Too True, Too Wonderful, Too Hard

Spirituality Column #177
March 30, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Too True, Too Wonderful, Too Hard
By Bob Walters

When “The Passion of the Christ” was released in 2004, I joined hundreds of local folks at a pre-screening of the film.

When it first appeared in stores, I bought the DVD.

Now years after that first theater viewing, the DVD is still in the wrapper and I’ve never seen the movie again.

It was that kind of movie. Our sin is that kind of awful.

Too many people debate the wrong elements of that film. They complain it is anti-Jewish, it is too violent, it includes story elements that aren’t in the Bible, the androgynous Satan / serpent character is too creepy, the theology is “old school,” producer Mel Gibson got a DUI and drunkenly made racist comments, Gibson’s father is a nut-case Holocaust denier, conspiracy theorist, and Vatican II crank.

Satan just loves it when he can pull us off point.

You see, the point is that the Cross of Christ’s crucifixion shows us the reality of our sin, and the depth of God’s love. The truth is that the Cross of Christ is not a picture of God’s wrath; nor does the Bible anywhere call it punishment or payment. Christ on the Cross is a picture of God’s grace with Jesus bearing the infinite burden of our sins, erasing them with his death, and defeating death itself with His resurrection.

It was the world’s evil and the wickedness of man – Satan – that beat and bloodied Christ. Those are a fallen world’s sins and our individual brokenness for which sinless Jesus suffered pain and humiliation, which are so realistically, shockingly, disturbingly, horrendously and mercilessly depicted in The Passion of the Christ.

If we blame God – or Mel Gibson or his dad or the Church or the Jews – for what happened on the Cross, we are blame-shifting something for which we must take full responsibility, and for which we must be willing to claim in faith as the ultimate truth:

- That I am a sinner and Christ died so I wouldn’t have to.

- That the victory of the Cross is our freedom from death; our salvation.

Do I believe that? Oh yeah.

What the innocent Jesus – fully man and fully God – endured to provide my salvation could not have been God’s hate and retribution; it could only have been God’s love.

But oh, I loath being reminded how the victory was won.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) knows other people who saw the movie, and then bought the video but never watched it.

Holy Week - Peace, Violence and Victory

Spirituality Column #176
March 23, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Holy Week – Peace, Violence and Victory
By Bob Walters

How odd that the greatest truth in the universe – Jesus Christ’s saving grace revealing God’s love, power over death, and our eternal home – is not explained in plainer language.

I know … it’s all right there in the Bible. But it’s a gigantic truth too big for words, too good for our sin, too eternal for our temporal understanding.

Next week is Holy Week – Palm Sunday to Easter – the Christian celebration of that enormous truth, of the Logos, of the Word of God.

Palm Sunday commemorates Christ’s “triumphant” arrival into Jerusalem. How odd that he rode a donkey, a symbol of peace and humility, rather than a horse, a symbol of power and triumph.

How odd is the violence of the Crucifixion on Good Friday, when Christ, the sinless Prince of Peace, died horribly to defeat death and erase our sin.

How odd that Christ’s victory over the grave on Easter assures us of eternal life. How odd that God’s love resides not in our understanding, but in our faith in His love, which gives us true hope.

How odd that a believer’s heart is assured and at peace, yet the world expects words to soften hardened hearts. How odd that a man without sin erased my sin, yet I’m still a sinner, yet I am loved, and in my faith am saved.

The difficulty describing this with words is at least twofold:

1. God’s truth is a love relationship, not a word puzzle. Try describing your love relationship with someone or something using only words. Can the totality and expression of love be contained in words? Not a chance.

2. Christ is a real person, not merely an idea, so words and images fail. The Bible’s words show us how to meet Christ, but truth resides in the relationship, not in the meeting.

Holy Week begins with the Peace of Christ and adulation; peaks with the crucifixion’s infinite violence and scorn, and ends with Christ’s resurrection and mankind’s victory over death. And so begins the truth of eternal life.

It’s a big week. Read about Palm Sunday in the Bible (Mark 11:1-11, Matthew 21:1-11, Luke 19:28-44, and John 12:12-19), and continue reading each book to the end.

Ask Christ to send the Holy Spirit to help you understand. I pray you’ll find love and peace, discover truth, and learn that it’s not odd at all.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) knows you can’t argue the Holy Spirit into someone, knows truth exists in Christ, and knows God loves each one of us. Amen.

Bars Closed on St. Patrick's Day

Spirituality Column #175
March 16, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Bars Closed on St. Patrick’s Day
By Bob Walters

A four-leaf clover, a pint (or several) of Guinness and a parade do not a proper Irish observance make for Patrick, the patron saint who drove the snakes from Ireland.

The four-leaf clover and snakes, in fact, are completely wrong, and pubs used to be closed.

St. Patrick, known as the Apostle of Ireland, was actually born in Scotland in 387 AD to a Roman family of high rank whose relatives included the great patron of France, St. Martin of Tours. Captured at age 16 by Irish marauders, Patrick was sold as a slave in Ireland and tended sheep, during which time he prayed continually for deliverance and guidance, and spoke with God in his dreams.

By learning the Celt language, Patrick was well-equipped later to share his faith with the pagan Druids and win them – and all of Ireland – over to Christianity.

Patrick, a Bishop, helped defeat heresies of the day, explained the Holy Trinity using the green three-leaf clover or shamrock, is credited with miracles of escape, healing and victories, and likely in his life never so much as saw a snake.

Snakes, you see, are not indigenous to Ireland. “Snakes” probably refers symbolically (think “serpent” in Genesis 3) to Druid paganism, a religion Patrick drove from Ireland.

