The Christian Story

Airplanes and Religion

Two men brusquely rushed through an airport terminal.  “I need to hurry, for my flight to New York leaves in 10 minutes,” said the first man.

“Oh, no hurry,” said the other.  “It doesn’t matter which plane you get on.  In the end, they all end up in New York.”

I know.  It’s a silly story.  But it illustrates a common misunderstanding about religion, for you have no doubt heard many people say that all religions point to the same god and end up in the same place.  I have sometimes wondered where people got this idea.  They didn’t get it from Jesus or Mohammad or Buddha.  They didn’t get it from Moses or Isaiah or Paul.  In fact, if you look at what the different religions actually say, it is like looking at different airplane destinations at the airport – New York, Beijing, Tokyo, Melbourne.  They don’t even pretend to be going to the same place.

So where did this idea come from?  Hinduism a little, perhaps.  It has its 35 million gods and has no trouble sliding the gods of other religions into its pantheon.  The problem is that it must radically distort those gods to make them fit in its pantheon, and once it distorts them, it no longer has the gods of those other religions.  It has a different god that it has shaped in its own image, and those other gods remain standing outside the pantheon.

So where did this idea come from?  Perhaps it sometimes comes from the fact that, broadly speaking, all religions are trying to describe something spiritual that people feel.  But this is like saying that all airplanes are trying to meet a need for people to travel somewhere.  It may be true, but it is so broad that it is of little use in picking a specific plane.

So where did this idea come from?  I think mostly it comes from our desires.  Have you ever thrown a party and then debated whom to invite?  You can’t leave out Aunt Jane, for she would feel bad.  If you invite Chris, then you must also invite Mai, for she will be sure to find out and be offended if she wasn’t invited.  You’ve experienced this kind of thing.  You want to include everybody because if you don’t, some people would be offended.  It’s a rather natural feeling.  I have it, too.  So people then say that Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Taoists, Jews and anyone else are all included in God’s kingdom.  That way we won’t offend anyone, and we’ll have the added bonus of knowing that we ourselves are true no matter what we believe.  It’s really a rather convenient notion.  Too convenient if you ask me.  It ignores the real world of what the religions actually say about themselves and replaces that real world with almost any belief we please.  It just doesn’t smell true.

The reality is that if you get past broad generalities, the major religions of the world are quite far apart.  Different religions, at their core, have different directions and emphases, and the essence of one faith is often peripheral to or contradicted in another.

For example, at the core of Buddhism is a philosophy.  I don’t mean that a philosophy is all there is to Buddhism nor that Buddhism is monolithic.  I mean simply that a philosophy is what seems to drive it.  It is the foundation for the Eightfold Path and the rest of Buddhist practice.  Remove the philosophy, and there isn’t much Buddhism left to talk about.

Islam, at its core, is a code of rules and laws.  Again, I don’t mean that rules and laws are all there is to Islam or that all Muslims would say exactly the same things.  I do mean, however, that submission of a code of rules lies at the heart of what it means to be a Muslim.  Remove the Five Pillars, for example, and you rip the guts out of Islam.

Other religions center on things like morality, cult practices, rituals, or festivals.

Faith in Jesus is different from these other religions.  It’s not that Christianity has none of these other things.  Christianity produces a philosophy, has a real moral code, and does practice certain rituals like communion or baptism, but none of these things lies at the heart of what it means to follow Jesus.  Christianity is not philosophy.  It is not a moral code.  It is not a set of rituals.

At its core, Christianity is a story.  But it is not any story.  It is the love story between God and the human race.  It is the story of Jesus.  It centers on who Jesus is and what He did.  Christian ethics, Christian philosophy, Christian doctrine, and Christian rituals are all grounded in the story of Jesus.  Remove the story, and you have torn the heart out of Christianity.

This is why Christians for thousands of years have focused so much on history, for history is nothing more than the story that is true, and the entire faith rests upon the historicity of specific events.  “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians (I Cor 15:14).  I know this idea sounds ridiculous to some people.  They elevate morality and put morality and history in separate compartments.  They believe they can have the morality of Jesus without having the Resurrection of Jesus.  Followers of Jesus see life more holistically.  We believe that our ability to live a godly life is grounded in the story.

