Living Securely

Micah 5: 2 – 5

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 15 Sep, 2007

ONE OF God’s primary concerns for his people is that they should live securely, in freedom and equality, and that has also been a major Baptist concern.

Wasn’t it funny, when the Chaser team drove fake Canadian cars right through APEC security? Even their Usama bin Laden look–alike got through. And our pompous Police Minister saw nothing funny. It was funny because it pricked hot air balloons. It was funny because not even $15.7 million dollars per delegate kept a fake bin Laden outside walking distance of the US President’s hotel. It was funny because, with all the security all the inconvenience, and all the uncounted losses to businesses, it proved it was all pomp and ceremony, all hollow boasts, all the abuse of power because they could do it.

We can never achieve security by imposing tougher controls. As the Psalmist says,

^{PSA 20:7} Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.

Sydney was Chariot City last week!

John Howard said all this nonsense was necessary because of violent protesters. No! Violent protesters were necessary because of all that security nonsense. When people are not heard, when they are repelled from the forums and rebuked for shouting, they scream until someone hears.

I don’t condone violence, but it is plain that what we do to gag people is a major cause of violent protest.

When the first Baptists apeared in the early 1600s, there was scant security for ordinary people. If you rejected the Church of England, you were considered a dangerous political revolutionary, a snake in the farmyard. They struck first and asked questions later. Many were imprisoned, many died.

Within 30 years of the Baptists arriving on the scene, there was a Catholic Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, there was a civil war, and the King was executed.

In the midst of this turmoil, Baptists stood for a different way. They sought peace, through valuing individuals, not suppressing them.

I told you last week about the Baptist, Thomas Helwys, and his tract, The Mistery of Iniquity. He wrote that no one, neither King nor bishop, had the right to coerce anyone’s conscience, whether that person was a Christian, a Jew, a Turk or of no religion at all.

At the time, it was the most radical tract ever written in English.

We Baptists believe that every person is valuable and deserves a hearing.

We didn’t write that down and adopt it at an Assembly. It was refined over the years, as Baptists worked out exactly what it is that makes us what we are.

Some say there are five basic Baptist convictions, some say there are four. I’ve even heard of seven or eight.

But they all boil down to three principles which sum them all up.

We Baptists believe in free and equal access to God the Father, we believe in free and equal access to God’s Word, and we believe in a free and equal society.

That doesn’t mean that those are our only beliefs. We affirm the basic facts of historic Christianity. We believe in God the heavenly Father. We believe in Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God, come to us by virgin birth. We believe in the Holy Spirit, sent to us by God the Father through the Son so that we may be born again of water and of the Spirit. We believe in the Church of God, bought and purified through the Blood of Jesus, who died on the cross and rose bodily from the dead. And we believe that he will come again one day to reward those who come after him by faith and to judge those who have refused to believe.

But the things which make us Baptists different are those three basics:

Free and Equal Access to God

 Before the Reformation, the idea grew of many mediators between God and us. But the Bible says,

There is one mediator between God and man, the man, Christ Jesus.

Before the Reformation, there was Mary, the saints, the martyrs, the Pope, the Cardinals and other bishops and even the parish priest — layer upon layer of intermediaries. No ordinary Christian believed he had direct access to God the Father.

If you wanted God to work in a situation you might ask Mary to intercede with Jesus so that he would in turn intercede with God the Father. Or if everything else had failed, you could pray to St Jude, the Patron Saint of Lost Causes.

But forget about praying at all unless your parish priest had heard your confession and you had done everything he told you to do. And you couldn’t even be heard by the priest unless the Bishop had confirmed you, and the Bishop wouldn’t confirm you unless you were baptised and in communion with the Pope.

It all started as a way of keeping heretics from infiltrating the church, but it became a system of keeping people from God.

I have read attacks on Christianity in the newspaper. So many say that all religion — and Christianity in particular — is about controlling people by claiming to control access to God.

I can’t believe that they don’t know that this battle was fought 500 years ago, and that Baptists were among the most radical opponents of the old idea that all these layers existed between the believer and God.

When we say that every believer has free and equal access to God, we are saying that, through faith in Jesus, there is one direct channel, where no one oelse can stand in the way.

Jesus said,

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.

Jesus proclaims himself the sole access to God, so he rules out all priestcraft, rules out all efforts to tame people through fear of exclusion from God.

When they tell you, “Do as I say, or God will reject you,” laugh with scorn in their face!

Quote this scripture:

^{ROM 8:38} For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹ neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

No human can keep you from God, unless you give away the right of access.

But there is more to this.

If we believe that this is so, then we must resist all who would abuse God to control us. If a politician says, “You have to vote for my party, because we are on God’s side,”  that politician is saying, “If you don’t vote for us, you are against God.” That is the same as saying, “Our Party controls access to God.” That is both blasphemy and heresy, and we must fight it with our utmost ability.,

If someone tells you that Christians must vote a certain way or buy a certain product or only watch certain programs or marry or not marry because not doing what that person says will cut you off from God, you must reject those lies and fight against them.

