proof, read biographies of Christians who committed themselves fully to God – George Müller, Hudson Taylor, Corrie ten Boom, Brother Andrew, and David Wilkerson, among many others. The lives of these sheeple were anything but boring and unimaginative!
Another misunderstanding that must be addressed is that becoming like Jesus will mean that we are no longer individuals in our own right. The distinction between Creator and created beings will remain forever in heaven, even after we become perfectly “like Him” (1 John 3:2). In heaven we will all be individually recognisable just as we are here on earth. We will nonetheless share a passionate love for God that extends to a perfect love for everyone else. Until that time, God is creating that kind of character within His sheep, using Jesus as the blueprint. This does not mean that He overlooks our uniqueness as individuals and makes us all exactly the same. As we found earlier, God is the ultimate reason for diversity in creation, and He is just as interested in maintaining diversity among His people (1 Cor. 12). Since He is the ultimate Source of the talents and creativity found in humans, is it not reasonable to think that He will further amplify these gifts when we submit them fully to Him?
Finally, obedience to God’s moral rules is falsely presented as a burdensome and dreary way to live. God’s sheeple are restricted in terms of what they can do – no drunken parties, no sexual immorality, no envious gossiping, no selfish ambitions, and no unclean behaviour of any kind (Gal. 5:19-21). According to society, such a life is no fun at all. Yet this is the path that leads to true fulfilment – the life characterised by love, joy, peace and the other wonderful fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23). These are the things that are lacking in the lives of those who have been deceived into thinking that a sinful life is somehow ‘the good life’. When they have finally had their fill of ‘fun’ they realise that none of it was real. All they have left is a few good memories and many painful regrets. By obeying their Shepherd, God’s sheeple are spared the regret and have glorious memories of His blessings in their lives.
The price of becoming one of God’s sheep is certainly not too high, while the rewards are unimaginably greater than we think they are. We simply cannot create a truly fulfilling life, whereby we maintain and grow beautiful relationships, fully develop all of our talents and come to experience real joy and peace, without God. The wonderful news is that not only can He fulfil our deepest desires, but that He actually wants to do so by drawing us into a relationship with Himself. Our Good Shepherd has made all of this possible by laying down His life for us. Are you willing to take up His offer and become one of God’s sheeple?
05 December, 2021
Oh, the Plans We Have Made!
A new variant of COVID, a new set of travel restrictions (for southern Africa), and a whole lot of plans dashed to pieces! Perhaps one of the more frustrating things about living through a pandemic is the fate of our carefully laid plans. I do not only mean the inconvenience of rescheduling flights and delaying various activities, as annoying as those are. Included in the plans that have been dashed these last few years are those made by the people who became ill or died during this time.
We all seem to love planning – we like to think about the future of our careers, where and how we will live, where we will go during the next holiday, and what we will do when we retire. When these carefully laid plans go awry, we feel frustrated, angry and disappointed – how dare this person/political system/disease interfere with all of our wonderful plans? The desire to plan ahead probably involves many motivations, but here I will focus on two particular, linked motivations: creating a sense of security and a sense of purpose for our lives.
Sadly, I have seen first-hand what happens when someone’s carefully laid plan was suddenly destroyed. A friend of mine worked faithfully his whole life, made wise financial decisions, and travelled all over South Africa before finding the perfect location for his retirement. With enough money to retire in reasonable comfort, he set about making his house self-sufficient by installing a solar system for electricity and collecting rainwater from his roof to meet his water needs (for those living in South Africa, getting off our unreliable grid is a dream). He then settled down to enjoy the fruits of his labour in quiet retirement.
That all changed dramatically due to a heart attack and subsequent open-heart surgery. Since the operation, his health has not recovered – he spent months in excruciating pain, lost so much weight as to be on the brink of starvation, and has suffered many other complications. His lovely little self-sufficient house stands empty, while he has gone from hospital to old-age home. In a moment, without warning, his life was turned upside down. He now wonders whether life is worth living at all.
This tragedy reminded me of a parable Jesus told: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?’ So he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?’ (Luke 12:16-20).
This parable was told about 2,000 years ago; this way of thinking is not new and it was just as prevalent among people then as it is now. I think that the Lord had two issues with the man in His parable: the purpose for which he saved his goods and his false sense of security. The man’s reasoning behind storing his goods was so that he could live a life of ease and pleasure, which he felt had been secured through his well-laid plans. In the parable, the man died that night and his plans came to naught. Jesus pointed out that his security was an illusion and his purposes were ultimately in vain.
Our plans are not only for retirement, however, as we also plan where to go and what to do with our time (particularly holiday time) on a short-term basis. Yet many of these plans have the same weaknesses as our long-term plans – they give us a false sense of security and an illusion of purpose. The security comes from the idea that we are controlling our own destinies – we plan a holiday, event, or career choice, and then expect to follow through with them. When the plans do work out, we feel satisfied – we are the captains of our own ships, and the ship is going in the right direction. Without plans to execute, our lives would feel rudderless and helpless, yet when our plans come to fruition we feel like we are in control.
James treats these short-term plans in a similar way to how Jesus treated long-term plans: Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
Desires for security and purpose are essential human characteristics, and are among the many things that set us apart from animals. This is why we get so upset when our short-term plans disintegrate and are devastated when our long-term plans collapse – the illusion of security and purpose that we have so carefully crafted evaporates and we are left with stark reality. A reality that King Solomon eloquently described as vanity of vanities, all is vanity (Eccl. 1:2).
As with many things that exist within the human psyche, there is a very good reason for these burning desires. Rather than deluding ourselves into thinking that we are living secure, purposeful lives, we need to seek out why we have these desires in the first place and then fulfil them with something real and true. The entire Book of Ecclesiastes is a rich description of the search for purpose, as Solomon examines each possible reason for living and declares them all to be ‘vanity’, until the final few verses where he concludes:
Fear God and keep His commandments, For this is man's all. For God will bring every work into judgment, Including every secret thing, Whether good or evil. (Eccl. 12:13-14).
Once we have found our true purpose as created beings to live in reverent obedience to our Creator, then we will find the other thing that we seek – security. This security is not just for this life, and sometimes our lives on earth will continue to seem insecure despite having a relationship with God (I still don’t even know which country I will be living in during 2022!). The security we receive from the Lord is far greater than that. Regardless of what happens in this life – whether our short- or long-term plans work out – we will be with Him for eternity.
With true purpose and security comes God’s peace that surpasses all understanding (Phil. 4:6-7). This is the peace that stays with us even when our plans are turned upside down and our lives seem to be chaotic and unsettled. Living with the sole purpose of obeying God and with a child-like trust in Him puts all of our current anxieties and problems into a new perspective. Flights cancelled? Perhaps the Lord wants me to stay where I am for now. Lost my job? God will provide in His own way. Health difficulties? Let Him lead me through the suffering and grow my faith. Relationship problems? I am in God’s school of instruction where He teaches me how to love.
This is not to say that all planning is evil and that we should have no desire at all to do things and go places. In his travels, Paul frequently made plans to go from one city to another to preach the gospel and strengthen the churches he had established. Yet these plans were often thwarted. In one example, he says that he frequently planned to visit the church in Rome, yet these plans were always hindered (Rom. 1:13-15). When he did get to Rome, it was certainly not “according to plan” – he was taken prisoner in Jerusalem, evaded several murder attempts, narrowly survived a shipwreck, and was finally brought to Rome in chains. I doubt whether anyone whose travel plans have been dashed due to COVID-19 would be willing to compare their inconveniences with Paul!
Paul’s decision to live only for God’s purpose and leave his security in God’s hands did not result in all his plans working out or an easy, pleasurable life. Yet what he gained instead of ease and pleasure was far more valuable – joy and contentment (Phil. 4:4-13). When he approached the end of his life, he described it thus: I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing. (2 Tim. 4:7). Paul had found a true purpose for living and was absolutely secure in the knowledge that the Lord would reward him in eternity.
I don’t think any of us will get to the end of our lives and reflect that everything went perfectly according to plan. Most of us will come to the end before we have finished doing everything we wanted to do. Many will feel pangs of regret after realising that their life was ultimately purposeless, or experience the chilling horror of insecurity when faced with death. Yet Paul shows us that this ending is not inevitable. Life can have real meaning and death can be met with confidence, provided that we find our ultimate purpose and security in Jesus Christ.
We all seem to love planning – we like to think about the future of our careers, where and how we will live, where we will go during the next holiday, and what we will do when we retire. When these carefully laid plans go awry, we feel frustrated, angry and disappointed – how dare this person/political system/disease interfere with all of our wonderful plans? The desire to plan ahead probably involves many motivations, but here I will focus on two particular, linked motivations: creating a sense of security and a sense of purpose for our lives.
Sadly, I have seen first-hand what happens when someone’s carefully laid plan was suddenly destroyed. A friend of mine worked faithfully his whole life, made wise financial decisions, and travelled all over South Africa before finding the perfect location for his retirement. With enough money to retire in reasonable comfort, he set about making his house self-sufficient by installing a solar system for electricity and collecting rainwater from his roof to meet his water needs (for those living in South Africa, getting off our unreliable grid is a dream). He then settled down to enjoy the fruits of his labour in quiet retirement.
That all changed dramatically due to a heart attack and subsequent open-heart surgery. Since the operation, his health has not recovered – he spent months in excruciating pain, lost so much weight as to be on the brink of starvation, and has suffered many other complications. His lovely little self-sufficient house stands empty, while he has gone from hospital to old-age home. In a moment, without warning, his life was turned upside down. He now wonders whether life is worth living at all.
This tragedy reminded me of a parable Jesus told: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?’ So he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?’ (Luke 12:16-20).
This parable was told about 2,000 years ago; this way of thinking is not new and it was just as prevalent among people then as it is now. I think that the Lord had two issues with the man in His parable: the purpose for which he saved his goods and his false sense of security. The man’s reasoning behind storing his goods was so that he could live a life of ease and pleasure, which he felt had been secured through his well-laid plans. In the parable, the man died that night and his plans came to naught. Jesus pointed out that his security was an illusion and his purposes were ultimately in vain.
