The Holy Land Theme Park

That’s right folks. Why not bask in the wonder of the Holy Land in a closer to home and fun atmosphere? Chase Jesus as he makes his way through the crowd of spectators to Golgatha or get a picture with a disciple (I would hope for Peter). Purchase to your heart’s content any style of cross necklace or a star of David maybe? I read the following article from Newsweek entitled, “The Crucifixion and Ice Cream“.

Built in 2001 at a cost of $16 million, the Holy Land Experience recreates the ancient city of Jerusalem to “take you 2,000 years back in time to the world of the Bible” where “it brings to life ancient Israel.” Dominating the theme park is a towering replica of Herod’s Temple, much like Cinderella’s Castle just down Interstate 4. Also on display are recreations of the Qumran caves (site of the Dead Sea Scrolls), the Garden Tomb of Jesus, the Wilderness Tabernacle with an Ark of the Covenant light and sound show and a Byzantine Scriptorium where tourists learn about the history of Bible production. A gift shop sells Star of David necklaces with Christian crosses embedded in them and olive wood from the real Holy Land.

So is this is what it all comes down to? A Christianized Disneyland? As if Universal Studios, Six Flags and Disneyland and World is not enough? What does that say about Christians or even Christianity? Is the Gospel so weak that we need to include side shows and paid actors to act out what Christianity is? In the past many of the passion plays were condemned by the Reformers as un-ordained substitutes for the actual preaching of the Word of God. When is enough enough?

My experience when going to Disneyland has always been too much of a good thing is. . . well, too much. I get tired after a while of wandering around an artificial world. In a biography on Walt Disney, Disney said that one of the objectives to good entertainment was to transport the public into a whole new world. If we think about it, television’s goal is to do just that: create an artificial world. What about this Holy Land Experience, are we really experiencing the Holy Land? Somehow I don’t think there are men reenacting the crucifixion in the city of Jerusalem or centurions patrolling downtown Bethlehem for fun seeking tourists to simply snap the camera with. The crucifixion was not some spectator sport where a crowd would ooh and awe at, but a horrific death that was shunned by even the Jewish historian Josephus. Somethings tells me that the “experience” people are looking for when going to this amusement park (let us call it what it is folks) is more fun than learning. If the head of this whole project is Paul Crouch of TBN then we know the park is not worth it. No, thank you Mr. Crouch I will save my money for a real trip back to Israel.

photos the courtesy of The Holy Land Experience 

(I didn’t know that rabbis had headsets back then)

Ponderings of a Thankless Heart

photo by Ian Britton

It rained the other day.  It had snowed a couple of days before that.  There was a magnificance in all of it that my heart discerned.  However, it seems that God today in my Scripture reading helped supply me with the expression to explain what I had sensed.  What a simple phenomenon that seems to fail to make us stop and wonder.  We can give a scientific account for the rains occurrence and yet that only serves to appease our natural curiosity of “how”.  Why is that?  How many of us have linked such a wonder to an expression of mercy or grace?  We know what happens when the rain refuses to fall.  Things die.  Water makes the life we know now possible.  It sustains us as human beings, but it also allows the nature we see everyday flourish.  Water is a gift and a blessing when given in good measure, the trees and flowers are likewise blessings, and the people who rely on the blessing of water in order to exist are likewise gifts.  But what are a lot of gifts compared to the one who gives them?  We are like the child at Christmas who eagerly tears apart the wrappings and bows with rising expectation of what is contained inside, but we forget the hands that wrapped it.  I fail a lot and often to look beyond the blessings to the One who blesses.  I fail to realize that in giving us these gifts, God in his mercy is imparting a grace upon us, in subtle ways he extends his hand towards us that we might turn to praise him.  Have we forgotten the gift Giver?  Where are the cries of blessings upon the Lord?  How has it come to this, that the things we are blessed with have ceased to draw our hearts upwards?  Today’s text is from Psalm 114 (ESV)

When Israel went out from Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a people of strange language,
Judah became his sanctuary,
Israel his dominion.

The sea looked and fled;
Jordan turned back.

The mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.

What ails you, O sea, that you flee?
O Jordan, that you turn back?
O mountains, that you skip like rams?
O hills, like lambs?

Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord,
at the presence of the God of Jacob,
who turns the rock into a pool of water,
the flint into a spring of water.

