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I read an article by Doug Wilson (Fixed Given) on the issue of what we can consider the word “nature” to mean when the scripture says homosexuals go against their nature. Very interesting. This is an issue that has intrigued me for some time. Ravi Zach points out that the deviation from the created order is more subtle than we think. It tends to start in language. He uses the word “homophobic” as a classic example of where the ungodly begin to blur the distinction between revelation and man’s tampering thereof. It starts with reconstructing language, and that usually starts with thinking patterns – Romans 12:1,2. In his words, we are “tampering with reality.”

The same can be said for terms like “coming out”, or even “gay”. I would argue the word “racism” also reflects a reconstituted morality. Not that rejecting people on the basis of ethnicity isn’t wrong – we should just couch the sin in biblical terms. The more we explore, the more we find out. Consider the term “irreconcilable difference” as given as a rationale for divorce, or “consenting adults” as a euphemism for adultery. It carries on and on. Christians should be vigilant and avoid all these ways of the world.

As a corollary, the rejection of biblical words happens too. Words like “judge”, “preach” and even “homosexual” (it has been mooted that this be rejected in Scotland, by the way) are “too harsh” and “hurt people”.

Worldiness is so invasive and deceitful. When last did we preach against abortion, or homosexuality, from the pulpit? When last did we say that God orders capital punishment? Or that parents should administer corporal punishment. Do we find these things offensive? If so, we’ve been modified by the world.

This is why, by the way, men like Eldgredge insist that their sons punch the bully on the playground. It’s because one of the evil effects of this worldliness is to remove natural (using the word from the article) masculinity. I agree with Eldredge, and reject misapplication of “turn the other cheek” in worldly pacifist terms

I have preached on this passage many times, and each time opens new vistas of meaning and application for me. It’s a wonderful passage – Genesis 32:22-31. The imagery, symmetry and irony of the passage is just staggering. For example, God asks Jacob to declare his name, because it is a direct reminder that the last time he did that he lied. Now, he has to declare himself the “twister”. Thereafter, he is named Israel.

I also preached on the paralytic in Mark 2:1-12 last week and found myself telling the congregation that there are many instances of Christ making it difficult for people to reach out to him. THe paralytic had to be lowered through a roof. THey had to wake Jesus up in the stern of the boat. When He walked on water, He was walking past them. The woman with the issue of blood had to break all sorts of barriers to touch him – otherwise He would have walked on.

That may rankle with some, but it certainly resonates with me – and my life as a Christian and a pastor. I limp more than I bound; I buckle more than I stride. God touches the point where there is the most pain, but the best opportunity for growth. Jacob learned to limp, and he never forgot his nature as a result. We need that reminder.

So, before this is labelled legalistic, let us remind ourselves that God means business with us, and our comforts and pleasures come way down the list. He is concerned about eternity and the long haul. Jacob’s hip joint was used as a means to teach him humility and dependance. Jacob was overcoming God, and while God had allowed that, God needed to teach him dependance, thus the clinging around the neck. Calvin says that Jacob changed from cunning to clinging.

Cunning to clinging – I love that!

21 December – and the people go shopping (certainly here in Jo’burg) with the vague thought in the back of their minds that somewhere they had read about the end of the world. No, not that Christian fundamentalist who got it wrong in MAY. It was the MAYANS, remember? Didn’t their calendar projections end today? And then they made a movie about it where the intelligentsia all end up near Krugersdorp. What was it called? 2012? Why Krugersdorp? Oh, it’s the Maropeng thing – the cradle of humankind and all that. They end up back where we all started.

As Screwtape says to Wormwood in Lewis’s Screwtape Letters “keep him on economics and sociology; don’t let him get away from that invaluable ‘real life’”.

For them it’s “real life”, but for those who have believed Christ:

2 Pet 1v16: We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eye-witnesses of his majesty.

My wife and I watched a movie entitled “The Company Men” yesterday. I think Christians need to be discerning when it comes to watching movies, by the way, but that’s not the point of this entry. I know there are those who have been in my pastorate who don’t believe in watching movies, and those who do but still castigate others on their choices, but be that as it may, movies – if chosen with discernment – are often commendable.

