They have come to listen… I have come to speak…
They don’t know me… and I don’t know them… and this will be the first and last time I will ever see them. What should I tell them? I mean I could share anything? What would you share with someone if you had one chance to tell them something…?
My mind drifted to the words of the great apostle… the cross of Jesus Christ.
What made the apostle Paul, who had a mind like no other, with revelations like no other, resolve to know nothing but the cross. What was it about Paul, who’s resume was unheard of, who had been visited by Christ Himself…
What was it that made this man “resolve to know nothing except Christ and Him crucified?” (1 Cor 2:2)
The cross… full of infinite meaning… The Son of God dying on a tree for sinners… it is this theme that Paul could not get out of His head… he was aflame with the love of Christ.
The cross here in India sure does take on a deeper meaning… the cross… rising above the sea of false gods… the testimony of the One True God… that comes to His people… that lives for His people… that weeps and dies for His people… The God that saves and redeems…
What a STRANGE GOD!!!? What God would do such a thing?
In India I am surrounded by literally hundreds of thousands of gods… these are all real gods (to them)… with names and faces. The one thing in common among them… they all demand sacrifices… and they are never satisfied with their worshipers…
I mean who has ever heard of a God that both demands a sacrifice and then provides the sacrifice… a God who even sacrifices Himself… and is forever satisfied with His people?? Well that’s the point… they haven’t heard… and that is why we are here to share the good news with them!
But until they hear and believe, they live in the sad delusion of false gods, with hearts enslaved to the evil one… trapped in their vain attempts to find peace…
The other day as we were passing through a town… a great crowd was parading through the streets… with raised voices, loud music, flowers and the smell of incense everywhere… paying respects to “a” god.
here is a random temple in the middle of the neighborhood…
In intersections of some roads, it is not uncommon to see a statue of one of these gods… covered in splattered paint and faded flowers… the perspiration of its’ worshipers. here is one god i found… i decided to sit on him…
Yesterday we traveled to the southern tip of India, where we saw these two islands, both rising above the sea in godless arrogance…
This one… was where a small protrusion in the shape of a footprint was found on top of a larger rock… how did the people respond when they discovered it…? They decided it was the incarnation and footprint of one of their gods… and so they built a temple around it… why not?
And for this one, an entirely different god, they decided to build a massive statue of him… Yeah, he looks pretty powerful and all… too bad he can’t breathe and couldn’t move if he tried…
And daily thousands of practicing Hindus make their way to the ticket counter, purchasing their ferry ride, and making the vain trek to worship and sacrifice.
These two kids are bald… their hair? It has been cut off and given to a god. Not sure at what age this stops… if it ever does. I guess that means certain gods are balding and are in need of hair…
It gets worse… it’s not something that is very much in the open, but it does go on… child sacrificing. Sometimes it’s the firstborn of the family… displaying the fullness of both the devotion and depravity of the worshiper… or maybe the child will be kidnapped from an unsuspecting family… either way, the innocent child will become a means of bartering with gods to attain blessing or ward off curses. How sick… and how perverted can we be?
May we take this moment, before heaping judgment upon Hindus, before considering ourselves so above them, to look at ourselves… to look in our own backyards. Are their idols, daily worshiped, daily sacrificed to in India… are they any different than the things we bow before in America? Sure… our gods are not as obvious, cause our gods don’t have faces, and it’s not under the name of “religion�, but does that make them any less real.
Consider the ways we give ourselves to athletes, movie stars, fashion, careers, houses, cars, drugs and alcohol, sex, sports and hobbies, music, video games, family… In this world, gods are everywhere! Everywhere people are… there are gods… they could be gods with names and faces, or they could be subtle matters of the heart…
A big one for me… is church. How sneaky the evil one has been to infiltrate God’s most precious family. It has been this way from the beginning… it was the lovers of “church� that killed Jesus… but we are not unaware of the schemes of the enemy. I fall into this trap all the time… worshiping church… not Jesus. I shared in an earlier blog, how coming out on the mission field has made me realize that foreign missions was an idol in my life… I had raised it up, thinking if I was doing missions, my work was somehow more acceptable to God… that then… once I was across the earth… then God would really love me… that’s garbage… His love is perfect, unconditional… all the time!!
It’s not the gods that are the problem… we are. There is nothing wrong with athletics, humor, sex, church… God created all these things… it’s us that have perverted them. A well known Christian leader describes his heart as “a factory of idols!� I think he is right… and we need to be on guard every day… to watch over our hearts to keep them at the feet of Jesus… you know… the one problem with a “living sacrifice� is it’s always crawling off the altar…
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?� Jer 17:9
We are a depraved race of humans… with no merit of our own… we can only look to a god… The God… that comes to rescue us from our perilous condition… The God who “has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself,� who “by His blood ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and made them a kingdom and priests to our God.� (Heb 9:26, Rev 5:9)
I think I will share about the cross… it has nothing to do with me… and everything to do with God… it is about grace, love, and forgiveness…
Let me tell you about the cross…
