The Greatest Drama Ever Staged

Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as "a bad press." We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine—"dull dogma," as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama.

That drama is summarised quite clearly in the creeds of the Church, and if we think it dull it is because we either have never really read those amazing documents, or have recited them so often and so mechanically as to have lost all sense of their meaning. The plot pivots upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a single central problem: What think ye of Christ? Before we adopt any of the unofficial solutions (some of which are indeed excessively dull) — before we dismiss Christ as a myth, an idealist, a demagogue, a liar or a lunatic — it will do no harm to find out what the creeds really say about Him. What does the Church think of Christ?

The Church's answer is categorical and uncompromising, and it is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God "by Whom all things were made." His body and brain were those of a common man; His personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of dæmon or fairy pretending to be human; He was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be "like God" — He was God.

Now, this is not just a pious commonplace; it is not commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is — limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death — He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worth while.

Christianity is, of course, not the only religion that has found the best explanation of human life in the idea of an incarnate and suffering god. The Egyptian Osiris died and rose again; Æschylus in his play, The Eumenides, reconciled man to God by the theory of a suffering Zeus. But in most theologies, the god is supposed to have suffered and died in some remote and mythical period of pre-history. The Christian story, on the other hand, starts off briskly in St. Matthew's account with a place and a date: "When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judæa in the days of Herod the King." St. Luke, still more practically and prosaically, pins the thing down by a reference to a piece of government finance. God, he says, was made man in the year when Cæsar Augustus was taking a census in connection with a scheme of taxation. Similarly, we might date an event by saying that it took place in the year that Great Britain went off the gold standard. About thirty-three years later (we are informed) God was executed, for being a political nuisance, "under Pontius Pilate " — much as we might say, "when Mr. Joynson-Hicks was Home Secretary." It is as definite and concrete as all that.

Possibly we might prefer not to take this tale too seriously — there are disquieting points about it. Here we had a man of Divine character walking and talking among us—and what did we find to do with Him? The common people, indeed, "heard Him gladly"; but our leading authorities in Church and State considered that He talked too much and uttered too many disconcerting truths. So we bribed one of His friends to hand Him over quietly to the police, and we tried Him on a rather vague charge of creating a disturbance, and had Him publicly flogged and hanged on the common gallows, "thanking God we were rid of a knave." All this was not very creditable to us, even if He was (as many people thought and think) only a harmless crazy preacher. But if the Church is right about Him, it was more discreditable still ; for the man we hanged was God Almighty.

So that is the outline of the official story — the tale of the time when God was the under-dog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men He had made broke Him and killed Him. This is the dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero.

If this is dull, then what, in Heaven's name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore — on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him "meek and mild," and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. To those who knew Him, however, He in no way suggested a milk-and-water person; they objected to Him as a dangerous firebrand. True, He was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers and humble before Heaven; but He insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites; He referred to King Herod as "that fox"; He went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a "gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"; He assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the Temple; He drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; He cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people's pigs and property; He showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, He displayed a paradoxical humour that affronted serious-minded people, and He retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in His human lifetime, and if He was God, there can be nothing dull about God either. But He had "a daily beauty in His life that made us ugly," and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without Him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness.

"And the third day He rose again"; what are we to make of that? One thing is certain: if He was God and nothing else, His immortality means nothing to us; if He was man and no more, His death is no more important than yours or mine. But if He really was both God and man, then when the man Jesus died, God died too, and when the God Jesus rose from the dead, man rose too, because they were one and the same person. The Church binds us to no theory about the exact composition of Christ's Resurrection Body. A body of some kind there had to be, since man cannot perceive the Infinite otherwise than in terms of space and time. It may have been made from the same elements as the body that disappeared so strangely from the guarded tomb, but it was not that old, limited, mortal body, though it was recognisably like it. In any case, those who saw the risen Christ remained persuaded that life was worth living and death a triviality—an attitude curiously unlike that of the modern defeatist, who is firmly persuaded that life is a disaster and death (rather inconsistently) a major catastrophe.

Now, nobody is compelled to believe a single word of this remarkable story. God (says the Church) has created us perfectly free to disbelieve in Him as much as we choose. If we do disbelieve, then He and we must take the consequences in a world ruled by cause and effect. The Church says further, that man did, in fact, disbelieve, and that God did, in fact, take the consequences. All the same, if we are going to disbelieve a thing, it seems on the whole to be desirable that we should first find out what, exactly, we are disbelieving. Very well, then: "The right Faith is, that we believe that Jesus Christ is God and Man. Perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Who although He be God and Man, yet is He not two, but one Christ." There is the essential doctrine, of which the whole elaborate structure of Christian faith and morals is only the logical consequence.

Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all. That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find Him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognise it as News; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it News, and good news at that; though we are apt to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational.

Perhaps the drama is played out now, and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that once at least in the world's history those words might have been spoken with complete conviction, and that was upon the eve of the Resurrection.

My wife and I now worship in our home, using only the Bible as our guide. We got tired of the contemporary business model corporate entity religion that is designed to entertain rather than edify.

Preachers who download their sermons off the internet on Saturday to deliver on Sunday. How do I know that? Because one of them, projecting his outline via powerpoint, forgot to hide the web address at the bottom of his sheet.

Other preachers deliver the absolute silliest, superficial excuses for a sermon imaginable. How do I know this? Because I was a career preacher for 25 years and can tell whether or not a man has researched his subject. Research and preparation are a thing of the past, apparantly, for professional preachers. They're overpaid and underworked, and the congregations at large are so ignorant, they don't know the difference.

I've been to congregations that have salaried pulpit ministers, worship ministers, associate ministers, children's ministers, family life ministers and youth ministers, and for the life of me, I can't figure out what any of them do.

2 Timothy 4:2 is a directive handed down from the Apostle Paul to Timothy (a young preacher): "Preach the word.."

We need to abandon this youth oriented, entertainment obsessed excuse for "Christian" worship and get back to worshipping the God of the Bible, through Jesus Christ His son.

Anything less than that is a waste of time, and I'm tired of wasting my time.

There is however the difference between preaching to the Jews vs. the Greeks.

Modern Christian Evangelism is like preaching to the Greeks.

It’s really difficult.

Their foundations for belief are so entrenched that virtually any all attempts are cut down before you can even start.

Preaching the Gospel in today’s society

http://creation.com/preaching-the-gospel-in-todays-society

Today’s society seems to be becoming more and more impervious to the Gospel. So how can we present the Gospel to maximum effect? The book of Acts provides an answer.

It is reasonable for us to consider the book of Acts as having two main purposes that benefit us today. These are:

For our edification as Christians, as we are given an account of the formation of the early Church and related events.

For our example as preachers, Christian workers, and missionaries, as we are shown the way in which the Apostles went about the task of obeying the Great Commission.

If we examine Acts in this light—as our example of how we should go about preaching the Gospel in a cross-cultural situation or in our own culture (which is becoming more and more multi-cultural) —we see some surprising things.
The love of God

First, the love of God is not mentioned by any preacher in Acts in any sermon. In fact, as a concordance will show, the word ‘love’ does not occur even once in the book of Acts in any context. Instead, Paul and the other preachers reiterate the themes of the death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s judgment, and the need for personal repentance and belief in Christ. Paul’s expositions on the love of God, including the great theme in Romans 5:8 that God loved us while we were still sinners, were all written to Christians, and were not, it seems, preached to non-Christians.

This does not mean, however, that God’s love cannot be seen in action in Acts.1 Saul’s (Paul’s) conversion, recounted three times for us in Acts (Acts 9:1–20, 22:1–16, 26:9–18), is attributed by Paul in his letter to Timothy as being due to the grace, love, mercy, and longsuffering of God, and Paul says that his conversion was ‘a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on Him’(I Timothy 1:12–16). In Romans 2:4, Paul says that it is the goodness of God that leads to repentance, and the term ‘goodness’ here encompasses not only God’s holiness, righteousness and truth, but also His love, benevolence, mercy and grace.2
Two starting points

The second surprising thing about the way Paul preached the Gospel, as recorded in Acts, is that he had two entirely different starting points, depending on his audience.

When Paul preached to the Jews, he ‘reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead’. The focal point of his message was ‘this Jesus whom I preach unto you is Christ’ [i.e. the Messiah] (Acts 17:2–3).

When Paul preached to the Gentiles, for example the Lycaonians (Acts 14:6, l5) and the Greeks (Acts 17:22–31), he began with Creation and God’s role as Creator, and he appealed to what can be seen in nature as the evidence for this.

Why the difference between Paul’s approach to the Jews and his approach to the non-Jews? The reason is the key to our understanding of why preaching about the lost state of man, or even about the cross, often has little impact in society today, whether in the West or in missionary situations.

