 GCO Mission and Goals | GCO Ministry Testimonials | Projects | Resources/Donations/Contact | SEARCH | |
Along Comes God
Larry Kirkpatrick. Mentone Seventh-day Adventist Church. May 21, 2005
Document URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kir-alongcomesgod.php
Document structure:
Burning Questions
Postmodernist Purposelessness
Along Comes God
Christianity A
Christianity’s Updating Mechanism
Christianity B
The Core of Christianity B
Christianity Z
Conclusion
Burning Questions
Tick, tick, tick: three seconds go by. They will never return. The countdown continues. The countdown to what? If you are mortal the answer is obvious. Countdown to zero; to the day when your life ends. What difference do I make here? Would the world be any different if I live or die?
Today’s message is somewhat different than usual. You will have to wait a bit until we get to the “Scripture” part. So stand by.
Postmodernist Purposelessness
There are more or less two main kinds of answers to these questions. One is offered by the so-called postmodern world. It would not be right to call it the “unbelieving” postmodern world, for postmoderns do, in fact, have an at least general set of beliefs. Their starting place is that there is no single, all-encompassing explanation for the way things are. Theirs is an essentially anarchic viewpoint. The universe is not the result of intelligent design but of non-directed, non-purposeful action. Its existence is an extremely long-odds, almost mathematically impossible occurrence, and our lives and opportunities are equally unlikely. Mother nature went to Las Vegas and came up with an extremely unlikely die roll.
Thus, their “metanarrative” is that there is no “metanarrative.” They find no underlying purpose. All is essentially random. Things don’t fit together; they just are. There is no transcendent basis for anything. There are merely more or less complex animals. There is not really so much difference between people and plankton. People are just a lot more destructive than plankton.
Today then, it is the view that there is no order, no real purpose, and ultimately, no transcendent morality, that competes against two views we will for now call “Christian A” and “Christian B.” There are others in the Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, in some religions we would call Animist, and of course in Judaism and Islam. Really, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all fall under the category of monotheistic religions. But today we will focus on the postmodern purposeless view in comparison with “Christian A” and “Christian B.”
We began with the postmodernist view. We can see that it has really little to offer. For the unconverted heart it offers the comfort of the idea that there is no transcendent morality, therefore there really can be no ultimately right or wrong thoughts or feelings. There really can be no ultimately right or wrong actions or behaviors, there really can be no ultimately good or bad people. If you are bent on self-indulgence, then this view offers you the option of doing whatever you want and the only constraints are what others will or won’t let you get away with. The person who dedicates his life to saving lives is altogether equal to the person who dedicates his life to killing and destroying them.
If you begin to process this viewpoint you will soon realize how bankrupt it is. Sooner or later many people do. Then along comes God.
Along Comes God
God was always there. But we aren’t always listening. Sometimes life has to bottom out before we begin to realize that He is always there. He has been waiting for us. He wants to give us something better than purposelessness. And that’s where Christian A and B come in.
Christianity A
Christianity offers us an actual metanarrative, an overarching, interrelated, systematic explanation for the way things are. It is a means for organizing life. Why do people do bad things? What happens when people die? Why are we here? What are we supposed to do here? What does my life mean? Am I valuable? What does Christianity say?
Christianity offers that man is not a random, purposeless creation, but was specifically designed to be a moral being. He was designed as a worshipping being. He was designed to appreciate morality, to operate in a moral environment, to appreciate goodness, to be repelled by badness.
Christianity offers that although this was the original design, in his immaturity, Adam sinned and damaged himself and passed that damage, that mutation, on to the race. Man’s high and holy purpose, his special endowments as a creature made after the image and likeness of God, were derailed. The communion that originally existed between God and man was radically changed. Man became inwardly turned, self-inclined rather than other-inclined. We see it in the creation story. When Adam and Eve transgressed God’s command and God came to check in on them, they immediately began to make self-preservatory excuses and to offload blame. Adam blamed Eve and Eve, the serpent.
