Death Reigns

September 1, 1999

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23)

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. (Romans 5:8,9)

"Death is swallowed up in victory." (Isa. 25:8)
"Oh Death, where is your sting?
Oh, Hades, where is you victory?" (Quoting Hos. 13:14)
The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the Law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through the Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:54b-57)

Three short sections of scripture, each containing law and gospel.

When is the last time you heard, or preached a good law and gospel sermon? Oh, I like to focus on love too, but until we truly understand the bad news, we really cannot begin to truly understand the good news. To put it another way, to understand the good news we truly have to look at sin and death. Death reigns in this world. To absolutely look at it the way God wants his followers to do, we must not fear death. Fear, not unbelief, is the opposite of faith. That faith alone is worked out by communion with Christ, through the cross as an appropriation of his grace alone.

Two weeks ago, as briefly mentioned in the miracle section last week, I had the opportunity to walk the trail around Mt. St. Helens. On May 18th, 1980 that little pimple on the face of the earth popped and really made a great mess of things in a small section of the rural northwestern United States. Twenty years later, death still reighs. As I write this, a hurricane is about to touch the Carolinas, a few weeks ago, an earthquake destroyed a portion of Turkey's infrastructure. When was it, just last year that Hurricane Mitch devastated much of Central America? I will not begin to discuss man's destruction of himself through acts of aggression.

Death reigns on this planet, and the only people who have an answer, is the church of Jesus Christ. We do not have an answer, we have the only answer, yet we do not, for the most part look at the this problem and its consequences, because we know that the solution doesn't lie within our intellect.

Mother Nature, as we Northwesterners like to call her, will over the next few hundred years, restore Mt. St. Helens, and other parts of the world destroyed by natural disaster. I however could not help but notice as I walked through the zone of natural devastation, how what is happening in our society, in many ways mirror, or models this exploding pimple. The only problem is, our problems are not small and isolated, but now effect the whole of society, throughout the world.

Approximately running a parallel time line with Mt. St. Helens is the fall of world communism centered in the former Soviet Union. Its restoration, unless the church gets off its duff, (or should the Lord tarry) will take about the same course as our devastated mountain.

The still existing world system, based on the same man centered atheistic model, is of course laisse faire multinational free trade. Its rape of the natural world and humanity in these last 20 some years, far surpasses the rape of mother Russia and her people over the 70 years of the communist dictatorship. No wonder the Russian people are skeptical of our "good intentions". The really bad thing, is unless the Lord intervenes directly, or through his church, we haven't even started to see its carnage yet.

The parallels between today and the time of the Reformation are fascinating, this time however, instead of an imperial church based in Rome, we have a protestant, post millennial, kingdom now, religious right, based in Washington, D.C. in tension with and die-hard bunch of pseudo-communists, hoping to try modified socialist model to fix society's ills. The only hope to overt, the exploding pimple concept is for the church of Jesus Christ, to refrain from pumping her resources into the soon to be unleashed volcano and begin to provide her liquidity to help develop a God centered natural model of society based on a Garden and Stewardship concept and not on individual and corporate greed.

In a God centered creation model, money is water or liquidity. God lets it fall like rain all over the earth. How it is utilized is the problem. As you walk around Mt. St. Helens, you soon learn what you have read in the guide books, the problem is water. Too much water and too little water. Interestingly the water supplied to the region is about the same as before the eruption. The problem with the water is that all life (herbs and trees) that would hold the soil in check and gradually release the melting snows has been annihilated and buried under hundreds of feet of volcanic ash and mud. Left to Mother Nature it will take centuries, through natural progression, for these natural communities to become reestablished. As a National Monument out in the hinterlands of the northwest this makes an appealing preserve.

