CYPRESSWOOD CHURCH OF CHRIST

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June 6, 2010

 CONTINUE TO PRAY FOR:

God’s will for our congregation Various friends, relatives and co-workers

Our nation, military and leaders Peace

GOD’S PEOPLE AND CULTURE

“Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’”

Throughout Bible history, the problem that God’s people faced was how to deal with the culture they lived in, and at times created. God told Israel not to intermarry with the people of Canaan, something they eventually ignored. As foreign idols and ideas became more prominent, the nation shrank. By the time of Christ, various groups attempted to deal with culture in a number of ways.

The Pharisees saw the need to clean up society (1). They were the “holy” ones who lived by the rules and traditions of years of study. If the people would live by their rules, follow their directions, then they would be considered God’s people. Otherwise the Pharisees would see them as scum, outcasts, and not worthy of God. Not all Pharisees saw it this way, but most did. Some were more extreme than others and so they were divided into about seven different groups. One group called the bleeding Pharisees would keep their heads down so as not to look at a woman; needless to say they ran into things. The Pharisees were Bible believers, believing in angels and the resurrection, but they also added their own traditions to scripture, attempting to live more accurately the way God wanted.

 One can understand their concern, considering their history. Their ancestors rejected the law of God and did their own thing to their own destruction. Today, we have Pharisees who want us to live according to their rules, equating them with scripture. Their fear is that we will fall away, destroy the church, and go off into apostasy if we do not live according to their traditions. Their emphasis is often on saying the right thing in the right way, following forms that have been developed over the last one hundred years, using the right translation, and never, ever questioning any of this.

The above groups had difficulty interacting with culture in general. They rejected anyone who did not see things their way, even Jesus. If people did not agree with them, they were out of fellowship with them. Jesus seems to indicate that they made a great effort to convert just one so as to make them just like themselves, eventually leading to a dangerous situation for that individual (see Matthew 23:15). Jesus challenged them and they crucified Him.

The second group, though not mentioned in scripture, were the Essenes, better known to us as the Dead Sea Scrolls people. They were so disgusted with culture and society that they left and went out into the desert to wait for the coming Messiah. They practiced their ideas so that they were pure, not touched by a corrupt society. We have no idea whether Jesus ever had contact with them. They were destroyed by Rome in 70 A.D.

Throughout church history, there were those who chose to withdraw from society. Monks were among those who went out into deserted places and established various monasteries to study, pray, and focus on God through meditation. While this might be valuable to a point, and for an individual, it did not influence society in any particular way. The Gnostics might have been a part of this idea, at least to a point. Secret rituals and words were a part of their activity. We do not see today such an extreme but some congregations have withdrawn from society to the point that they offer nothing to their community. They grow old and die.

 A third group were the militant Zealots. They were the revolutionaries who were determined to rebel against Rome, overthrow its power, and restore Israel to its former glory. They were assassins and angry. No one was safe when they were around because they saw any who did not follow them as collaborators with Rome. Yet Jesus had an impact on one of them, Simon the Zealot.

Today we might see this group in what some have called the Christian Identity Movement. It is not Christian! They ignore the law when convenient, are racist, hateful, anti-Semitic, and consider anyone not with them as enemies. They are enemies of the state. They preach hatred, and while acknowledging Jesus, they hate Jews. One wonders how they get around the fact that Jesus was a Jew, unless they just deny it. They have little contact with society in any positive way.

 The fourth group are the Sadducees, Herodians, and to some extent, the Samaritans. These are the compromisers. They worked with the political powers to develop a better society. The Sadducees did not believe in angels or the resurrection and the Samaritans only accept their version of the first five books of the Old Testament. They accepted Greek and Roman ideas including public baths, food, and other cultural ideas. There idea was that if one couldn’t beat them, join them.

