President Barak Obama visited Turkey this week. In a press conference he stated “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.” Newsweek reporter Jon Meacham wrote the cover story for his magazine entitled “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” The 2009 American Religious Identification Survey finds the number of people who claim to be a Christian has dropped 11% in a generation. 15% of the U.S. population now claim no religious affiliation. That’s up from only 8% in 1990. Noted apologist Josh McDowell even wrote a book called The Last Christian Generation.
Many people today believe we live in a post-Christian world. If that’s true, then why gather on a day we call Easter, or Resurrection Sunday—to celebrate?
Is the cross of Christ still relevant?
If not, why not? And is the problem the cross, or something else?
If so, then how do we reconcile the attitudes and beliefs of people today who are walking away from their idea of Christianity by the droves?
If the cross is still relevant, then how can we communicate it in a way that makes sense?
Now you’ll notice that I didn’t say “is the church still relevant” or even “is Christianity still relevant” because it is my belief that what many people are actually reacting to is not the core of our faith, but either what the institution has become, or people’s misconceptions about what Jesus Christ was all about.
I think there are two things operating here:
1. People get the church and Jesus mixed up.
Jesus has become synonymous with the church (when in reality the church today is much like the Pharisee Party in Jesus’ time).
2. People get the church and the state mixed up.
Our nation was modeled after the views of people who served God, or were at least very familiar with the Bible, but we are not nor have we ever been a “Christian” nation – that is, a nation directly governed by the Lord Jesus like Israel was to be governed by Yahweh.
Now hear me – I am not advocating for the division of church and state and never the twain shall meet (that doctrine was to protect the church from the state, not the other way around). I am a firm believer that a nation governed by godly principals is a better nation.
But what has happened is that these two mistaken concepts have led to people become inoculated against the real truth of the cross. So we have a nation of people who think they are apprentices of Jesus because either they join a church or are citizens of a particular country—neither of which is true.
Let’s take these two concepts one at a time.
1. The church isn’t Jesus
Even in many of the surveys that are done about Christianity, the focus is on a denomination, rather than on a belief structure. How many Baptists are there compared to Catholics and the like. Over time this has led to the belief that you join Christ by becoming part of an organization. The organization has rules for joining and rules for behavior. Even though there are plenty of apprentices of Jesus in denominations, over time the rules of behavior begin to cloud the belief structure, or at least confuse the two. This leads to legalism—the feeling of being superior for being better at following the rules than others, especially newbies.
Joining a church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than signing admission papers at a hospital cures you of your disease. In a hospital you’ve got to entrust yourselves to the medical intervention of doctors to get better. In life you’ve got to entrust yourself to the healing power of the Messiah in order to get any benefit. I can still die in my hospital bed if I refuse treatment.
Jesus isn’t an organization, He is a person. We should belong to Him, love Him, serve Him, be taken over by Him—not by some label we wear like Presbyterian, or Calvary Chapelin. The church, then, is all of us collectively as we serve Jesus.
2. The church is not the state
We are not a theocracy. A theocracy is a country where God is the leader, giving direction for how the country is to operate through prophets and leaders. Israel is the only such nation that has ever existed—and look what they did with that. Instead of having Yahweh as their leader, they wanted a king “like all the nations.” That led them away from God on a steady path. The purpose of having a theocracy was not to have heaven on earth but to point to the fact that 1) we can’t serve God on our own strength and 2) God was sending Someone who could do that for all of us. The point of the nation was to prepare the way for that Someone.
It is actually true that you cannot legislate morality. On the other hand, it is possible to legislate God’s character out of a nation’s laws and justify immorality. Making laws to make people good is like ordering a meth addict to stop using. They can’t stop because they are addicted. We can’t stop doing evil because we are enslaved to it at birth. Laws can moderate bad behavior, but they cannot stop it.
