Keep the Faith

I’m back

kim — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:43:08 +0000

Hello people! I’m back from summer vacation and hope to start writing for Keep the Faith this week. Kim Batteau

We celebrated Pentecost on May 23

Administrator — Sun, 30 May 2010 21:39:33 +0000

Painting: Emil Nolde, Pfingsten, 1909, Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie Pentecost, in our day, is the celebration of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the church by the risen and reigning Jesus Christ. Acts 2 records this event. The disciples of Jesus, gathered in Jerusalem, heard the sound of a mighty wind fill the room they were gathered in, they saw what appeared to be flames of fire above their heads, and began to speak in languages they had never learned. Jews who had come to Jerusalem for the Jewish feast of Pentecost, 50 days after Passover, were drawn to the sound of wind, and heard these disciples of Jesus speaking the languages of their home countries, ranging from Persia in the east to Rome in the west. According to liberal theologians, this episode has been invented by the author (Luke), as a non-historical fantasy, based on various stories about the presence of the Holy Spirit after Jesus' departure. However, Luke himself qualifies his own writing as based on interviews with eyewitnesses and his own extensive research (Luke 1:1-4). Luke's express purpose, written in literary Greek, is to convince "Theofilus," probably a Roman in high government circles, of the historical trustworthiness of the story of Jesus, as already written about by eyewitnesses. Either Luke is lying,which is unlikely, this meaning he is considerably naive about the credulity of an educated Roman, who was certainly able to look into the historical facts himself, or he is telling the truth. If the Pentecost story is true, then God did a great miracle, which had a tremendous impact on many Jewish people who heard uneducated Galileans speaking their own native languages and dialects fluently. They heard them proclaiming "God's mighty acts," that is, what God had done through the coming of Jesus the Messiah. God was demonstrating his intention to "pour out His spirit on all flesh," as the prophet Joel had prophesied in the Old Testament. It was the beginning of a great "baptism in the Spirit," as John the Baptist and Jesus had foretold, the beginning of the fulfilling of prophecies in Jeremiah and Ezechiel about the New Covenant in the age of the Holy Spirit. If the Pentecost story is true, then we know for sure that Jesus is reigning and pouring out the Holy Spirit on people in all nations, bringing salvation and the power of the Holy Spirit to all who trust in him. What do you think about Pentecost?

We celebrated Ascension Day

Administrator — Sat, 15 May 2010 21:19:50 +0000

Painting: Rembrandt, Ascension of Jesus, 1636, Alte Pinakothek, München This past Thursday we celebrated Ascension Day here in The Hague. Most people in The Netherlands have no idea what Ascension Day (Hemelvaartsdag) means. it is a holiday here, but few associate Jesus' heavenly kingship with this day. This is very sad. Nevertheless there are many Christians who come together on Ascension Day to celebrate Jesus' ascending to heaven to be crowned King. To many people, including many liberal theologians, this story sounds mythological and improbable. Yet Luke, at the beginning of his two-volume work, the Gospel according to Luke and the book of Acts, introduces his narrative with a consciously chosen statement, saying that he had himself done careful research into the historical truth of what was known about Jesus. At the end of the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus' ascension is described summarily. In Acts 1, the events leading up to his ascension, and the ascension itself are described in more detail. If God made all things, if Jesus was and is truly God in the flesh, if he really rose from the dead, if he realy was and is the promised Anointed One of Israel (Messiah), and thereby the inheritor of all the promises given David's expected great successor on David's throne, then the Ascension is not mythological, but historical. The disciples, it is true, expected Jesus to go to Jerusalem to rule, replacing the Herodian surrogate kingship over Israel, but he went up to heaven, heaven being in the Bible that place in or dimension of the creation where God reveals himself in splendor and peace, surrounded by angels and the spirits of just men and women made perfect. If the Ascension is history, everything on earth is different.

