Tag Archive for: gospel

The Gospel: How Vocation Follows Redemption

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Over a number of posts, I will be exploring the wider dimensions of the Gospel as articulated by the New Testament, helping us fill in gaps that Ghanaian Christianity tends to ignore, so we can work towards better discipleship. This is part 1. Stick around.

And they sang a new song, saying: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals because you were slain, and with your blood, you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.” (Rev 5:9-10 NIV)

If you have been around Ghanaian Christianity for any length of time, you are bound to have heard “the Gospel” expressed in various ways, but mostly summarized as follows.

“God loves you. But you are a sinner and cut off from God (and at risk of hellfire). God has sent Jesus to come and die for your sins. If you accept Jesus, all your sins will be forgiven, and you will have a place in heaven”.

Again, these may not be the exact words, and some details may be more emphasized than others or phrased differently. But if you are honest, you can identify this message in many evangelistic tracts, sermons, “crusades” and the like on the Ghanaian Christian landscape.

But over the years, as I have compared popular renditions of “the Gospel” with the version summarized by Rev 5:9-10 quoted above, I notice a wide gap between what the New Testament says the Gospel is, versus what tends to pertain in Ghanaian Christianity. And in these series of posts, I will explore certain dimensions that I feel this passage brings to light that is usually ignored by much the Christianity that dominates Ghanaian circles. The key to the discomfort lies in v 10.

They Will Reign On Earth?

Permit me to deal with the end of that verse before we get to the beginning. Isn’t it weird that, contrary to popular opinions, v 10 says that the people from different tribes and nations purchased by the Lamb are made to “reign on earth”, and not in heaven?

I mean I was born and bred a Pentecostal, and the idea that the goal of my life was to “make it to heaven” was pretty well drummed into my head. I remember the many revivals where I was warned to look into my heart and be sure whether my final destination would be heaven or hell assuming Jesus’ second coming was to be in a few minutes. Basically, I had to be “rapture-ready”, as Jesus could come at any moment. So, what does it mean when those purchased by the Lamb are destined not for rule in heaven, but for a “reign on earth”?  Were my well-beloved elders, deacons, and pastors selling me snake oil? Perhaps the answer may be closer than we think if we dig a little deeper.

A Kingdom and Priests

So, apparently this purchased group of diverse individuals are then made into a “kingdom and priests to serve our God”. What does that also mean? Perhaps the earliest usage of that phrase may give us some clues. 

When God called Israel out of Egypt, he required them to keep his covenant, and if they did so, then he would make them his treasured possession and they will be for him “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. (Ex 19:5-6).

This would suggest that the goals that God had for choosing Israel (descendants of only 1 nation), are the same goals that he had for choosing this diverse group from many nations, languages, and cultures by virtue of the shedding of the lamb’s blood. So, if the goal was the same whether with ancient Israel or with the church after Jesus, then why the language of “kingdom of/and priests” to serve him?

The Imago Dei

An important point to remember is John H. Walton’s dictum – the bible was not written to us, but it was written for us. So, to understand biblical language, we need to immerse ourselves in the world of the people to whom the text was first written, and not look to our modern interpretations of what words mean.

In the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) world of ancient Israel, it was the kings and their priests who were the intermediaries between the gods and ordinary people, much like we have in our Ghanaian cultural settings today. In this regard, our Nananom and our Wulomei were not very different from the culture that existed in ancient Israel, Babylon, Egypt or Canaan at the time of the Old Testament. In the ANE world, everybody was a slave of the gods, and only the kings and priests were “made in the image” of the gods. Hence the absolute power and almost “godlike” status afforded kings and their priests not only in the ANE world but even here and now, in Ghanaian traditional culture. It was and is a class system, pure and simple.

However, right from the beginning when the Creator God of Israel chooses to create, he breaks the chain of class systems by making all human beings “in his image”.

“So, God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27 NIV)

Which raises a question. If God made all humans in his image, then why would he choose a certain subset of those humans (Israel) and give them the task to be “kings and priests” aka be image-bearers again? Isn’t he going against his own classless ideal?

