Redeeming God's Voice

I wonder what comes to mind when you hear the word Judgment? If your like most people, not pleasant things. Judgment is one of those words that carries a heavy yoke of connotation. It implies imperiousness and piety in its practitioner and shame in the object of this practice. While we would like for the implications of Judgment to be Justice, it doesn't work that way in practice, in how we actually think about the term. Judgment, which should be a term of objectivity - as in an impartial judge rendering a verdict - instead has become a term of partiality and subjectiveness whereby the executor of judgment seems to mete it out at will, often unfairly.

In the scriptures though, Judgment is a key characteristic of God's nature. He is just, therefore he judges righteously, therefore his Judgment is good. the Bible supports this over and over again. The Judgment of God is a good thing in scripture, even a desirable thing because His Judgment is the execution of His just nature. Psalm 1:5 even promises evil people that they will not receive the Judgment of God. Imagine that, a lack of judgment as a threat!

Judgment is a tool of righteousness for God, but here's the catch. God is perfect, and he has perfect judgment, so the Judgment that He delivers is perfect. Since this is the case, His judgment is not something to be feared but rather something to be embraced. This concept of Judgment holds the world together; it makes social life possible, makes law and order in human communities possible, makes relationships fair, and so on. All of this is possible from a perfect source.

Something happens, though, when Judgment falls into our hands. We quickly learn to be proud of ourselves. As we recognize the justice of our actions - that is, as we align our activity with the precepts of God - we have a tendency to feel pretty good about what we're doing. In the process we give ourselves liberty to mete out the Judgment of God on everyone else, and a cycle can take hold whereby we seek perfection in our actions in order to leverage Judgment over everyone else. This is the very foundation of Religion in the most negative sense of that word. A sense of self-righteousness born out of the perversion of something good which we set up as the framework for judging everyone around us - that is the definition of religion.

Once you have self-centered religion, any Judgment you practice is tainted. It's tainted by pettiness and arrogance and a lack of mercy. It's tainted by rules and guidelines that become the arbiters of righteousness rather than God. And as people sense that they're being judged unfairly, that Religion is afoot and mercy and grace have retreated, the very word Judgment becomes tainted by an unrighteous practice of its application.

I've been talking about the word Judgment, but there are any number of other words that Religion has stolen and debased. Let's start with that word, Religion. This word is tainted mostly owing to its connection to Judgment. Etymologically religion comes from practices of study and devotion to gods, very concrete concepts that one would expect. But modern Religion implies Puritanical elements of unattainable piety and exclusivity.

Fellowship is a word I've grown to hate. It seems code for religious socializing, often forced or otherwise decidedly not fun. Then there's Church, a word which in the New Testament almost never refers to a building, but which in our time almost never does not. The writers of the New Testament constantly refer to the church as belonging to God; in Acts we're told that God purchased the church "with his own blood." Surely he didn't want to buy an assortment of ugly buildings in Amarillo, TX? Surely if we received a letter from a missionary to "The Church of God in Amarillo" we wouldn't post a picture of it online and claim it was meant only for our little congregation?

If any word is ready for redemption it is surely the word Church. The 2,000 plus years that have passed since Jesus was on the earth have been plagued with abuses by the church. In the name of "the church" people have been maimed, killed, and enslaved; forced to leave homes, families, and entire cultures; taught to hate other religions and ethnicities and nations; forced to support unjust governments and modes of life; and generally made to believe that someone besides Jesus himself is head of this thing called the Church which, by all accounts in scripture, should include anyone who has the slightest interest in a good, just, and holy God who does everything possible to bring grace and mercy and love to all humanity.

The very voice of God needs redemption. We live in the most literate time in human history, which by most Christian standards should mean that the Bible is being read in almost every possible corner of the globe. By the standards of most of the Christians I know, this should translate to a global revival. Imagine several billion people with access to God's words! And yet something unsettling is happening instead. It seems that instead of more freedom and healing and joy spreading around the world along with the written word, there's a strangling of the language of God. The more we put Bibles into peoples hands, the more we want to include our own interpretations (and connotations) of the language in those bibles. It's not enough for many of us that the Word of God is out there for the reading if someone who "knows what they're doing" is not also there to explain Judgment, Church, Fellowship, Grace, and even Salvation to the ignorant masses.

The voice of God needs to be redeemed because many of us Christians decided years ago that He doesn't (or can't) really speak anymore anyway. We ignored the fact that the Bible says "the Word became Flesh" and instead spread the lie that the Flesh became Word - that Jesus is summed up in the Holy Bible, so reading is all that's required. Our fixation on the printed scriptures ignores the fact that in order to encounter Jesus, you have to, you know, encounter Jesus! The word became flesh because not only can some people not read, but some people who can never will. God didn't write Moses a letter, he spoke to the man from a burning bush.

Redeeming God's voice is about redeeming the language of God. It's about giving life and power to words like Just and Good, Judgment and Love. Jesus came to earth to show us the character of God through the medium of our own skin, our own condition. Jesus embodied Judgment when he laid bare the hypocrisy of the religious leaders and repeatedly said, "I demand mercy and not sacrifice." Jesus showed us that Church is a community of the God-fearing rather than a temple of exclusion. And Jesus taught us that Religion is about self-sacrifice and care for the weakest among us - for the widows and orphans, the powerless and marginalized. Redeeming God's voice is an act of redeeming His character in our world. We need the language of God to represent His character and connote His love and grace, or else the only answers we'll have for the questions of the world will be empty promises.