August 2, 2013

1 Peter 3:2 — God is not slack, but works in His own time

 As Myra and I drove to the airport yesterday, the radio station we were listening to played Richard Strauss’s tone poem “Also Sprach Zarathustra”. Many of us are familiar with at least the opening of the piece because it’s used to great effect in Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001, A Space Odyssey” and as the theme for the Apollo program.

Nowadays, perhaps, fewer people are familiar with Friedrich Nietschze’s philosophical novel on which the music is based. The Novel is fiercely critical of mass movements –  Zarathustra is harshly critical of all kinds of mass movements, and of the “rabble” in general. Christianity is based upon a hatred of the body and of this earth, and an attempt to deny them both by believing in the spirit and in an afterlife. Nationalism and mass politics are also means by which weary, weak, or sick bodies try to escape from themselves. Those who are strong enough, Zarathustra suggests, struggle. Those who are not strong give up and turn to religion, nationalism, democracy, or some other means of escape.

Famously, Zarathustra is shocked that one of the characters he meets, an old man in the woods, has not heard that God is dead!

So is God dead? Some, weary of what they see as an unstoppable moral and spiritual decline, seem prepared to say so.

The truth may not be so simple. According to a

Gallup poll from — more than 90% of Americans believe in a god. That figure drops as you move East, talk to a younger or more liberal group, and rises if you consider Southerners, conservatives or older people. We have to be careful how we generalize, of course. Belief in “god” is not the same as believing in God!

God is not dead! It seems more that we have decided to act as though He were. Even when I was being raised in England there was a general acceptance — even if Christianity was lukewarm — that God was in charge and that the Bible was at least the starting point for law. Over the last 50 years it seems that, in Europe first and America next, God has been driven out of people’s hearts and minds — As the letter to the Romans has it, “They suppress the truth. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them.”

God  not dead, but we are! Unless we claim Him. Paul also said, “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins …” and “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

If we behave as though God is dead, and deny Him, WE are dead! If we behave as though God is alive, and confess Him, we are alive.

So if God is alive, and will be mad at us if we don’t get right with Him, how come we’re still here? It’s because He’s patient! How did He announce Himself to Moses? “And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.” He’s working … in Hs own time …

Never mind “Thus spake Zarathustra”. Thus sayeth the Word. Pass it on!