Judaism had a creation basis—Genesis. From the Old Testament Scriptures the Jews believed in the one true God and knew Him as Creator, Lawgiver, and Judge. The Jews already knew and believed the scriptural record of Creation and the Fall: they knew about sin and that the penalty for sin is death. They needed only to be shown from the Scriptures and from the Resurrection that Jesus was the promised Messiah.
Greeks … Evolutionists

On the other hand, the Gentiles, and the Greeks in particular, were evolutionary in their thinking. Professor Fairfield Osborn, of Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History, has said that Empedocles, who lived in the fifth Century BC, ‘may justly be called the father of the evolution idea’.3 Aristotle, 384–322 BC, in his Physics, ‘refers to Empedocles as having first shown the possibility of the origin of the fittest forms of life through chance rather than through Design’.4 And Aristotle himself ‘taught that there was a continuous gradation of living forms from the lowest to the highest, culminating in man, and that this evolutionary sequence came about through an internal perfecting tendency.’5

When Paul was on Mars Hill, he was dealing with ‘certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoics’ (Acts 17:18). The Epicureans followed Epicurus (342–270 BC), who denied that there was any purposive form in nature and taught that everything on the earth had evolved directly from the earth material itself. It is not surprising then that the Epicureans believed that pleasure, and particularly sensuous pleasure, was the chief good of existence. The Stoics, on the other hand, stressed a simple life-style, but were completely pantheistic. Thus Greek society was both evolutionary in its thinking and idolatrous in its practice.

These Gentiles did not have the Jewish Scriptures. Paul therefore had to reach them in terms of something they did have—the foundational knowledge of God as Creator, almost obliterated by their philosophies and idolatries, but still there and witnessed to by nature and their consciences (Romans 1:20, 2:15). And so, in his address to the men on Mars Hill (Acts 17:22–31), Paul began with the power of God in creation, and moved onto the goodness of God in His providence. He then spoke against their idols, and he urged them to repent in view of the fact that God was ruler and judge and there was a coming day of judgment. It was only after this that he mentioned the Resurrection. Presumably, if he had not been interrupted, he would have gone on to say that this Resurrection occurred after Christ’s death on the cross, and he would have expounded God’s grace in the provision of a risen Saviour. But note the order in which Paul developed his argument

I'm not sure what your point is. Are you suggesting these career preachers are delivering mickey mouse lessons cause that's what's needed to actually reach the audience?

1 Corinthians 9:20ff: to the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews; to those who are under the Law, as under the Law, though not being myself under the Law, that I might win those who are under the Law; 21 to those who are without law, as without law, though not being without the law of God but under the law of Christ, that I might win those who are without law. 22 To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak; I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some

That's different from what I'm observing. I'm talking about career preachers who don't study. They deliver shallow, superficial "lessons" simply because they can get away with it. They deliver these lessons to people who have been attending their respective services all their lives, yet know no more now than they did when they began.

Hebrews 5:12 is more appropriate for them. For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat.

This is why so many religious entities that call themselves "Christian" have completely abandoned truth. The Episcopaleans, for example, and their endorsement of homosexuals. They did that because their membership is ignorant of what the Bible says ........ about anything.

Preaching silliness and entertainment has nothing to do with strategy. It has everything to do with lazy con men (and, even contrary to plain Bible teaching, women) who have discovered they can get paid, sometimes quite handsomely, for doing nothing. Throw some scriptures on powerpoint, eat up about twenty minutes of time, and get paid.

I was a career preacher for 25 years. I observed that each successive generation wanted less Bible scholarship and research, and more and more social "gospel."

I remember when teenage classes went from solid Bible study to looking at nothing but social issues. Racism. Abortion. Women's liberation. It was contemporary. It was cool. It was also mindless.

That generation, which was raised on pablum, now has assumed the positions of leadership, and they're clueless as to what they're supposed to be doing. They don't realize it, but they've discarded the Bible as their sole source and guide. Now they are so ignorant, they evaluate the efficacy of a "sermon" in terms of entertainment value.

And today's preachers are loving it. I could tell you stories, but suffice to say, today's sermons can be thrown together in fifteen or twenty minutes, literally. They rest of their time they can sit in their office playing computer games.

When I used to preach, it literally took me fifteen to twenty hours per sermon to prepare. In the church of Christ, preachers delivered (back then), two sermons each Sunday. That was in addition to two Bible classes weekly. I also had a weekly radio program and a weekly television broadcast.

And all this was before computers and the internet. My audience was similarly raised on solid Bible teaching, and they could tell if I had done my homework. It was difficult, but it made me grow.

Then I retired from preaching and began visiting area congregations. I was horrified at the dumbing down of the church that has taken place in the last several decades. After several years of perpetual visiting, my wife and I got so tired of leaving worship, having benefitted nothing, that we now worship in our home, using only the Bible as our source and guide. We've been doing that for two or three years, studying scripture in detail. We're about halfway through Isaiah, a fascinating and intriguing book, as you well know.

Best of luck to you in your quest and may God always bless you with the absolute best that life has to offer. And may God bless our once great nation, a nation that used to love and serve Him, but has lost its way. Like Israel, I fear He is now, because of our disobedience and apathy, giving our country to our enemies.

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