There are many pointed questions in Scripture, but perhaps the most pointed of them all appears in Luke 6:46.  Here, Jesus exposes the great contradiction of (self-described) Christianity—the millions upon millions of people who call Jesus Lord but don’t do what He says to do.  It is as though they see Jesus as the spiritual equivalent of Queen Elizabeth II—a beloved ceremonial figure who makes speeches from time to time but doesn’t have any real power.

This clearly is not the way that the Son of Man wants to be perceived.  Indeed, in the next several verses, He warns that the difference between the obedient and the disobedient is stark.  The former will triumph despite disaster; the latter will be destroyed by it.  “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’,” then, is another way of saying, “Why are you rejecting my word even though it is your only hope?”

There are many ways in which (again, self-described) believers do this.  Most conspicuously, they take the things that He and His apostles said not to do and do them.  They practice every form of wickedness and, like the corrupt temple-goers of Jeremiah 7:10, they show up at church on Sunday morning and cry out, “We are rescued!”, only to return to evildoing.  Sometimes, their bad behavior is endorsed by the hierarchy of their denomination (many of which have been doing a lot of Bible-rewriting over the past few decades); at others, it is the result of their own stubborn commitment to sin.

Of a similar stripe are those who take what Jesus said to do and do something else instead.  They say He’s Lord, but they act like their ideas are better than His.  This spirit is evident in every departure from the simple pattern of the first century. 

Yes, we know that congregations in the first century were autonomous, but we think that banding together in a denomination will help us serve Him more effectively.  Yes, early churches spent their modest financial resources on only a few things, but think of all the good we can do if we go beyond that!  Yes, early Christians worshiped in song without instrumental accompaniment, but instrumental music is so beautiful and uplifting!

There are lots of people who think they’re smarter than Jesus.  I’m still waiting to find somebody who actually is.  If we don’t think that we are, what excuse do we have for exceeding His Lordship?

If we wish to avoid these errors, we must do so by magnifying rather than minimizing Christ as Lord in our hearts.  We must seek to increase rather than diminish the sphere of His authority.  In addition to following all of His commandments, we must honor Him in our judgments. 

If we are of a mind to do so, we can justify watching any kind of filth on TV, and if confronted over our preferences, we can indignantly demand book, chapter, and verse showing that we’re wrong:  “I know this isn’t the cleanest, but watching it isn’t sin, is it?”  Wrong question.  If Jesus is Lord, we won’t seek to expand the boundaries of moral gray areas.  Instead, we will seek what glorifies Him.

The Lordship of Christ is no small thing.  It should transform us in every area of our lives.  However, we do not yield this service to Him out of fear, but out of love, out of a desire to acknowledge, if not repay, all that He has done for us.

Sunday, April 12^th, 9:15 AM:  Facebook Live study on Titus 1.

Sunday, April 12th, 10:15 AM: YouTube worship service. Sermon title: "The Pattern of the Resurrection”

Sunday, April 12th, 5 PM: Zoom Bible study on the parable of the two sons and the parable of the tenants.

Wednesday, April 15th, 7 PM: Facebook Live study on intercession.

The other day, I found myself going through some hymns of hope and comfort that a hymn blogger has been posting daily through the coronavirus pandemic.  The style (organ plus choir) isn’t my thing; from my perspective, you’ve got a nasty instrument drowning out the good parts.  However, the hymns themselves were generally quite good, even the ones we don’t sing, like “All My Hope on God Is Founded”.

In time, I came to this version of “How Firm a Foundation”.  I was particularly interested in it; after all, the very title of my blog comes from the hymn!  Rather than the lyrics I’ve known all my life, though, here’s how the first verse went:

How firm a foundation, you saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in God’s excellent word;
What more can be said than to you God has said,
You who unto Jesus for refuge have fled?

My first thought was, “Ewww!  Were the hymnal editors allergic to pronouns?”  My second thought was, “No; they’re only allergic to masculine pronouns.”

