Is Believing in God a Psychological Crutch?

Is Faith Delusional?

Prayer As Worship

The Church as Witness

The Cross - Foolishness Or Wisdom

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Is Believing in God a Psychological Crutch?

Taken from Is Believing in God Irrational? by Amy Orr-Ewing, a forthcoming title from InterVarsity Press. Copyright (c) 2008 by Amy Orr- Ewing. Used with permission of InterVarsity Press, PO Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515. www.ivpress.com.

It was strange walking down a hospital corridor with a growing sense of foreboding, getting closer to the consultant’s office and wondering what he would say. I was fifteen years old and had the afternoon off school to receive the results from the operation I had undergone the week before. A mole on my leg had begun to turn dark, and my doctor had decided to remove it as a precaution. My mother and I entered the office together and sat down. The consultant leaned over the desk and said, “I’m afraid it’s cancer.”

Those words still echo in my head now as I write them; the shock, the fear, the bewildering emotions rushed through my body from head to toe. He went on to explain that it was, in fact, a borderline case of melanoma and that they would need to do a further operation to make absolutely sure that I was in the clear. But those stark words “it’s cancer” stayed with me. What was life all about? What was it for? Was there a purpose for my life? Was my life over?

Well, as you have probably guessed, I survived. My life was not yet over; it was to last more than fifteen years. Through the experience of the cancer, I encountered a God who is near us in suffering, a God who makes his presence known. I remember lying in my bed, shaking with fear and calling out to God, who then tangibly filled my bedroom and lifted the fear and blackness from my chest. As Psalm 30:1-3 says,

I will exalt you, O Lord,
for you lifted me out of the depths
and did not let my enemies gloat over me.
O Lord my God, I called to you for help
and you healed me.
O Lord, you brought me up from the grave;
you spared me from going down into the pit.

As life has gone on, friends have died suddenly, members of my community in London have been on the receiving end of horrific violence, and the questions of the human heart have kept on coming year after year as I have traveled and met people of different ages, backgrounds and nationalities.

I have found that many people have questions about Christian experience. These questions can be genuine objections to Christianity or things that trouble Christians in the back of their minds. During my journey of talking to the many people who have asked me all the questions in this book, I’ve discovered that finding answers is a real challenge because the questions do not just touch on intellectual ideas but are undergirded by emotional realities and the pain of life. The issues examined in this book have all emerged during conversations in the course of the last couple of years.

Is God real? Is it possible to know anything—let alone to know him? Why do bad things happen to people who worship this God? What about the spiritual experiences of other faiths? All these questions and more have come out of real-life situations, so whether you are an atheist or someone who wonders if there just might be something more to Christianity than you first thought, I hope that, as you read this book, at least some of the thoughts offered here will help you to see what the Christian faith has to say amid all the pain, confusion and complexity of life.

Your Relationship with God Is Just a Psychological Crutch!

Has anyone ever told you that your faith is a “crutch”? I remember getting into a black taxi outside a central London church. The cabbie took one look at my Bible and launched into his opinion of Christianity. He explained to me with pity and pathos that belief in God is a crutch for weak, pathetic people who don’t have the strength to take responsibility for their own lives.

When he finished his lengthy thesis, he looked at me in the mirror as if expecting my response. When I answered, “Thank you very much,” with just a hint of irony, he blustered on, likely hoping to increase the diminishing likelihood of a tip with, “Well, I’m just saying it for your own good. A girl like you doesn’t need religion!”

This idea that Christian faith is a psychological crutch for needy people is a pervasive one. At its root are a number of assumptions. The first is that God is merely a psychological projection. He doesn’t actually exist, not in any real sense; he exists only in the minds of his followers. In fact, the thinking goes, these minds have created him out of their own need. That could be a need for a father figure or a need to give significance to existence by believing in a God who created the world.

Where does this idea come from—this concept of God as a creation or projection of human minds that is propounded by so many? Its most famous proponent was the thinker Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a movement that popularized the theory that unconscious motives control much human behavior. His theories and his treatment of patients were controversial in nineteenth-century Vienna and remain hotly debated today. His research was wide ranging and complex, but for our purposes we examine in particular his commitment to the notion of God as entirely a projection of the human mind.

God as Psychological Projection

Though a Jew, Freud was an atheist for most of his life. He went through a brief period of “wavering” on the issue of God in his university days—during which time he wrote to a friend, “The bad part of it, especially for me, lies in the fact that science of all things seems to demand the existence of a God”1—yet he emerged from his studies without religious conviction. Freud’s peers, and many authors of the time, were immersed in scientific materialism, and he remained a strident atheist. Another factor may have been the appalling anti-Semitism that swept through his native and culturally Roman Catholic Austria. In the light of his experiences of the weakness of Christianity at repelling such vitriol, one writer comments, “One can understand Freud’s motivation to discredit and destroy what he called the ‘religious Weltanschauung (worldview)’ and why he referred to religion as ‘the enemy.’ ”2

In arguing against the existence of God, Freud believed that an individual’s perspective on what God is like sprung from his or her experience of their own father. When people grow up and find themselves alone in the world they cannot go on looking to human parents for security but must find some other more ultimate source of security and end up positing a God to fill this role.

He argued that it is this human need to rise above the vulnerability and frailty of adult existence that leads to us positing the existence of some higher power or God: “When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child for ever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father.”3

From this perspective, God is merely a creation of the human mind, a projection emanating from human need and desire rather than a distinct reality or being that exists independently of the human mind. Freud’s notion of God acting as an idealized father figure for humans, providing a cushion from the harshness of the real world and a comforting friend in the midst of life’s troubles, reduces God to a human construct. Indeed, for Freud, God is made in humanity’s own image and is the “ultimate wish-fulfillment”; God does not actually exist but is merely the creation of humanity’s imagination and desire for a loving father figure.4

How might a Christian respond to this? Can God really be explained away so easily by one aspect of psychology? Of course, the most obvious point to make in response is that this argument about projection cuts both ways. After all, isn’t it equally possible to say that Freud and other atheists deny the existence of God out of a need to escape from a father figure, or to argue that the nonexistence of God springs from a deepseated desire for no father figure to exist?

Clearly this doesn’t prove that God is real, but it does help us see that Freud’s arguments cannot prove that God does not exist, while at the same time helping us tackle the question of projection. After all, dismissing God as a psychological projection while claiming neutrality in our own psyche is disingenuous at best and cannot be an adequate basis for rejecting God. This is rather like the mother who sees her child swearing and is so overcome with fury that she ends up swearing at her child while telling him off. When her child asks about this inconsistency, she replies, “Don’t do what I do, do what I say!” We may well cringe inwardly when we hear something like this in a supermarket or airplane, but trying to do away with God as if he were a psychological projection is actually rather similar. The protagonist is saying that you as a Christian are subject to psychological factors but I, the skeptic, am not.

It also becomes quickly apparent that a Freudian belief in God as a human projection cannot provide us with an explanation for the Christian faith of converts who would rather not believe but find themselves compelled by evidence. I have known many people who have started out as strongly convinced nonbelievers but have found that when they looked at real evidence of God and began to read the Bible, they found themselves convinced—almost against their will—that it is actually true and real. It is then that a decision must be made: will I now respond to what I believe is true, or will I sweep it under the carpet? Alister McGrath writes,

Back in the 1960s, we were told that religion was fading
away, to be replaced by a secular world. For some of us
that sounded like a great thing. I was an atheist back
in the late 1960s, and remember looking forward to the
demise of religion with a certain grim pleasure. I had
grown up in Northern Ireland, and had known religious
tensions and violence at first hand. . . . The future was
bright and godless. . . . I started out as an atheist, who
went on to become a Christian. I had originally intended
to spend my life in scientific research, but found that my
discovery of Christianity led me to study its history and
ideas in greater depth. I gained my doctorate in molecular
biophysics while working in the Oxford laboratories
of Sir George Radda, but then gave up active scientific
research to study theology.5

In fact, we may go further than nullifying this argument that God is a projection of the mind by turning it on its head and suggesting that a desire for a God who can fulfill our needs and provide moral order exists precisely because human beings have been designed and created to desire them. The man floating on a raft at sea is unbearably thirsty, but he won’t just get a drink of water simply by being thirsty. But the very existence of his thirst does show that a way for his desire to be satisfied actually exists: fresh water. As C. S. Lewis put it, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.”6

Lewis is an interesting case here because he was a contemporary of Freud and an atheist himself into his thirties. He famously described his unhappiness before turning to Christ as resulting from “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”7 Lewis described this desire as “Joy,” and he spoke of finding it for himself when he surrendered to God: “To be united with that Life in the eternal Sonship of Christ is . . . the only thing worth a moment’s consideration.”8 He argued that the inborn longing one feels as a human being is a desire for a relationship with the Creator God and that the very presence of this desire within us suggests the existence of God.
 
While Freud believed that human desire could be fulfilled in the ordinary run of life, Lewis argued that “earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care . . . never to mistake them [earthly pleasures] for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.”9 For the Christian it is a relationship with God that brings humans this genuine fulfillment. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal put it beautifully:

There once was in man a true happiness, of which all that
now remains is the empty print and trace. This he tries
in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in
things that are not there the help he cannot find in those
that are, though none can help, because the infinite abyss
can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object;
in other words, by God himself.10

St. Augustine famously said of God, “Thou movest us to delight in praising You; for You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You.”11 And Woody Allen mused on this from the opposite perspective when he said as an atheist analyzing life, “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”12
 
And so we have seen that God cannot be dispensed with as if he were a mere psychological projection without atheism being equally treated as the same. But more than that, the desire for God, rather than undermining his existence, points to its reality. After all, if human beings are created by God in his image as the Bible teaches, shouldn’t we expect a divine fingerprint and the possibility of relationship between creature and Creator?

However, ultimately for the Christian the important question is not whether I have a psychological need for a father figure or a desire for a father figure not to exist. Rather, the question is about what actually exists: is God really there? The way to come to any conclusions about that is to investigate the evidence for his existence.13

So we have observed that the first assumption in the statement “Your relationship with God is just a psychological crutch!” is that God is merely a psychological projection. The second assumption that we encounter is that, because belief in God provides the faithful with a crutch, it is somehow suspect.

God as Talisman

The skeptic implies that since the believer finds protection from the cruelty and evil of the world, the idea of God is like a talisman, an irrational superstition. Freud makes the same point: “religious ideas have arisen from the same need
as have all other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature.”14 Humans need to find comfort and meaning in the midst of the pain of life as well as a guide for how
to live, and they look to God for this. The religious believer views the evolution of morality within human societies as moral absolutes revealed and upheld by God. This belief in absolutes then provides an unreal but comforting refuge in
a dark world, so that the individual can feel safe in his or her own status before God and secure in the knowledge that evildoers will be punished.

