Role Models

One question I often like to ask people at church is, “Who is your role model in the Bible?”

Role models are a keenly discussed topic in our day. It is said that children follow news about their favourite footballers. If the player has hit the headlines because of scandalous behaviour the child may absorb that behaviour and view it as something normal and good - after all, his or her hero does it.

Much agonising is done about a lack of male teachers in some schools. Children, so the argument goes, see too few men in everyday life that they can look up to as good male role models. But then, clean living people often do not attract a child’s attention because they do not hit the headlines!

The rest of us may well feel we have lived long enough not to idolise anybody. We may admire some people more than others but experience and wisdom have shown that all are afflicted by temptations and weaknesses. We feel a responsibility to live according to our best lights, not someone else’s.

So which role model do you choose from the Bible? Clearly there are some bad ones. The Bible writers never intended that we should see them as anything else. Nobody would pretend that Queen Jezebel of Israel was anything but a bad role model. She consistently championed idol gods and the political interests of her husband, the unrighteous and misguided king Ahab.

Of course there is one easy answer to the question of the best role model, and that is “Jesus!” Certainly there are aspects of His character that I envy. I wish I had more of His human warmth and His ability to read human nature like a book. However, it is too simplistic to say He is a role model to the exclusion of everyone else we might look up to. The apostle Paul, for instance, says,

“Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1 ESV).

Paul is not being big-headed. He doesn’t expect people to imitate anything about him that doesn’t reflect Christ. In this instance he holds himself up as not seeking personal advantage but the good of the many:

“… I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved” (1 Corinthians 10:33).

Paul in turn imitates his Master. Jesus Christ would have been the foremost person with a right to proclaim His own importance. He is the creator of the world and is normally exalted at God the Father’s right hand. But He humbled Himself, even to the point of dying on the cross. Mark’s gospel says about Him,

“For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

If I were asked to choose a role model (apart from Jesus!) it would be Caleb in the Old Testament. When Moses sent out twelve men to reconnoitre the Promised Land before the people entered, they came up with a discouraging report. Only Caleb and Joshua objected and said how good the land was, just as God promised it would be. But that isn’t the last we hear of Caleb. At 85 years old he presents himself to Joshua, now leader of God’s people in Moses’ place, and announces,

“… my brothers who went up with me made the heart of the people melt; yet I wholly followed the LORD my God. And Moses swore on that day, saying, ‘Surely the land on which your foot has trodden shall be an inheritance for you and your children forever, because you have wholly followed the LORD my God.’ And now, behold, the LORD has kept me alive, just as he said, these forty-five years since the time that the LORD spoke this word to Moses, while Israel walked in the wilderness. And now, behold, I am this day eighty-five years old. I am still as strong today as I was in the day that Moses sent me; my strength now is as my strength was then, for war and for going and coming. So now give me this hill country of which the LORD spoke on that day, for you heard on that day how the Anakim were there, with great fortified cities. It may be that the LORD will be with me, and I shall drive them out just as the LORD said” (Joshua 14:8-12).

I don’t say I’m like Caleb, only that I aspire to be like him, with his positive spirit and his refusal to be beaten by age and frailty. May God make me a lifelong soldier for the Christ who saved me. And may I reflect Christ so well that others will see something of Him in me.

Unexpected residents in heaven?

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.

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.)

Philistines

I am surely the despair of any culture vulture I happen to meet.

It is not as though I am devoid of refined feelings. I have at home a DVD of a lovely production about the life of Jesus. This combines the skills of Russian puppet makers and Welsh cartoonists. It sees the whole story from the point of view of Jairus’ daughter, whom Jesus raises from death (Luke 8:41-42 and 49-56). The plot imagines the little girl, now recovered, to have become a lifelong follower of Jesus in gratitude. I always weep as I watch this.

My reactions to highbrow productions, though, usually range from indifference to unbounded mirth.

The thought of people talking to each other in blank verse - as in Shakespeare’s plays - or, worse still, singing to each other as in opera, causes me huge amusement. I haven’t yet learned to take ballet seriously either. As a non-dancer I can imagine myself playing the part in Swan Lake where the duck drops dead. As a modern art critic I am foremost among those who declare that a bunch of monkeys could do just as well … you get the idea. Any sophisticated person would undoubtedly dismiss me as a Philistine.

This term of abuse refers to what my copy of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary describes as

“An uneducated or unenlightened person; a person indifferent or hostile to culture, or whose interests and tastes are commonplace and material."

This, incidentally, is a misunderstanding of what the original Philistines were like. These enemies of the Israelites who occupied part of the west coast of Palestine in Bible times were certainly warlike, but they were also highly cultured and advanced.