If one can get past the expletives in the first part of the movie, the story is very appropriate, particularly for people who have been through financial collapse, as we have. Ben Afflek is probably the strongest or most pervasive character in the movie. He has a job paying $160000 per annum, drives a Porsche and lives in the best part of town in a magnificent house. Definitely top level, even beyond the yuppie theme parks we have here in Jo’burg. Even beyond Drainfern.

The time is September 2008 in Boston, USA, and the collapse starts to have its effect on the big corporates, particularly those that don’t do real business. One of the movie’s main points is that the glory days of primary and secondary industry (things like mining and manufacturing) have given way to corporates that shift money around and are only concerned with profit, not quality products. Ben Afflek’s character (look up Roger Ebert’s review to get the name – I commend Ebert’s reviews at rogerebert.com) comes home in the Porsche one day and announces to a busy wife (busy, that is, living off his great salary) that he has three months’ salary left (as part of the severance), but he’ll bounce back. No worries. His son overhears him, and the fretting starts.

I’ll spare the detail, but the tracking of his fall from grace, or rather his fall from a great life and a Porsche, is superbly handled. And, in a way that common grace dictates, worldly thinkers depict his fall from PRIDE to HUMILITY as more important. He is arrogant, abusive and foul mouthed in the beginning. He fobs off his brother in law’s (who gets on with his swaer?) offer of a carpentry job at about $1000 a month, telling him in a very condescending way he WILL get his job back and WON’T do a demeaning job.

Well, the Porsche disappears, there is foreclosure on the house and they end up living with his in-laws – all the things he hates. Then, he starts to discover what makes life really worth appreciating. Gratitude, family, clean air in the mornings, friendship and the other little things in life. I know this is a cliché. I once had a staff member who said of movies like this: “It’s so clichéd”. She said it so often that I had to remind her that her expression was becoming clichéd.

So, why is the heading of this entry “Common Grace”? There is nothing about special grace in the movie, and as Christians we all know that to be infused with the very nature of God takes us to realms these people can’t even dream about. But, here is the point. Even in the warp and whoof of a damaged creation, the lessons of humility, appreciating the “rain that falls on the righteous and unrighteous” and the lessons about righteousness and goodness abound. And these of course all point to a more important goal – the importance of living life as God’s child. Unfortunately, most of them don’t notice (and I include the makers and actors of the movie), but in the grace of a benevolent creator, it’s still good. Ben Afflek’s character ends up working as a carpenter for his brother in law, who accidentally on purpose pays him an extra $200 one month.

Common Grace surfaces everywhere. Consider my suburb. Those of us who live in one of the crime capitals of the world know about how the hard times of lawlessness and poor governance in society cause pain and heartache for millions. (My own sons have been held at gunpoint and robbed in their own rooms while their mother was sleeping upstairs and I was doing business in Zambia). We’d prefer not to run to the nanny states, because we prefer and love our own country. But, it’s a labour of love, and we echo the sentiments of one of our bards when we say, “Cry, the Beloved Country!” Why mention this? Our local newspaper, the Northcliff and Melville Times, has the following headlines in the current issue, amongst others:

“Thou shalt not steal!” The main article is about the theft of bibles in a Soweto bookshop.
“Start 2013 with strong finances and a plan.”
“Avoid impulse spending.”
“Christmas cheer for kids in Zimbabwe from Rotary.”
“Recycle your festive waste.”

As small as these things are, they are stars in the firmament of grace, more specifically in the constellation called Common Grace. Praise be to God.

One last point. The other night, I was at a restaurant with an expat saffer who was back home on business from the UK. There was some conflict at a nearby table, with rising voices and very aggressive demeanour. From another table, a large man stood up and approached the noise quarter. I expected confrontation. To my surprise, he shared the gospel with the offender and they prayed together – in the restaurant. In a nanny state, he would have been castigated for pushing his religion. Who cares? Praise God for his witness, and for grace. It keeps us from descending into oblivion.

“This, then, is the ‘striptease of humanism,’ a gathering crisis of optimism, an escape from reason, a surfacing of subterranean pessimism.”

