Good Monday morning! We went to church or watched. Maybe you heard about John the Baptist preaching repentance. Good message: we church people are hypocrites if we don’t repent. Now on to this week’s activities. Or not.
I worry how our western culture subtly distorts the Bible’s message. In The Bondage Breaker, Neil T. Anderson says western culture has a two-tier worldview: The transcendent world of God and spiritual forces (religion) and the empirical world of senses (science). People in the non-western world see things differently. They mingle the two tiers which we westerners keep separate. Hence, religion is compartmentalized to Sunday and church…not integral to the daily lives of many parishioners…and increasingly irrelevant to public life.
Back to John the Baptist. He preached repentance, a message the Church willingly hears. Nothing wrong with that, but John wasn’t only preaching to religious people. Some were religious, “go to synagogue” types, those from the priests and Pharisees, but others were tax collectors, soldiers, and no doubt other categories of people from society (see Luke 3). John was preaching repentance to the whole society, not just to church people. The separation of Sunday from the west of the week, western compartmentalization, can let us be comfy in personal piety that doesn’t help our neighbors.
“The arrogance in government, the multitude of unjust killings, the unjust wars, the hatred and the envy! Uncontrolled lusts, improper desires, the ravings of the demented are beyond calculation. Thievery is clearly beyond measure in illegal business practices…. Who works without greed? Who is content with what he has? Who piously and properly handles his property? Finally, everyone deplores double-talk and lying in treaties, contracts, and courts of justice.” Isn’t that the truth about so much in America today? But these words came from the sixteenth century, from educator and theologian Philip Melanchthon.
In every era, repentance is a message for all, not just for church people. What motivated the ancient prophets? The love of God. The essence of God is not anger but love (1 John 4:8). When prophets speak of God’s anger, they’re saying how much God loves this world He has created and how much He’s concerned how all people live in it. Jesus’ first Advent was not to condemn the world but to save it (John 3:17). “God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Romans 2:4). Pleading for repentance before a loving God is not just for church.
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