Perhaps you have heard the story.  Even so, I still need to tell it.  It is a story worth telling a million times over.  Next blog we’ll pick up with that story.

A Covenant and a Rescue

Isaac had a son.  His name was Jacob.  Jacob was a schemer, a deceptive, crafty, wily man who cheated his brother out of their father’s inheritance and then deceived his father into giving him the family blessing.  Strangely, Jacob was the man God chose to build His people through.  It was not because Jacob was a righteous man but because God was a gracious God.  God was going to make His special people, His treasured possession, to come from this scheming man, but in doing so He would also transform that man.  One night, when Jacob was in distress, he met God.  Jacob wrestled with God that night, and God wounded him.  The next day, Jacob was not the same man, for when God wounds you, you are never the same.  In fact, to illustrate Jacob’s new nature, God gave him a new name – Israel.  God’s special people would be called Israel.

As God did with Abraham, He also did with Israel.  He entered into a covenant with her.  A covenant is a Bible word that means a holy agreement.  Marriage is a good example of a covenant.  In marriage, a man says to his bride, “I will be your husband, and you will be my wife.”  And the bride says in return, “I will be your wife, and you will be my man.”  And the man and the woman vow that they belong to each other until they die.  That is a covenant.  And that is what God did with the people Israel.  He said, “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”

We must remember why God did this.  He did not do it just for Israel.  God was after more fish than Israel.  God intended a relationship with Him to be special and exclusive – like that of a husband and wife.  Therefore, He gave the world two pictures of such a relationship.  The first, of course, is marriage itself.  And the second is God’s special relationship with Israel.  In marriage, we see the picture on the individual level – one person to one person.  In Israel, we see the same picture on the corporate level – one God for one people.  God wants you personally, individually.  But He also wants you to be part of His special people – His people who will be His bride.  Thus, God’s purpose for this covenant with Israel was not just Israel but the world.  God chose one people to become an example for all people.  He was not being narrow.  Far from it.  He was simply beginning with Israel and putting her in the display window.  He was using Israel to illustrate what a special relationship with God looks like.  But His goal was all nations, for He would use Israel to bless all nations.  That was part of His promise to Abraham.

Jacob then had twelve sons who became the leaders of twelve tribes.  Ten of these sons became jealous of son number eleven, Joseph, and decided to get rid of him.  So they sold him into slavery and Joseph was taken to Egypt.  The brothers then deceived their father and made him think that Joseph had been killed.

In a short time, Joseph found himself in prison for a crime he did not commit.  He was there for at least two years until Pharaoh (king) of Egypt had a dream.  Pharaoh discovered that Joseph could interpret dreams, so he called Joseph, who interpreted Pharaoh’s dream, which predicted that the land would have seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine.  Joseph then advised Pharaoh on how best to navigate these coming years, and Pharaoh, seeing the wisdom in Joseph’s counsel, promoted him from prison to second in command of the entire country.

When the famine came, Israel began to suffer, and Jacob sent his sons to Egypt to buy food, for Egypt was the only place in the region that had food during this time.  When the sons arrived and met Joseph, they did not recognize him, but after their second trip, Joseph could hide his identity no longer.  He told them to go and get his father and bring him to Egypt, and Joseph would take care of the entire house during the famine.

The brothers returned to Jacob and said, “Joseph is alive and is second in command in Egypt.  He has invited you to come to Egypt where he will take care of you.”

Jacob at first did not believe them, but when he saw the gifts Joseph had sent, his heart cheered, and he said, “I will go and see my son before I die.”  He then packed up and took all his sons and all his household to Egypt.

When they reached Egypt, Pharaoh was glad and gave them choice land to settle in, but after a few generations of Pharaohs had passed, the reigning Pharaoh forgot about Egypt’s kindness to Israel.  The Egyptians then took the Israelites and made them slaves.