Our plans are not only for retirement, however, as we also plan where to go and what to do with our time (particularly holiday time) on a short-term basis. Yet many of these plans have the same weaknesses as our long-term plans – they give us a false sense of security and an illusion of purpose. The security comes from the idea that we are controlling our own destinies – we plan a holiday, event, or career choice, and then expect to follow through with them. When the plans do work out, we feel satisfied – we are the captains of our own ships, and the ship is going in the right direction. Without plans to execute, our lives would feel rudderless and helpless, yet when our plans come to fruition we feel like we are in control.
James treats these short-term plans in a similar way to how Jesus treated long-term plans: Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
Desires for security and purpose are essential human characteristics, and are among the many things that set us apart from animals. This is why we get so upset when our short-term plans disintegrate and are devastated when our long-term plans collapse – the illusion of security and purpose that we have so carefully crafted evaporates and we are left with stark reality. A reality that King Solomon eloquently described as vanity of vanities, all is vanity (Eccl. 1:2).
As with many things that exist within the human psyche, there is a very good reason for these burning desires. Rather than deluding ourselves into thinking that we are living secure, purposeful lives, we need to seek out why we have these desires in the first place and then fulfil them with something real and true. The entire Book of Ecclesiastes is a rich description of the search for purpose, as Solomon examines each possible reason for living and declares them all to be ‘vanity’, until the final few verses where he concludes:
Fear God and keep His commandments, For this is man's all. For God will bring every work into judgment, Including every secret thing, Whether good or evil. (Eccl. 12:13-14).
Once we have found our true purpose as created beings to live in reverent obedience to our Creator, then we will find the other thing that we seek – security. This security is not just for this life, and sometimes our lives on earth will continue to seem insecure despite having a relationship with God (I still don’t even know which country I will be living in during 2022!). The security we receive from the Lord is far greater than that. Regardless of what happens in this life – whether our short- or long-term plans work out – we will be with Him for eternity.
With true purpose and security comes God’s peace that surpasses all understanding (Phil. 4:6-7). This is the peace that stays with us even when our plans are turned upside down and our lives seem to be chaotic and unsettled. Living with the sole purpose of obeying God and with a child-like trust in Him puts all of our current anxieties and problems into a new perspective. Flights cancelled? Perhaps the Lord wants me to stay where I am for now. Lost my job? God will provide in His own way. Health difficulties? Let Him lead me through the suffering and grow my faith. Relationship problems? I am in God’s school of instruction where He teaches me how to love.
This is not to say that all planning is evil and that we should have no desire at all to do things and go places. In his travels, Paul frequently made plans to go from one city to another to preach the gospel and strengthen the churches he had established. Yet these plans were often thwarted. In one example, he says that he frequently planned to visit the church in Rome, yet these plans were always hindered (Rom. 1:13-15). When he did get to Rome, it was certainly not “according to plan” – he was taken prisoner in Jerusalem, evaded several murder attempts, narrowly survived a shipwreck, and was finally brought to Rome in chains. I doubt whether anyone whose travel plans have been dashed due to COVID-19 would be willing to compare their inconveniences with Paul!
Paul’s decision to live only for God’s purpose and leave his security in God’s hands did not result in all his plans working out or an easy, pleasurable life. Yet what he gained instead of ease and pleasure was far more valuable – joy and contentment (Phil. 4:4-13). When he approached the end of his life, he described it thus: I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing. (2 Tim. 4:7). Paul had found a true purpose for living and was absolutely secure in the knowledge that the Lord would reward him in eternity.
I don’t think any of us will get to the end of our lives and reflect that everything went perfectly according to plan. Most of us will come to the end before we have finished doing everything we wanted to do. Many will feel pangs of regret after realising that their life was ultimately purposeless, or experience the chilling horror of insecurity when faced with death. Yet Paul shows us that this ending is not inevitable. Life can have real meaning and death can be met with confidence, provided that we find our ultimate purpose and security in Jesus Christ.
03 October, 2021
Beware the Trap of Loving Yourself
Self-esteem, self-love, self-confidence, self-compassion, among other positive self- concepts, have become immensely popular in the last few decades. It takes less than half an hour of scrolling through social media before one comes across a message that promotes one or more of these ideas. We are reminded daily to take care of ourselves (especially our mental health), drop friends who don’t nourish our sense of self, and overlook any flaws or failings we might have.
There are so many self-related concepts that have been defined by psychologists that I will not go into each one of them here, so I will use only three examples to make a bigger point. The first of these is a positive self-image, which means that you think you are attractive, smart, healthy, and fun to be around, among other things. The second is self-love, whereby you see yourself as basically a good person, who is worthy of love and forgiveness. Once you love yourself, the theory goes, you are more able to love others. My final example is self-esteem, meaning that you are not afraid to ‘be yourself’ or ‘believe in yourself’ to get through life’s challenges.
Each of these supposedly good things has a flip side. Having a negative self-image is to focus on every flaw (physical or otherwise) we think we have and amplify them in our minds. If you don’t love yourself, then you blame yourself for everything and cannot stop thinking about any of the evil deeds you committed in the past. Having a low self-esteem means that we don’t think we are capable of dealing with life and therefore become afraid to try new things or ‘be ourselves’ in front of others, in case they don’t like what they see.
All of the things above describe human emotions and states of mind, so it is not surprising if you see yourself in detailed descriptions of these concepts. Living on the ‘positive’ side of these definitions undoubtedly feels good – you feel like you are winning in life. While living on the negative side feels bad, often driving you to find help. There is a fatal flaw in defining our problems this way, however, and that flaw leads to trying to find solutions in all the wrong places. These vain efforts to fix ourselves are a classic example of the way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death (Prov. 14:12).
The first problem with self-related concepts is that they are, by definition, preoccupied with self. Trying to figure out if you have a positive or negative self-image, for example, requires introspection. You have to be actively conscious of what you’re feeling, why you’re feeling that way, and (if it is negative) what steps you should take to rectify it. Spending time contemplating or deconstructing reasons why you don’t like the way you look, don’t forgive yourself for past transgressions, or don’t think you are capable is by its nature a self-centred act. Furthermore, most of the solutions proposed to fix the identified issues are fundamentally atheistic – for example, the advice to ‘forgive yourself’ for your own mistakes assumes that there is no God of whom you need to ask forgiveness.
Compare this deep introspection with the way Jesus talks about ‘loving yourself’ in this famous passage: ‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these (Mark 12:30-31). Right at the end He says ‘as yourself’ – the fact that you love yourself is taken for granted. It is not an act He commands us to do (as with loving God and others), but something He simply assumes we do already. No dissection of what that means, or how to do it, just an implication that telling us how to do it is unnecessary.
In contrast to the self-centred ideas championed by the world, the entire focus of the Bible is God. It is the story of His creative power, His great love, His compassion on human beings, His plan for salvation and His glory in eternity. Humans are characters in the story, as God worked through humans and communicated with them in various ways, but the focus is ultimately on Him. Similarly, the people in the Bible who experienced God’s presence most fully did not come away with a greater appreciation of themselves, but quite the opposite.
In most of the Book of Job, we have Job’s friends trying to analyse his situation and the causes for it, while Job wallows in self-pity. Finally, God comes to set the record straight (Job 38-41). In these passages God says almost nothing about Job’s situation, his state of mind, or even what he could do to feel better. Instead, God declares who He is – His power, His pre-eminence, His glory and strength, all as they are revealed in creation. Job was so busy introspecting that he did not take the time to appreciate the sheer majesty and glory of God. He was too self-obsessed. When Job gets this new perspective from the Lord, he responds immediately:
“I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:5-6)
This change in Job’s understanding of himself relative to God was one of the lessons God wanted to teach him from the beginning. Yet you will rarely hear anyone these days teach you to abhor yourself!
Similarly, David understood where mankind fits into the equation relative to the Almighty God, as explained in this wonderful Psalm:
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honour.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet
(Psalm 8:3-6, emphasis mine)
Human beings have an important place in the order of creation purely because God made that place for us. This thought struck David with abject wonder – when he contemplated the vastness of the universe, he could not wrap his head around why God would bother with such specks of insignificance as us. Herein is an important lesson: our value as human beings only exists because God bestowed it on us. Without His decision to make us in His image and place us above the rest of His creation, we are absolutely valueless (Isaiah 40:17). It is ironic, then, that atheistic solutions to human problems emphasise our ‘value as human beings’ without any logical grounding for that value.
If we are merely advanced apes clinging onto the third rock from the sun while our solar system hurtles through a universe that has no creator or meaning, then what makes each human life valuable? If the universe came from nothing, for no reason, then we have no more reason to be alive than an ant, and are possibly of even less value than they are for this earth (indeed, many who think this way advocate fiercely for fewer people on earth, while putting great value on insects as critical parts of the global ecosystem).
When God is absent from our thinking, the only way we can place value on ourselves is through comparison with other humans. The idea that we are ‘good people’ is really just a statement that we are better people than some others out there. Being attractive, smart, or ‘fun’ is also relative – we must be better in these ways than others that we know in order to attract people to form relationships with us. We must be more capable than others around us to get a promotion at work. The competition is endless, and often ruthless.
Mankind has found ways to compete more effectively, or to cope when we are outcompeted, since the dawn of time. Envy is what caused Cain to kill Abel, and competition breeds envy (James 3:13-18). In more recent generations, the focus seems to have shifted towards coping, particularly for those who don’t have that ‘winning feeling’ and believe that they are less attractive, worthy, or capable than other people. The current coping mechanism seems to be to play mental games with yourself – to tell yourself frequently that you are all the things you don’t feel that you are, despite any evidence to the contrary. Parts of our culture seem to be shifting away from ruthless competition and towards pretending that everyone is really the same – that there are no differences in our talents or abilities and that we are all equally capable of everything.
