Christ’s Afflictions Lacking?
"Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His body (which is the church) in filling up that which is lacking in Christ's afflictions." (Colossians 1:24)
Now here is a verse that once caused me to scratch my head. Really! Christ said on the cross, "It is finished!" so how could there be anything yet to be done? Is Paul saying that Christ’s suffering was not enough? Was His sacrifice insufficient for our debt? No, he has something else in view.
For the background we go to Matthew 23, "Therefore, behold, I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city, that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar." (vs. 34-35)
You remember the context. Christ was issuing the most scathing rebuke of the Jewish leaders. They attempted to defend themselves but in their "defense" they admitted they were the children of the very ones who persecuted all of God’s prophets for generations. Christ told them in verses 32-33, "Fill up then the measure of the guilt of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how shall you escape the sentence of hell?"
He told them that judgment would fall on their generation but they would have to attain the full measure of the guilt of their fathers before them. Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient to atone for the sins of the world, but that was not the end of His work on earth. His purpose for coming in "the fulness of time" was certainly for redemption, but that redemption would be manifest in the judgment of the Jews perversion of the Law.
In the period that intervened between His ascension and the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, they had ample time to repent and acknowledge Christ as God. He had prayed for their forgiveness and then offered them grace and mercy. They refused it declaring, "We have no king but Caesar!"
The stoning of Stephen confirmed their rejection of Christ and the fulfillment of his prophecy. It is ironic that Paul, who held the coats of those who stoned him, writes as one in whom the fullness of Christ’s afflictions is being worked. The persecutor became the persecuted.
He was not alone, all of Christ’s apostles met with untimely deaths except John and even he was persecuted. The filling up of the Jews measure of sin is the flip side of the apostles filling up what was lacking in Christ’s affliction.
In a very real sense, their affliction was shared by Christ as well because they were His abiding place. The apostles and all first century believers were suffering affliction and many would fall away in spite of constant encouragement to remain faithful just a little while longer. Those who were faithful, inherited the promised relief when Christ came in judgment against Jerusalem. They were vindicated and Christ was seen by all to be victorious.
Do Christians still suffer today? Without a doubt. Is that suffering a filling up of what was lacking in Christ’s affliction. I don’t think so. Christ is certainly with us in our distress, but there is no eschatological significance in our afflictions.
In 2 Corinthians 4:17, Paul referred to the persecution of the saints then as a "momentary, light affliction." In Romans 8:18 he encouraged his readers by telling them that the measure of their suffering could not begin to compare with the glory to be revealed to them soon. Some of them lived to witness that revelation and the faith engendered by that hope spread the gospel to all the world (Col. 1:6, 23).
Again and again, scripture affirms the veracity of their message. It is dangerous to carelessly disregard the clear statements of the text because they don’t fit our existing paradigm. Some serious Christians will dismiss what is written above because the conclusions it would compel them to accept are contrary to the creeds of men. Those who would chastise them for that failure, need to understand that exalting their own traditions is as much idolatry as exalting the creeds.
How Do You Respond?
There is presently considerable interest in Islam as a result of the ongoing conflict in the mid-east. Many conjecture, perhaps rightfully so, that we are about to see that religion embraced around the world. Christianity is being evicted from the playing field. Actually, it has been pretty much a forfeit as few Christians actually engage the contest for the minds of men.
Whether the source is an atheist, a Jew, or a Muslim, Christians will almost always be confronted with the challenge of demonstrating that Christ is the Son of God. Everyone of these deny Christ’s deity. Always near the top of their list of reasons why, is the charge that He is a false prophet. Their basis for this claim? He didn’t come again as He promised.
Regardless of which futurist view you hold, you are forced to agree with them or deny the overwhelming majority of Christian scholars who support their claim. If you find it more than a little uncomfortable agreeing with atheists and pagans that Christ was wrong, good for you! Now, what are you going to do about it? Will you console yourself with thoughts that it really doesn’t matter what you believe about "last things"?
How can we begin to convince the world of the victory there is in Christ as long as the message we proclaim is rooted in the belief that He failed? Make no mistake about it; if Christ did not fulfill His first century promises He failed. And, if He failed, He is not God but a false prophet, a liar and a deceiver.
The implications of our eschatology are far reaching. We deceive ourselves when we treat the subject as though it is of little practical consequence in how we live out our lives day to day. Pledge yourself now to the diligent study of this topic.