The towns of these Sea People show much evidence of careful planning, with industrial zones just as there are in the cities of today. Philistine pottery ware was of remarkable design. The Philistines seem to have exercised control over iron working. 1 Samuel 13 tells us that God’s people had to go to them to have their tools and weapons sharpened. It is not for nothing that the land of Palestine is named after them.

One thing about them, however, was definitely primitive and crude: their religion. In reality, they seem to have had none of their own. They borrowed the debased gods of the local Canaanites.

I remember seeing the film Samson and Delilah as a child. I was scared witless by the horrible statue of the god Dagon tottering and crashing to the ground. This took place when strong man Samson, blinded and humiliated by the Philistines, brought down their pagan temple and thus took revenge on his tormentors (Judges 16:23-31).

There never has been a place in the religion of God’s people for idolatry. The Ten Commandments condemned it. They also outlined a wholesome way of life that stood in sharp contrast to the unseemly goings-on among their neighbours. From their Jewish heritage stemmed the Lord Jesus Christ. He personally kept the Commandments perfectly. Yet He went much further than the Law of Moses. He died and rose again so that those who trust in Him could find forgiveness of sin and favour with God. This free mercy truly is divine wisdom. It is a height that no other religion can seriously approach.

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.’

“Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18-25 NIV).

All believers have a responsibility to live right, but no longer need anyone live in terror and superstition. I fear somewhat for those who call themselves sophisticated but have no time for God. When the dust has settled they are likely to find that they, not genuine Christian believers, have been the real Philistines.





 

Bone Idle

It feels like a bit of a challenge to move back into employment.

I’ve been in that ambiguous state that could be regarded either as “between churches” or “retired early”. Life for me has mostly gone on at a stately pace.

Many senior Christians with busier personalities and better connections than mine fill their time to capacity, even without paid employment. “We are so busy now we are retired,” they cry, “that we don’t know how we found time to work!”

When I’ve been at home, I’ve got by through having a daily routine. Behind it all are twin basic aims: to make sure to speak to someone and to get out of the four walls each day.

The routine involves plenty of time spent behind a desk. I have a rich and varied devotional time in the mornings. Then comes preaching and teaching preparation. At some point in the day I will go out walking or shopping for an hour or so, always hoping to have a chat to at least one other person on the way. Other elements in the mix include educational TV watching and a great deal of resting. Apart from that, filling the hours has often been a matter of doing the rounds of coffee events like an old timer!

The opportunity to do guest house ministry in Wales has been a Godsend. This season I will have spent some 60 days in Llandudno and Conwy. This has given me a real focus of interest.

To be fair to myself, I have endeavoured to do volunteering work in my local community, and have been enriched by joining community organisations. Yet it’s amazing how often you find you simply aren’t needed.

All in all, I can understand why people go on pre-retirement courses; it is very easy to vegetate if you don’t plan for all those empty hours and set goals for yourself.

What does the great adventure of a new pastorate do for my use of time? In many ways that remains to be seen. When you are looking after one small church, there are limits to what you can do. I know some pastors who cope with that by deliberately making work for themselves in order to justify their existence. That is not my approach. Of course I hope the new appointment will generate enough activity, as the months go by, to keep me fully occupied simply doing what God puts my way. Until that happens, my pattern may not look vastly different from the routine described above. But I would rather be busy in God’s way than mine.

The Bible is firm with idle and lazy people.

Go to the ant, O sluggard;
consider her ways, and be wise.
Without having any chief, officer, or ruler,
she prepares her bread in summer
and gathers her food in harvest.
How long will you lie there, O sluggard?
When will you arise from your sleep?
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest,
and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
and want like an armed man.

(Proverbs 6:6-11 ESV)

“Be diligent,” counselled John Wesley right at the start of his “Twelve Rules of a Helper”. “Never be unemployed a moment. Never be triflingly employed. Never while away time.” And lower down: “You have nothing to do but to save souls. Therefore spend and be spent in this work.”

It did him no harm; he lived for some 88 years! At the same time, being human is about “being” as well as “doing”, and I trust Christians will encourage church workers to have sanctified leisure as well as being busy, busy, busy. Our Saviour sets the pattern.

On the lone mountain side,
Before the morning’s light,
The Man of sorrows wept and cried,
And rose refreshed with might.

Oh, hear us then, for we
Are very weak and frail,
We make the Saviour’s Name our plea,
And surely must prevail. 

From C.H. Spurgeon, "Sweetly the holy hymn" in Hymns for an Early Morning Prayer Meeting (perhaps inspired by Matthew 14:23 “And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone …” )

Migrations - the sequel

Carrying on the theme of migration, I myself am soon to migrate. I am delighted to report that in mid-November I take up the pastorate of Durrington Free Church, in the middle of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.

The move south is a few weeks away yet. My life, though, is gradually being transferred to storage bins and boxes. It is a familiar routine. On average, in recent times, I have moved once every four years.

