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I WAS THINKING 12
"THE PASSION "
My 'Passion' experience was partially eclipsed by the novelty of it being my first cinema experience since I was 11 - except for one in the West End where after ten minutes I stormed out protesting the mockery of Christ.
The Passion film left a mass of viewers shocked and speechless. These scenes were the sword that went through the soul of Mary, Christ's mother, too searing to contemplate. But I own that the screen portrayal did not affect me too greatly. I suppose I knew the actuality so well from the Gospels. Also, as a newcomer to cinema, like a dinosaur (a very small one!) coming alive from the past of extreme holiness separation-ism, my focus was on Biblical accuracy and the techniques of acting, so the force of the presentation struck me more obliquely at the time.
But Mel Gibson did what the Bible does not, that is describe or dramatise the suffering. Scripture uses few descriptive adjectives, depending on facts without embroidery, like the French writer Gide. But the film, especially the fiendish scourging, was adjectival throughout. God left it to us, our imagination and the skill of Mel Gibson and others to bring home to us the convulsing realities. Being critical for a moment I wished I had been consultant for those scourging takes. As I watched I felt it was too overdone. Jesus, or any other man, would have died half way through such extreme violence. Similarly, 'Jesus' was unrealistically shown as never losing consciousness even struggling uphill on the Via Dolorosa with a very weighty cross - which would only have been the crosspiece - and collapsing at the Stations of the Cross. I observed too that that precious blood of His, which would have been a crimson pool on the ground, appeared only as a lace of lacerations.
Brutal scenes are a feature of Mel Gibson films, I am told. He is Catholic and the Catholic view of the Cross is pity and empathy, gazing at length on crucifixion pictures to identify with His sufferings as a road of salvation. The message of the film is similar but it quotes Isaiah texts during the introduction, making it clear that Christ bore our sins and by His stripes we were healed.
For all my years submerged in theology (the Cross being my life long focus) this visual display remains for me weeks later as the reminder of what our iniquity has really done, and done to God. Its vile hand dragged that Holy One from His sublime throne down to that sordid and hellish Roman cockpit.
I can't get over the fact that He was my victim, impeached for my sins. The screen presented me with a new realisation of wickedness. My sin scalds others, sometimes even terribly, yet what did it do to Him, His suffering, photographed on a 30 foot screen! There are no words - tears are superficial. What a price tag for our illegitimate pleasures! Hollywood gloss and all, but to see Romans trying to cut my Lord in pieces with their lashes was unbearable. He, Christ – and me! My sin associated Him with me! My sin offering, my redeemer.
Now, the viciousness of Roman whips was sickening enough and I know that 'by his stripes we were healed', but it was on the Cross that my hell-fires scorched His soul. The scourging was so grotesquely cruel, so what actually went on in the infinite consciousness of our Saviour during those 6 hours gibbeted on a tree? That is the mystery of God and of eternity. No film, no portrayal could convey that. "None of the ransomed ever knew how deep were the waters crossed, how dark was the night that the Lord passed through e'er he found the sheep that was lost".
Jewish critics bitterly claimed the film was anti-Jewish propaganda. To me, the allegation sounded prejudiced and untrue. The story Mel Gibson gave us was, as the Pope said, ".. as it was". Jealous Israel leaders did hand Christ over but the brutality was not shown as Jewish, but Roman. To eliminate Jewish involvement from the Passion story would have been false and blind. Does political correctness want us to re-write history? (Like the American film showing USA forces, not the British, capturing the Enigma machine.) In the Passion film Jewish women were paid tributes.
The film's scenes are numbing. Like the Cross itself, it highlights what sin does, not only to God but also to ourselves, twisting our thinking, corrupting our conscience, distorting our understanding of truth, and finally crucifying God and putting the devil on the throne. It puts into pictorial form the most devastating statement ever made about mankind: "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and who can know it?" Who can know it? We reply 'nobody', and TV news confirms it, daily.
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A demon-hunter demanded "Lying spirit of the devil, what is your name?" I imagined that spirit creasing his brow in a dilemma. Tell the truth?
IWT 11 pointed out that Job's friends never attributed his troubles to Satan, though he appears 14 times in chapters 1 and 2. In the rest of the OT he is on stage only 5 times, and in the New Testament 34 times. Otherwise his gang of fallen spirits are called 'the devil', operating at the Satanic will.
Satan himself personally troubled Jesus and others, buffeting Paul, for example, with a thorn in the flesh. He is capable of inciting endless mayhem, including murder (John 8:44).
