Kingdom and culture

2 Kings 5: 1 – 19a

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday evening, 2 Dec, 2007

THE STORY of Naaman, the Syrian leper, contains a fascinating throw–away conversation which speaks to us of our lives as Christians in a non–Christian world

A Chinese friend asked me during the week about the conflict she feels between wanting to come to Christ, and, on the other hand, wanting to respect and honour her family and her family’s culture. It is an acute pain for many Chinese. But, in a way, the issue confronts us all, and it has never been entirely resolved for us.

In fact, as I said to my friend, one issue is that our cultures tend to bind us to our past and to the people of our history; it’s just that people from Asian cultures are inclined to be bound to devotion to their ancestors while people from Western cultures are inclined to be bound by anger against their ancestors.

I believe that the reason is that we would all love a rule which says, “Do this, do that, and God will be pleased.” But every situation is a little different, and we can really only look at the principles and decide for ourselves how to put those principles into practice.

Do you remember that Kenny Rogers song about the gambler? He says,

You’ve got to know when to hold them
Know when to fold them,
Know when to walk away
And know when to run...

Life is a learning experience, and we have to work out the subtleties if we want to survive.

But it is not all up in the air; it isn’t all woolly and diffuse. There are some very clear principles, but we struggle to know how to work those principles out in practice.

I want to look at three principles tonight:

Separation to God.

I’ve mentioned many times how preachers when I was a teenager used to warn us,

Come out from among them and be separate.

It is good advice, but they didn’t always make it very clear that we are in the first place to be separate to God. Often is was little more than separation from pubs, dances, and brightly-coloured socks.

In the Ten Commandments, in Exodus 20, God says,

 ^{EX 20:2} “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

  ^{EX 20:3} “You shall have no other gods before me.

  ^{EX 20:4} “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. ⁵ You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, ⁶ but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

This is very clear. It places the focus entirely on God. He will not tolerate any other god beside him, for a very simple reason, that such so–called gods are demonic. The God who brings his people out of bondage and slavery does not want us to go back into another kind of bondage and slavery.

Similarly, God says to Israel in Deuteronomy 6: 4,5,

Hear, O Israel!

The Lord your God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength.

The more we obey that command, the less opportunity we will have to turn aside after other gods.

What God seeks from us is focus. As James reminds anyone seeking God’s blessing:

⁶ But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. ⁷ That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; ⁸ he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.

It does not mean that we won’t question how God can possibly give what we ask. It’s about putting our belief into action, and that is something we can only do through active trust, through focused trust. So you don’t ask God — and then buy a good luck charm or run from advisor to advisor looking for a quick fix. I don’t deny that God speaks through our brothers and sisters in Christ. I don’t deny that we can all benefit from skilled help. But it’s one thing to make wise use of counsel and and another merely to run around in a panic.

Wise counsel still keeps the focus on God. But if you lose the focus, you will merely flap.

So God’s first principle in everything is separation: separation to himself.

In the ancient Semitic inscriptions, the word for “holy” is sometimes used of religious prostitutes. It doesn’t mean that they are good or spiritual, it just means that they are separated to their god or goddess.

We could say the same about our communion glasses. They aren’t morally notable glasses, they don’t give to the poor or work for justice; but they are “holy” because they are set aside entirely for worship. If we were having a party and needed shot glasses for whiskey — not very likely in a Baptist Church — we wouldn’t pull those glasses out!

In the Bible, the ancient Israelites realised that God himself is separate from the world, separate to his own purposes, and separate for goodness. So holiness grew from the plain idea of separation to God into separation to God so that we can display his character and quality.

God says

You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord, am holy.

Separation from the world

We have seen that God wants us separate to himself, and that also means separation from the world.

Jesus died. He was cut off and separated from the world. He allowed the world to disown him — to reject him — as he went to the cross and suffered and died for us.

This week, a gentleman with an Indian accent phoned to speak to the pastor. “Do you have a Telstra phone account?” he asked. I said we didn’t. “What firm do you represented?” I asked — but he didn’t answer. “Do you have an Optus account, then?” he asked. “No.” I replied. Again, I asked him what company he was with, but he didn’t answer. So I said, “Obviously you aren’t from either Telstra or Optus. What company do you represent?”

He kept asking what company our account was with, and I asked again what company he was with. I wasn’t doing things the way he expected. He got quite angry. “My God, you are a...” he shouted. I didn’t hear what it was he called me, because he hung up in my ear.

The world demands that we play its game, and gets angry and aggressive if we don’t.

The world expected Jesus to play its game, and raged against him when he didn’t.

But he went all the way. You can’t pull away just a bit from the world: you will end up going back.

Jesus went to the cross — no return. That’s what the cross is like. And he told us to take up the cross and follow him. That is a no–returns choice. It separates us from the world and separates us to God in a single action, as we repent and turn to God through faith in Jesus.

