No blogs in January

I’m taking a break! Partly because I’ll be away for some of January, and partly because I need some time to catch up and put together some much-researched topics, I won’t be posting any blogs in January. But come back on the 3^rd of February for regular weekly thoughtfulness once again.

If you think you’ll forget in that long, or would just like a reminder, or if you have some thoughts, questions or opinions, send me an email at gregornewton(at)gmail(dot)com

See below for this week's blog.

Take care and God bless,

Gregor

Why?

To finish off the year, I want to do something different. This week I simply reflect on why I believe in God. It’s probably something I should have done long ago, so you know where I come from in writing this blog. My faith isn’t a tradition passed down that I cling to for safety or comfort, it’s a dynamic and often troublesome fight to understand myself, the world, and what it all means. This isn’t a long story of my life, telling of how I grew up and so on, but a reflection on what convicts me about God today.

The thing that has the most impact on me is the nature of existence itself. When I spend a night looking up at the stars, musing at the existence of the universe in all its magnitude, and considering things like where it all came from, where it ends, how there can be nothingness beyond it, I can’t help but consider what must be behind it all. How else could everything work without some form of higher power? Concepts of infinity and endlessness are quite simply beyond understanding. It’s the same with the world around me – a creation full of such intricacies that there is no way I can believe they all just happened by chance, no matter how long the earth is meant to have existed. This isn’t discarding science, but saying that there’s more to it than mere chance. Naturally my words don’t do this justice, but you need only consider something like the human body or a fragile ecosystem to see how finely balanced and carefully interrelated everything is to see my point.

The idea of the supernatural is something that convicts me quite a bit too. Much as I’ll often try to argue away seeming miracles and the like, I can’t deny that there are myriad things in this universe that at least appear supernatural in nature, whether they’re coincidences way too huge to be believable, healings, hearing the voice of God or spirits, or events that are simply not possible. Like anyone, I will often try to ignore these, I think we all want to pretend that miracles or the supernatural don’t occur, even as Christians, but the more I see or hear (from authoritative sources) the less I can deny that there’s more to this universe than what can be explained without God.

The Bible is another pretty significant impact for me. Not just believing what it says, but in studying it as a history student I come to see that it is so much more reliable than just being an object of faith. I’ll be looking at some of this more another time in this blog, but the way it all holds together, the way prophesies play out, and the way theology holds true has me thoroughly convinced that it is reliable as a historical source as well as a religious document. Even in taking an objective stance, it still makes way too much sense for me to attribute to chance, despite the questions and troubles that arise at the same time. The Bible is one of the most confusing and disputed works known to man, but for all its seeming problems it has an awful lot that holds together and speaks to me of an authentic God.

And finally my own spiritual journey is pretty special to me. From encounters with God (in whatever sense), to the times I feel without God, to seeing the way God has shaped my life and everything in it, I know that God is with me. This is an area that can’t be explained verbally, and is something that can only be experienced, but it is a core part of why I follow God.

In the end, I don’t claim to be able to prove anything to you about the truth of Christianity. It’s not my goal, and it’s a personal decision we all need to look into ourselves. Here I have only just touched on some of the major things that amaze and convict me about this world. I simply look around me and there’s no way I can’t believe in some form of higher power, and the more I look into it, the more Christianity makes sense. Our understanding of God may not be perfect, and it has questions of its own, but for me a world without God has far more questions than a world with God. That’s why I believe in God, and that’s why I struggle through the questions in this blog, to try with honesty and integrity to understand the faith that shapes who I am and what I do. What I’ve written here is why I believe, and everything else I struggle through in this blog is trying to figure out how the rest of it fits together, testing my faith and leaving nothing untouched. If it’s what I believe in, it’s not good enough just to trust that it works, I have to figure it out for myself.

A chosen people?

Why were the Israelites God’s chosen people?

The Old Testament (pre-Jesus) of the Bible is full of stories and history of the Israelites (now the Jews), and centres on them being God’s chosen people. All the way through the Old Testament, different authors cite God’s specific choosing of them. But why were they the people of God, and not anyone else? And what does that mean of us today? Are the Jews still the only chosen people of God?

This is a challenging question, because the Bible speaks so clearly of the Israelites as God’s chosen people: “And who is like your people Israel – the one nation on earth that God went out to redeem as a people for himself, and to create a name for himself” (2 Samuel 7:23).

When I think about it this does make sense though. The differences between denominations in recent times show that as imperfect people, even within the Church we fail to get things right and have conflict amongst the greater Christian community. Our understandings of God differ, generally in minor details, and these are the cause of disagreements and in some cases conflict.

