I WAS THINKING 6

GOD'S SPECIAL GIFT JUST FOR ME. MORE THAN A MINISTRY GIFT.

At 14 heaven crashed into my 84lb body, and I found myself speaking with tongues almost without realising it. All I could think about was that God had broken in upon me. The effects continue, but - I had joined the battle.

For decades it was reckoned that if people spoke with tongues they must have many other faults too. Pentecostals were useful aunt sallies in many a sermon. Our reputation was condensed from rumour. Why tongues objections? We shall see, but for a long time our Pentecostal image was hardly prepossessing, I suppose. We were poor, struggling, The church world would forgive that, but - tongues! Spirit-baptism attested by glossalalia!

However, criticism can't kill. In 1906, the first chiropractor (bone setter) was jailed, and the medical world didn't finally accept the practice until 1974. Even football! In 1796 a Derbyshire court jury said "(Football is) a custom which, while it has no better recommendation for its continuance than its antiquity, is disgraceful to humanity and civilisation, subversive of good order and government, and destructive of the morals, properties and very lives of the inhabitants" The 'beautiful game' survives and so does the Pentecostal movement, lately projected to number a billion by the year 2040.

But why object to tongues? Behind the dislike is fear, fear of an 'outside' power invading us. Naturally we guard our personal sovereignty. " I am me". But at Pentecost the Holy Spirit claimed His right to His people. They 'let go and let God' and tongues were heard. I myself yielded. though I could have resisted, but knowing this was God I did not. Yield yourselves unto God, yield your members (as) members of righteousness"

The church started with tongues, though some churches would rather forget their embarrassing lowly beginnings in a mere upper room, with disciples their poor relations. Tongues established the true character of Christianity as spiritual-physical union. For centuries Christianity was regarded as just a spiritual religion. When the Pentecostals began teaching the baptism in the Spirit, traditional teachers opposed it saying the baptism takes place at conversion. unnoticed. The Spirit is not in the habit of coming unnoticed. However the Bible is interpreted the unassailable fact is that Jesus offers every believer a direct, spiritual-physical experience of power.

At 14, I easily yielded to the Spirit being used to yielding to others - especially my mother. Although my breeding as a north-easterner meant no 'soft' feelings, tears especially, I was overwhelmed. But the fish and chips north east was a million miles from the impassive dignity of Eton and Harrow. Sadly, nobody with a stiff upper lip has ever spoken with tongues. Why fear it? God is always to be feared, but His desire to bless living people is plain enough.

Supernatural tongues are also natural. We didn't invent tongues. Why would we, such a peculiar thing? It was God our Maker. He formed us, so that we could speak in tongues. We are not freaks - it is all the others who clam up on God. All first Christians spoke in tongues and Peter said it was for all, even those far off.

From their early 20th century appearance, Pentecostals suffered opposition and isolation, being driven into a corner, but God was in their corner. They knew the truth. That kept the Pentecostals They knew it could change the world.

Pentecost is an intense encounter with the Spirit of God. The baptism in the Spirit is an unique and wonderful experience. To operate other spiritual gifts for ministry, such as healing, bring no special feelings except to the patients, no tingling hands or electric vibrations.. We heal by faith, not feeling. But tongues, a dynamic down-rush from heaven upon one's whole being, is an awesome personal experience, It is mainly for one's self and personal edification.

For decades the Christian world admitted Pentecostals existed only like mice behind the skirting. But they endured rejection knowing this was the power Jesus promised for world evangelism. Judging by the earlier struggling Pentecostal churches, it didn't look like it Their 'power' apparently amounted to three tongues 'messages' on Sunday mornings. But it had vast implications. For half a century the Pentecostal banner looked a poor fluttering rag, but it betokened that the King was in residence.