Resurrection and creation

Administrator — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 22:04:14 +0000

Painting: Titian, Polyptych of Jesus' Resurrection, 1520-22 In Paul's letter to the Romans, chapter 8, he brings the resurrection of Jesus into confrontation with the "sighing" of all creation, longing to be liberated from decay. This sigh of existence is something which is admitted by all human beings, and something we all experience personally. There is something about life which cries out for cosmic redemption. A cry for eternal life in the midst of ever-present death. And then we begin to rationalize. We say, after reflection, in the cold light of day: "It can't be helped. Death is part of life." And yet, when a loved one dies, we feel the loss deep in our bones, and we cannot say with such cool rationality: "O well, that's that, death is part of life." Paul says: Jesus' resurrection is the beginning of God's "great reversal." The "curse" which He laid upon the creation due to man's rebellion, this curse He is going to lift. He has lifted it. By the first coming of Jesus to this earth, by Jesus' death and resurrection from the dead, there are forces at work in creation which will one day mean that death no longer is part of life. Things will not go stale. Human beings will no longer ache with unbearable loss. Incredibly, the entire creation, and here I think we must think of the animal and plant kingdom, next to human life, will be set free. Life will rise up and never go down again. Secular thought accuses religions of trying to "escape" from reality. For in this view, death is the final end, nothingness wins. There is no hope for man or this earth beyond the grave. This is the pessimistic verdict of Western rationality about the reality of our existence in 2010. Yet at the same time this secular thought longs for "solutions" to the problems of earth: poverty, sickness, injustice, the abuse of creation, even death itself. The tension here is palpable. Jesus' resurrection means that there is real hope for our world. Not in an escape from reality. But in God's promise that what He has begun, by Jesus' resurrection from the dead, He will continue till there is a new earth under a new heaven. Unimaginable? Yes, if our rationality is limited by our own conceptions of the inevitability of death. No, if the God of Jesus' resurrection really is there. And if Jesus really rose from the dead.

Jesus’ resurrection in history

Administrator — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 21:28:27 +0000

Painting: Raphael, Paul in Athens, 1515, Victoria and Albert museum, London In the book of Acts, chapter 17, we see the apostle Paul in Athens. Although the political and cultural capital of the Roman empire at that time was Rome itself, Athens still had the allure of the source of the Greek wisdom, art, and philosophical religion which Rome had copied and tried to make its own. Paul, a Jew, and a Pharisee, had been raised in Tarsus in what is now Turkey, and educated under one of the leading Rabbi's of that day. After a period of intense hostility to the "Jesus movement," he came to faith in Jesus as the Messiah for Israel and the nations. This was on the road to Damascus, recorded in Acts 9. From that moment on he believed that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead, and that that resurrection, next to Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross, was the pivotal moment in all of human history. He talked about it everywhere he went, and tried to get all the people he met to believe that Jesus, the Messiah, had been raised from the dead. Paul was a close observer of the cultural landscape he travelled through. When he came to Athens, he was stirred by all the temple worship there. He also found a temple with the inscription, "to an unknown god." He began to try to engage the Athenians at the Areopagus, "Mars' hill." He speaks of the striking polytheism and worship of statues of gods in Athens. This was at variance with some of the Greeks' own philosophers, who had said that we are God's children. "If we are God's children, how come you all are worshipping statues?" Paul said. He went further to speak of God who made all things. Paul said: the "unknown god," I saw named in that temple, I'm talking about Him. Paul said: this living God has given a special sign of a coming judgment of the world. God had raised a man from the dead, as a convincing sign to all people that the judgment day is coming. God is moving history to its climax. History is not meaningless. It is not an endless repetition of the same things. History is going somewhere: to a renewal of our world, but also to judgment of men who don't want to worship God forever. Paul said: this sign of Jesus' resurrection is proof to all that God will judge the world through this man, Jesus. To many Athenians who heard Paul that day, this sounded utterly ridiculous. Jewish nonsense. But some listened carefully, and came to faith that day. Others came to faith later. Faith in Jesus, the resurrected Messiah.

Jesus and authority

Administrator — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 13:45:32 +0000

Authority
April 2010
by Tim Keller
The root idea of modernity is the overturning of all authority outside of the self. In the 18th century European ‘Enlightenment’ thinkers insisted that the modern person must question all tradition, revelation, and external authority by subjecting them to the supreme court of his or her own reason and intuition. We are our own moral authority.

In spite of this tectonic philosophical shift, modern society nonetheless continued to be dominated by relatively stable institutions for a long time. People still were able to root their identities to a great degree in family and clan, in local civic communities, and in their work or vocation. All that seems now to be passing because of the ‘acid’ of the modern principle, namely that individual happiness must come before anything else. Marriage and family, workplace and career, neighborhood and civic community—none of these institutions now remain stable long enough for individuals to depend on them.

People live increasingly fragmented lives, no longer thinking of themselves in terms of basic roles in communities (“Christian, father, lawyer.”) Instead, their identity constantly shape-shifts as they move through a series of life episodes that are not tightly connected to each other. They are always ready to change direction and abandon commitments and loyalties without qualms and to pursue, on a personal cost-benefit basis, the best opportunity available to them.