Well, if there is one thing that has been established about human beings is that we are mimetic – we learn best from one another. And the 2nd thing that one can establish about human beings is that the way we treat each other and the world around us is very dependent on the mental pictures of god/gods (conception) that we have acquired throughout our lives. To address this 2 fold behavior of human beings, God’ choice of the people of Israel (and by extension, the diverse people called the church paid for by the blood of the lamb) is so that he will reveal himself to these people (changing their conception of God), and through them (applying mimesis), open the eyes of the rest of the world as to their real identity – people made in the image of a particular type of god.

In this respect, the choosing of the people of God is not so they feel privileged, singing “I’m walking in power, I’m walking in miracles”, but so they serve God by serving the world. 

Wrapping up

All of this is work that is to be done not in heaven, but here on earth, extending into a “new heaven and a new earth”. To be a “kingdom and priests to serve our God and to rule on the earth” is to be a people who serve God by showing who God is to the rest of the world, both by deed and action, and not just in the spiritual sense, but in every sphere of life. It is in that way that we are truly “ruling on the earth”.

But since Ghanaian Christianity has largely sold itself a Gospel that is more about preparing us to go to heaven, we have lost a sense of vocation. We pile up the pews with more people waiting to go to heaven and make them of no earthly use. 

What if we developed a different imagination for what the purpose of being saved was for? Then maybe, the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus might help us understand the particular kind of God we are dealing with, a subject we will broach in the next post.

What is so sacred about sex? – Part 2

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This continues from part 1…..

In part one of this article, we discussed the sexual mood of our present culture and whether or not as human beings, we are the owners of our own bodies and minds. We ended on the note that if it is the case that we have been made or created by someone else for his own purposes, then surely we would have a lot more obligations than we would have if we only belonged to ourselves. But we also noted that, this is a big “IF” because some people do not believe (or at least they live as if they don’t believe) that there is any Being higher than ourselves, to whom we must be responsible. Is it reasonable to believe that an actual Being exists who is responsible for our existence and to whom we might be accountable to, regarding our sexual lives? If there is the possibility for such a Being to exist, why would he be interested in what we do with our bodies sexually?

For starters, let us be brutally honest with ourselves: everything in this world – from ourselves to the flowers to the stars to sea to animals etc – points to the fact that some sort of careful designing has gone into the creation of our world and of ourselves, doesn’t it? We often take it for granted that this physical world of ours is structured the way it is. But mathematically speaking, the probability of this world happening by a mindless random or unordered process is incredibly small. According to Astrophysicist Hugh Ross’ conservative calculation, the chance of a planet like ours existing in the universe is about 1 in a trillion billion billion (i.e. 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1 in 10 raised to the power 30).

 Scientists are discovering that had even a single feature of our universe been just a little bit different, the stars, galaxies and human life would not exist. Let us briefly look at a few amazing scientific discoveries before we go on. The distance from the earth to the sun is just right. Why? Even a small change of around 2% and all life would cease. If the earth was too near the sun, water would evaporate. If it was too far from the sun, its coldness level would not support life. In fact, even the rotation speed of the earth is just right; if it was too slow, the temperature differences between day and night would be too extreme, and if it was too fast the wind speeds would be catastrophic. Furthermore, if the ratio of the electromagnetic and gravitational forces had differed by about one part in ten thousand billion billion billion billion (i.e. 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000), then stars such as the Sun, which are capable of supporting life, could not exist. Do you see any picture emerging?

The delicate balance of the elements in our universe, to use the illustration of the theoretical physicist Paul Davies, is like the accuracy level that a marksman needs in order to hit a coin twenty billion light years away on the other side of the observable universe. [A light year is the speed travelled by light in one year. And light, by the way, has the fastest travelling speed in our universe]. In fact it has been noted by some researchers that the earth is placed precisely in a part of the universe that is congenial to scientific studies in cosmology, galactic astronomy, stellar astrophysics and geophysics. That is, if our earth had been positioned in a part of the universe with too much starlight, we could not have been able to see into deep space. There are more than 3000 galaxies in the observable universe, each containing millions to trillions of stars – many being bigger than the earth.

