The Long Silence

At the end of time, billions of people were seated on a great plain before God’s throne. Most shrank back from the brilliant light before them. But some groups near the front talked heatedly, not cringing with cringing shame – but with belligerence.

“Can God judge us? How can He know about suffering?”, snapped a young girl. She ripped open a sleeve to reveal a tattooed number from a Nazi concentration camp. “We endured terror … beatings … torture … death!”

In another group an African slave boy lowered his collar. “What about this?” he demanded, showing an ugly rope burn. “Lynched, for no crime but being black!”

In another crowd there was a pregnant schoolgirl with sullen eyes: “Why should I suffer?” she murmured. “It wasn’t my fault.” Far out across the plain were hundreds of such groups. Each had a complaint against God for the evil and suffering He had permitted in His world.

How lucky God was to live in Heaven, where all was sweetness and light. Where there was no weeping or fear, no hunger or hatred. What did God know of all that man had been forced to endure in this world? For God leads a pretty sheltered life, they said.

So each of these groups sent forth their leader, chosen because he had suffered the most. A Jew, an African slave, a person from Hiroshima, a horribly deformed arthritic, a thalidomide child. In the centre of the vast plain, they consulted with each other. At last they were ready to present their case. It was rather clever.

Before God could be qualified to be their judge, He must endure what they had endured. Their decision was that God should be sentenced to live on earth as a man.

Let him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of his birth be doubted. Give him a work so difficult that even his family will think him out of his mind.

Let him be betrayed by his closest friends. Let him face false charges, be tried by a prejudiced jury and convicted by a cowardly judge. Let him be tortured.

At the last, let him see what it means to be terribly alone. Then let him die so there can be no doubt he died. Let there be a great host of witnesses to verify it.

As each leader announced his portion of the sentence, loud murmurs of approval went up from the throng of people assembled. When the last had finished pronouncing sentence, there was a long silence. No one uttered a word. No one moved.

For suddenly, all knew that God had already served His sentence.

True Love

It’s been a long time since I posted anything on here, so since it’s a week until Good Friday I thought I’d share one of my absolute favourite songs with you.

True Love is by Phil Wickham, from his 2007 album Cannons. You can listen to it here on YouTube. What I think I’ll do is talk about each bit of the lyrics separately, what they mean and why they are so powerful.

Phil uses ‘true love’ as a name in the song – it refers to Jesus, the only perfect human being to have ever lived, who was ‘full of grace and truth.’ (John 1:14, NIV.) Jesus reveals the Father to us, and God is love. So Jesus reveals the love of God to us – Jesus is true love.

Come close, listen to the story
About a love more faithful than the morning
The Father gave his only Son just to save us

The first verse is pretty self-explanatory – it establishes the theme of the song and talks about the faithfulness of God’s love – ‘more faithful than the morning’. This reminds me of part of Lamentations:

…his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness. - Lamentations 3:22-23, NIV.

Musically, this part of the song is open and full of space – it’s reflective, and Phil’s voice has a tenderness about it that helps to get across the mercy that God has for all of us.

The chorus gives us a comprehensive understanding of what went on when Jesus died. I was thinking about this the other day and I was realising how much of a monumental event it is – we know that the death of Jesus probably the most important thing to have happened for the whole of history (as Tim Hughes’ song Happy Day describes it, ‘The greatest day in history’).

Trust

The word trust features heavily in our everyday lives. But what is it?

We place our trust in a huge number of people and things. For example, we trust bus drivers – to turn up at the right time, and to drive in such a way that we don’t get damaged. We put our faith in taxi drivers in the same way (excepting the taxi driver featured in BBC’s Sherlock), and we trust that they will take the most direct route to our destination. We have faith that the builders, plumbers & electricians who built our houses, workplaces or schools have completed their work to an acceptable standard, such that the buildings can function as necessary and not fall over. We trust supermarkets and the people that work in them to provide us with food that is safe to eat. We put our faith in our government to make decisions on our behalf that will be the best for our country. We also place our trust in people in different ways – we trust friends with secrets and problems. We trust girlfriends or boyfriends to remain faithful.

You may have noticed that I have used the words trust and faith almost interchangeably. This is because they mean exactly the same thing.

The words trust and faith describe the confidence that we have that someone will act in an honourable way. Think about the word entrust – by entrusting something to somebody, we are passing the responsibility of looking after that something to them. Trust is important in that situation – we need to have faith that they will be responsible and act in the correct way.

Very often, trust is not something we can just switch on. It takes time to develop trust in someone, as we get to know them better and begin to see them as honourable and responsible. Placing our trust in someone can be a difficult thing to do – the fear of betrayal or ‘breaking our trust’ keeps us wary.

So trust has a lot to do with confidence and responsibility. Why do we do it?

We place our trust in things that are trustworthy. We put our faith in those things that are faithful. How do we decide if something or someone is trustworthy or faithful? From experience and reputation. Supermarkets have a reputation for providing food that is not diseased. We use our experience with someone to determine if it is safe to tell them something personal. Trust and faith also relate to love – the more we come to love someone, the more we trust them and have faith in them.