The thread that ties all this together is the inconceivability of a moral order with an authority more fundamental than one’s own experience. Sociologist Christian Smith has written a book called Souls in Transition which profiles the beliefs of young adults under the age of 25. He finds that most of them believe it is the choice of their beliefs that make them true, not their truth that leads to our choice of them. He notes how even young adults who go to conservative churches and identify as Christians often refuse to believe Christian prohibitions against premarital sex and other Biblical norms that conflict with their feelings and intuitions.

Smith relates how he often interviewed people and asked them if their moral convictions (some of which were very strong) were mainly subjective feelings or really true to reality. He found that most had difficulty even understanding what he was asking. He concludes: “They simply cannot believe in or sometimes even conceive of a given objective truth… that is independent of their subjective self-experience (p. 37).

Many years ago as a young Christian my attention was arrested by an article on ‘Authority’ by John Stott. Stott asked, “Why should people believe that the Bible is God’s Word written, inspired by his Spirit and authoritative over their lives?” (The Authority of the Bible, IVP, 1974,p.6) This was a big question for me. I had decided that I believed in Jesus Christ, but I struggled with the idea that I had to believe everything in the Bible. Stott answered that we do not believe it simply because we want to be dogmatic and certain about our own beliefs, nor because the church has consistently taught this (though it has), nor because we just ‘feel’ the Bible is true as we read it. “No. The overriding reason for accepting the divine inspiration and authority of Scripture is plain loyalty to Jesus…Our understanding of everything is conditioned by what Jesus taught. And that includes his teaching about the Bible. We have no liberty to exclude anything from Jesus’ teaching and say, ‘I believe what he taught about this but not what he taught about that.’ What possible right do we have to be selective?” (p.7)

What did Jesus believe about the Bible? He said that not a ‘jot or tittle’ (i.e. not the smallest letter or even a part of a letter) would pass away from God’s Word until all was fulfilled (Matthew 5:17-18 cf.

John 10:35.) In Matthew 19:5, Jesus tells us that in Genesis “God said” that “A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife.” But when you go back to Genesis 2:24 you discover that it is only the human but inspired author of Genesis who wrote that. So, to Jesus, what Scripture says, God says. And Jesus did not simply believe the Bible, but he guided and regulated every step and detail of his life by it (cf. John 19:28.)

Stott’s question—‘what possible right do we have to be selective?’—is like a hammer blow to our contemporary way of life. We feel strongly that we have the right, even the obligation to select what parts of Jesus teaching we can accept and what parts we cannot. But that makes no sense. Why should you trust in him as Savior if you are wiser and smarter then he is? Either he is who he said he is, and his views judge our views, or he was lying or deluded about being the Son of God. So Jesus’ authority and the absolute authority of the Bible stand or fall together. If we believe he was who he said he was, then we must accept the entire Bible as God’s word.

Jesus’ resurrection a reality

Administrator — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 22:17:27 +0000

Painting: Caravaggio, The incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1601-1602, Neues Palais, Potsdam The apostle Paul wrote within 25 years of Jesus' death that there were good grounds for believing that He had come back from the dead. In the 15th chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians he says that there were more than 500 people who had seen Jesus alive after His death, and most of them were still living at the time he wrote 1 Corinthians. This appeal to witnesses concerning an historical event which is a central belief of a religious conviction is extraordinary. The German philosopher Lessing said that religion could not be based on historical events, but Paul does just that in 1 Cor. 15. Paul makes his case for the historical reality of Jesus being vibrantly alive after His crucifixion, and says that if that is not the case, faith in Jesus as the Savior of the world is pure nonsense. Everything depends upon it. Liberal theologians since the 18th century have tried to tone down Paul's enthusiasm for the bodily nature of Jesus' resurrection body, but their attempts at reconstructions of Paul's belief have failed miserably. Paul is not saying: Jesus' life has the effect on me as if He is really alive; or: Jesus' spirit lives on, whether or not He physically came back from the dead or not; or: it doesn't really matter if Jesus' grave was empty or not. None of this. Paul says: I saw the physical body of Jesus with my own two eyes, and I was not the only one. This assertion challenges all readers to do something with it. Basically there are only three choices. You can say Paul (and the other 500 witnesses) are lying. A monster conspiracy to manipulate the facts. This seems to me to be quite improbable, psychologically impossible, really. The second possibility is that they are sincerely wrong: they did see a vision of Jesus, but they didn't really see Jesus' body. This is calling into question their competence to judge whether it is really a human being I am talking with or not. The fact that there were at least 500 people who claimed to have seen Jesus' body after His resurrection is in any case for Paul a strong argument for the truth of what he and they were saying. The third possibility is that Jesus really did come back from the dead and appeared to all these people. You could say: so what? Many unusual things are possible in this world. But if Jesus really did come back to life, and not as an emaciated zombie, but as a living Lord, and if this is a confirmation of His teaching about Himself and about God's plan, then this means everyone who hears about Jesus' resurrection is summoned to trust in Him as the Savior and Lord He proclaimed Himself to be. How about you?