Whether we are competing successfully or barely coping, we are still trying to find our solutions within ourselves, or at least blame others for the way we are. Another popular mental game is to review your life to figure out who or what caused any of the weaknesses in your character – your relatives, circumstances, the culture around you, etc. – so that you no longer need to be held accountable for those issues. If you are not really to blame for anything, then you can easily ‘forgive yourself’, convince yourself that you really are a good/successful/capable person after all, and thus make your life better. Or so they say.
Trying to boost your self-image either by comparing yourself favourably with others, or blaming others for producing any flaws in your character, or trying to trick yourself into thinking that your flaws do not exist anyway all lead down the wrong path. These options are ultimately derived from placing some sort of value upon ourselves that is entirely subjective and relative. God’s way is that we stop valuing ourselves altogether. When you consider yourself to be absolutely nothing without God, then it makes no sense to wonder whether someone else is more or less than your nothing (2 Cor. 12:11; 1 Cor. 13:2). Viewing yourself as nothing thus sets you free from all comparisons with others.
As we have seen already, God’s way of dealing with the human condition is in direct contradiction to the solutions we have come up with on our own. Although God has placed value upon us by making us in His image, and then paying the highest price in the universe to redeem us (the blood of His Son Jesus Christ), He has a far more realistic view of us than we conjure up for ourselves. For a start, He declares that there is no such thing as a ‘good person’:
The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men,
To see if there are any who understand, who seek God.
They have all turned aside, they have together become corrupt;
There is none who does good, no, not one.
(Psalm 14:2-3)
Paul adopted God’s view of himself: For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. (Rom. 7:18). Human beings have fallen so far from God’s original creation that there is nothing within us that can be described as good. Isaiah describes it aptly: But we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags (Is. 64:6a). God’s estimation of our current state is that we are evil and even the supposedly good things that we do come from evil intent.
Nowhere in the Bible will you find that the solution to this evil is to forgive yourself or love yourself. David describes our real situation accurately in Psalm 51:3-4 – For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight – That You may be found just when You speak, and blameless when You judge. The forgiveness we need comes from the One we have sinned against – God Himself. This is another example of how our definitions of the problems we have and the way we ought to solve them actually lead us away from the truth. It is a lie to tell ourselves that we are basically good people, and it is a lie to believe that forgiving ourselves or loving ourselves more is going to make anything better. The ultimate consequence of believing such lies is to miss the real solution to the problems we have, which is to follow David’s example of repentance before God.
Finally, we think that self-esteem will give us the confidence to be successful in life. Yet the very concept of esteeming oneself flies in the face of God’s commands to mankind throughout the Bible. Thinking that you are capable and independent is another form of pride, and we know from the Bible that “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” (James 4:6). Self-confidence is given the same treatment: A wise man fears and departs from evil, but a fool rages and is self-confident (Prov. 14:16). Instead, God calls us to become entirely dependent on Him for every need and to look to Him as a small child looks to its father (Matt. 6:25-34; Mark 10:15). In God’s kingdom, meekness and humility are real virtues, not pride and self-sufficiency.
Unlike the many positive images of self that we are told we need to nurture, the Bible commands two key things about self – control and denial. Self-control is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23) and one of the conditions for church leadership (Titus 1:7-8). Self-denial is a key condition to becoming a follower of Jesus Christ (Matt. 16:24). Far from telling us to analyse our feelings, focus on our problems, and fix them through a process of introspection and self-glorification, the Bible presents us with the only true solution – focus on God and die to self.
This doesn’t sound like very good advice from a worldly perspective, wherein we are all competing to ultimately promote ourselves, but this really is the solution to the many mental and emotional challenges we face. If you are truly dead to the world, then nothing that anyone says to you will ever upset or offend you. A corpse cannot be offended. Whether someone is more attractive, nicer, or more successful than you are will have no meaning – you are nothing anyway. Your reputation is no longer of any significance, and your self-worth can never be devalued, because your self-assessed value is set at zero anyway.
Yet in this death comes life. And love. Not the self-centred love that you have to conjure up within yourself, but the true, glorious self-sacrificial love of God. God’s definition of love is self-sacrifice: Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends (John 15:13; see also 1 Cor. 13). He sacrificed Himself for us, and the only correct response to such love is to sacrifice ourselves for Him in return. When you are absolutely bent on serving God with every talent He has given you, with every breath and with every thought, then you will no longer even think about your self-worth or esteem. These things will become entirely irrelevant to you. Instead, sacrificing yourself for Him becomes your greatest joy and reason for living, knowing that your love is a tiny fraction of the love He has for you (1 John 4:19). The world’s message to love yourself is a lie and a trap to keep you from your ultimate purpose – loving God.
There are so many self-related concepts that have been defined by psychologists that I will not go into each one of them here, so I will use only three examples to make a bigger point. The first of these is a positive self-image, which means that you think you are attractive, smart, healthy, and fun to be around, among other things. The second is self-love, whereby you see yourself as basically a good person, who is worthy of love and forgiveness. Once you love yourself, the theory goes, you are more able to love others. My final example is self-esteem, meaning that you are not afraid to ‘be yourself’ or ‘believe in yourself’ to get through life’s challenges.
Each of these supposedly good things has a flip side. Having a negative self-image is to focus on every flaw (physical or otherwise) we think we have and amplify them in our minds. If you don’t love yourself, then you blame yourself for everything and cannot stop thinking about any of the evil deeds you committed in the past. Having a low self-esteem means that we don’t think we are capable of dealing with life and therefore become afraid to try new things or ‘be ourselves’ in front of others, in case they don’t like what they see.
All of the things above describe human emotions and states of mind, so it is not surprising if you see yourself in detailed descriptions of these concepts. Living on the ‘positive’ side of these definitions undoubtedly feels good – you feel like you are winning in life. While living on the negative side feels bad, often driving you to find help. There is a fatal flaw in defining our problems this way, however, and that flaw leads to trying to find solutions in all the wrong places. These vain efforts to fix ourselves are a classic example of the way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death (Prov. 14:12).
The first problem with self-related concepts is that they are, by definition, preoccupied with self. Trying to figure out if you have a positive or negative self-image, for example, requires introspection. You have to be actively conscious of what you’re feeling, why you’re feeling that way, and (if it is negative) what steps you should take to rectify it. Spending time contemplating or deconstructing reasons why you don’t like the way you look, don’t forgive yourself for past transgressions, or don’t think you are capable is by its nature a self-centred act. Furthermore, most of the solutions proposed to fix the identified issues are fundamentally atheistic – for example, the advice to ‘forgive yourself’ for your own mistakes assumes that there is no God of whom you need to ask forgiveness.
Compare this deep introspection with the way Jesus talks about ‘loving yourself’ in this famous passage: ‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these (Mark 12:30-31). Right at the end He says ‘as yourself’ – the fact that you love yourself is taken for granted. It is not an act He commands us to do (as with loving God and others), but something He simply assumes we do already. No dissection of what that means, or how to do it, just an implication that telling us how to do it is unnecessary.
In contrast to the self-centred ideas championed by the world, the entire focus of the Bible is God. It is the story of His creative power, His great love, His compassion on human beings, His plan for salvation and His glory in eternity. Humans are characters in the story, as God worked through humans and communicated with them in various ways, but the focus is ultimately on Him. Similarly, the people in the Bible who experienced God’s presence most fully did not come away with a greater appreciation of themselves, but quite the opposite.
In most of the Book of Job, we have Job’s friends trying to analyse his situation and the causes for it, while Job wallows in self-pity. Finally, God comes to set the record straight (Job 38-41). In these passages God says almost nothing about Job’s situation, his state of mind, or even what he could do to feel better. Instead, God declares who He is – His power, His pre-eminence, His glory and strength, all as they are revealed in creation. Job was so busy introspecting that he did not take the time to appreciate the sheer majesty and glory of God. He was too self-obsessed. When Job gets this new perspective from the Lord, he responds immediately:
“I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:5-6)
This change in Job’s understanding of himself relative to God was one of the lessons God wanted to teach him from the beginning. Yet you will rarely hear anyone these days teach you to abhor yourself!
Similarly, David understood where mankind fits into the equation relative to the Almighty God, as explained in this wonderful Psalm:
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honour.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet
(Psalm 8:3-6, emphasis mine)
Human beings have an important place in the order of creation purely because God made that place for us. This thought struck David with abject wonder – when he contemplated the vastness of the universe, he could not wrap his head around why God would bother with such specks of insignificance as us. Herein is an important lesson: our value as human beings only exists because God bestowed it on us. Without His decision to make us in His image and place us above the rest of His creation, we are absolutely valueless (Isaiah 40:17). It is ironic, then, that atheistic solutions to human problems emphasise our ‘value as human beings’ without any logical grounding for that value.
If we are merely advanced apes clinging onto the third rock from the sun while our solar system hurtles through a universe that has no creator or meaning, then what makes each human life valuable? If the universe came from nothing, for no reason, then we have no more reason to be alive than an ant, and are possibly of even less value than they are for this earth (indeed, many who think this way advocate fiercely for fewer people on earth, while putting great value on insects as critical parts of the global ecosystem).
When God is absent from our thinking, the only way we can place value on ourselves is through comparison with other humans. The idea that we are ‘good people’ is really just a statement that we are better people than some others out there. Being attractive, smart, or ‘fun’ is also relative – we must be better in these ways than others that we know in order to attract people to form relationships with us. We must be more capable than others around us to get a promotion at work. The competition is endless, and often ruthless.
Mankind has found ways to compete more effectively, or to cope when we are outcompeted, since the dawn of time. Envy is what caused Cain to kill Abel, and competition breeds envy (James 3:13-18). In more recent generations, the focus seems to have shifted towards coping, particularly for those who don’t have that ‘winning feeling’ and believe that they are less attractive, worthy, or capable than other people. The current coping mechanism seems to be to play mental games with yourself – to tell yourself frequently that you are all the things you don’t feel that you are, despite any evidence to the contrary. Parts of our culture seem to be shifting away from ruthless competition and towards pretending that everyone is really the same – that there are no differences in our talents or abilities and that we are all equally capable of everything.