Freud argues against what he sees as an unreal supernatural power who arbitrarily imposes moral standards on humans. For him, God exists only inside the human mind and has been imagined into existence at the whim of carnal desires. He writes, “We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is the very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”15 Later he states,

Since it is an awkward task to separate what God himself
has demanded from what can be traced to the authority
of an all-powerful parliament or a high judiciary, it would
be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out
altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin
of all the regulations and precepts of civilization.16

One writer comments: “Humans, now educated and enlightened by science, begin to grow out of their childlike belief in God and recognize morals as man-made rules put into place for their own benefit. . . . Freud believed that as education increased and scientific research continued, humans would slowly stop believing in God and begin to recognize that God was simply an expression of their wishes.”17 But if belief in God makes sense of the world and provides a positive moral framework that helps people to live constructively, that in itself is not a reason to disbelieve in him. Similarly, if relationship with God enables the believer to find healing, wholeness and comfort in the midst of their human suffering, we should not be surprised. After all, clearly, if God is real it will have a massive impact on life and on the experience of life.


Only for the Weak and Inferior

The third assumption is that people who make use of this “crutch” of relationship with God, and find it practical, meaningful and effective, must be weak or inferior. This is a rather strange idea, since surely it makes sense to access real sources of support and relationship that are there for us. This reminds me of the story of a man who had been given a suitcase filled with money. He was told that if he could successfully give away this money, he would receive the same amount again for himself. The only condition was that each banknote had to go to a different person. So he thought to himself, This will be easy. I’m going to be rich! He ran out into the nearest shopping street, opened his suitcase and started shouting, “Roll up, roll up— free money—absolutely no catch. Come and take it.

Most people passed straight by, not even looking at him. A few slowed their pace but thought better of it. One woman stopped and asked, “What’s the catch? What are you going to try to get out of me?” “Absolutely nothing,” the man replied. “It really is free money. Please take it.” “No, I don’t think so,” she said, and walked off. A very small proportion of the shoppers on that day took the free money. They were so suspicious as to be convinced that no deal could really be that simple and easy. The money really was free, with no strings attached, and the logical thing to do was to accept it.
 
In the same way, if a God of love does exist, the rational thing to do is to accept his love, to come to know him. Entering into that kind of a relationship will have a positive effect, but that does not make the person weaker or somehow inferior to anyone else.

In contrast to the implication that those who need God are somehow inferior specimens of the human race is the Christian belief that there is an essential equality within humanity— all humans are precious beings who have been made in the image of God. At the same time, all humans are sinful and equally in need of God.

Freud did not really take issue with this idea of human fallibility; in fact, he believed in the reality of shame and guilt. Yet in his closed universe, with no ultimate authority, he struggled to deal with good and evil. As a consequence, he looked to the ideal of education as the solution. People must be taught that ethical behavior is in their own best interest, he stated; once they became well educated, they would naturally behave ethically. But can we really be sure that education in and of itself necessarily produces goodness? As one scholar notes, “Freud wrote this in 1927 before the Nazi rise in educated Germany.”18

Yet even before that—as far back as 1913—Freud confessed to a friend, “That psychoanalysis has not made the analysts themselves better, nobler, or of stronger character remains a disappointment to me.”19

The idea that Christianity is a crutch for weak people assumes that God is a human invention, that he is a psychological projection. We have seen that this argument cuts both ways as it could equally be argued that atheism is a psychological phenomenon and so it is nullified as a reasonable basis for rejecting God. The idea also assumes that belief in God provides people with a “crutch” and should be regarded with suspicion. Here we saw that something working ought not be a reason for rejecting it. On the contrary, if God does exist, we should surely expect his existence to have a real palpable impact on our lives.

As C. S. Lewis put it, “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him.” 20 To enter into a relationship with God is a logical response if he actually exists and reveals himself to people. It is only if he is not real that we ought to be worried about the “crutch” he provides.

And finally, we saw that we do not necessarily need to be weaker than or inferior to others if we accept God’s offer of relationship and become Christians. In fact, it is the logical, reasonable response if God himself is real.

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“Is Faith Delusional?”
with Ravi Zacharias

Atlanta Civic Center 395 Piedmont Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30308

February 26, 2009, 7pm

Doors open at 6:30pm

According to Richard Dawkins, there’s no difference between God and the Easter Bunny. Is God really just a trick or a deception like the Tooth Fairy? Is accepting God’s existence a fantasy fit only for the consumption of a child? In a world with so many tears is belief in God simply a lie we use to persuade a smile? Join RZIM for a thought provoking evening featuring Ravi Zacharias as he addresses the intellectual assumptions surrounding atheism while contrasting the validity of the Christian faith in his special message, “Is Faith Delusional?” Question & Answer session to follow this message.  Tickets on sale now! Seating is limited!

Click here to order tickets.

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Prayer As Worship

For this morning, I'm going to take a digression, if I might, away from our study of 1 Timothy and I'd like you to turn in your Bible to Matthew chapter 6 verses 9 and 10.  This, of course, is a very familiar portion of Scripture known to many people as the Lord's prayer.  It probably better would be titled the disciples' prayer.  And the reason I'm taking a bit of a break from our study of Timothy is two fold, I think.  One, it seems to me that we have been along time in Timothy, many months now, talking about ministry and the ministry of the church and the role of the pastors and leaders of the church and the servants in the church, the deacons, the deaconesses, and all of that.  We've really been talking about the pragmatics of ministry.

     And I think the Lord just impressed upon my heart that we needed to take at least one Lord's day and look back at the whole matter of worship.  We don't want to be too pragmatic in the sense that we lose the focus of what we're all about, and that primarily is a matter of worship.

     The second reason, not only was the sensitivity to balance some of the teaching about pragmatics along with the perspective on worship, but in my own personal life over the last year and a half or so, I have seen God answer prayer in more mighty and evident ways than ever in any other time in my life.  And so I've been sort of concerned about this whole matter of prayer and evaluating my own prayer life and what prayer is really all about recently.  We ran the series on the disciples' prayer on radio and had a wonderful response to that.

     Because of those kinds of things on the positive side, I just felt that we ought to look back at the disciples' prayer and sort of regrip some of the great truths that are foundational in the matter of prayer that relate to worship.  But not only was I motivated on the positive end, I was also motivated on the negative side as I often am.  As I listen to what's going on in the Christian world, as I hear various preachers and teachers, as I read various books, as I try to sort of put my finger on the pulse, if you will, of what's happening in Christian circles, I see an ever increasing movement that all of us are probably somewhat aware of in this matter of the prosperity gospel and positive confession that is really very, very threatening to the purity and the sanity of the church.  It seems as though television and Christian radio, Christian television, churches are literally getting more and more and more people who are buying into the fact that prayer is simply a way for you to get what you want...that God is obligated to deliver the goods to you.

     I turned on the television last night, on came a man name Kenneth Copeland, you've probably seen.  He said, "Write for this little book if you want to know how to get health and prosperity."  And when someone doesn't have that it's because they haven't cashed their check in...that's what they advocate.  It's all there for you.  God has to deliver.  He's put Himself in that position.  All you've got to do is name it and claim it and it's yours. 

     The bottom line problem with this is makes a tremendous reversal in the role of God and man.  The Bible teaches that God is sovereign and man His servant.  The "name it and claim it" theology and the prosperity gospel teaches that man is sovereign and God is his servant.  And we are in the demand position and the command position and God is in the role of the servant who must deliver.

     Now admittedly we live in a very indulgent society.  We live in a very self-centered and selfish society.  We live in a materialistic society.  That...the waves of that society have washed ashore on Christian theology.  And the prosperity, health, wealth, name-it-and-claim-it mentality which says you demand from God and God has to give it is nothing more than a spiritual justification for self-indulgent sin...nothing more.  That kind of praying is no praying at all, it is a perversion of prayer.  In fact, it does what we are forbidden to do in Scripture, it takes the name of the Lord in vain.  It is irreverent.  It is Satanic.  It is anything but biblical, anything but virtuous, anything but godly, anything but directed by the Holy Spirit.

     And I think for us to understand what's going on, we need to sort of relook at this whole matter of how we are to pray.  And the focal point of that comes in these words of our Lord Jesus in Matthew 6.  "After this manner therefore pray, Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen, or so let it be."

     When Jesus teaches us how to pray, and this is the model of how to pray, beginning and end of that prayer focuses on God...hallowing His name, praying that His Kingdom come, praying that His will be done.  And then the few petitions that are listed there followed by "Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen."  The focal point of the prayer then is on the glory and the Kingdom...the honor of God, the extension of His Kingdom.  Everything has to fit into that context so that all prayer in a sense is controlled by the Kingdom, by the glory of God.  And this, I think, is really basic to our prayer life.

     In fact, in John 14, Jesus said, "Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do that the Father may be glorified in the Son," John 14:13.  Whatever you ask in My name, I'll do it that the Father may be glorified in the Son.  Prayer begins and ends not with the indulgence of man, but with the glory of God...not with the building of my empire, but His Kingdom...not with getting what I want, but doing His will...not with the elevation of my name but with the hallowing of His name.  Everything in prayer revolves around who God is and what God wants and how God is to be glorified.  And that is the sum and substance of proper praying.  And any praying that is self-consuming, that is self- indulgent, self-aggrandizing, that seeks whatever I want no matter what God wants, any praying that makes God have to deliver to me because I have demanded it takes His name in vain, sins violently against the nature of God and against His will and Word.

     And when these people come along with this "name it and claim it" kind of praying and say that God wants you healthy, wealthy, prosperous and successful and they appear to be spiritual, know this...they are not spiritual for their preoccupation has not to do with the extension of the Kingdom and the glory of God's name but with the extension of their own empire and the fulfillment of their own desires.  We must understand that.  The error of this is not a peripheral error, it is an error at the very heart of Christian truth, namely the nature of God is attacked.

     You go back into the Old Testament and pick out, for example, three prophets who were in dire situations.  Starting in Jeremiah chapter 32, Jeremiah is in prison.  He is trying to preach to a nation of people who will not hear.  They want to shut his mouth.  They are not interested in anything he says.  Ultimately they throw him in a pit. They want him shut up.  He has really no measurable success in his ministry.  One of his prayers is given to us in Jeremiah 32 and I would like you to note this, at the end of verse 16 he says, "I prayed to the Lord."  Here's his prayer, notice the absence of any personal requests.

