Archive for May 2010
Memorial Day
This is a reposting of something I did last year on my old blog around memorial day…
This is, obviously, Memorial Day weekend. Many will be packing up the family and heading to not-so-far-off destinations, as I did with mine. Others will betaking part in picnics and meeting up with family or fellow believers to memorialize the fact that we do this every year. OK, I know it is to remember our fallen war heroes and those who fought bravely for the freedom of our country. Honestly, how many of us actually remember that on Memorial Day? I am not saying this to discount it’s importance, but to simply make a point. I believe we should make mention of this fact on a day, when most people just see it as a day off for celebrating, well a day off.
This anticlimactic response to the day’s supposed meaning is a parallel to the way in which we treat the memorial known as Communion or the Lord’s Table in the Evangelical Church. (For those who want to start in on the Calvinistic vs. the Zwinglian meaning, you know where I stand by my use of the word memorial, let’s please leave it at that and get to the point.) Many unknowing people treat this ordinance with the same disinterest as remembering the fallen War Heroes on Memorial Day.
For many Communion or the Lord’s Table was known as Mass for most of their lives. Others may simply see it as wrote religious practice that must be done every Sunday, once a month or once a quarter. Does it have significance in the life of the Christian today? I would say yes and it all depends on two questions…
“What is Communion?” and “Who Instituted It and Why?” (I guess you might categorize that as 3 questions, but I’ve never been that good at math!)
I guess we might have to answer the second (& third, oh never mind you get what I mean) in order to answer the first. In Matthew 26:26-30 (as well as the accounts in the other Gospels) Jesus inserts new meaning into the tradition of passover. He takes the bread (the Afikoman), breaks and distributes it to the men and tells them to take it and eat it, and Luke adds, in remembrance of Him. He took the after dinner wine (the fourth cup Hallel) and in the same manner told them that it was an emblem of His blood and that they should drink in remembrance of Him. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 that we are to do this as often as we do in remembrance of Christ, until He returns. So, there is the Who and the why. In this we get the answer to the “why” question.
It is not as the Roman Catholics put it, that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ. In that they eat and drink condemnation unto themselves, supposing that they earn favor with God in the re-sacrificing of Christ (in which the priest commands Christ to come down and be sacrificed again for sin.) No, we are remembering what Christ did, in the fashion in which He asked us to.
Understanding this remembrance is of utmost importance! We cannot let it go the way of other ceremony, somehow only giving a nod to it’s intent and purpose, while religiously adhering to its practice. It is one of the activities that God has called us to and one in which we must obey with not only doing, but thinking as well.
Can I Forgive When Someone Has Not Asked For It?
In my last post I was making the point that we must reflect upon the way in which we have been forgiven, by Whom we are forgiven and the great cost at which that forgiveness was secured, namely the blood and sacrifice of Christ.
I also made the point that in that same post that we can act in a spirit of forgiveness towards someone, but that we cannot actually forgive them until they have sought it. I was teaching a VBS content meeting the other night and I made the same statement and some folks were not sure that that idea settled with them that well. I decided maybe the best place to hash it out was in my blog space.
The question was raised in regard to how we can obey the admonition to forgive those of their debts as God has forgiven us (Matt. 6:12 in the Lord’s Model Prayer), even when they have not asked for it. I don’t think it is a stretch to say, that we can act in a spirit of forgiveness, but the exchange of that forgiveness cannot take place, without an actual personal verbal interaction. My mind is drawn to Matthew 18 and Jesus’ conversation with Peter. After Jesus’ admonition to lovingly confront those in unrepentant sin within the church, Peter asks Jesus how much we should forgive. Peter believes he is being generous with seven times. Jesus says, seven times seven (or seventy times seven depending on your translation), either way, it is a futile effort to try and keep track and that is exactly the point. It goes back to the previous post about how much we’ve been forgiven vis-à-vis the price paid by Christ’s shed blood. Avery clear parallel to this is Luke 17:3-4 in which in a similar way Jesus states that if your brother sins against you rebuke, if he repents, you need to forgive him. And if v.4 we see even if he does it seven times a day. The thing we notice is that there is an exchange. It follows then, that for actual forgiveness to occur, there must be an interaction. It also follows that without that exchange the actual, relational aspect of forgiveness can not be granted, but we are never the less to act in a spirit of forgiveness, because of the great price paid to secure our forgiveness in the sight of God and in light of His just wrath.
The Ultimate Reason for Forgiveness
A couple of weeks ago I filled in for John Callan (a fellow elder) in a class called “Different by Design” based on the book of the same name by H. Dale Burke. This particular class was on forgiveness. I studied as I should have for the class, but as I was praying the morning of the class I was struck with the reality of the reason/ basis for us forgiving one another and the need to express to the class this foundation. I extemporaneously dealt with the issue of Christ’s death and resurrection and how it is the basis for God’s forgiveness of us and therefore the basis of our forgiveness of one another (Eph 4:32). While the following will not be exactly what I spoke, it will be close. I believe this is important because of the attack on penal substitution that is underway within so called evangelicalism.
Let’s begin with the verse referenced above. Ephesians 4:32 states, “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” How is it that God in Christ has forgiven us? My mind goes to Hebrews 9:22, “without the shedding of blood there us no forgiveness.” If we cross reference this with Heb 9:28 we see that Christ was offered “once to bear the sins of many.” (I leave the extent of the atonement alone for now, although there are implications that involve that in what I am stating). There are those who are positing today that Christ’s death was not a substitution (Click here and follow a discussion started by Adrian Warnock in regard to Stephen Chalke who does not belive in Penal Substitution) in that it does not satisfy the wrath of God. If God’s wrath is not satisfied, there is no forgiveness (Romans 5:9; 1 Thes 5:9-10). This seems plain and simple enough. But what we must do is reflect upon the forgiveness offered to us and what was necessary for the accomplishment of it, in order to undersand the gravity of our need to forgive others. (The next post will deal with the idea of how we forgive or live in a spirit of forgiveness, if we have not been literally asked for forgiveness.)
If it took the very sacrifice of the Son of God to satisfy the Father’s wrath in order that He might forgive us, how can we hold forgiveness back from those who ask it of us? What have they done that compares to the horror of the cross? What have they done that can’t be covered by the blood of Christ that was shed on our behalf? Is there anything like the cry of Jesus from the cross, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” This should cause us to pause and consider what basis we have to not forgive others. The answer seems simple enough, the practice of it seems to be the problem…at least for me.