Further, Oxford mathematician John Lennox in his book, ‘God’s undertaker: has Science buried God?’, notes that the distinguished mathematician and astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, admitted that his atheism was shaken profoundly when he discovered the degree of fine-tuning needed between the nuclear ground state energy levels in order for carbon to be formed either by a combination of three helium nuclei, or by a combination of nuclei of helium and beryllium. (And for the record, life cannot exist on earth without an abundant supply of carbon). Sir Hoyle’s discovery, according to Lennox, led him to remark that, “a superintellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology,” and that “there are no blind forces in nature worth talking about.” Interesting isn’t it? And let us not forget the issue of the human DNA – the molecule containing coded instructions for the cells in the body. A group of scientists have recently estimated that the adult body contains about 37.2 trillion cells, each containing DNA. Each person’s complete DNA is unique; the exception being identical twins. The instructions are in what is called Genetic language and they are detailed, complex and specific. These instructions include for example, which cells should grow and when, which cells should die and when, which cells should make hair and what colour it should be.  If all this sounds too technical, then let me make it simple: the scientific discoveries are pointing in the direction where it is highly unlikely that an intelligent Being did not plan and execute the creation of this whole skilfully crafted universe, including human beings like us.

What is my point with all this information? It is this: if conditions in this universe, and the nature of our human bodies, are the way they are – so delicately precision-tuned – and if human beings like us posses the kind of intelligence we posses, even to study them, then it is very reasonable to (and unreasonable not to) suppose that a more intelligent Being, (1) is out there, (2) is the cause of our beings and (3) is interested in our lives. Now if we relate this thought to Mr. Lewis’ thoughts about moral duties (discussed in part one of this article), we can say with a fair degree of confidence that the whole of mankind must have a Landlord. Our bodies, strictly speaking, are not ours. Our Landlord is this Intelligent Being who created this world and everything in it. Religious folks simply call him, God. Since this God is the cause of our intricately designed bodies and existence, it is not mind-boggling that any “Dos and Don’ts” on how we use our bodies should come from him.

 

A Curious Worldview

 In his speech to the members of the city council of Athens, Paul the apostle of Christ tried to give them a new view of God, saying, “God, who made the world and everything in it, is Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made by human hands.” (Acts 17:24 GNB) In a city so used to building alters and shrines for every imaginable god, this news was however unimaginable. But to the people in the city of Corinth (a city well-known for its immorality), who became believers in Jesus Christ, Paul wrote them a letter in which he explained to them the sacredness of their bodies: “…the body is not to be used for sexual immorality, but to serve the Lord, and the Lord provides for the body. God raised the Lord [i.e. Jesus] from death and will also raise us by his power. … Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and who was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourselves but to God; he bought you for a price. So use your bodies for God’s glory.” (1 Cor. 6: 13,14, 19,20 GNB). Dr Ravi Zacharias, a Christian philosopher, appropriately explains that, “the Christian walks with God, not to God. We no longer go to the temple to worship. Rather we go with our temples to worship.” The body of a believer in Christ, rather than a church building, is the holy dwelling place of God and must be treated as “holy grounds.” Thus what this person wears, or touches, or says, or looks at or reads or listens to must uphold God’s holiness.

So much for the Christian “bodies”! What bearing does this worldview have on those who do not subscribe to it? The non-Christian is a prospective temple of God. God wants to live in this person. The Christian explanation for human existence in general is that God made us and not only that, but also that he made us all for himself (Col. 1:16) and he made us in such a way that only in union with him can our greatest good be had (John 10:10). Sin does not allow this to happen. But God became man in Jesus Christ, lived uprightly among us, identified with our human weaknesses, paid for our sins in his death and rose up and wants to live in us to empower us to live as we ought to. Like C. S. Lewis once observed, God invented us in a certain sense like how a man invents an engine. And when a car is made to run of gasoline, it would not run properly on anything else. In this same sense God made the “human machine,” as Lewis puts it, to run on himself.