If God had ‘chosen’ every nation and spoken directly to each nation as He did to the Israelites, then by now the world would have hundreds of different cultures claiming to know the exact nature of God. While they may all be generally right, the minor differences they have would almost certainly end up in conflict, with each claiming to be completely right. The conflicts between Christian denominations now, like Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, are bad enough, without completely isolated communities claiming to know exactly the same God in different ways, and are good evidence of the harm that could be caused if God acted the same way with all nations.

So the way I understand the chosen people of Israel is as an example set by God for the rest of the world. As cultures spread and people moved all around the world, so God spread with them. So in that way, God used his chosen people as the starting point for all people to know Him personally, eventuating in a world where all had the opportunity to know God, and from one source, rather than hundreds of cultural variants that would cause confusion and conflict today. And I think that’s what “create a name for myself” means – God showing Himself through the Israelites. It’s not some ego-related claim, but God saying this is where I’ll start to show my true self to the world.

Similarly, God doesn’t write off other people, but says “foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord to serve him, to love the name of the Lord, and to worship him… these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer” (Isaiah 56:6-7). The temple in Jerusalem had a special area for foreigners to worship, and clearly they were accepted, albeit in a different way, within the Jewish community. And as I looked at in “Faith for the unreached”, this doesn’t mean that people who have never heard of God by name can’t know Him or be granted eternal life.

In the New Testament, writers like Paul confirm this, by preaching to the Gentiles (the non-Jewish people) and accepting all who believe into the community of Christ. The chosen people of today include all races, nations and cultures, so we are all the chosen people of God.

So I guess in essence my way of understanding this question is quite simple – God had to start somewhere. In considering this, and how this doesn’t exclude non-Israelites from faith, I think I can be quite happy with why the Israelites were the chosen people then, understanding that as the word of God has spread, so all people are God’s chosen people.

As for why it was Israel and not, say, Australia? Well, I guess we can’t really know for certain, but it’s understandable, as they are one of the most ancient population centres, and were prevalent in the early historic world of Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures. They lived in areas close to where written history began (and thus there are many written records of God), and existed around many of the major civilisations that we have records of today. Apart from that, I guess it’s just up to God. After all, why not start there?

Some Bible verses to check out on this topic: 2 Samuel 7:23; 1 Kings 8:41-43; Isaiah 56:3-8; John 10:14-16; Matthew 15:21-28.

God and War?

Why did God encourage the Israelites to fight their neighbours and take their land? How is that the actions of the loving and gracious God of Christianity?

I want to tackle the issue of one of the seeming differences between the Old and the New Testament, that of God encouraging the Israelites to go to war with their neighbours, to kill the people and to take their lands, frequently with God on their side. It’s a huge challenge to me to consider this, as it doesn’t seem to be the same sort of God we worship at first glance.

In really thinking about it, there’s no way I can dismiss war as ‘good’ or even ‘Godly’ so to speak, but I do see it as an important part of a big picture of Judaism and Christianity.

The Old Testament, and particularly the book of Joshua, tells of Israel conquering new lands, and killing the inhabitants in the process. One thing that sticks out for me in this is that it is clear that these countries were morally and ethically wrong. And by this I don’t mean pagan worship, though this was there too, but from what I’ve read (both in the Bible and elsewhere) they were nations that operated in the vein of Sodom and Gomorrah (see Genesis 19:12-13), countries rife with behaviour none of us would consider remotely acceptable by any standards. So although I still don’t like the concept of war in itself, the idea that God was reclaiming a land that was His anyway (as God and Creator) from a ‘sinful’ people and giving it to His people who lived by His moral standards, seems a lot more sound to me. And when the Israelites didn’t do the right things, and lived similarly bad lives, they had the land taken from them at God’s command, being overrun and enslaved by the Egyptians or Babylonians. Thus it went both ways.

Also, a lot of these accounts of war tell of the Israelites defending their own country. Just as we would not consider it ‘sinful’ or wrong to defend our own country, this isn’t such a difficult aspect of Old Testament warfare to comprehend.

The biggest thing that struck me though is that we consider this whole issue from the perspective of death being the end. But in terms of the rest of Christian theology, death is only a step on the journey. So when the Israelites killed their enemies, those who died moved on to the spiritual realm, and if they were living God’s way they moved on to heaven anyway. For those who died, they only moved on to the next stage of their lives more quickly than they would have otherwise. Of course there is likely to be pain and suffering for families, and I don’t pretend to make light of that factor, but when taken as a big picture the deaths of people, for whatever reason, become much less significant and wrong.

