Unchristian Unfathered

Introduction

In the last six months 3 Anglican ministers in Perth have been defrocked, on Monday this week I heard about a Pentecostal youth pastor stood down because of fooling around with girls, then in Tuesday’s West Australian newspaper the heading UNCHRISTIAN BROTHERS appeared on page one (29/4/14 p.1). This article describes the brutal physical and sexual abuse endured for years by orphans at the hands of merciless catholic priests and the shame, guilt and fear which has followed them all their lives. When a friend read this article he wept uncontrollably, not simply for these men but for the sake of the reputation of the beautiful name of Jesus. The decade long crisis in the trustworthiness of the public representatives of Jesus Christ[1], I know of people who have been spat on in the streets of Perth because they were wearing clerical collars,  is a crisis that must be owned by us all; “if one member suffers all suffer together” (1 Cor 12:26). The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse which has been released upon our city has a message from the Spirit to the churches (Rev 2:7). I have no doubt every single church in this city will merrily sing to the Lord this morning, but in how many will there be a call to confession, lamentation and mourning (cf. Mic 5:23-24)?

The deepest spiritual dimension of this crisis of Christian credibility is what pains Jesus most deeply in his heart, is that the God whom he came to reveal can no longer be believed in as the “Father of the fatherless” (Ps 68:5). Most Christians in Western Australia will not sense this in the Spirit, because like those orphans so brutalised by the Christian Brothers we too are carrying the trauma of an orphan spirit that has dulled our sensitivity to the pain that God feels over the lost condition of his children. To understand the crisis in our humanity we must go back to Eden.

Wisdom and Punishment: The Beginning

God’s dialogue with Adam and Eve revolved around two words; the first is one of unconditional favour. “God blessed them. And God said to them, “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion” (Gen 1:28). This original blessing is the source of all of the dimensions of humanity’s delights[2]. All the material and relational riches of paradise revolved around the dignity of Adam as the created “son of God” (Luke 3:38).  The tone of God’s second word is much harder for us to digest; “the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”” (Gen 2:16-17). This grave warning is a sign not of harshness but of favour, as it says in Proverbs, “For the Lord corrects those he loves, just as a father corrects a child in whom he delights.” (3:12). The goal of God’s discipline is our eternal delight. The LORD’s tone of voice in warning about the threat of death[3] must unmistakeably conveyed heartfelt grief at the prospect of losing intimacy with his first created children (Luke 6:45). The revelation of God’s anguished heart of God should have been enough to keep the first couple from sinning (cf. Gen 6:5-6; Ex 20:20; Prov 9:10). However they could not hear because they aspired to an extraordinary condition of greatness.

The satanic promise ““you will not surely die… when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”” (Gen 3:4-5) transformed Eve’s perception of everything, “so when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband.” (Gen 3:6 ESV). Adam and Eve were excited by the prospect of being able to make their own decisions without fear of correction or punishment. They delighted in the opportunity to live a life free from all bad news, a life unthreatened by suffering and death. At the deepest level they desired to be fatherless.

But having been created as God’s children (Isaiah 43:6-7) we are wired up for fathering in the depths of our being. Jesus understood the nature of fatherhood to be at the root of his conflict with the religious teachers of his day; ““I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.” You seek to kill me…you are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning…”” (John 8:39, 44 ESV). To listen to the false father has disastrous consequences; “when the woman… took of its fruit and ate, and…gave some to her husband…the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.” (Genesis 3:6-7 ESV). Ultimately shame is a condition of losing intimacy with a loving, protecting Father.

Satan has been spectacularly successful in reversing our image of fatherhood, God is there to provide our needs, and when he doesn’t we feel justifiably disappointed and angry. Fallen people feel shamefully abandoned by God. In our sheer selfishness we have never understood the connection between our choice of fatherlessness and the experience of divine punishment. When Adam and Eve were forcefully banished from Eden[4] they were like little children who felt their punishment was losing all the enjoyable things of life. The story of the Bible is the story of how the castaway Father reintroduces himself into the life of his rebellious children; it is a story of the adoption of cosmic orphans.