     "Ah, Lord God, behold Thou hast made the heaven and the earth by Thy great power and outstretched arm and there's nothing too hard for Thee.  Thou showest loving kindness unto thousands and recompenses the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them, the great, the mighty God, the Lord of hosts is His name.  Great in counsel, mighty in work, for Thine eyes are open upon all the ways of the sons of men to give every one according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings, who has set signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, even unto this day and in Israel and among other men and hast made Thee a name at this day.  And hast brought forth Thy people Israel out of the land of Egypt with signs and with wonders and with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm and with great terror and hast given them this land which Thou didst swear to their fathers to give them, a land flowing with milk and honey.  They came in and possessed it but they obeyed not Thy voice, neither walked in Thy law.  They have done nothing of all that Thou commandest them to do, therefore Thou hast caused all this evil to come upon them."

     In other words, here is a man in great distress, a man in great loneliness, a man in despair in terms of ministry insofar as the people have not heard what he has said.  But the preoccupation of the heart of Jeremiah is to extol the glory, the majesty, the name, the honor and the works of God.  There is no preoccupation with his own pain.  There is no preoccupation with his own circumstance.

     In Daniel chapter 9, Daniel also in a very difficult situation, caught in the transition between two great world empires, representing a dispossessed people in a foreign land, cries out to God in prayer in chapter 9 verse 3, "I set my face to the Lord God to seek by prayer and supplication with fasting and sack cloth and ashes and I prayed unto the Lord my God and made my confession and this is what I said," and here is how his prayer begins: "O Lord, the great and awesome God, keeping the covenant and mercy to them that love Him and to them that keep His commandments, we have sinned," and on he goes.  And again, the initiation of prayer comes with an affirmation of the nature and the glory and the greatness and the majesty of God.  That is always the godly perspective...God, You're in charge, God, You are glorious, God, You are holy...whatever I pray then is prayed in line with that, that God may indeed be glorified.

     Jonah who is in the middle of the belly of a fish, an absolutely inconceivable place, chapter 2 verse 7 says, "I remembered the Lord and my prayer came in unto Thee and to Thy holy temple," and here was his prayer, "I will sacrifice unto Thee with the voice of thanksgiving, I will pay what I have vowed, salvation is of the Lord," that's a funny prayer when you're in the middle of a fish.  But the Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited out Jonah.  It was a prayer for the glory of God.  It was, "Thank You, God, for who You are, bless You for Your salvation, Your delivering power."  There was no pleading and begging.  And there was no claiming, naming and claiming anything.  Simply extolling the character of God.  And that's the heart of what our Lord teaches us in this prayer.

     Let's look at just those first two verses and the four initial elements of prayer that give us the focus on prayer as an act of worship.  Prayer is primarily worship.  It is godward, it is not to get for me, it is to allow God to be glorified.  I have to see that in my prayers.  My prayers are not primarily for what I can gain but for the glory of God.

     First of all, God's paternity, that is that God is Father.  "Our Father who art in heaven," this is the basis--by the way--of our boldness in prayer.  We go to God because He is not our King only, He is not our monarch only, He is not our judge only, He is not our creator only, but He is also our father.  And that beautiful expression gives us the sense of access and the boldness to come intimately into His presence as a son or a daughter would come to the presence of their own father.

     Isaiah 64:8, "Now, O Lord, Thou art our Father, we are the clay and Thou our potter.  We all are the work of Thy hand."  That's the recognition.  Lord, You made us.  You gave us life.  You gave us birth.  You supply our resources.  We belong to You through the link of common life through faith in Christ.  We're Your children.  And when I come to God in prayer, I come first of all to one who is my father.  Very different than the pagans who came to a vengeful angry violent unfair unjust cruel jealous envious man-made deity whom they had to appease.  We don't have to appease God, we come to our loving father.

     And in Matthew chapter 7, do you remember verses 7 to 11?  "Ask and it shall be given you, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you and everyone that asks receives and he that seeks finds, and the one who knocks, it shall be opened."  Why?  Why is that so?  Here's an illustration.  "What man is there of whom if his son asks bread will he give him a stone?  If he asks a fish, will he give him a snake?  If you then being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?"

     In other words, our confidence and our boldness in coming to God with whatever is on our heart is based initially on the fact that He is our Father.  He is our Father.  This was a new revelation in many ways to the Jews when Jesus said this.  They saw God as Father only in a national sense.  "Our Father" is a very uncommon phrase in the Old Testament, it only appears 14 times.  "My Father," that is an individual expression of a person to God as his personal father never appears in the Old Testament.  If God is seen as father in the Old Testament, He is seen as the father of a nation, not an intimate loving father of an individual.

     It's not until Jesus came and revealed God as the intimate loving Father that He really becomes one to whom we can say, "My Father."  And the Apostle Paul says we can call Him "Abba Father" which means "papa...daddy," Romans 8:15, Galatians 6:4.  Those are terms of endearment, terms of intimacy.  And so He is our Father.  Jesus called Him Father over 70 times in the New Testament.  Every time He prayed He called Him Father, with one exception and that was the time when He was separated from Him on the cross bearing sin and then He said, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?"  The intimacy was lost in the moment of spiritual death, spiritual separation.  But Jesus comes back and says, "God is My Father and God is also your Father."  He says that in John 20 verse 17...you remember the statement?  He said this, "Touch Me not," to Mary, "I'm not yet ascended to My Father but I go to...but go to the brethren and say to them, I ascend to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God."  He's not only My Father, He's your Father.

     So, in our prayers we are going to a God who is our Father, our loving Father.  And we can go with a sense of intimacy.  We can go with boldness and confidence as a child would go to his father.  No fear is there.

     This was news not only to the Jews who saw God as very separate and a Father only in a national sense, the Jews who wouldn't even name the name of God....whenever the name of God came along, they had a blank...they wouldn't even speak it.  They were so distant from God and God had become so fearful to them.  But you add to that the Greco-Roman world and the culture there and you'll find they had the same ideas.  The gods that they created were gods who were absolutely beyond any concern with mankind.  They..the Stoics, for example, famous philosophical group among the Greeks and the Romans, had decided that the essential attribute of God was apathea(?), that means apathy, that God was essentially apathetic, not in the sense of the English word, apathetic means indifferent.  Apathea in the Greek means more than indifferent, it means incapable of feeling anything, without any pathos, without any feeling, without any emotion.  And they said because man feels love and hate, because man feels joy and sorrow, because man feels contentment and anger, man is volatile and all the problems of life are bound up in man's ability to feel the range of emotion.  Therefore God cannot be a victim of those things.  So in order to set God apart from the struggle of man and make Him greater than man, He must be a God who is absolutely apathea, beyond feeling anything.  And so the Stoics said God has not the essential ability to experience any feeling at all.  But Jesus said that's just not true.  You can go to Him as your loving Father and He responds because He cares.  He is not passionless, emotionless or unfeeling.

     The Epicureans set another attribute that they thought was the primary attribute of God and that was the attribute which is the word ateraxia(?).  It means perfectly serene and perfectly calm.  And it's the same idea.  They said that if God were involved in the affairs of the world, God would be as upset as everybody else is.  So for God to maintain His serenity, He must be absolutely incapable of feeling anything that would disturb His permanent state of calm.  So they had postulated that God was some kind of a feelingless passionless emotionless serene personality that had no feeling at all, no matter what was going on in the world.  And the Jews really felt that God was so far away they couldn't even speak His name.  Jesus burst on the scene and begins to talk of the intimacy with which men and women can know God.

     Two more modern examples I read about, Thomas Hardy who asked what possible use prayer could be to anyone, because when you pray, all you're praying to is...and he said this, "The dreaming dark dumb thing that turns the handle of this idol show."  For him God was some dreaming dark dumb thing.  And Voltaire's final verdict on life was "a bad joke, ring down the curtain, the farce is done."  And H.G. Welles(?) in one of his novels painted a picture of a man who was defeated by the stress and strain and tension of modern life.  His only hope was trying to find fellowship with God and the man said this, "I would as soon think of cooling my throat with the Milky Way or shaking hands with the stars."  God's unfeeling, indifferent.

     Albert Einstein was interviewed on one occasion.  He was asked if he believed in a God.  He said there is definitely a cosmic force that's created things.  But he said we could never know Him.

     But that's just not true.  That's just not true.  God is not emotionless.  God is not utterly detached.  God is seen to us, I believe, in Jesus Christ to carry all the passion that could ever be carried...to weep, to know sorrow, to know joy, to know pain, to know all of human emotion and thus He is a loving Father who understands what His children endure.  And we go to a God who does not need to be appeased, but who embraces us as His own.  That settles the matter of fear.  That settles the matter of fear.  I'm not afraid of God because Jesus Christ has made me acceptable with God, I'm not afraid of Him, I'm His child now.  He's adopted me into His family.

     You may have read the most significant of all Greek legends, supposedly, is the legend of Prometheus.  Prometheus was a deity in the pantheon of gods of Greece.  And in the days before man possessed fire, they said life was very difficult, no fire, no warmth...no cooking and so forth.  So in pity one day, Prometheus decided to take fire out of the realm of the gods and give it to men as a gift.  So Prometheus brought fire down and gave it to man on earth.  And Zeus, the king of the gods, was absolutely furious that he would do that.  He wanted to keep man in a very low and humble state and not have fire.  So he took Prometheus and he chained him to rock in the middle of the Adriatic Sea.  And he was chained to that rock, you may have heard of Prometheus Bound, and during the day he was suffering from the exposure to the elements, heat, the sunlight, so forth.  And at night, the cold of the night.  And beyond that, Zeus was so furious with Prometheus that he sent a vulture to tear out his liver.  But it kept growing back and every time it grew back, the Greeks said the vulture came and tore it out again.

     And you say, "What's the point of all that?  Who wants a God like Zeus?"  That's typical of the ancient kind of gods.  They are vengeful, they are jealous.  They're angry.  Typically all across the world, false religions with false gods have deities that must be desperately appealed to to appease their anger.  That's typical of all cultures...where there are false gods.  But God is our Father.  That settles the matter of fear.