Moses

Remember.  I am telling the story of God’s dealings with the human race.  It is the story of Christ.  We saw that it began with the creation.  God made this universe and put the human race at the top of His creation, but we sinned against God, and in sinning, we messed up the good thing God had made.  The rest of the Bible is the story of God fixing what we messed up.  We saw that God instituted punishment for sin.  We saw that God called to Himself a special people Israel.  He took care of them in a famine, but they later found themselves in slavery in Egypt.

While in Egypt, Israel cried out to God for help, and God heard their prayers.  He raised up from among them a man named Moses, who went to Pharaoh and demanded that Pharaoh let God’s people go.  God did mighty signs to convince Pharaoh and the people that this truly was from God, but Pharaoh’s heart was hard, and he would not let the people go.   Finally, God said that He would slay the oldest son from every household in Egypt.  He would not, however, take the sons from those who painted the blood of a lamb over the doorpost of their home.  The blood would cause God to pass over that home.  Today, the biggest holiday in the Jewish tradition is Passover, a celebration of this very event.

Pharaoh would not listen and lost his son.  He then let Moses take the people of Israel away from Egypt, but after the people had left, Pharaoh changed his mind and came after them with his army.  Pharaoh had Israel trapped.  Behind Israel was the Red Sea.  In front of her were Pharaoh’s chariots.  But God fought for Israel, and God made a way of escape for her.  He prevented Pharaoh from reaching Israel and then parted the Red Sea to allow Israel to walk through it on dry ground.  Eventually Pharaoh chased Israel into the path created by the walls of water on both sides, but his chariots got stuck in the mud, and their wheels fell off, and the water of the Red Sea came crashing down on Pharaoh’s army, wiping it out.  Israel was free.

But Israel was not home.  They were stuck in the middle of the desert.  Slowly Moses led Israel toward the land God had promised to give them, but when they reached the border, Israel became fearful of entering and taking the land.  The natives were too strong, they said.  Since the people did not trust God, God said that He would not give them the land.  Instead He would give the land to their children, and Israel would have to wait 40 years.  Moses then led Israel back out to the wilderness, where they wandered for those 40 years.

During those wanderings, God provided for Israel water, meat, food and clothing.

During those wanderings, God gave to Israel a clear picture of who He was.  In a spiritual landscape of polytheism, God gave Israel a grounding in one God and one God only.  “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one.”

During those wanderings, God gave to Israel written laws.  These laws revealed different aspects of God’s character.  They showed that God desires purity, holiness, integrity, honesty.  These laws also showed how far from God the human race had fallen. When the command said, “Do not covet your neighbors things,” it made clear the fact that what is normal to us is warped and wicked to God.  We humans needed this type of clarity.  We had become good at hiding our sin.  We had gotten into the habit of comparing our behavior with each other and concluding that we were OK.  We had become skilled in hiding our emptiness behind diversion or pleasure or religion and pretending we were all right. The law put God’s righteous standard in front of our faces so that we could see plainly that we weren’t righteous at all.

During those wanderings, God also gave to Israel an entire system of sacrifices in which sin and death were inextricably woven together.  He wanted a clear message of the severity of sin. It was as if He were saying, “You have sinned and justly deserve to die.  But I’ll tell you what we’ll do.  If you’ll take that lamb and cut its throat, I’ll count its blood for yours.”  Thus, God remained just in demanding a punishment, but He clearly illustrated His mercy as well. He also tied the payment of sin to the shedding of blood.  He wanted us to know that sin is more costly than we think.

During this time, God was delivering Israel, caring for Israel, and teaching Israel about His character and their sin.  Their sin separated them from God, but God allowed them to return to Him through the blood of a sacrifice.

At the end of the 40 years of wandering, God brought Israel into the land that He had promised to give them.  All of the first generation had died away except for a couple men, and the new generation was ready to trust that God would give them what He had promised.

 Toward a King

When Moses died, God used a man named Joshua to lead the Israelites into the land God had promised them.  They conquered the land and settled in it, but within a few generations, Israel began to worship the gods of the other peoples in the region, something God had expressly forbidden.

