WARNING PREACHY - 02/14/2016

The Making of my Golden Calf…

John 5:39-40

³⁹ You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, ⁴⁰ yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

When God redeemed the Israelites from their Egyptian slavery, He did so with many undeniable miracles.  Then, some 40-days after they were released they gathered gold and created the Golden Calf which they then called God who redeemed them.  [(3/7/2016) NOTE: I have no idea where I got this number of 40 days, it has been something that I have believed for almost 20 years and I am not sure where I got it.  The number is wrong, as I read through it now I count roughly 110 days and I suspect there were more that I did not count.  The funny part is that I have never once been challenged on it. ;-) ]  I remember the first time I read the book of Exodus; I remember thinking to myself, “are they really that stupid?”  Time after time in quick succession they forgot about the God who redeemed them and went headlong into some form of idolatry.  

Now I feel for the Israelites.  

I know my own propensity toward being superstitious and creating my own Golden Calves.  Not that I would ever use my gold to make a graven image (the Lord knows I’m too cheap (ahem) I mean frugal for that) but I do know my own capacity of making God in my own image; I just do it in the construct of my mind.

Someone said: “When God hates all the same people you do, you can be sure that you have created a god in your own image.” 

I am guilty of this.

I don’t believe God hates the people I do.  I realize that the same blood that was shed for me was shed for even my enemy.  But I have certainly created a god in my own image because I have translated His very essence into definition that my limited human brain can make sense of.  Instead of seeking to be led by God through many long and tedious hours of prayer and guidance through the Holy Spirit, I read the words of my denominational literature or the faithful men of Church history, heck; I even read the Scriptures and form grandiose ideas that I can make sense of.  And it is my thoughts, my best reasoning, the images in my limited mind that I hold dear to and say “This is my God.”

When Jesus rose back to life from the dead he appeared to his disciples and he breathed on them the Holy Spirit (John 20:22), at that instant faith in God became forevermore a spiritual concern; never again to be confused with something physical that is created.  The Holy Spirit of God is not to be captured, defined, and then repackaged into a neat comfortable doctrine by the likes of me.  But that is exactly what I do; I recognize the obvious abuses that men have done (and do) in the name of the Holy Spirit and so I reject the pursuit of God though the Holy Spirit for deference to a sound reason.  I cling to doctrines and theologies that are neat and tidy; highly defined.  I throw the Holy Spirit out with the proverbial bath-water and trade it for the popular systematic theology of the Holy Spirit.  And then I stand back with those of my ilk and say “Here, here is our God”.

And when I am silent and still before Him I get a sense of that breath.  As the nephesh (breath of life) was breathed into me at my creation (Genesis 2:7) so also the Holy Spirit has been breathed upon me by my resurrected savior.  I do recognize that I have physical life through Adam and when I recognized my redemption and bent a knee to Jesus, I realized a newly born spiritual life in me (John 3:5-8).  And yet, like a scared Israelite, some 40 days out of Egypt, I always seem to return and seek those definable physical constructs of my own mind. 
 
Because of this I find comfort in the words of the Apostle Paul.

¹And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.   ²For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. ³I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. ⁴My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, ⁵so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.  (1 Corinthians 2:1-5)

As I ponder the above words I am stopped dead in my religious tracks as I see clearly the calf that I have made.

WARNING: PREACHY - 12/6/2015 (ADVENT 2)

  

⁷ Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.  (Genesis 2:7)

They say that Adam didn’t have a belly button.  That he was created as the perfect human without human intervention.  God formed him from the dust of the earth and breathed life into him and he became a living soul.  He was perfect, without sin, living in union with God.  But perfect as he was he was not God.

In Luke 1 the Holy Spirit came upon the virgin in power and formed in her a new life.  He was to be called Jesus and, as Matthew states, Immanuel (which means God with us).  He was perfectly man and he was perfectly God; the New Man.

⁴⁵So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. ⁴⁶The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. ⁴⁷The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. ⁴⁸As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. ⁴⁹And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man. (1 Corinthians 15:25-49)

There is that famous picture of Michelangelo’s where the finger of God comes out of heaven and touches the finger of man.  It is at the point that God literally touches man that we recognize the reality of God in our world, that moment when we recognize the babe in the manger as the fingers of God and man touching, and when by faith we received the Spirit of the Almighty into our own souls and it shocks us like a spiritual sonic boom in our souls.

You do understand that I am not really talking about Adam and Mary right?  For you and I are the focus of Christmas here and now.  Jesus died for sin some 2000 years ago creating the assembly of believers (the church).  Today, his death still holds and he is still forming his church (the assembly of believers) among men.  Today is the day for you and I to recognize God on earth through the baby Jesus in the manger.  For faith in Jesus is retroactive.

¹⁶So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. ¹⁷Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! ¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. (2 Corinthians5:16-18)