Whether we are competing successfully or barely coping, we are still trying to find our solutions within ourselves, or at least blame others for the way we are. Another popular mental game is to review your life to figure out who or what caused any of the weaknesses in your character – your relatives, circumstances, the culture around you, etc. – so that you no longer need to be held accountable for those issues. If you are not really to blame for anything, then you can easily ‘forgive yourself’, convince yourself that you really are a good/successful/capable person after all, and thus make your life better. Or so they say.
Trying to boost your self-image either by comparing yourself favourably with others, or blaming others for producing any flaws in your character, or trying to trick yourself into thinking that your flaws do not exist anyway all lead down the wrong path. These options are ultimately derived from placing some sort of value upon ourselves that is entirely subjective and relative. God’s way is that we stop valuing ourselves altogether. When you consider yourself to be absolutely nothing without God, then it makes no sense to wonder whether someone else is more or less than your nothing (2 Cor. 12:11; 1 Cor. 13:2). Viewing yourself as nothing thus sets you free from all comparisons with others.
As we have seen already, God’s way of dealing with the human condition is in direct contradiction to the solutions we have come up with on our own. Although God has placed value upon us by making us in His image, and then paying the highest price in the universe to redeem us (the blood of His Son Jesus Christ), He has a far more realistic view of us than we conjure up for ourselves. For a start, He declares that there is no such thing as a ‘good person’:
The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men,
To see if there are any who understand, who seek God.
They have all turned aside, they have together become corrupt;
There is none who does good, no, not one.
(Psalm 14:2-3)
Paul adopted God’s view of himself: For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. (Rom. 7:18). Human beings have fallen so far from God’s original creation that there is nothing within us that can be described as good. Isaiah describes it aptly: But we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags (Is. 64:6a). God’s estimation of our current state is that we are evil and even the supposedly good things that we do come from evil intent.
Nowhere in the Bible will you find that the solution to this evil is to forgive yourself or love yourself. David describes our real situation accurately in Psalm 51:3-4 – For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight – That You may be found just when You speak, and blameless when You judge. The forgiveness we need comes from the One we have sinned against – God Himself. This is another example of how our definitions of the problems we have and the way we ought to solve them actually lead us away from the truth. It is a lie to tell ourselves that we are basically good people, and it is a lie to believe that forgiving ourselves or loving ourselves more is going to make anything better. The ultimate consequence of believing such lies is to miss the real solution to the problems we have, which is to follow David’s example of repentance before God.
Finally, we think that self-esteem will give us the confidence to be successful in life. Yet the very concept of esteeming oneself flies in the face of God’s commands to mankind throughout the Bible. Thinking that you are capable and independent is another form of pride, and we know from the Bible that “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” (James 4:6). Self-confidence is given the same treatment: A wise man fears and departs from evil, but a fool rages and is self-confident (Prov. 14:16). Instead, God calls us to become entirely dependent on Him for every need and to look to Him as a small child looks to its father (Matt. 6:25-34; Mark 10:15). In God’s kingdom, meekness and humility are real virtues, not pride and self-sufficiency.
Unlike the many positive images of self that we are told we need to nurture, the Bible commands two key things about self – control and denial. Self-control is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23) and one of the conditions for church leadership (Titus 1:7-8). Self-denial is a key condition to becoming a follower of Jesus Christ (Matt. 16:24). Far from telling us to analyse our feelings, focus on our problems, and fix them through a process of introspection and self-glorification, the Bible presents us with the only true solution – focus on God and die to self.
This doesn’t sound like very good advice from a worldly perspective, wherein we are all competing to ultimately promote ourselves, but this really is the solution to the many mental and emotional challenges we face. If you are truly dead to the world, then nothing that anyone says to you will ever upset or offend you. A corpse cannot be offended. Whether someone is more attractive, nicer, or more successful than you are will have no meaning – you are nothing anyway. Your reputation is no longer of any significance, and your self-worth can never be devalued, because your self-assessed value is set at zero anyway.
Yet in this death comes life. And love. Not the self-centred love that you have to conjure up within yourself, but the true, glorious self-sacrificial love of God. God’s definition of love is self-sacrifice: Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends (John 15:13; see also 1 Cor. 13). He sacrificed Himself for us, and the only correct response to such love is to sacrifice ourselves for Him in return. When you are absolutely bent on serving God with every talent He has given you, with every breath and with every thought, then you will no longer even think about your self-worth or esteem. These things will become entirely irrelevant to you. Instead, sacrificing yourself for Him becomes your greatest joy and reason for living, knowing that your love is a tiny fraction of the love He has for you (1 John 4:19). The world’s message to love yourself is a lie and a trap to keep you from your ultimate purpose – loving God.
08 August, 2021
Finding Peace in Tumultuous Times
The world seems to be falling apart at the seams. The COVID pandemic has exacerbated many underlying tensions throughout the world and brought social divisions, even within households. In South Africa, this was compounded by political unrest that shook an already too-violent country with yet more violence. According to one estimate, 342 people were killed in South Africa in just three days, making these the bloodiest days of our democratic history.
Now more than ever, we need peace. Since our world became a global village, such that we know about wars and unrest on the other side of the world, everyone has been crying out for ‘world peace’ among nations. But the recent upheaval caused by COVID has intensified the need for peace on other levels – inner peace and peace with the people around you. Not only are the nations fighting each other over vaccines and travel restrictions, but friends and even families are deeply divided over COVID-related issues. Meanwhile, the isolation and stress are causing increasing mental health issues. We seem to be in a near perpetual state of war – with each other and with ourselves.
First, let’s get the concept of ‘world peace’ out of the way. The nations of the world have rejected God (Psalm 2) and as a result they will not have real peace. Any version of peace without complete surrender to God and obedience to His will is a false peace that cannot last. In the Old Testament, when God was just about to judge Israel by sending them into captivity for their rebellion against Him, there were many false prophets who told them not to worry. They were crying out “Peace, Peace!” rather than telling people to repent over their sin (Jer. 8:11; Ezek. 13:10). Yet God’s real prophets, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, were saying the opposite: “There is no peace,” Says my God, “for the wicked.” (Isaiah 57:19-21).
Although the nations have rejected God and are not going to turn back to him, this need not be true of individuals. Yet we must still apply the same principle – there can be no real peace in any life for any length of time without repentance. Anyone who proclaims “Peace, Peace!” without calling people to repent is spreading a false message. Throughout God’s Word, peace is linked directly with having a right relationship with Him, known as righteousness, which is maintained by keeping his commands:
Great peace have those who love Your law, And nothing causes them to stumble. (Ps. 119:165)
My son, do not forget my law, but let your heart keep my commands; for length of days and long life and peace they will add to you. (Prov. 3:1-2)
Oh, that you had heeded My commandments! Then your peace would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea. (Isaiah 48:18)
But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. (James 3:17-18)
Consequently, the first critical step towards peace is getting into a right relationship with the Lord. As with the people of Israel, God calls us to repentance – to stop rebelling against Him and surrender to Him as Lord. For the people of Israel, doing so would result in internal rest within their land with no threat of war from surrounding nations. In the same way, by repenting and coming to God we can experience rest within ourselves and be able to make peace with those around us. Today, however, we can have a deep, abiding peace with God that even the most righteous Israelites could only dream of.
Some of those Old Testament prophets knew that a deeper level of peace would come one day, when the Messiah came to earth. Isaiah had possibly the greatest revelation of the Messiah, and he called Him the “Prince of Peace”:
For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David and over His kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward, even forever. (Is 9:6-7)
Isaiah also had some notion of what the Messiah would do in order to make this peace: But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. (Is 53:5)
This set the stage for the Messiah to come to the earth and make peace between God and man. What Israel did not understand, however, was the nature of the peace that the Messiah was bringing. Similarly to those who wish for ‘world peace’ today, they were thinking in terms of nations and politics, rather than individuals. They thought that the Messiah would bring their nation internal and external peace, mainly by conquering or subduing their enemies. What they did not understand was that there can be no real peace among people without true peace with God. This is what the Messiah – Jesus Christ – came to do.
This is why the angels who heralded Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem could cry out: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men!” yet Jesus Himself told the Israelites that He did not come to earth to bring peace of the kind that they were looking for (Matt. 10:34; Luke 12:51). Although one day the Lord Jesus will come back to earth to rule and reign, thus establishing a government of true peace (as described in Isaiah 9:6-7), He first had to make the way open for peace between individual people and God. This is what He did on the cross (as described in Isaiah 53:5).
Through Jesus we therefore have the possibility of true peace between each one of us and God Himself (Eph. 2:13-18; Col. 1:19-23). When we repent and turn to Him, God is able to forgive us because of what Jesus did on the cross when He took the penalty of our sin for us (Isaiah 53). Because of this relationship with God, we are able to cast our anxieties, doubts and burdens on Him, rather than try to carry them on our own. Being able to do this generates a real, inner peace even when the world around us is going through tumultuous times.
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. (Phill. 4:6-7).
Even Christians can sometimes lose the peace we now have access to, however. As with every other gift our Lord gives us, it cannot be separated from Himself. The link between righteousness and peace has not vanished since the Lord Jesus died for us. He makes us righteous in the first place, thus enabling true peace, but if we stray from His side and sin, we will leave our peace behind. As Jesus told His disciples just before He went to the cross, they would have peace in Him, which would be made possible after His death by the Holy Spirit dwelling in them and creating this beautiful relationship we now enjoy (John 14:25-27).
Christians still live in this world, and we still have sinful tendencies, so there are many things that can draw us away from God and therefore away from His peace. When this happens, we need to do exactly what we did the first time – repent, turn around and come back to our Lord. On a practical level, we can maintain our peace on a day-to-day basis by focusing our minds on Him. Once again, we turn to Isaiah: You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You. (Is 26:3). In the New Testament, Paul gives us more detail of what it means to keep our minds on Him:
Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things (Phill. 4:8).
