https://theaquilareport.com/called-to-be-faithful-in-the-here-and-now/
Written by J. Stonestreet & T. Padgett |
Saturday, September 3, 2022
It’s easy to forget in all these headlines that things have been bad before, in some ways even worse than today. In that time and place, God called His people to keep the faith, commit to the tasks at hand, and steward the time they were given by remaining faithful. Sometimes they won against the forces of darkness and death. Sometimes they lost. Either way, their calling remained the same, and God’s Kingdom marched on.
Perhaps the strongest antidote for optimism or for misplaced faith in our fellow man is watching the news. Of course, much of the media we consume is voyeuristic, so in a sort of supply-and-demand scenario, bad news makes headlines more than good news. At the same time, this is more than a problem of clickbait filling our newsfeeds. A series of events in recent years suggests that our cultural center cannot hold much longer.
An Increasingly Fallen World
Not decades but just a few days ago, prominent novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed, not in some “shady” part of the world, but in public at a lecture in upstate New York. Also, dogs in San Francisco are becoming hooked on meth. Apparently, human excrement is so common in public areas, pets have learned where to go for a quick high from the residue of addicted residents. Radical ideologies continue to dominate headlines, which few outside of ivory towers had heard of until a few years ago. They are now compulsory at some schools. And, those who challenge the new orthodoxy are often ostracized from what is an increasingly impolite society. Healthcare now involves practices that, until yesterday, would’ve rightly been considered abuse, including children having otherwise healthy organs turned inside out.
Clearly, the state of our world is largely rotten. For some Christians, this indicates that the end is nigh. Particularly in the last century or so, many books and sermons have declared that we are living in the last days, so the best we can hope for is to go down fighting this increasingly fallen world.
The Calling Remains the Same
It’s easy to forget in all these headlines that things have been bad before, in some ways even worse than today.
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A High Ecclesiology in the Digital Age
As members of Christ’s body, we should connect ourselves as members of a local expression of that body. Digital space disconnects us from our bodies, communities, and physical locations, and swirls us about in cyberspace, but the church roots us in reality, grounds us in love, and is ground zero for our life with Christ.
It’s no secret that the church is experiencing an institutional crisis. Forty million people have left over the last 20 years. Not everyone is leaving for the same reasons, and just because they’re leaving the church behind doesn’t mean they’re leaving God. About 50 percent of people who have “hardly any” trust in organized religion still believe in God “without a doubt.” And while the reasons for leaving the church are wide-ranging, it’d be naive not to look at our digital practices as the church to see in what ways we are contributing to it.
In their book, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?, Jim Davis and Michael Graham write,
“Most dechurched evangelicals still worship online (which is more common among evangelicals anyway), but they do so at their convenience. Many evangelical churches now call their online worship services ‘on demand,’ and that is exactly what people are choosing to do. What is intended as a new front door is often having the opposite effect by helping the dechurched leave through the back door. Our research showed that physically going to a church in our consumerist digital age has become inconvenient, and many people concluded that they had other priorities for their time and money.”
This doesn’t mean that you should shut down your live stream. That would need to be determined on a church-by-church basis, and there are good reasons to have a live stream. What this does mean is that we need to take a closer examination of our ecclesiology in a digital age. What are we communicating about the church in an age of institutional distrust and digital convenience? Can church really be “on demand”? Or have we lowered our ecclesiology to the lowest possible rung, happy to have views when Jesus called us to make disciples?
The proliferation not just of live streams but of Christian influencers and podcasts makes it easy to consume religious content and get the weekly dose of spirituality one feels one needs without the messy realities of dealing with a community of fellow sinners.
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The Nature of Your Constant Enemy
The key to overcoming the Evil One is to stay close to the Good One. To listen to the voice of the Shepherd so much that, when the Devil interrupts, you know it is not God, and you resist him, firm in your belief in the Good Shepherd.
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)
What if you had a real, living, constant enemy with powers beyond your imagination that was stalking you and your family day and night?
You do.
His name is Satan. He has supernatural powers and a host of demons at his disposal. He has one constant agenda: to usurp God. If you are one of God’s children by grace through faith, you are on his radar. You are filled with God and represent God in this generation. You are the salt and light in this present world and the greatest obstacle to Satan’s dominance.
His Nature
Jesus was very clear about this. He identifies Satan and his agenda repeatedly.
He’s a thief and a robber.
So, he constantly comes to take what does not belong to him. He does not want you to experience and enjoy all the riches of God’s Kingdom that Christ has for you. And he certainly doesn’t want you introducing anyone else to the Good Shepherd.
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The Basics: The Deity of Jesus Christ
The coming Messiah is repeatedly identified as the almighty God and eternal father, the wisdom of God, righteous, highly exalted, yet to be born of a lowly virgin. These prophetic verses can only be speaking of one person, Israel’s coming Redeemer, Jesus Christ, who is the God of Abraham (cf. John 8:58).
Like Jews and Muslims, Christians are monotheists. But unlike Jews and Muslims, Christians are also Trinitarians. We believe that the one God is triune, and is revealed as three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When it comes to the Son (Jesus Christ), the Bible everywhere affirms that Jesus is true and eternal God, uncreated, without beginning or end.
Given Jesus’s central place in Christian theology and his importance in the history of Western Civilization, non-Christian religions often attempt to co-opt Jesus and make him one of their own. But this is not easy to do since the doctrine of the deity of Jesus Christ differentiates Christianity from all other religions. If Jesus is true and eternal God as taught in Scripture, then the Christian doctrine of God is unique among world religions. The irony is that while virtually all religions honor Jesus as a prophet or teacher, nevertheless they all reject (implicitly or explicitly) the key points the New Testament makes about Jesus–that he is the second person of the Trinity, and that he is the eternal Son, and he possesses the same divine attributes as the Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus is God in human flesh, something Jesus personally believed and proclaimed about himself (and a matter to which we will return in a subsequent essay in this series when we discuss Christ’s incarnation).
That the doctrine of the deity of Jesus Christ is not the invention of the early church as often claimed, can be seen by merely scanning the pages of Holy Scripture, with its substantial teaching regarding the deity of Jesus in both testaments. One of the most powerful lines of evidence for the deity of Jesus are those texts in the Old Testament, such as the well-known messianic prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 written hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth. “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” The Messiah will be miraculously conceived, and given the title “God with us.”
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