Perhaps I’m something of a nomad. And perhaps that’s the way God wants it, but I’ve been resistant.

You see, I have a couple of dreams. One is definitely within God’s will. The other I’m more doubtful about.

The doubtful dream is one about eventually being settled. On retirement you find a pleasant home where you can put down roots in a healthful area that you already know reasonably well.

The facilities are good and there are friendly people who know you and will welcome you. Within easy reach are to be found a sound gospel church and community groups to join. You have a garden you can get established and enough space in the house to accommodate an array of exciting electronic gadgets. The neighbourhood is quiet; country lanes are not far away. The noise pollution of barking, yelping pet dogs is mercifully a thing of the past. A sufficient, guaranteed pension income allows you to explore new possibilities.

Sounds good at first. It fails to take account of a number of things.

First, I have yet to master this retirement business. When faced with enforced leisure I don’t function well.

Second, in God’s purposes there is no real retirement. The Promised Land was supposed to be journey’s end for the Israelites of old. Yet they were expected to leave their houses once a year and build shelters for themselves out in the open - it was called the Feast of Tabernacles - to remind them of the Exodus from Egypt. This festival is no longer binding on Christians, but they are told in Hebrews 13:14

For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come (NIV).

This should be a warning. A long, settled earthly retirement is not wrong for the Christian, but it is not an automatic entitlement either.

The other dream is more likely to be within God’s will. It is about being pastor of a church where I can serve God productively among people who understand what that service means.

“Surely,” you say to yourself, “that would describe any church.” Yet it is astonishing how many put road blocks in front of a pastor that are totally uncalled for. In situations like that a pastor will feel that he is a guest at the table, not a member of the family. Meaningful service becomes impossible and survival or departure is the name of the game.

As the next stage of my life’s journey takes me to Wiltshire, I have high hopes that the experience will be positive both for the new pastor and for the church.

It will be a joy to find the elusive pastorate which works out. Yet that joy, like all earthly joys, is a guide and a pointer rather than an end in itself. For those who remain faithful unto death, through all the ups and downs, there is a heavenly home yet to be revealed.

Years ago, God spoke to me dramatically through Psalm 138:8 -

The Lord will fulfil his purpose for me.

The Holy Spirit brings this up to date for the Christian in another verse, Philippians 1:6 -

… he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

Make that Day your goal, and both disappointments and joys fall into their God-given place.

Migrations

Then you shall declare before the LORD your God: "My father was a wandering Aramaean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians ill-treated us and made us suffer, putting us to hard labour. Then we cried out to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. So the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And now I bring the first fruits of the soil that you, O LORD, have given me." Deuteronomy 26:5-10 NIV

Migration is a phenomenon that applies not only to the human race but also to much of nature. We wonder at the extraordinary movements of birds, summer by summer, making their way to their northern feeding grounds and then returning southwards for the winter.

Among humans there were vast migrations even before written history began. As a student of languages, I used to learn about the massive people movements that must have taken place in time out of mind. Early populations would have moved en masse from central Asia and fanned out right through Europe, taking their languages with them.

Nowadays the issue of migration is very much a talking point. Many thousands are desperate to get from their homelands in Africa and Asia and make their way to the west. In an effort to make sense of it all, we try to classify them as either economic migrants or political refugees. Economic migrants are mostly seen as wishing to take advantage of the affluence of the developed world, unless they can contribute skills that the receiving country particularly needs. Political migrants may find a more sympathetic reception. These are people who go in the fear of their lives because of conditions in their home countries. In practice it is often not possible to determine which motive is uppermost in the mind of a particular migrant.

There is much about migration in the Bible. The Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt into the Promised Land is burned into the consciousness of the Jewish people and indeed Christians to this very day. The model of Christians as people on a journey looms large in the book of Hebrews. In Hebrews 12:13-14 we read that the Lord Jesus was hounded to death as an outsider and His followers too are outsiders in this world:

“… Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.” (ESV)

Because true citizens of God’s Kingdom are looking for another and better country, they are never prepared to compromise with the worldly conditions and expectations that they find around them. We may have all the trappings of affluence. Yet we cannot simply rest content with the status we have now. The Lord Jesus made these pointed remarks:

And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward (Matthew 6:16)

In other words, in the admiration people give them they have already had all the reward they are going to get.

In what I call the Great Reversal, Jesus repeatedly states how the downtrodden will receive blessing in the next life. Remember, too, that He said about Himself that He had nowhere to lay His head (Matthew 8:20).

None of this means that we can in any way romanticise the aching issues of migration, the human dramas that are going on around us. But it does remind us that the human race is not programmed to be stuck in a groove. We are to embrace change – first and foremost the change of repentance: the 180° turnaround from sin to righteousness, from rejecting Christ to accepting Him. Then we go on to move deliberately to the pattern of service that God has for us, which may take us well away from the familiar and comfortable.