The fuel we need in order to function the way he designed us is God himself and the food we need to keep our souls spiritually alive is God himself. We cannot expect to function properly on our own terms. Sexual fulfillment (a major hunger of our generation) with its proper joy, peace and security does not come through the pulling down of God’s boundaries. Without God at the centre of a sexual relationship, our much desired real and secure intimacy which we often believe can be found in sexual intercourse will prove elusive. Any person, Christian or not, who tries to outsmart God on this front will soon find that the last laugh is always God’s, not ours; restlessness, emptiness, meaninglessness, broken trust, guilt and shame will ultimately come resting at our door steps. There is definitely pleasure in sin but it is fleeting. Kenyan Christian Apologist, John Njoroge, insightfully says that, “Trying to meet our real needs without God is like trying to satisfy our thirst with salty water: the more we drink, the thirstier we become.  This is a sure path to various sorts of addictions.”

Even in our limited wisdom, we realize that playing our cherished game of football without any rules does not make it really enjoyable. So we have created rules, in all their imperfections. Even with the rules in place, some people hurt others and get hurt themselves; they offend and get offended during the course of the game. Can you imagine the unbridled chaos that would exist if there were no clear rules? In the same way, we are living in an increasing sexually chaotic culture today because we are desperately throwing off God’s moral restraints: husbands and wives are sleeping with people other than their spouses, young unmarried boys and girls are “training” themselves in the act of sex yet ironically the idea of marriage is appearing uncomfortable to them because of its widely acknowledged moral limitations. God has provided a framework within which sex can be properly enjoyed physically, emotionally and spiritually, and it is not outside marriage.

 In God’s scheme of things, according to Christian teachings, you do not need to be experienced in sex before marriage. This is because you have the whole of your married life to get to know your spouse’s body (God’s gift to you) as your bodies lock and your spirits mesh in sexual intercourse before God. With each encounter you get to know the body of your spouse even better to the glory of God. And here is the rich wisdom of the Christian faith (which may seem foolish on the face of it): Any person who genuinely relies on Jesus Christ before his marriage and also during his marriage will be given the grace and spiritual strength to stay the course of marriage should he find out that he has ended up with a sexually defective spouse. Tough to take in, I know, but I cannot make this truth any more appealing than it sounds right now in a time like ours. Marriage is not a selfish enterprise, where if you are not having a sexually exciting life everything else must come crushing down for everyone in it. Rather it is essentially a self-giving worship of God as you commit yourself exclusively to that one person, to love, to cherish and to seek the good of this person always.

 The Christian scriptures teach that all who trust in God will not be disappointed, ultimately. But break God’s precepts on sex (or on any other issue of life) and you can be sure that you will not only separate yourself from God and into a dark loneliness of the soul but you will also hurt yourself and others. Let us be clear: the idea that God is an unloving and unfeeling Judge up there who is simply watching down to see who has gone even slightly wrong so that he may swiftly punish him, is wrong. God wants to reconcile us back to himself. This is the Christian message to the world. God’s precepts in the Bible are intended to facilitate our happiness and not to stifle it. A parent sternly warns her child to steer clear of fire not because she wants to make the child miserable but because she wants to prevent the child from getting hurt or even dying. How can a child enjoy life when he is hurt or dead? If we separate ourselves spiritually from God (a spiritual death), through sin, how can we expect to receive God’s best? God knows the limits within which our best can be had. Stolen waters are not as sweet as we want to believe. Many people may look happy on the outside but on the inside they may be empty, restless, bitter and troubled because they have violated God in this area of sex.

Conclusion

We were made for God and if we spend ourselves in illegitimate pleasures, we will only come away broken and impoverished in our souls (and perhaps with physical scars too). No one enriches his soul by being sexually immoral. Rather we bankrupt ourselves spiritually; we feel the emptiness, restlessness of the soul, the guilt and shame of sin because we have divorced ourselves from God, who is our ultimate good. A more serious side to sexual immorality is that in the end, we must give account of our lives to the God. Some people realize this quicker than others but the important thing is that we are willing to take the necessary steps back to God through the path he has provided – faith in his Son, Jesus Christ. And to be clear, faith in Jesus Christ is not mere intellectual belief in Jesus as Lord but includes a willful commitment to live the whole of one’s life in reverence of him and his teachings. Christ offers forgiveness and rebirth even to the one who has wrecked himself or herself sexually yet is willing to repent. Are you a mess, sexually? Jesus gives hope and strength to those seeking to please God in their sexual lives.

