Deep Dive into Jesus

 

Jesus Christ is the most revered, the most respected, the most pivotal Person who ever lived. But He is also the most reviled, the most controversial, the most misunderstood, it seems to me. His entrance onto the stage of history changed everything, and yet, people still do all they can to explain away, deny, or resist the Savior’s influence.

To believers, Jesus Christ means salvation from all that is wrong with this world, and from all that is wrong with ourselves, as well as all that is wrong between us and our Creator. His humble birth, His sinless life, His atoning death, His victorious resurrection, and His promise of forgiveness and eternal life all make Him one of a kind.

So…I have to ask myself: Why am I so often ashamed of Jesus Christ?

If I truly, totally, savingly trust in Him as my Savior, Lord and King, then why is His name so seldom found on my lips, in my conversations, sometimes even in my prayers? Is it just that there is a pervasive anti-religious sentiment in our culture permeating the air all around me? Is it merely because of our pluralistic philosophical bent I’ve been steeped in here in the American “melting pot”?

If I had a machine in my possession that could completely do away with war, disease, hatred, greed, crime, poverty…and I was too ashamed to tell people about it–tell everybody I knew–wouldn’t you call me a fool…an insane monster…to keep quiet about it? Is my thinking so twisted and clouded and cowardly, that I tend to keep the truth of Jesus Christ to myself?

For the past year or so, I’ve been listening to a certain podcast on the internet that focuses on one of my favorite TV shows from back in the 1960s. It happens to be a very unique series that was adventurous, fun and thought-provoking. For its time, it was quite controversial in many ways. This podcast features two men in their 40s who were analyzing the series episode by episode, doing what they referred to as a “deep dive” into the writing, the characters, the direction, the messages, and the lasting impact of that TV program. Both hosts on the podcast confessed that they were so obsessed with the show, they considered it a major influence in their lives.

They also confessed that, when they were in their teens, their devotion to this particular show had been ridiculed by their peers, and they had both suffered from a kind of “geek shame” over their obsession, and secretly wondered if there was something wrong with them deep down. In their minds, while they loved this TV series immensely, they still felt alone and isolated in their devotion to it. But their love for the show persisted over the years, and when they finally met one another and discovered how they shared this obsession, they were eager to explore the show from a more analytical standpoint, digging into how it was written, how the characters were developed, etc.

One of the results was that they came to realize how absurd it was for them to have been ashamed of their obsession. The more they did their “deep dives” into each of the episodes, the more reasons they found to be proud of their original devotion to the series, its excellence, its ideals, its sense of adventure, its prophetic outlook toward the future. As they describe this growing realization, it almost comes across like a religious epiphany or a life manifesto.

While I listen to this podcast, and the rapturous words of the two guys hosting it, I can’t help but compare their obsession to the other fandoms that exist in our TV and movie-soaked culture today: Lord of the Rings…Marvel characters…Harry Potter…Jane Austen novels and films…the list is endless. Certainly we all have our favorites, our pet obsessions. And then I think…

What do we think of Jesus? How obsessed are we with the Savior? The King whose story wasn’t concocted in the mind of a TV or screen writer, but in the mind of Almighty God? All the heroic and grand ideals you and I meet in our favorite myths and adventure tales pale to nothing in comparison with the eternal God’s plan of redemption that features His one and only Son.

A wonderful book I’ve been reading by teacher and theologian Dr. Michael Bennett is entitled Beginning with Moses: Finding Christ in the Old Testament. Dr. Bennett does a fantastic job as he dives deep into the Scriptures to discover the clues of Jesus’ mission, His offices, His roles, His names, His appearances, His place in prophecy, things that span the entire timeline of this planet…and beyond! As I read this insightful book, my excitement swells considering the total tapestry of the Father’s plan–a plan to rescue and redeem a fallen, helpless, sin-ridden race, all for the sake of His beloved Son. Who could not be moved by the story of a Father who chose to sacrifice His Son for ungrateful sinners such as I?

When I think of this story–this true story, I want to dive deep, deeper, deepest, into the chronicle of God’s truth, God’s holy Scripture. And I want to become so obsessed with the riches of His living Word, His only begotten Son, that His name is continually in my mind, on my heart, falling from my lips. I want everyone to hear of Him, to love Him, to trust Him, to know Him eternally. I want you, my friend, to become part of His story.