The one word that caught my attention was tremble.  The psalmist has commanded this of the earth and particularly in the presence (or the face) of God.  How many of us make this part of who we are as Christians?  Has trembling ever been a part of our experience, not only before the sheer exposure to nature, but to God in worship?  The psalmist begins with pointing to God’s redemption of His people from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.  We are reminded again of God’s mercy and His fulfillment of that good promise made to Abraham by way of covenant.  Why though should that make us tremble?  I think it is important to refer to another verse in the book of Jeremiah that uses the same Hebrew word “hul” (tremble)-

Do you not fear me? declares the Lord.
Do you not tremble before me?
I placed the sand as the boundary for the sea,
a perpetual barrier that it cannot pass;
though the waves toss, they cannot prevail;
though they roar, they cannot pass over it.
But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart;
they have turned aside and gone away.
They do not say in their hearts,
‘Let us fear the Lord our God,
who gives the rain in its season,
the autumn rain and the spring rain,
and keeps for us
the weeks appointed for the harvest.’
Your iniquities have turned these away,
and your sins have kept good from you.  (Jeremiah 5:22-25, ESV)

It is interesting that the use of the word tremble is used in these two passages within context of nature.  The sea “looks and flees” and “though the waves toss, they cannot prevail”.  God even asks why is their is no godly fear or trembling.  The Lord has given us the reason to tremble at his presence because of his work in nature.  It would seem that the similes we find in the Psalm hints at nature itself obediently being subject to God’s rule, so much so that it cannot go against what God has appointed.  We have something great being revealed to us about God.  God is so wonderful and terrifying that even nature itself “trembles” in his presence.  We can liken it to the view of God robed in His splendor in the temple before Isaiah in chapter six of that book. 

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robefilled the temple.  Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one cried to another and said:

      “ Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
      The whole earth is full of His glory!”

And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke.
So I said:

      “ Woe is me, for I am undone!
      Because I am a man of unclean lips,
      And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips;
      For my eyes have seen the King,
      The LORD of hosts.”

Here was a man who knew fear and trembling.  Who saw God “high and exalted” and who in his fear cried out “Woe is me!”  What but only the very presence of God could drive a man to call down curses upon himself.  God “high and exalted” can only lead us to pronounce ourselves undone (that is every fiber of our being is unraveled).   Who are we to take lightly the presence of God in worship when even the seraphim, who stand ever before him, stand with their faces covered?  Praise to “the King, The Lord of hosts” “who gives rain in its season, the autumn rain and the spring rain”, “who turns the rock into a pool of water , the flint into a spring of water.”  Truly the humble heart is the trembling heart.  God, make it so in your church and may it be part of who I am as a Christian.  Help me to tremble with outstretched hands as I receive your blessings you so wisely bestow upon me every single day.  Amen.

 

Praying for China and the Earthquake

You know what gets me the most?  It is the unsettling indifference that we as Americans have for the pain and suffering experienced abroad.  I know that when 9/11 occurred the nation was “devastated” and when the flooding happened in New Orleans we were all “shocked”, but where is the strong emotive words for those people outside our borders?  I am not bitter towards America, but saddened by the narrow concern we have when tragedy happens abroad.  I could liken it to reading the obituaries in the newspapers.  We scan them only to see if someone we know has passed on, but have no careful consideration of those we do not know.  Why must the death of another effect us personally before we are willing to pray for those who are in tragic situations? 

As a Christian, how must God break our hearts before we show compassion?  I feel that the Church at large has God like Moses striking his walking stick upon the rock to bring forth water.  Would it be right to pen a diatribe against the church when I am fully aware of my own weaknesses in this area?  No, I admit that I have failed to reach out with compassion and been willing to build the wall of indifference a little higher.  I confess it is hard to stop by the wayside and help when the person is a stranger.  What does this say though about me?  I see now that I need even more to be on my knees in prayer crying out for grace to show compassion, grace to sustain me and grace to carry me through.  If the Holy Spirit does not second my prayers, I am sure that my weaknesses will overcome me.  I am appalled with myself.  On my own I can do nothing, but God has given us Christ and Christ has given us His Holy Spirit and the Spirit will work His perfect work.  Even so, as pain and suffering finds China on her knees and I find myself on mine, may God reveal himself again as the Sovereign and Comforter, and may he shower us with grace from his right hand.  Amen.

Pray for China as they try to find their lost among the ruins of their cities and as they mourn the loss of those who have been taken by the earthquake.

