Prodigal Auction

My daughter came to me on Saturday evening, and put a paper in my hand saying “#### asked me to give you this”.

It was a letter from my 14 year old son.

In it he confessed that he had mindlessly put a bid on a famous auction website for a car, and against his expectations, he had won, and was now liable for money well in excess of his funds. Plus, it would be very inconvenient to fetch the said car in another town. It was a very self-deprecating letter, full of genuine grief and remorse as well as panic for his situation. He did not expert forgiveness, but offered to pay what he could in pocket money and by handing over his computer.

I was reeling with the impact of the whole thing and taken aback by the fact that I was now going to have to stump up the cash. But mostly, I felt sad for him, hiding in his basement bedroom, worked up into such a state of self-loathing that he felt he had to send his sister with a letter, rather than face me himself. It hurt me that he called himself “a screw-up of a son”.

I consulted with my wife, and we agreed the problem had three aspects:

• Re-affirmation of our son
• Careful discipline of our son
• Resolving the problem of the car

The discipline was relatively easy – it didn’t need anything heavy handed. We have been telling him for months he is not allowed a computer in his bedroom – now we could enforce that rule.

Re the car, we felt there was a binding contract and we would have to buy it with borrowed money, but then sell it straightaway to recover as much as we could.

Time for re-affirmation. I couldn’t go down to him straightaway – other kids going to bed, incoming phone calls, etc - but at the first break I went down, and found him flushed in the face and full of tears. (This is the rough tough footballing son.) I explained I would take the burden of dealing with the car, and that we would move his computer out, but mostly that the self-deprecating aspect of his letter was out of place for a son of God, a valued one for whom Christ died, and a son that made me proud. I could not shout – I could only hug him. And he received the hug, which normally he would not.

Cutting a long story short, we contacted the vendor and explained the situation. He was very understanding, and agreed to ‘mutually withdraw’ – which I hadn’t realised you could do on the auction website. All we had to do was refund him his listing fee, a small amount which my son agreed to pay.

The phrase ‘cutting a long story short’ includes all the prayer! Prayer which was answered.

So there we have it – a living prodigal son, a living parable of the undeserving who is loved not because of what he does but because of who he is (the son of the father), and whose repentance opens the floodgates of forgiveness.

Hot Springs to Heresy

As I child I went to Rotorua in New Zealand. This is an area of geysers, hot springs, and boiling mud. The mud made an impression on me because you could see where a bubble was about to appear – the surface would slowly heave up, then it would seem to stretch and get thinner before finally the bubble would burst, splattering hot mud randomly in all directions.

The is how this post is coming – it has been brooding for some time, and now POP..here it is, sending stuff randomly all around.

Some bloke wrote a letter to the Church of England Newspaper, saying that in ‘Penal substitution’ the word penal doesn’t come in the legal sense but in terms of the penalty, ie consequences, of our actions. He argued that Jesus does not take our punishment, just the fallout from our deeds.

This is in line with a lot of other stuff I have read recently, all with his same theme that God is such a loving God that he couldn’t possibly dream of punishing us for our sins, and that God has not written any laws for us to break and so there is no need for punishment: its just a matter of trying to live without hurting anyone and facing natural cause-and-effect consequences of our mistakes. There is a suggestion that God himself is not wronged by our sins, its just our fellow man.

So why do we always repeat in the Lord’s prayer “Forgive us our trespasses…”?

If there is no law, there is no need for forgiveness.
If there is no punishment, there is not need for forgiveness.
If we have not wronged God, he does not need to forgive us.

Therefore, since we regularly beg for forgiveness as Christ taught us, there must be something to be forgiven for.

If there is no law, there is no trespass.
If there is no trespass, there is no need for forgiveness.

So what I am saying is that the Lords Prayer, recognised by every Christian in the world, embodies the concept of breaking God’s law and needing to be forgiven by him for it.

The Penalty is not just a natural consequence, it is punishment according to God’s law. (PS, to say Penalty just means consequences doesn’t make sense, either from the etymology of the word or from its use in common language. If the Police give me a fixed penalty notice for illegal parking, it is a punishment for breaking the law, not just a natural consequence of my action)

Now, without going into a whole "quote scripture" section which would take all day, the punishment for trespassing God’s law is death.

[NB I am not referring particularly to the OT ‘law’, more to God’s instructions and commands generally]

This takes us on to that verse in Hebrews – “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins”.