MNA (3/21/2023)

A Dark Place to Pray

If Jonah is a well-known biblical character, it’s most likely because he was swallowed by a great fish, or possibly, by a whale. This mammoth sea creature became a tool in the hands of God to rescue His prophet from drowning in the stormy waters, to bring Jonah back to the dry land, and to be a resting place in which Jonah could reason with himself and repent of his rebellion against God.

For three days and three nights, Jonah was safe and secure in the fish’s belly. What was it like in there, I wonder? What thoughts went through Jonah’s mind during those many hours? Did he fear that he’d never see the light of day again? That he would die of suffocation or starvation? Surely he thought a lot about his disobedient behavior--how he’d run from the presence of the Lord, and how the Lord had pursued him with a mighty storm.

Whatever Jonah may have been thinking, the Bible tells us what he DID: “Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish.” The opening of Jonah’s prayer tells of his heart-cry to the Lord as he sank into the murky depths of the sea. It also tells of a living God who not only hears the desperate cries of His children, but answers them. We often take it for granted that God hears and answers our prayers. But this is a precious, precious truth! Those who bow down to other gods might wish and hope for some kind of answer, but they hope only in vain! Believers in the God of the Bible can be assured that every prayer of theirs finds their heavenly Father willing and eager to listen...able and willing to help them in their time of need.

The next part of this prayer recounts how Jonah found himself in trouble: “For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas...all your waves and your billows passed over me.” Notice how the prophet gives glory to God. Gives the Lord the credit for everything that happened. Even though it was the sailors on the ship that physically threw Jonah overboard, Jonah knows that the sovereign God of heaven acted behind the scenes to engineer the whole thing. “YOU cast me into the deep...YOUR waves and YOUR billows passed over me.”

Several weeks ago, a great theologian and Bible teacher, R.C. Sproul, went home to be with the Lord. In his teaching, he’d often refer to his favorite fiction book, Moby Dick. This great American novel tells the tale of a ship’s captain named Ahab, who uses his ship and crew to hunt down a great white whale, Moby Dick. The whale had attacked Ahab in the past and taken off one of the captain’s legs. It had crippled both Ahab’s body and his soul. Ahab searched and searched for Moby Dick to get his revenge by killing it. R.C. Sproul believed that this was a symbol of man’s pursuit of God, not out of love, but a hunger for vengeance.

Yes, there are those who know that our God exists, and yet do all they can to put Him out of their thinking--to kill God off in their hearts and minds. They do this so that they can be free of His laws and demands and expectations. In effect they are, like Jonah, running away from the presence of the Lord. But when those same people get into some kind of deep, dark trouble, where do they turn? Many of them turn to God out of desperation. They come to the end of their rope and have nowhere else to turn, so they PRAY.

Prayer, however, is no panacea--no magical formula that automatically solves all of my problems. People wrongly think of God as a kind of supernatural bellhop who is just waiting for us to ring for Him when we have a wish or request. What we discover in the book of Jonah, is that God is SOVEREIGN. That is, He is in control of all that exists in His creation, and all that happens to all His creatures, all the time. When he was sleeping in the hold of his ship, and even when the storm was raging all around them, Jonah failed to pray. But God arranged the events and circumstances in such a way that when Jonah was cast into the sea, at last he was willing to cry out to the Lord his God.

Do you see the purpose in God’s treatment of Jonah? The story began with Jonah running away from the presence of the Lord. He was running from the responsibility of being God’s prophet, of going to Ninevah and preaching against that city. But the Lord pursued him. The Lord didn’t give up on him. The Lord loved him and planned to return Jonah to a life of loving obedience. At first Jonah’s reaction to God’s casting him into the sea was: “Then I said, I am driven away from your sight.” But soon, inside the fish, he prayed: “yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.”

When dangers and tragedies happen to you and me, often we are tempted to become bitter like Captain Ahab. We are tempted to say, “Lord, why are you treating me this way? Are you trying to drive me away? I don’t deserve this harsh trial.” Or, perhaps we think, “I really DO deserve this. God must be doing this to punish me because He has stopped loving me.” When Jonah was tempted to turn bitter, he remembered instead the lesson of God’s “holy temple.”

What did the temple represent to God’s people Israel? A God who dwelt in their midst. A God who didn’t want to keep away from those He loved. A God who chose to share His own holy presence with them in a special, concentrated way. A God who wishes to be available for fellowship, not just with perfect, holy people...but with fallen, rebellious, guilty sinners.