The nation then fell into a cycle that went something like this:  1) some king or ruler would oppress them, 2) they would cry to God for help, 3) God would raise up a deliverer among the Israelites, and this person would defeat the oppressive king, 4) Israel would then forget God and return to worshipping other gods, so God would bring them back to #1.  This pattern went on for hundreds of years, and Israel couldn’t seem to break it.  It was a spiritually empty time, a time in which “every man did what was right in his own eyes.”  God was showing the nation that if they wanted any real satisfaction, any real progress, any real fulfillment, they would have to honor God.  But if they just wanted to do what they wanted to do, they would go nowhere.  God does not honor our pursuits of our own ideas, for our ideas are quite different from God’s ideas.

Israel then wanted a king.  They did not want God to be king; they wanted a human king like the other nations around them.  They wanted to be like everyone else.  God gave them a king, but the first king, named Saul, turned out to be a wicked king who did not honor God.  Nonetheless, God had a plan to replace Saul.  He sent his prophet to the home of Jesse and told his youngest son, David, that he would be king of all Israel.  David was a shepherd boy, not a man of state.  He was from a small village called Bethlehem and not from a city like Jerusalem.  But most importantly, he was a man after God’s own heart. (I Sam 13:14)  He wanted God, and, therefore, he was qualified to rule God’s people.  When God chose him, he said, “… the Lord sees not as man sees:  man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”  (I Sam 16:6)

Many years went by before David would become king.  During those years, David rose in rank and in estimation before the people, and Saul, being jealous, tried a number of times to kill David.  On two occasions, David had Saul in a position in which he could have killed Saul, but he chose not to.  If he was to be king, he was not going to be king by killing God’s anointed.  Instead, God would have to make him king.  David would trust God and not take matters into his own hands.

In time, Saul died in battle, and David ascended to the throne.  Though David was “a man after God’s own heart,” he was also a sinner.  He committed adultery with Bathsheba and then had her husband killed in battle.  He did not discipline his sons or his commander Joab but looked the other way when they murdered people.  This is the man whom God says has a right heart.  That right heart is obviously not shown in his sin, but when God confronts him with his sin, he repents and runs to God to be clean.  David was quick to confess his sin, and people with right hearts are likewise quick to confess.  They see their sin and grieve over it.

David united the people of Israel into one nation.  He called the people to God.  He wrote psalms (songs of worship) for the people to sing.  He brought the nation prosperity.  He began plans to build a temple for God.  It was not to be a place where God lived.  David knew that he could not contain God in a building.  It was instead to be a special place to honor God.  It was to be the place where the priests would sacrifice the animals that would take away the sins of the people.

God, for His part, made a covenant with David, just as He had done with Abraham many centuries before.  God promised David that one of his descendants would always sit on the throne.

And when David died, his son Solomon took over the throne.

Kings and Prophets

King David’s son Solomon enjoyed peace.  But Solomon’s son did not.  During the reign of Rehoboam, Israel entered into a civil war.  The nation split with ten tribes in the north going their own way, and two tribes in the south remaining loyal to the descendant of David.  This northern kingdom was called Israel.  The southern kingdom was called Judah, named after the tribe that David belonged to.  It is where we get the word “Jew” today.

The Israelite temple was located in Jerusalem — the south.  Therefore, Jeroboam, first king of the north, feared that his people would not remain loyal to him because the most important location in their religion was in the south.  So he said to his people, “You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough.  Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” And he made gold idols and set them up in two cities within his own kingdom, and he called the Israelites to worship these idols in these cities.  (I Kings 12:25-33)  In essence, he instituted state-sanctioned idolatry in order to save his political hide.  The people mostly followed his lead, and the northern kingdom quickly fell into idolatry, sexual immorality, and various sorts of evil.  Because it rejected God, the nation had little stability.  It went through a series of about ten different dynasties in the span of a few hundred years. No family line could ever rule for long before a bloody upheaval would slaughter it and take its place only later to be slaughtered itself by another family line.