     It also settles the matter of hope.  It also settles the matter of hope.  Things will change because a loving father will do what a loving father needs to do.  If we ask Him for bread, He won't give us a stone.  If we ask Him for a fish, He won't give us a snake.  But whatever we ask, He will do that for His loving children, if it fits within His will.  That settles the matter of hope.  We can live in hope in this world because we know our God is a loving Father.  It also settles the matter of loneliness.  We may not have a friend in this world as we would like to have a friend, but we have in Him a friend that sticks closer than a brother.  We have in Him a Father who will never leave us or forsake us.  There is an intimacy of love that takes away any loneliness.  A believer can be without human resources and have the presence of God and be sufficient.

     Fourthly, it settles the matter of selfishness.  Notice what it says, "our Father."  And it says "our daily bread" in verse 11 and "our debts" and "our debtors" and "us into temptation," and "deliver us from evil."  The point is that all of our praying embraces a family.  We're not just alone in this, we have brothers and sisters who also are the children of God.  And whatever we ask must embrace them as well.  In other words, I'm not saying, "God, give me what I want...I want it no matter how it effects everybody else."

     I don't know how it is in your family, but in our family we try to do things for the children together.  And if one of our children came for a request and wanted something particularly from us, we would perhaps feel right about giving that to that child only if we somehow were able to do something equal for the other children.  There's a sense in which part of being a parent is embracing the fact that no child exists in isolation from the other children but all are a part of a family.  And so, my prayer life simply is not "I want this...I demand this...Give me this," but my prayer life is, "Father, You have a lot of children, whatever You think is best for me as one of those children, here's my request."  It settles the matter of selfishness that He is our Father, not just mine.

     It settles the matter of resources also in our prayer life.  It says "our Father who art in heaven."  He's not bound to earth.  He's not limited by the limitation of earth.  We are used to a declining...a declining amount of resources.  We hear all the time that the natural resources of this world are diminishing.  And that's true.  We understand the law of entropy that things are winding down, that everything is moving toward disintegration.  We understand what it means to use up something.  You buy the box full and in a week the box is empty.  We understand that.  You pour out the bottle and the bottle is empty.  But in terms of spiritual and eternal resources, that doesn't even exist.  There is the pouring out of all resources and the diminishing of none.

     Now I don't understand that, I just believe that.  So when we go to God with our need, the fact that He is in heaven, that is supernatural, beyond the diminishing resources of this world, means the matter of resources is a settled issue.  Whatever we...whatever we need to receive from Him by His purpose is available.

     It also settles the matter of wisdom.  You remember the line, "Father knows...what?...best."  And when I go to God as Father, I have to acknowledge that He knows best.  It also settles the matter of obedience.  A father is to be obeyed, even Jesus obeyed the Father and that's part of the father/child relationship.

     So, when I pray "our Father," what I'm really saying is, "God, I recognize that I'm Your child.  I recognize that You love me and I have an intimate access to You.  I recognize that You have absolutely unlimited resources which could be used at my disposal.  I recognize that You have a family larger than myself who has needs.  I recognize You're going to do what is best for me.  I recognize that I need to obey You.  And I recognize that whatever You do, You know best."  And that's how prayer begins.  It begins with an affirmation of the fact that God is my Father, that means resources, that means obedience, that's the heart of it.  All the resources are there.  And the call to obedience is there as well.

     The Bible says that God knows when a sparrow falls.  I remember reading J.E. McFadden who said that the book of Scripture, when it says a sparrow falls, if you look at the Greek really means more than falls, it's not just that God knows when a sparrow falls to the ground in the sense of death.  The word really means lights.  And he says it's better to translate that, "God knows every time a sparrow hops."  Nothing escapes the knowledge of God.  Every time it hops on the ground, a little sparrow is known by God, He sees it and He knows it.

     And God who is the God who knows everything about the little sparrow is the same God who knows everything about His beloved children.  And that's why one man said, when we say "our Father" we know we are not lost in the crowd.  There's intimacy there.  We're not pleading to some great sovereign deity somewhere who is apathetic, but to a loving Father.

     But we must recognize in praying to Him as a Father that He has a right to give us what He wants because Father knows best.  And we are responsible to obey Him because He is our Father.  So, prayer begins then with the recognition in general that we're going to a loving father with unlimited resources who knows best to whom we must obey.

     Let's go to the second thought in this prayer, not God's priority...God's paternity, but God's priority...God's priority.  Verse 9, it says, "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name."  Here is the first petition, the initial statement was simply the salutation in prayer, here is the first petition.  And the essence of this petition is worship.  God, the first thing I pray is that Your name be hallowed.

     I was reading last night the biography of Arthur Pink, a great teacher of God's Word.  One of the things that he said is very, very, very related to this and I think practical.  He said, "How clearly then is the fundamental duty in prayer set forth, self and all its needs must be given a secondary place and the Lord freely accorded the preeminence in our thoughts, desires and supplications.  This petition must take the precedence for the glory of God's great name is the ultimate end of all things.  Every other request must not only be subordinated to this one, but be in harmony with and in pursuance of it.  We cannot pray a right unless the honor of God be dominant in our hearts.  If we cherish a desire for the honoring of God's name, we must not ask for anything which it would be against the divine holiness to bestow," end quote.

     So our prayers are controlled, first of all, by a recognition that God is Father.  Secondly, they're controlled by a recognition that God's name is to be hallowed.  Now "name," what does that mean?  "Hallowed be Thy name."  That simply means all that God is...all that God is.  In those days the name of someone was in a sense the sum of who they were.  It's still that way to some extent.  My name is more than just a name, it really sums up who I am.  If someone says to you, "John MacArthur," there's an image of all that I am in that name.  And so it is with God.  God's name is the sum of all that He is.  Christ's name is the sum of all that He is.  And the name stands for the nature, the attributes, the character, the personality of God.  And so, what this petition is saying is, "Father, may Your person, Your identity, Your character, Your nature, Your attributes, and Your reputation be hallowed."

     Now what does it mean to be hallowed?  Well, it simply means to set apart as sacred.  When we think of hallowed halls, we usually think of some cloistered halls, long robes, dismal chants, halos, musty dim churches, morbid music, tired traditions.  Hallowed means to be set apart as sacred.  May Your name be set apart as sacred.  The word hagiazo(?), to treat as sacred, to hallow, has a synonym, dixazo(?) from which we get the word "glory."  It means to glorify or honor. 

     Another writer, Origen, said that it also is synonym with hupsoo which means to exalt or lift on high.  Lift on high Your name, exalt Your name, honor Your name, glorify Your name, may Your name be elevated as sacred.  That's a very, very basic part of prayer.  Lord, whatever honors You, whatever glorifies You, whatever exalts Your name, whatever lifts You up...you see, that's the antithesis to the kind of praying that's so popular today which says lift me up, give me this, give me that, make me prosper, make me successful.  The whole idea is...God, may You prosper, may You be glorified.  Whatever that means, the name of God, elohim, creator.  The name of God, el elyon, God Most high, Jehovah meaning I am that I am; Jehovah-jireh, the Lord will provide; Jehovah-nissi, the Lord our banner; Jehovah-ropha(?), the Lord that heals; Jehovah Shalom, the Lord our peace; Jehovah- roi, the Lord our Shepherd; Jehovah-Tsidkenu, the Lord our righteousness; Jehovah-tsabaoth, the Lord of hosts; Jehovah- Shammah, the Lord is present; Jehovah-meqaddeshkem, the Lord who sanctifies; all that He is is wrapped up in all of His name.  And when we say "hallowed be Thy name" we are saying God be glorified.

     The purpose of every prayer you ever offer is that God be glorified, exalted, honored, lifted up, whatever way He can be.  And this, by the way is a protection against abusing the sentimentalism of "Father."  To say "Our Father" and "our Father" alone might be a little bit dangerous.  You might overuse that idea of father.  And then "Abba Father...papa...daddy," you might understand that intimacy but not understand the balancing and the balancing is, "Yes, You are my loving Father, but hallowed be Your holy name."  No Jew would ever say "Father" without adding something.  So in the prayers of the Jews, here are some examples, "O Lord, Father and ruler of my life...O Lord, Father and God of my life...O Father, King of great power Most High, Almighty God..."  And the famous daily prayers of the Shemina(?) Esra(?), "O Father, O King, O Lord," the fatherhood always balanced with those which represent His awesomeness.

     On the Day of Atonement there are ten penitential days that surround that one day.  And the Jews pray the great "Abinu Malkainu(??) which is the Our Father, our King, and they pray it 44 times, "Our Father, our King...Our Father, our King..."  If you only know God as Father, you might lose a little bit of balance.  God is also your King.  And He has a holy place and He deserves that holy place and His name is to be lifted up and exalted in every way.

     Now how do you do that?  How do you pray in such a way as to exalt God's name?  By simply praying for His glory to be done, for His glory to be accomplished, for His honor.  My prayer is, God, that You would do this if it brings You glory.  You might be praying about a child.  You might be praying about a situation in your family.  You might be praying about a job.  You might be praying about a physical problem.  Lord, whatever will bring You glory, do that...do that.  Whatever will lift Your name, whatever will cause You to be glorious, to be exalted, whatever will draw people to see You as the true God, that's the issue.

     And I tell you, in this contemporary name-it-and-claim-it theology, that is not the true God.  It reminds me what John Wesley said to a critic of Christianity, he said, "Your god is my devil."  The kind of God who is a utilitarian genie who has to knuckle under to everybody's commands is not the God of the Bible and you have not glorified His name, exalted His name and lifted Him up, you've pulled Him down.  And the error of this is to strike a blow at the very nature of God.  It is to take God's name in vain.  It is to be irreverent.  It isn't just bad theology, it is gross irreverence, fearful irreverence.

     As Luther's catechism says, "How is God's name hallowed among us?"  Answer:  "When both our doctrine and our life are truly Christian."  In other words, God is glorified when my life reflects the truth of God's Word, when my doctrine reflects the truth of God's Word.  In other words, I believe rightly about Him and I live rightly in submission to Him.

     So, when I say "hallowed be Thy name," I'm saying God glorify Yourself. And what do I mean by that?  Put Yourself on display.  And how's He going to do that?  Through my life.  Put Yourself on display through my life, whatever that means to me in life or in death, in poverty or in wealth, in sickness or in health, whatever it is.  Put Yourself on display through my life, that's that prayer.

     Nietzsche supposedly said, "Show me your redeemed life and I'll be inclined to believe in your Redeemer."  Show me God.  Where are people going to see God?  Through us.

