Our religion deceives

The text below was taken from The Book Bom Demais for Ser Verdade by Michael Horton, Faithful Editor.

Christianity is not true because it works. In many cases, this does not “work”. In other words, it doesn’t solve all the problems that we think need to be solved. This is not a technique for our personal therapy, but the truth that God overcame sin and death by the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Those who became Christians because someone told them that would fix their marriage and are on the platform of divorce, can even abandon Christianity. Those who hoped to free themselves from all their sinful habits, temptations, and desires afterwards. their conversion, because they had been promised a sudden victory, they may be totally disappointed by God when they realize that they are still sinners saved by grace.

• At this difficult funeral of a pastor.
• Friend.
• Father.
• And brother in Christ who ended his life of suffering.
• Many people asked.
• Even aloud.
• “If Christianity did not work for a person like Steve.
• How can I expect it to work for me?”? It’s an honest question.
• An understandable question.
• But this presupposes that Christianity straightens everything.
• Christianity does not solve everything.
• At least not here and now.
• That promises.
• Yes.
• That everything will be solved at the end of history.
• But in our experience in the desert.
• We are on pilgrimage.
• Some pilgrims will find it much more difficult than returning to Egypt in disbelief.
• Steve wasn’t one of those pilgrims who returned to Egypt.
• Others will endure their fate as best they can.
• Steve and his wife went on a tour de force for me on my own pilgrimage.
• When I saw them face disasters one after the other and constantly turn.
• Every time.
• To God and his promises of grace.

But Steve was a pilgrim for whom the march to the Eternal City proved so heavy that he sought a shortcut. With his pious wife, did he aspire to a better country?(Hebrews 11:16 NIrV), but he was unwilling to wait any longer Have you not accepted God’s time?However, despite this, he found a mediator who interceded for him to the right of the Father, he will receive (as we will receive) the price he expected, even in his weakness.

We are in no better position than Job to sue God, either because of our personal trials or those we collectively experience as people of a certain time and place. Whether we face tragedies in our families or we look helplessly at the Twin Towers of New York, filled with citizens like us. God did not promise us health, wealth, and happiness. In fact, he tells us, who expects to share the glory of Christ, that we too will share his sufferings? not just suffering in general, but a special test in solidarity with Christ (Romans 8:17). The good news we proclaim is true, not because it works for people from a pragmatic and utilitarian point of view, but because almost two thousand years ago, outside the city of Jerusalem, the Son of God was crucified for our sins and resurrected. for our life. justification. This historic event may not fix our marriage, relationships, messy lives, in the way we wanted or the time we wanted, but it saves us from God’s coming wrath and gives us new life, hope, and wisdom. for our life in the here and now, to make sure that in the end the pain stops completely. Given this, is everything else certainly pale? This is not trivial, but it is of secondary importance in the face of the great question: “Do we command the human being to die only once, and then the judgment? (Hebrews 9:27, author’s translation). The perfect justice that God demand of us was possessed only by one human being, the Redeemer that Job and Paul and all the other saints sought as a refuge from death and hell. By trusting Jesus, renouncing our own claims of holiness and acceptability, removing leaves of fig tree of our own creation, God clothes us with the robe of Christ’s righteousness. Through the life of Christ’s obedience, through his sacrificial death and triumphant resurrection, we are accepted by the Father, we become his heirs, we are he gives his Holy Spirit, and the resurrection of our own mortal body is promised.

This means that it is wise to turn to God, as Job said that if he had only one lawyer, he could admire God in his suffering, so we too can we mourn on the Father’s shoulder in our painful evenings, because we have nothing to do. It is not his wrath that sends us pain and suffering if we belong to him, because he intervenes in Satan’s designs and even turns sin and evil into messengers of his grace, even if we do not see his project in our own lives or in the great tragedies of history, we trust in God’s plans, because we see the evident purpose revealed in humanity’s greatest injustice : the crucifixion of the Lord of glory. As Job in his affliction and Stephen in his martyrdom, He can even face death with confidence: “Here I see the open heavens and the Son of Man, standing at the right hand of God?”(Acts 7. 56).

Although Job was right to recognize that he was not in a position to judge God, it is true that this astonishing book depicts Himself as exactly the one who put himself in this situation. In fact, Job’s terrible experience is simply “a play. “in a play, “a secondary plot in the broader plot of cosmic judgment between Satan and the Trinitarian God of history. Intertwined with all the history of Israel and the saints is the plot of the two seeds here: the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, the lineage of the covenant promises that messiah, and the ”principalities and powers” of this present time of wickedness, both struggling to produce two antithetical plans for this world. Job’s judgments take place in this larger court in which Satan always seeks to induce the jury to believe that God is neither good nor powerful enough to demand his reverence.

However, God triumphs because there is a Redeemer, a mediator who has walked on the snake’s head and after banishing sin from his presence forever, will amended all evils and will do all things new. Our tests will never be incorporated into the canonical. Scriptures, but they can also participate in this cosmic judgment, where God bows to our level, allowing him to be prosecuted in the court of history.

In this book, Michael Horton addresses the problem and reality of evil, suffering and anxieties of human life in the light of the theology of the cross, contrasting it with the increasingly popular theology of glory. Judicially addressing the dramas of life, Horton presents a robust theology of God’s providence and grace, and offers the reader the hope of speaking of Christ’s triumph in the Resurrection.

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