The punishment for sin is death. That is an absolute eternal principle that even God will not break. Every sin requires a death. Forgiveness is not a casual “oh well, never mind, don’t do it again’. Sin can’t be forgiven without death. If you think about it this makes sense – if I sin against God by injuring my brother, and God were to just dismiss it, my brother would say “Hey, what about me? Where’s my justice?” So my sin against my brother requires justice – it requires a death under the terms of God’s law.

So the only way that we can be forgiven, is for that punishment to be implemented, but not in a way that we feel.

And so, Jesus bore my sins in his body on the cross. In a sense I was in him, crucified with him, but he was the one that felt the pain.

When my victims turn to God and demand their justice, he replies “Yes, those sins have been punished, Simon died in Jesus”.

Yet when I present myself to God, he says, “Yes, you have lived a perfect life in Jesus”

This is the love of God. Not that he ignores sins, but that he deals with them properly in a way that ensures justice for the victim and freedom and forgiveness for me.

And it is only by taking that punishment onto his eternal self that he could bring these opposites together.

And so, I believe in Penal Substitution. I believe that I deserved to be punished because I have broken God’s commands. But I believe that I have been crucified with Christ, and that I live with Christ.

He has substituted himself for me and taken my Penalty.

And I can only say Hallelujah, and worship him with thanksgiving.

But the reason I say all this is that I am really worried that there is a deep, truly sinister heresy growing in the church.

If we deny that God makes laws, and if we deny that he will punish us for breaking them, then we are saying exactly the same as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And that is Very Dangerous!

And that is why I speak out for the true message of the cross.

Moving On / Paris [Chapter 2]

Despite all this we had a fantastic time. Our main objective was to sit in cafes absorbing the atmosphere, rather than rushing round sightseeing. So we had lunch in the Café Panis opposite Notre Dame (very good), we had cappuccinos in cafes looking onto the Arc de Triomphe and Sacre Couer, and the Place du Tertre in Montmartre where the artists do their stuff, and had coffee from a kiosk looking at the Eiffel tower. We cruised on the seine, shopped on the Champs Elysees, and walked around St Germain, Montmartre and various other areas each of which had its own atmosphere and culture while still being typically French. This included a walk past the famous Moulin Rouge, and on down the street which we knew was the red light district but were still taken aback by how explicit some of the posters where, with only the smallest stickers censoring the ladies’ naughty bits. For those of you who have read my blog in the past and issues of pornography in our marriage, you will understand that this was difficult for both of us. From my part all of my past addictions were straining to be released again, in total conflict with my opposing urge to demonstrate to my wife that I am now OK in this area. From her part, she could tell that it was having a strong effect on me, which she found upsetting. We also went into Sacre Couer, which was very peaceful but full of posters preaching Catholic theology that I couldn’t agree with. And we also went into Notre Dame while a mass was taking place. I really enjoyed this. There was a real sense of awe and majesty. When the priest said “behold the lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world” it was really a powerful statement, with the church members forming a large congregation in the centre and thousands of tourists clustered around the edges. Of course I have to take issue with the fact he was probably referring to the wafer in his hand, but even from my own strongly Protestant perspective I was strongly conscious that the priest was preaching the gospel to people who might otherwise never hear it, and although I would argue he preached it imperfectly with many Roman Catholic distortions of the truth the word of God is powerful enough to overcome those imperfections and call people to himself in that context. I really felt that God was present.

So, before the Holiday, Mrs announced that she would try to make a concerted effort to return to God on her return. And I believe that this will have been part of that return.

I should have mentioned that we left our children at home in England, with our 16 year old son in charge assisted by the 15 year old. Number 3 was our main concern, being of a very different personality to the others and hence at the centre of most rows. So we announced that while he wasn’t old enough to share responsibility with numbers 1 and 2, he was old enough to do his own thing, and so we gave him a supply of pies to heat up and money for the chip shop. So with him feeling proudly independent, we managed to separate out the main source of trouble without causing offence to anyone. The youngest two spent one night with friends. We returned to a tidy and peaceful household, so either it all went very well or they have hidden the evidence!

Mrs is now feeling much better. On Wednesday she went for a scan and was finally given the all-clear. They also announced that she had a ripe follicle ready, should she wish to start trying again. And so she came home in a very good mood, and without giving too much away she is making me very happy too.