The 19th century saints prayed for power to win the world for Christ. The answer came with the 20th century understanding of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Until then believers had no way to know when power had come. They were never sure they had prayed enough. Some came to suppose that praying was power. More prayer, more power! It is still a common idea with talk of 'prayer-power', instead of the power of the Spirit, a gift. Power is not to be generated by effort and time, but comes by the anointing, the baptism in the Spirit.

Just as with any subject, arguments can be brought up against Spirit-baptism and tongues. To despise this unique and wonderful confrontation with the Spirit of God, is revealing. Why be like that? It is hard to know why anybody would not want what the disciples had, but nobody can speak against the truth without revealing their own character. The Bible is our judge. Our reactions show what we are made of, but the truth goes marching on.

WHEN THE CREATOR BECAME A CREATURE

Christ came into the world to save sinners but in any case He would have come. He loved us "while we were yet sinners" but not because we were sinners. There's nothing endearing about sinfulness.

God could save us only by coming, He did come. and salvation is achieved, But that 'coming'! The how of it is awesome. He was the Creator, and His condescension brings worship and praise, but it was infinitely more than coming as a visitor in an act of Divine humility, He became one of us and part of His own material world, I had to think about that. He owned the world and then the world owned Him.

"The Word was made flesh". The Word by whom "All things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made." To save us was possible only by the stupendous act and mystery of incarnation. He was not a special form or appearance and didn't put on a temporary guise for the occasion distinct from His eternal self. He WAS His eternal self, "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and for ever", 'very God of very God'. The invisible joined Himself with the visible, Spirit with matter, Divine nature with human nature. He entered the heart of His own world, for ever.

That is the truth about the world, a new work of God. The Lord and His world united, Nature subject to God, and God subject to nature. He shared our material and mortal experience, even death. The Builder occupies the house. "In Him we live and move, and have our being." Made one with us, His hand is in everything. His local Bethlehem coming was a cosmic occasion.

Christ " upholds all things by His word of power". He clothed Himself with a material garment, His mighty arm a human arm, sleeved in nature. When He died on the Cross the planet shuddered and the sunlight flickered. The universe reacts to Him, for the whole natural order has met its Lord (See Romans 8)

However, that Creation has been cankered by evil. The Holy One took our nature upon Himself, and suffered to be one with the world as it was. But its corruption did not corrupt Him. The world reeked like an abattoir with the blood of murder and war but the smell did not cling even to his robes. Then In His own body He experienced the horrors of sin and knew what it was like to stand in the shoes of the guilty, or rather hang on the cross of the guilty.

Bernard Shaw said forgiveness of sin is impossible, because what's done can't be undone. Clever but misinformed! Christ broke into the dark world where all our past sins still muttered threats against us. He invaded the past were all wrongs can be righted, justified the wrongdoer as if he had done no wrong, and saved His people from their sins.

But God can't forgive and leave everything as it was. Sin had not left everything as it was. It turned Eden into a wilderness, and "the heavens are not clean in His sight". To forgive, God did this incredible thing, joined us and our world, worked from within the sinful order and tore the very roots of evil. Salvation affects heaven and earth.

When God created this world He had another act in view, the coming of Jesus. It was not an afterthought in an emergency but pre-planned. This world was made for Christ, and also for His Cross, "the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world" (Rev. 13:8). He died for our sins according to the Scriptures". The gross weight of everything God detested rested upon Him crushing Him in the garden to the ground in bloody sweat, but He carried the mountainous load up the Calvary road, and left it there.

That dark Friday afternoon He tasted death in solidarity with sinners at the heart of things. From Him flows a stream of holy cleansing through the universe. Calvary built concrete hope into all existence, and saving power. The hell He knew we shall never know. The Carpenter turned the wooden cross into the door of life.

But the crucial fact was that the crucified One was also the Eternal one. No physical grave could contain the life-power of the universe The resurrection was bound to happen. He rose, and planted resurrection life in the world for ever. The upholder of all things said "I am the resurrection". From Him a resurrection cataract pours through the old order with renewal and life.

