Blog Archives - Ironworks Pike Community Church

Our Version of Reality = What Happened Yesterday

3/30/2015

It's been a moderate winter, here in Kentucky.

Right away, many friends might exclaim, "What are you saying?! Weren't you here during mid-February? Storm after storm! The church's gutter almost got torn clean off by an ice-slide! We saw those pictures of you, shoveling a path all the way from your driveway to the main road!" (hero music here).

But the fact remains that the totality of winter here hasn't been so bad. But because we had a couple of whopper storms late in the season, now we say that this winter was "bad." If you remember back to Christmas 2014, however, winter actually was pretty average. It only got bad at the end.

This is so much like how I remember the past. I remember my worst experiences in bright Technicolor, and forget a lot of the good things God daily did for me, and for us, over long stretches of time. If my most recent days are harsh, then I say the whole season has been harsh. I lack perspective.

Maybe this is a reason why Jesus commanded us to formally remember His death in the Lord's Table, rather than commanding us to commemorate our own conversion experiences? Our memories about many experiences are less than reliable. We are prone to forget important things, and to maximize or minimize events that don't merit the sizes we assign them. My wife remembers family trips that have completely fled my mind. I remember things my friends said or did that they don't remember at all!

Special man-made days like Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, and Biblically-ordained ceremonies like baptism and the communion service, and God's decision to write down His words in the form of a book, serve as guards against our emotionalism and mental selectivity. No matter what I do or don't remember about what we were doing on any given day in 1992, Christ was always born in Bethlehem, died for our sins on Golgotha, and rose again on the third day. I'm not floundering around in a swirling stream of my own consciousness. I have an anchor lodged in the unchangeable history of God coming to save me.

Bible Cliches

3/30/2015

I was reading the story of Jesus cleansing the temple of the money-changers, in preparation for His passion week, and for some reason was struck by how this story is misused.

If you read the question asked Him by the temple personnel, that is the kernel of the story. "What right do you have to do this?" This was a blatantly dishonest question, asked by a cabal of corrupt and dishonest men who profited from the price-gouging rates they charged the common people for exchanging regular money for their bogus temple money. So Christ put them back on their heels by demanding they say who they thought John the Baptist was.

The point is, this story is not about the "rightness of anger." It is about the authority of Jesus of Nazareth. He was God's Son, and this was His Father's sanctified house. He had every right to march in and run off all these crooks. Like Odysseus coming home and kicking all the ruffians out of his home, like Frodo and his friends scouring the Shire at the end of their adventures, Christ did what he did because it was His Father's place, and he was His Father's Son.

The story has nothing to do with it being okay to get mad at people. We wouldn't have had the right to drive out the money-changers with a whip, because we aren't the Son of God. The chief priests and scribes worked for Jesus of Nazareth, though they absolutely refused to recognize His authority over them. The story is also a foreshadowing of Christ's glorious return. First the crucifixion, then the going-away to a far country to receive a kingship, then a return to rebuild and restore the Temple.

And Christ acted out of zeal for His Father's glory, not out of rage.

Too many Christians have used this story as a justification for their bad tempers. Even if we preachers place a right distinction on godly anger versus fleshly anger, "anger" still isn't what the story is about. Christ's emotion at that moment is a secondary issue; He could easily have acted with silent determination. The temple exchange-area was a criminal enterprise that had been crying out for purging a long time. The Messiah did it, because He was the Messiah. It is Christ making one more declaration of His true identity, before Good Friday came.