I am not saying, that you should not heed the wisdom of others who may tell you you will damage yourself if you follow or feed immorality or disoobedience. What I mean is that your access to God does not depend on conforming to someone else’s rules and regulations, Jesus controls the way — he is the way. Listen to him and obey him!

If you believe in free and equal access to God, you will be vigilant against all abuse of power in the name of God, whether it is used against you or against others.
 

Free and equal access to God’s Word

The second area of distinctive Baptist thought is that we believe that all believers have free and equal rights of access to the Bible.

I read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at University. It’s about pilgrims going from London to Canterbury to visit the tomb of Thomas Beckett, who was murdered in the Cathedral.

As Pilgrims, they are all theoretically Christians. But Chaucer pokes a bit of fun at them. One is a Pardoner who sells relics to people, but really most of what is in his bag are pig’s bones. One of them can say, “In Principio” very accurately  — the opening words of John’s Gospel. But he doesn’t really understand what he is saying. Another belches and quotes a line from a Psalm in Latin, which is not really about belching, but about good things coming from a believer’s heart. Chaucer is quietly saying, “They hear the Bible, but do they understand it?”

And that was the problem. People heard the Bible read in Latin, but hardly knew what it was about. Only the priests really had access to the Word of God, and only if they understood Latin.

At the Reformation, that all changed. Now they had the Bible in English or German or French — whatever was the local language.

Only it was still the ministers and pastors who read it and explained it and interpreted it — educated men.

Of course, people began to read the Bible — it was now the Christian’s devotional book. But that was unofficial and controlled by the great theological teachers of the period.

It was among Baptists that the idea first took hold that every believer is competent to read and understand the Bible, and that every believer has a duty to share with others what they find in that book.

In early Baptist services, often four men preached, one after the other, on a Sunday afternoon when the church came together.

The idea was that all believers had to read and interpret the Bible, and share it with one another. They had to judge what each said, to see whether it was from God or not.

This is a powerful religious idea, but think of the implications.

It means that every believer must have an opportunity to learn to read. It means that every believer should know a bit about theology and history and how to interpret a text.

It means that every believer must learn to be articulate, and able to give a clear reason for his or her faith.

And, if this applies to believers, it also applies to those who may yet become believers.

The idea of free and equal access to God’s Word implies a literate, articulate, informed society. It implies that rulers — Church or State — have to stand back a little and allow these things to happen, have to take risks.

It also implies that Bibles must be widely available and that other literature will be needed as Christians learn everything they need to learn so as to be informed Christians.

It is quite a revolutionary view, because it has to allow for people to be wrong, and to argue passionately for incorrect ideas — because there may even be a kernel of truth embedded in a heresy.

It doesn’t mean, of course, that a congregation must accept uncritically what is said. It may finally need to break fellowship with someone who is obstinately and disruptively wrong–headed. But it should mean pretty tolerant fellowships, which look for a person’s genuine faith before they look at his current ideas. Free and equal access to God’s Word is a key plank in our agenda.
 

A Free and Equal Society.

All of this adds up to a free and equal society. If people are free to approach God their own way — even if they rest on a false hope; and if people are free to read, interpret and apply God’s Word without fear of coercion or abuse, that adds up to an open society. It is an approach to society which says, “The Government can’t control how I relate to God, the official Church can’t control how I relate to God, and I am free to respond to the gospel or to reject it, I am free to exercise my conscience as long as I don’t harm others in the process. I am free before God and I am free before my society. I have equal rights before God and I have equal rights in society. I am responsible before God as an adult, able to make my own decisions, and I am responsible within my society as an adult, able to make my own decisions.”

One of the things people fear about the church is that we will take their freedoms from them, that we will set an all–powerful hierarchy over them. I am sure that there are Christians who would love to do just that.

We as Baptists must never join them. People can only live securely when they know that they will be treated no differently from anyone else, that Presidents and paupers stand equally before the Judgment seat of Christ and the judge in the local court.
 

How should this play out?

It is not surprising that Martin Luther King was the great leader of the Civil Rights movement in the US. He was a Baptist who understood Baptist principles. When he spoke in Washington, when he cried out,

Free at last!
Free at last!
Praise God Almighty,
I’m free at last!

— he wasn’t speaking out of a Marxist textbook, but out of the Word of God and out of having lived with oppressed people and as one of them. Just like those first Baptists 500 years ago. It was a song from the Black people of America as they longed for that day when their hopes would be fulfilled and the Glory of God would shine forever in this world.

Doesn’t it call for us to stand for freedom and equality in our churches? Doesn’t it call for us to stand for freedom and equality in Australia?

Doesn’t it call for us to stand shoulder–to–shoulder with the Lord who preached,

^{LK 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.”

You can’t get much more freedom and equality than that!

If we want a secure society, we will want a society where every person’s right to free and equal access to God, and free and equal access to his word is guaranteed, because that is the basis of a free and equal society.

Let’s seek to put these principles into practice.    AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2007. 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.)