The world is not what it was. Something new is here, and that something is all Christ was, salvation, renewal and power. He did not slip into the world and out again, but belongs to us all for ever. Our world environs Him. He cares about it all. He has an eternal purpose, beginning with a new heaven and a new earth.

God eternally linking Himself with this material universe makes it more than a pro-tem arrangement until God can do something different. Humans will always be human, just as the Son of Man is, but joined to His immortality, are transformed into the children of God, never to be bodiless, gibbering, bloodless ghosts, as the ancient pagan world believed. Christ saves people, not just souls. We shall see Him and be like Him, body mind and spirit adapted to be with Him for ever. Amen!

WHERE EAGLES GATHER

I was asked what Jesus meant in that great "second coming" chapter, Matthew 24, (v.28) about eagles gathering where there was a carcase. Luke 17:37 says, 'body' but a dead body. Eagles are vultures.

Well, no I did not know what Jesus meant, but I had a look first at scholars, Dr.Manson, Dr. Donald A. Hagner, Dr. John Nolland. Disappointingly, they didn't know either, but offered their speculations and all disagreed with one another - typical anyway. Dr. Nolland wasn't seriously interested despite his three volume commentary on Luke, remarking there are many explanations. Here are their suggestions.

One, the eagles are the Roman legionaries who would destroy Jerusalem 40 years later.
Two, the eagles are the people gathered by Christ at His coming. (!)
Three, Jesus meant the swiftness with which judgement would come on the day of the Son of Man.
Four, nobody can miss Christ's coming like nobody can miss vultures coming to a dead body.

Each takes it that Christ's enigmatic saying is about the day of His coming. But it just doesn't fit! How can vultures have anything to do with Jesus' return in glory? Their scholarly suggestions were bound to be odd. Dr. Nolland said the vultures are the elect caught away with Christ! I ask you, would Jesus make such a crude comparison? By the way, there's nothing in the passage about judgment either.

Well, we can all think. My basis of enquiry is different. Obviously Christ's saying has nothing to do with His return. That was not all He had been talking about in this discourse. He spoke of what the world would be like from His times to the end. He sums it all up, saying, "Where the carcase is the vultures will gather", A world of vultures! Christ's saying was a penetrating comment on the state of things as He prophesied they would be.

History is a story of vultures. So much distress is due to avarice and selfishness, everyone seeking gain at the expense of others. Jesus did refer to earthquakes, but otherwise the evils He listed were mostly man made. Troubles, great dangers, wars, persecutions, nations against nation, civil strife like the raging sea, false prophets, self-appointed messiahs, famines and pestilences, all traceable to avarice and selfishness in individuals or nations. Commerce and industry often show no more feeling than vultures for the mass of people. Where there is something to gain, the human predators pounce. History is made up of such stuff. "The love of money is the root of all evils".

This proverb of Jesus actually alludes to a Bible theme from the time of Abraham. God isolated Abraham from the world to get the world out of his system. The ways of nations and city states in the ancient world were brutal, murder, rapine, and oppression. To help their economy cities pillaged their neighbours. Genesis 14 is there as an example. Abraham had been in Ur, Egypt, Haran, and the Cities of the Plain. They all depended on rapacity, the bounty of war, vulture-like scavengers swooping down and making off with their neighbours' property. The great empires were typical. Nebuchadnezzar portrayed Babylon as a beautiful golden image. (Daniel 2) God described it as a preying beast trampling the earth, and also the empires of the Medes, Greeks and Romans.

The King of Sodom followed the world system. He offered Abraham the spoil of battle, but the patriarch refused it. God then said "Abraham I am thy exceeding great reward". God gave him a vision of another city whose foundations were not military power and whose wealth was not stolen gold stained with blood. The foundations were righteousness, laid by God. It was a vision of a civilised age we have scarcely achieved yet. We see riots about capitalistic practices, but what would our newscasters do if people stopped trying to get what wasn't theirs? Abraham was ahead of our times.