This brings us to the next level of peace we need – peace with those around us. Given our tumultuous times, I bet that you seriously disagree with at least one of the people in your circle of family and friends on at least one topic (COVID vaccine, anyone?). This is further compounded by all the lockdowns that have forced us into isolation, which makes us rely even more on treacherous social media platforms to communicate.
Christians are frequently commanded to pursue peace with those around us, whether they are other Christians or unbelievers (e.g. Rom. 12:18, 14:19; 2 Tim. 2:22; Heb. 12:14). When you pursue something, you don’t just casually accept it if it comes your way: you hunt it down, you try every means at your disposal to get it. This is the attitude we should have towards living peacefully with those around us. Sometimes pursuit is not successful; not everyone will respond positively by making peace with you, but that is no excuse not to try.
Nonetheless, having peace with God first makes the pursuit of peace with others possible from our side. A close relationship with God that brings peace will also change our character, which is known in the New Testament as bearing the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5:22-23). When we grow closer to the Lord in our relationship with Him, these things become increasingly part of who we are. By exhibiting these characteristics we will make it much easier for others to be at peace with us, thus giving our pursuit of peace the best possible chances of success.
Perfect peace is thus attainable for anyone, even during these terrible times. If you have not established peace with God, let me urge you to repent and start that relationship through Jesus Christ. If you have a relationship with Him, yet have lost your peace recently, then repent and draw close to Him by focusing your mind on Him. If you have peace with the Lord, but not with others who disagree with you, then it is time to diligently pursue peace with them. In the words of our Lord Jesus:
“These things I have spoken to you while being present with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you. Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” (John 14:25-27)
Now more than ever, we need peace. Since our world became a global village, such that we know about wars and unrest on the other side of the world, everyone has been crying out for ‘world peace’ among nations. But the recent upheaval caused by COVID has intensified the need for peace on other levels – inner peace and peace with the people around you. Not only are the nations fighting each other over vaccines and travel restrictions, but friends and even families are deeply divided over COVID-related issues. Meanwhile, the isolation and stress are causing increasing mental health issues. We seem to be in a near perpetual state of war – with each other and with ourselves.
First, let’s get the concept of ‘world peace’ out of the way. The nations of the world have rejected God (Psalm 2) and as a result they will not have real peace. Any version of peace without complete surrender to God and obedience to His will is a false peace that cannot last. In the Old Testament, when God was just about to judge Israel by sending them into captivity for their rebellion against Him, there were many false prophets who told them not to worry. They were crying out “Peace, Peace!” rather than telling people to repent over their sin (Jer. 8:11; Ezek. 13:10). Yet God’s real prophets, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, were saying the opposite: “There is no peace,” Says my God, “for the wicked.” (Isaiah 57:19-21).
Although the nations have rejected God and are not going to turn back to him, this need not be true of individuals. Yet we must still apply the same principle – there can be no real peace in any life for any length of time without repentance. Anyone who proclaims “Peace, Peace!” without calling people to repent is spreading a false message. Throughout God’s Word, peace is linked directly with having a right relationship with Him, known as righteousness, which is maintained by keeping his commands:
Great peace have those who love Your law, And nothing causes them to stumble. (Ps. 119:165)
My son, do not forget my law, but let your heart keep my commands; for length of days and long life and peace they will add to you. (Prov. 3:1-2)
Oh, that you had heeded My commandments! Then your peace would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea. (Isaiah 48:18)
But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. (James 3:17-18)
Consequently, the first critical step towards peace is getting into a right relationship with the Lord. As with the people of Israel, God calls us to repentance – to stop rebelling against Him and surrender to Him as Lord. For the people of Israel, doing so would result in internal rest within their land with no threat of war from surrounding nations. In the same way, by repenting and coming to God we can experience rest within ourselves and be able to make peace with those around us. Today, however, we can have a deep, abiding peace with God that even the most righteous Israelites could only dream of.
Some of those Old Testament prophets knew that a deeper level of peace would come one day, when the Messiah came to earth. Isaiah had possibly the greatest revelation of the Messiah, and he called Him the “Prince of Peace”:
For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David and over His kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward, even forever. (Is 9:6-7)
Isaiah also had some notion of what the Messiah would do in order to make this peace: But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. (Is 53:5)
This set the stage for the Messiah to come to the earth and make peace between God and man. What Israel did not understand, however, was the nature of the peace that the Messiah was bringing. Similarly to those who wish for ‘world peace’ today, they were thinking in terms of nations and politics, rather than individuals. They thought that the Messiah would bring their nation internal and external peace, mainly by conquering or subduing their enemies. What they did not understand was that there can be no real peace among people without true peace with God. This is what the Messiah – Jesus Christ – came to do.
This is why the angels who heralded Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem could cry out: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men!” yet Jesus Himself told the Israelites that He did not come to earth to bring peace of the kind that they were looking for (Matt. 10:34; Luke 12:51). Although one day the Lord Jesus will come back to earth to rule and reign, thus establishing a government of true peace (as described in Isaiah 9:6-7), He first had to make the way open for peace between individual people and God. This is what He did on the cross (as described in Isaiah 53:5).
Through Jesus we therefore have the possibility of true peace between each one of us and God Himself (Eph. 2:13-18; Col. 1:19-23). When we repent and turn to Him, God is able to forgive us because of what Jesus did on the cross when He took the penalty of our sin for us (Isaiah 53). Because of this relationship with God, we are able to cast our anxieties, doubts and burdens on Him, rather than try to carry them on our own. Being able to do this generates a real, inner peace even when the world around us is going through tumultuous times.
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. (Phill. 4:6-7).
Even Christians can sometimes lose the peace we now have access to, however. As with every other gift our Lord gives us, it cannot be separated from Himself. The link between righteousness and peace has not vanished since the Lord Jesus died for us. He makes us righteous in the first place, thus enabling true peace, but if we stray from His side and sin, we will leave our peace behind. As Jesus told His disciples just before He went to the cross, they would have peace in Him, which would be made possible after His death by the Holy Spirit dwelling in them and creating this beautiful relationship we now enjoy (John 14:25-27).
Christians still live in this world, and we still have sinful tendencies, so there are many things that can draw us away from God and therefore away from His peace. When this happens, we need to do exactly what we did the first time – repent, turn around and come back to our Lord. On a practical level, we can maintain our peace on a day-to-day basis by focusing our minds on Him. Once again, we turn to Isaiah: You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You. (Is 26:3). In the New Testament, Paul gives us more detail of what it means to keep our minds on Him:
Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things (Phill. 4:8).
This brings us to the next level of peace we need – peace with those around us. Given our tumultuous times, I bet that you seriously disagree with at least one of the people in your circle of family and friends on at least one topic (COVID vaccine, anyone?). This is further compounded by all the lockdowns that have forced us into isolation, which makes us rely even more on treacherous social media platforms to communicate.
Christians are frequently commanded to pursue peace with those around us, whether they are other Christians or unbelievers (e.g. Rom. 12:18, 14:19; 2 Tim. 2:22; Heb. 12:14). When you pursue something, you don’t just casually accept it if it comes your way: you hunt it down, you try every means at your disposal to get it. This is the attitude we should have towards living peacefully with those around us. Sometimes pursuit is not successful; not everyone will respond positively by making peace with you, but that is no excuse not to try.
Nonetheless, having peace with God first makes the pursuit of peace with others possible from our side. A close relationship with God that brings peace will also change our character, which is known in the New Testament as bearing the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5:22-23). When we grow closer to the Lord in our relationship with Him, these things become increasingly part of who we are. By exhibiting these characteristics we will make it much easier for others to be at peace with us, thus giving our pursuit of peace the best possible chances of success.
Perfect peace is thus attainable for anyone, even during these terrible times. If you have not established peace with God, let me urge you to repent and start that relationship through Jesus Christ. If you have a relationship with Him, yet have lost your peace recently, then repent and draw close to Him by focusing your mind on Him. If you have peace with the Lord, but not with others who disagree with you, then it is time to diligently pursue peace with them. In the words of our Lord Jesus:
“These things I have spoken to you while being present with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you. Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” (John 14:25-27)
27 June, 2021
Why I am Getting Vaccinated
Somewhere during the middle of this crazy pandemic, I found myself at a small dinner party where it turned out that I was the only one in the room willing to be vaccinated. Many people at dinner that evening were strongly opposed to the idea of getting vaccinated, for several different reasons. One of them challenged my willingness to get vaccinated with a question: “What are you afraid of?” A simple, five-word question, and yet I could not answer. I was speechless.
Since then, I have contemplated both where this question was coming from and why I could not answer it. This article is not about convincing anyone that vaccines are a good idea – I am not going to present evidence one way or the other, or argue any of the typical points on the pro-vaccination side of this debate. If you have spent any time at all on the Internet, or even discussing life with friends, you probably know both sides of the argument already. Whether you want to get vaccinated or not is unlikely to change whether you read the rest of this article or not.
The point of the article, then, is to show why I found the above question unanswerable and to dig a little deeper into the ideas behind this deceptively simple question. The first keyword in that question that I want to consider is afraid and its mother concept of fear. I think that fear is a key driving force that few people want to admit to feeling when deciding whether or not to get vaccinated.
Some are afraid of the virus and its impacts – contracting it, getting sick, losing their livelihood due to related economic issues, or even dying. Others are afraid of the vaccine – what is in it, whether it is safe, and which nefarious entity or institution might be using it for sinister purposes. Not everyone fears either of these things to the same degree, but I think that some level of fear is present in our decisions one way or the other.
When my anti-vaxx friend asked her question, she was asking why I was afraid of the virus. The first reason I could not answer is because I have no fear of death, by Covid or anything else. As a Christian, death is just stepping into eternity to be with God, which is a wonderful thing. Christians do not seek death, however, because the reason we are alive right now is to serve God on this earth (Phill. 1:19-26). He will keep me alive on this planet for as long as He wants me to be here. Regardless of what finally kills me, I will not die without His consent.
