Tag: Universal Truth

WHY DOES GOD LOVE US?

As Christians we’re very acquainted with the gospel message that God loves us, and that God loves us so much that he gave to the world his Divine Son, our Lord Jesus the Messiah (Mashiach), to atone for our sinfulness and to redeem us from sin, death and the devil. But have you ever wondered why God loves us?

So, why is it that God loves us in the first place?

Thankfully, we find the beautiful and powerful answer to this question from the Word of God within the Holy Scriptures. In many passages throughout the Holy Bible, the twofold biblical reason why God loves us so much is simply because we are [1] his cherished creations and [2] his beloved children. As God’s cherished creations, we are his artwork, his building, his craftsmanship. We are God’s painting, God’s musical composition, God’s architectural design, God’s masterwork. And, of course, as we are Almighty God’s offspring (children of our Heavenly Father), we are loved with a fully parental, self-giving and self-sacrificing kind of love.

(Psalm 139:13-14a) – “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works…”

(Isaiah 64:8) – “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.”

(Matthew 6:9) – “This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name’…”

We are indeed cherished creations and beloved children of God, first and foremost. Humankind is created in the image of God (imago Dei) as a complementary balance of female and male (yin/yang), and, although women and men are very different, we are equal in our God-given value and dignity. In addition, humanity is a beautiful kaleidoscope of ethnicities and cultures, but we are one human race that is endowed with inalienable human rights and responsibilities.

(Genesis 1:27) – “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

(Acts 17:26-29) – “From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God, and perhaps grope for him and find him — though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals…”

Consequently, our core identity is not centered on any sociological ideology or theory of conflict that’s obsessed with group identities, differences and partialities. Rather, as beloved children of God, our core identity is purely based upon the universal truth of the Word of God and upon the all-encompassing love and grace of God revealed in Jesus the Christ (Christos).

(John 17:17) – “Sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth.”

(Ephesians 5:1-2) – “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

Knowing why God loves us, we can live our daily lives in this wonderful awareness “as beloved children.” Although our human condition is fallen and sinful, our human nature is divine as offspring of Almighty God. So, we must always uplift and rejoice in our true identity and heavenly heritage as human beings.

Therefore, we praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom God created us and the countless worlds of our universe (see John 1:1-4 and Colossians 1:15-17 and Hebrews 1:1-2). With deep gratitude and thanksgiving, we can live every single day in the awareness that we are cherished creations and beloved children of our Heavenly Father, and that God loves us so much that he gave us his Holy Son, Jesus (Yeshua), to be the once-and-for-all sacrificial offering of atonement for the sins of humanity (see John 3:16-17 and Hebrews 10:10-14 and First John 4:9-11). Glory to God in the highest!!!

Happy Thanksgiving & Good Advent! Pastor Tim

THE REALLY REAL STRAWBERRY OF GOD

(I was asked by a parishioner on Pentecost Sunday several weeks ago for a printed copy of my sermon for that morning, so I’ve decided to also use this sermon as the basis for my July/August article.)

Have you ever eaten any kind of wild berry? If you have, then you might have noticed a difference in flavor from the garden-variety that’s been selectively bred vs. the wild-variety of the natural world. And there’s even some taste differences between berries that have been farmed conventionally (with chemical pesticides and artificial fertilizers) vs. berries that have been farmed more organically.

My favorite kind of berry is the strawberry for sure, and the kind of strawberry we’re all most familiar with is the conventionally farmed garden-variety strawberry that’s the descendant of the wild strawberry. And of course, the garden-variety strawberry that we’re most accustomed to is a mass produced strawberry breed that has been designed and grown to be consistently the biggest, most beautiful and juiciest strawberry possible. These strawberries are still technically real strawberries, but they’re selectively grown using only the best GMO seeds. So the supermarket strawberries that we’re used to eating are essentially the very pinnacle of what a strawberry could be.

Now because the flavor of the strawberry is so delicious, people have also devised ways to distill its flavor down to be even more concentrated than the flavor of the strawberry itself. And wanting to make it even more powerful, we’ve taken that distilled juice to make delicious strawberry candy, with a heavy dose of sugar and a little sodium added to it. Then, because real strawberry juice and pure cane sugar are too expensive, the large scale candy maker has decided to use artificial strawberry flavor along with high fructose corn syrup, and they’ve even bumped up the sodium a little bit more.

