IN THE SPIRIT

This Christmas, one of my young nieces had to read the instructions for a game that she had received as a gift. While her mother waited, she looked at the page and looked again and couldn't make heads nor tails of the writing before her. She panicked, had she been too glad to get out of school the week before, could she have forgotten to read that quickly! She meekly handed the paper over and asked for help. Her mother quickly perceived that the text was in Spanish and my niece was relieved and went on to play her game!

In another case, a young Iranian who was traveling, picked up the Gideon Bible one lonely night in his travels and after a half hour of trying to decipher the ancient King James, put it down as mere gibberish. Some years later, he was given a more modern translation which he quickly understood and within months accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior. Yet some people have more than just a linguistic problem when they come to the sacred text.

I remember reading of a person in the last century who wished aloud that they could understand the subtle meanings of the sacred words and go on and believe what they contained. Yet, like Esau, try as he might, he would not accept the clear teachings of our God and King and eventually gave up trying. Please note that I used the words "would not accept" in the previous sentence.

In my first two examples, the situation was different, but in the second there is evident a certain hardness of heart as well as the natural inability to sense the leading of God's Spirit. We have to understand that there are all sorts of people who choose to go their own way. And this choosing is the way of the worldly in all ages. This is the natural condition. And only if the Holy Spirit, of the loving Trinity that we worship, ... only if He opens our eyes, are we enabled to see and comprehend our desperate situation. This is the whole point of the ten verses in front of us today. Tragically, very many people, just as verse fourteen points out, do not and will not accept the deep wisdom of God's mysterious wonder of salvation.

And why is that? Don't you know? The vast majority are blind, deaf and dumb when it comes to spiritual matters. This is why so many false religions are so popular, because people can get either a simple false explanation that they can understand. Or they obscure the original message with something more complex, more worthy of their own intelligence.

Years ago, I had a young man leave the church where I was preaching to go to another one because, there he could understand what the Pastor actually said from the pulpit. I wrestled a long time with what I was doing then, and with the advice of two elders decided that there was more a hearing problem than a telling problem.

Now before you put the tar and feathers on to boil, please understand that I am not setting this text up for a gnostic wallow of higher intelligence and secret revelations kept only for the leaders of the church. Each and every Christian has everything that they need in the way of general revelation. Your translations are just as good as mine and there are no secret techniques of mental gymnastics involved. After twenty some years in education I have concluded that the average intelligence is of much greater power than our current educational and ecclesiastical structures estimate. For that reason, there is no purpose in lowering the intellectual standards of the faith by leaving out these unpopular and "difficult" texts of the Scriptures. The "Jesus only" crowd or the people who detest doctrine because it divides would aptly fit into this category very comfortably. So would most of the New Age advocates who desire to think widely but not too deeply!

From the same experience I have concluded that there is another opposite tendency to artificially make things so difficult with double speak that only those who are in the know may comprehend and profit from the dynamics of spiritualism. I am reminded of the way one Church growth model emphasizes that Pastor CEO's must be able to demonstrate 27 key personality characteristics to be successful. In the same pattern, modern educationists would make the learning system so complex that only those who posses degrees in education would ever be allowed to finish schooling.

As far as religions go, Scientology, the Way and half a dozen other gnostic styled cults would fit this model very well. Any masonic orders who would establish a religious cast system or circles of power or ascending decrees of gnostic mastery would fit in here very well.

Having said that, then how can I insist that some people are in the know spiritually and others are left out? Looking carefully at the teaching of the verses before you, how could we teach anything else. God tells us through the Apostle Paul that grace is a gift. The understanding of Scripture, our coming to realize our sinful nature, and our coming to Christ are all initiated by the Holy Spirit. And the wisdom revealed to the Church by the same Spirit gives us what Paul calls the mind of Christ which we may see unfolded verse by verse in the Scriptures. Here is where the worldly separate themselves from the true church, in the understanding of God's gracious and merciful revelation history. In a liberal Sunday School class, I once tried to explain the supremacy of Scriptures when the class leader announced that the passage being studied that day was boring and uninspired. That was one of the last Lord's Days I ever spent in that Church. Before I left I tried to point out that if we took the miracles and the difficult books of Paul out of the New Testament, and the prophecies and creation passages out of the Old Testament we would have precious little left to justify the huge expense of operating a Church week by week. People were unimpressed, who was I, this difficult Paul like character who gloried in the sacred texts because the Lord gave me an ear to hear His voice. That hearing has been no end of troubles over the years, but through it all this remains clear to me. God has spoken, not by whispering in my ear, or thundering out of the clouds, but in and through His Holy Word