Testing One, Two, Three ...

Spirituality Column #251
August 30, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Testing One, Two, Three …
By Bob Walters

Horrible things happen and we ask God, “Why?”

The crazy, awful, accurate answer is: Because it’s a fallen world and everything that we might think is a test of God’s love for us is really a test of our faith in Him.

I know. It’s a typical, maddening, unsatisfying, mysterious and at-first-glance non-definitive Christian answer. It seems appallingly cold, impersonal and unfeeling; a nearly criminal endorsement of accepting God no matter what.

It’s the last thing we want to hear when we suffer. But honestly, it’s the first thing we must understand.

The truth is that there is nothing more intensely personal to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit than our individual faith and suffering. Christ’s suffering work on the cross – dying to defeat death and erase our sin – was 100 percent about the well-being of our eternal relationship with God the Father, in faith. In our own moment-by-moment existence, that doesn’t seem to do me any good. That doesn’t heal me or my loved one, relieve today’s suffering and fear, or establish and enforce temporal justice.

God abides; we fret and condemn.

And while it is perfectly OK to shout at, argue and plead with God – He is listening, after all – God calls for and insists upon our faith, not our agreement. That’s no test; that’s the truth. God in his holy realm can indeed “do whatever He wants.”

But “whatever He wants” is different in the eternity of God’s perfect, immaculate, complete, literal goodness and purpose, as opposed to our “on the clock” perspective in an imperfect, sinful, limited and situationally dynamic world.

We can count on God being faithful to Who He is, and to be Who He says He is to us. Always. Christ on the Cross is our proof of that, and the Bible backs it up. Too often, we want God to conform to who we say we are, and Who we want Him to be. The Bible explains that God’s truth is precisely the opposite; God is God, and we’re not.

It’s better and healthier to test God with our love than with our anger. Death, you see, is part of our fallen world but not part of God’s perfect eternity.

So don’t ask God, “What have You done for me lately?” Pass the true test of faith, and say, “Thank You, God, for what You have done for me eternally.”

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) knows from experience that when horrible things happen, it’s even more horrible not to know and trust God.

Of Disasters and Salvation

Spirituality Column #181
April 27, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Of Disasters and Salvation
By Bob Walters

“What we know about Jesus Christ tells us everything we need to know about God.”

That was a pretty good comment in a recent sermon by our co-preacher Daron. He was making excellent points about how we try to assign common social roles to God (sheriff, judge, Santa Claus, dad), separating God from Christ.

I got to thinking, “Man … how true is that?” We figure God will give us stuff and spare us pain if He likes us, which only happens if we do good things. “Watch out for God!” we think. “It’s Jesus who loves us unconditionally, while God is that horrible, wrathful guy from the Old Testament.”

No. Don’t ever separate God and Jesus. Here’s why.

Consider a few “must know” things about the person of Jesus. One is that He was fully man and fully God. Another is that He was blameless.

See? Fully God, and blameless. Was, is, and always will be.

That means just as Jesus loves us, God loves us. And just as Jesus is blameless, so God is blameless. Hebrews 1:3 says “the son (Jesus) is the … exact representation of his (God’s) being.”

But don’t we just love to blame God when bad things happen? 1 Peter 4:11 is crystal clear, “… that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.” We’re supposed to praise God, not blame him.

So who do we blame?

Looking closely, it is the fallen world that is to blame. Examine Adam and Eve and the Fall (Genesis 3). The perfect, good, ordered world God created has been groaning ever since. Disasters are evidence of that.

Remember that the Lord of this “world” – Lord of the Bad Stuff – is Satan. When we peg our miseries on God, we are missing the peace and joy that a right relationship with God brings.

And we are cutting Satan slack he doesn’t deserve.

Disasters, cruelty, disease, assorted miseries … nobody ever blames those worldly things on Jesus, yet we are quick to blame them on God. Even our insurance policies call them “acts of God.”

They aren’t. They are acts of a Fallen World. God is “the Good.”

Don’t worry about whether God loves you; Jesus proves that He does. Worry about whether you love Him back. That’s our Salvation, and our only shelter from the disasters we encounter in this world.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thanks Daron Earlewine at E91 Church for the wise words. (Update: Daron now preaches at various churches around Carmel and continues his "Pub Theology" ministry.)

Jesus: Who IS This Guy? Part 1

Spirituality Column #96
September 9, 2008
Current! In Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current! In Westfield (IN) newspaper

Jesus: Who IS This Guy? Part 1
By Bob Walters

(First of two parts)

Can you explain who Jesus Christ is?

No, I mean, seriously, if someone tells you Jesus was just a prophet or was just a man in history famous for giving good advice and being crucified or was a “sinner like me” or isn’t really God or is “my homeboy” or is a myth or is just “your personal opinion,” can you explain who Jesus Christ is, really?

Without your face turning red and your tongue getting tied?

We Christians tend to mangle our message and get our feet tangled up in church buzzwords and scriptural chimera when we attempt to explain Jesus Christ to non-Christians. They have no idea what we’re talking about. “Blood of the Lamb … Huh?”

