The most dangerous time for God's people would seem to be
when they are experiencing material blessings, so why do we have a prosperity
gospel? Struggle tends to bring us
closer to Him, we know our need.
Prosperity is dangerous because we have all we need and allow those
things to draw us away from Him. The
Lord was deeply concerned that prosperity would be their undoing and, if we
listen to the prophets, we know that times of prosperity were when they fell
away from Him. The next several chapters
of Deuteronomy lay out the dangers of this prosperity and set in place certain
reminders in worship of how they got this prosperity. The sacrifices are to be offered with the
statement, "My father was a wandering Aramean", the feast of booths
is an annual reminder of the time in the wilderness when they had no permanent
homes, the Sabbath commandments were there to force the nation to remember, to
allow themselves to trust that if they did not work this one day each week they
would have all they needed, the Sabbath years once every seven and the Jubilee
year once every fifty years were there to call them away from this notion of
self-sufficiency. One of the things I
truly appreciate about our liturgical calendar is that very idea is embedded in
Lent and Advent. I don't enjoy Lent per
se but it is important to my life in Christ.
The world did not know the One who created it but worse yet,
His own people did not know Him. How did
that happen when the ones who most openly rejected Him and most vehemently
despised Him were supposedly the most religious of the people? Religion had become do-it-yourself rather
than trusting in Him. We can easily make
that same mistake today unless we always remember that the work of salvation
was and is all His. Until the 1979 Book
of Common Prayer the confession in Morning Prayer said: Almighty and most
merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep. We
have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have
offended against Thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought
to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done;
And there is no health in us." That
last clause, after the semicolon, is no longer part of the confession. Everything else is the same, that alone was
omitted. We don't like to admit that
truth, but omitting it is what changes us into Pharisees, enables us to
distance ourselves from our need of Him just a bit. Slippery slopes.
The point of the book of Hebrews is to restore Jesus to
pre-eminence in the community. Nothing
can compare with Him, so why try and add anything to Him? He alone is the perfect image of God. We are created in His image and to bear His
image to the world, but when the perfect image came they thought He was
possessed by a demon. When He appeared
before the throne a lamb looking like it was slain, heaven recognized Him and
worshipped Him. We need to join them in
worship of Jesus, its alright, He is one with the Father. If heaven can be allowed to worship Him, so
can we. He is our deliverer, just like
God was the deliverer of the people of Israel from bondage in Egypt, not we
ourselves. The fact that the community
had to be reminded of this only a few years after the resurrection tells me
that there is no health in us at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment