Centre In Which God?
I've been told that the vaguest word in the English language is the word "God". I don't know how they know such things but that's what some literary people I know tell us and I'm inclined to believe it.
There's a silly but popular view that makes the rounds that really is silly despite its popularity. It's the view that all religions are essentially the same. On the surface that looks like a deep remark but when you go deep it's really a very surface remark because there are many and profound differences between major religions. Their views of "the meaning" of life, death, existence, destiny, mission and, above all, God are widely different.
In a Western society where it seems the supreme virtue is religious tolerance some people tell us, "All these names are different names for the one God and we're all going in the same direction." You only have to allow these major faiths to tell their own story to know that's just not true. I often think that the people who tell us "it's all the same thing" are those who just can't be bothered with all the arguments and would like it to go away. Not being especially interested themselves they find it a bit tedious that others go on and on about it.
I know it is especially offensive in a pluralist society where everyone has a right to his or her own religious views for someone to stand up and say, "This is the one true God!" but that's just how the New Testament comes across. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 8:5-6, "For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth...yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live."
Can you imagine walking into a Greco-Roman province and saying that, in the face of all the idol temples and in the face of signs everywhere that said Caesar was Lord? He had his nerve that Paul, didn't he? But the truth is Paul had met the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ one day when he was on his way to kill off the followers of Jesus Christ (Acts 22:1-21) and now he was proclaiming what he was told to say.
And it was a strange Story right enough. He claimed that the one true God had shown himself in and as the crucified Jesus of Nazareth and that he had come to set the world right even as he had promised. And in the person of Jesus of Nazareth he underwent the world's great wrongs, suffered at the hands of sin and death and rose again to glorious immortality. He experienced all that in the individual called Jesus but, and this many feel to be even harder to believe, he did it in the name of humanity for our sake. What we see and hear to have happened in Christ is to be the destiny of all who belong to God through him. This is the one true God in whom we should centre our lives and thoughts--a God with a cross as his badge of honour and triumph who did it for his wayward humanity.
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