Your God is Too Small – A New Creation

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I’ve heard this statement “Your God is too small” used in certain Christian circles to denote a certain lack of faith in God’s ability to do supposedly mighty things for a person. I find that quite an interesting statement, but even more so very applicable to my current post (and a few others to come with it soon). So I’ll appropriate that title, but for a different purpose and we’ll see why as we go along.

 

In recent times I’ve downloaded and installed a new version of a certain Android bible (YouVersion), which comes with the latest NIV (2011) version. Suffice it to say that the name of that app itself is subject to questioning, but I digress. Interestingly I came across one of the all-time favorite passages of Christendom – 2 Cor 5:17. The 1984 version of the NIV (which is the widely known version) puts it this way).

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come”

And yet the modern translation says this

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come; The old has gone, the new is here!”

Now for those who are about to charge the writers of NIV 2011 with changing the word of God, heresy, blasphemy, unfaithfulness to scripture and many other such accusations, I will gladly ask you to find out how Bibles are translated, and how versions of Bibles are updated over time. And for those who judge every other bible by the standard of the King James Version, you will find that “God does not speak King James”, as my friend Kwame Antwi-Boasiako puts it. Such a discourse will take another post altogether, one which someday will be put together.

But indeed I smiled when I saw this. Here was one of those passages which had been one of the foremost evangelistic tools of Protestantism, being shown in a different but extremely important perspective. Not that the previous translation was incompatible with Jesus’s sayings or Paul’s teachings, but because the now corrected construction points to one of the points that is missing in Christendom today. And I will illustrate why with this short scenario.

We read a passage at church the other day, and I asked a question about that passage, answers to which showed` the problem. Jesus was speaking to his disciples, and he made this statement to them.

“I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:27).

The question then logically arose how it is possible that Peter, Andrew et al will not die before the kingdom of God comes. Are they still alive today? Did Jesus Christ mean what he was saying or was he smoking something we haven’t heard of yet? Or was there some “spiritual” meaning to what he said?

Try as my brothers at church did, many gave all sorts of theories, from the absurd to the plausible but unlikely. And I know that if I asked many contemporary Christians the same question, I will get the same kind of answers from them. But everyone excluded the 1 possibility:

THAT THE KINGDOM OF GOD HAD ALREADY BEGUN

No, there is no “spiritual” meaning to it; neither was Jesus smoking the pot when he said this. Peter doesn’t need to be alive and waiting 2000 years and more to be part of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God was inaugurated by Jesus’s presence on this earth, and he said this so many times it is surprising that so many people (including myself for a long time) haven’t noticed (Matt 12:28; Lk 4:18-21; Lk 17:20-21).

Jesus’s breaking into this world signified that God has begun changing the world and that man and women are being called into his kingdom to work with him against the kingdoms of this world. Jesus came to lay claim to the whole world as his, and to point out to the world that God had anointed him king of this world, and that everyone needed to submit to him to be a part of his kingdom (Col 1:15-20). And he showed us how – not in overthrowing the world with violence and guns (whether automatic, semi-automatic or non-automatic), but with deeds that speak of the character of their king. The point about the kingdom of God that many Christians miss is that it CANNOT work using the methods of the world, or else it will be defeated by the corrupting influence of the world. It must work with the methods of its king, who lays his life down for others, who calls the leaders to be servants, who is good news to the poor, who challenges the status quo and its comfort zones (including the religious elite), who feeds the flock before feeding himself (and not fleecing them rather – as is the dominant case both politically and religiously).