Then the soft drink company comes along, and says they’re going to make a soda pop out of the popular mass produced strawberry candy. And then the gas station minimart people come along and say they’re going to make a slurpee that’s flavored like the soda, that was flavored like the mass produced candy, that was flavored like the original candy, that was distilled from the genetically modified strawberry, that was based upon the wild strawberry of the real natural world. So by the time we go from the wild strawberry through all the various iterations down to the slurpee, we have something that tastes vaguely strawberry-ish, but isn’t anything like a real strawberry.

Consequently, if someone buys that slurpee and they start drinking it as they’re walking along the road, and they see off the road some funny little red things that kind of look like the picture of the red berries on the plastic cup of their slurpee, then they just might pick one of those berries and take a bite. And they would realize that it sort of tastes a little bit like their slurpee, but it’s not nearly as flavorful. So they decide to stick with their slurpee.

Brothers and sisters, we live in a time of hyper-reality, where things are supposedly now more real than real — more strawberry than a real strawberry, so to speak. There are the hyper-realities of virtual reality and virtual community, for instance, but all this unreality of our present era is no accident. In fact, sociologists say that our society has moved out of the modern era into what they call the post-modern era.

In the modern era, society accepted the idea that there is such a thing as objective reality. However, in our new postmodern era, there’s only your truth and my truth — there’s only subjective reality. So in this present upside-down era, there is no such thing as an objective reality that is universally true. It’s like Pontius Pilate cynically stating to Jesus, “What is truth?” (see John 18:37-38). Just like the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate, today’s postmodern mindset assumes there is no such thing as “the truth.” It assumes there is only power, and whichever narrative can muster the most muscle to support it is the winner. But what do the Holy Scriptures declare about this?

Several of our Bible readings on Pentecost Sunday 2021 declared that there is such a thing as universal truth. In our Gospel Reading from John 15:26-27 and 16:4b-15, our Lord Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit of God twice as the “Spirit of Truth.” And in our Epistle Reading from Second Corinthians 3:17–4:9, the Apostle Paul refers to the plain truth of the gospel. So for Christians, there is indeed such a thing as objective reality and universal truth, and God is the source of all truth (both natural truth and spiritual truth). Whether revealed by the natural world through science and reason, or revealed by the supernatural world through faith and spirit, God is the source and foundation of all of it.

But we’re now being told these days that the distinctions between mother, father and child are unjust power categories from a bygone era. We’re being told that a mother is now a “birthing parent,” and that a child must give their permission for a diaper change. Give me a break! And some educators now want us to believe that 2+2=4 is a “subjective cultural construct,” and not objectively true. Well, just try rocketing astronauts to Mars without 2+2=4. Good luck with that!

While there’s some usefulness to the various critical deconstructions of absolutely everything these days, I’m convinced that the radical cynicism, criticism and deconstruction which characterize our present postmodern era are ultimately a dead end road. It’s essentially what our passage from Second Corinthians 3 and 4 would call “the god of this age” — what we might call the god of this era — and it’s a god that continues to try to blind hearts and minds to the grace and truth of Almighty God.

However, the “Spirit of Truth” will guide us through it all. Like Dante in Dante’s Inferno, we must pass through the fires of this present age before we come to the glorious return to the harmonious natural reality of Eden that God promises us through Jesus Christ our Savior — the glorious return to the really real natural strawberry (so to speak) of God’s original blessing in the Garden.

The Apostle Paul says in our Second Corinthians reading, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” and our Lord Jesus says in our Gospel of John reading, this freedom-giving Spirit of the Lord is the “Spirit of Truth.” So it’s clear that these two aspects of God’s Spirit are inseparably linked together. Freedom and Truth… Truth and Freedom… You can’t have one without the other.

Therefore, if we stand firm upon our Judeo-Christian belief in objective reality and universal truth — unlike the false gospel of the postmodern god of this era — then we will be grounded in the really real and we will be truly free indeed.

Together in Christ, Pastor Tim