Jesus indicated that the future would be dominated by vultures, wanting what's going, first come first served "and the devil take the hindermost". Mankind's prehensile hand and predatory heart brought about conditions which Jesus said would precede His second advent. We used the emblems of Cross and Crusade when "Christian" armies slaughtered and plundered their way to Jerusalem 900 years ago. But there were many episodes before and since.

This 'proverb' of Christ is typical of His great wisdom, He flings it across the whole human scenario and sums it up. We have had 2000 years of vulture like economies and the inevitable distress.

In contrast come other words of Jesus "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness". No wonder great criminal powers hate Christianity. Jesus challenges their systems of imperialist loot and exploitation. Stalin's 18 million Gulag slaves have just recently become newspaper revelation. What were Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler but vultures? Has any nation a righteous aim except their own gain? The current God is Mammon.

Christian believers can't implement Christ's radical teaching by imposing it on nations. We should, and I hope do, exemplify it in our own lives. We are the light of the world. Christian standards clash with the way of the world, like Abraham clashed with the King of Sodom. But, let the vultures gather to satisfy their greed, Christ calls us to follow Him. "If any man love the world, the love of God is not in him" said the apostle John. He meant universal cupidity.

Abraham looked for a city, the Kingdom of God, to which Jesus opened the door, and in which dwells righteousness. Twice-born believers are its citizens

DOES GOD HURT TO HEAL?

Only one place in the New Testament reads as if God brought hurt just to heal, John 9. Meeting a blind man the disciples asked Jesus about him, and Jesus' reply in the AV reads "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him, I must work the works of him that sent me!" Jesus then healed the man.

In fact one can read it differently with different punctuation. However it creates a problem as if God made the man blind so Jesus could heal it. That is morally repugnant, never a Bible idea.

Now this verse hinges on the Greek word, "hina". It occurs several times in John's Gospel. Bible translations usually render it "but that" or "in order that" like the AV. The NIV emphasises it "This has happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life". The words "This has happened" are not in the Greek text at all. This implies that God destined the man to be blind just so Jesus could heal him.

Does God cause misfortune so He can step in and rectify it, for His glory? The New Testament has no such teaching. Anyway, there were enough blind people in Israel without God making one more just so He can heal him.

Now the question rests on the Greek word "hina", rendered "so that" or "in order that". But this meaning is not fixed. It also means "Let it be". That is the meaning in John 9:2 and can be in other places in John. It is not a conjunction but an imperative. "let it be". The word 'hina' for "let it be" comes in the Greek Old Testament " more than once.

What Jesus actually said was "Neither has this man sinned nor his parents, but LET the works of God be done", He then healed the man.

The disciples were uselessly speculating about the man's blindness and its cause. Jesus never did and He wasn't interested in the disciples' question, only in healing the man . It is as if He said "Never mind who or what is to blame, let the works of God be manifested".

My early ministry consisted largely of the whys and wherefores of suffering. Library shelves are full of volumes philosophising on the subject. With a shock, long ago, I saw my intellectualised concerns about the sick had little relevance and anyway the problem was beyond my poor brains. Jesus said "heal the sick!" It never entered my head to ask "Why?" - not even in the recent inconsolable loss of my wife. Debating evil has little to do with faith, except knock it flat.

We are ministers, not philosophers. Our calling is compassion, prayer, faith and the Word. Our terms, full Gospel or 'Foursquare" meant the proclamation of Jesus as Saviour, Baptiser. King and Healer. He is being 'proclaimed', but is Christ as Healer being toned down to general and less specific terms? Is our theology wobbling under the test of objective faith? The term "Foursquare" was coined by healing pioneers of the 19th century, for "Christ the Saviour, Healer, Coming King and Sanctifier". If Healer is no longer written in capitals, is it the Foursquare Gospel?

We must obey Jesus. "Let the works of God be manifest!". It is a command. So is "Heal the sick!" Is church practice in line with Christ's will? His compassions express His will, but does our will express His compassions?