Wisdom and Punishment: Israel

God’s history with Israel as Father begins with the declaration, ““Let my son go that he may serve me.”” (Ex 4:23) but the nation repeatedly chooses to serve other fathers. “As a thief is shamed when caught, so the house of Israel shall be shamed: who say to a tree, ‘You are my father, ’and to a stone, ‘You gave me birth.’(Jeremiah 2:26-27 ESV). Again and again the prophets warned the nation that such idolatry would bring judgement but lacking the maturity of wise sons they would not listen.

The sages in Israel taught “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.” (Psalm 103:13-14 ESV). “My son, do not despise the LORD’s discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the LORD reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.” (Prov 3:11-12 ESV). Israel however were rebellious brats children and would not listen to their Father’s warnings (Isa 30:9). In those prophetic passages which threaten most intense judgement the LORD ratchets up the intensity of his paternal love. After speaking of his trampling the winepress of wrath he can talks most tenderly, “in all their suffering he also suffered, and he personallyrescued them. In his love and mercy he redeemed them. He lifted them up and carried them through all the years.” (Isa 63:1ff, 9). Israel must be destroyed by the sword of Assyria, but hope remains for, ““Oh, how can I give you up, Israel? How can I let you go?….My heart is torn within me, and my compassion overflows.” (Hos 11:1, 8).

Despite these and many other texts we still hear people saying that the Old Testament is a book of wrath whilst the New Testament is a book of love? The orphan spirit of man persists in its conviction that God’s punishment, which indeed is abundant under the old covenant, is heartless and fatherless. Only Jesus can free us from this terrible confusion.

Wisdom and Punishment: Jesus

The revelation breakthrough that frees us from recoiling from divine punishment is that Jesus spoke of judgement in the light of his Sonship, “”The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him…. The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son”” (John 3:35-36; 5:21 ESV). Paul likewise can speak of the lost as “by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3). These texts reveal teach us that the sole difference between being an object of God’s wrath and the tender punishment of the heavenly Father is our location, all outside of Christ are objects of the divine anger, all who belong to Christ, all in the Son are in an anger free zone. If we are “in the Son” (1 John 2:24; 5:20) the Father can no more be angry with us than he can be with Jesus[5]. The orphan spirit cannot however be convinced by biblical texts, to be free from the heart conviction that God is an abandoning and wrathful Father we must have a revelation of the cross.

A very seasoned Christian brother recently who was disturbed when his minister said, “God punished Jesus so we would not have to be punished.” Did God punish Jesus on the cross or is this conviction an imagination of our orphaned spirits[6]? I am sure that in the hearts of all priests, pastors and preachers involved in spiritual and sexual abuse there is a conviction that the Father is an angry God mercilessly pouring out his vengeance on his innocent Son, their abuse of children images God as a divine abuser. This is the spiritual root of the crisis we are being faced with today. We must understand the difference between an angry Father punishing Jesus, which scripture never teaches, and the biblical truth that Christ took our punishment in our place.

Isaiah’s prophecy testifies that the natural human way of understanding of the cross is that Christ was punished by God; “we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.” Then in what must be one of the most important “buts” in scripture we read ⁵ But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (Isa 53:4-5). To think that God was personally angry with Jesus is to share the opinion of the unbelievers who watched him suffer and die. “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross….He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”” (Matt 27:40, 43). Naturally speaking the terrible cry, ““My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46) could only be interpreted by the orphan spirit of man as the absence of sonship and the presence of an angry God?

There is one amazing exception to this natural conclusion; “ Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last…And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:37-39 ESV). The loud cry which led this hard hearted slaughterer to confess Jesus as the Son of God was these words, ““Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”” (Luke 23:46). It is as the Spirit reveals to our spirits that the God is both Jesus is and our “Abba! Father” we know that it was impossible for God to be the angry punisher of his Son (Mark 14:36; Rom 8:13-16; Gal 4:4-6). It was not the Spirit of the Father who oppressed Jesus on the cross[7]; what filled Jesus heart with grief, disappointment, desolation and dereliction was his drinking to the full the cup of our orphan prodigal humanity in its rejection of all contact with the Fatherhood of God. This is what it meant for the Son to experience God’s wrath on our behalf.