A Modern Prophet Speaks
On September 15th, I happened to see Paul Crouch on TBN. He was all caught up (pun intended) in how we are living in the end times. He went so far as to say, "There are people living right now, who will never [physically-jw] die!" He was almost teary-eyed as he recounted how the modern state of Israel emerged in 1948. He, like many others, is convinced the generation which witnessed that event will be the generation of "the rapture" and the return of Christ to earth.
Well, I was born in 1947 and will soon be 56 years old. I don’t know how long I will live, but the next 40 years should pretty well take care of most of my generation and then Crouch and others will be seen for the financial opportunists they are.
In the meantime, diligent students will find all the evidence they need to convince them that the Jews inhabiting Jerusalem today have no claim to the status of biblical Israel (and they make no such claim). Who is a national Jew today? Anyone who wants to be. If you are born of a Jewish mother or if you convert to Judaism, you’re in. It has absolutely nothing to do with any biblical perspective and it is high time Christians became scholarly enough to recognize this well established fact.
Unfortunately, many are driven by sentiment which results from decades of erroneous teaching. This leads to some really bizarre ideas. One reader of our local newspaper wrote a letter to the editor citing the recent close encounter with Mars as a possible omen of "the antichrist." She was captivated by the date of the encounter, 8/27/2003. Why she wrote it that way will be apparent shortly.
She noted Mars was the god of war and looking at the date it occurred to her that subtracting the 2 of 27 from 8, leaves 6 (the 2 of 27 is really twenty but that seems to have escaped her logic). Then if you subtract 1 from the seven of 27 you get 6 (she didn’t explain why she chose 1 instead of say 42, but it is obvious she wants another 6). Then, you take the 1 you subtracted from 7 and add it to the 2 and 3 from 2003 and you get (surprise!!!) 6. Everyone knows that the 666 is the number of the antichrist, right? No, it’s the number of the beast. The book of Revelation doesn’t even contain the word antichrist. This kind of foolishness makes Crouch and others look like geniuses.
I don’t know the hearts of these folks but the problem is they are on stage for Christianity and the way they act strongly influences the way Christ and His followers are viewed by the world. May God deliver us from the preaching that spawns these blemishes on the Christian faith.
"Pray without ceasing"
Do you remember your thoughts the first time this verse from 1 Thessalonians 5:17 was brought to your attention? They were probably something like, "You’ve got to be kidding!" The way most people understand prayer immediately creates a logical conflict. There is no way they can pray all the time.
Either they scratch their heads in confusion and do the best they can, decide not to think about it, or live out their lives always feeling that their prayer life is deficient. It never occurs to most that their understanding of what prayer is may be at the heart of their difficulty.
While I certainly don’t have the final word on the matter, there is enough information in scripture to convince me that prayer has a much wider view than we typically ascribe to it. Certainly, there are times when we stop and give ourselves to focusing on our communication with God, but prayer is much more than those times.
As the passage implies, prayer is a lifestyle of constant communication with the Father. It is not so much an action as a continual awareness of our dependency upon God. In scripture, there are various words which are translated "pray" and their common trait is that God is the object of exercise. It may be a matter of blessing (or cursing - imprecatory prayer), intercession, or personal petition. We tend to major in asking for things but biblical prayer doesn’t have that focus..
Some want to establish a prayer formula. The ACTS model (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication) is frequently offered as a pattern. While there is a logical progression in this method, it focuses on form. What we frequently see in scripture is not the adherence to some established form, but to the cry of the heart and that can jumble the ACTS order considerably.
In times of calamity, it is rare that the immediate cry of our heart is adoration. We petition for relief. As we work through the trial our need to confess becomes obvious and our supplication resolves into thanksgiving and adoration. That is not to say that our supplication is void of adoration or thanksgiving. To the contrary, it is because we are living a life of praise and thanksgiving that our petitions are bathed in adoration and confession even when they are not verbalized.
In short, that is praying "in the name of Jesus". It is not tagging that phrase onto the end of our petition to make it acceptable but, rather, it is the inner awareness that our request is based on our position in Christ and His authority.
