January 31 2016
WHO THEN CAN BE SAVED?
“If people are in Christ, they are a new creation. The old has passed away, now there is something new! (2 Cor. 5: 17).”
This is a revolutionary passage. In Paul’s days being in Christ meant swearing off false gods, severing all family ties, risking financial ruin and becoming a pariah, an outcast from society. Today it means something equally drastic: it means being totally new people, people with a different mindset, different living habits, totally in tune with creation. Yes, today also, when we are in Christ, it entails a total change, reflecting what is to come, portraying the new humanity.
It really makes me wonder whether I am in Christ, because there’s so little in me and by me and through me that shows that I am a new creature.
Of course, this passage makes me think of Revelation. Of course. That book, like no other, points to the New Age to come, a time totally different from what is happening today, now at this precise moment in your and my life.
Today we all eerily resemble the proverbial frog situation, that creature that sat in a comfortable pot of water, slowly brought to a boil and blithely burns to death. That, literally, reflects our ever warming globe, a product, a situation caused by us driving cars everywhere, turning up the heat when it is cold, the air conditioning when it is warm, traveling anywhere in the world.
We live in abnormal times. This flick-of-the-finger feast is something totally new in the world. Only the previous 100 years or so have seen such incredible luxuries. According to Angus Maddison, an historian of economic growth, the annual rate of growth in the western world from AD 1 to AD 1820 was a mere 0.06 per cent per year, or 6 per cent per century. Or, as summed up by the economic commentator Steven Landsburg: “Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture—but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level… Then—just a couple of hundred years ago—people started getting richer, and richer and richer still.”
Why did we become so wealthy? Simple: we discovered carbon fuel.
And there is where we are now. What did we do? We robbed Peter – creation – to pay Paul – us, mostly Western White people. Now Peter – creation – is exhausted: we have robbed it blind: goodbye to riches; goodbye to the good life; goodbye to everything that has made material life so marvelous. Also goodbye to the skills of yesteryear, the skills of basic survival, the skills of living on $400 to $600 per year thanks to multi- century-long generational know-how. The real rich will survive a little longer, but their lives will be miserable and dangerous and lonely, because they will be beset with dangers wherever they venture.
We now are in the stage referred to in Romans 8: 22: “The entire creation is groaning as in the pains of child-birth.”
If we are with it, if we really feel the pain of creation, if we really suffer with the birds and the bees, the fish and the elephants, the trees and the oceans, then – says that same text – we now, at this time, at this moment in history, should eagerly look forward to this stage of development, for it signifies the coming of what we hope for: the redemption of our bodies and our being adopted into the new creation. Wow. Rejoice. Don’t panic: embrace the suffering: it signals the end of the beginning, the sinful Adam stage.
But……. There always is a ‘but’.
The bible book “James” pulls no punches: “What good is it if we claim to have faith but have no deeds?” Or Jesus’ words: Where do we benefit if we gain the whole world, but lose our soul?” (Matt.16:26).
Yes, talk is cheap. Bonhoeffer calls that ‘pious secularism’ when we try to please God and Mammon, because living the energy-rich life without thinking about it, without having a grain of regret, is wanting to have the cake and eat it too.
This calls for wisdom. Ecclesiastes 7: 12 points the way: “Wisdom is a shelter as money is a shelter, but the advantage of knowledge is this: that wisdom preserves the life of its possessor.”
Preserving life does not mean the life in the here and now, but the life for eternity. Of course that makes sense: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That too needs an explanation. Fear of the Lord simply means that we are in awe of God’s wisdom in creation and act accordingly. When we abuse creation, we abuse God, a daily occurrence for all of us.
It is not easy to be a “New Creation,” particularly in these last days, when everything is speeding up, except a God consciousness. I have said it before and will say it again: If God so loved the world that he offered his most precious to gain it back, isn’t our first obligation to love it as well with whatever we possess, even with our very life?
So here is step 1 of preparing for the AGE TO COME.
Commit yourself to the preservation and enhancement of God’s creation. Today everything we do has a stamp of destruction. If there ever were a generation that sins, it is ours. No wonder Revelation 18: 4 says: “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues; (verse 5) for her sins are piled up heaven, and God has remembered her crimes.” How appropriate that the ‘sins are piled up to heaven’. Indeed Climate Change has everything to do with the CO2 we pump into the heavens.