Or we get mad. The irony is that Satan thrives on both the misinformation that makes us angry, and the fact that anger makes us poor witnesses for Christ. Funny how that works.

Our efforts are further hampered because the world … that would be the Fallen World which is the turf of Satan, you know, this place where we all live … works overtime to confuse the issue of who Jesus truly is.

So who is He?

For this conversation, let’s start with the fact that Jesus is Satan’s Public Enemy No. 1. Hence, the world works hard to confuse us about Jesus’ identity. Non-believers are easily suckered into accepting – and too many believers are not equipped to refute – incorrect information about the basic facts of Christ.

It is critically important that Christians are able to explain that …

… Jesus is God in human form. He is God’s expression and assurance of love, and our invitation to a relationship with God. Jesus is God’s proof that God created and loves each one of us individually. Jesus really lived, really died, really came back to life, really ascended into heaven and He really lives.

… The Cross – Christ crucified and risen – was about God’s love, not about God’s wrath.

… Jesus is mankind’s only link with a loving, personal God; Satan promotes our separation from God.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will explain the “only link” remark next week in the conclusion of this column.

C.S. Lewis, Narnia and a Fallen World

Spirituality Column #85
June 24, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

C.S. Lewis, Narnia and a Fallen World
By Bob Walters

Prince Caspian, the recent second movie installment of the seven-book “Chronicles of Narnia” series by C.S. Lewis, is
· breathtakingly beautiful in its photography,
· tear-harkeningly tender in its presentation of the lion Aslan as Christ,
· and – for a Disney movie based on a children’s book by perhaps the 20th century’s greatest Christian apologist – almost disturbingly violent as a fallen world metaphor.

Lewis wrote the series in the 1950s. The seven books read the way you expect third or fourth-grade level literature to read. Prince Caspian the book is nowhere near as violent as the movie. The book develops the talking animals as characters of great depth.

One might suppose the movie’s violence is just the heavy hammer of Hollywood, itself a comment on what it takes to entertain us these days since so much of the original Narnia stories unmistakably and entertainingly parallel the teachings of the Bible.

Peter, the oldest of the four children, lurches into the breach of any fight the way one might envision the Apostle Peter. Lucy, the youngest child, is the first to see Aslan (read Matthew 11:25), and is the child that leads the way (Isaiah 11:6).

Alas … these days, more of us understand violence than the Bible.

Lewis, a professor at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England, was not just a theologian of towering intellect; he was also renowned for his unparalleled knowledge of literature. That so advanced a scholar could write so clear and simple a set of stories as Narnia reveals unusual genius.

Despite the movie’s being “juiced” with Hollywood action steroids, what Narnia’s violence represents, in a most pointed way, is that the mayhem, strife and sickness we all encounter is a function of our sin problem in a fallen world. Some of us readily admit our sin, and some of us shockingly and self-righteously dismiss the very idea.

Narnia’s capacity for violence and evil is every bit as stunning as its potential for beauty and heroics.

Think of it this way: we have a sin problem, but a Christ opportunity.

Just like Narnia.

We’re better off when we “get” the fallen part of our earthly experience. It often explains the unexplainable.

Walters' (rlwcom@aol.com) faith was heavily informed by Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, two Lewis classics. Read them if you haven’t.

Simple Question

Spirituality Column #70
March 11, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Simple Question
By Bob Walters

Let’s ask the great theological question:

Are we humans basically good, or basically bad?

I’m going to go with “basically good,” because we are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27, 2:7) who the Bible convinces me is a loving and good God, and who – the Bible insists (John 3:16) – desires a perfect and eternal relationship with each one of us.

There’s just that pesky “sinful nature” and unavoidable “death” (“the wages of sin is death,” Romans 6:23) that we can’t seem to shake off.

So, if we are basically good, why do we need Christ? Because we have free will and we sin and we have doubts and we create all kinds of physical and spiritual mayhem all over the world. And because Christ very simply – whether we prefer to believe we are good or bad – is the access path to God.

That’s why He was sent here.

It bothers me to think that Christ would go through the ordeal of the cross if we were basically bad. We must be worth something to God.

And if we are to hope in anything, isn’t “good” hope’s foundation? I rarely hope for anything bad to happen, even to people I don’t like. “Bad” and “hope” just don’t go together.

Plenty of people are convinced that they themselves are the good and that God must be the bad because awful things happen – in the Bible and in the present world around us – and how can a good God let awful things happen?

That, my friends, is a very human – and very flawed – way to see life.

Do we carry Adam’s sin in us? Yes, it certainly seems so. And it is a fact beyond discussion that the curse of Adam’s sin is death; not only of us humans, but for all of creation (Genesis 3, Romans 8:22). The phrase isn’t “fallen humans,” it’s “fallen world.”

There is no sin in the first two books of the Bible (Genesis 1 and 2) nor in the last two (Revelation 21 and 22). The story starts good, and ends good.

As for this time in the middle, it sure is a comfort knowing Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thinks the point of life is to learn to love God, and each other, no matter what happens.