An Important Note To Students And Teachers
How do you answer the question, "How do you get there?" If that is the only question you have, you cannot answer it. The only proper reply is, "How do you get there from where?" One must know the point of origination before he or she can provide a map to the destination. It is not enough to know where someone wishes to go. You can be useful only if you know the starting point.
An accurate map that directs a person to a specific destination includes all relevant information. The more accurate information it includes, the more helpful the map becomes. If a person is traveling a 1,000 miles, the map is severely limited if it includes very accurate instruction for the first 50 miles and the last 50 miles, but says nothing of the 900 miles between! If the inquirer is told, "If you just get on this road and stay on it, you will get there," the person may soon find himself or herself confused, frustrated, and deceived.
Understanding God in a manner that allows us to travel to Him after death (a) involves accurate insight into revelations made for thousands of years (b) finally collected into one book we know as the Bible. Even a casual reading of the Bible makes it obvious people had many different starting points. People still do! There are still greedy people, deceitful people, people devoted to things that physically exploit and abuse them, people who do not understand godly values, people so steeped in the powers of evil that they do not understand that following God means redirecting life.
Can God save all such people? Certainly! However, the starting point of someone who has the benefits of a four generation Christian home with the experiences of their first 18 years in a loving, knowledgeable congregation is not at all the same as a person who does not have a Christian in the family tree and never was in a church building the first eighteen years of his or her life! Woe is the congregation who fails to understand that converts with no Christian background have different challenges from converts that come from four generations of Christian influence! These two kinds of converts have very different starting points!
Does someone reply, "God is not interested in people like that! If they have no Christian influence in their past, they just are not good church material!" Really???? Do you realize that most if not all the first century converts you read about in the New Testament were the first Christians in their families? They did not have one Christian in their family tree! Do you realize that most of Paul's writings were letters to congregations with a majority of converts who came directly from idol worship? Their concept of deity was radically different. Their concept of morality was radically different. Their concept of "good values" was radically different. It is obvious in many of Paul's writings to such congregations that they still did not have a good understanding of what a Christian existence "looked like" (for example, that is why Paul described what it "looked like" to be a Christian in Rome in Romans chapters 12-15). God is quite experienced in forgiving people with no Christian background!
Among the many problems concerning obedience, one close to top of the list is our tendency to impose 21st century ideas on concepts thousands of years old. The "truth" is not fully revealed by citing scriptures we prefer and ignoring scriptures that challenge us to see how complex our "simple, easy view" actually is. This quarter's study hopefully will challenge you to realize how complex the concept of obedience is and how great God's forgiveness is.