Escape from Nihilism

I was very fascinated by this article, Escape from Nihilism.  I think it speaks very clearly as to the logical outworking of a nihilistic worldview.  This is not an article that will argue philosophically against nihilism, but is rather a honest dealing from a professor, Dr. J. Budziszewski of Leadership University, who himself was an avowed nihilist.  We all need to realize that ideas do have consequences.  One of the lessons I learned in philosophy was that no one is ever neutral in the way they see the world.  The only people who are will be found in the cemetery down the street (which my university is surrounded by three).  Here is an excerpt:

As I mentioned above, I made two claims: first that we make up the difference between good and evil, second that we aren’t responsible for what we do anyway. My argument reversed this order, because first I denied free will. The reasoning was not very original. Everything we do or think or feel, I thought, is just an effect of prior causes. It doesn’t matter that some of those prior causes are my previous deeds or thoughts or feelings, because those would be effects of still earlier causes, and if we traced the chain further and further back, sooner or later we would come to causes that are outside of me completely, such as my heredity and environment.

Second I concluded that if we don’t have free will, then good and evil can’t make sense. On the one hand I’m not responsible for my deeds, so I can’t be praised or blamed for good or evil; on the other hand I’m not responsible for my thoughts, so I can’t have any confidence that my reasoning will lead me to the truth about good and evil. So far it may seem that my argument was merely skeptical, not nihilist. But I reasoned that if the good for man cannot be known to man, then it cannot be offered to man as his good; for all practical purposes, there is no good.

The holes in the preceding arguments are so large that one can see light through them. One hole is that in order to deny free will I assumed that I understood causality. That is foolish because I didn’t know what causality really is any more than I understand what free will really is. They are equally wonderful and mysterious, so I had no business pretending to understand one in order to attack the other. Another problem is that my argument was self-referentially incoherent. If my lack of free will made my reasoning unreliable so I couldn’t find out which ideas about good and evil are true, then by the same token I shouldn’t have been able to find out which ideas about free will are true either. But in that case I had no business denying that I had free will in the first place.

 

Most Excellent Diognetus. . . This is Their Christ

The Epistle to Diognetus was written around 130 A.D. and supposedly was written by Mathetes “a disciple of the Apostles.”  A. Cleveland Coxe says, “Altogether, the Epistle is a gem of purest ray; and, while suggest some difficulties as to interpretation and exposition, it is practically clear as to argument and intent.  Mathetes is, perhaps, the first of the apologists.” (The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Iranaeus,  Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 p. 23)  It was supposed that Mathetes may have been a catechumen (a person under instruction in the faith of Christianity) of the Apostle Paul or one of his associates, but it is still debated who the author was.  It would seem that he was writing to the tutor of M. Aurelius.  Any other information has been obscured by time.  So to begin the early church fathers (from now on EcF series), I present a piece from The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus:

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Chapter VII-The Manifestation of Christ 

For, as I have said, this was no mere earthly invention which was delivered to them, nor is it a mere human opinion, which they judge in right to preserve so carefully, nor has a dispensation of mere human mysteries been committed to them, but truly God Himself, who is almighty, the Creator of all things, and invisible, has sent from heaven, and placed among men, (He who is) the truth, and the holy and incomprehensible Word, and has firmly esablished Him in their hearts.  He did not, as one might have imagined, send to men any servant, or angel, or ruler, or any one of those to who bear sway over earthly things, or one those to whom the government of things in the heavens has been entrusted, but the very Creator and Fashioner of all things- by whom He made the heavens- by whom he enclosed the sea within its proper bounds- whose ordinances all the stars faithfully observe- from whom the sun has recieved the measure of his daily course to be observed- whom the moon obeys, being commanded to shine in the night, and whom the stars also obey, following the moon in her course; by whom all things have been arranged, and placed within their proper limits, and to whom all are subject- the heavens and the things therein, the earth and the things that are therein -fire, air, and the abyss- the things which are in the heights, the things which are in the depths, and the things which lie between. 

This (messenger) He sent to them. Was it then, as one might conceive, for the purpose of exercising tyranny, or of inspiring fear and terror?  By no means, but under the influence of clemency and meekness.  As a king sends his son, whos is also a king, so sent He Him; as God He sent Him; as to men He sent Him; as a Saviour He sent Him, and as seeking to persuade, not to compel us; for violence has no place in the character of God.  As calling us He sent Him, not as vengefully pursuing us; as loving us He sent Him, not as judging us.  For He will yet send Him, to judge us, and who shall endure His appearing. . . 

Do you not see them exposed to wild beasts, that they may be persuaded to deny the Lord and yet not overcome? Do you not see that the more of them are punished, the greater becomes the number of the rest?  This does not seem to be the work of man: this is the power of God; these are the evidences of His manifestation. 

(Roberts, Alexander.  Early Church Fathers: Ante-Nicene Vol. 1.  Hendrickson Publishers. 1994. p. 27-28 )

 

photo by Ian Britton