Posted on 12/29/2019 12:26:39 PM PST by Kaslin
The Heidelberg Catechism, published in 1563, poses a good question to contemplate as 2019 heads toward history: “What is your only comfort in life and death?”
Last month, aboard a ship steaming from Casablanca, Morocco, to Dakar, Senegal, I read two thought-provoking novels featuring West African protagonists who found no comfort.
One novel, often called the most important work of fiction in English by an African in the past century, is Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”(1958). Achebe’s father expressed faith in Christ, and Achebe later said, “It was extremely useful that we prayed and read from the Bible and sang hymns night and day.”
‘Is anyone spared mortal terror?’ Yes, if we know that Christ’s sacrifice pays for our sins, and that God gives us assurance of eternal life.
Nevertheless, Achebe positively portrayed African tribal culture and criticized Christianity’s overturning of that culture. Okonkwo, the protagonist of “Things Fall Apart,” is a strong man who scorns Christian love for the weak. Always wanting to look tough, Okonkwo kills his adopted son and an official. Okonkwo’s tribal religion gives him no comfort. About to be arrested, he commits suicide.
My wife and I walked the ship’s deck off the African coast and memorized the first part of the Heidelberg Catechism’s answer about our only comfort: “That I, with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ, who with his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil.”
I turned to the second novel, Graham Greene’s “The Heart of the Matter”(1948), which is also on many Top-100-in-the-20th-century lists. The protagonist, Major Henry Scobie, a Roman Catholic believer in Sierra Leone during World War II, breaks his vows to wife and country.
Scobie follows Catholic rituals, but they do not give him comfort. Foolishly worried that his faithful servant Ali will expose his adultery and corruption, Scobie says the words that get Ali killed. Then, like Okonkwo, Scobie commits suicide.
Susan and I memorized the rest of Heidelberg’s explanation of our only comfort: God “so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head: yea, that all things must work together for my salvation. Wherefore, by His Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me heartily willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto Him.”
And yet, many in Morocco and Senegal, like many in America, look for comfort elsewhere.
Many Muslims in Casablanca gain comfort in worshipping alongside 105,000 others in the Grande Mosquée Hassan II, the largest mosque in Africa. It opened in 1993 with a 689-foot-tall minaret topped by a laser that shoots beams toward Mecca.
Twelve million donors gain comfort from certificates showing they helped pay for the $700 million mosque, which is supposed to last for centuries—but structural deterioration required an investment of another $60 million only a decade after the grand opening.
Muslim grandiosity is also coming to Dakar. Senegal’s capital already boasted the Grand Mosque of Dakar, but on Sept. 27 the new Massalikul Jinaan mosque opened: Carrara marble exterior, gold-leaf interior, giant chandelier with 2,000 lights, five minarets. More comfort in life and purportedly in death.
Imams in 2010 denounced new secular competition in Dakar: the 161-foot-tall African Renaissance Monument. The $27 million statue, Africa’s largest, displays a bare-chested man and a scantily dressed woman. It is purportedly a tribute to Africa’s “greatness, stability, and durability,” although the half of Senegal’s population that is illiterate, desperately poor, and mostly unemployed might dispute that characterization.
The statue, built by North Koreans, is not the only comfort politicians offer tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free. China paid $34 million to help construct in Dakar a Museum of Black Civilization that opened last December. Senegal President Macky Sall this year announced a $400 million high-speed train project that “is driving us at great speed into modernity.”
As we left Dakar’s harbor, I read another work of fiction, “The Lemon Table”: Author Julian Barnes describes how we drive at great speed toward death. He asks, “Is anyone spared mortal terror?” Yes, if we know that Christ’s sacrifice pays for our sins, and that God’s loving sovereignty gives us assurance of eternal life. Mosques, trains, statues: All weak tea.
Truly Jesus the Son of Man paid with His Blood for all sins everywhere for all time committed by everyone.
However, a rational human that knows right from wrong can appropriate eternal (everlasting) absolute life only by totally and irrevocably trusting and yielding all that he/she ever was or is or has into the care of Jesus and His Shed Blood alone, which He as Eternal High Priest applied once to the True Mercyseat of Heaven to satisfy The Mighty God's Righteous demands, thus appeasing His fiery wrath, and permitting The Father to unilaterally extend His full pardon and reconciliation to the committed new spirit-born purchased possession and servant of His Only Begotten Son, justifying that person by judicially declaring him/her "Not Guilty!" and crediting that person with the Righteousness of His Son, with not one smidgen of that person's material deeds desired, required, or admired to accomplish the transaction and transition from being dead to God to living in Christ, nor held against him/her, ever.
By this commitment one ceases the relentless rush to perpetrate error under Sin as the master, and enters into a timeless state of rest in the Lord, the Prince of Peace.
So you are a Universalist?
By all means, NO!
Read what I wrote carefully.
Jesus has paid the debt for all sins of all humans. But those who choose not to accept the transaction offered unilaterally by His Father, of Jesus' righteousness in exchange for His purchase of them ans all their sins, when they willingly accept His ownership and Lordship.
The proud rejectors, still claiming credit for their "good works"--they too belong the the Final Judge of All, Who at the Great White Throne Judgment Seat, will find them without excuse, and owing Him the blood price He paid for them. He will have every right to cast them into the Lake of Fire with their liar father the Devil, and all his fallen angels, to be tormented forever, eternally spiritually unable to communicate with God or each other, having each one's dead soul rejoined with a corrupt body forever. They will never, ever be able to pay back for the Blood shed for them. Some theorists argue for annihilation, but that is not a steep enough price to pay for their hate and rejection of God's love for them through the gift of His Son to suffer in their stead.
That is my picture of the eternal disposition of Christ-rejectors.
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