THE CHURCH IN FLUX
Chapter 6
Who really is in charge of this world?
I remember singing a song “He’s got the whole world in His hand”, the He being God, of course. Well, to me the statement there sounds no longer true. There simply is too much evidence around us and also in the Bible that takes issue with this claim. If God is no longer calling the tune here, then this has tremendous implications for the church, which brings me to a preliminary thought on the church, a very tentative one, one that came to me while I was stimulating my brain by running outside.
Jesus once made a reference to wine. He himself loved wine, as was evident from his first public miracle where he turned water into Israel’s national drink, wine of the highest quality. His enemies even called him a ‘wine-bibber’, probably somewhat justified.
Jesus stated that new wine should be stored in new wineskins rather than re-use the old ones. He said in Matthew 9:17 that when we store new wine in old skins, they burst. The same is true for bringing new ideas to a church that is stuck in the old format: it just won’t work. The church is too rigid to accommodate radical ideas.
We have a striking precedent there in what happened at and after Pentecost in Jerusalem, just after Jesus had gone to heaven. Then a radically different Christian church emerged, abolishing circumcisions, changing the date of worship from Saturday to Sunday, from the 7th day to the first day of the week, the day of Jesus’ resurrection. It also abandoned the rigidity of the law with the flexibility of freedom.
So, when Jesus talks about new wine in new containers, he really means is that new ideas also need new structures. By suggesting this already so early in my writing, could well mean that this will have significance for my theme The Church in Flux later on.
Something also struck me when we were reciting the Lord’s Prayer in church. We often do this as a matter of routine, mindlessly almost. When we say that second line: ‘Hallowed by Thy name’, my bet is that no more that one in a hundred – I am being optimistic – realizes what these words mean for today. God’s first recorded words in Genesis 1 and 2 were His Creation Words, where He spoke and things came to be, created ‘in His name.’ This makes everything that God did holy. Yes, that means that creation is holy, something usually not reflected in our daily life.
This is confirmed by what follows in the prayer Jesus taught us: “Thy Kingdom Come.”
You know what that line is? It is a prayer for the speedy arrival of the New Creation. If we take this prayer as its face value, and if we really want to follow Jesus in this, should all our actions, our entire life-style not reflect this prayer? As a matter of fact, the bible shows on every page that the meaning of creation can be traced directly to the concept of Kingdom, to the idea that all our actions must be geared toward its coming. That’s why Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount – Matthew 6:33 – urges all believers to “Seek first the Kingdom and its righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.”
Radical statements from Jesus. He unambiguously states that our first duty in life is to seek the welfare of creation, and when we do that, when we make that our life’s motto, then we will never want for anything.
I again say: that Kingdom is not the instituted church but God’s creation, God’s beautiful work of art. Jesus’ command to ‘Seek the Kingdom’ means that we must get up in the morning with the overriding desire to improve the creation God so graciously has given us. And when we go to bed at night we must confess to God that we have miserably failed to do that, probably have made matters worse, have not treated this earth as God’s precious possession and have not promoted its well-being. Yet, that is what “seeking the Kingdom” means, the pursuit of which is our foremost task in life.
So here again, if I am correct in my reasoning, we have to ask the question whether the church even can change its course so that in all its proclamation and direct action, the emphasis is on The Kingdom.
The other side of the coin is that when we fail to keep the Kingdom in mind or worse actively do harm to the Kingdom, we sin.
There are sins of commission and sins of omission. Not effectively seeking the welfare of Creation, God’s kingdom, is a sin of omission. Doing damage to creation is a sin of commission, something that is increasingly going to haunt us, as sin often carries it own punishment. Rather than giving God the honor due to his name- which literally means that we must love creation as He loved it – in claiming that we can do to the earth as we please, we have made ourselves equal to God and with that act we have effectively cut off communion with God. That is the real cause of our alienation from the divine. We have cut ourselves loose from God, and, by our actions, are refusing to acknowledge God as the creator and creation as His kingdom.
I want to go even further: in essence we have destroyed the Kingdom. Genesis 3:17 tells the sorry story that the ground is cursed because of our actions. Paul reiterates this in Romans 8:20 when he says that creation has been subjected to human stupidity, that’s why a curse has descended upon the earth.
That our actions make no sense is certainly evident from our economic priorities, where we demand from creation the impossible task to supply us with all our wants, which are, of course, infinite while, if we would stop and think, we would realize that we must strive for such economic conditions that the needs of all people in the world can be met on a sustainable basis. That this is not happening – and the result is Global Warming, Peak Oil and loss of species – suggest all too clearly that God has let the human race do its thing, has surrendered his kingdom – temporarily at least – to the powers of evil, allowing humanity to pursue its own course, away from God and away from Shalom. That too is something the church has failed to recognize.
This means that the world now is in the power of demons. The kingdom is in the clutches of Satan. He is in charge of this world.
The protestant theologian and author of many books, Jacques Ellul, former professor of law in Bordeaux France, laments in his Hope in Time of Abandonment: “It is my belief that we have entered upon an age of abandonment, that God has turned away from us and is leaving us to our fate. I am sure, of course, that he has not turned away from all, that is he is perhaps in the life of an individual. But it is from history, our societies, our cultures, our science, and our politics that God is absent. He is keeping quiet, and has shut himself up in his silence and his night.”
He continues to list all the arguments against this view – the usual quotes from the Bible, true in David’s time, but now no longer valid as Ellul continues: “God has indeed turned away, and that his word as such is no longer spoken…. It is not the unbelievers who are keeping God away. It is, on the one hand, a matter of structures. On the other hand is it the responsibility of Christians and of the Church, who do not know how to be what God expects of them.” Ellul goes as far as saying that the church no longer understands the true situation in the world, and the message it brings carries no longer any power.
And here we come to a crucial point. What then should the church do and what should be their message? The church often provides the easy answers, because it doesn’t want controversy, doesn’t want to upset people and doesn’t really want to confront reality. Pointing to Psalm 24, the preachers proclaim: “Of course God is in charge. Doesn’t it say there that ‘The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world and all who live in it”? The Gospel ministers don’t want it any other way, because then they have to change their triumphant heaven-bound message to a plaintive cry of ‘How long O Lord, when will you return?’ Then they have to surrender their claim of certainty to a more hesitant approach, realizing that what they proclaim from the pulpit is open to question, especially because of the church’s failure to see the significance of the Kingdom.
I don’t dispute that “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof”, as other Psalms also readily admit. However – and here is something I have never heard in a sermon – “If the cosmos is really in God’s hand, why does it say in John 3:16 that God sacrificed his Son, his one and only Son, to buy it back?” The word ‘redeem’ means ‘to buy back’! We can only buy something back, if we first have sold it.
And that’s exactly what we did. The original sin in Paradise is that God gave the earth to Adam and Eve, who then became not stewards, not caretakers but owners. That’s why Psalm 115:16 quite plainly says that “The heavens belong to the Lord, and the earth he has given to the human race.” They, in turn, transferred title to Satan.
More about this in the next chapter.