Now the runoff water in the Monument is quite similar to what happens our laisse faire system. It rapidly runs off into multinational corporate coffers and little remains to water the local plant flora and provide forage for local fauna, the local community. The only difference is that Mt. St. Helens was a natural occurrence. Laisse faire free market capitalism is a short sighted man caused channeling of financial resources for power, greed and individual enrichment at the expense of others. That is it, pure and simple. It devastates the landscape leaving canyons and gullies, leaving the potentially fertile volcanic soils parched and dry.

Can the church do anything about it? Or should it? As long as many of the individual church members are more interested in their return from their stock portfolio (we all know that no church has such worldly investments) and there early retirement then only the sovereign act of the Lord will change that. Lets see, what kind of disaster, could he come up with that would alter, that perspective? Y2K? Not a chance, perhaps a little storm, but Y2K is man created and must (will) be man solved. Something else in which only God will get the glory, will be the scenario. Those individuals do have a choice in the matter, perhaps if they hear a little more about death from the pulpit, they will be a little more willing to part with liquidity from a dying world system.

As community builders however, the church has a better opportunity. We all know about planting gospel seeds, watering, weeding, plowing and all that Biblical agriculture. It is really not much different to plant community seeds. Little businesses, community infrastructure projects like clean water and sewage treatment, appropriate technology, music, song and the other arts and countless other seeds that will supply the local community without entering the multinational free trade trough. We must be the rancher for the God that owns the cattle on a thousand hills, that eat the grass on those hills, that grows by the rain, that God himself supplies in strange and miraculous ways.

Death reigns in this world, we as church leaders, stand at a fork in the wilderness trail, we can continue to follow the way of a dying world, appropriate its ways and its investments and do little good, living the good life in the city of man, or we have the choice to follow the way of Christ and his cross. It is the narrow way to a new abundant life, that only comes to us through him. We again have a personal choice. The worldly religion would say along with the Buddhist and the Hindu that it is better to come back as a cow or a rat on a journey to nothingness, than it is to face the face of a holy God and be judged as an unrepentant sinner. Through grace alone we have the opportunity to say, sinner yes I am but my brother, Jesus Christ paid for me and because of him I shall not fear death. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Let us cease to let death reign in our lives and move forward into a restored church in a restored eternal community. Amen!

PRAYER PLANTS

On May 18th, 1980, I was looking at buying a house in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle. From the front steps of the house you had an excellent view of the billowing cloud that was the Mt. St. Helens eruption. While I didn't buy the house, from another house in Montlake a year later, I was pretty much spewed out of corporate culture by a minor eruption of the "world's largest consulting engineering firm", into an urban wilderness I was completely untrained for. Over the next couple of years I developed this natural basis for business affairs and used it to some extent to earn a living during the '80's. Through that process and in the ensuing years, the Lord has allowed me to be reeducated into his way of doing things, in this metropolitan jungle, and adapt his wisdom to what I had learned from worldly ways of management.

Having said that, if the church truly is to make a difference in this world, I do know that most who receive this are of that persuasion, we must get beyond this dying world culture and our love of its rewards, into a situation where we look to God alone for our supply, our liquidity. To do that we must be willing to take some unpopular stands on some tough issues related to sound doctrine; the working of the Holy Spirit; the inerrancy of Scripture, including the creation and flood record established in Genesis; rebuilding community; but all focusing upon the completed work of Christ, which establishes our justification before God and allows us to look upon death without its sting.

There is a need now for the rain of liquidity to fall upon this ministry, by means only known to God. Other needs are also required in the nature of community building.

Many of you who receive this letter look at death on a daily basis and lot more directly than I do. I know I would much rather look at life and wish that death would disappear, pain and other suffering too. Really as Christians we have been in the ultimate sense been called into life from the realm and reign of death. Pressing on, in all natural appearances alone, seems impossible, but we serve the God of creation, the God of forgiveness, the God of eternal life, the God of the miraculous and the impossible. As he told Paul, "My grace is sufficient" and so it is. As God lays his personal burden for you upon my heart, I'll pray for you and you pray for me. Other than this letter, that is all I can do at this time, even though I truly wish to do more.