Just think for a moment how many of our hymns are really prayers. How many end, "In Jesus Name, Amen"? Not many, if any. Are then those petitions offered in song in vain? Of course not! We have no problem realizing that God knows us because we are Christ’s and that as we make our supplication He hears us. "In Jesus name" is not some magic formula to get a prayer heard by God and we shouldn’t use it that way.
Our petitions are limited to those things which are compatible with the will of the Father. The "blank check" idea is appealing to some, but it is recipe for disappointment. It is imperative that our petitions be based on God’s will, not our own. God’s gifts are for His purposes, not our whims.
Biblical prayer goes far beyond the cry of the heart. It binds the petition to the Father in the ongoing work of kingdom building. Austin O’Malley says it this way, "Practical prayer is harder on the soles of your shoes than on the knees of your trousers."
We should never forget that we are co-workers with God and that when we seek for His will to be done, of necessity we open ourselves to be available as the instruments of fulfilling our own request. We don’t just lob the ball into His court and then go our way as though we’ve done our part. The truth is, we have just begun.
Our next responsibility is to be sensitive to how God desires to work with us in His answer. Frequently, when He places a need on our heart, it is because He intends for us to be involved in meeting that need. How often is our prayer for God to meet a need instead of asking how He can use us to meet it by His grace?
I don’t mean to imply that we should only petition the Father about situations which we can personally address; just that we should be aware of how we might be part of the answer. Living in the presence of Almighty God expands the scope of our "prayer" far beyond what the patriarchs or those living under the Mosaic Covenant ever experienced. The prayers of the patriarchs and Old Covenant Israel were accompanied by sacrifices to seek God’s favor. The thought of living in relationship with The Almighty was foreign to them.
While many today, understand we now come boldly before God in Christ, there is a danger that this knowledge will breed an undue sense of familiarity with God. He is not our cosmic bellboy chomping at the bit to do our bidding if we can just get His attention. He doesn’t work for tips either, so let’s not act as though He can be bought. Those who adopt this presumptuous system only grow in their arrogance toward God.
As usual, the balance is somewhere between the extremes. It lies in the intense realization that outside of Christ, we have no standing and could not even approach the Father. This awareness should impress us all the more as to the glory we share in Christ and cause our lives to resound with praise.
If we can ever begin to glimpse the liberty that is ours in Christ, it will transform our thinking.
Consider our manner of prayer for a moment. We assemble where petitioning the Father is one of our purposes. We acknowledge that we have gathered as His children. Then we spend extended amounts of time expressing our prayer concerns with one another. Finally, as though we have been out of the presence of the Father, we bow our heads, close our eyes and, voila, He is present and listening to our prayer. Doesn't that seem just a little silly?
Please don’t misunderstand. I don’t think there is anything wrong with bowing one’s head and closing one’s eyes to pray. Nevertheless, it does concern me that we think something special happens because we do. All I’m suggesting is that we begin to act as though we actually believe we live in the presence of God. Being in the presence of the Father was something which was largely foreign to the experience of believers prior to Christ’s coming. Their focus was on sacrifice. In Christ, our sacrifice is complete and the focus is on relationship and communion.
How blessed we will be when we recover this truth as Christ’s body and live it out in our life together.
The Demise of Free Speech
If you’ve paid attention to the news at all in the past month, you realize there has been a major confrontation between tyrannical judges and the Christian faith. This time it came in the banning of the ten commandments monument in the Alabama state Judicial Building by a federal judge. Of course, the buck doesn’t stop there.
The really telling issue goes far beyond the fact that the federal government has no authority to tell the states what they can and can’t display (if you find that authority in the Constitution, be sure to let me know). George Bush and John Ashcroft both rose to power at least in part due to their profession of faith in Christ and their oaths to defend the Constitution.
It is their duty to uphold the law of the land at all times, especially when Congress or the Courts act against it. The wisdom of our founders is seen in the separation of powers. The courts can rule and congress can legislate, but only the executive branch is authorized to act on behalf of the central government. When a court ruling or legislation violates the Constitution, the president has no duty to act. To the contrary, his duty is to treat such mandates as though they had never been issued.
In the case before us, Mr. Ashcroft is directly responsible for the U.S. Marshals which were ordered to remove the monument. Without his order, it would still be there. His duty was clear, but in spite of his professed faith and rhetoric in support of the Constitution, he clearly violated his oath. But the buck doesn’t stop there.