So how do we make sense of all of this? Should we just give up and let our country devolve into anti-Christian nation? Should the church just dissolve because it has become so polluted with legalism? No on both counts. What I think we should do on this Resurrection Sunday is change the debate. Instead of focusing on institutions we should focus on what really matters—something called the “cross event.”
The cross event encompasses the entire work of Jesus here on earth—being born without sin, living a perfect life, pointing the way to God only through Himself, then volunteering to take the brunt of consequences that should have come to us, dying on a cross, being buried, then raised up again from the dead, never to die again and offering us His new life free of charge but not free of strings.
While that seems simple enough, it is amazing how difficult it can be for people to accept, and more and more in this age as time goes on. Why is that? I think the Apostle Paul got it right at the beginning of his letter to the Corinthians.
1 Corinthians 1:18-25 For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart."
The cross is “folly”, which is a Greek word that means “a deficiency”. “What is meant is a weakness of understanding or judgment, sometimes through stupidity, sometimes through confusion, but always demanding censure.” (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament). So for many living today, they see us Christians as either stupid or confused.
Why is the cross so hard to grasp?
God starts out with a plausibility structure which gets stretched thinner and thinner until we move from sight to belief. He did it with the miracles in Egypt, moving from things that were possible and even duplicable. But when it came to darkness in part of the land, and the death of the first born only—God left plausibility way behind, and invited His people to take that step—using what He had already done as evidence. Jesus came, looking like an ordinary Jewish man. And even at first, he said things that made sense, like a good Rabbi. But then he started saying and doing things that were not plausible for any Rabbi, including making food, walking on water and then raising people from the dead. He invited people to look at what he said and did as evidence that He was a person to be relied upon and trusted more than any other.
Why is the appeal to the cross not working like it used to?
It seems that during the last few generations, the appeal for the cross has been emotional. We fear punishment and so emotionally are drawn to rescue. While this is vital, it doesn’t seem to gain as much traction today.
But we should not be afraid of the rational argument for the cross either.
What is that argument? Hebrews 11:1Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
“Conviction” means something of substance, putting a foundation under something. Our trust and reliance on Jesus Christ is not based on a whim, a hope, a rumor, or a wish. It is based on concrete facts and acts that prove God invaded this age with a message and a person. The message is that something horrible happened to us after God created us good, and it was our fault. God knew it would happen and set about very methodically to fix our mistake by sending someone into this age to undo what we did. That person was Jesus of Nazareth, who actually lived, performed miracles, spoke with authority, really died and really came back to life—resurrected, not resuscitated (evidence by the fact that He could walk through walls and appear instantly at will anywhere). These things were witnessed and the people who experienced them went willingly (but not suicidal) to their deaths holding to what they had seen. They told others and they wrote them down and we have that testimony today in much the same form as when they were penned.
It is evidence that must be considered, weighed, and ultimately either received or rejected.
How is Jesus different?
Jesus is the only religious leader who pointed to Himself as the answer, rather than to his teachings or to God in general.
The cross is also different in that it is the only religion where man does nothing to inherit eternal life.
In the end, we must acknowledge that our current way of thinking is polluted by the nature of the age we live in. Coming to the cross and becoming a disciple of Jesus means we have a change in our way of thinking. We can get there – God said in Isaiah 1:18, “Come now, let us reason together.” But God brings us along with our own reason only so far, then we must abandon our own plausibility structure and begin to transition to God’s. At some point we must realize that the assumptions and attitudes we have, may not reflect ultimate truth.
1 Corinthians 1:20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
So how should we react to things that we are hearing?
Our president actually did us a favor. By decoupling “Christian” from “nation” we can begin a dialogue that is more accurate and fruitful. By realizing that not everyone who labels (or doesn’t label) themselves a “Christian” is an apprentice of Jesus. It doesn’t mean we judge other people, but it does mean we can talk about the reality of the cross apart from the baggage associated with the church.
Jesus died and rose again. In His death, we died. In his resurrection, we came to life. It is as simple and profound as that and definitely worth celebrating today!
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