©2005 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

01-02-05

Tragedy and Truth

1/2/05 Tragedy and Truth

What I do this morning

will very likely come across

as a collection of random and unrelated comments

about several different topics.

It will likely come across that way

because that’s what it is.

It was my intention when I began my notes

to tidy up a few things left over from our study on communicating to the culture in which we live,

and I will do some of that,

but some other thoughts intruded into my preparation along the way

and I didn’t exactly end up where I thought I was going.

But before we get into any of that,

I want to offer just a few comments

about what has been happening in our world during the past week.

The earthquake-tsunami disaster

that devastated those nations surrounding the Indian Ocean

has put our world into a stunned sense of shock.

With a death toll already well over a hundred thousand people,

it is impossible for anyone to encounter this magnitude of tragedy

without wrestling with the questions it creates inside us.

And one of the first questions

that comes into the minds of many

is the question, “How could God let something like this happen?”

We ask that question

because there are in place within each of us

certain basic attitudes and assumptions about this life,

assumptions that are rooted in that spirit-level rebellion against God

that each of us brings with us when we enter this world.

And a tragedy like this one

simply brings those attitudes and assumptions to light

in a way that forces us to recognize them at a level we rarely do.

When we hear about more than a hundred thousand people dying in a matter of minutes

it angers us,

and saddens us,

and frightens us

because it seems to violate the basic rules of life

that we assume exist between us and our Creator,

rules that govern this game of life we’re playing.

It’s like God has just committed a huge foul in the game

and we feel as if He should be called to account for it.

Nobody actually says this, of course,

because none of us dare to admit the existence of the game

or the existence of the rules we have established for that game.

But they are there,

deeply ingrained in each of us,

rules that we accept as indisputable human rights.

In fact, our founding fathers even etched them in broad strokes

into the documents upon which our nation is built.

We hold these truths to be self-evident,

that all men are created equal,

and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,

that among these are LIFE, LIBERTY, and THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.

The absolute, divinely granted right to LIFE...

And when we are confronted with a tragedy

in which we are faced with the deaths of more than 100,000 people in a day

we honestly view it as a huge increase in the death rate in the human family.

Now, I certainly do not in any way want to minimize

or trivialize the loss or suffering of those afflicted by this event,

but at the same time

I want us to be honest about what has happened.

This tragedy did not increase the death rate in the human family by even one.

From the very beginning

the death rate for the human family has always been an absolute fixed constant -

one death for each life.

We have perhaps 200 people here this morning.

Do you know what percent of us are going to die?

100%

Do you know how many people die in the world on any given day?

146,000 people.

Do you know how many people die each day just from hunger related causes?

24,000 a day.

In the past week

there have been more people in the world

who have died as a result of hunger-related causes

than all those who died as a result of the Indian Ocean earthquake.

And the same thing will happen next week,

and the following week,

and the week after that.

The thing that affects us so deeply with a tragedy like the one this past week

is not that the people died,

it’s that by our evaluation those who died by the earthquake died too soon,

and they had no warning.

They were not given the seventy or eighty years we feel they had a “right” to.

And if their life could be cut short like that

just maybe our lives could be too.

The whole thing is incredibly unsettling.

We hurt for them,

and we fear for ourselves.

But the heart of the problem

goes back to that fundamental deeply flawed belief system

that we bring with us into this world at birth.

We are created beings,

created by God for eternal friendship with Him.

That’s why we exist.

But early in our history

the human race,

which at the time existed only of Adam and Eve,

rebelled against God,

and they, and then all of us who have followed after

separated ourselves from Him,

and declared ourselves independent agents.

We took possession of the world He’d created for us

and then claimed for ourselves the “right” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on our terms.

And we decided that God owed each of us a full life

in which to exercise our rights,

and if He fails to deliver what we feel we are entitled to,

if, for example,

an earthquake removes some of us from this planet

before we have achieved our allotted time,

we think evil of Him

and blame Him for not delivering what we think we deserve.

And only when we see things as they really are

can we begin to make sense of what has happened.

For, you see,

each day of life we have on this planet

is not an inalienable right,

it is a gift given to us by the grace of our good God.

And our highest calling during the days we are allotted,

no matter how many...or few of them there may be,

our calling is not the pursuit of happiness on our terms,

it is the pursuit of our Creator on His terms.

We had a dog once (not our beloved Pepper),

who clearly did not understand the basic dog/man rules of life.

Her name was Dotty.

Dotty ate the food we gave her,

drank the water,

enjoyed the warmth and the protection we offered,

but Dotty had no interest whatsoever in us.