It is pretty clear here that these things have everything to do with the future. The future is something that we definitely cannot see, so we must be reliant on trust to allow us to look past the present. Every example given above is related to something that could happen, that we trust will, or won’t. It could be that our boyfriend or girlfriend cheats on us, but we trust that they won’t. It could be that the bus driver crashes the bus and we are seriously hurt, but have faith that they won’t. It could be that my house falls down, but I trust that it will stay standing.

Nobody is perfect. Therefore nobody can be completely trustworthy. Trust is broken fairly often – pipes burst, cars crash, food is bad, people cheat. It might be the case occasionally that this is not due to human fault, but that majority of the time it is – and unfortunately we can’t help it. We are a messed up people, continually making mistakes and getting things wrong.

The trust that we place in our plumbers, for example, is different to that trust that is placed in our friends. A busted pipe or broken tap doesn’t bother us in the same way that a secret of ours making its way around our peer group does. There are things that are harder to trust people with – and these tend to be aspects of our lives, the things that make us, us.

I’ve come to realise that the trust that we place in people who we are in relationships with – our boyfriends, girlfriends, wives or husbands – is more that just the faith that they will remain exclusively ours – we have to place more trust in them that the trust that they won’t cheat. We trust them with increasingly more aspects of our lives the longer we are with them – until ultimately, (if we find a husband or wife) we trust those we are married to with the rest of our lives. For example, we trust them to be responsible in raising any children that we might have, or to look after the house we might own. Trusting someone in a relationship requires more than the confidence that they won’t cheat – and like all trust, it is built and developed over time. This deeper sense of trust is not simply switched on.

When someone breaks our trust in these areas, we hurt. We are upset, angry and resentful. There’s no way of changing things back to how they were once someone has dirtied your name to others. This is where we have two options – either we remain angry and resentful towards that person, or we choose forgiveness. Forgiveness is hard, but at most times, extremely necessary. There isn’t one person on earth who hasn’t struggled to forgive someone at some point.

You knew this was coming… Why should we place our trust and faith in God?

God asks us to trust Him with our lives.  God is the One who can deal with life & death, so He is the only One in whom we can entrust these things. By life I mean more than our time on earth – I’m talking about our eternal fate and destiny. Like it or not, we are eternal beings, and this life is but a speck on the time-line of eternity. There is no-one else available for us to put our trust in with these things.

God is good, and what He promises us in eternity is what Christians refer to as heaven. Heaven most probably isn’t sitting on clouds, or a never-ending harp recital, heaven is simply spending eternity in the presence of God (in the same way, hell simply describes spending eternity without God). And if God is who He says He is, then heaven is a pretty awesome way to spend our time.

But why?! Good question. If God is real and if God is God, then we don’t need too many reasons. By definition, God loves us more than we could imagine, knows what’s best for us in a way that we can’t imagine, and is bigger and more powerful than anything we could ever imagine. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to struggle to much to put my trust in Him, if all that is true! But how do we know that it is true?

You see, this trust in God is different to the trust we use on earth. I mentioned above that experience and reputation are what allow us to make decisions regarding what to place our trust in. But who has experience of death? Very few people. God certainly has a reputation, but we still can’t know from that what happens after we die.

Jesus has had experience of death. For He died by crucifixion, but on the third day rose again to life, and He’s still alive today. Jesus didn’t say after His resurrection, ‘hold on, all that stuff I said about heaven and God before I died was all wrong, I’ve just seen what death is really like and it’s completely different.’ He continued to teach what He had taught before He died – and that is where we can gain experience of what God is like. That is where we can see that God is trustworthy. It’s written down in something called the Bible, an amazing collection of 66 books from many different authors, spanning centuries. The words of Jesus are shown from four independent sources, each saying more or less the exact same thing as the others. That evidence shows us that we should trust that it tells the truth. (There is plenty more evidence, scientific/archaeological, but I won’t go into all of it here.)

Once we have made the step of placing our trust in God for our eternities, it becomes a little easier and lot more sensible to trust God with the smaller things, such as our money, or our future on earth. If we have entrusted our eternal selves to God, then it makes a lot of sense to give to Him the time we have here.

I’ve struggled a lot recently with the word belief. Having written this, it’s become a lot more clear to me what it’s all about. Belief has very little to do with God’s existence. God’s existence is not subjective to our belief in Him – He doesn’t exist just because we believe it. Whether we believe that He exists or not is irrelevant to whether or not it is true. Belief is almost synonymous with faith and trust – belief is all about the future. Belief is more about what God will do than what God is! In the same way, it’s less important to believe ‘in Jesus’, that He existed, than it is to believe that Jesus is the Son of God.

The Bible says this:

Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. – Hebrews 11:1 (NLT).

What ‘we cannot see’ is the future. It does not refer to what I can’t see on the other side of the opaque wall of my room.

We must trust that God is powerful enough, strong enough, and loving enough to give us the best future possible. As we begin to see that future come alive, our faith in God gets stronger. Faith in God isn’t switched on to its maximum immediately, we learn to trust Him with all that we have as we get older, wiser, and as we come to love Him more.

God is faithful, and God is trustworthy, because God is perfect, and there is no-one in whom we should place our trust more.

Why? It’s simple: He loves us.