Wisdom and Punishment: Church

The abuse catastrophe of our day is first of all a spiritual one. Those who have most suffered abuse in Christian institutions have been not merely naturally defenceless orphaned children but victims of the most evil spiritual power. The great goal of Satan’s murderous ambitions has always been (John 8:44) to separate human beings from their heavenly Father and to punish them mercilessly and he has found willing accomplices in the Church of God. These are wolves in sheep’s clothing who heartlessly prey on the sheep (Matt 7:15; Acts 20:29), “ungodly…. shameless shepherds who care only for themselves” (Jude).

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is surely performing a function like that of the foreign nations which oppressed Israel long ago, if you will not listen to my servants the prophets I will send Assyria, I will send you to Babylon to punish you so that you might turn back to me (Ezek 33:11 cf. Jer 3:19). This Commission is performing the prophetic function of stripping the sheep’s clothing off the wolf’s back and exposing the corrupted character of the institutions lying underneath. This work is a sign of God’s wrath on Christian institutions of past and present which have failed to reveal him as “Father of the fatherless” (Ps 68:5). Institutional Christianity has not understood such things for a very specific reason.

I was once approached by an old prophet who seized me and began to speak of how the Word and the Spirit[8] would come together in my life. Then his seriousness intensified and he spoke on and on…about how God was going to crush me through his discipline in order to achieve such intimacy. Since then I have been evicted from several churches and suffered many vilifications, but the greatest pain has been abandonment by men whom I once considered as true fathers in the faith. None of this anguish was because God was angry with me, but because the crushing wounds of the cross lead us to the glory of the Father. Paul explains to the ignorant Corinthian Christians how he was “utterly unbearably crushed so that we despaired of life itself” (2 Cor 1:8), for his afflictions are a share in the sufferings of the one willingly crushed for our iniquities (Col 1:24; Isa 53:5). The suffering of a Christian may feel like abandonment but they are a sharing in Christ’s work on the cross, they are not an experience of exclusion from privilege but a revelation of the heart of God as he destroys sin in its power to separate us from his paternal favour (Rom 8:3). The great crisis in the Church is our failure to discern the difference between the chastisement which the “Father of spirits” brings to us in love and the wrath of God which falls only on those outside of Christ (Heb 12:9).

We have forgotten the exhortation that addresses us as sons, “my son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and punishes every son whom he receives.” (Hebrews 12:5-6). Our ability to endure pain for Christ is a mark of grace and the only way a materialistic and ungodly Church can be restored to the holiness of the Father (John 17:11; Heb 12:10-11). God delights to say “I have no wrath” (Isa 27:4) but looking at an intimidated, fearful, undiscipled Church who would believe this today. It is time that God’s children understood that the pain he afflicts in growing our testimony to Jesus never means the wrath of an abandoning Father (Rev 19:10).

Conclusion

All around us are evidences of the Lord’s punishing hand on our nation and Church for our frivolous ways. The Western Church has been powerless to stem the rise of militant atheism because its tolerance of “Christian” perpetrators of evil has given the beast permission to speak proud blasphemies against God and against the wife of the Lamb (Rev 13:5-6). We have failed to be salt and light (Matt 5:13-16). What is at stake here is not the tax breaks enjoyed by the Church or access to schools to teach religion but the honour of the name of Christ (Mal 2:2). Something must be done.

What is the most famous church in Australia and for what is it famous?  People all over the world have heard of Hillsong and its gifting for celebration;  but where are those spiritual leaders who can speak prophetically with James to one of the materially richest nations ever but one of the spiritually poorest, “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you.” (James 5:1). God help us for we have forgotten how to howl! Instead of gaily singing the songs of Zion (Ps 137) we need to repent (cf. 2 Cor 6:14-7:1).  In fact the current scandals reveal that dimensions of the Church have become worse than Babylonian. In our current state how can we echo the apocalyptic message, ““Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality…. Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues;”” (Rev 14:8).

Every revival begins with repentance amongst the people of God; “Blow a trumpet in Zion; sound an alarm on my holy mountain!…consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly;” (Joel 2:1, 15). The abuse scandals in the Church should be covering us with a mantle of sackcloth and ashes (Joel 1:13; Rev 11:3).

Jesus promised, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” (Matt 5:4 cf. 2 Cor 7:10). As the one who on the cross mourned the loss of his Father, who allowed himself to be immersed in spirit of orphanhood and who has been forever comforted in the Father’s presence by resurrection from the dead he has all authority to lead us in this way. May the Lord grant us a season of mourning for a season of victory.

 

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