     Gregory of Nyssa many years ago in the early church preached a sermon on the kind of person who hallows God's name, who lives to the glory of God, who lives to honor God, to lift God up.  And he said this of that person, "He touches the earth but lightly with the tip of his toes, for he is not engulfed by the pleasurable enjoyments of this life, but is above all deceit that comes by the senses.  And so even although in the flesh he strives after the immaterial life, he counts the possession of virtues the only riches, familiarity with God the only nobility.  His only privilege and power is the mastery of self so as not to be a slave to human passions.  He is saddened if his life in this material world be prolonged, like those who are seasick, he hastens to reach the port of rest."

     That's the way to live.  We're not living here to get prosperous in this world.  And the one who lives to the glory of God, the one who hallows the name of God wants God to be glorified, God to be exalted.  And he is more concerned to pray about the glory of God than he is about his own situation, his own glory, his own prosperity.  He wants only to strive after the immaterial and not be engulfed, he said, by the pleasurable enjoyments of this life.

     The one who glorifies God is more consumed with the things that dishonor God, more consumed with what's going wrong in terms of the world and how it treats God than how he is being treated.  That's why Psalm 34:3 says, "O magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt His name together." That's what prayer's all about.

     Thirdly, prayer is not only a matter of recognizing God's paternity and priority but God's program.  Verse 10 says, "Thy Kingdom come...Thy Kingdom come."  Here is a prayer for the advancement of God's Kingdom.  This marks every true man and woman of God through the history of the kingdom.  The greats of God's Kingdom, the saints of the ages have been people who greatly were concerned about the advancement of God's Kingdom, not the building of their own empire, not the padding of their pocket.

     I was asked the other day how to evaluate a very well-known, a very high profile Christian leader in America, a man whom I respect as a person.  He said, "How do you evaluate that man?"  I said, "Well, I think there are two primary ways in which I evaluate the character of a man I don't know personally.  Number one way is, how long do good godly people stay with him?"  In other words, he's at a level of leadership where he has a lot of folks working around him.  How long do good and godly people stay with him?  That's the measure of his character.

     "And secondly, how much of his success winds up in his own pocket?"  If good and godly men stay with him for a long time, that means good and godly men find in him a man of like mind.  And if after much success he appears not to be having indulged himself excessively, the indication is that his preoccupation is not for building his bank account but for building the Kingdom.  Those are the kinds of questions you have to ask.

     In my prayer life and your prayer life, the bottom line is not how's it going to help the empire of John MacArthur, the enterprise of John MacArthur, the efforts of John MacArthur, but how is it going to help the Kingdom expand.  That's the bottom line.  In fact, the Talmud said that prayer in which there is no mention of the Kingdom of God is no prayer at all.  How's it going to advance the Kingdom?  And so He really is saying here that the words would read, "Let the...really, the Greek would be ordered this way...Kingdom, let it come...Kingdom, let it come."  Turn it loose, God.  Build Your Kingdom.  That's the heart of our petition.  We're not praying just about the success of our enterprise.  We're not to be praying just about our little family and its particular needs.  We're not praying just about our church or our state, and we're looking at an election coming up on Tuesday and I'm sure we've been praying about that election and what is going to happen.  We're thinking about things on the national level and praying for the leadership of the nation and so forth.  But that's not the sum of our prayers. 

     In all of that, the bottom line is, "Lord, just let Your Kingdom come."  That's all.  That's the big picture.  Not our petty kingdom, Your Kingdom.

     That's a perspective that's very helpful in the ministry so that you don't begin to pray only for your own little thing, your own little world, your own church, your own radio ministry, your own tapes, your own college and seminary, your own little enterprises.  But what you really pray for is that the Kingdom would come however and in what way and through whom ever God would want it to come. 

     What do we mean by that?  What is the Kingdom?  It's a common phrase.  First of all it's simple enough to say the kingdom is simply the sphere of salvation in which Christ rules.  Yes, there's a sense in which God is the universal King of the whole universe and He rules the whole universe all the time always has, always will.  But what He's talking about here is not the universal kingdom, so much as He's talking about the Kingdom of Christ that rules in the hearts of the redeemed.  It's really a prayer for salvation of lost people.  Let Your Kingdom come through conversion of lost souls.

     The Kingdom, Jesus said, is in your midst.  It's in you.  The Kingdom is the sphere where Christ rules.  And where does Christ rule?  He is the ruler in the heart of every one who has put their faith in Him, right?  He is my Lord and King, He's your Lord and King, that's His Kingdom.  His Kingdom will come to earth in the millennium.  His Kingdom will fill the universe in the new heaven and the new earth.  But even then the Kingdom will still be the sphere of His rule in the hearts of men through salvation.  And the prayer is this, whatever advances Your Kingdom, O God, whatever advances the elements of the Kingdom mentioned in Romans 14:17, the Kingdom of God is righteousness, peace and joy and the Holy Spirit, whatever will bring Christ to set up His Kingdom on earth to be all glorious, let it come.

     In other words, this name-it-and-claim-it theology is so myopic, it's so self-indulgent, it's so small in its thinking, all it sees is me and what I want.  And it has no thought for the greater cause.  Lord, advance Your Kingdom if that means I lose everything.  That's the issue.

     Francis Havergogh(??) beautifully wrote the following verse to Christ.  "O the joy to see Thee reigning, Thee my own beloved Lord, every tongue Thy name confessing, worship, honor, glory, blessing brought to Thee with one accord.  Thee my Master and my friend, vindicated and enthroned, unto earth's remotest end, glorified, adored and owned."  Now there's the prayer of a true saint.  I'm not concerned about me...I want You to be honored and You to be glorified and Your Kingdom to be extended to the hearts of men across the earth so that everywhere You are glorified, adored and owned.  That's a prayer as Jesus taught us to pray.

     The centrality of prayer then is worship.  We go to a loving Father, but that means we accept that He knows best and in obedience respond to Him.  And in our prayers the first thing to be concerned about is His glory.  The second thing to be concerned about is the extension of His Kingdom. 

     And the third thing is His will be done, God's purpose.  Verse 10, "Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven."   We know His will's done in heaven, right?  Because everybody who didn't do His will in heaven is...what?  Out, the fallen angels, they were kicked out.  "Thy will be done."  That means, "God, do Your purpose."  I never pray a prayer without saying, "Lord, do Your will."  And I don't feel hesitant in praying that way.  That's all I want.  I don't want anything that isn't God's will.

     Somebody said to me, "What would happen if all of a sudden you had to go off all the radio stations?"  Fine, if that's God's will, that's fine.  I don't mind.  I don't need anymore to do.  And doing less might be kind of nice.  And they pursued the question.  I've been asked that before...what would happen if the Lord just took away your ministry?  Fine.  If the Lord wants to take it away, He can take it away.  I'll borrow from Job...the Lord gave, the Lord takes away...what?  Blessed be the name of the Lord.  He doesn't need me.  And if He decides to make a change, that's fine because I don't want to do anything that isn't His will.  I don't have any personal agenda. 

     I'm often asked, "What are your goals for ministry?"  I really don't have any, I just want to wake up in the morning and do what I have to do that day and trust God that He's leading me.  But I don't have any big agenda of things to try to accomplish.  I just want to do God's will and I want to stay in the position of doing it.  That's not something I'm resigned to.  There are some people who say, "Thy will be done," only they say it like this, "Thy will be done," bitter resentment, I know You're going to do what You're going to do. 

     Omar Khayyam wrote that famous little poem, "But helpless pieces of the game He plays," speaking of God, we're helpless pieces of the game He plays, "Upon this checkerboard of nights and days, hither and thither moves and checks and slays and one by one back in the closet lays."  Tragic view of God.

     So, there are those people who grit their teeth in bitter resentment and say "Thy will be done," fatalistically.  And that's not what we mean by that.

     Then there are those passive people who just sort of resign, "Well, if that's what You're going to do, God, so be it."  And they go off in a corner and suck their spiritual thumb and pine away, moan and groan because of how tragic it is.

     And then there are those whose "Thy will be done" comes out of their theology.  They're the hyper-Calvinist types, you know.  Who think God's bigger than them, so what's the use anyway.  Everything's going to be the way it's going to be.  It's another kind of fatalism.  The first is sort of a philosophical fatalism, the second is sort of a "poor me" fatalism, and the third is kind of a theological fatalism.  But I don't believe saying "Thy will be done" means we just give up. 

     I like what David Welles said, he said, "In essence, petitionary prayer is rebellion.  It's not rebellion against God, it's rebellion against the world and its fallenness, the absolute and undying refusal to accept as normal what is pervasively abnormal.  It is in this its negative aspect, the refusal of every agenda and every scheme, every interpretation that is at odds with the norm as originally established by God."

     And I can pray rebelling against the way things are, rebelling against evil, rebelling against sin, rebelling against God being dishonored.  I'm not going to accept that.  I'm not going to strike a truce with what is wrong.  I'm not going to even lose heart.  I'm going to be like the souls under the altar, "How long, O Lord, until You're going to do something?  Lord, glorify Your name, exalt Your name."  I can pray to God, "Do this, Lord, I plead with You to do this because it dishonors You.  Change this circumstance, bring glory to Yourself, bring the honor to Your name."  I have no problem with that, being bold. 

     But at the same time, whatever God brings I have to accept.  And I do not accept it bitterly and I do not accept it passively.  And I do not accept it simply as some theological thing.  I accept it as His will. And not only that, it's His best.  For now...and you say, well sometimes that doesn't seem right.  Sure, because you can't see everything, right?  You can't see everything.  You just don't have the big picture.

     In the days of the Covenanters in Scotland, terrible things were happening to those very devout men and women.  The government, by the most savaged means, was trying to crush the Covenanters out of existence.  One of them, probably the most famous and one of the greatest of all was Richard Cameron.  They captured his son.  In order to harm him, they took his son.  And the son was known for notably deft hands.  So in order to punish his father, they cut off his hands and sent them both to the father in an act of incredible cruelty. 

     Richard Cameron when receiving those hands recognized them at once, as any father would recognize the hands of his own son, this is what he said, "They are my son's, my own dear son's, but it is the Lord's will and good is the will of the Lord.  He has never wronged me."  See, that's a worshiping heart that sees beyond his son, beyond himself to the holy purposes of God, to the will of God, to the Kingdom of God, to the glory of God so that even though God is My Father and loves me, and even though if I ask Him for bread He won't give me a stone, and if I ask Him for fish He won't give me a snake, even though God has resources unlimited to give at my disposal, those things are given when they will give Him glory, when they will extend His Kingdom and when they will fulfill His will.  And so, my prayers are always controlled by those things.  That's how Jesus taught us to pray.