The president, realizing that Ashcroft was not going to uphold his oath, had a duty to intervene by directly ordering the Attorney General to cease and desist, or replacing him with someone who would. Our Christian president ignored his duty and the rest is now history. But the buck doesn’t stop there.
Congress could have passed a resolution reaffirming that the ten commandments are protected speech and that the federal government has no authority to involve itself in this issue at the state level. (They demonstrated this power when just a few weeks later they responded to the Supreme Courts ruling against their bill requiring telemarketers to honor the national "Do Not Call List." It is ironic that the Court is correct in this case - and understand, I hate telemarketing). Though there are a number of Christians in Congress, no one offered such a resolution. But the buck doesn’t stop there either.
Where does it stop? It stops with you and me. All these serve at our pleasure. When they fail in their duty, it becomes our duty to discipline and remove them. I’d love to see a show of hands of how many Christians have written a letter to an elected official to correct their unlawful actions. My guess is that most have never written a single one. The buck stops here. We are accountable to God and we are required to hold our elected servants to be accountable to us. Have you? Will you?
Sadly, my guess is that in the 2004 election cycle Christians will again rally around a man who has repeatedly demonstrated that the law of the land means little if anything to him. If you vote for a tyrant, don’t be surprised when the tyranny expands; and it will.
On a related note, the Canadian Parliament just approved a law to make it illegal for Christians to speak out against homosexuality, even in their church assemblies. That legislation is still waiting for approval by the senate but observers state that is just a formality. Soon, Canadian Christians who proclaim homosexuality is a sin will be subject to imprisonment for five years. Don’t take comfort if you live in the USA. It is just a matter of time until similar legislation is passed in this country.
Maybe if we can find fifty ... no forty-five ... or maybe forty ... or perhaps thirty ... or possibly twenty ... or even ten righteous, God will cover us with mercy and spare us the coming horror. Where will you be numbered?
The Apprentice’s Journal
A rare experience has really blessed me recently and it is amazing how much hope and encouragement one simple encounter can bring. Let me explain.
It is not news that I’ve been studying covenant eschatology for some time now. That is just the latest development in my life that puts me at odds with a number of the people I love and care about. Nevertheless, conscience demands my diligence in living out what I believe (and no, I’m certainly not perfect in the living of it).
I was raised with the deep conviction I was to share truth as I best understand it and I’ve always tried to heed that conviction. That doesn’t win popularity contests, but then I was never called to win in that arena. Most folks are delighted to listen to teaching as long as it agrees with their previously held beliefs, but recoil immediately when their closely held beliefs are challenged. That’s a natural response, but it is one that needs to be resisted long enough to be honest with ourselves.
Little troubles me more in this regard, than individuals who dismiss something out of hand when they have never studied it for themselves: an all too frequent occurrence. That makes one event this week all the more life-giving for me. I prefer to do business with Christians so most of the services that I use are doorways to relationships which almost always include some discussion of our faith.
As I began the study of covenant eschatology, I shared it with these friends just as I have with you. Being local, they had the opportunity to attend the seminars we’ve held here. While one local friend who is new to the study attended these meetings, others have not. My dentist is one individual who has wanted to attend, but he is frequently out of town and the timing just hasn’t been right yet.
This week I delivered a set of tapes he requested from our most recent seminar. He has been interested in understanding the subject from day one, but when he began to realize just how the fulfilled view differs from modern teaching, he became really energized. He literally beamed at the prospect of taking a look at something which had the potential to revolutionize the way he understands scripture and how it applies to our lives.
Instead of being threatened, he wanted to know more. He told me his devotion to truth is more important than his traditions. He doesn’t care if it flies in the face of what he has been taught or what his denomination teaches, he is eager to have his understanding enlightened. As a leader in his congregation, he realizes his need to be informed, even if he ultimately disagrees with what he hears in the tapes.
It’s a sad commentary on our day that many Christians just want to be comfortable. In reality, what seems to them to be uncomfortable is, in the end, the place of greatest comfort. Sticking one’s head in the sand may change the view, but it doesn’t change reality.
Real comfort is found in constantly seeking to weed out the error in our understanding. It is incredible to watch truth grow and blossom as the things which hinder us are removed. If you’ve grown comfortable with weeds, consider cleaning up your garden. You’ll be amazed at what will be freed to grow there.