Of course this brings up one of the 10 Commandments from Exodus 20:13, which is “do not murder”, but from the original Hebrew it is clear this refers specifically to deliberate, premeditated murder, rather than all forms of killing. Obviously I’m not saying killing people is right, but that the absolute prohibition refers only to specific murder, and it does not preclude God from working in this way.

Another point that I think is important is the context of the Old Testament, when power was shown by military might, and this was an important part of a nation’s identity. The Israelites probably wouldn’t have listened to God very much if they remained oppressed and enslaved for their entire existence, as they would question where their God was. For God to work in these times, He also had to be a part of the times. I’m not saying that God changes His nature, but that He changes the way He works according to His purposes. Just as we change the way we act around different people, so God acts differently according to different needs. I think it's necessary to understand that in the militaristic Old Testament times someone was going to die, and it was simply a matter of who. These were times of conquest and warfare, and conflict was a given. It wasn't a question of whether there would be a war, but when, and who would win.

I think it’s also worth noting that Christianity isn’t all soft and cuddly, as is sometimes portrayed. When I really look into the Bible, I can see that Jesus was a hard man, overturning tables in the Synagogue, and saying “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). While He is described as a Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6), and that is the ultimate aspiration of God and of Christians, Jesus recognised that war and conflict were an unfortunately necessary part of a world corrupted by sin and hatred. A parent may wish to have a home where love and peace rule, but at times strict discipline is necessary. That’s the best way I can describe the necessity of war at times. It’s undesirable, but necessary.

Having said this, many a war has been attributed to God in the past, and many leaders have claimed to lead a ‘holy war’, from the dark and distant past to only just recently. I don’t mean to justify these. Of course it’s always possible, but it’s also a good excuse for leaders of Christian nations to use to validate their actions.

Personally I hate war, and I’m quite sure God does too. But it doesn’t mean it’s not necessary sometimes and for good reasons. I would much rather peace, and will fight for it (excuse the pun), but I’m pretty sure God can have a good reason for fighting wars too.

Some Bible verses to check out on this topic: Joshua (all); Isaiah 9:2-7; Matthew 21:12-13.

A Postmodern Faith?

A church with all the answers?

From what a number of people have said, it seems that one of the things people dislike so much about the church is the way it presents itself as having all the answers. The thought that the church can say God is like this, does this, and thinks this, and this is the way you should respond, what you should do, how you should live. And this negative opinion comes from both Christians and non-Christians. While I do think it’s important that the church make a stand on certain issues, be they moral or theological, at the same time I think there are so many areas where we just don’t understand, and the church fails when it tries to give a simple answer.

When someone presents you with a question, it’s natural to respond with a solid, absolute answer, to say ‘this is how it is, end of story’, even if that only addresses part of it. Sometimes they’re almost “because I said so” sort of answers that don’t address the question at all. This is something the church can do too, trying to give solid theological and moral direction when the answers aren’t always as clear cut. I’m not saying here that the church is wrong in what it says, but that sometimes the way it presents things is very absolute, insisting that it has all the answers when it’s not necessarily that simple. I think sometimes the church is a bit like a parent, trying to give a straightforward solution or direction to ‘children’ of faith, not realising that people have moved beyond this and want a solid and honest understanding of Christianity as it is. What the church has to say is valuable, if not always perfect (just as with parents), but it can be out of touch with the contemporary world, like telling a teenage child they can’t go out “because I said so”.

When you really get into the depths of Christianity, and trying to understand the nature of God, the reality is that we simply don’t know enough to really measure up God. Here I really want to emphasise the mystery of God. I know many people are discouraged in faith, or turned away when the church fails to meet their needs. But the way I see my faith is as a mystery, something I always puzzle over, something that will never be at rest. I know not everything makes sense, that God seems illogical or flawed at times, but when I take a step back and think about it, everything is so much more illogical, more flawed without God. It’s easy to get caught up in the technicalities of religion, and forget the simple nature of faith in God. No, we may not know exactly how heaven and hell work, or what parts of the Bible might be metaphorical or literal, or why other religions have developed. But I wonder how much these little things really matter. When the church (or for that matter individual Christians) try to give simple, straightforward answers it may cause resentment. But for me the central thing that doesn’t change is faith in God. No matter how these things are explained, God remains God.