Some teach that Satan wished to displace God. He had no such insane idea, knowing himself to be a limited creature and that God filled heaven and earth. His ambition was no more than lord of the Earth, this planet being the vital battle ground between good and evil. He installed himself as 'the god of this world'. Human beings are capable of resisting or of falling in with Satanic scheming. We were created vulnerable, precisely so that the victory of God will be evident through our weakness as agents of God's strategy. He will rid creation of all evil through us. Angels and heavenly intelligences serve us as we battle here against entrenched evil.
From the Garden of Eden, Satan had the world pretty much to himself. The invasion of his territory by God the Son was a shattering blow to the kingdom of hell. The devil could not anticipate that the Son of God would take flesh and suffer death and go to such extreme lengths to overcome evil. Love, such love especially, is a mystery to Satan.
The devil knows he can't win, so why carry on? Quite simply, he can't help himself. The embodiment and personification of evil can't stop being what he is, evil. Knowing he has but a short time, the devil is filled with greater fury (Revelation 12:12).
I am amazed by, but do not admire, the faith many have in the devil. Half the Christian world believes the devil is active in their everyday life, yet have difficulty accepting that God is equally active. They believe the devil makes them sick but not that God can cure them. The devil appears to be at ease creating trouble, but people clatter on God's door for a week to get His help. Need they? Prayer is often an expression of unbelief. Why ask God to do what He said He would do? Is He such a reluctant character? They take the devil for granted as up and doing, reliably being a bad devil, but believe that God must be persuaded and blandished with fasting to be a good God. Yes?
Most troubles and evils, including temptations, come from ourselves (James 1:14) and from the imperfect world which environs us. Satan is not another God. He has no Divine attributes, no omnipresence, omniscience or omnipotence. He is the anti-God. God is good, full of iridescent light and joy. Satan is the negative, limited, evil, full of darkness.
Few have dealings with Satan himself, but we all have indirectly through the medium of demon spirits. Once in my life, God let me see Satan as a warning of the impossible situation he would engineer around me. Normally he does not stay with us but does what he can and leaves us. His targets are people dangerous to him in the war. "Mighty men around us falling" sang the hymn writer - of course! Satan creates pressures on leaders that others know little about. They may go down in the battle and we should pick them up not kick them down.
Christ emptied Satan of his power. Heb. 2:14 "That through death he might destroy him that had the power of death". The word "katargeo", used 27 times in the NT, means of 'none effect'. Satan seeks whom he may destroy, to bring about their death or their ruin. How, if he is evacuated of power? Satan has only the power we concede when we give way to him. We can resist him, for in Christ we have the upper hand. Jesus told the disciples "I have given you authority over all the power of the enemy". The 'enemy' had power, but not after the victory on Calvary.
Some teach that demonic forces can control us. They ascribe erratic or wrong behaviour to controlling demons. But surely anyone not responsible for what they do should be sectioned under British law? Believers should never lay their sins at the devil's door. God has given us "the power of a sound mind", 2 Timothy 1:7, and power over the evil one. That is what salvation is (Acts 26:18).
Telling believers they have a demon is dreadfully wrong. To rid them of the idea is something I have found well nigh impossible. Exorcism again and again achieves nothing simply because there is no demon to expel, but each time it drives the idea deeper into their consciousness. Eventually they 'learn to live with it', like a bent nose, which is hardly the glorious freedom of the children of God.
The ABC of the Gospel is being set free from the devil. Otherwise the mighty work of Christ has failed. We shall be troubled by Satanic attention, but in Christ we are stronger than he is. It is time to live that way and not give way.
To think he is all powerful is the deceit of the devil. We are the masters, not he.
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WHAT IS 'TRUE REVIVAL' ?
"I have been young and now am old but I have not seen the masses repenting nor their seed coming to church." If prayer could do it, the whole world by now would be in religious ferment.
'Revival', is a matter of definition. There's the kind associated with the question "Why does revival tarry?" It seems a perpetual subject for preachers as a chance to have a go at church shortcomings. Some want God to step in, do everything and make work easier for Christians. 'Prayer brings revival'? So does work! Without it, revival never did happen. The Bible talks about evangelism, never 'revival'.
Periodically we hear of 'signs' of revival, as when Billy Graham was in Haringey 50 years ago and constantly in the fads and fashions of worship and Bible 'discoveries'. The cry "Do it again Lord!" is for a repeat of old church excitements. Realities should be our concern, the paralysing and disgusting national ignorance of the Bible and Christianity, spiritual collapse and public moral bankruptcy even led by a blind Parliament.
Now, when Wesley died in 1791, Britain was still only half civilised, cruel, debauched. Churches were struggling, or empty, and it was feared that Christianity would not survive the century. Wesley's followers were mostly poor un-influential country folk. Fifty years of revivalism left only 50,000 Methodists (accounts vary). Of the 10 million UK, 9,950,000 were not Methodists. The Industrial Revolution created slums for the masses of country folk recruited for the mills, the new 'working classes'. Little was done for their spiritual welfare, shunned as the 'great unwashed' by the churches and lost to them until now.