Christianity says that God stood ready with a plan to restore man to his intended glory. The plan of redemption was placed in operation. Men need a radical inward change to meet their original purpose. God took the initiative to reach man, and began to communicate with us through prophets. Prophets spoke to men messages from God. God inspired them, put his ideas into their minds, and they clothed those ideas with their own words and individuality, writing them and speaking them on God’s behalf. He assured through the process of inspiration that what came from them to us would be infallible.
God has a moral code and man violated it. Yet his rebellion was superficial, relatively unconsidered. Without changing the moral foundation of His creation, God would meet the need. The penalties for sin would not be changed, but Jesus, one of the three persons of the godhead, would die in man’s place. He would be our Substitute. He would take our penalty and grant us opportunity to use our own free choice and choose to be repaired, select to be healed.
God, to communicate with the human race, gave the Bible, a collection of 66 books written by more than 40 authors over some 1600 years. Astonishingly, the message of this collection of books we call the Bible, or holy writings, presents a unified, internally consistent message. God preserved this record through history to instruct His people that should live in all ages until the return of Christ.
Christianity A (as we have here called it) tells many precious truths. Yet it tends to have little to say about prophecy and the shape of apocalyptic events. It tends to teach a mystical Jesus who is not too aggressive about our sin issues and not particularly insistent concerning issues of morality. This kind of Christianity tends to be content with traditions, and non-aggressive about rooting out from the faith those alien aspects that have been incorporated into it from Greek philosophy and other sources.
Christianity A certainly has much more to offer people than postmodern purposelessness. We appreciate and agree with the core aspects of the story of redemption presented by it. God made man upright, he chose to sin, his descendants have all inherited a disordered, damaged kind of humanity, Jesus came to die on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin for us and to buy us back from servitude to sin. He is thus the Savior and we have opportunity to accept His work for us and the healing He offers.
However there is more. And that is why we must say something of Christianity B.
Christianity’s Updating Mechanism
Christianity is always updating itself. By that I mean that in the time of Noah, all the believing in God that had gone before that time was just as valid as ever it was. But in Noah’s day a new aspect, a present aspect, was emphasized in God’s message: Catastrophic judgment is coming, the world will be flooded, God is bringing us to a testing hour, you must get on board the ark to survive!
In the time of Christ, it was again all of God’s message that had gone before, but now the key updated aspect was that Messiah had come, Jesus is Messiah, He is God, His sacrifice is to be accepted. It was a testing time for the Jewish nation. Many came over. Many refused to come over. God was updating again. Christian A had been updated to B again.
The updating is never a change of the core principles, but it is a highlighting of an aspect of special present significance. In the Adventist Church we have historically used the biblical phrase “present truth” (2 Peter 1:12) to describe this phenomenon.
Developments in thought and philosophy, in the attitudes toward the metanarratives of the day never catch God by surprise. We may be assured that Christianity is kept current by His intervention in history, His custodianship of His message, His providential watching over the world of man. We may be assured that He foresaw the rise of postmodernist purposelessness, and was ready at the appointed hour to update from Christian A to Christian B yet again. It is to that recently updated Christianity that we now turn.
Christianity B
Some parts of the Bible contain predictive prophecy. God, existing not only within time but also transcending it, knows not only past and present, but also the future. As a faith-building evidence of His knowledge and protection in those massive shifts and crises in events as this age closes, He predicted the rise and fall of nations, of religious systems of truth and systems of error, and gave those who would believe on Jesus a mission to live and share His message in the face of the arriving crisis.
There is a time for everything. Hear Ecclesiastes 3:1-8:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
There has been a moral war underway for some 6000 years. A great controversy between Christ and Satan has been in process. The scene of the great battle has been here on planet earth. There is a time of war, and a time for peace. For a long time now the universe has been waiting for the time of peace. There is a time to keep silence and a time to speak. God will not always keep silent. He has a special purpose for His last generation. He will speak through them.