 We see this today from both the right and left, or from conservatives and liberals. They align with a certain political party and advocate ideas and policies that sound more like those parties than like scripture. At times, it is difficult to separate them. Too often, they put their trust in the right party and the right person rather than in God, and are often disappointed when those people fail. They equate policies to scripture and claim that it is what God wants (2). We do gravitate to the political group that we think best represents our views, and sometimes it is difficult to separate our political and religious views.

 A fifth group that was a part of the first century was that of Rome. Since it ruled Israel, and because Jesus came in contact with Romans, it is something that must be considered. The pagan ideas came with the Romans though Israel had Persian and Greek ideas over a five hundred year period. Many Jews saw this as a danger but there were Romans who were influenced by the God of Israel as well. For the most part, Rome was in the background during Jesus’ lifetime, which we cannot ignore. It would be later that Rome would become more hostile to Christianity.

 “We know that Jesus’ exclusive claim to make Israel’s exclusive God known infuriated the Pharisees and entertained the Sadducees. We know that Rome winked at this strange Jewish religion and gave Israel special permission to maintain their exclusive religious beliefs. Yet, when the early church began, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to spread into the religiously pluralistic world of the Roman Empire, the exclusive declaration ‘Jesus is Lord’ (and Caesar is not) became dangerous to your Christ-following health. ‘Jesus is Lord’ infuriated Rome. As N. T. Wright has pointed out: the most advanced religion in the world and the most advanced political system in the world conspired together to stamp out the exclusivity of Jesus the Christ” (3).

 Back in the 1930s, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book called Christ and Culture. In it he asked how we can present Christ to our culture. He looked at the ideas of taking Christ out of culture, fighting against culture, becoming part of culture, being transformed by culture or transforming culture in Christ. That challenge remains today. What is called The Emergent Church today are people who are trying to communicate with culture just like Niebuhr (4). Timothy Keller is a preacher in a growing New York City church who approaches culture from two aspects. He approaches those who have grown up with the Bible by speaking about sin and the sacrifice of Jesus. But he also realizes that the postmoderns in New York have not grown up with scripture, so he approaches them by emphasizing what they have made as idols, such as sex, money, etc. (5).

 There is one more group we did not mention. We have talked about radical living, that is, living like Jesus. We should show God’s love for people by loving people, that is, by seeking what is best for them even if it means dying for them. Paul Copan suggests that we build relationships and in and through them, we present Jesus Christ (6). Mosab Hassan Yousef was given a Bible by a British visitor to Israel, read about Jesus’ sermon on the Mount, and about loving one’s enemies, and was shocked by such an attitude. After about six years of study, he was baptized into Christ (7). Christianity spread across the world, east and west, influences peoples and nations, preaching Jesus crucified and raised, and living radically from the pagan societies they lived in (8)

 We can affect culture by being transformed ourselves. It is our choice. Which group do we belong to? It can be a challenge to change from one to another. That is the difficult part.

 George B. Mearns

(1) The first four groups listed comes from an outline in Joshua Graves, The Feast, Leafwood, 2009, p. 42.

(2) One can read Tony Campolo, Red Letter Christians to see this from a liberal perspective, and D. James Kennedy, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson to see it from a conservative view. Cal Thomas rejected this idea in the 1990s and challenged Christians to refocus on the gospel in his book Blinded by Might.

(3) Emergent Theology and the Exclusivity of Jesus Christ, copied on 3/20/2010 from

(4) There are different shades to this idea, and like many things, the most radical are often the best known.

(5) The Gospel in All its Forms, by Timothy Keller, copied on 3/22/2010 from

See also his books The Reason for God and Counterfeit Gods.

(6) Paul Copan, Want the Bad News First?, copied on 3/22/2010 at

(7) See Born-again ‘Son of Hamas’ now fights ‘Islam’s god’ copied on 3/21/2010 at

(8) See Rodney Stark, Cities of God and Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity.

www.wnd.comwww.patheos.comwww.christianitytoday.com (John 14:6).www.jesustheradicalpastor.comhttp://geobme.blogspot.com

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