So therefore the newer translation of 1 Corinthians 5:17 makes a lot of sense to me. For if Jesus’s breaking into this world signifies a changed world then indeed when a person is in Christ, he is not just a new creation, but CREATION HAS BECOME NEW TO HIM. They now live by a new set of rules, serves a different king and belong to a different people. The world is no longer the same to them, because of the following below.

  1. He answers to a new king
  2. He belongs to a new people
  3. He is a new person.

The order is important. The gospel was always about the kingship of Jesus and not about salvation from sin, though it included it. If you doubt it, take the time to read and digest properly all the sermons preached by both Paul and Peter in the book of Acts (2:14-36; 10:34-43; 13:16-40; 17:22-31). To help you navigate this course better, you can look up New Testament scholars like Scott McKnight’s “The King Jesus Gospel”, or NT Wright’s “How God became King”.

Secondly, the gospel called us to be included amongst the people of God by repentance and baptism, and to live with those people who by the Spirit of God in them are fulfilling their King’s purpose and mission. And as we work with these people and we obey our king and his Spirit’s leading, we are further transformed both as a people, and as individuals.

But today the gospel has been turned upside down. Everything is now centered on the number 3 person in the order above. Everything is about how Jesus will solve “my problems”, how he will “make me rich and prosperous”. The number 1 thing that enabled sin to enter the world today – the sin of not submitting to God, but putting ourselves in the center of everything – is the same thing that our gospel has become about. Me.

And when I meet Christians who think Jesus is all about a “personal relationship”, the phrase that comes into my head most often is the title of this post – your God is too small. Your God isn’t the Jewish Messiah – king of this world, who demands that mankind abandon the ways of this world in pursuit of him, who requires that mankind learn to live in peace and in submission and servitude to one another for the purpose of his kingdom, who requires a change in the deepest of hearts of each individual person. No, your god is a genie in a bottle, and when you feel low or your next bout of narcissism shows up, you rub the bottle with some “prayers and tongues, with plenty ‘overcoming’ faith”, say what you want him to do for you, and go about your business, paying no heed to the kingdom of God, which is indeed amongst us, but hidden from our eyes.

This discourse is not over yet, and in my next post we will take a historical look at how the gospel of Jesus changed (or our God became smaller) through the course of history through a better look at the popular Christian creeds.

Joy to the World

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“… the Lord is come, let earth receive the king.”

So goes the Christmas carol we were taught in nursery school. And we sung it with all our feeble hearts and fumbling lips, looking forward to the Christmas gifts our parents will be buying us – the new shoes, clothes and fancy spectacles and cap. Alas, those were the days. But do we stop to ponder deeper into the Christmas story and imbibe its significance for not only our lives, but for the world at large? Today I intend to recap the Christmas story with a bit of New Testament historical background, and draw out implications for us of the birth of this Jesus. Fair warning that this post will be long, so have patience for it, for the story of Jesus’ birth, though simple, is actually quite a multi-layered one worth pondering deeply.

The story of Christmas is rooted in the story of Israel, and we must always attempt to tell it from that perspective. So here goes. Please note my usage of certain bolded words. They will come in handy in this and other posts.

2000 years before Jesus Christ, God called a certain man called Abram from amongst his family in Ur to a place called Canaan. He changed this man’s name to Abraham and gave him a promise.

“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; … and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen 12:2-3 NIV)

This promise Abraham diligently transmits to his children, who end up being exiled in Egypt for 470 years because of initial worldwide hunger and now forced into slavery. God however, miraculously leads them through Moses out of Egypt in triumphant fashion back to their own land. Now they have their land back, Torah is given to them as a way of life, and the tabernacle/temple is built for God to come and dwell in and supposedly never leave. They demand a king, and God gives them Saul and then David. God makes a promise to David.

 “When your days are over and you rest with you fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom … Your house and your kingdom shall endure before me forever, your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam 7:12-16 NIV).

Having received this prophecy, David himself prays in Ps 72 about that son of his thus (a Messianic Psalm – one which the Jews always looked to when thinking of the promised Son of David).