Yes, along comes God and as improbable as Noah and the flood were to the minds of men then, just as improbable as Jesus being Messiah come was to the minds of men then, just so improbable it may seem to you when we propose that according to Christianity B, today God is calling each of us in a special way to participate in His resolution of the moral war. “It can’t be,” you say. “I am just a nobody.” But God delights in using the weak to fulfill His purpose.
You see, in the Christian metanarrative, each person is mightily important. Each is made in God’s image. Each has the power to think and do. More than this, each has the power to think and do with reference to a transcendent morality. That means a morality not merely composed by mortal men as a community consensus, but a morality above and beyond anything defined by a fallen human being.
Reality is not socially constructed. That is the postmodernist view. In that view, a community rises and by reaching a consensus determines its own values. If the community decides polygamy is morally acceptable, that value will be accepted within the community, or if it decides that monogamous marital faithfulness is a high value, that will be reflected in what is accepted in the community. The moral parameters rise no higher than the accepted behavior of the group.
The truth here is that groups can determine what they accept and do not accept, but that is independent of God’s transcendent morality. Transcendent morality rises above any idea men may have. A group may decide they like the idea of polygamy, but God has indicated His opposition to the idea. There is a moral line drawn in the sand here, whether men like it or not. Christians believe that morality is transcendent. God, our Designer, tells us what works best, what is right and wrong. His perceptions of right and wrong remain correct and unbent.
We may indulge in suspicions that we are quite advanced and that the idea of God is an empty construction. But at the end of the day we are all so frail and mortal. We grow old, we begin to experience health deficiencies. We curl up and die. We are both mortal and seemingly powerless, and yet have an immense place in God’s plan. There is a reason for our existence.
Someone is claimed to have said, “We are here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here?” I like the sound of that.
But most of us see ourselves as very average, as shacks, not mansions; as pickup trucks, not sports cars. I’ve met few women who were satisfied with photographs of themselves, and few men who haven’t wished they were a little stronger or a little smarter or a little better able to provide for their family. What place do such as we have in this world? How can the average people expect that their lives are important, that they could even imagine, let alone dare, to “put a dent” into the universe?
In postmodern purposelessness what reason is there for putting a dent in the universe? None really. So you do that and you die, you cease to exist. So what have you achieved? You are gone.
But in the Christian life, God has called us to put a dent into His universe. For that purpose He has called you and I to Christianity B.
The Core of Christianity B
Christianity B says that man was damaged at the Fall and we have all inherited weaknesses and tendencies to evil from our ancestors. It says that men and women will be lost because of personal choices, not because of being born with disordered natures. It says that God, unilaterally has taken steps to save man, and that we have a part to play in the great controversy war, even in our own healing, although that part can never earn us any credit of our own for our salvation.
Christian B says that Jesus came and took human flesh just like our own, that He faced the same challenges, being tempted both externally and internally, as we. It says that He laid aside out of His possession certain of His powers of deity and lived as a man among men, that He had no special exemptions or exceptions, no powers that we cannot ourselves have in our battles with self and Satan. It says that Jesus became God with us, Immanuel, that He joined Himself to the broken race and in the broken flesh of the broken race conquered sin by the same power that is available to each of us.
It says that the death of Christ on the cross was at the center of the atonement, but that the atonement is still being made as Christ today in the heavenly sanctuary serves as our great High Priest, our Mediator. It says that through this atonement process in heaven, God is changing hearts on earth, that He is making a demonstration of His power to save. Not His authority to make declarations and enforce them because He is all-powerful, but His capacity to change those willing to be changed. Oh yes; in this light your role and mine became very significant.
Romans 8:12-22 has some help for us. Let us ponder verses from one passage:
Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh (Romans 8:12).