Then, from about 1830 or 1840, almost imperceptibly, spiritual waters crept in with the greatest revival I know of, though little mentioned in the books about revival. The main Wesleyan increase did not come from 'revivals' at all, but from church expansion continuing up to the Great War of 1914. What the Victorians did for us was to lay new Christian foundations. God does things His own way, not according to a preset revival formula. He changed Britain then, His way. I pray for 'revival', but for God to do it His way - again. The need is not a week or two of excitement, but a nation-wide swing back to Christian principles and a change in social conscience and God-consciousness.
Revivalist type meetings thrived in the 19th century because religion itself was thriving. "Revivals", especially in country places, regularly took place where people in noisy convulsions called on God. One Yorkshire worthy boasted he had been converted like that every year! It contributed to the Christian England the Victorians gave us. A main cause of Victorian godliness was the leadership of great evangelicals, as in the Clapham Sect. William Wilberforce championed not only the Empire slaves, but another ninety moral causes. Evangelicals fought for the deprived and critical social issues. Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, piloted a succession of measures for the depressed classes through Parliament, as in the Factory Acts. When he died, 100,000 working people lined the streets, weeping. We need a broader vision. God made the world, not just churches.
I was brought up by Victorians and I could never convey the ambience, the atmosphere, unimaginable by the present generation with Christianity as the common currency and God a universal sanction curbing crime. Everybody knew right from wrong – then. Britain was the world leader and the greatest missionary country. Possibly the French Revolution failed to cross the white cliffs of Dover partly because Wesley and his preaching of the Gospel were a spiritual barricade. Jesus said "Ye are the salt of the earth". Where the Gospel is preached, godly and preservative social effects follow, quite beyond any actual evangelistic results.
In books, revivals sound as if they happened in a vacuum, related to nothing but prayer and authenticated by special phenomena. The D.L. Moody, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham campaigns are not counted as 'revival'. Reinhard Bonnke seeing a million converts in a week is also not 'revival.' The revivalism USA paper 'The Herald of His coming' has never mentioned that in about three decades, CfaN has received 34 million decisions cards and brought unprecedented public and even national changes with multitudes healed and the dead raised to life. Should we wait for something we've never seen or move with God in what He is doing?
'Revival' with classical phenomena invariably follows religious pre-conditioning. Duncan Campbell told me that in the Isle of Lewis, where he led the 1949 classic 'revival', even drunken fathers had read the Bible at breakfast each morning. The Welsh revival winged along on the nostalgia of chapel culture. When the Salvation Army first took to London streets a crowd would listen to them at any time of day or night. The "Awakening" in the American colonies was among people already very religion-conscious. Toronto phenomena, mainly among believers was hailed as signs of 'revival', but no sweeping soul-winning followed.
Christian expansion today, however, is amazing, but only on other continents. Bogotá (Colombia) may explain. There, as in the Philippines, to talk to someone on the street about God attracts a crowd. Why? Because Catholicism is inbred, everyone is religiously aware and interested and there is spiritual unrest. Catholic theologians tried to meet it with their leftist Theology of Deliverance, but people want God, not just politics. Similar pre-conditioning accounts for Christian expansion in Africa, China, Korea, and other global areas.
Why no revival in Britain? First, there is no inbred religious consciousness here. Second, 300 years of rationalist thinking from European and British philosophers like Descartes, Hume, Locke, Kant, plus Biblical critics and liberals, has washed religion out of the public mind. These secularist teachings, however, have not penetrated everywhere and on other continents multitudes turn to Christ while Europe stagnates in spiritual uncertainty, like another Nazareth rejecting Christ.
Folk of the 19th century, less well educated and sophisticated had not absorbed the Enlightenment rationalism and turned to God not in the classical revival sense but like a quiet tide. Remembering Wesley many say "Lord do it again". Has God only one bolt to shoot? In my grandparents' times God proved He had bigger ideas and soon Christian standards permeated society generally.
I was born into a Christian land. No locked doors, no burglars, no muggings, but Sunday schools and church-going were becoming unfashionable. That is why I suffered 11 burglaries, road rage assault, and my wife being attacked near our home. In her final illness a plausible rogue offered me a gadget for £946 to relieve her pain. I saw it in a Curries catalogue for £46. Builders told me my house needed new gutters. They had installed new ones themselves 6 weeks before. England today!