The southern kingdom had a somewhat different story.  It actually had some good kings — men who honored God and who called their nation to do so as well.  Of course, it had its share of bad kings, too, but its decline into idolatry was not so quick as that of its brothers in the north.  Judah enjoyed more stability.  The line of David sat on the throne for more than 400 years, but over time, Judah eventually rejected God to chase the gods of the nations around her.

As centuries passed and kings rose and fell, God sent to His people messengers who called them away from those other gods, away from their injustice, away from their murders and sexual immoralities, and back to the living God.  These messengers were called prophets.  In addition to their cries for moral justice and religious purity, these prophets spoke of a future king who would one day come and deliver his people from their bondage.  A deliverer is coming.  A deliverer is coming.  A deliverer is coming.  Century after century, the prophets kept hammering this idea into the souls of the people.  This deliverer the Hebrews called the Messiah, a Hebrew word that means “Anointed One.”  When Messiah comes, then we shall have peace and righteousness, the people would think.

But Israel and Judah did not listen to the prophets.  Most people rejected the unseen God and chose instead to bow before the “gods” they made.  God showed great patience and mercy toward them.  He sent prophet after prophet to warn them to repent, but only a small number would listen.  The rest chased their own desires and followed the cultures around them.

Eventually God’s justice overtook the two nations, and the people fell by the sword.  First Israel fell to the Assyrians in the 8^th century BC.  Later Judah fell to the Babylonians in the 6^th century BC.  Both Israel and Judah were carried away captive by their conquerors.  Most of the northern tribes of Israel mingled into the nations around them and were lost from history forever.  Today you will not find anyone who can tell you he was descended from the tribe of Manasseh, Naphtali, or Dan.

The leaders of Judah were carried off into exile by Babylon into what is modern day Iraq.  They were captives, slaves, forced to serve in a foreign land, but they longed for the day when they would return home. The prophets had promised defeat and exile if Judah did not repent, and defeat and exile came; but the prophets also promised restoration.  Could Messiah deliver them and bring them home?

After Exile

God drove Judah into exile because Judah gave herself to the worship of other gods.  Exile was a punishment for a violation of God’s law.  God had spoken through the prophets and forewarned Judah that this would happen, and it was just.  But God had spoken through the same prophets and declared that He would also restore His people.  Jeremiah predicted that after 70 years in Babylon, Judah would return to her homeland.  Isaiah predicted that a ruler named Cyrus would carry out God’s will and allow the Jewish people to go back to their land.

These very things came to pass.  Babylon, the nation that had subjugated the Jews, was itself conquered by Persia.  Cyrus was the first great king of the Persian Empire, and among the edicts that he issued was one that granted the Jewish people the right to return to their homeland.

And return they did.  They came in waves at different times.  They came with jubilation at the thought of having their own land again, but when they arrived, they found that they had a lot of work to do.  Jerusalem, the great city of Judah, was in a shambles.  It was small and its walls and buildings were falling apart.  A man named Zerubbabel returned and began to rebuild the temple.  Ezra came and taught the people the law of God.  Nehemiah rebuilt the walls around the city.  Slowly, Judah came to life again, but it was a struggle.

Many other peoples were in the area, and they opposed all forms of help for the Jews.  In addition, many Jewish people began following the cultures around them, so those who wanted to serve God often found opposition from without and opposition from within.  But by the grace of God, His people established themselves back where they had started.  It was as if God was saying, “Now, let’s try this again.”

It would be wrong to say that Judah never struggled with idolatry again.  The latter prophets show that greed, injustice, and the worship of other gods were still live issues after the exile.  But the extent of the idolatry was never the same again: the Jewish people never quite gave themselves over en mass to other gods.  Yet their former idolatry was still costly.  No longer did they rule their land.  They settled in the land, but other nations ruled them.  During this time, they taught the law God had given them.  They had their sects.  Some were strict with the law, others loose, but in many ways, the law was their life.  Persia conquered Babylon.  Alexander the Great and Greece conquered Persia, and Rome conquered Greece.  Through all these kingdoms, God’s people knew suffering and began to take hold of the ancient prophecies of a king who would come and deliver them from their bondage.  “If only he would come now,” they might say when political or economic oppression was strong.