Gender-neutrality in hymns has been a topic of discussion for several decades if not more.  I find some forms of it to be utterly unobjectionable (writing hymns that refer to both men and women) and others to be mildly so (rewriting older hymns to refer to both men and women).  However, I have serious problems with taking hymns that refer to God as Father and King and rewriting them so that God is no longer even masculine.

First, the only way to justify such a change is to perform some dramatic surgery on the Bible too.  How many times in Scripture is God a He or a Him?  How many times in the New Testament is He the Father?  How many times in the Psalms is He King?  Reading out of a Bible that says such things on the one hand and singing hymns that deny their truth on the other creates massive cognitive dissonance.

(Yes; I am aware that there are Scriptural texts--Isaiah 49:15, for instance--that compare God to a woman.  In 1 Thessalonians 2:7, Paul compares himself to a woman.  That doesn’t mean that Paul was feminine.)

To be quite frank, we live in a society that needs to spend more time considering the patriarchal authority of God, not less.  I don’t think it’s coincidence that the same folks who deny God’s masculinity also reject what the word of God has to say about sex and gender roles (and many other things).  At that point, regardless of what they might think about their “worship”, they are not prostrating themselves before Him in any meaningful sense.  We don’t need hymnals that encourage us to abandon reverence and subjection.  We need the opposite.

Finally, it shows a great deal of disdain for the hymnists of earlier eras, their convictions, and their work.  I’m as sure as I can be that if I had asked Robert Keene (the probable author of “How Firm a Foundation”) if God was masculine, he would have replied incredulously, “Of course!”, and he certainly would not have approved stripping out the evidence of His masculinity from his hymn.

Such lack of respect is par for the course for our amnesiac society.  We are very concerned about diversity and honoring the views of people from the different cultures of our time, but we have zero interest in (dead white male) voices from the cultures of the past.  In fact, we’re so willing to stifle them that we’ll do a hack job on a great hymn, rendering a beautiful line ugly and graceless, just to make sure that it expresses our viewpoint rather than the author’s.  Diversity that ain’t.

In Romans 8:15, Paul notes that we have received a spirit of adoption as sons, by which we cry out, “Abba!  Father!”  If, on the other hand, we no longer are willing to cry out, “Abba, Father!”, well, that too reveals a great deal about the spirit that is in us.

Even as the epidemic continues to ravage the United States, the blame game is already ramping up.  It’s the fault of the Chinese.  It’s President Trump’s fault.  It’s the fault of the CDC.  It’s the fault of those moronic Gen-Z spring-breakers.  And so on.  COVID-19 will have run its course in a year or two, but I would imagine the culpability debate will outlive me.

There’s a sense in which all of this is quite reasonable.  We are faced with a generational tragedy, and already it has become apparent that not all the decision-makers involved have done everything exactly right.  It’s fairly easy to indict any of the above people or groups for what they did or didn’t do. 

However, foolishness and poor judgment has been par for the course for the human race since the beginning.  As a history enthusiast, I’ve read countless books that show how the failures of some leader led to catastrophe.  The story of the Civil War (the period of history I know best) is a story of if-onlys.  If only McClellan had been willing to launch a final assault during the battle of Antietam!  If only Lee had declined battle at Gettysburg and sought a better opportunity through maneuver!  Nearly every battle in the war is defined by someone’s consequential mistake.

In short, the flawed people and organizations of today have plenty of company.  Theoretically, all of them could have done better than they did.  Practically, humankind never does do better. 

Our power exceeds our wisdom.  Our ability to predict the future is not nearly as good as we think it is.  We think of ourselves as rational actors, but when we most need to think clearly, our judgment instead is clouded by our desires and fears. 

However, we find these truths about ourselves difficult to face.  It’s easier to play the blame game, to pretend that with the right leaders and policies, we would have gotten it right, and indeed that once we put the right leaders and policies in place, from now on, everything will be right.  It’s easier to pretend that we are imperfect but capable of perfection.