That coming out is different for each. Leaving this current world behind is not the same for each person, that’s why I cannot dictate what you must do. I know what I must do, and try it consciously, even though I know it is impossible to live a totally creation-friendly life. We have our social, business and family life to preserve. Also it is different for city folk than for country dwellers, but for each of us the biblical given is: “to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.”
That “working out” has an immense global dimension for the simple reason that we are to inherit this world. Therefore I see this life as proving grounds for eternity: our eternal life starts here and thus life today must somehow, however faintly, resemble our life to come. It is not perfection that counts: it is the struggle that’s important. We must fight the good fight to do whatever we can to somehow reflect eternity.
To think that we have arrived, and can coast from now on, doesn’t work. We never arrive, and even though we see “through a glass darkly”, and have only a faint notion how we have to live, we do know our destination: a world where peace and shalom and perfection have an uninterrupted present and is good for eternity.
That takes constant effort and conscious attention. Nothing has damaged ‘Christian’ life more than the Heaven Heresy; nothing is more significant than the proper idea of “the Kingdom”, the perfect, pristine, Paradise-like life that is to come. Without the correct idea of the Kingdom, for which we pray each time we recite the Lord’s Prayer, we cannot proceed. Jesus’ foremost message is and always has been “Seek first the Kingdom, the welfare of Creation, and the rules that guide it, and everything else will fall into place.”
Step Number 2.
Involve your spouse and your family. If not married, find a like-minded person to pursue this goal. Try to promote this Kingdom idea in your church, if you still attend one. After all, the church should be the primary promoter of this idea, but, sorry to say, the church has, by and large, lost this Kingdom ideal. Still the church ought to have the only real solution, so it fervently should promote the “New Earth” option, the only real one out there. The fields are ripe for harvests because the world is desperate for answers.
There are many concerned people today, very worried about the deterioration in almost every field. Never has the political and economic and natural climate in been more worrying.
Step 3
Live as if the New World has already come. Fact is that our current creation-destroying life cannot be sustained: everything today points in that direction. The year 2015 was the warmest on record by a long shot. Also the spread of diseases are really worrying, combine that with the deteriorating state of Global health, where more than 90 percent of people suffer from one or more diseases, and the stage is set for a major pandemic. Again Revelation, the last Bible book, points in that direction as well. I am not sure what to recommend here. Does the plea “Come out of her lest you will be burdened by her ills”, apply here as well? The spread of Christianity in the first centuries was aided by the unstinted and unselfish aid to victims of pandemics in spite of direct exposure to crippling diseases.
Step 4
Gather knowledge. Stay informed. Research the ways of old; find out how people before the Carbon Revolution lived and thrived. In a sense these times were much more community minded, with small country, one-room schools being a focus for a certain small area.
Today, with computers, these schools should be resurrected, displacing the stinking diesel buses which cart young people over great distances to a regional education factory where there is little or no parental oversight. The result of mass schooling is certainly not a success. There the students are trained for a life that has no future. Small schools, reflecting the values of the parents, (do they still have values?) are more student-friendly, are more flexible, and flexibility is the key to the future, because it will resemble more what worked in the past. And the past is the future!
Step 5.
Turn off television.
Neil Postman has written an enlightening book on the subject of television, subtitling it “Amusing ourselves to Death”. By death he basically means ‘spiritual death’ because television deadens our minds. Of course it also speeds up physical death, making us ‘couch potatoes’. TV basically is an entertainment tool, at the expense of quality information. Politics and religion become a commodity and ‘the news of the day’ a show, with lurid pictures and distorted snapshots.
Of course commercials pay for the content, and so we receive a package that promotes the capitalistic point of view. TV has done much to give such continents as Africa an unreal picture of the Western world, and is a factor in economic refugees.
Postman argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about candidates’ ideas and solutions, but whether they come across favorably on television: image is everything.
Personally I hate television. I confess that I subscribe to a basic package, mainly for the news. We watch it so little that I wonder why I pay for it.
We did without TV when our family grew up. TV is very detrimental for family life and development.
Enough.
My main thesis here is that “If anybody is in Christ, they are a new creation. The old has passed away, now there is something new! (2 Cor. 5: 17).”
The last 100 years or so have been a complete abnormality. History has speeded up at a breath-taking – literally – and ultimately life-taking speed. All this is part of the Lord’s plan to accelerate the coming of the Kingdom. Our (old) way of life has to disappear. Our life out of tune with creation has to become totally in harmony with creation. Don’t think too lightly about this.
It was an enormous change for the early Christians. May be it has become even more difficult to day.
Who then can be saved?