Some Christians and theologians think that one of the only sins left to commit is to look forward to the coming of Jesus Christ. If you commit this one you’re “sticking your head in the clouds”; you’re “too heavenly minded”; you’re “ignoring Christ’s commission” and you just aren’t living as a Christian should live. My first erudite, thoughtful and carefully considered response to such accusations is. “Poppycock!” More precisely, it’s unbiblical poppycock.
Beyond the “Kingdom Now” type of theology, which manifests in varying degrees depending which Christian setting you’re in, we have the common and often-repeated “prophecies” within charismatic circles that God is going to bring great revival across the world, or perhaps across a nation. I first heard such pronouncements, presented in the “thus saith the Lord” style, fifty-one years ago. Trickles of living water would become streams in the form of new believers. Streams were going to become rivers, and rivers would become oceans of faith and worship – across the city, across the country and across the world. Such prophecies are still being made today. True, the Lord may just be taking his time fulfilling His word – if they ever were His word at all. The Scriptural evidence is that they were not.
PRISONERS. Scripture, however, doesn’t seem to be considered in such matters, or if it is, it’s used in little bits and attached to a theory or a theological position. For example, I heard a minister quoting the “brilliance” of N.T. Wright, who claims that when Scripture says “He has come to set the prisoners free” (Luke 4:18) it means that it’s the job of Christians to get criminals released from jail, and if we fail in that task we can’t really consider ourselves to have “visited” them as Jesus told the sheep and the goats that we must.
I’d always thought that when Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah about setting prisoners free he was speaking of spiritual freedom; that those who were bound by such constraints as the Mosaic Law (which according to Paul brings death) would be set free by the grace of God. Perhaps I was wrong all along, but I suspect that John the Baptist may have seen it my way. There he was chained up in Herod’s prison awaiting his fate, while Jesus Christ, the one he had identified as taking away the sins of the world, wandered the countryside just miles away, seemingly unconcerned. Jesus had the power to free John, but he didn’t. He could have literally turned John’s fetters to dust but he didn’t. He didn’t even call on John to wish him all the best.
Was it cold and callous or even hypocritical of Jesus to not attempt to release John? No, it was no more cold than it has been for our God to observe the suffering and martyrdom of multitudes of believers down through the ages, when all the time He had the power to release them. Amazingly, Jesus himself, admitting that he had the option of calling upon legions of angels to release him from the grip of the Romans soldiers and execution, refused to do it. He told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place” (John 8:36).
Our freedom, once we are in Christ, is from the wrath of God. Our freedom is from sin and death, so that John’s physical death was in fact a victory:
“Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (Jon 11:25).
BALANCE. Of course, as in many facets of life there is a balance. Jesus does indeed want us to visit the sick and those in prison: that’s a clear command, and if we can get them released – all the better. However, to ditch the will of God and the plan of God, which is that we suffer for Him and that one day He will come to rescue us from a troubled world, is a denial of or an intentional ignorance of the true intent of the word of God, for a more sanitized and humanized version cooked up by theologians and “prophets”.
To teach your flock that it’s their job to change the world and make it like the garden of Eden, and that Christ will then consent to come and be Lord, is a gross and crass perversion of Scripture. It’s calling Jesus and the Father liars. It’s dumping a burdensome load of obligation onto the very “prisoners” Christ came to free. We cannot free ourselves. Humanity cannot free itself from the grip of a very real Satan and of ubiquitous sin.
BLAZING FIRE. Scripture paints a clear picture of a fallen world in opposition to God’s will at every stage of history, all the way up to the glorious appearing of our great God and saviour Jesus Christ in the sky, “in blazing fire”. There will be no “world-wide” revival, and while we would love to see a national revival and pray for it, we shouldn’t be holding our breath for that either. I totally believe in being engaged in our world and working to make it a better place for all, beginning at home: that’s honoring to God and fulfilling His will. We are, after all, the salt of the earth. However, the other side of that equation and that balance is that God is God and we are not. Only He can save the world from the evil and sickness which enslaves its people, and the Bible is full of evidence to confirm it. Do you want to live by the Bible or by your own idea of what God has said?
“Why are your garments red,
like those of one treading the winepress?”
“I have trodden the winepress alone;
from the nations no one was with me.
I trampled them in my anger
and trod them down in my wrath;
their blood spattered my garments,
and I stained all my clothing.
It was for me the day of vengeance;
the year for me to redeem had come.
I looked, but there was no one to help,
I was appalled that no one gave support;
so my own arm achieved salvation for me,
and my own wrath sustained me.
I trampled the nations in my anger;
in my wrath I made them drunk
and poured their blood on the ground” (Isaiah 63:2-6).
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Fuel for Faith, Food for Thought 