It’s like up the north coast, around Nimbin, the grass capital of the north. People went there to try to get out of the world system. They listened to Timothy Leary who said, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

Some of the most business–oriented people in Australia are from up that way now. They didn’t free themselves from the world. They stayed in the world and smoked dope.

But the world faces judgment. It faces destruction. You read the book of Revelation, one third of the earth burnt up, people gnawing their tongues in agony and despair. Read what Jesus says in Matthew 24:

⁶ You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. ⁷ Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

This is not a world moving towards perfection. This is not a world where, in the long run, everything will pan out.

We are on the eve of destruction, and it is for our salvation that we must separate from the world. We either sink with it, or, through faith in Christ, we survive its end.

I am not talking about going into a monastery or switching your brain off.

God created knowledge: he has no interest in cutting us off from knowledge. The father of all has no plan to destroy our family relationships or to make us ignorant of our society. He doesn’t object to our having fun. He is not interested in seeing us perish. He has a plan to keep us from being dragged down with any of our worldly ties when the world meets its end. He wants to save us from being so tied up with pleasure that we don’t notice that the end is upon us.

Our God is a loving God, and he wants us to experience his goodness.

That is where our passage about Naaman the Leper comes in.

After all God’s blessings, after experiencing healing of leprosy which could only have come from God, Naaman was a transformed man. He knew, he understood, that God had signally blessed him. He was not going to turn his back on God.

He said,

“Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel...”

But he had a problem. His pagan culture expected him to perform certain rituals which had a religious aspect. He said to Elisha,

^{2KI 5:17} “...your servant will never again make burnt offerings and sacrifices to any other god but the LORD. ¹⁸ But may the LORD forgive your servant for this one thing: When my master enters the temple of Rimmon to bow down and he is leaning on my arm and I bow there also — when I bow down in the temple of Rimmon, may the LORD forgive your servant for this.”

Here’s the interesting thing. In v 19, we read,

“Go in peace,” Elisha said.

Effectively, he tells Naaman, “Don’t let it worry you,”

God knows that in difficult situations, we can walk a fine line between obedience and compromise. It is vital that Naaman should truly worship God, but his social environment requires him to go through the motions sometimes to support his master.

Wherever possible, avoid compromise — but each of us has to make a decision about what we can and what we can’t agree to.

It’s not easy, but if our true goal is to worship God above all, all the rest will fit into place.

But you must notice that the first step for Naaman was to surrender to God and decide to worship him above all. Once that basic issue was sorted out, the rest would work out in its proper time.

Cultural Sensitivity

This brings us to the issue of cultural sensitivity.

We Baptists come from a tradition of very little compromise, and that is good. Many Baptists and others from the radical side of the Reformation suffered and even died for refusing to give in to the ways of their world. If our spiritual ancestors hadn’t stood for their rights to follow closely in what the Bible says, we would have disappeared and there would have been less freedom in our world.

But not everyone has the light from the Bible that we have. Some may be trapped in a culture that we could not compromise with.

For example, we Baptists have resisted some aspects of Catholic worship which easily fall into idolatry. This was one of the great issues in the Reformation.

But most Catholics don’t see the issue the way we do. It isn’t idolatry in their eyes. They show respect to saints, but most know that they must worship only God through Jesus, just like we do.

We could be very critical and judgmental, but that helps no one.

Understand the culture people are from and the issues that they face. Don’t just to react without thinking.

I knew a Chinese lady many years ago who had spoken to another pastor about being a Christian. He had told her to get rid of everything associated with her past idolatry. He was so insistent, that she got rid of everything, including family photos. When she talked about worshipping her ancestors, the pastor didn’t know that she merely wanted to remember them and the good they had done. There’s nothing wrong with that. But, to treat them as equal to God, to worship in a spiritual sense, is certainly wrong.

He hadn’t understood the cultural issues.

We need to understand, and not try to force other people to do things the way we would.

Conclusion

It is not easy to live in this world. We have to make many decisions.

The basic decision we have to make is to put Jesus first, to seek first the Kingdom of God, to put the focus on him.

Once we get that right, most of the other things will fall into their right places.

In other words, we separate ourselves to God by repentance and by our decision to place our trust in him.

In a parallel way, we are separated from the world by our choice to follow Jesus and go the way of the cross.

Once we get those things sorted, the final issues become much easier to work out. We can decide what in our culture we can hang onto and what we must cut ourselves free from.

While we are on the outside looking in, it always seems too hard, even though we don’t face anything like Jesus did on the cross.

But never forget what the Bible says,

^{ROM 12:1} Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God — this is your spiritual act of worship. ² Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will.

When we truly put Jesus first, the things which seemed so hard to give up no longer seem a trouble, because we discover how good, pleasing and perfect God’s will is.

I urge you to put Jesus first, to dissociate yourself from the patterns of the world you belong to, and to let the Holy Spirit transform your mind. You’ll find it’s the greatest move you can make!

© 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.)