Jesus is truly risen!

Administrator — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 12:15:57 +0000

Today is Easter day, and Jesus' resurrection is being celebrated around the world. For the first time in recent history, the majority of the Dutch don't know that Easter is such a celebration. They think in terms of Easter eggs and nice meals. The first disciples did not expect Jesus back from the dead. They thought there was no more hope, now that Jesus had been crucified and buried. He appears, and they are shocked. They think they see a ghost. They begin to be joyful when they see him closer up. But they still can't believe it's him. He shows them his hands and feet, with the prints of the nails of Good Friday clearly visible. This is amazing, but they are still not totally convinced. Jesus eats a bit of leftover fish from their evening meal before their eyes. Then begin to realize: he is really back from the dead, physically, bodily. And after he explains from the whole Old Testament what his coming means, that he came to suffer and die according to Isaiah 53, and to come back to life, as Psalm 16 prophecies, they begin to trust that God's salvation has come to pass in this risen Jesus. We worship the risen Jesus Christ! In the words of Bach's Easter Oratorio, in a recitative: Wir sind erfreut, Dass unser Jesus wieder lebt (we are joyful because our Jesus lives again), and in the words of the closing chorale: Christus, der hat in dieser Schlacht gesieget un uns frei gemacht (Christ, who has won the victory in this battle, and made us free).

Matthew Passion, Good Friday!

Administrator — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:46:40 +0000

Living in The Netherlands is a curious experience. Churches are dying, yet nowhere on earth do more people (proportionately) go to see performances of J.S. Bach's Matthew Passion around Good Friday and Easter than here. Why? I think people are impressed by the story of Jesus' suffering and crucifixion, supported by sublime music in historic churches and concert halls which give you a sense you are connected to your cultural past. Bach was an orthodox Lutheran, though he was willing to have a musical function in Köthen, where the Prince was Reformed (Calvinistic), and where he wrote the wonderful Brandenburg Concertos. Bach wrote the Matthew Passion for a church service: sections for choir alternate with aria's as musical "faith reflections" on the story of Jesus' suffering leading to his death on Good Friday, which is narrated by the "evangelist" in recitatives, balanced by the voices of Jesus himself and others in the story. The choir sections and aria's display Bach's own faith as a Christian. The poetry, to our modern taste, is quite "romantic," in the sense of excessively emotional. Yet Bach was not doing it just to get a "tear-jerking" response from the congregation. He really believed that Jesus' death was the greatest moment of salvation and new life the world has ever known. In doing this, he was reflecting the faith of the Bible itself. The apostle Paul says: I preach Christ and Him crucified. We who are Christians pray that God will use performances of the Matthew Passion (and the John Passion, and other Christian musical works of art) to reach a generation of Dutch people who don't know much about Jesus. The words of the New Testament, in the hands of Bach's supreme artistry, could be the means of reigniting a living faith in Jesus as the Savior and Lord we who have come to know him, know he is. '

Seeing a nebula

Administrator — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:23:20 +0000

Look at a nebula through a telescope. Wow! Wonder at the miracle that the universe is. According to evolutionary naturalism, this is nothing more than a preprogrammed response of the human brain to certain stimuli. My genes make me respond this way because this response will help my species survive. The problem is, if I believe this, my sense of wonder disappears. Everyone (almost everyone) has a sense that there is more to this experience than this. Wonder is a feeling of awe, mixed with mystery. There is a sense of distance: I am not the nebula. But also of connection: I am able to observe and be overwhelmed by the sight of the nebula. Naturalism makes everything flat and destroys the reality of this experience. Belief in God supports this sense of wonder by making the universe a wondrous creation of a great artist. Saying "Wow!" at the sight of a nebula meshes beautifully with a faith in God, Creator.