Tuesday, June 4, 2013

It Satan were in control...

 “What would things look like if Satan really took control of a city? Over half a century ago, Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse offered his own scenario in his weekly sermon that was also broadcast nationwide on CBS radio. Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia (the city where Barnhouse pastored), all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say "Yes, sir" and "No, ma'am," and the churches would be full every Sunday...where Christ was not preached.”    
 
Good words.  We think that if Satan were in control, things would be bad.  We assume that the goal of Satan is our misery, is to corrupt us, is to torment us with our weakness, failing, and sin.  That is not true.  As Todd Wilken said, "Satan will make you miserable later."  For  now, the one and only item on his agenda is to remove Christ from us and all our lives.  The goal of Satan is to remove Christ from the Church, from its message, from its witness, from its preaching, and from its worship.  Satan is not happy or satisfied with our misery.  He will take care of that later.  His goal is simply a Christ-less Christianity, a religion without the cross, worship without the Gospel...
 
I have often said that, unlike the characterization we have learned from years of preaching and teaching, we would not have hated the Pharisees.  We would have loved them.  We still do love them.  They are good people, who do good works, are good neighbors, good citizens, tithers, and every time the door of the church is opened, they are there -- well scrubbed, earnest, and sincere.  At least that is what is on the outside.  Inside, is emptiness.  The death of self and of a self-righteousness which does the right but does not love it.
 
The same could  be said of Satan.  Despite the horrible images of the devil painted over history, the descriptive words of a myriad of authors, or imagined on the sets of movies, Satan's power is not his appearance.  It is his lies, rather the one big lie.  Christ is not raised, His death did not accomplish anything, His promises were not kept, and His value is to mentor a better morality and not to save sinners.  Satan does not come to scare us but to deceive us and the greatest of all lies are not the ones that make us fear, but the ones that make us comfortable with ourselves, with our lives, and with a religion and god of our own manufacture.  A reasonable religion and an amenable deity who conforms to us, who is a greater image of our own image.  Such a god cannot save us but he can make us feel better about ourselves, encourage us to be better, to strive for more and to take credit for our advances, successes, and progress.
 
Hell on earth does not look like the darkened streets of prostitution, drugs, broken men and women.  No, hell on earth looks just like the author said above.  It looks so good we do not need a real god and we do not believe in one.  Luther taught that we cannot by our own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ our Lord or come to him; Satan teaches us that we can and that simple change transforms Jesus so that He is not the incarnate Son of God come to redeem and save but merely a good man who encourages and inspires us to be good men and women. 
 
Save us, O Lord, from the Satan who has become our friend, our confidant, our neighbor, our inspiration... who looks so good on the outside, we do not see the death within... who teaches us to see the good on the outside, to be happy with it, and not to see the death inside us.  If Satan were in control the trains would run on time, the kids would go to school every day ready to do their best, the workers would give an honest day's labor for an honest day's wage, terrible crimes would be a memory, injustice would be wiped out, and we would all feel so good about the moment, we forget the death inside us or the impending eternal death to come... so content within ourselves and with the god of our own making, we do not need a Savior who is God in flesh to suffer for us, to die in our place, and to rise up to make us new...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like Salt Lake City

Timothy Buelow said...

I've lived there. It's Sweden. An extremely comfortable place to live as a law-abiding atheist. Scary as hell to raise children there and hope they might remain Christians.

Anonymous said...

Mecca?

Anonymous said...

Pastor Peters wrote: "Such a god cannot save us but he can make us feel better about ourselves, encourage us to be better, to strive for more and to take credit for our advances, successes, and progress."


Yup! This is the theology of glory in action:

http://www.amazon.com/Every-Day-Friday-Happier-Days/dp/0892969903

Sir Cuthbert said...

Didn't you leave something out?

"But this petition is especially directed also against our chief enemy, the devil. For all his thought and desire is to deprive us of all that we have from God, or to hinder it; and he is not satisfied to obstruct and destroy spiritual government in leading souls astray by his lies and bringing them under his power, but he also prevents and hinders the stability of all government and honorable, peaceable relations on earth. There he causes so much contention, murder, sedition, and war, also lightning and hail to destroy grain and cattle, to poison the air, etc. In short, he is sorry that any one has a morsel of bread from God and eats it in peace; and if it were in his power, and our prayer (next to God) did not prevent him, we would not keep a straw in the field, a farthing in the house, yea, not even our life for an hour, especially those who have the Word of God and would like to be Christians."

and

"Therefore we finally sum it all up and say: Dear Father, pray, help that we be rid of all these calamities. But there is nevertheless also included whatever evil may happen to us under the devil's kingdom-poverty, shame, death, and, in short, all the agonizing misery and heartache of which there is such an unnumbered multitude on the earth. For since the devil is not only a liar, but also a murderer, he constantly seeks our life, and wreaks his anger whenever he can afflict our bodies with misfortune and harm. Hence it comes that he often breaks men's necks or drives them to insanity, drowns some, and incites many to commit suicide, and to many other terrible calamities. Therefore there is nothing for us to do upon earth but to pray against this arch-enemy without ceasing. For unless God preserved us, we would not be safe from him even for an hour."

http://bookofconcord.org/lc-5-ourfather.php

Anonymous said...

“The segment instead profiled a highly functioning autistic scientist who had learned through years of research how to register which stimuli produce which animal sounds and how to track what scares or stresses livestock. It turns out that the beef industry was wiling to pay for this information, and not entirely due to their humanitarian goals. High stress levels in animals can release hormones that could down grade the quality of the meat. Some of the largest corporations in the world hired this scientist to visit their meat plants with a checklist. She said her secret was the insight that novelty distresses cows. A slaughterhouse, then, in order to keep the cattle relaxed, should remove anything from the sight of the animals that isn’t completely familiar. The real problem is novelty… Workers shouldn’t yell at the cows, she said, and they should never ever use cattle prods…If you just keep the cows contented and comfortable, they’ll go wherever they’re led……” to their slaughter.

Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Transition: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005), 44-55

Russell D. Moore. Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ. Wheaton, Il: Crossway. (2011) Kindle 319.