Mike Gastin

I received a reviewer's copy of John Bohannon's book, Preaching and the Emerging Church yesterday. (Thanks, John!) I'm looking forward to reading and reviewing it. There's been so much noise over the last few years about the message of the emerging church. Bohannon looks at the preaching of the four main voices in the emerging church: Mark Driscoll, Dan Kimball, Brian McLaren and Doug Pagitt. This work should add some needed clarity to the din.

I'll be starting the book in about a week or so. I'll publish a full review here. If you want to check out the title in the meantime, visit the book's Amazon page here.

In my last post, I talked about the idea that from the Old Testament to the New, God has not changed. I want to expand on that for a minute by asking the question, what does God want?

What I mean is, what does God want from me, from you, from every living person? Because if God has not changed, then it should be true that His expectations for men have remained the same.

I get the feeling when talking with my brothers and sisters in the faith that there's a general assumption—what God wanted from man in the Old Testament is not the same as what He wants now. There's a belief that Christ set us free of any expectations that God may have had; that anything found in the Old Testament is to be done away with, because it's Law and as every Christian knows, the Law is not for us.

I'll be the first to reject a return to the law. You'll never see me sacrifice an ox to atone for my sins. Nor will I start to obey dietary laws. I'm not about to start tithing anytime soon, since all I have is God's anyway. I've got no problem letting an unbeliever use my silverware, and since God has hidden His word in my heart, I'm not going to start wearing tefillin.

99% of the Body of Christ agrees with that we're not bound to the law. But, the Old Testament is more than the law, no? The law makes up a very small percentage of the Old Testament. What about the prophets? What about all the poetry in Psalms and Song of Solomon; the wisdom found in Proverbs? What about the narratives found in Genesis and Exodus or all the history found in Kings and Chronicles?

In all those books there are themes that run throughout. Holiness, purity of heart, humility, faith in God, separation from sin, righteousness, faithfulness, patience, love—the Old Testament, as well as the New, is full of these themes. Reading it reveals to us that God wants a people set apart to Him, holy and pure, that obeys Him. And, if He can find this holy nation, well then, He will dwell with them and they will be His people and He will be their God. It's simple and you can easily find this theme all throughout the Old Testament. All the law, wisdom, stories, history; all of it points to God's desire for a holy people that He can call his own and dwell with.

So, the question remains, what does God want? I can’t help but answer that what He wants has not changed from the fist moment he breathed life into that lump of clay. He wants a people, holy unto Himself. In fact, the work of Christ proves that this is so, for through the work of Christ we now have the power to be that people. We are now not only forgiven, but we can walk free of sin. We can now be holy, set apart, unsullied by the sin surrounding us. We can have pure hearts and minds. We can take on the nature of Jesus—the very nature of God! We can have power and life eternal. We can commune with God, the creator of the universe.

When I meditate on this amazing revelation of God’s heart—that He wants a holy people and that He was willing to die to make it possible, I have to ask, has God received what He has desired? He freely gave Himself for us so that we can become His people. Have we responded in like fashion? Have we given ourselves to Him??

If there’s anyone who’s word is sure, it’s God’s. He will have His holy people. The question becomes, will we be a part?

There's a curious phrase that gets rolled out in Christianity on a regular basis. Usually it's invoked in the context of a bible story where the army of Israel is told by God to wipe out some people, including women and children, or when there's talk about human sin and animal sacrifice. It's a handy phrase because it helps us deal with the cognitive dissonance those kinds of stories create.

The phrase? The God of the Old Testament.

I'm sure you've heard it. I know I have many times over. It's used to communicate the idea that way back in the day God was different. He was violent, demanding, warlike, powerful, destructive, legalistic and unforgiving. He was to be feared and He was not to be messed with. You obeyed the God of the Old Testament—or you died.

A god like that creates a problem for us. We have Jesus, God incarnate, the Rose of Sharon, the humble servant. Jesus loved people, fed the masses, cast out demons, healed the sick, gave the blind sight and raised the dead. Jesus walked among us with only a cloak on his back and sandals on His feet. He ate with publicans and sinners and forgave adulterers and tax collectors. He took the little children onto his lap and ultimately laid down His life to save humanity from its sin. Jesus is both the gentle Lamb of God and our Good Shepherd.

