Last Sunday, my church celebrated Palm Sunday with a re-enactment of the Triumphal Procession. Members of the church dressed in Biblical costumes and paraded through the sanctuary with palm branches, rejoicing as “Jesus” entered the sanctuary.
Seeing that visual re-enactment of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, less than a week before the Crucifixion, all I could think about was how quickly the triumphant crowd would be replaced with an angry, condemning crowd.
Palm Sunday is a moment of refuge and joy, the calm before the storm. Only days later, the crowd will be shouting at Pilate to free a murderer and to crucify Jesus.
Have you ever experienced the turn of the tide in your life? Ever felt like public opinion was on your side one minute, then turning against you the next?
Ever felt like a friend was for you one day, then nowhere to be found when things got hairy?
One thing’s for sure. Sinful people are fickle. It doesn’t mean we should condemn and distrust one another in order to protect ourselves. With God’s help, we can all become better friends, parents, and lovers.
But we have to remember that when everyone seems turn their back on us, there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Jesus knows what it feels like to be betrayed by your closest friends and by the general population. Turn to the One who knows you and loves you when you’re going through a valley of betrayal. Ask Him for the ability to forgive and move forward in love.
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. Hebrews 4:15-16
As we prepare for Holy Week, I’m reminded that God’s calling in our lives is often counter-intuitive.
Then Jesus went with His disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and He said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and He began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then He said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Going a little farther, He fell with His face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from Me. Yet not as I will, but as You will.” Matthew 26:36-9
Just when we think we have life figured out, just when we’re starting to feel comfortable, God calls us to follow Him into uncertainty, into potential or certain pain. Not our will, but His will.
Is this because He’s mean? Is He standing over us waiting until we feel good so He can rain on our parade? Is He just trying to lord His power over us? (No pun intended…okay, well, maybe pun intended. But go ahead and groan, I know it was bad.)
Not at all.
God calls us to uncomfortable, sometimes excruciatingly painful situations with a wonderful purpose in mind. In leading Jesus to the cross, the Father was extending salvation to all of creation. The cross didn’t feel good. It was foolishness to the world! No human being, apparently even Jesus, God in the flesh, would have chosen death on a cross as the best way to execute a plan of salvation.
Yet Jesus said, “Not as I will, but as You will.”
In Matthew 16, we see an example of Jesus dealing with criticism concerning God’s counter-intuitive call on His life:
From that time on Jesus began to explain to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that He must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to You!” Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone would come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.”
Have there been times in your life when God has called you away from comfort? Have you been called into an uncertain or painful situation? How have people in your life responded? Have you had to face challenges from loved ones who were well-meaning but ultimately trying to take your eyes off of the Lord? How did you deal with that discouragement?
The Village, a 2004 film by M. Night Shyamalan is one of my favorite films. A lot of people don’t like it because the twist was predictable, far-fetched, and perhaps a bit cheesy. But I loved that it made me think. (I tend to like movies like that, no matter how predictable the twists might be.)
For those of you who haven’t seen the film, but want to, you can skip the next paragraph. It will spoil the movie for you. Keep reading after the next paragraph. But for those who haven’t seen the film and probably won’t see it, here’s some background to the point of the film and why I like it so much.
<<<Plot Spoiler>>> Most of The Village follows the lives of a few young people who live in a quaint village set in nineteenth century America. The only trouble with this village is that it’s surrounded by woods, where mysterious, man-eating creatures live. As long as the inhabitants of the village throw sacrifices of animal meat into the woods on occasion, wear the color yellow as “the safe color” that the creatures don’t like, and hide all traces of red, the color the creatures are attracted to, the creatures stay in the woods and leave the village alone. Toward the end of the film, one of the young people becomes very ill. He will die if he doesn’t get proper medicine. The elders of the village tell his fiancée, a blind girl, that she must go into the woods to the nearby town and get the medicine for him. Before they send her into the woods, her father lets her in on a secret. There are no creatures in the woods. The elders have been lying to the rest of the village; they were pretending to be the creatures themselves. Every time a sacrifice was thrown into the woods, an elder was responsible for removing it later. When the village inhabitants needed a more vivid reminder of the dangerous creatures, an elder would dress up as a creature and come into the village to scare anyone who wasn’t quick enough to find shelter. The fiancée goes through the woods to the nearby “town,” where the audience discovers that the setting is actually contemporary 20th century America. Since the girl is blind, she never discovers the full truth, that not only were the elders of the village lying about the creatures, but they were also lying about the time they were living in. The movie then reveals that the elders decided to create a false world for the young people in their village because they had each experienced tragic losses through crime in the “outside” world. They wanted to create a utopia of the “good old days,” and the only way to maintain that utopia was to use fear and deception.
Now, we get to the part where I stop spoiling the plot and tell you what fascinates me about this movie. It’s the question of how we get people to be obedient. I’m not a parent yet, but I have had a lot of experiences with children (and most recently, with my dog) that make this question relevant. Is it ever justifiable to use fear to inspire obedience?
The Bible says that perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18). Jesus says that if we love Him, we’ll obey Him (John 14). It seems that obedience should be inspired by love, not by fear.
And yet, in our world, we so often act like the elders in The Village, assuming that our children (or pets) need a healthy dose of fear to ensure their obedience.
In an ideal world, children would listen. They would take us at our word.
In an ideal world, we would listen to our heavenly Father. We would take Him at His word.
But in our fallen world, sometimes fear seems to help inspire obedience even more than love. Some examples:
I love my country. I am grateful for the authority figures put in place to keep this country safe. But when I’m driving, it is not my love of country that causes me to drive the speed limit. It’s my fear of getting caught and having to pay a heavy fine.