Jonah went on in his prayer to describe the terrors he experienced as he sank deeper and deeper into the angry sea. He was staring death in the face. The concept of Sheol that he mentioned earlier is a shadowy underworld where the wicked dwell after death. Even as he drew closer and closer to drowning in the waters, Jonah’s hope in His God welled up inside him and he prayed for help!

The temples of false gods are so often UNHOLY temples. They are places where idol worshipers released their sinful passions and broke the laws of decency in order to please their wicked deities. But Jonah’s God came close to His people in a HOLY temple. A place where people were cleansed from their sins and gave sacrifices to a God of truth and purity and beauty: a God who called His people to be holy as well. A God of great and precious promises about a coming Savior who would bless not only Israel, but ALL the nations of the earth!

God longs to bless His people, to answer our faintest prayers. Remember this when you are weak, discouraged, fainting, even drawing close to death! Remember that this is often WHY you are tried and tested by dangers and difficulties: because God desires that we turn to Him for His blessings. He is well able to bring us up from the deepest pits just as He did for Jonah. Even our weakest, faintest prayer is heard in the heavenly courts of our all-seeing Father. He can but speak a word, and his almighty life-giving power can be unleashed to save His child.

Even the bonds of death are no match for the strength of our mighty God. Think of all the people in the Bible who were raised from the dead! Our Lord Jesus suffered death on a terrible cross at the hands of sinners and under the curse of God the Father, so that believers could be freed from their sins and receive eternal life. Then Jesus arose from the tomb three days later, fulfilling what He called “the sign of the prophet Jonah.”

The three days Jesus spent in the tomb were not like others who died. He saw no decay, because God had promised He wouldn’t. And the three days Jonah spent in the belly of the fish, God also preserved him from decay. Both Jesus and Jonah still had work to do. Jesus rose from the tomb to send His followers into all the world to make disciples of all nations...Jonah rose from the fish to take the message of the true God to the lost sinners of Ninevah.

But before Jonah fulfilled his mission, Jonah had a pledge to pay. A vow to fulfill. The Israelites would sacrifice to the Lord for several different reasons. They would make offerings for the covering of sins--to acknowledge their guilt before a holy God. But they would also bring offerings of thanksgiving, sacrifices to celebrate the answers to prayer they had received. Jonah was now more than ready to lift his voice in thanksgiving to the Lord of his salvation.

“Those who pay regard to vain idols,” he prayed, “forsake their hope of steadfast love.” Even after running from God’s presence, Jonah hadn’t lost his basic awareness that the false gods of the sailors could do nothing to assure their salvation. He knew that the One pursuing him with a storm was the Maker of heaven and earth, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He realized that his own people were making a grave mistake by paying regard to the vain idols of the neighboring nations.

“As for me,” Jonah concluded, “I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to YOU.” The covenant-keeping God of the Bible, the One who keeps all His promises. And then he tells us why: “Salvation belongs to the Lord!”

MNA
1/14/2018

Crying Out in the Darkness

“Count your blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done...”

If you are like me, you can echo the words of that cheerful song most of the days of your life, and you can list blessing after blessing given to you by our gracious God. As Ethan the Ezrahite says in Psalm 89, “The heavens are yours, and yours also the earth; you founded the world and all that is in it.” Every breath I take, every beat of my heart, every wonder of nature I behold, is a good gift from my heavenly Father. And the greatest gift of all is the gift of forgiveness and eternal life through the Lord Jesus Christ who gave His life for me on the cross!

But, likewise, if you are like me, there are days of sadness, fear, doubt, and discouragement--times when our heavenly Father seems to be far away, seems to have turned his back on me, even seems to be afflicting me with severe punishment! This is the kind of experience that Heman the Ezrahite is writing about in Psalm 88.

Someone has said that this is the only Psalm in our Bible that doesn’t contain words of praise, joy or thanksgiving. Apparently, Heman the Ezrahite was referring to a time in his life that was so dark and dreadful, all the blessings and benefits of knowing God seemed blotted out. What kind of trouble could account for this?