     So, the end of prayer is not so much tangible answers.  The end of prayer is a deepening life of dependency and the end of prayer is a greater sense of being a part of God's Kingdom and what God is doing.  Prayer is where I sign in to get on duty to do what God wants to do for His own glory.

     Now when I've gotten that all in order, then I can say, "Lord, give us this day our daily bread."  Then I can ask for my needs and nothing more than needs are there.  "And, Lord, forgive us our debts, or sins, as we forgive others."  First I ask for my needs to be supplied.  Secondly, for my sins to be forgiven.  And thirdly, "Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil."  The third thing I ask is, "Lord, protect me."  We pray for needs.  We pray for cleansing.  We pray for His protection.  But all within the contexts of His glory...it ends in verse 13...His Kingdom, His power, that's the focus.

     And so, prayer is worship.  It's worship.  And anything less than a worshiping prayer that gives God the right to be God, glorify His name, extend His Kingdom and do His will is not prayer at all.  It may be called prayer.  It is not prayer.  It is merely an exercise in self-indulgence.  And anything that assumes, any theology that assumes that God has to give you what you demand, is taking His name in vain, is irreverent and is dishonoring God immensely by assuming Him to be other than He is.  And as I said at the beginning, the error of this theology is that this theology makes man God and God man.  Man becomes the sovereign, God the servant.  Not so.

     So, when we pray, we pray in this way, Jesus said, that God might be honored.  Let's bow together.

     Father, we thank You for such a clear word to us.  We never want anything that isn't Your will for us.  We don't understand all the mystery of that.  And we do believe that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much, we believe you answer prayer.  And if an unjust judge when continually beseeched would do right, how much will a just Savior do for those who love Him?  And if a man asleep will finally open the door to someone who knocks and knocks and knocks, even though he opens it out of anger, how fast will You provide what we need who are a loving Father?  Yes, Lord, we believe our prayer will be answered.  Even as we read in the Psalms, "I cried and You answered me." But, Lord, help us to know and to pray that the answer must be in line with the sacredness of Your name, the extension of Your Kingdom and the wonderful reality of Your will being fulfilled. 

     To that end we pray even for this morning that as a result of our worship together, Your name will be made sacred, lifted up, exalted and glorified.  Your Kingdom would be extended as some would even today open their hearts to Christ.  Your will would be done.  Thank You for the confidence, Lord, that when we put You in the rightful place, our needs will be met, cleansing will be provided, protection and guidance will be our lot.  We could ask nothing more and do not ask anymore than that.  Whatever good gifts You choose to give us, we accept with thanksgiving.  For Jesus' sake we pray these things.  Amen.

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The Church as Witness

Why did Jesus tell us in John 13:34,35 that the final apologetic by which this world would recognise that Jesus was sent by God the Father was the demonstrable love-relationship that would be seen in the lives of His disciples? As we have seen in the last 8 issues of TFT, there are any number of philosophical, theological, scientific and historical reasons on the basis of which one could reasonably conclude that Jesus is exactly Who He said He was – the Eternal God, the Second Person of the Trinity now come in the flesh. Why is it that this fact can be conclusively understood by the world only in a living, verifiable community called ‘The Church’? Why is it that of all the methods that the devil could invent out of his evil genius to thwart the purposes of God, none would succeed so spectacularly as the disruption of relationships among the members of the body of Christ through divisions, schisms and partisanship?

For all the above questions, there is only one simple but profound answer: Ultimate Reality (God) is a Being in Relationship and any truth pertaining to Him, in the final analysis, stands attested only if accompanied by exemplary relationships among His creatures.

Inorganic and organic (both animal and vegetation) creation were designed for and held together in a finely-tuned ecological balance. But humans were to realise their relationship with the Creator and among themselves in voluntary mutual submission. This was because they were made in the image of God with the capacity for free voluntary action so that relationships could be necessarily wilful and not instinctive or programmed. (We often fail to notice that all that is enjoyable in our relationships beginning with intimate ones such as marriage to the most causal acquaintances is due to the freedom exercised in forging them.) Our rebellion against God and the consequent fall have vitiated this Divine order and the symmetry of relationships at all levels of creation. The redemption offered to the human race by our Creator in the Lord Jesus Christ has to necessarily produce a lifestyle which would indicate redeemed relationships as the reality of salvation. Our individualistic theologies have substituted ‘personal’ and ‘private’ holiness (which are hallmarks of ascetic religions) for true inter-personal holiness among God’s people, and by implication with all other levels of creation. In the Scripture under consideration, Jesus seeks to redress this misunderstanding. Philosophical speculations, theologisations and debates cannot argue against a society of God’s people who in their corporate life demonstrate the reality of the god whom they worship. If this dimension of the reality of God cannot be truly and vitally demonstrated, there could be reasons to doubt the truth affirmations regarding God.

To the clever lawyer who questioned Him (Matt. 22:34-40) about the greatest commandment, Jesus significantly refrained from giving religious or ritualistic requirements; instead, He had only two simple relational injunctions to offer: ‘Love you God’ and ‘Love your neighbour’. By placing these two at the same level, Jesus brought relationships into focus. Thus, worshipping God was not mere observance (in whatever sense) but to relate to Him in love; He is the One Who would liberate the individual from the ‘ego’ (self) to love others. The first commandment (obedience to which is essentially secret) thus becomes foundational and makes the second obeyable. But by the same token, obedience to the second (which is necessarily public) becomes the evidence that the first has been obeyed. The brilliance of this summation would take some time to soak into our conscious mind because of the distractions of the pluralist cacophony assaulting us at every turn.

I may be permitted to digress a bit and delineate the spectrum of beliefs by which fallen humankind has sought to avoid confrontation (which is also one of the facets of a relationships!) with an Infinite-Personal God. Starting with God-denying polemics, this exercise has taken us far a field to the possibility that we ourselves could be the extension of the divine essence, which is considered to be impersonal. The atheist, for whom nature is all that there is and evolution is all the intelligence that is needed to direct it to Utopia, would still describe these two forces with Capital ‘N’ and ‘C’, thus betraying his unconscious grope for meaning in an impersonal universe! At the other end of the scale, the Advaita Vedantist, would deny the ultimate validity of all existential and moral questions by appeal to maya, the impersonal force which gives the illusion of reality to all of life’s struggles and yearnings. Thus the central issue of relationship to the Infinite personal God of the Bible is carefully skirted.

Also, some religions prescribe rituals and observances as indicators of piety and devotion. Many of these have laudable motives and a fair amount of theological justification. What they fail to indicate is the need for the inner reality of a sacred relationship to God. Very often, in all religions – and I willingly include Christianity among them – the prescribed religious duties do represent an earnestness but often could become a substitute – and a dangerous one at that! – for a true and meaningful relationship. One could therefore be religiously devoted without in any sense being acquainted with the God of that devotion.

Other philosophies (such as Advaita Vedanta) pooh-pooh such efforts as childish and rudimentary, and suggest as alternatives, sadhnas and techniques by which one could hope to achieve self-realisation. Such a state is expected to bring the devotee to a purported mystical union with the Impersonal Infinite Brahman or Cosmic Consciousness. This, it must be noted, is however a state of mid rather than a relationship. The pluralist spectrum thus has nothing to contribute to a satisfactory resolution of the inner tensions within humans for a significant framework for true relationships.

It is in the context of this scheme of things that the Church finds herself entrusted with the onerous responsibility of speaking about the relational nature of her God. What better way could there be to communicate this blessed reality than by a model which would uncompromisingly demonstrate it before a watching world!

In this series of articles, we have alluded to various theological, philosophical and existential reasons for the necessity of ultimate reality to be a plurality. These celebrations would still remain in the domain of God being a good and great idea but for the fact that the God Whom we worship is a real Tri-Personal Being. No contemplation of the beauty and glory of the Triune God can therefore be complete without some understanding of the dynamics of relationship between the Three Persons of the Trinity.

Thankfully, the Scriptures give us more than a glimpse into the outworking of God-as-Community. In this context, we shall be referring often to the writings of John to whom more about the truth of the Trinity has been sovereignty entrusted by the Holy Spirit. Even this fact has a probable reason in John as the most relational of the disciples, his ‘arrogating’ to himself the position of being ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ being a rather unique example. We could be sure that Jesus showed no favouritism in dispensing His love to any of His disciples, having washed the feet of Judas along with the others’. It was John who appropriated and reciprocated this love more forthrightly than any of the other cared to do. It is not surprising that more of the God of relationships was revealed to and through him of all the writers of NT Scriptures.

The equality of the status of the Father and the Son is strikingly portrayed in this discussion between Jesus and Jewish leaders following the healing of the paralytic at Bethesda (Jn. 5:19-30). At the same time, we should not fail to notice an amazing paradox – the Father does not hold on to any of His prerogatives as the First Person of the Trinity but loves the Son and shows Him all that He does (v.20), entrusts all judgment to the Son (vv. 22,27) and has granted the Son to have life in Himself and to give life to others (vv. 20,26). On His part, what is the attitude of the Son to the Father? He does only what He sees the Father doing (v. 19) confesses that by Himself, He could do nothing (vv. 19,30) and seeks to please the Father (v.30).

And what about the Holy Spirit? He is the One the Father sends upon His Church in the Name of His Son (Jn. 14:26), the One Who goes out from the Father (Jn. 15:26) and is an equal (and even better) replacement for the physical presence of the Son among His people (Jn. 16:7). There is no doubt about the eternal divinity of the Holy Spirit as co-equal with the Father and the Son. Yet, He will testify (not about Himself, but) about Christ (Jn. 15:26), He will not speak on His own but only what He hears (Jn. 16:13) and He will bring glory to the Son by taking what is the Son’s and making it known to us (Jn. 16:14). Please note that the Son is careful to testify that all that He has is the Father’s (Jn. 16:15).

What do we have here? – Three co-eternal, co-equal Persons of the Trinity giving Themselves to One Another in eternal Self-effacement! Are we able to discern the faintest outline of why servanthood and relationship-building is no longer optional extras for the Christian but essential to reflecting the glory of the Triune God? I would make bold to assert that the glory of our God is essentially not the thunder-and-lighting aspect which is so appealing to our base instincts but rather the Self-giving love within the Trinity (Jn. 17:20-24). Jesus’ prayer for His disciples (and us) is that the same glory of the Trinity may be given to us that we ‘may be one’ even as They ‘are One’.

What then are the practical implications of the commandment in Jn. 13:34,35? Does this necessarily mean that the individual members are in themselves perfect representations of God? In a world society which is being increasingly fragmented and individualised, it is easy to develop a theology of the Church as a collection of perfect individuals. A right understanding of the relationships within the Trinity would militate against such an interpretation.