We are not required to follow our lower impulses, to live after the flesh, or according to the flesh. We are not just overfluffed animals occupying a domain with no transcendent morality.
For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live (Romans 8:13).
We can live like animals. We have a choice. We may use that choice to choose life or choose death. But we can only choose life if we trust God and His Holy Spirit to work in us and change what we are, to counteract the weaknesses and tendencies to evil we are born with.
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God (Romans 8:14).
Who are the sons of God? Only as many as allow themselves to be led by the Spirit of God. There is a difference. Some of us will not only profess to live according to the higher, transcendent morality, but actually do it.
For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15).
Becoming a Christian does not suddenly make your life easier. There are no shortcuts. But becoming a Christian means being received to our true purpose as children of God. He is searching today for His sons and daughters. We are wayward, like sheep we have gone astray, but He stands ready to seek the sheep, to find them. Yes, along comes God. What will we do?
The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God (Romans 8:16).
Christians are not unfeeling. They are just careful not to trust their feelings. In fact, it is probably true that Christians feel more deeply, for the Bible tells us that the love of God is shed abroad into our heart by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). Christians are not trialless—far from it. But the presence of the Holy Spirit helps us to find the pathway of growth experience God has for us.
And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together (Romans 8:17).
The Christian suffers with Christ, but He can only do this because He joins Christ in His viewpoint about sin and righteousness. When Jesus looks out onto our world He sees the good and the evil; He sees the doers of good and of evil; He sees the hearts of the doers of good and of evil. He sees the pain and brokenness in this world and longs for the day when His world will be renewed. He remembers hanging on the cross and dying to purchase for us the opportunity to be healed and live forever. He wants us to come through the dangerous things that blockade our pathway and bring along others besides. He wants us to be glorified together with Him.
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us (Romans 8:18).
What we are enduring on planet earth now, in all the valleys of sorrow we pass through, measures as next to nothing in comparison to the wonderful things that will follow as we reach toward the time of peace. They cannot compare to the glory that shall be revealed where? “in us.” In us? Why yes. There is a glory that shall be revealed in us. The question is, When? In us after the supreme days of the apocalypse, when the war is over? Or in us at a different time?
For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God (Romans 8:18).
The creation is waiting for something. Planet earth is waiting for something. There is a purpose, there is a reason why we are here. Fish were designed to live in aqueous environments; birds, to fly in the sky (perhaps the effects of the Fall have brought in changes in some cases). Humans were designed for a moral environment. And the creation is waiting to see what is the effect of Christianity B, what is the effect of following the Jesus of Christianity B, not the mystical, otherworldly Christ, but the one who came to earth and got His feet dirty and walked among men and who knew by experience what it was to be a man in fallen flesh and to be touched with the feeling of our infirmities (Hebrews 4:15).
For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him who hath subjected the same in hope (Romans 8:20).
The creation was made subject to all the indignities that have struck it for a reason. It was not the emptiness, the purposelessness proposed by the postmodernist. God, the transcendent God, has a purpose and He subjected this world to the poisoning and infestation of wicked men to achieve the larger vision. He plans to win in the moral war in the end. We’re just the soldiers.
Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God (Romans 8:21).
The creation itself shall be delivered from the bondage of the effect of evil into the glorious liberty that awaits us. But this liberty waits not only for after the war. This liberty is available for us now. Remember, the creation is waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God. When they appear, the end will come. The glory shall be revealed where? “in us.” The power of God will overcome in those who say, “Yes, Divine Doctor, please heal me. I will take any and all medicines You prescribe.”
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now (Romans 8:22).
The whole creation groans and travails, presently, as it awaits the appearing of the sons and daughters of God. It is groaning as if at the moment of birth. Even now. Even now. And now God has called His own. He calls them to His side. When the world has come to a great hour of unbelief, He calls us to His side. He has taken mighty steps to reveal to us from the Bible, as the prophetic scroll has unrolled, Christianity B.