Just like I do not seek death, I have no desire to get sick either, particularly because this virus is infectious and my getting sick will make others around me sick, too. There is a far greater chance that I will be killed or severely injured on the roads than I will die from either Covid or the vaccine. Although I am not afraid of dying in a car accident either, I have no desire to be in one. Again, that is both for my personal comfort and others who might be in the accident too.
I thus view Covid in the same way as any other potentially dangerous thing – I will avoid it if possible, but have no reason to fear it. The vaccination, on the other hand, is another potentially dangerous thing. Although statistically speaking, the chances of dying from a vaccination is vanishingly small compared to the chance of dying from Covid itself, this is still a reason why some people may fear it. For the same reason I do not fear dying from Covid (or car accidents), I have no fear of dying from the vaccine.
Although death-by-vaccination is highly unlikely, there is a good chance that I might feel sick for a while after getting vaccinated (my first shot came with zero side effects, but there is a chance that my future second shot will produce side effects). But I have just said that I avoid getting sick if possible, yet taking the vaccine seems to be volunteering for feeling sick, since some sort of sickness for 24 hours or so is a fairly common side-effect of any of the vaccines. Am I being inconsistent?
This is where the other keyword in that five-word question comes into play: “What are you afraid of?” Whether one is afraid of the virus or the vaccine is strongly linked to their possible effects on yourself, with potential knock-on effects for those around you. The key issue nonetheless seems to be a personal one – e.g. “I don’t want that stuff in my body,” or “If people don’t get vaccinated, my livelihood is at risk,” or “I don’t want to be controlled by the people who made the vaccine (or the virus!)”, or “When other people don’t wear their masks or refuse the vaccination, they are putting me and my family at risk.” I have seen examples similar to these on both sides of the vaccination fence – but it all really boils down to what I want and how either the virus or the vaccination will affect me.
In my case, my willingness to be vaccinated really has very little to do with me, which is why I couldn’t answer the question, “What are you afraid of?” I might get sick from the vaccination itself; alternatively, if I get Covid after being vaccinated I might be less sick than would have been the case before the vaccine. These two possibilities will affect me in some way, but neither of them played a major role in my decision. While it would be unpleasant to have 24-hours of feeling sick after the vaccination, or it would be nice to have a ‘gentle’ bout of Covid, it really makes no difference. The thing that played the biggest role in my decision was the antidote to fear – love (1 John 4:18).
To emphasise my previous points: if I die from any cause, I will go to heaven. If I get sick (from either cause), it will be just as severe and as long as the Lord allows it to be. This knowledge leaves me free from the usual considerations about what will happen to me, and thus allows me to consider more seriously what will happen to other people. This is also what makes the possibility of feeling sick after the vaccination a small price to pay for the potential of helping others.
There are other people I may come into contact with, whether friends or total strangers, who are more physically vulnerable to Covid than I am. More critically, many of these people will not go to heaven if they contract this illness and die. On an economic level, while my own ability to make a living is not directly linked to international travel or other Covid-related restrictions, there are many others whose livelihoods are closely linked with these factors. If I can do anything at all to prevent other people from contracting Covid, or to be part of allowing travel to open up and restrictions to ease, then I will do it.
Now, some who doubt the efficacy of the vaccinations may ask: “What if getting vaccinated doesn’t reduce the risk of infection, or what if the government keeps the restrictions regardless of whether or not people get vaccinated?” Then it would seem that I got a sore arm and (potentially) felt sick for a day for no reason. Yet these things are out of my control – I did not develop the vaccine, nor do I make the rules about travel and public gatherings. The best I can do is to control what I can – getting myself to a vaccination centre – and leave the rest of it up to virology and politics. If it turns out that I have to get another vaccination at a later date, so be it. If I have to keep my mask on everywhere I go in public and avoid large gatherings even after I have been fully vaccinated, then so be it. Even if there are currently unknown long-term side effects of this vaccine and I suffer from them some time in the future, so be it.
One final thought – I have come across the idea that Christians who are getting vaccinated are not trusting God to protect them. Yet this argument is logically flawed – trusting God does not mean that you live recklessly. Not fearing death is not the same as seeking death. Being fearless (i.e. not being afraid to die) and being reckless (i.e. putting oneself in harm’s way deliberately) are two different things.
Going back to my comparison with vehicle accidents – I trust that God will keep me safe on the roads, unless He chooses a vehicle accident as the means to get me to heaven. Either way, I am 100% safe in His loving hands. Nonetheless, I still wear a seatbelt and obey the rules of the road. These are both manmade things that are designed to keep one safe on the roads (the car itself is manmade, of course). Is doing either of these things going to provide 100% assurance that I will never land up in a fatal road accident? Not at all, but I do not rely on them to do so.
Even if the virus is manmade (like my car), the vaccine and the recently invented social rules are designed to increase our safety in this Covid-ridden world. Being vaccinated doesn’t give me any assurance of not dying, but I do not rely on it to prevent my death. Only God can do that, and He does not only protect me from one cause of death, but from any cause of death – until He calls me home.
For those of you reading this who do not want to get vaccinated, or who cannot get vaccinated (e.g. due to health complications), this paragraph is for you. Regardless of what you believe about this virus or the vaccinations, I want the very best for you. While I know that I will go to heaven when I die, I don’t know if you will. If my getting vaccinated will reduce the chances of just one of you getting Covid, then that alone will be worth a sore arm or any other side effects, both short and long-term.
The reason for what may seem to be a strange attitude to you is rather simple for me. I serve a God who willingly died for me, knowing just how stubborn, disobedient and ignorant of His love I would be (He did the same for you!). He sacrificed everything for me, and gave an explicit command that I should imitate His love for me towards others (John 13:34-35). My microscopically small inconvenience from a vaccination is not even worth being in the same sentence as His immense love and self-sacrifice displayed on the cross. Yet it is in the same spirit – as a tiny little imitation of His love – that I choose to get vaccinated.
If I were able to re-live the dinner party recounted at the start of this article, I would answer my anti-vaxx friend’s question: “What are you afraid of?” with a more thoroughly considered answer: “I love you.”
Since then, I have contemplated both where this question was coming from and why I could not answer it. This article is not about convincing anyone that vaccines are a good idea – I am not going to present evidence one way or the other, or argue any of the typical points on the pro-vaccination side of this debate. If you have spent any time at all on the Internet, or even discussing life with friends, you probably know both sides of the argument already. Whether you want to get vaccinated or not is unlikely to change whether you read the rest of this article or not.
The point of the article, then, is to show why I found the above question unanswerable and to dig a little deeper into the ideas behind this deceptively simple question. The first keyword in that question that I want to consider is afraid and its mother concept of fear. I think that fear is a key driving force that few people want to admit to feeling when deciding whether or not to get vaccinated.
Some are afraid of the virus and its impacts – contracting it, getting sick, losing their livelihood due to related economic issues, or even dying. Others are afraid of the vaccine – what is in it, whether it is safe, and which nefarious entity or institution might be using it for sinister purposes. Not everyone fears either of these things to the same degree, but I think that some level of fear is present in our decisions one way or the other.
When my anti-vaxx friend asked her question, she was asking why I was afraid of the virus. The first reason I could not answer is because I have no fear of death, by Covid or anything else. As a Christian, death is just stepping into eternity to be with God, which is a wonderful thing. Christians do not seek death, however, because the reason we are alive right now is to serve God on this earth (Phill. 1:19-26). He will keep me alive on this planet for as long as He wants me to be here. Regardless of what finally kills me, I will not die without His consent.
Just like I do not seek death, I have no desire to get sick either, particularly because this virus is infectious and my getting sick will make others around me sick, too. There is a far greater chance that I will be killed or severely injured on the roads than I will die from either Covid or the vaccine. Although I am not afraid of dying in a car accident either, I have no desire to be in one. Again, that is both for my personal comfort and others who might be in the accident too.
I thus view Covid in the same way as any other potentially dangerous thing – I will avoid it if possible, but have no reason to fear it. The vaccination, on the other hand, is another potentially dangerous thing. Although statistically speaking, the chances of dying from a vaccination is vanishingly small compared to the chance of dying from Covid itself, this is still a reason why some people may fear it. For the same reason I do not fear dying from Covid (or car accidents), I have no fear of dying from the vaccine.
Although death-by-vaccination is highly unlikely, there is a good chance that I might feel sick for a while after getting vaccinated (my first shot came with zero side effects, but there is a chance that my future second shot will produce side effects). But I have just said that I avoid getting sick if possible, yet taking the vaccine seems to be volunteering for feeling sick, since some sort of sickness for 24 hours or so is a fairly common side-effect of any of the vaccines. Am I being inconsistent?
This is where the other keyword in that five-word question comes into play: “What are you afraid of?” Whether one is afraid of the virus or the vaccine is strongly linked to their possible effects on yourself, with potential knock-on effects for those around you. The key issue nonetheless seems to be a personal one – e.g. “I don’t want that stuff in my body,” or “If people don’t get vaccinated, my livelihood is at risk,” or “I don’t want to be controlled by the people who made the vaccine (or the virus!)”, or “When other people don’t wear their masks or refuse the vaccination, they are putting me and my family at risk.” I have seen examples similar to these on both sides of the vaccination fence – but it all really boils down to what I want and how either the virus or the vaccination will affect me.
In my case, my willingness to be vaccinated really has very little to do with me, which is why I couldn’t answer the question, “What are you afraid of?” I might get sick from the vaccination itself; alternatively, if I get Covid after being vaccinated I might be less sick than would have been the case before the vaccine. These two possibilities will affect me in some way, but neither of them played a major role in my decision. While it would be unpleasant to have 24-hours of feeling sick after the vaccination, or it would be nice to have a ‘gentle’ bout of Covid, it really makes no difference. The thing that played the biggest role in my decision was the antidote to fear – love (1 John 4:18).