When Princess Diana died, grief changed Britain overnight. That's human nature. The 19th century surge back to faith can easily happen again. British people will surely awake to the void of life without a spiritual dimension. The British and European scene is a spiritual vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum! It can be a precursor for a general swing towards God. I could now be writing of something imminent, contemporary, true revival, prayed for over a century, the kind that made us Christian a century or so ago. Where there are channels and little creeks, God's ocean will steal in, and overflow. Let us make them!
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PEBBLE IN A CAVE
In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd, Muhammad edh-Dhib looking for a straying goat threw a stone into an opening in the sun-lashed hills near the Dead Sea and heard a tingle of broken pottery. Venturing in, he found several large jars containing seven ancient scrolls, and hundreds of leather scraps.
Bedouins realised such documents meant money. They found more and so did certain scholars. By 1956 another ten caves had yielded some 800 scrolls and thousands of fragments, written mostly in Hebrew and Aramaic (the language of Jesus), pre-dating the Christian era. Qumran, a site near the caves thought to have been a fort, was explored and proved to be where a community lived which had owned the scrolls. I have visited Qumran.
We waited for years for translation and publishing and the completion was so delayed it was a scholastic scandal. Today our curiosity is gratified. I have the English translation. Most of the finds were non-Biblical, being rules and practices of the Qumran community, but all the Old Testament books were represented except Esther, usually in several copies, such as 30 of the Psalms.
The scrolls contain little history but show the style of writing and language of 2000 years ago. They included Old Testament versions in use before and at the time of Jesus. We now have the complete book of Isaiah 1000 years older than what we had before - the Cairo codex Ben Scrolls. Much debate continues, such as where the scrolls were written. But it is too technical for my short article.
Copying Scripture was obviously not too precise. After the fall of Jerusalem, Jewish experts, the Masorites, worked carefully to tidy up the diverse publications and produce an authentic version. It can now be checked against copies 6 or 7 centuries older.
This lost community was (we think) the Essenes, a rigid fundamentalist back-to-the Bible movement, known to us from the historian Josephus. Qumran lasted over 200 years with an average group of about 200 men. They were rigid fundamentalists attempting perfect obedience to the law far more than the Pharisees. They, like all Israel at that time, (vide Simeon and Nicodemus) believed the Kingdom of God was imminent. They were right, and wrong. The Kingdom came but not as they expected. It broke into the world in the person of our Lord Jesus.
Qumran men called themselves the 'Sons of Light' and their founder, or some individual, the 'Teacher of Righteousness', being at war with the 'Sons of Darkness'. Their strictness is incredible. Anyone speaking the name of God would be expelled. On the Sabbath it was an offence to carry even dust on their clothes. The community possibly fled during the Jews uprising against Rome and deposited their precious MSS in the caves for safety. Nobody came back.
When the scrolls were known, various scholars made gratuitous and authoritative comments but which proved to be fatuous nonsense. Now, they said, we would know the truth of Christianity's origins, and that perhaps Jesus belonged to the cult. One 'authority', Dr. Allegro, suggested the disciples were inspired by intoxicant mushroom juice. His department head said to him "Allegro. Retardo! Retardo!" Any such outrageous sensation was greeted with approving enthusiasm by the press.
Personally I find nothing in the scrolls that could effect the New Testament and Christian teaching, but they are immensely useful. To possess the very Scriptures used over 2000 years ago is exciting, but they also give us examples of the ideas, beliefs, attitudes and languages current up to the time of Jesus. The scrolls are important to Textual Criticism upon which we depend for our Bibles.
Qumran was not remotely a source of New Testament teaching, but provides a backdrop to the glittering jewels of Christ's teaching and His unfolding of truth and Scripture. Qumran made it very hard labour to come to God and believed nobody else could unless they joined their commune. Their rules carried the death sentence though they could not carry it out.
Right through history there have been purists, kathari, extreme fundamentalists. In my lifetime I've seen an endless procession flaunting their special revelations like banners, claiming secret knowledge, special keys to power, blessing, holiness, and 'structures' for the church, with all ordinary folk, like me, lost!
But I'm not lost. Jesus found me. Qumran was ultra-selective and elitist, Jesus embraced all. Qumran laboured to impress God, but Jesus said "Come to me all you that labour". Qumran spoke of strife and war, but Jesus of reconciliation and peace. Qumran lingered on the theme of judgment, but Jesus taught forgiveness.
Well, I congratulate myself and thank God daily for my incredible good fortune getting to know Jesus. Extremists today, like the Qumran Essenes, conceive their own ideas and cherish them like brain children. Full of their own pet religious theories and assumptions they make life so difficult, even impossible for themselves. God never meant it. He made us for His fellowship so ordinary folk could enjoy it. Jesus stands always offering us life. To not know Jesus, when you can, is proof of the perversity of human nature.
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