In my last blog entry but one I wrote myself off as something of a Philistine, in the sense of not being given to appreciating art. Yet maybe even I have my moments of artistic discernment. Many years ago I went to an art exhibition in the north Welsh seaside resort of Llandudno. One item in this involved you in opening a door and entering a small room. It turned out that the room was completely unfurnished - except for a number of small terra-cotta figures dotted around the floor. These were stylised little people, just head and body. It turned out that they represented aborted human foetuses. I found myself deeply moved. I visualised a whole town full of people - people who never had the opportunity to be born. It is an image that has stayed with me ever since.
Could there be countless thousands of such individuals peopling the City of God, the Kingdom of Heaven? The status of tiny children in the sight of God has long been a matter of debate. The doctrine of Original Sin claims that we all inherit sin from our first ancestors, Adam and Eve. According to this, humans are automatically sinners simply by being part of the human race. Thus there is no such thing as a time of innocence before the first conscious sin takes place. While the matter is not spelt out in that precise way in the Bible, support for it can readily be found in its pages.
“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5 ESV).
Certainly I smile when I hear of arguments about raising the legal age of responsibility. I was probably not yet four years old when I became aware, for the first time, of doing something really wrong. I wandered up the lane to the side of our house and took a fancy to a glass bauble floating in someone’s pond. I fished it out and walked down the lane with it. Soon afterwards Mum saw me. When I spotted her, to use her words, I “destroyed the evidence”. In other words, I smashed the bauble by the side of the road.
Jesus had no illusions about children. He knew their failings, including how small-minded and quarrelsome they could be. He gives us this vivid picture of children moaning when others did not join in their games:
“But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates,
“‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn’.” (Matthew 11:16-17.)
Yet He also talked as though they had a special place in God’s heart.
“See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 18:10.)
Who exactly the “little ones” were that Jesus had in mind, we are not sure. They might simply have been new Christians. But all around this passage Jesus is talking about children.
When His disciples wanted to discourage parents from bringing children for Him to bless, He protested:
“Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14).
We dare not speculate about heaven beyond what God says in His word, the Bible. The only sure way to heaven is by deliberate trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Yet somehow I would love to think that there is space in heaven for many who never had a chance to walk this earth because powerful and influential interests denied it to them.
Monday 23 November 2015
Tuesday 10 November 2015
Forecasting the Weather
As I prepare to move down south any time now, I am keenly following the weather forecasts to see what the conditions will be like when furniture is going into the van and coming out of it. Will it rain? Will it be windy? Both of those things could drastically affect the way the move goes.
It's all part of a lifelong interest in the weather. I love to learn about changing weather patterns mean. I enjoy identifying the various types of cloud and getting to know what they indicate. I once read the book The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. He used to spend hours and hours apparently whiling away time but was in fact intently studying cloud formations and everything connected with them. I also own a weather station that enables me to gather all the relevant information together and try to make my own forecast.
In fact simply making sense of other people's weather forecasts is hard enough. I think of the airport weather forecasts. Their detailed, coded data are supposed to help pilots of aircraft who need to be sure of weather conditions before they fly. Understanding them is often a question of trying to work out what it is indicated by probabilities. Say they give a 30% chance of rain. Well, does that mean it will rain or doesn't it? I find the whole approach very frustrating.
In fact most forecasting involves percentages. It's a way of hedging your bets!
I am intrigued by a weather forecast in the Bible. It comes when Jesus confronted some of his opponents over their narrow-mindedness and foolishness and inability to see what was coming the way He could. You can find that story in Matthew's gospel chapter 16.
And the Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” So he left them and departed (Matthew 16:1-4 ESV).
The Pharisees were looking for some spectacular demonstration of Jesus' power, as if they hadn't seen enough of those already. Jesus points out the inconsistency of their position. They are instinctively able to tell the weather to come from the weather lore. Yet Jesus' coming should give thoughtful hearers a pointer to the state of God's world now and where it is heading. Jesus' opponents are blind to the signs - signs that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, that new conditions are approaching where God is seen to be in charge, where wrongs will be seen to be righted and a new order of things put into place.
We too can be guilty of looking at the world around us with blinkers on. I hear people obsessing about which news item fulfils which Bible prophecy. We may well be wasting our time looking for these often fanciful connections while the real signs go tragically unnoticed.
Jesus counsels the Pharisees and Sadducees to study the sign of Jonah. That presumably means the way that prophet was three days in the belly of the big fish before emerging into daylight again. This would be paralleled spectacularly by the way the Lord Jesus would be three days dead and then after that time rise again to newness of life, to bring about conditions of forgiveness and healing for all who believe.
Let's be keen on understanding the future - as God sees it. That will mean gaining Holy Spirit wisdom to sift out the relevant from the irrelevant in our quest for signs.
(By way of a footnote: moving day, 9 November, started off wet but ended much drier. After a very long day I was finally and happily installed in my new home in Wiltshire.)
It's all part of a lifelong interest in the weather. I love to learn about changing weather patterns mean. I enjoy identifying the various types of cloud and getting to know what they indicate. I once read the book The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. He used to spend hours and hours apparently whiling away time but was in fact intently studying cloud formations and everything connected with them. I also own a weather station that enables me to gather all the relevant information together and try to make my own forecast.
In fact simply making sense of other people's weather forecasts is hard enough. I think of the airport weather forecasts. Their detailed, coded data are supposed to help pilots of aircraft who need to be sure of weather conditions before they fly. Understanding them is often a question of trying to work out what it is indicated by probabilities. Say they give a 30% chance of rain. Well, does that mean it will rain or doesn't it? I find the whole approach very frustrating.
In fact most forecasting involves percentages. It's a way of hedging your bets!
I am intrigued by a weather forecast in the Bible. It comes when Jesus confronted some of his opponents over their narrow-mindedness and foolishness and inability to see what was coming the way He could. You can find that story in Matthew's gospel chapter 16.
And the Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” So he left them and departed (Matthew 16:1-4 ESV).
The Pharisees were looking for some spectacular demonstration of Jesus' power, as if they hadn't seen enough of those already. Jesus points out the inconsistency of their position. They are instinctively able to tell the weather to come from the weather lore. Yet Jesus' coming should give thoughtful hearers a pointer to the state of God's world now and where it is heading. Jesus' opponents are blind to the signs - signs that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, that new conditions are approaching where God is seen to be in charge, where wrongs will be seen to be righted and a new order of things put into place.
We too can be guilty of looking at the world around us with blinkers on. I hear people obsessing about which news item fulfils which Bible prophecy. We may well be wasting our time looking for these often fanciful connections while the real signs go tragically unnoticed.
Jesus counsels the Pharisees and Sadducees to study the sign of Jonah. That presumably means the way that prophet was three days in the belly of the big fish before emerging into daylight again. This would be paralleled spectacularly by the way the Lord Jesus would be three days dead and then after that time rise again to newness of life, to bring about conditions of forgiveness and healing for all who believe.
Let's be keen on understanding the future - as God sees it. That will mean gaining Holy Spirit wisdom to sift out the relevant from the irrelevant in our quest for signs.
(By way of a footnote: moving day, 9 November, started off wet but ended much drier. After a very long day I was finally and happily installed in my new home in Wiltshire.)
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