Discovering God -- introduction

I Tim 4: 1 – 15

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 08 Aug, 2004

OVER THE next few weeks, we will look at how to know God. Today I will look at what we need to know in preparation. Next week, we overview the series, and the week after, it starts.

When I was in my teens, people understood enough of the gospel that it was fairly easy to get responses. Today, we have to start much further back. People have only the most rudimentary understanding about who God is and what it means to know him.
So use today as a primer, an introduction so that you know what is going on, and so that you can feel confident, perhaps to invite a friend to the services over coming weeks for classes on finding out about God.

FEARS ABOUT “GOD TALK”
Today, many people are afraid of talk about God. There are several reasons for this fear.

First, many people are afraid that getting close to God will expose their sin and rebellion against him. I know a woman who talks about God, but always at a distance. As far as I can see, the problem is fairly simple. She is living with a chap but not married to him, and she knows that getting close to God has a moral dimension. She will have to deal with that relationship, and I think she is afraid of losing something valuable if she does. So she never gets too close to God.

  Second, people today genuinely don’t know where to start with finding out about God. In the 19th Century, it was a lot easier. My great grandfather was an Englishman who left Cambridgeshire to go to the goldfields as a tailor. He was no Christian — in fact, he hated what he had seen of Christianity in his home village where the local Vicar was an angry, abusive man.
  But he knew basically what God is like and, when the Primitive Methodists came and preached on the verandah of the pub where he was staying, Sam Taylor — my great grandfather — was converted on the spot, and lived as a Christian for the rest of his life.
  Today, people don’t know what to make of the various messages they hear about God, so they decide to forget about the whole thing. They don’t know if they are going to hear about the real God, or if they are going to hear about the false gods of cults like the Jonestown Cult which committed mass suicide. They don’t understand how to compare the gods of the Hindus with Allah in the Qur’an.
  When people are confused, they generally avoid decisions.

  The third problem people have today is that they don’t like religious people.
  There have always been angry or abusive Christians, and Muslims and Jews — and people in general. That’s life. But the world at large expects better of people with a religion.
  I remember the angry nuns at the Catholic School next to my grandparents’ place. I don’t remember even hearing the nice ones with gentle spirits, though I’m sure they existed. You always notice the nasty ones.
  Also, there are always people who use religion to justify violence or aggression or oppression. Sometimes it seems that the most evil people are the most religious.

Paul wrote to Timothy that this kind of thing would happen. People abandon the faith, people follow demonic spirits, people are hypocrites.

41The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. 2Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.

But there are other factors. There’s the whole impact of how Christians are presented in the media. It is worse for Christians than most others, because Seven National News would never cut a Hindu spokesperson short for fear of being offensive, but they don’t worry so much about offending Christians.

  And here’s what happens. The news team approaches the Archbishop of Woop Woop for a Christian view on Capital punishment. The Archbishop says, “The Bible has a place for capital punishment, but we have to remember that mercy and grace are also important Judaeo–Christian virtues, so perhaps capital punishment should only ever be the very last resort.”
  But here’s how it comes out on the news report.
  “Commonwealth News asked Archbishop Hatch for a Christian view on Capital punishment.”
  Then there’s a lap dissolve to the Archbishop saying, “The Bible has a place for capital punishment.”
  Then the camera cuts back to the interviewer saying, “The Archbishop added comments on the importance of mercy.”

But you never hear the Archbishop saying that, you only hear it from the journalist. So your mind knows that the Archbishop talked about both capital punishment and mercy, but your feelings say, “Archbishop means punishment; journalist means grace.”

So we get a very distorted view of what religion is about. Add the facts that many people think that all religions are basically alike and that hardly anyone has a sense of history, and it’s no wonder that our world is ignorant of and afraid of anything to do with God.
To sum up so far, then, people are afraid of the moral demands of getting involved with God, People are afraid of being led astray because they know they are ignorant in such matters. And people have a distorted view of anyone religious — especially of Christians.

THE THREE “Rs” OF RELIGION
I’ve been using the term “religion” to describe the belief systems of people who believe in God, but I really want to focus it now on those belief and behaviour systems which do not have a central place for Jesus.

The result of people not wanting to get too close to God is that they are torn. In part, people are desperate for real relationship with God; on the other, they want to keep him at arm’s length. This is why people like a religious system rather than a real encounter with God. They take one of the three basics of all religious systems and try to find God through it.

The basics of religious systems are Rules, Rituals and Rumination. I had to cheat a bit to make it Three Rs.

Each of these is a throwback to childish ways. Psychologists call them infantile.

It all goes back to what made you feel happy and safe as a small child — or to what made you feel unhappy and unsafe.

Some people think they will find God through Keeping Rules. It’s called legalism.
It may be that, when you were a small child, you realised that breaking the rules got you offside with Daddy and Mummy. Your parents became angry, and didn’t really become happy again until you were keeping the rules. People from such a background are likely to feel that keeping the rules is the way to keep God from getting angry and cutting them off.