So what will we do? Are we content with the purposelessness of postmodernism? Or will we embrace the metanarrative of Christianity A, Christianity maybe as Ma and Pa Clampett had it? No disrespect to them intended. It’s just that that was then and this is now. This is the hour. We have come to the kingdom for this hour. But Matthew 7:13, 14 remains true. The gospel road does not get wider as we near the end, but more constricted, more stringent. This is the true gospel of Jesus Christ.
Christianity Z
Maybe we should think of it not as Christian A or even B. Perhaps God has updated several times. We are long past then Christian C, D, E F, G, H, and so on. Could we be at Christianity Z? Perhaps what we have been speaking of is not really Christian B, but Christian Z, or we might call it Christianity Omega (Ω), the last letter of the Greek alphabet and of the language the New Testament was written in, the ultimate final development of God’s purpose.
We wait the redemption of our body, but character is what is at question. Jesus came to earth and lived out an example for us that we might receive Him and echo back the same example. Self must be crucified. It must be no longer I that live, but Christ who lives in me. That is how I must live my present life. That is how His power will be shown in me; that is how the sons and daughters of God will be manifest in this hour.
Apocalyptic? Yes. Freakish? No, I don’t think so. Just Bible. Just Jesus our great High Priest making the final atonement and changing those who take all His medicine, and who refuse to make God’s Word a cafeteria from which we pick and choose only the elements that please us, leaving behind the harder things. That won’t cut it in this hour. It is time for Christianity Z.
Conclusion
Yes. Along comes God. You didn’t expect it quite this way. You might have been content with Christianity A; it certainly meant a different way of living. But God is working on something. He is determined to reveal something unique through the last generation. They will have something unique to say about God.
What difference do I make here? Would the world be any different if I live or die? Our questions at the front we now answer at the back. What difference does the Christian make here? He stands as a character witness for God’s goodness. He alone can tell the story of God’s goodness toward Him. None other can tell your story. You are the most credible witness concerning what God has done for you.
Each of us is a special, unique being. God makes no clones. Each personality, each character, differs from every other. Each person is a unique mirror for God’s goodness. Those who elect self-destruction through sin choose not to reflect the divine image, they choose to rob the universe of the story of His goodness that only they could tell. The universe will be immeasurably poorer then for every soul who chooses self rather than Christ. In Christianity, there really is no such thing as “average.”
You make a great difference. You are uniquely valuable. You are non-reproducible. God will not override your free will. He is making everything you need for life and godliness available to you (2 Peter 1:3, 4).
He has not left Himself without a witness. He foresaw the rise of the relativistic, no-morality theory, the purposelessness of our epoch. Now He has launched Christianity Z. Now we are being tested. Is it too intense? Or is it at last time for Christ in our lives to bring the earth to decision time at last—not because of any goodness that might be in us, but because we allow the Lord Jesus Christ through His Holy Spirit to live in us and overcome in us and to love others through us.
At the end of the day it is all about Jesus. At the end of the day it is all about the power of the gospel to remake or not men and women. At the end of the day you and I, moral creatures, stand as witnesses to some kind of metanarrative. Christianity has updated itself again. The times have changed. An hour of intensity unlike any before in earth’s history awaits. Just ahead it is visible in the roadway. God’s message for these last days is here. Purpose is not the question; it is resolve. Are we willing to go where He leads? Are we willing to accept His Word to us? Will we follow the Lamb wherever He goes? The decision is ours because Christ has made it ours. Along comes God. The Spirit and the bride say, Come.
What do we say? What do we say? GCO
© 2005 by GreatControversy.org. GCO grants permission to individuals, wholeheartedly encouraging them to copy and reproduce documents and files appearing on this site, in an unaltered state, and for non-commercial use, unless otherwise noted. All other rights reserved. Other groups or entities wishing to reproduce these materials are encouraged to contact us with reproduction requests.
