Roaming through Romans #3

THE GREAT YET TRAGIC EXCHANGE! ROMANS 1:18-32

When left to themselves, humanity spirals downwards.
I was interested to read some snippets from Brian McLaren's new book' Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007). In this book he writes...

The Human Situation: What is the story we find ourselves in?
Conventional View: God created the world as perfect, but because our primal ancestors, Adam and Eve, did not maintain the absolute perfection demanded by God, God has irrevocably determined that the entire universe and all it contains will be destroyed, and the souls of all human beings — except for those specifically exempted — will be forever punished for their imperfection in hell.

Emerging View: God created the world as good, but human beings — as individuals, and as groups — have rebelled against God and filled the world with evil and injustice. God wants to save humanity and heal it from its sickness, but humanity is hopelessly lost and confused, like sheep without a shepherd, wandering further and further into lostness and danger. Left to themselves, human beings will spiral downward in sickness and evil.

When I read this I was reminded of Romans 1:18-32 where we read that humanity exchanged the glory of God for the images of mortal man and beast. Paul is bringing to his readers mind the image in Exodus where the Israelites made a Golden calf and began to worship it while Moses was receiving the 10 commandments. The human race has rebelled against it's creator God. And as we look around at our world we can see that things are broken, that things are out of joint, that things are not as they are meant to be. Slavery, war injustice, exploitation, hunger - things just aren't right. We were designed to worship, honour and serve our creator. Paul affirms to us however that humanity has suppressed this truth and the disease is spiralling out of control. Rob Bell writes in 'Jesus wants to save Christians too' -"The story is a tragic progression: the broken, toxic nature at the heart of a few humans has now spread to the whole world". It all starts in our thinking Paul wants us to know and then out of distorted and wrong beliefs our hearts become hard and black. It all starts when we begin to worship created things other than our creator thinking that we are wise, but infact we are foolish. And today we aren't any different to those Israelites who built the golden calf and worshiped it. Sure, I haven't built a golden calf as such, but I have at times elevated money, sex, and power above the line at equal footing or even greater than God. So, the God's we worship today just look different - perhaps are even more subtle than the creation of a giant golden animal!! It is all this that brings us down, brings us all down. Thank goodness that God is a God of Justice and cannot tolerate injustice and is not doing nothing but is at work now righting the wrongs. I am thankful that God is moved, that God hears the cries of the exploited, that he hears the groans and the pains of those in poverty and he doesn't sit there with his arms folded but is angry and grieved over the injustice.

Gen X & Gen Y / Jesus - our Picture of God

Marks depiction of the Gen X vs Gen Y parents picture and how this reflects into their views of who God is what he is like was accurate, stimulating and eye opening. It reminds me of the importance to gather our views of who God is and what He is like not from our pop culture or family but by looking at Jesus. If you want to know what God is like, then ask what is Jesus like. If you want to know what God thinks about the exploitation of the poor, the look at what Jesus thinks and did in regards to this. You see Jesus is the living, breathing, moving picture of who God is and what he like. Let us stop having our own standards or pop culture standards for living, behaviour, love, relationships and truth and let us look at Jesus' standards, life and obedience to the Father. From this we see how we are too live in and live out our relationship with our King. A couple of other random points to add in here from what Mark said...sure it's a little off the topic but I want to share it here...today we don't like words, like discipline, obedience, submission, authority, surrender, obligation - but when it comes to walking life with the Spirit, this is how we are called to live. To be obedient to God, to surrender to him, to submit to his authority and discipline. But unfortunately we want to be own ruler and our own King. May God save us from ourselves. I hope that we can bring back into our faith the understanding that we haven't been set free to be our own Kings and our own Authority, but rather, like Paul reminds us, we have been set free from the power or dominion of death to be a slave to Jesus Christ - the worlds true Lord and King. Our King and our Lord.
Finally... God is Holy, and we must balance his holiness and judgement. But I wonder if because he is Holy we have adopted the idea that God is too Holy to look up on Sin. And so we form our understandings of the atonement from this vantage point or we think that God cannot live with Sin or look upon sin. In Habakkuk 1:13 we read the prophet saying 'Your eyes are too pure to look on evil'. And at times we leave the passage there saying 'see, God cannot even look upon sin'. But what we actually see Habakkuk saying is that God is too pure and Holy to look on evil and not do anything about it. In Jesus we see him not retreating from evil but entering the world believing that he wasn't going to be contaminated by the world's evil but rather that his holiness was going to change the world and cleanse it. May we follow Jesus. May we walk by the Spirit. May our world be changed by our obedience to living in King Jesus. May we look to Jesus to see who God is what God is like.