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What arrogance!

Acts 4: 8 – 12

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 26 Mar, 2006

MY FRIEND was a convert to Buddhism from a vaguely Roman Catholic background. He told me that Christians are arrogant to claim that salvation comes only through Christ.

Well, the passage we just read declares,

^{ACTS 4:12} Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”

That sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Aren’t we effectively saying that we are superior to everyone else who doesn’t follow our way? Aren’t we dismissing all those good Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Animists and Hindus and devil–worshippers and Jainists and Zoroastrians, and... well, consider the numbers, who are we Christians to say all those people will be lost despite their best efforts?

Here’s a chance to think about this issue, to understand what the gospel is about, and why it was absolutely necessary that Jesus should die. Easter is on our doorstep: what better time is there to consider what the Gospel means in a world indifferent or hostile to Christianity?

So, let’s look at why we need salvation, let’s look at what is really necessary for salvation, and let’s see how Jesus fulfils those needs.

Why we need salvation

I told my Buddhist friend that he misunderstood why we need salvation or how it can be gained.

The general opinion — if people ever think about it — is that, sometime in the future, or after death, God will raise the good people and bring them to heaven, and the really bad people will just get missed in the process.

When you were a kid, did you chant that children’s rime —

One, two three, four, five, six, seven,

All good children go to heaven,

Penny in the water

Twopence in the sea,

Threepence on the railway

And I like me.

All good children go to heaven... No, they don’t. That’s the basic error. Hell will be full of good people, because heaven is not for the good, but for the saved.

Some years ago, there was a serious break of relationship between me and my father. It started with a disagreement between my wife and my father, but somehow I got dragged in and, when I didn’t back down, he didn’t speak to me for a long time.

Regardless of who was to blame, there is a basic principle here.

As a kid, I was taught not to pick my teeth with my knife, to use a handkerchief and not my arm, to say, “Please” and “Thank you.” And, even when my father wasn’t speaking to me, I kept doing those things.

But I wasn’t particularly welcome at home, because the relationship had broken down.

To my father’s credit, one day he rang me up and said, “Let’s have lunch.” But that’s another story.

Here’s the point: it doesn’t matter how well you keep doing the good you have learned to do if you don’t have a relationship with the God who saves.

Doing good doesn’t win points with God.

You don’t pick your teeth with a knife, because you can injure your mouth. You don’t murder because that injures society and ultimately you yourself get hurt. You say “Please” and “Thank you” because politeness oils the wheels of society and make your life more pleasant in the long run. And you don’t commit adultery because people who do eventually come undone, and the society they live in comes undone.

Good people get their reward in this life: saved people get the reward of the saved in the life to come.

So we need salvation because it restores our relationship with the God who made us.

Again, we are all lawbreakers in God’s sight, because we all break the most basic of laws.

^{DEUT 6:4} Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. ⁵ Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

It doesn’t even tell us to obey the LORD our God or to follow his ways. It tells us to love him with every gram of our being.

Love will result in obedience.

The simplest of commands is to love him; that is, to trust and to obey and to expect acceptance.

And not one single one of us has ever come close to doing that!

Furthermore the Bible also tells us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. Who does that? Even the good we do to others is generally tainted with selfishness.

When I offered to get Pepsi Maxes ® for the people in our section at work the other day, there was just that whiff of selfishness about it, that feeling that maybe I’ll be liked more. We all do it.

Christians are arrogant? What about people who think they are so good that God is obliged to save them? Aren’t they insufferably arrogant and blind to their own failings?

Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good: he came to make dead people live. That’s why we need salvation. We do not — I repeat it, we do not — have the means of salvation within ourselves or within our capacity. The best we can do is live as effectively as possible outside the realm of a relationship with God.

^{ACTS 4:12} Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”

Living by the rules might give you a good life — or at least, prevent the worst disasters that you could bring on yourself. Living by faith in Jesus will bring you salvation and eternal life. Never confuse the categories!

What is necessary for salvation?

Peter said,

“There is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”

Jesus said,

“Trust God, trust me, too.”

The key to salvation is Jesus. He said,

“I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except by me.”

What about the billions who have never even heard of him? Are they condemned because they have never heard? Or should we agree with theologians who say, “God will judge ignorance more lightly.”? After all, Paul says that God “winked at” the former ignorance of the Athenians, and said that pagans who don’t have the Law still have a moral conscience which may accuse them or may even excuse them.

If ignorance is bliss, why disturb the ignorance of those who haven’t heard? Why subject them to more stringent conditions?

Of course, one basic fact is that the gospel does bring liberation to people. Whole societies are transformed when they hear the message of Jesus.

I’ve told before how the gospel came to poor, drunken, failed people along one of the world’s great rivers. Trusting Jesus and trying to live for him changed one couple. As they changed, the entire community also had to change: you can’t ignore two people who are living differently. And, as the community changed, its aspirations changed. They had hope, they had goals for their children. They lobbied for a share in their nation’s wealth. The town, the city, the state they lived in, all began to change when Jesus came to town.