“He will judge your people in righteousness, your afflicted ones with justice … He will defend the afflicted among the people and save the children of the needy; he will crush the oppressor. He will endure as long as the sun … The kings of Tarshish and distant shores will bring tribute to him … All kings will bow down to him … All nations will be blessed through him, and they will call him blessed” (Ps 72:2-17)

From the above, one can see what this promised king is to do; by bringing hope to the afflicted, to the hopeless and needy; by subduing all kingdoms under him; and by being the means through which God’s promise to Abraham will be fulfilled in this world.

Well unfortunately, David’s throne did not last forever, and those who came after him increasingly departed from God’s ways. Finally, despite all the warnings of prophets like Jeremiah, they are uprooted and exiled for a second time in their history – this time forcefully – by the Babylonians.

For the next 250 years, they are separated from their land and the temple. The only thing that they still had was Torah, and they began to take it quite seriously as the only means of reconnecting with their God and their lost heritage. Prophets like Daniel, Isaiah and Ezekiel remind them of God’s promises to them and their forefathers, and expand those promises by giving further prophecies concerning a certain son of David will be the one to bring their deliverance forever.

They are released from exile and allowed to go back to their land. With much joy and hard work, they build a new temple, though not as resplendent and beautiful as Solomon’s temple (The history of Jews after this second temple was built is what is referred to as “2nd Temple Judaism”). Yet, they still feel like they are in exile, for though they live on their own land, they are being ruled remotely, first by the Persians who set them free, then by Alexandria and his protégés after him including the Ptolemys from Egypt, and then the Seleucids from Syria, and finally by Rome. They had a little bit of joy when Judas Maccabeus led a revolt to overthrow the Seleucid emperor Antiochus Epiphanes (who was receiving bribes from the highest bidder to appoint them High Priest of the Jewish temple), leading to the declaration of Hanukkah as a new Jewish festival. And yet soon enough the Romans came with their crushing military might, and they were back to square one.

For the next 300 years after returning from exile in Babylon, the question plaguing the people of Israel is when God will honor his promises of blessings to their fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? When is he going to send that son of David to fulfill that promise of a kingdom that will last forever? What were they doing wrong that God was taking so long? In the meantime, while they waited for God to come and save them, their lifestyles were also being challenged by introduction of Greek culture which had dominated the world since Alexander’s conquests in a process called Hellenization (just like American culture is dominating our world today). This they felt was an affront to their Jewish ways of life, enshrined in Torah. To most Jews, Hellenization was a serious threat, and probably one of the reasons why God had not yet sent his salvation because of all these and other sins of the nation Israel.

No wonder then that most Jews believed in the message of one of the dominant groups of their time, the Pharisees. The Pharisees insisted that the faithful keeping of Torah will cause God to finally bring salvation to Israel. This is why the Pharisees were so worried about the keeping of Torah and guarding against Hellenization – unlike what Reformed theology has taught us since the 17th century; it was not that they felt keeping Torah will guarantee their ticket to heaven or make them personally “righteous”. It was about keeping it so God will look with mercy upon them and send his salvation to the nation Israel, and also that the individuals that kept Torah will then be mercifully received into the coming kingdom. No, they were not busy thinking of how to go to heaven as individuals, they were busy debating the nitty-gritty of how heaven may come to earth. One other question that was asked back then is “how will our forefathers who have waited for so long for this coming kingdom benefit from it?” The answer was resurrection; that all faithful Israel will resurrect with the coming of the Son of David to also partake of this wonderful kingdom.

Of course there were those who were more interested in keeping the status quo, and one of such groups was the Sadducees. They were the priests who run the temple with the head of their council being the High Priest. Israel was supposed to be ruled by 2 authorities – a king and a high priest. In times where their conquerors didn’t appoint a king, they gave all political power to the high priest and his council. And so, they were the real power brokers of their time, and were less interested in the faithful keeping of Torah etc., but more interested in just making sure the sacrifices went on as usual, the tithes were received as usual (so they could benefit from it, unsurprisingly) and the bribes were paid as usual to convince a Seleucid or Roman governor to appoint them/keep them as high priest for all its benefits. Obviously you can understand why your average Jew was fonder of a Pharisee than a Sadducee, as a careful reading of the Gospels will show. And as usual you can see the similarities between them and today’s dominant Christian “clergy”. Interestingly because of their past evils of causing the death of others who challenged their power, the Sadducees did not believe in resurrection.