At its heart, I think ‘religion’ (as opposed to faith) is a way that people of faith try to explain God. Everyone wants clear, simple answers, and the church has developed in trying to provide these answers. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it fails. The core of faith for me is understanding that God is God, and forgetting about the theology and all the stuff that goes with it where it’s a problem. This won’t be a popular idea with some, but I hold that the most important thing is quite simply understanding that God is. Full stop. The rest is important for sure, but that core point, the “I AM” of God, is the core of my faith, and the rest settles in around that one absolute truth.

If a child has only ever seen birds flying in the air, and then sees and aeroplane, they will try to explain it as a type of bird, somehow different, but likening it to what they understand from their experiences. Obviously they will be wrong in the way they interpret the plane, but despite this, the plane remains a plane. When we try to understand God, we are trying to interpret something so different to what we’ve ever seen before, and we’ll get it wrong in many ways, but God still remains God.

Much as I dislike a lot of what Postmodernism has to offer, this is one thing I like about it. Many have moved on from trying to describe God in black and white terms, instead focusing on a more spiritual, personal relationship with a God who is beyond their comprehension. Theology is important, but to me God Himself is more important.

Some Bible verses to check out on this topic: Exodus 3:14; John 8:58; Acts 15:5-11, especially verse 9.

Why is there suffering?

If God is a loving God, why does He allow suffering to occur? Why do things like cancer or tsunamis happen?

The typical answer I’ve heard to this is “we can’t know the will of God, there must be a reason only God knows”, but I know that’s not enough. We will never be able to know the will of God completely, or to adequately understand why suffering occurs, but simply saying that God knows and we don’t is not enough. When people look around them and see such suffering, they naturally question how there can be a god.

There is no way I can justify the way the world works, and the way God works in it. I have a few ideas to put forward, but I don’t expect to explain suffering away, or to ‘make it all ok’. It’s not something that can be brushed away even by the best of explanations. These are simply some thoughts on how suffering and God can coexist.

One idea is the importance of suffering in the way we live our lives. I can look back on the hard times of my life (although trivial compared to many) and see how those experiences have shaped me and are a part of who I am. I was reading a book recently which explored this idea really well – “For man to be free and capable of growth, he needs to be in an environment that challenges him. If we lived in a world where it was impossible to suffer, wouldn’t we remain incredibly bland and childlike?”* That captures my ideas really well, and it’s a thoughtful exploration of the importance suffering plays in human thought and existence. Suffering does act to shape the way humans think, behave and respond to the world.

Related to this is the thought that the presence of suffering can give direction to our lives. The presence of suffering leads people to question the nature of existence, of a higher power, and provokes thoughts about death and eternity and what they mean. While suffering isn’t something God wants us to go through, it does play a part in our understanding of our existence and purpose.

Possibly one of the most important considerations is that in the frame of Christianity life is only a precursor to eternity. So even when someone suffers a horrendous life, when they do die they move on to eternity, and depending on what choices they’ve made in life they can have an eternity with no suffering. While this can sound like a coverall feel-good idea to make people disregard suffering as somehow OK, it does come into understanding how God can allow suffering. Its nature as being very temporary is really important, as it makes it far less significant in the big picture, rather than a lifelong curse or cruel ending.

Besides, Jesus himself suffered one of the most painful forms of death, crucifixion, and also suffered on earth just as humans did. God is not some distant entity oblivious to the sufferings of mankind. To assume that suffering is something God has cursed man with is to forget that it played into the life of His son as well, meaning that God (as Jesus is God, a part of the trinity) has experienced the very pain and sufferings we deal with.

A final thought to consider is the idea of Spiritual battle. I don’t understand what form this takes, or how it works, but with both God and the devil both active in the world, could suffering be at least partially attributed to the devil’s opposition to God?

When it comes down to it though, I really have nothing I can say to a parent of a kid who dies of leukaemia, or in response to hundreds of thousands of people dying in the tsunami. To try and cover up suffering with a cheerful “God’s in control” is so hopelessly inadequate. I don’t know that what I’ve written here is much better. There is no way I can hope to make the concept of suffering any less real, any less painful or any less challenging. All I can hope and believe is that in the context of the greater frame of existence, of life, death and eternity, that somehow this suffering becomes a little less significant, a small part of a greater whole. That it will become a part of our identity because of its very pain, through what it teaches us and causes us to question, but also that in time it will become a part of our understanding of God, causing us to question, to explore, to engage with God because of the suffering of the world, not to turn away from Him as a result.

Some Bible verses to check out on this topic: Job (all); Romans 8:17; 1 Peter 4:1-2.

* Richard MacKenna, God for Nothing…