Perhaps it was a time of terrible sickness: an illness that threatened his life. He refers several times to being near the grave. Of being like one who is without strength. If you have ever been sick with a severe fever or bedridden with a wasting disease, then you know what it’s like, perhaps, to lose any hope of recovery: you cry out in your soul for God to deliver you. Or, you might even imagine that you are so close to death that not even He could help you. We must remember that God “knows our frame, he remembers that we are but dust.” The Lord created us and he knows that when we are weak and sick and played out physically, those are the times we find it hard to trust him and go on “counting our blessings.”

Maybe the darkness and trouble Heman refers to has to do with his relationships. There are times in all our lives when the people around us are difficult to deal with. People are fallible, sinful, unreliable, often careless. They make us promises and fail to keep them. They claim to be our friends but then betray or abandon us. They are greedy and ambitious, so they tend to manipulate or attack those who stand in their way. Heman complains to the Lord that He has taken away his closest friends and made him repulsive to them. Heman understands that God is in control of all things, even the relationships in his life that have gone wrong and become hurtful.

Do you and I cry out to the Lord when people in our lives let us down? Do we give God the credit He deserves for the friends and loved ones we treasure and rely on? We must remember that God declared “It is not good for man to be alone.” He created us to desire and to need companionship. And that is one important reason God became a man--the Lord Jesus Christ--to be our closest companion, even when all other friends and loved ones fail and abandon us.

It is clear that Heman the Ezrahite felt himself to be in real, immediate danger. Time and again in his Psalm he mentions being close to death, pleading with God on the basis of soon facing his own grave and the oblivion death represented to him. He even says that the closeness of death has plagued him even from his youth. There may have been an episode in his boyhood days in which the death of a parent or a friend affected Heman deeply and permanently. It became a scar on his heart and in his mind that tortured him throughout his life. Indeed, the Bible speaks of death as a great enemy--a terrifying force to be reckoned with as long as we live in this sinful world. Once again, Heman lays the complaint at the feet of God, telling the Lord “Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me.”

I sincerely doubt that Heman is referring to God’s wrath against his own sin. Nowhere in the psalm does he mention his own need for repentance because of some wrongdoing. I rather believe he’s referring to the fiery intensity of the trials he is going through, seemingly an angry outpouring of punishment that could only be coming from the hand of his Creator. Does a God of perfect love really cause fiery affliction to fall upon his children, so that they begin to despair and lose hope? If we are honest and read the scriptures faithfully, we will see that the answer is often “yes.”

Joseph faced afflictions and trials at the hands of his own brothers, as well as those who owned him as a slave in Egypt, and he spent years in prison unjustly, before God cause him to be raised to the office where he could save his own people. Later, God caused his people the Israelites to be oppressed as slaves in Egypt for four hundred years, before He brought them out in the Exodus and made them a nation.

Finally, the ultimate affliction God dealt out was upon His own beloved Son, in whom He was “well pleased.” One of the lessons we must learn again and again is that God has a good purpose in everything He does and everything He allows in our lives. The suffering and death of Jesus was the most terrible and unjust thing that ever took place on earth. And yet it was part of God’s perfect plan to atone for the sins of His beloved people.

I believe that this is a lesson that Heman the Ezrahite had learned. For even in the darkness of the terrifying pit, the place of fierce affliction where darkness was his closest friend, Heman cried out to the right person. “O Lord (Jehovah, the covenant God of Israel, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ), the God who saves me, day and night I cry out to you. May my prayer come before you; turn your ear to my cry.” Yes, he complained and expressed his fear and grief and pain and loneliness. But he knew who to complain to and he knew where his only hope of salvation lay.

When I wake up and find myself in total darkness, one of the first things I probably do is to feel around for a light switch. Even though the God of our salvation may lead us into a dungeon of darkness for a time to teach us to trust in him alone, this God has assured us that His light “shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

When you and I face our darkest days of affliction, it can be a comforting and reassuring thing that we know whom to cry out to. And He has promised that His light will conquer the darkness one day, forever.

Challenged and Cheered

Paul writes in Romans 1:16, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.” No sooner does the apostle explain this, than he proceeds to paint a very painful picture of the human race. A race of people doomed to experience the wrath of God for their sins.

The point that Paul is making is that the gospel of God--the “good news” regarding Jesus, God’s only Son--can only be seen as good news as it is proclaimed against a backdrop of a fallen world. This is a world that is rendered fallen by a rebellious, treasonous, disobedient human family, of which each of us is a guilty member.

This bad news about people marks out the irreconcilable “no-man’s land” that separates so-called liberal Christianity from what may rightly be called evangelical Christianity. Full-orbed biblical faith in Jesus Christ is based on truth which insists on a radical antithesis.