And so we find ourselves dealing with a problem. We know that Jesus is God. He said as much and He proved it by rising from the dead. And He was nice and good. But, when we read about God in the Old Testament we see a different picture of the Lord; angry and judging, and it does not make sense to us. Clearly, we think, Jesus and the God of the Old Testament are not the same!

So, to deal with the incongruity and dissonance we develop theology and doctrines to sort it all out. We latch onto ideas like dispensationalism or covenant theology. They explain why God has one nature and set of expectations in one era and seemingly another nature and set of expectations in a different era.

Writers like Brian McLaren, even go as far as to declare that the God of the Old Testament is not really God. In fact, McLaren, in his book A New Kind of Christianity, renames the God of the Old Testament as Theos and proceeds to explain that Theos is a construct of mankind's imagination and due to early mankind's limitations in understanding. According to McLaren, mankind was horrible back then, unevolved, and so the only way it could understand God was to see Him as horrible. But fear not! We know more now. We're smarter, more better. And, not only have we evolved—we have Jesus.

Authors and preachers and Joe and Jane Believer can all say whatever they want. Jesus and the God of the Old Testament are the same. Jesus said, I and the Father are one! And, if we read the Old Testament with an open heart we see that God was both judging and merciful. He was harsh at times and full of love, too. He cared about the orphan and the widow, He rewarded the people of pure heart. He went to war on behalf of slaves and the downtrodden. He blessed the land and fed nations. He even forgave.

You see, we have an idea that Jesus came and changed everything. But he did not. Jesus did not change anything, he just fulfilled everything. So, he did not come to get rid of the law, but to fulfill it. He did not come to change the rules on sin, but to give us power over sin. He did not come to lower the bar on holiness, but rather to make a way for us to be holy. He did not come to do away with the priesthood and the temple-based worship, but to make all his followers into priests and their bodies His temple. He did not come to do away with judgement but to act as our judge.

Everything that we see about God in the Old Testament is true of Jesus. God never changed. God did not evolve and neither did we. God still desires a people set apart to Him. He still demands holiness and He still hates idolatry. Jesus is the way to meeting God and his desires. Jesus gives us to power to fulfill God's demands. There is no God of the Old Testament. There’s just God, the same yesterday, today and forever.

Lydia and I watched a movie called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last night. It was moving. The idea was creative, the cinematography was amazing and the acting was excellent. We went to bed feeling a little overwhelmed with emotion from the experience.

As we lay there and I mulled over what we'd just watched, it dawned on me that almost every character in the movie was unmarried. There was a lot intimacy between men and women, but not a whole lot of marriage. In fact, of the three marriages portrayed, two suffered adultery due to the actions of the main character and one had a husband that abandoned his newborn son on a door step.

And as thoughts always seem to flow like a stream, this realization lead me to two long-standing questions I often wrestle with. How much are we influenced by our consumption? And, is it possible to really know how much we're influenced while immersed in our culture?

Look, I'm not going to rail against this movie. Yeah, it was wonderful in many respects. But, I just can't agree with it's subtext. And, it's the subtext that's most powerful. We all know that it's impossible for a person to be born with an old man's body and to continually grow younger as time marches on. So, we smile at the idea and enjoy a movie that shows what that would be like. It's fiction and we know it. No harm there, just like we know there are no hobbits or Mordor.

But what abut the message within the story? Not that we all grow old or that we all have to say goodbye to the ones we love. I'm talking about the implied values, like adultery. Can we just filter those out with no effect?

A character in this movie is a devout church goer, prays all the time and exclaims praises to God throughout the movie. She has trouble bearing a child and even goes to a faith healer in hopes the Lord will grant her wish to have a baby. And, eventually, she has a child. But, this character, who is the salt of the earth and a protagonist, never marries. She has a man that she sleeps with on a regular basis. But, they never make a formal commitment. He just comes and goes. She is portrayed as a faithful child of the Lord, but in reality she does not obey Him.

How does a portrayal like that effect us? What values do we derive? Does it start to poke small holes of doubt in our thinking, or values our beliefs? What does it teach the uninformed?

I know this is just a movie. It's just a two hour bit of entertainment, but multiply that by all the things we consume in one day—the music, advertising, television, movies, books, magazines, web sites, video clips, news. When you start to think about how much information we're fed in a day the idea of subtext and values becomes staggering.

I'll close with a bit of irony by quoting The Fixx. Are we, are we, are we ourselves?