To emphasise my previous points: if I die from any cause, I will go to heaven. If I get sick (from either cause), it will be just as severe and as long as the Lord allows it to be. This knowledge leaves me free from the usual considerations about what will happen to me, and thus allows me to consider more seriously what will happen to other people. This is also what makes the possibility of feeling sick after the vaccination a small price to pay for the potential of helping others.
There are other people I may come into contact with, whether friends or total strangers, who are more physically vulnerable to Covid than I am. More critically, many of these people will not go to heaven if they contract this illness and die. On an economic level, while my own ability to make a living is not directly linked to international travel or other Covid-related restrictions, there are many others whose livelihoods are closely linked with these factors. If I can do anything at all to prevent other people from contracting Covid, or to be part of allowing travel to open up and restrictions to ease, then I will do it.
Now, some who doubt the efficacy of the vaccinations may ask: “What if getting vaccinated doesn’t reduce the risk of infection, or what if the government keeps the restrictions regardless of whether or not people get vaccinated?” Then it would seem that I got a sore arm and (potentially) felt sick for a day for no reason. Yet these things are out of my control – I did not develop the vaccine, nor do I make the rules about travel and public gatherings. The best I can do is to control what I can – getting myself to a vaccination centre – and leave the rest of it up to virology and politics. If it turns out that I have to get another vaccination at a later date, so be it. If I have to keep my mask on everywhere I go in public and avoid large gatherings even after I have been fully vaccinated, then so be it. Even if there are currently unknown long-term side effects of this vaccine and I suffer from them some time in the future, so be it.
One final thought – I have come across the idea that Christians who are getting vaccinated are not trusting God to protect them. Yet this argument is logically flawed – trusting God does not mean that you live recklessly. Not fearing death is not the same as seeking death. Being fearless (i.e. not being afraid to die) and being reckless (i.e. putting oneself in harm’s way deliberately) are two different things.
Going back to my comparison with vehicle accidents – I trust that God will keep me safe on the roads, unless He chooses a vehicle accident as the means to get me to heaven. Either way, I am 100% safe in His loving hands. Nonetheless, I still wear a seatbelt and obey the rules of the road. These are both manmade things that are designed to keep one safe on the roads (the car itself is manmade, of course). Is doing either of these things going to provide 100% assurance that I will never land up in a fatal road accident? Not at all, but I do not rely on them to do so.
Even if the virus is manmade (like my car), the vaccine and the recently invented social rules are designed to increase our safety in this Covid-ridden world. Being vaccinated doesn’t give me any assurance of not dying, but I do not rely on it to prevent my death. Only God can do that, and He does not only protect me from one cause of death, but from any cause of death – until He calls me home.
For those of you reading this who do not want to get vaccinated, or who cannot get vaccinated (e.g. due to health complications), this paragraph is for you. Regardless of what you believe about this virus or the vaccinations, I want the very best for you. While I know that I will go to heaven when I die, I don’t know if you will. If my getting vaccinated will reduce the chances of just one of you getting Covid, then that alone will be worth a sore arm or any other side effects, both short and long-term.
The reason for what may seem to be a strange attitude to you is rather simple for me. I serve a God who willingly died for me, knowing just how stubborn, disobedient and ignorant of His love I would be (He did the same for you!). He sacrificed everything for me, and gave an explicit command that I should imitate His love for me towards others (John 13:34-35). My microscopically small inconvenience from a vaccination is not even worth being in the same sentence as His immense love and self-sacrifice displayed on the cross. Yet it is in the same spirit – as a tiny little imitation of His love – that I choose to get vaccinated.
If I were able to re-live the dinner party recounted at the start of this article, I would answer my anti-vaxx friend’s question: “What are you afraid of?” with a more thoroughly considered answer: “I love you.”
20 June, 2021
A Different View of Privilege
Privilege has become a dirty word these days. One of the issues that swirls around this word is inequality, which slaps every South African in the face every day – to the point that many of us become numb to it. South African inequality meets you at every traffic light, where beggars stand next to luxury vehicles. Most of our cities are surrounded by shacks where people huddle together for shelter, while the wealthier suburbs consist of large houses, beautiful gardens and high security fences.
Namibia is not much better in this respect. There is a small village in southern Namibia where around 90% of the population are unemployed – alcoholism and malnutrition are rampant. The shacks are growing around Namibian cities, too, as people coming in from rural areas find nowhere affordable to stay. Away from the densely populated informal settlements are large estates just close enough to Windhoek for convenience’ sake, but far enough away for total peace and quiet. Some of the houses on these estates are spectacular – the garage is larger than a decent-sized shack elsewhere in Windhoek.
When we lived in Botswana, we knew of some lodges where the cost of staying a single night was more than what many people in that country would earn in a year. The mind boggles when thinking just how much someone must earn to stay in one of those lodges for a week. I could go on, but you get the picture – inequality is a sad reality of every country I have lived in. I can understand why the people who live in dire poverty and whose chances of employment are slim to none are upset with the status quo. Poverty in these countries can be a vicious cycle, and very few who are born into poverty manage to get out of it.
In the face of all this we feel helpless and hopeless. For my part, I often feel helpless. Even some of the wealthiest people I know who have done much to help the poor in their own capacities or through their businesses seem to be fighting against enormous odds. My own financial capacity is minuscule compared to what is needed to help the millions of poor people in southern Africa. What can I do?
Meanwhile hopelessness pervades the small villages and urban shacks. This is particularly evident in places where alcoholism has taken hold – even when someone gets a job that might help them support their families, it is not long before they lose it again due to alcohol consumption. Foreign aid programmes and grants often fail too, because no real hope comes with the money or the opportunities that these initiatives create.
I have barely scratched the surface of the problem, and there are many other issues and nuances to this enormous topic that I have not touched. But take a moment to consider the various aspects of inequality you have come across in your own life and country. Perhaps you feel helpless or hopeless yourself.
Let’s move beyond our reaction to inequality and explore the cause instead. Like every other intractable problem in the world today, inequality flows from the state of the human heart. In this case, the root issues are greed and envy. No matter what financial status we find ourselves in, we always want more (greed) and when we see others that are getting more, yet do not seem to “deserve” it as much as we do, we envy them. We will go to great lengths to defend whatever degree of wealth we have accumulated, even if it comes at the expense of others. These two things go hand-in-hand and both help to create inequality itself and the social issues surrounding inequality. The important point here is that greed and envy are common amongst all humans – neither of them is unique to either rich or poor people.
Many have suggested economic solutions to inequality, and no doubt there are things that could be done to ease the situation economically. But this issue goes far beyond economics. It reaches right into the very heart of human beings. This is why even prosperous countries aren’t perfect countries, and why wealthy people are not necessarily happy people. Even if we manage to engineer an equal society (which has been tried before, mostly to disastrous effect), we will never create a perfectly contented one.
Looking at my own life reveals that I have privilege – in the sense that I was born into a society where the colour of my skin gave me more opportunities than someone born at the same time with a darker skin tone. The conditions in South Africa in 1987 were most certainly rigged in my favour. Besides that, I had a sheltered upbringing, an excellent education, and a wholesome family life – a great start that many others did not have. This set me on a trajectory towards success, as the world sees it.
Yet all of these privileges (plus many others I have omitted) are really nothing compared to my blessings. I would give up every one of those privileges just to keep the blessing, and I would not swap my level of privilege for something much higher (e.g. being born to a billionaire) if it meant giving up the blessing. This blessing has done for me what privilege could never do – it has set me free. To say that this blessing is priceless is to undervalue it; the blessing is so wonderful that even angels want a glimpse of it (1 Pet. 1:12).
I have referred to the blessing as both singular and plural, because it is a composite – one blessing that comprises and delivers countless others. The one blessing can be described simply as salvation, which in itself is a deep and wonderful thing, but the other blessings that flow from it are ever more beautiful and glorious. The word ‘salvation’ poses the question – saved from what? Saved from the very thing that causes inequality, injustice, misery, suffering, and every other evil we find in this world. Saved from sin.
I have been saved from my own sin and set free from its controlling power over my life. Changing a heart in this way addresses the cause of evil such as inequality. Our world is not only broken by inequality, however, it is also wracked with violence, hatred, destruction, lust and deceit (to name a few). All of these things, besides many more similar evils, arise from our hearts (Rom. 1:28-32). When a heart is set free from sin through the blessing of salvation, evil is replaced by the myriad of other blessings that comes with it. These include love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23).
When I reflect on the terrible inequality around me, and I feel helpless at the sight of much hopelessness, I start contemplating ways to help people out of the poverty trap. Helping the poor is a good, virtuous thing – indeed, God is often characterised in the Old Testament as the One who helps “the fatherless and the widow”, which represent the poorest and most hopeless of society (Deut. 10:18). He also instituted several laws in Israel to reduce inequality within their society and help people out of poverty traps (e.g. Levi. 25). In the New Testament, the churches are frequently encouraged to give to the poor (Gal. 2:10) and are warned strongly against treating wealthy people preferentially (James 2:1-13). Giving to the poor around us and doing what we can to help others out of the poverty trap is therefore a godly thing to do.
Nonetheless, Christians are called to do more than just give to the poor. As I said earlier, the physical privileges I have experienced in my life are valueless when compared with the glorious blessing of salvation. One of the many blessings that flow from salvation is hope, which is a far greater blessing to bestow on anyone than help. The hope of eternity with the Lord in heaven will see you through any difficulty life can throw at you. If a church or Christian focuses solely on helping poor people without presenting the hope of eternal salvation to them, then they are really short-changing those they want to help. Help and hope must go together – you might attract someone by offering them help (e.g. a hot meal), but you should not leave them without offering hope.
Furthermore, this is a blessing that the wealthy need just as badly as the poor do. Understanding the true value of my blessing has been the greatest antidote to envy – how could I possibly envy a wealthy person who does not have the treasure I hold in my heart? They might have a gorgeous house, fancy car, and go on holidays to fantastic places that I will never see, but they are poor and wretched compared to me. The wealthy are paradoxically among the poorest of humanity, because they are harder to reach with the gospel than materially poor people (Matt. 19:24).