She liked to roam the neighborhood,

and was clearly far more attached to the family across the street

than she ever was to us.

She never came when we called,

and always bolted and ran whenever I gave her freedom.

She didn’t trust me,

she didn’t like me,

and she wanted as little to do with me as possible.

She did not live with us very long.

That’s us with our God

when we first enter this world.

Fortunately God’s love for us

and His patience and grace poured out on us

far exceeded mine for that dog.

Our purpose here is not so that we can somehow claim for ourselves

as much of the “good life” as we can get,

it is so that we can hear

and then respond to the voice of our God

as He seeks to call each of us back to Himself.

Remarkably,

even in the face of our rebellion,

He still wants us,

and seeks us,

and calls us to Himself,

having made a way through His Son

in which we can be restored to Him in perfect righteousness for all eternity.

This life, even at its best,

is incredibly brief,

only a few days loaned to each of us,

a few days in which we are each called to find the center of Love.

God did no injustice to those who died last week,

just as He will have done no injustice to me

if I should die today.

We have no right to life.

It is not a right, it is a gift given to us by our God.

What we do have

is the high calling

of living each new day He chooses to give us in His presence,

and in submission to Him.

Certainly that does not mean

that we should not feel deep compassion

for those who have suffered great loss.

We should both share their pain and, as we are able,

reach out to those who hurt.

That is all part of being the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ on this earth,

all part of reflecting His heart through our lives.

But, although our founding fathers

showed tremendous wisdom in much that they did,

there is one area where they got it all wrong.

We have no inalienable right to life, or to liberty, or to the pursuit of happiness.

What we do have

is a Creator God who in His grace

has granted to each of us

the number of days on this planet appointed for us,

and the calling to hear and respond to His love poured out on us while we’re here.

Now, to take us in a different direction for the rest of our time together,

before the holidays stormed into our lives

we were involved in a short series

on effective communication of the message of Christ

within the context of the culture in which we live.

When we left this study

I was convinced that I had said all I had to say about it,

and I’m still holding to that...sort of.

But this past week I came across a few notes I’d made to myself,

notes that came out of conversations I had with several of you while we were in that study,

questions some of you had at the time

about how the concepts we were looking at

played out in practical ways in our lives.

And so,

before we move on to where we are going next,

I’d like to begin our teaching in 2005

with a few thoughts from 2004 that were left unsaid.

If you were here a month ago

you will remember the basics of what we saw in that study.

We saw that we now live in a world

in which moral good is defined in terms of absolute tolerance

of every individual’s personal value system and life style,

a world in which even the suggestion of all people being held accountable

to one divinely revealed standard

is considered divisive

and destructive to the greater good of society as a whole.

We then saw the way in which

the void created within us through the loss of this absolute standard

has caused us to develop a layered approach to our lives,

an approach in which we think and live in terms

of numerous distinct layers of life,

each one isolated from the others,

each one lived on the basis of a different set of governing principles.

We have our “public” life,

and then we have our “private” life,

and, as a culture, we reserve for ourselves

the absolute right to live those two

on the basis of radically different value systems.

And the layering doesn’t stop there.

In truth,

we not only have our public and private layers,

but we have our work layer,

and our family layer,

and our religious layer,

and our entertainment layer,

and our relationship-to-the-government layer, and on and on.

And because we recognize no universal moral absolutes,

the fact that we establish different rules with each different layer

doesn’t trouble us at all.

And then we went on to see

that the first great step our Lord seeks to lead each of us through

as He rebuilds our lives in Christ

is His drawing us into the discovery of

and then personal commitment to

that universal protective moral framework revealed to us in His Word.

True freedom of spirit and soul

does not come from having the freedom to live any way we want.

It comes from knowing how life

and especially how human relationships are designed by God to operate,

and then having the ability

to choose to live our own lives on the basis of that revealed pattern.

And God’s first step in preparing each of His children

to relate effectively to this culture in which we live

is to create within us

an unshakeable trust in and commitment to a life lived within His revealed moral framework.

And our preparation for life in this culture

begins by our recognizing and then laying aside

our own personal layered approach to life.

And then we looked briefly at the threefold calling

our Lord gives the Christian in this culture.

First, we are to understand and build our lives upon

an unshakable commitment to moral integrity as defined by our God.

Second, we are to make a clear distinction between what is moral and what is merely cultural.

And then third,

we are to reach out to the lost, hurting, hopeless people in the culture around us

and love them,

and through that love

show them the true heart of our Lord Jesus Christ for them.