The kids I baby-sit for love their parents. But when they decide to behave, it is usually not because they want to express that love; it’s because they’re afraid of being punished if they don’t listen. It’s because they’re afraid of not receiving a reward for good behavior if they decide to misbehave.
When my dog is getting ready to run into the street, she won’t turn around and come to me if I call her with a loving tone. But when my tone rises sharply, and she knows I’m displeased with her, she immediately stops what she’s doing and slinks to me apologetically.
When I first became a Christian, a few of my behavior changes were rooted in genuine transformation through the Holy Spirit, inspired simply by love for God. But I remember many times when I wanted to do something that I knew was wrong (for example, using bad language), and I would have done it, except that I was with other people who weren’t Christians. And I knew that if my words and actions weren’t reflecting Christ, my unsaved friends would notice. It was my fear for their souls, more so than my love for God or even fear for my own soul, that motivated me to be obedient.
So in our fallen world, do we accept fear as a tactic for inspiring obedience? Do you think God ever uses or allows fear to motivate us when our love for Him is immature?
What about your children or pets? Do you expect them to listen to you just because they love you? Or do you give them fearful consequences to motivate them to listen? In short, do you find that honey or vinegar works best to inspire obedience? Or are there different seasons when one works better than the other?
P.S. If you haven’t noticed, each week we’re adding music to our blog playlist (located on the right side of every page of our blog) that fits with the week’s theme. This week, I was even able to find an old Adventures in Odyssey episode on our theme of obedience. Hope you enjoy!
If you follow us on Twitter, you probably know that we’re going through Isaiah 59 right now in our Tweets. (For those who aren’t following us on Twitter yet, find us at @insp_faith)
Something struck me as I was reading through Isaiah 59 this week. I call it the language of “them.”
What I mean by the language of “them” is my tendency to read certain passages in the Bible as if they relate to “them” and not to me, or us.
Let me give you an example:
Their cobwebs are useless for clothing;
they cannot cover themselves with what they make.
Their deeds are evil deeds,
and acts of violence are in their hands.
Their feet rush into sin;
they are swift to shed innocent blood.
Their thoughts are evil thoughts;
ruin and destruction mark their ways.
The way of peace they do not know;
there is no justice in their paths.
They have turned them into crooked roads;
no one who walks in them will know peace.
Isaiah 59:6-8
Dathan from The Ten Commandments, my stereotypical view of "the bad guys" in Scripture
Even though right before and after these passages, Isaiah switches from using “them” language to using “us” language, internally, I still stay in the mindset that all of this depressing talk about sin and injustice relates to “them” – the “wicked.” When I think of the wicked who rush into sin and shed innocent blood, I picture the bad guys in those old Bible movies, like Dathan from The Ten Commandments. The wicked people the Bible must be referring to are slightly overweight, stuck-up gluttons dressed in old-fashioned robes. With an image like that in my head, it’s hard to relate these passages to people in today’s world or to myself.
Even when I realize how silly my mental images are and make an effort to apply these Scriptures to contemporary times, it’s still hard to bring it home to me and people I know. It’s much easier to look at leaders like Hitler and Stalin who clearly shed a lot of innocent blood and are considered wicked by most people’s standards.
But me…I’m not so bad, right? My friends and family, none of them have committed murder or stolen from those who are impoverished.
Or so I think.
And so it appears, on the surface.
But when we’re all really honest about the world’s problems…when I realize that I take a long shower on days when I’m tired, with absolutely no thought to the resources I take for granted that people in other parts of the world are literally dying for…when I think about the products I use that at some point in their production are polluting groundwater and rivers…when I dwell on the methane that my trash is creating somewhere in the world after it leaves the garbage can in my kitchen, I realize that maybe I’m not quite as different from those “wicked” people in the Bible after all. Maybe I am contributing to violence and injustice, without even thinking about it.
The thing is, even though I know about these problems, even though I see injustice that I’m indirectly connected to every time I watch the news, I’m like the people in Isaiah 59. Verse 16 says, “Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey. The LORD looked and was displeased that there was no justice.” I am part of that crowd of sinners that is mankind, refusing to shun evil, lest I become a prey.
So what’s to be done about that? Am I saying that we should all withdraw from the world and its corrupt systems? Should I stop using water or using any material goods, knowing that my use of them is hurting somebody somewhere? Should I stop paying my taxes, knowing that some of the money is probably going toward systemic injustices, toward pollution, toward abortion?
I could be wrong about this, but I don’t think that’s what God is calling me and calling you to do. I don’t think we’re supposed to withdraw from the world. And I don’t think we’re supposed to be wracked with paralyzing guilt over all the evils we’re voluntarily or involuntarily committing.
The Good News is in Isaiah 59:17, “He saw that there was no one, He was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so His own arm worked salvation for Him, and His own righteousness sustained Him.”
Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, God is bringing redemption to us and to creation. Do I have an obligation to join with Him in that work of redemption? You bet. And that’s going to show up in small ways, through loving my neighbor, through recycling, through composting, through telling people about Jesus, through doing what I can do to fight injustice.
And it’s going to come through confession and repentance. Through realizing that even if I can’t change the world entirely and bring about God’s justice in my lifetime, I have a duty to intercede in prayer and to confess my sins and our corporate, societal sins with a contrite heart to the LORD.
I have full confidence that one day Jesus will physically return to the earth and restore everything that has gone wrong through sin and death. But until that day comes, let us identify ourselves with the “thems” of Scripture and realize the role we have to play in confession, repentance, and justice.