Rather than calling us to better performance, though, these tragedies should remind us of our inherent fallibility.  In reality, the new policies and leaders will fail somewhere like the old policies and leaders did.  There will be new catastrophes and new disasters, every one of them avoidable--in retrospect.  Our striving for perfection is a doomed struggle.

Instead, we should strive for humility and grace.  It is not only the powerful who have failed and always will fail.  It is our families, our friends, our co-workers, our brethren, and ourselves.  We shouldn’t think that we will get it right, nor should we expect others to.  Failure is part of the human condition.

Above all, we should learn to rely on God, precisely because He is not like us.  We don’t know what we’re doing, but He does.  The future is hidden from us, but He sees the end from the beginning.  We continually fail, but His word continually accomplishes His will. 

Rather than pretending that we’ve got it figured out, or even that we have the capacity to figure it out, we need to follow and trust Him.  This is true when His will makes sense to us but especially when it doesn’t.  Regardless of how it seems to us, we never will put a foot wrong when we walk in His footsteps.

Throughout this crisis, then, seek God.  Continue to seek Him when it is over.  Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.  In all your ways, acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.

Luke 6:20-49 is often described as the Sermon on the Plain, as opposed to the Sermon on the Mount.  There are many explanations for the similarities and differences in content between the two sermons, but I believe the simplest one is the best.  Like most preachers, Jesus was willing to preach the same sermon to different audiences, adapting his content to the need of the moment.

One of the most obvious differences between the Beatitudes as presented in Luke 6:20-21, rather than Matthew 5:3-10, is the physical focus of the former.  Matthew 5:3 speaks of the poor in spirit; Luke 6:20 speaks simply of the poor.  Matthew 5:6 is about those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; Luke 6:21 is about those who are hungry.  

So too, the woes of Luke 6:24-26 are concerned with the physical condition of the hearers.  It is those who are literally rich, well-fed, happy, and honored who should be concerned.

At first glance, this appears to be class warfare written into the pages of the New Testament.  Poor = good, rich = bad.  However, such a flat reading harmonizes poorly with other texts, such as 1 Timothy 6:17-19.  There, Paul is quite clear that in order to please God, the rich don’t have to become poor.  They merely have to become rich in good works.  The rich can be righteous, and the poor can be wicked.

Instead, we need to read Luke 6 not only in the context of the rest of the text of Luke, but in the context of its time and place.  Here, as in many places in the gospels, the Great Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 is lurking just offstage.  We must consider Jesus’ words with that calamity in mind.

During that time, though the Romans certainly did destroy Jerusalem, their work was not limited to its immediate area.  Instead, they crushed the Jewish rebellion throughout Galilee and Judea.  Nor were the legions troubled by modern-day concerns like good optics and minimizing collateral damage.  From their perspective, collateral damage was a feature, not a bug.  The more horribly the Jewish people suffered, the less likely other subject peoples would be to defy the majesty of Rome.

As a result, the decade around the destruction of the Temple was a pretty terrible time to be a prosperous Jew.  If you had it, the Romans were going to take it away from you.  Jesus’ prophecy proved exactly correct.  The rich did become destitute.  The well-fed did become hungry.  The laughing did weep. 

Because everybody was going to end up with nothing, those who started with nothing had an important advantage.  In Jesus’ time, the literally poor, hungry, and grieving were most likely to listen to Him because they didn’t like the status quo.  Even today, people whose lives aren’t going well are more likely to listen to the gospel than people who are prospering.  Hard times predispose people to change.

As a result, even though they didn’t realize it, the poor who followed Jesus were making the best preparations possible for the painful years ahead.  On the other hand, the rich thought they had everything figured out but weren’t truly prepared.  Poverty is nobody’s idea of a good time, but even it can be blessed if it causes us to turn to the Lord.