Patrick died in Downpatrick, Ireland, probably in 461 AD and possibly on March 17, a date ever since celebrated by the Irish who themselves made Patrick a “Saint” some 500 years before the Roman Church began the practice.

In the early 1600s the Church formally put March 17 on its calendar to honor St. Patrick of Ireland. It wasn’t until 1903 that St. Patrick’s Day was an official holiday in Ireland – a day upon which all bars in Ireland were closed (until the 1970s) to preserve religious solemnity.

Oddly enough, the first “St. Patrick’s Day Parade” anywhere on record was in New York City in 1762, when Irish soldiers of the British Army marched to identify each other and build fellowship.

The traditional meal of corned beef and cabbage is American. Irish prefer pork with their cabbage as pious Catholics take a break from their no-meat Lenten fast.

So it’s a three-leaf clover, not four. Druid religion, not snakes. Pork, not beef.

But as for Guinness … aye Celts, a fine Irish quaff.

Erin go bragh! (Ireland forever!)

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) here are excerpts the beautiful prayer “St. Patrick’s Breast-Plate” for a proper St. Paddy’s observance:
“… Christ with me, Christ before me; Christ behind me, Christ within me;
Christ beneath me, Christ above me; Christ at my right, Christ at my left …”

The Meaning of Life

Spirituality Column #174
March 9, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

The Meaning of Life (it can’t be that easy … )
By Bob Walters
Author of the book: Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

What is the meaning of life?

Many philosophers, spiritualists, deep thinkers, academics, theorists, Darwinists, humanists, humorists, dreamers, artists, odds-makers, rascals – and more than a few theologians – make the answer to that question more difficult than it needs to be.

The answer, the capital-T Truth, is built into Christian doctrine: life means seeking God, praising God, loving God … and loving other humans as we love ourselves. Our faith in Jesus Christ on the Cross – that He erased our sins so we may have eternal life and fellowship with God in heaven (John 3:16) – is the Truth’s straight path and narrow gate (Matthew 7:13-14).

Looking around us, it is hard to imagine this life should be dedicated to God and other humans because so much of it seems to be dedicated to ourselves. Our innate fear of death, our natural appetites (some sinful, some not), a culture that exalts self, even our God-given freedom, all conspire against our trust in Christ’s new covenant and new creation, which divinely calls us not to selfish power, but to selfless, sacrificial love.

God promises this new covenant in the Old Testament (Jeremiah 31:31), and Christ delivers it in the New Testament (Luke 22:20). St. Paul explains that when we allow Christ to live in our hearts, we are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). With this comes new meaning for our lives.

Is life’s meaning founded in loving our family, neighbor and nation? Only if we understand it is God Who authored and gives meaning to love.

Is life’s meaning money, wealth, power … or fear? Each can wreak spiritual destruction – as can poverty or ill-health – if loving God is not one’s first priority. Love is an exercise of our God-given freedom; but love isn’t something we create. We think we do, but … we don’t. We can’t.

“God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Period. Believe it.

A personal relationship with Christ that truly gives one’s life peace, joy and meaning “beyond all understanding” (Philippians 4:7) is not what the above earthly thinkers readily or willingly accept as life’s meaning.

They put too much “me” in meaning, and too much “I” in idea.

Life’s true meaning is only in us if Christ is in us, and if our faith is in Christ, because life’s meaning is Christ.

Know what I mean?

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) quotes the Westminster Catechism of 1647: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever.” Amen.

If God is So Smart ...

Spirituality Column #173
March 2, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

If God is So Smart …
By Bob Walters

Who is smarter … us, or God?

The vast majority of humans – who in this bit of the conversation must necessarily and by definition believe God exists (if God doesn’t exist, neither does this conversation) – will likely concede that God “is smarter than me.”

Yet evidence suggests that culture and academia have long since concluded that sincere, experiential, active, sharing, evangelical belief in God disqualifies one from consideration of being a true intellectual.

In other words, God is smart; but if I say He is real, I must not be smart.

Spend a moment thinking that one over.

The rationalist non-believers may now enter into the conversation.

Late last year at the New School in New York City (Greenwich Village, Manhattan), the intellectual journal “n+1” convened a discussion panel on “Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual.” The proceedings were august, thoughtful, deliberate … all very smart, liberal and intellectual.

It is quite telling that missing from the panel was even one evangelical intellectual, or any professing Christian. A Wall Street Journal commentary on the proceedings noted that all the panelists discussed their “move away from evangelical faith as a part of becoming intellectuals” which I believe infers they believe no evangelical intellectuals exist. Emotion is a disqualifying component.

And, it infers that a modern intellectual, necessarily and by definition, considers his mind to be superior to that of the necessarily non-real God’s.

When thoughtfully pressed to name someone both intellectual and Christian, the panel listed several, all of whom were liberal Catholics or Anglicans. Surprisingly, intellectually steeped Pope Benedict XVI wasn’t named, an omission that makes one doubt the intellectual weight of the exercise.

The underpinning of modern liberal intellectual thought, it would seem, is that no issue can ever be fully settled; hence, no truth can ever be known. And if you think an issue is settled, such as salvation through Jesus Christ, or that you know the truth … well, you can’t by definition be an intellectual.

Wouldn’t a true intellectual be thankful for the fact of the Creator God’s authorship of intellect, certainly a powerful sanction and purpose for intellectual endeavor? Yet the panel didn’t consider God sufficiently real to be intellectual.

The panel certainly was unwilling to profess that the truth of the Gospel – the saving grace of Jesus Christ – is God’s greatest and smartest truth.

Thinking one is smarter than God, I think, proves the opposite.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes intellect proceeds from God, and too often recedes from “intellectuals.”