We can’t withhold the transforming power of the gospel from people who need to hear!

But the other fact is that it is just so hard to change our outlook apart from Jesus.

Jesus told this parable:

^{LUKE 18:10} “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹ The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: `God, I thank you that I am not like other men — robbers, evildoers, adulterers— or even like this tax collector. ¹² I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

¹³ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, `God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

¹⁴ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

What is required for justification before God? What will lead God to saying, “This person has no case to answer before me.”?

This tax collector knew exactly what he was and where his life was heading. He threw himself onto God’s mercy. He didn’t need to justify himself. All he wanted was to come back into fellowship with God.

That is repentance: he thought again about himself and his relationship with God and his fellow humans. And it is faith: he trusted God to receive him, sinner that he was.

It was a defective faith, because this man didn’t even know about Jesus. But it was a real faith, because it trusted without reservation.

We who know the gospel can go much further. We know that Jesus died, the just for the unjust. We know that he paid the price to set us free. We know that he cried on that cross,

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

• and, in that terrible moment, he experienced the entire weight of sin and guilt and separation so that we could come to our God by him.

The tax collector had to guess that God might be like that; he assumed that God would be gracious, because he had no definite evidence. We don’t guess: we know. We don’t assume, we are assured. We don’t have no definite evidence, because we have heard the truth: Christ died, Christ rose, Christ shall come again!

It is a rare person who doesn’t know the good news of Christ who would even dare to assume that God will be gracious and welcoming. The person who does not know Christ will nearly always try to please God by doing good, will nearly always try to lay a claim to God’s mercy by performing religious deeds, will nearly always assume that he or she comes to God with something of value to trade. Or they say the whole thing is nonsense, because that’s a game they don’t want to play.

But God isn’t in trade. He doesn’t do deals. He receives the repentant, and it takes a powerful message of suffering and sacrifice to bring one sinner to believe.

Don’t treat God as a whore who dispenses the best favours to those who pay the most. He is a gracious and loving Sovereign, who justifies the ungodly and redeems the lost.

Salvation needs repentance and it needs faith — faith in the God who is revealed in Jesus as he suffers and dies on a cross.

How Jesus fulfills those needs.

I guess that I have already said most of it.

In our abject failure, in our sin, we completely miss what God has for us. We don’t need self–help nearly as much as we need God.

A century ago, two sociologists, Max Weber and Richard Tawney, developed a thesis that Protestantism led directly to the capitalism which made England, Holland, North Germany and the United States so wealthy.

There are a lot of holes in the thesis. et there is also a kernel of truth, which keeps bringing sociologists back.

It’s not Protestants who created capitalism, it’s the children of Protestants. People who had the teachings of the Reformation but lacked the sense of intimacy with God; people whose parents knew grace and acceptance, but who didn’t personally know it themselves: they were the ones who set about creating and acquiring wealth so they could think they were blessed and accepted by God.

We all have an inbuilt passion to know God, and, if it is not satisfied the natural way, through discovering God and his grace, it will demand satisfaction in legalisms, in grace–killing theories and practices, in self–indulgences of all kinds.

Jesus makes all the difference.

Before I started theological college, I had a fairly lengthy period of depression. I can think of at least four fairly major issues in my life which contributed to this condition.

Many aspects of my faith got shaken up quite seriously at that time.

Did God love me? I didn‘t really know. Could God really love me, if I was feeling so defeated about life itself? Who could tell?

And then I saw Jesus. He is how God’s love is proved:

God commends his love to us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

I had all the proof I needed. Other religions may have a theory of God’s love: only Christ shows how real and sacrificial God’s love is.

I will never be a big fat capitalist boss. I miss out on 50% of that definition.

But I don’t need to succeed in business without really trying. I am accepted by God. Jesus proves it.

The Pharisees and Sadducees thought that God blessed the wealthy. Jesus proves otherwise:

^{LUKE 4:18} “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to release the oppressed,

¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

Without Jesus, you might just possibly discover the reality of God. But without Jesus, it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. There is no guide and there is never an assurance.

CONCLUSION

The death and resurrection of Jesus is absolutely central to the good news of salvation. There is only one sure and solid name on which to base our hope.

As the apostles said,

^{ACTS 4:12} Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”

When we proclaim Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the Life, we don’t set ourselves up to judge others who don’t know or understand about Jesus himself. They can take that up with God.

What we are doing is saying,

“Jesus is what it is all about. He is the source of salvation, the perfect demonstration of God’s redeeming love, he is the mould and pattern for knowing acceptance by God.”

Don’t be ashamed of the gospel: it is truly good news. Don’t let the world’s insults deter you. Jesus is the name which brings salvation.

His blood still avails for me, and it will never lose its power! AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2006. 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.)