Then there was the third stream, who felt that God was not going to come down from heaven with his own sword to come and remove the Romans. Just as Judas Maccabeus was successful with removing at one time the Seleucids by the use of violence, they must arm themselves and fight the oppressor. At least they respected the Pharisees, but the Sadducees they loathed and there were many murders of Sadducees, Roman soldiers stationed in Jerusalem and generally caused much violence. They were the Boko Haram of their time we may say. There were many such groups, with different names. From Zealots, to Sicarii they flourished in the dark. Barabbas was one of them (he wasn’t just a thief/rioter but more of a coup maker), as was the disciple Simon the Zealot (incorrectly interpreted as Simon the Canaanite in some bibles), who may/may not have recanted his violence to follow Jesus.

 

The Birth of Jesus

Enter the birth of Jesus Christ. Mary is confronted by an angel with the following news

“But the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end’” (Lk 1:30-33 NIV)

Mary being a proper Jew will know immediately how significant this message was. God was fulfilling his promises to exiled Israel; the king of the world was coming. He will wipe away all their sins of unfaithfulness to God, and he will restore Israel to the status of the capital of the world, and the Jews will be the “chilling brothers” in that kingdom. And the poor and broken hearted will find joy at last. The weight of being the carrier of this wonderful child was definitely heavy on her and she expresses it in Lk 1:46-56. This was joy to the world indeed.

Being a proper Jew, King Herod hearing about the son of God/David being born is an immediate challenge to him. Not because he will simply provide forgiveness of sins and carry us all to heaven as our modern gospel preachers from DL Moody to Billy Graham have over-simplified it to a fault for us, but because his coming signals an end to the reign of every king and every kingdom, even more so to a Jewish king. No wonder he will have all babies less than 3 years old in Bethlehem killed. This is indeed joy to the world, but not to him.

Even more dramatic is the fact that whoever is the son of God/David or the Messiah is actually supposed to be greater than any world power. Therefore Jesus being proclaimed the son of David simply means that Jesus is Lord, not the Roman Emperor, something which was scandalous at the time and has severe implications for all political power today. The reason Jews call Jesus “Lord” is not because he is merely their “Lord and Personal savior” – another questionable phrase in Christendom – but because he is the supreme emperor of both the visible and invisible world. He is Lord over both the Ghanaian and the American president, and just like any political figure, he demands our obedience in totality. Devout loyalty to any political institution is pure idolatry.

And yet his ways are different. He refuses to keep his Kingdom limited to the Jews only, contrary to the wishes of the Pharisees. He refuses to Lord it over his people, contrary to the Sadducees and their modern day descendants. And he refuses to establish his kingdom by violence, seriously disappointing the Zealots. He is king, yet on his own terms and through his own means of love and self-sacrifice.

 

Conclusion

And so, just as the world gets excited that Prince William’s wife is pregnant and about to give birth, Christmas is the time to remember when the king of the world left his throne in heaven, and was born into this fallen world; to walk amongst men and experience their suffering, and yet to bring them out of the deception of this world into one of love and care for one another and for care for his creation.

Chrismas is time when those of us who believe in him must make sure we practicalize his mission – to bring hope to the hopeless, joy to the broken-hearted and declare his kingship over all kings. As he stated clearly in Lk 4:18, his kingdom has already began and his good news is to the poor, to the brokenhearted, to the captives, to the blind and to the bruised. To the mentally oppressed, who can only resort to taking out guns and shooting 26 people and themselves, we must realize we have good news to spread; we have a king to declare and a kingdom to both express today and work towards in future. To the proud and haughty, we must remind that there is a king who calls them to do their part in bringing peace; justice and constant social and economic improvement (note I didn’t say equality). For the king of the world demands it, and he waits patiently to exert his judgment in due cause, when both the quick and the dead are brought before him.

JOY TO THE WORLD INDEED, FOR THE LORD IS COME.