I believe that the story in John 13 has a moral which fails to speak to us as a Church today because our thinking on interdependent inter-personal life has strayed so far from the Biblical model. We have been thoroughly programmed by the world to think individualistically and our autonomy from God has made us autonomous from one another. Even in Christian work, these are the days of the ‘independent’ worker who is in every sense independent of God and fellowman! Because of bad experiences in Church or organisation, good leaders sometimes advocate being on ‘one’s own’ as if that would somehow solve the problem of relationships. In family and social circles, because of real hurts suffered in some relationships, we tend to retreat into a ‘shell’ and refuse to go out of our way to relate to others. Without being unrealistic- even Scripture (Rom. 12:18) attests that good relationships are bilateral – we can ensure that our side of the deal is blameless. All the same, I would make aver that relationships lie at the heart of our testimony to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.

We will do well to remember that the Scripture under consideration occurs in the context of the powerful acted parable of the washing of the disciples’ feet. The feet of all the disciples were dirty, but as they would submit themselves to cleansing by one another, they would emerge as a perfect community (Jn. 13:14). We may fundamentally have no difficulty to have ourselves cleansed by Christ, (although Peter had a problem even there because the Master insisted on touching his feet) but to submit to ablutions by another is virtually unthinkable. Jesus, rightly, did not require others to wash His feet to signify that the cleansing was not a reference to external physical ‘dirt’ (in which sense, Jesus’ feet would also have been dirty), but to inward moral purity. The disciples (and we as well!) would have been very happy to wash the feet of Jesus, but His injunction was that they should wash one another’s feet (Jn. 13:14). In so insisting, Jesus was demonstrating a deeper reality about relationships which we may fail to notice in the context of this amazing chapter.

Let us look again at the picture so that we get our theology straight. The washing of the feet was not the offer of salvation – we notice that when Peter insisted that Jesus was his hands and head, Jesus said that that would not be necessary because all of them (but one) were clean – such a bath would have signified salvation (vv. 9-11). But He had still insisted to Peter to have a part (that is, to have fellowship) with Jesus (v.8b). This could only have meant a daily cleansing and forgiveness which would ensure continued fellowship between Christ and disciple. But then Jesus proceeds to imply that such a mutual acceptance is needed among disciples themselves by commanding them ‘to wash one another’s feet’. It was a strange but effective way of communicating the importance of relating to one another by forgiving, cleansing and accepting one another in perfect mutuality. In other words, this was two imperfect individuals synergistically portraying a perfect relationship! – the very antidote so desperately needed to correct our individualistic privatised spirituality!

But look again! Without what attitude was this cleansing to be carried out? Jesus took the position of a Servant and assigned the status of the master to the disciple with the dirty feet! The clean One takes the position of weakness and offers the seat of strength and authority to the one who is dirty! Have not our relationships always suffered because we choose to relate to others from a position of strength? Is this not particularly so when ‘we’ are right and ‘they’ wrong? But we are taught here that the ‘right’ one is to take the position of a servant while offering advice and counsel to the one who is ‘wrong’. Why is it that so often a backsliding believer finds it difficult to come back? – because his counsellor, in his superciliousness, preaches down to him rather than ‘wash his feet’. Our political leaders are called as ‘ministers’ only because the authority vested in them is to be used by them to serve the people. Our administrative bosses belong to the Indian Administrative Service – the connotation of servanthood is essentially Christian where the investiture of authority and privilege is not an end in itself but only a means to serve.

All this is fine-sounding but is it practical? Should we say that this is all right for Jesus but not quite applicable to us?  I am afraid that this would have been a good excuse but for two reasons:

1. Jesus, as Son of Man, lived His life in the power and authority of the Third Person of the Trinity and not as the Second Person of the Trinity – F.B. Meyer.

2. Jn. 13:1-3 provide the backdrop for this story and they apply to us as well.

Jesus becomes our example (1 Pet. 2:21), only because He, as a Human Being lived His life in perfect obedience to His Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus, He is our example in this context of relationships as in other aspects of the Christian life. May we not be found shirking our responsibility of painstakingly putting together relationships under the excuse of Jesus being Divine!

There are four fundamental aspects of consciousness (Jn. 13:1-3) which provided the basis for this tremendous act of service of the Son of God:

1. Jesus walked according to the time-table of the Father (v.1a). It was the consciousness that enabled Him to perform this act of menial service to His disciples without a trace of condescension. Very often, a lack of assurance of walking in the will of God makes us reluctant in taking the vulnerable side of relationships.

2. His relationship to His disciples culminated in His work of service to them only because He had consciously decided to love them (v.1b). Jesus shunned shallow sentimentality as a poor counterfeit of genuine wholesome emotion which originated in the will.
3. He consciously refrained from favouritism even when He knew that one of the Twelve would be His betrayer (v.2). Judas also had his feet washed by the Master. I have often wondered what would have happened if Jesus had been partisan in His attitude to the disciples – the first Church of the Twelve might have split equally between Peter and Judas!

4. He could serve His disciples only because of His own Sonship to the Father and the attendant authority that flowed from it. He served His people only because of the security of His Identity. Today, people serve others in their search for identity. When I saw the photographs of Mother Teresa and Diana, Princess of Wales on the same page of India Today, the thought that crossed my mind was this: One woman served others out of the overflow of her fullness in Christ – the other served the poor to compensate for her inner loneliness!

It is with this grand introduction that John begins his account of this acted parable. It is surprising that Jesus was now able to ‘[take] off His outer clothing’ (thus divesting Himself to His Divine prerogatives) ‘and wrap a towel round His waist’ (thus ‘taking the very nature of a servant’)? (Jn. 13:4; Phil. 2:6,7).

All relationships involve a servant-attitude. I am told that there are 36 ‘one another's in the New Testament. Each of these involves the one who gives (the stronger, hence the servant) and the other who receives the weaker, hence accorded the status of the master). In each of the 3 pairs of relationships Paul deals with in Eph. 5:22-6:4, one is a stronger partner and the other the weaker one. But the stronger one is, the greater the self-giving that is expected. Thus, for example, the husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her. Headship of the home is thus earned through servanthood and is not a divine patronage which is to be bandied about with not a little chauvinism!

Let me conclude this essay by reiterating the one issue that cannot be overemphasised: The hallmark of the Church of Jesus Christ is a relational testimony which serves as a pointer to the reality of the Eternal Triune God. May we, under God, consciously discern every trap that the devil sets for us to rupture relationships and trust the Holy Spirit of love to breathe His healing and remake our fractured bonds!

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The Cross - Foolishness Or Wisdom

In the previous issue of TFT, we considered the all-important subject of loving, caring, serving relationships among the Lord’s people as the supreme apologetic (John 13: 34, 35). In the present essay, I would endeavour to examine the aspect of the ‘foolishness of what was preached’ that Paul alludes to in I Cor.1:21 and its link to the quality of our inter-personal relationships in the body of Christ. This verse is often quoted as a Biblical objection to the use of apologetics as a tool for evangelism. Conclusions are drawn to the effect that the gospel is meant to be proclaimed and not defended. Some would even go to the extent of interpreting this verse to infer that the intellect should never be used to proclaim the gospel and that it (the intellect) is the tool of the devil! Some would argue that the content of the Christian gospel is intellectually foolish and is wise only in a spiritual sense. My intention is to go beyond formulation of an apologetic for apologetics! - I would seek to establish that the cross is God’s brilliant stroke of genius to undo what humankind brought upon itself in the disobedience at Eden and that it is the cross that makes possible the standard of relationships which proclaim the uniqueness of Christ before a watching world.

We will do well to study the whole context of this verse from I Cor.1:18-26. We need to see that the gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing (v.18) - this emphasis of Paul makes clear the fact that the ‘foolishness’ referred to is not necessarily ‘intellectual’ but rather ‘spiritual’ and ‘moral’. In this use of the word, Paul is reflecting classical Hebrew thinking where foolishness is often a lack of moral direction. (The NIV is very useful here - the footnotes in Psalms, Proverbs [1:7,22 e.g.] etc. make it clear that there is a whole genre of words which for us with our Hellenistic thinking would have an intellectual connotation but what is meant to be conveyed is moral.) Conversely, the ‘wisdom’ and ‘intelligence’ that are denigrated (vv.19-21) are those of the world. What is condemned is not wisdom per se but that which is employed in humanistic and atheistic pursuits. In a similar passage (Col.1:28) meant for believers living in a Gnostic environment, Paul defines ‘hollow and deceptive philosophy’ as that which depends on (i) ‘human tradition’, and (ii) ‘basic principles of this world’ which reject the reality of Christ.

We need to be careful here. In all our thinking about the created world, we do not err when we draw conclusions about the existence or the glory of God (Rom.1:20; Ps.19:1 etc.). But the moment our thinking seeks to employ categories of naturalism, we begin to rely on the world system which is ruled by the ‘prince of the power of the air’ - the devil - and is antagonistic to God. C.S.Lewis, in his masterpiece Miracles, argues powerfully that our normal reason which we employ has to be admitted to be supernatural in origin (chapter III) in order to be dependable. Elsewhere (The Abolition of Man), his famous statement against atheism runs thus: ‘Reason might conceivably be found to depend on [another reason], and so on; it would not matter how far this process was carried, provided you found Reason coming from Reason at each stage. It is only when you are asked to believe that Reason comes from non-reason that you must cry Halt, for if you don’t, all thought is discredited. It is therefore obvious that sooner or later, you must admit a Reason which exists absolutely on its own’ (emphasis mine). In other words, the normal employment of reason without contradiction involves an indirect admission of the supernatural. Are you not reminded of the majestic opening line of John’s gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Logos’? In the light of the foregoing, I consider it a great pity that well-meaning Christians often find themselves in violent disagreement with the use of the intellect while clarifying issues relevant to the presentation of the gospel. 

Let us proceed further in this passage. The cross was a stumbling-block (skandalos in the Greek) both to the kingdom expectation of the Jews and the conceptual wisdom of the Greeks. How? The Jewish Messiah was to be the powerful ruler who would restore the fortunes of dispersed Israel. He could not be recognised as the One Who was crucified on the cursed tree in apparent weakness - a scandal indeed! The Bible does not imply in any way that the cross is weakness in an absolute sense. We are consistently taught by Scripture that spiritual powers and authorities were triumphed over by the cross (Col.2:15) and that victory over our selfish nature and the fallen world system is available in it (Gal.5:24; 6:14). The apparent weakness of the gospel is stronger than the real weakness of the Jew who wrongly understood the role of the Messiah and therefore rejected Him.(I Cor.1:24,25).

