No sooner had I posted my first reflection on what a church should be than I received a comment that powerfully reveals our need for systematic and faithful teaching of Scripture. Somewhere out there is a soul possessed of a hundred questions, who apparently thinks that s/he knows Christ. And yet they appear clueless about the reasons for His coming and the purpose of His life on earth. From the sound of it, s/he might be a refugee from the contemporary church; at the least they harbor a great deal of cynicism towards it.
The possibility that this possessor of questions might well have been in regular attendance at a church is a powerful indictment against contemporary protestantism. The fact that someone could think that they know Christ and yet be so pointedly ignorant of the reasons for redemption demonstrates that the church has abdicated her responsibilities to teach the Word. This commentator apparently envisions Christ as a Robert Heinlein character, some powerful, mystical embodiment of human divinity, calling out the goodness lying dormant within human consciousness. No doubt s/he believes that humanity suffers under an accretion of layers of toxic sediment disgorged by the machinery of western, capitalistic culture, which has buried the divinity within our hearts. For this possessor of questions, humanity is in a state of unconscious ignorance, imprisoned to materialistic desires and awaiting a cryptic key to release our hidden potential.
Make no mistake: in the beginning Almighty God created humanity good and declared him very good indeed (Gen 1:31). Humanity at the first walked in fellowship with God (Gen 3:8). Now imagine that for a moment: what kind of being must Adam have been before the fall, that he had the faculties to fellowship with the Creator of the Universe? I love my children, and there was nothing like coming home when they were young and walking with them in the late afternoon light. They might tell me a story or share a dream, but more often than not, their attention would wander after a bug or a rock or a swing set. It was a joyous connection for me, but it was not fellowship. For fellowship, I needed someone who could converse with me with a measure of comprehension, understanding and empathy. Think of it… what kind of man was man before the Fall?
But Adam sinned: he rejected God by disobeying His commands. The devil said that God didn’t want Adam and Eve to be “like God” (Gen. 3:5), but that was a lie, because they already were like God! God had invested them with the authority to rule over all the works of His hands (Gen. 1:28; Ps. 8:5–7). All Adam needed to do in order to exercise that lordship was to submit himself to God, and allow God to rule through him. But Adam—like the devil himself—rejected this place of submission and dependency. He wanted to be like God on his own, without having to bow his knee to God. And so he fell. And great was the fall of human kind.
Humanity repeats this fall again and again, and those today who seek to fan the flames of some so-called divine spark inside of us, who see in Christ Jesus a mystical purveyor of esoteric knowledge that will enable humanity to reach its full potential, fall in the same fashion as Adam again. Man is not God and never can be nor will be God. But my question is, how could someone hold such beliefs in a church? That could only be because the church has abandoned the teaching of the Word.
Sadly, what my commentator accurately divines is that the church too often is about the inappropriate exercise of power. Much of the contemporary church is nothing more than a business enterprise marketing compassion and religion. Their focus is on their income statement; they keep score by the square footage of their “campuses” and the numbers of their outreaches. They design ministry in response to consumer surveys in the hope that they will increase their market share and proportionately raise their income. However, where my commentator misses the mark is in accusing those who accurately teach the Scripture of an abuse of power. Those who hold to Scripture are not building an enterprise based on guilt or fear, but instead are leading people to God by teaching them the Truth.
If anyone wishes to see religious abuse, to witness church malpractice, they need only look to the seeker-sensitive, purpose-driven, or emergent church paradigms. Leaders in those ecclesiologies gather disciples after themselves; they abandon Scripture and preach whatever their people want to hear. These are the ultimate abusers, for they willingly allow people to slip into an eternal destiny in hell, all so that they may build a bigger church, elevate their personal profile, and obtain a seat at the place of power in the community. They choose to dispense comfort for the here and now, rather than point to our need of redemption, holiness and sacrifice. They reject Scripture as the source of authority for all things concerning life and faith and instead turn to human wisdom and the literature of human potential and pop-psychology. They corrupt the worship of God in spirit and truth with a panoply of neo-pagan emotional, inarticulate, and irrational rituals.
If humanity is ever to achieve its design as capable of fellowship with God; if we are ever to regain the good, divine aspects of our original being, it will only be as we fully and completely surrender ourselves to God in absolute dependence upon Him and His teaching. His ways of redemption are articulated by Christ in the Word. Therefore we must commit to immerse ourselves in the Word, and to allow His Word and Spirit to completely inhabit, indwell, and impel us. If there is, or ever was, a divine aspect to humanity, it was the presence of God within us. There is nothing divine in us alone. Once, long ago, human beings bore the imago dei—the image of God—without measure. But that was lost and marred through the fall. Jesus Christ came to restore that image. And when we receive the Word and are born again from above; when the Holy Spirit comes to indwell our hearts anew, then God begins the process of restoring His unblemished image in us. It is through the Word and the Spirit that humanity can be transformed and conformed to the image of our Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus.
Let us therefore be a church that elevates the teaching of the Word and the doctrines of the faith. Let us so love the world that we refuse to allow them to live with fatal misconceptions of God, Christ and humanity, and instead be willing to proclaim the Truth, even if it makes us unpopular. Let us be passionately hungry for God’s Word, esteeming the words of His mouth more than our necessary food. And let us cry out to God to be a church—and for all our churches to be—a place where the Word is faithfully proclaimed and taught. May God have mercy on us all.