When I use the label “liberal” here, I am referring to those who believe in unifying humanity under a banner of fallacious hopes and wishful thinking. These well-intentioned folks want to see peace and healing for a hurting and divided mankind...but they believe they can be attained by basically human, non-miraculous methods.

This became clearer to me recently as I pondered the apparent aims of some spiritually minded poets. These writers urge us to look within ourselves to discover the common ground and universal desires that can unite us all. They imply (or preach openly) that if flawed, mistaken, dissatisfied men and women would rally together under a banner of brotherhood, or a love of nature, or a desire for self-preservation, then...all would be well. After all, we are all “in the same boat together,” and together we are sufficiently equipped to get things right in the end.

Only a casual glance through the pages of Scripture will show that this view falls far short of the plight of mankind as the Bible describes it. Rather than facing a self-perfecting building project that merely requires a beefed-up quantity of concerted effort, humanity is, in reality, in the middle of a to-the-death cosmic combat of God-sized proportions! Our Creator is extremely mad...because people are extremely bad. And eternity in either a real Heaven, or a real Hell, hangs in the balance.

This biblical picture presents too sharp an antithesis to the liberal mind. In order to avoid such a God-vs-Man confrontation, one must do one’s best to equalize the two sides in the conflict. The liberal must either inflate man’s goodness and perfectibility, or deflate God’s nature as powerful and holy sovereign. Or both. Making man more god-like than the Bible paints him, or making God more man-like, is the key.

A favorite tool of such theological makeovers is modern textual criticism: taking the plain language of Scripture concerning God, His nature, His demands, His action, judgments and decrees, and re-interpreting it to render it more manageable on a purely human level. To a large degree, the biblical God has died the death of a thousand re-interpretations. Liberal theologians have taken God’s wrath, laws, miraculous powers and sovereign providence--even His plan to save sinners, and have reduced them to symbolic signposts that humans can use on their own journey toward self-perfection.

Those divine qualities, no longer seen as simple and factual, have been ripped from their spatial and historical context and boiled down into Aesop-like moralisms. In the modern theologian’s mind, there’s no genuine conflict--there’s only a moralistic stew where all of man’s good intentions (including his assumptions about God) are simmering together on the fire until we all wake up to the fact that we’re really all the same. All is One. There is no real antithesis to worry about.

When I, as a Christian poet, seek to reflect my faith in beautiful verses, the resultant lines cannot avoid the antithetical. To me, the truth of the biblical faith is just that: truth. And the truth forces one to make distinctions. The universe is not all “A”...it is also “non-A.” The reason that humanity is divided is that we’ve sinned against our Maker. The existence of evil in our world and in ourselves makes this perfectly plain, even if it wasn’t for the biblical testimony.

Furthermore, now that our Maker has provided a way to be saved from the punishment our sins have earned--Jesus--we turn our noses up at that gracious way, and go on devising our own ways--including the self-perfectionist path of the liberal.

The call of God from time immemorial has always been, “Repent”--to turn from non-A, and return back to A. This was the antithetical call of the judges and prophets of the Old Testament, the call of the Christ, as well as His forerunner and emissaries in the New Testament. To repent is to surrender before the challenge of God that stands against the proud, false hopes of those who imagine salvation is within their own grasp.

The Christian antithesis is that only the perfect work and atoning death of the divine, historical Jesus can provide a saving record of righteousness for sinners in the courtroom of a holy God. Every other path of salvation is “non-A.”

The liberal thinker may ask: “Are things really that desperate? Is the message of Jesus really so stark, judgmental and exclusive? Isn’t there room to flex, to leave our doors open a crack for sincere Buddhists or Jews or Hindus or Muslims? Can’t we all get along on a platform of good intentions?”

To those with such hopes I would simply point to the manger...the cross...the empty tomb...and ask the question: “Why?” If our good intentions were always good enough, who, then, really needs a Savior? Jesus said He came to earth “not to bring peace...but a sword.” He became the most challenging, antithetical figure who ever lived. But in love, He gave His life “as a ransom for many, to bring us to God.” And He claimed to be God’s only Way. His sole, unique Savior for the lost. That’s His challenge.

Only those who surrender before the challenge of Christ’s gospel, can truly be cheered by it.

Mark Aikins
April 12, 2015