Questions on Christianity

At church during the Easter Sunday services and while our pastor was preaching on what John had to say about the resurrection, I did some back tracking and read about the crucifixion and burial of Jesus.  What caught my eye were two characters who we might call closet Christians.   “Closet” being defined as “a state or condition of secrecy or carefully guarded privacy”.

“After these things Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus, and Pilate gave him permission. So he came and took away his body.  Nicodemus also, who earlier had come to Jesus by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds in weight. So they took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews. Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid. So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, since the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there.”  (John 19:38-42) ESV

Both Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were secret followers of Jesus and today we might be critical of them because of that.  Yet when all of Jesus’ disciples save one had deserted him (John was busy taking care of Jesus’ mother as Jesus had commanded him), they did what no one else did—take proper care of the burial of Jesus’ body.  These two prominent Jewish leaders (and they were prominent because how else would they have access to Pilate to request the body of Jesus) were protecting their careers by not openly supporting Jesus but when Jesus needed them most, they stepped forward.

Now I am not saying we should not challenge Christians to be more vocal about their faith, but God can use closet Christians to accomplish his purposes.  Maybe that is why Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:1:   ”Judge not, that you be not judged.”

Over the past few blogs, we have seen that Hitler and Stalin did not kill millions on their own but there were thousands of others who actively approved and carried out their orders.  When I was searching the internet for the book on the Ukraine famine, I found another book that illustrates this point again.  This one involved China, Mao, and the Great Leap Forward.

The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s attempt to rapidly bring China into the modern world by setting lofty goals for industry and agriculture in order to stimulate new methods of accomplishing particular tasks.  The leaders in the cities and country in order to show support for this initiative set even loftier goals.  These goals proved to be impossible to meet.  The result was violence against the worker in an attempt to increase output.  Safety and quality took a backseat to quantity which resulted in many  industrial accidents.  In the country, the rulers vastly overestimated the harvest and when the national government took what it was told was excess produce the result was little food left for the farmers which resulted in the starvation of millions. The result of all this political maneuvering was that in the years 1958 to 1962 between 32 and 45 million Chinese died unnecessarily.

So who was responsible for all this suffering and deaths?  Was Mao the only person  who committed all these atrocities? As Dikötter explains:  “. . .a dictatorship never has one has one dictator only, as many people become willing to scramble for power over the next person above them.” [1]

There were many party  members who did not back the Great Leap Forward with sufficient enthusiasm were removed from their positions. [2]  The question is how far  would we go when commanded by our superiors in government or business to take actions that would go against our Christian beliefs?  Would we find some way to justify such actions or would we be willing to suffer the consequences?

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[1]   Frank Dikötter.  Mao’s Great Famine.  London:  Bloomsbury, 2010, p. 41.

[2]   Ibid., pp. 100-103.

In our blog of November 12, 2020 entitled “Individual Responsibility” we saw that one person by themselves cannot change the world.  It takes a group of people committed to an idea.  We saw that Hitler alone was not responsible for the Holocaust but thousands of others shared his vision and helped him carry it out.

This lesson is reinforced in Anne Applebaum’s book Red Famine which documents how Stalin deliberately removed all food from the Ukraine in order to starve the kulaks into the collectivization of their farms and to teach them resistance was futile.  It is estimated that around three million people died.

As Applebaum points out in her book, it took thousands of people to implement the policies that caused the starvation of the Ukrainian people; Stalin did not do it on his own.  [1]  It took activist teams to search all the farms and remove anything edible;  it took neighbors iinforming on neighbors. [2]  It took the extraordinary effort of the international  press together with government officials to deny the famine ever existed, to cover it up. [3]

This event is history and there is nothing we can do to change it.  What we can do is to learn from it.  The most important question for us to ask ourselves is how would we respond if we were ordered by our government to take an action against strangers or even our neighbors, knowing full well we were condemning them to death?  It would take courage to refuse to carry out such government orders and it might even cost us our life.  What an incident such as this would reveal to us is the type of person we really are.  Would we condemn another person to death to save our own life, to secure for us and our family a better future?  Or would we heed the words of Jesus:  “For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?”  (Luke 9:25 ESV)

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[1]   Anne Applebaum.  Red Famine.  New York:  Anchor Books, 2017, pp. 253-254.

[2]   Ibid., pp. 264-286.

[3]   Ibid., pp. 354-359.  Also watch the  movie Mr. Jones to see how the international news media handled this human  tragedy.

I have been reading The Christian Mind by Harry Blamires.  It was written in 1963 but is highly relevant for today.  He has some interesting comments about truth.

In my book, The Renovation of Our Soul, I discuss the difficulty we have in knowing what is true.  This is a result of several factors—we are finite, we are limited in our knowledge and in our ability to utilize the knowledge we have, and we have a sinful nature.  However, that does not stop us from trying to learn what is true.  So as Pilate asks:   “What is truth?” (John 18:38).

Some people think truth is like a pudding or a brew; which is concocted from a variety of human opinions. [1]  This is the thinking today; truth is relative and is dependent upon one’s view and the society in which one lives.

But Blamires believes that truth is more like a rock which is exposed by scrapping away the dirt surrounding it and the dirt is human prejudice and passion. [1]  And I would add human ignorance.

Or Blamires states truth is like a lighthouse.  It always sends out its light but that light can be obscured by the elements–rain, snow, fog.  Again in speaking of truth, those elements that obscure the truth include human prejudice, passion, and ignorance. [1]

Using either analogy, it is obvious that determining the truth requires work.  Sometimes truth stumbles in the public square (Isaiah 59:14) and unrighteousness suppresses the truth (Romans 1:18).  However, God has promised to provide us with assistance.  Jesus, in talking about the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives, calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of truth (John14:17) and promises us the Holy Spirit will guide us into all the truth (John 16:13).  So let us be sensitive to the Holy Spirit and not be like those Paul describes as:  “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7  ESV).

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[1]   Harry Blamires. The Christian Mind.  Ann Arbor, MI:   Servant Books, 1978, pp.  112-114.