This is just a tiny side-track from our study,

but during the 20 plus years in which I have been your pastor,

I have noticed that the times in our personal church history

when we have lost people,

those times when some folks who had been involved to some degree in our fellowship

have ended their involvement with us,

have frequently been at those times

when I have been teaching

on the ways in which the true message of the grace of God will play out in our lives.

Though I rarely hear (and really don’t care) what people outside of our fellowship say about my teaching,

I hear enough to know

that during the past two decades

I seem to have developed a reputation

as sort of an extreme preacher of grace.

Implied in these evaluations

is the clear belief that a “healthier” and “more balanced” message

would involve more of a blending of grace and law,

of God’s love and God’s judgment,

of faith and performance.

And the truth is,

in one sense I would be the first to agree with such thinking.

I have often thought it would have been far more reasonable

and far more logical

for God to approach us with more of a 50/50 partnership agreement for salvation,

an agreement in which He would offer to get us started,

and then we would need to pick up the calling and fulfill a certain level of performance

before the deal was sealed.

At the very least

I would have thought

that some sort of probationary period or conditional acceptance would have been reasonable.

If I would have written the script for Christ,

I think I would have had Him come

and offer Himself as payment for our past sins only.

And then He could have come to us and said,

“Now obviously you have made a hideous mess of things in the past,

but here’s what I’m going to do.

I will wipe your slate clean.

I will remove all of your past sins,

and give you a second chance to try again.

The past belongs to Me,

but the future belongs to you.

If, after I have scrubbed you clean,

you can then, from that point on, keep yourself clean,

all will be well,

and you and I will live together in harmony from now on.

But if you don’t keep your part of the agreement,

then the whole thing is off.”

To me that seems far more balanced,

far more reasonable -

a little grace from God, a little performance from us and all will be well.

But that isn’t what He said,

and that isn’t what He did,

because a clean slate isn’t what we needed.

What we needed was an agreement with God,

a New Covenant

in which He didn’t just wipe our slate clean,

but in which He threw it away altogether.

ROM 7:4 ¶ Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.

ROM 8:3 For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh,

ROM 8:4 so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

God is utterly unbalanced in the message He has given us through Christ

because, though a blending of grace and performance would have been far more reasonable,

it would also have been powerless to accomplish in us what He wanted done.

He didn’t want to give us a second chance.

He didn’t want to offer us a call to try harder to please Him.

He wanted to offer us

an entirely new motivation for everything we do -

not a futile attempt to try to earn God’s acceptance through our performance,

but the utterly incredible discovery

of the true nature of His love for us,

a love that,

once we finally glimpse it just a little,

becomes an all-consuming reason for everything we do.

Now, every culture

and every generation has its own unique barriers

that make it difficult for the true message of the grace of God

to be heard correctly by that generation.

And I brought all of this up this morning

because I have noticed something fascinating

about the presentation of the message of the grace of God

in this current culture in which we live.

You see, at first glance

it appears as though the message of the grace of God

blends perfectly with the basic life philosophy of our culture.

Our culture tells us that we should accept everyone right where they are,

without expecting or demanding any changes in their behavior,

without holding up any universal moral standard of measure to see if they pass or fail.

And there is, within the message of the grace of God,

a message that, if taken out of context,

sounds very much the same.

Our God really does take us just exactly where we are,

no matter what kind of performance or lack of performance we my offer.

Nobody has ever been rejected from the grace of God

on the basis of their performance.

And it doesn’t stop there,

because the agreement He then sets up with us through Christ

is one that doesn’t rest on our performance in the future, either.

Paul says simply,

ROM 3:28 For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law...

and, ROM 8:1 Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

And if we stop there and say no more

it sounds as if what God is saying

and what our culture is saying is a perfect match.

But that is not where God’s communication with us stops,

because our God loves us far too much

to ever allow us to continue in our self-destructive patterns of life

without His doing all He can within the context of our free will

to bring us into the freedom that can only be found in true righteous living.

Whenever we come in contact

with the true grace of God

it will move us, draw us powerfully,

forcefully toward greater and greater practical righteous living in our personal lives,

not out of fear,

not out of guilt,

not out of religious condemnation,

but out of a longing to conform our lives more closely

to the image of this God who has poured out His grace upon us.

Over the years

I have noticed that whenever we start talking

about this built-in litmus test of the true message of grace

we loose a few people.

But the truth is

whenever God is granted real access to our lives,

the first step in His recreative work within us

is to bring our lives into the freedom and security that can only be found

through living within the protective moral framework given to us by Him.

It is the solid footing upon which

we can then reach out to the culture around us

without being destroyed by it in the process.

Which ends my little side-track

and also the time allotted to me,

so we’ll pick it up here next week and get back to those notes I made to myself

that I think need to be addressed before we move on.