Os Guiness goes on to pinpoint the salient features of secular humanism in his seminal work, “The Dust of Death”. First, there is surprise. As Camus has said, man has cast off the fetters of religion and there is surprise at the wake of destruction this has left.
Second, there is the “irreversibility of the exposure of humanism”. This isn’t a cycle. Like the irreversible scars a cancer leaves, it is here to stay. “God is dead. God remains dead, and all that for which God was once held responsible must disappear too, and this terrible game is played out until the last throw of the dice.”

Man is now “overwhelmingly responsible”. And we contemplate an event in Connecticut without the necessary knowledge, perspective and depth of understanding required. Watch the rush now to explain this – to fill the awful gap left by our triumph over religion and our need of a God. Watch the volumes pile up and the sages of the age pontificate over genetics, sociopathic behaviour, yes even blame RELIGION for the atrocity. The explanations will be legion as they try to fill this terrible vacuum that only true theology can explain.

In the mean time, however, something must be done as the forces of academia rally to accommodate the sheer inexplicability of this phenomenon. And I don’t castigate the president’s tear and his heartfelt condolences. He is, after all, human – all too human. He must grieve. But, one must feel a pang of real perplexity here as he and his leadership face a trend of growing momentum – a society going mad, it seems. There is reference to “prayer”and “God”, but this is a god who is impersonal, contradictory (he must, inevitably, fill the space we feel in our hearts for something “other”, but also accommodate all beliefs, systems, world views and ideologies – even the atheists) and therefore there are tears. One senses, however, that these are tears of anxiety and perplexity as well as compassion.

And then there is that lingering contradiction in the back of our minds… Does this order (let’s not personalise it) not expound the freedom to CHOOSE the death of a child in the womb, but does not LAMENT such a death? As the adolescents of our day say…”How does that work?”

This is the overwhelming responsibility of secular humanism. Like the law book that has now tried to codify every single eventuality, every single situational ethic and every single law and code for life, it has taken its eye off the source and is now burdened with the impossible – meaning in life without a God to explain it.

Tragic.

Let me explain what it is like from one of the most materialistic cities in all of South Africa- Johannesburg. A lower percentage of us live in great comfort, and the rest live in squalour – in squatter camps sprawled around a massive megalopolis – eight million and counting. Urbanisation is increasing rapidly, and all the diseases and heartaches that come with it.

Amongst the nuveau riche (and the Christian nuvuea riche, I have always said, are the most pretentious), it’s all about where you live, what school your kid goes to, and how much better your car is. There are others, like how often you can travel overseas and how many gadgets you have. This is not unique to Johannesburg; I’ve spoken to many who know about this shallow existence elsewhere. What I mean to outline is the duplicity of such a position. It’s easy to give to charities and tithe with that smug attitude – you have achieved what Schaeffer called the two great goals of the modern, western person – personal peace and affluence. We hear from our pulpits about how “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions”, but straight after church people start thinking of the mall, the next purchase, the next great goodie in their lives. “Greed?”, they would say. “I’m not greedy”. But, we are. Christ pointed that out to a man whom he tested – and the man couldn’t give up his possessions. He went away “very sad”, and scripture does not exaggerate. Christ knew of the shallowness of such a position – which is why he called the rich fool a FOOL.

There are so many treasures that we could focus on, like family, health, relationships, worship, church, but somehow this thing has got under the skin. If we don’t have that car, we’re somehow deficient.

Is this trite, a cliche? Of course it is, but the reason cliches become cliches is simply becuase they have to be repeated. And they have to be repeated because people have stopped taking notice. One of things I have noticed about this obsession is that it makes one’s heart smaller, not bigger. One could also say that life becomes smaller. The thing that makes us happy is a tiny advantage over the next guy. Our satnav has TOUCH SCREEN – and so we feel advantaged, and better. Our house is in a BETTER STREET, and so we have the one upmanship.

Foolish? Of course. That’s why Christ called him a FOOL (Luke 12:26 ff)

Our heart will be where our treasure is, and the least we can do is admit it. If we maintain that it is not so, then we should be honest about what makes us tick, what makes us happy to get up in the morning, what the next goal is. There’s no problem having toys, but I would contend that the vast majority of us – particularly Christians – have placed our security and our esteem in our toys – especially when those toys outshine the next guy’s toys.

This disease is deeper than we can imagine.