Another wonderful thing about this blessing is that it does not run out, which means that there are an unlimited number of people I can share it with. I do not have enough money in my bank account to give every person in Windhoek a single cent, which won’t help them at all and leave me bankrupt. Indeed, my money will do less than nothing for the rich! But if I share the gospel with them, I will not only be able to give to anyone who wants it, but I will be enriched in the process. The giver and the receiver are blessed without measure in this exchange, regardless of their relative material wealth.
Yet one more way in which the blessing is far superior to privilege – you cannot thank or blame anyone in person for your privilege, or lack thereof. The ancestors who gave my parents and, in turn, me a pale skin tone are long dead. I can neither thank nor harangue them for what they did hundreds of years ago. I can do nothing about the wars they fought, the way they thought, or the consequences of their actions – it is all entirely out of my control. Yet I can thank God for the blessing he gave to me freely, even though I certainly didn’t deserve it. I can also do something practical to thank Him for this wonderful gift: to give it to others!
In the world’s eyes, we are each measured by our “net worth”, and those that have accumulated greater net worth are listened to and valued in society more than those with low net worth. Yet in God’s eyes, we all have exactly the same value that He has attached to us by paying infinitely more for us than we are really worth. The Father sacrificed His Son for every individual human being. He did not pay a higher price for the wealthy or influential, or a lower price for the poor or enslaved. In a terribly unequal society like the one I was born into, this is a wonderful thing. It does not matter if you were born into privilege or abject poverty; the price for your salvation was exactly the same – and it has been paid in full.
If you are reading this and are deeply concerned with the terrible inequality of this world, it concerns me too. You and I will not be able to fix the whole world, however, we cannot even fix ourselves. Feeling guilty for your own privilege or angry because of your underprivileged status will certainly not change anything. Although you cannot change yourself in any meaningful way, God can. Irrespective of your earthly net worth, He paid the highest price in the universe in order to make the blessing of salvation available to you. Receiving that blessing is an infinitely more wonderful prospect than mere privilege.
Namibia is not much better in this respect. There is a small village in southern Namibia where around 90% of the population are unemployed – alcoholism and malnutrition are rampant. The shacks are growing around Namibian cities, too, as people coming in from rural areas find nowhere affordable to stay. Away from the densely populated informal settlements are large estates just close enough to Windhoek for convenience’ sake, but far enough away for total peace and quiet. Some of the houses on these estates are spectacular – the garage is larger than a decent-sized shack elsewhere in Windhoek.
When we lived in Botswana, we knew of some lodges where the cost of staying a single night was more than what many people in that country would earn in a year. The mind boggles when thinking just how much someone must earn to stay in one of those lodges for a week. I could go on, but you get the picture – inequality is a sad reality of every country I have lived in. I can understand why the people who live in dire poverty and whose chances of employment are slim to none are upset with the status quo. Poverty in these countries can be a vicious cycle, and very few who are born into poverty manage to get out of it.
In the face of all this we feel helpless and hopeless. For my part, I often feel helpless. Even some of the wealthiest people I know who have done much to help the poor in their own capacities or through their businesses seem to be fighting against enormous odds. My own financial capacity is minuscule compared to what is needed to help the millions of poor people in southern Africa. What can I do?
Meanwhile hopelessness pervades the small villages and urban shacks. This is particularly evident in places where alcoholism has taken hold – even when someone gets a job that might help them support their families, it is not long before they lose it again due to alcohol consumption. Foreign aid programmes and grants often fail too, because no real hope comes with the money or the opportunities that these initiatives create.
I have barely scratched the surface of the problem, and there are many other issues and nuances to this enormous topic that I have not touched. But take a moment to consider the various aspects of inequality you have come across in your own life and country. Perhaps you feel helpless or hopeless yourself.
Let’s move beyond our reaction to inequality and explore the cause instead. Like every other intractable problem in the world today, inequality flows from the state of the human heart. In this case, the root issues are greed and envy. No matter what financial status we find ourselves in, we always want more (greed) and when we see others that are getting more, yet do not seem to “deserve” it as much as we do, we envy them. We will go to great lengths to defend whatever degree of wealth we have accumulated, even if it comes at the expense of others. These two things go hand-in-hand and both help to create inequality itself and the social issues surrounding inequality. The important point here is that greed and envy are common amongst all humans – neither of them is unique to either rich or poor people.
Many have suggested economic solutions to inequality, and no doubt there are things that could be done to ease the situation economically. But this issue goes far beyond economics. It reaches right into the very heart of human beings. This is why even prosperous countries aren’t perfect countries, and why wealthy people are not necessarily happy people. Even if we manage to engineer an equal society (which has been tried before, mostly to disastrous effect), we will never create a perfectly contented one.
Looking at my own life reveals that I have privilege – in the sense that I was born into a society where the colour of my skin gave me more opportunities than someone born at the same time with a darker skin tone. The conditions in South Africa in 1987 were most certainly rigged in my favour. Besides that, I had a sheltered upbringing, an excellent education, and a wholesome family life – a great start that many others did not have. This set me on a trajectory towards success, as the world sees it.
Yet all of these privileges (plus many others I have omitted) are really nothing compared to my blessings. I would give up every one of those privileges just to keep the blessing, and I would not swap my level of privilege for something much higher (e.g. being born to a billionaire) if it meant giving up the blessing. This blessing has done for me what privilege could never do – it has set me free. To say that this blessing is priceless is to undervalue it; the blessing is so wonderful that even angels want a glimpse of it (1 Pet. 1:12).
I have referred to the blessing as both singular and plural, because it is a composite – one blessing that comprises and delivers countless others. The one blessing can be described simply as salvation, which in itself is a deep and wonderful thing, but the other blessings that flow from it are ever more beautiful and glorious. The word ‘salvation’ poses the question – saved from what? Saved from the very thing that causes inequality, injustice, misery, suffering, and every other evil we find in this world. Saved from sin.
I have been saved from my own sin and set free from its controlling power over my life. Changing a heart in this way addresses the cause of evil such as inequality. Our world is not only broken by inequality, however, it is also wracked with violence, hatred, destruction, lust and deceit (to name a few). All of these things, besides many more similar evils, arise from our hearts (Rom. 1:28-32). When a heart is set free from sin through the blessing of salvation, evil is replaced by the myriad of other blessings that comes with it. These include love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23).
When I reflect on the terrible inequality around me, and I feel helpless at the sight of much hopelessness, I start contemplating ways to help people out of the poverty trap. Helping the poor is a good, virtuous thing – indeed, God is often characterised in the Old Testament as the One who helps “the fatherless and the widow”, which represent the poorest and most hopeless of society (Deut. 10:18). He also instituted several laws in Israel to reduce inequality within their society and help people out of poverty traps (e.g. Levi. 25). In the New Testament, the churches are frequently encouraged to give to the poor (Gal. 2:10) and are warned strongly against treating wealthy people preferentially (James 2:1-13). Giving to the poor around us and doing what we can to help others out of the poverty trap is therefore a godly thing to do.
Nonetheless, Christians are called to do more than just give to the poor. As I said earlier, the physical privileges I have experienced in my life are valueless when compared with the glorious blessing of salvation. One of the many blessings that flow from salvation is hope, which is a far greater blessing to bestow on anyone than help. The hope of eternity with the Lord in heaven will see you through any difficulty life can throw at you. If a church or Christian focuses solely on helping poor people without presenting the hope of eternal salvation to them, then they are really short-changing those they want to help. Help and hope must go together – you might attract someone by offering them help (e.g. a hot meal), but you should not leave them without offering hope.
Furthermore, this is a blessing that the wealthy need just as badly as the poor do. Understanding the true value of my blessing has been the greatest antidote to envy – how could I possibly envy a wealthy person who does not have the treasure I hold in my heart? They might have a gorgeous house, fancy car, and go on holidays to fantastic places that I will never see, but they are poor and wretched compared to me. The wealthy are paradoxically among the poorest of humanity, because they are harder to reach with the gospel than materially poor people (Matt. 19:24).
Another wonderful thing about this blessing is that it does not run out, which means that there are an unlimited number of people I can share it with. I do not have enough money in my bank account to give every person in Windhoek a single cent, which won’t help them at all and leave me bankrupt. Indeed, my money will do less than nothing for the rich! But if I share the gospel with them, I will not only be able to give to anyone who wants it, but I will be enriched in the process. The giver and the receiver are blessed without measure in this exchange, regardless of their relative material wealth.
Yet one more way in which the blessing is far superior to privilege – you cannot thank or blame anyone in person for your privilege, or lack thereof. The ancestors who gave my parents and, in turn, me a pale skin tone are long dead. I can neither thank nor harangue them for what they did hundreds of years ago. I can do nothing about the wars they fought, the way they thought, or the consequences of their actions – it is all entirely out of my control. Yet I can thank God for the blessing he gave to me freely, even though I certainly didn’t deserve it. I can also do something practical to thank Him for this wonderful gift: to give it to others!
In the world’s eyes, we are each measured by our “net worth”, and those that have accumulated greater net worth are listened to and valued in society more than those with low net worth. Yet in God’s eyes, we all have exactly the same value that He has attached to us by paying infinitely more for us than we are really worth. The Father sacrificed His Son for every individual human being. He did not pay a higher price for the wealthy or influential, or a lower price for the poor or enslaved. In a terribly unequal society like the one I was born into, this is a wonderful thing. It does not matter if you were born into privilege or abject poverty; the price for your salvation was exactly the same – and it has been paid in full.
If you are reading this and are deeply concerned with the terrible inequality of this world, it concerns me too. You and I will not be able to fix the whole world, however, we cannot even fix ourselves. Feeling guilty for your own privilege or angry because of your underprivileged status will certainly not change anything. Although you cannot change yourself in any meaningful way, God can. Irrespective of your earthly net worth, He paid the highest price in the universe in order to make the blessing of salvation available to you. Receiving that blessing is an infinitely more wonderful prospect than mere privilege.
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