Paul describes this kind of teaching:

3They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth.

Of course, it is vital to live a godly, righteous life, but that’s different from knowing God.
I could write a list of things I want done, and someone who never met me or never knew me in any way could find that list and do everything on it, but they would not know me any better when they finished than they did when they started. It’s the same with God. No matter how good the rules are, no matter how well you keep them, that in itself doesn’t help you to know God.

  Then there are Rituals. Small children engage in ritualistic behaviours to make themselves feel better. You might still do something you did when you were very small. For example, many people rock themselves to sleep just as they did when they were little, or they hug themselves when they feel in need of comfort.
  Since I was little I have always rubbed my feet together or rubbed them on the bedding before I felt ready to sleep.
  But many people are entirely dependent on their rituals. It’s rather like practising magic.

I knew a chap who felt really bad if he ever missed reading his Bible or praying. He would interrupt important events so that he could do that reading and praying. For him, I'm sure that the ritual of reading and praying was more important than the relationship with God that we maintain and develop through our Bible reading and prayer. He felt out of control of his life if he didn’t do those things.

Some religions have so many requirements about ritual that people suddenly feel naked and exposed if you try to get them free from their religion.
Paul writes,

7Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly. 8For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

Once again, you can tie yourself increasingly tightly in knots of ritual, but it doesn’t bring you any nearer God.

Finally, there’s Rumination. As I said, I had to push things a little to make them fit. But some people get into meditation, into “chewing over” certain thoughts or feelings, in the hope of finding God inside themselves. They hope to produce good feelings or sensations and find God in there.
Of course we have all heard of people who were paranoid schizophrenics who thought that some of the voices they heard were the voice of God. But who else would accept that?

Our thoughts are powerful. Most of us have had the experience of dreams so real that they have some real physical effects on us as though what we dreamt had really happened.

Then there is the documented ability that some people have to change their blood pressure merely by thinking about it. So we can change our feelings and sensations by meditation, but what does that really mean about God?
I don’t knock meditation. The Bible tells us to meditate on the Law of the Lord day and night. But it’s God’s word, not our inner feelings, which gives us a true sense of God as we meditate.

The point is that none of the three major ways people follow when they want to find God apart from the Bible actually works.
We need to discourage these dead–end efforts to find God.

THE TRUE WORD
What this brings us to is that we can’t really find God through the methods that people normally use as their way to find him. We need some revelation of God.
But what is the way ahead for revealed religion?

There are three major world religions with their own book: Buddhism, Islam and Christianity.

  Buddhism isn’t really a contender in the “Getting to know God” stakes. Buddhism is agnostic. It doesn’t know if there is a God or not. It is about right behaviour. It sensibly recognises that right behaviour is more than keeping rules, that it has to consider attitudes and motives. But all of that works whether or not there is a God.
  In Cambodia, there was a cult of the God–king — devaraja was the term, where deva means God and raja means king. When Buddhism came, it changed. It didn’t mention God anymore. The cult became a buddharaja cult, where the King was seen as the embodiment of Buddhist values.
  Buddhism has no need of a god.

Islam has its Qur’an, written around 650–700 AD.
Although it claims to be the fulfilment of both Judaism and Christianity, Islam rejects the Old and New Testaments as corrupt and unreliable. The Qur'an retells several Old Testament and New Testament stories in altered form. Although the Bible is much closer in time to these events than the Qur'an is, and although many of the Bible’s stories claim to be eyewitness accounts, Islam claims that its version is right, because God revealed it to Mahomet.

On the other hand, the Old and New Testaments taken together are the Christian scriptures, and they do not rely on a claim to authority like the Qur’an does.
At several places the Bible calls on readers to consider the evidence and make up their minds.

Come now, let us reason together...
says God.

Paul writes,

If Christ is not risen, your faith is empty and you are still in your sins.

We need to think over the evidence, and not to leave our brains outside when we come to church.

The simple fact is that only the Judaeo–Christian faith and Islam really have books which claim to reveal God and to be based on God’s dealings in history. One appeals to its own authority. It says, “You must believe me because I am what you must believe.” The other says, “Look at the evidence and make up your mind.”

Both claim an historical basis. Either one is right and one wrong, or both are wrong.
Everyone must make up his or her mind.

But the Bible also encourages us to believe that we will truly meet God in its pages and in the person of Jesus our Lord, the living Word of God.
It says,

9This is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance 10(and for this we labour and strive), that we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, and especially of those who believe.

My encouragement to us all today is to think and pray, and invite a friend to come next week and for the next several weeks, as we go on that adventure of discovering God.

If you believe and I believe
And we together strive
The Holy Spirit will come down
And Marrickville will revive.

May it be so. AMENN

© Peter R. Green 2004. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)