The Greek, on the other hand, had made wisdom an end in itself (similar to the rationalists of our day). Vinoth Ramachandra rightly points out how the Greeks erroneously argued that because the circle was the perfect geometrical shape, God the perfect being must have created the heavenly bodies to move in circular orbits - actual observations however showed that they moved in orbits of distorted circles called ellipses. It was the same rationalism espoused by the Church that resisted the discoveries of Galileo later. The Greeks were guilty of denying the contingency of God’s creation which led them to this error in their scientific conceptualisation (Gods that Fail, p.141). Modern science had to wait to be born till after the reformation. The Biblical world view which depicted God to be transcendent and free outside of His creation was necessary in order to carry on the right kind of scientific theorising and experimentation. No wonder the earliest scientists were, as Ramachandra puts it, ‘men of personal faith…. of passionate and orthodox Christian convictions’ (Ibid., p.137). Transferring this approach to the subject of salvation, the Greek could not conceive of the foolishness and failure of the cross to be compatible with wisdom in the god of his imagination. He was thus unable to appreciate that the cross was the initiative of an all-wise God who would love humankind and bring it back to Himself without violating the free will He had bestowed on them. Paul’s doxology in Rom.11:33-36 is primarily to the wisdom of God who has provided salvation for all people even through the failure of the Jews. Even in the passage under discussion, Paul makes it clear that the gospel is not foolishness in any absolute sense at all - rather the apparent foolishness of the gospel is wiser than the real foolishness of the wise man and the philosopher of this age who rejects it (vv. 24,25).  

The gospel further tells today’s moralist that his ‘good works’ based on his keeping of ‘the law’ are of no avail and that he must admit his guilt before an infinitely moral God and accept humbly the salvation that God, in His grace has freely provided for him through the cross of Christ.

When we carefully extrapolate the argument of Paul, we can see that the cross becomes a scandal to different people in different ways. To the rich (whether material, intellectual or emotional), the poverty that the gospel requires at all these levels becomes a stumbling-block. They find themselves worshipping the idols of the intellect, emotion (generated by ‘satisfying’ relationships) and wealth and that idolatry prevents them from accepting the way of the cross. This perverse idolatry gloats in enthroning self and is subtler than the image-worship which is easily discerned as evil. We will do well to remember that in the Ten Commandments, the injunction against idolatry takes a lower position (the 2nd) than proscription of the worship of ‘other gods beside Me’ (the 1st). If our friends who pursue popular folk religions are guilty of breaking the second commandment, we Christians could very well be guilty of breaking the first!

In an interesting exchange with followers of the ISKCON (International Society of Krishna Consciousness otherwise called the Hare Krishna) movement in the IIT Kanpur, I found myself challenged by their constant comparison between Christ and Krishna whom they had elevated to the level of the infinite-personal God, contrary even to classical Hinduism. (I carefully refrained from attacking the morality of Krishna). When finally they made a reference to the sublime beauty of their heaven and of the attractive personality of Krishna, I simply referred to the description of heaven in the book of Revelation but went on to emphasise that the central personality of our heaven would not be as comely as their Krishna but would be a nail-scarred Saviour (Rev.5; Is.53:2,3. I went on to explain that without those marks of the cross, I would not be qualified to be there). The whole room fell silent as there was no scope for any further comparison! I realised that the cross was ugliness to the ISKCON devotee because it offended his sense of aesthetics! I can now say that the cross is not ugly in any absolute sense - to the Christian, it would be the theme of the anthems of heaven! - the apparent ugliness of the cross is more beautiful than the real ugliness of the sentimental romantic aesthete who rejects it!

Now we shall take a closer look at the cross itself as God’s instrument of salvation. In what way can we say that the cross, which is considered foolishness by the fallen world, is wiser than man’s wisdom (I Cor. 1:24)? During an open forum in the Physics department of Nagpur University, a penetrating question was put to me by a Hindu post-graduate student - ‘How then can we be saved?’ The question was in itself quite innocuous and invited a ready-made evangelistic reply. But what surprised and thrilled me was the context in which it was raised. I had finished giving a critique of Paul Davies’ God and the New Physics, particularly with reference to the chapter on Free will and Determinism. His hidden question would have run something like this: ‘If I am truly free, I can choose to be or not to be saved, but if I am pre-programmed to behave in a certain way, I cannot help being saved or lost!’ Before I gave him the straight-forward answer of the gospel, I placed before him the two other alternatives available to God for human salvation - (i) to have destroyed evil, or (ii) to have prevented us from making the wrong choices by continuous intervention. But both these options would have reduced us to the level of robots. The only way God could achieve His way in us while respecting our freedom was to demonstrate His love in the most selfless way possible - the cross - humankind could then freely respond to this Divine wooing without any kind of external compulsion or manipulation. This is not as simple as it sounds. It is extremely profound in that the salvation of God-like beings (humans) cannot be orchestrated without damaging the imago dei in them. God expects our selflessness in the only way in which it becomes practically possible - in response to His selflessness displayed on the cross.

A Christian believer can reflect long and hard on the cross as God’s instrument of salvation and cannot fail to be fascinated with the love and the wisdom of God:-  

                        O loving wisdom of our God,
                                    When all was sin and shame,
                        A second Adam to the fight
                                    And to the rescue came.

                        O wisest love! That flesh and blood 
                                    Which did in Adam fail,
                        Should strive afresh against the foe, 
                                    Should strive and should prevail.

                        And that a higher gift than grace
                                    Should flesh and blood refine,
                        God’s presence and His very self 
                                    And essence all-divine.
               
                        O generous love! that He, who smote 
                                    In man for man the foe,
                        The double agony in man 
                                    For man should undergo.

                        And in the garden secretly, 
                                    And on the Cross on high,
                        Should teach His brethren, and inspire 
                                    To suffer and to die.

This beautiful hymn of Cardinal J.H.Newman - with the likes of which we must sadly admit that we are becoming less and less familiar - points to, among other ineffable realities like the Incarnation, the inherent wisdom both of the Godward aspect of salvation and its humanward complement. 

The primary aspect of the cross is the atonement and propitiation which it effects towards an infinitely holy God in whose sight our righteous (should I say, self-righteous) thoughts, attitudes and deeds are as filthy rags. It is through the precious blood of Christ, signifying His sinless life, shed on the cross that we are pardoned and made children of God who now becomes our heavenly Father. But I turn to the other aspect of the cross, the humanward, by which we are invited to die to ourselves voluntarily in order to enable the life of Christ to be revealed in us. This is often technically called Sanctification and relegated to a chronologically later period after Justification, the immediate certification of us as morally acceptable to God. However the terms may be separated in our experience as Christians, we need to recognise that the cross is performing its work even when we accept God’s verdict on us as sinners. Till then, we were selfishly holding on to whatever we considered righteous in our lives. Now, without any pressure except the legitimate and stark moral contrast between God and us, we die to ourselves and our idea of morality.

See how the cross stands out in brilliant contrast when set against the backdrop of the self-preoccupation in our religions and particularly our philosophies! As Indian Christians, we need to paraphrase the confessional prayer of Isaiah (6:5) in this context - ‘I am a selfish human being and I live in a land of self-exalting philosophers!’ I wonder whether we have been genetically conditioned to be pre-occupied with ourselves and not to think of others except in a patronising way.

Our country has given to the world several export-quality gurus. Below the apparent diversity of their teaching and practice, there is a strong common under-current: our egos can be transcended by the greater Self within. All that we need to do is to get rid of the ignorance (avidya) which keeps suggesting that we are frail and finite. With the help of various practices (sadhnas) such as yoga and meditation, we are to discover that we are part of the Infinite. Whether it is the Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (now being marketed under a scientific brand name for consumption in the West) or the promiscuity popularised and legitimised by the hedonistic Rajneesh, we are bombarded by a constant stream of self-realisation techniques. Even in Islamic Pakistan, there is no problem in getting company executives to join in on lunch-break meditation sessions which are supposed to increase their productivity in the work place. It is the Self that is supposed to effectively deal with the nasty ego. We can as well believe that we can launch ourselves into outer space by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps! There is a strident refusal to admit to the need for an external frame of reference - a Saviour who can redeem us from our present predicament. We need to recognise that these demonic alternatives exalt the self rather than calling its bluff. On the other hand, the crucifixion - have you ever reflected on the fact that it is not possible to commit suicide by crucifixion and the hand that crucified the rest of you would still remain uncrucified! - ensures that our old nature is drastically dealt with by Christ. It is only the cross that shows us the true colour of our fallen nature - did we not manage to indict the sinless Son of God and have Him condemned to death when He visited our planet? - and calls us to be co-crucified with Christ in order to experience true deliverance from it.

Are we now any nearer the answer to the question as to why we are not able to live self-giving, feet-washing lives in terms of our relationships with one another within the body of Christ? Having begun our Christian existence at Calvary, why is it that we often go back to self-centred living? Are we able to discern the subtle self in our so-called ‘loving’ of others? We do not really love others but only our ‘alter ego’ - the projections of our selves - in them. That is the reason Christ calls us to ‘hate’ our father, mother etc. (Lk.14:26) - that is to hate the self in our love for them. 

Some of us might have sacrificed the good life in order to serve Christ, only to see our old nature showing up through various kinds of superiority and inferiority complexes. These inbred attitudes deeply affect our relationships with one another and betray Christ and deny the cross in our lives - we refuse to carry the cross daily and indulge ourselves in insidious substitutes. One other example is the degeneration of the Church to the level of a well-run machine. The designations in the hierarchy give us an identity which we do not seem to have discovered in Christ. We have forgotten that the word Church was never used in the New Testament to denote a building or an organisation but the redeemed people of God as a loving community called out of the world. We leaders have turned the Church into a bureaucracy and carved out for ourselves a niche in the EAS - the Evangelical Administrative Service! We have even given a semblance of biblical justification for this substitution of meanings because the set-up suits our lust for recognition, power and position.         

Let me conclude - the cross is foolishness not in a rational sense but because it goes against the grain of human nature. When the world propagates the up-for-grabs mentality, we Christians find it difficult to resist the temptation and decide to join the rat race. In so doing, we find ourselves trampling over one another and denying our Lord in our relationships with one another. The world in which Christ has placed His people is still waiting to hear a definitive statement from them about the uniqueness of His Being and work on Calvary.