Tag: opinion

My Reflections On Vaccines

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Wuhan, China 2019 – the first reported case of Covid-19 emerged, the first seed of a global crisis that would, in the coming years, kill over 5 million people. At the time, I didn’t give much thought to it. I had heard of epidemics and killer viruses before. None of the worst ones had ever reached Western shores in my lifetime, why would they now? It wasn’t long, however, before Australia was thrown into restrictions and lockdowns; people hoarded toilet paper, and thousands lost their jobs as only businesses deemed “essential” could stay open. All in all, Australia has had it pretty good. We’ve only had around 200 thousand cases in total and less than 2 thousand related deaths. Compare that to the U.S. and other countries and Australia has suffered very little. Nevertheless, as the virus took life after life, we all scrambled for a vaccine. One study suggests that in an unprecedented move, over 92 billion U.S. dollars (worldwide) have been poured into vaccine-related products and research since the start of the pandemic. As a result, vaccines were fast-tracked and mass-produced, allowing for an estimated 42.7% of the world to be already fully vaccinated against the original strains of the virus. Australia, in particular, has been pushing three major vaccines; AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna. As of now, 86.7% of Australia’s population between the ages of 16 and 80 is fully vaxxed. This is a little snap-shot of where we’re at as a nation.

I’m not a doctor and I’m not an expert in vaccines and pandemics. I’ve just finished my degree in ministry/theology and that’s where my first love lay, so my reflections will be mostly theological in nature. Until now, I have been hesitant to blog about my own thoughts on the issue of vaccines, but here we are. I look forward to the fire and pitchforks.

  1. Vaccines are not a Gospel issue (or anywhere even close). The Gospel (Good News) is about how God and humanity can be reconciled to God in Christ Jesus (Colossians 1). It isn’t about public health, potential government agendas, and global depopulation. Mandates are an important issue for us to work through as citizens of Australia and even as the Church. However, your status in the Kingdom is not dependant upon the reception or rejection of the vaccine – it is dependant solely on the grace of God and the atoning work of Jesus. This leads me to my next point…
  2. Vaccines are not the mark of the beast. Getting the vaccine won’t identify you on judgement day as a child of Satan or whatever. The book of Revelation is highly figurative, rife with Old Testament imagery that would have made sense to its contemporary audience. Vaccines were not even in the mind of the author (the Apostle John) as he wrote it (they weren’t invented yet). Please go to a Bible college or seminary. Read a good book or three, attend a rational local church where the pastor loves the Bible. In fact, let me give you some good places to start when reading up on Revelation and the mark; just click here, here, here and here.
  3. Vaccine mandates are not akin to the Holocaust or Nazi Germany. That this needs to be explained is mind-blowing, but here we are. I’m no history buff, but it seems to me that Nazi Germany became a thing, that Jews and other races were thrown into camps and gassed because of racism and xenophobia, not because Hitler and The Third Reich were genuinely concerned by a pandemic that was wiping out the global population. Restricting unvaxxed people doesn’t seem like segregation, at least not in the traditional sense. If I were in government and health professionals were telling me that Covid-19 was killing people around the world, I’m not entirely sure I’d be making different decisions. Believe me when I say I am extremely uncomfortable with some of the mandates and how it affects people’s lives. I know many people who won’t get the vaccine (a choice I honour) who won’t be able to see loved one’s who are sick or even be able to catch up with me for a coffee come mid-December. I’m not sitting here smugly believing I’m superior for getting the vaccine (though I do believe it is, perhaps, the wiser choice to make), I am burdened for my brothers and sisters in the Church and in Australia who have a particularly hard road ahead of them.
  4. Mandates need to be heavily scrutinised and reformed. Over the last few days and weeks, I have seen mass protests where thousands, even hundreds of thousands, all over the nation and globe have been protesting against the unvaxxed mandates. It warms my heart. I believe in the people’s right to protest peacefully. I don’t believe the government has always handled this entire situation well. The people deserve vulnerability from their leaders, clear communication, and a say in how this is all handled.
  5. How beautiful are the feet of those that bring the Good News (Isaiah 52:7). As the Church we should be heavily praying for our leaders, preaching the Gospel, and planting churches so that God revives the hearts and minds of our nation before we protest and lobby. Before we try to preserve our earthly kingdoms, we need to be about the work of bringing God’s Kingdom to earth through the work that God has prepared for us in advance.

A final thought. Bad theology and sin lead to disunity in the Church during a time where unity is needed more than ever. Christians can differ on taking the vaccine, but they can’t break fellowship over it. Coming to the Lord’s table is a time where we remember and demonstrate Jesus’ atoning death until His return. We must lay aside those things that so easily cause us to hate one another, and place Jesus and His mission at the centre of our lives and meetings. As of today, I am double vaxxed. I say this with a certain degree of trepidation as I lay at the foot of the King. If you decide to not get the jab, I will never stop meeting with you, worshipping with you, and loving you in our shared calling to take the Gospel out to all nations which include our own backyards. You will always be welcome in my home. I will trust that the Spirit has led you to reasonable conclusions about this issue, I simply encourage you to consider the above points.

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

Ephesians 4:1-6

Reflections on Why the Biblical Story Makes the Most Sense

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This is part IV in a series on apologetics. If you want to read the other articles click on the following links:

Part I What is Apologetics?
Part II People and Apologetics
Part III Christianity and the Questions of Right and Wrong

Enjoy!

“The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.”

― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

Life is full of myth, lore, and drama that ensnares the imagination and catches us up within the rich tapestry that makes up our human story – that makes sense of our existence. Every one of us has this deep sense of our life, meaning more than it does, from the Sun rising in the East to the birds singing in the early morning. From the kettle boiling, our stomachs rumbling, the caress of a brisk winter wind, or the smell of saltwater in the Summer. The high pitched cry of a newborn baby and the roof of your mouth burning after taking a bite from a slice of hot pepperoni pizza. The gutted feeling you get over betrayal or the stress of paying your bills on time. The weariness one feels after a long day at work or looking after the family. For some, depression, for others, worse. Finally, the contentment (or excitement) of being in the arms of a lover – these are all paragraphs in the chapters to the book that makes up our existence.

The greatest stories ever written are told so that humanity can make sense of themselves. So that we can all slowly stitch together those chaotic, beautiful and terrifying chapters that we’ve all starred in. The world’s oldest stories, from the Enuma Elis (The Epic of Gilgamesh), The Hermopolis Egyptian creation myth, and The Eridu Genesis, to the Aboriginal dream-time stories and the Native American Creation myths, every culture and civilization has within their memory a story that defines who they are and why they’re here. For the modern West, we look to science and western philosophy to make sense of our humanity. According to evolutionary biologists, humanity (Homo sapiens) evolved from Homo heidelbergensis somewhere around 100 000 years ago. All life (a biologist might argue) evolved from the big bang event approximately 13.7 million years ago, and humanity is the latest in the evolutionary chain (that we know of). In light of this, philosophers like Fredrick Nietzsche and scientists in the neo atheist movement such as Richard Dawkins, and socio-political critics such a Christopher Hitchens might argue that life has no intrinsic meaning or value (this is called existential Nihilism). As Dawkins famously said, “the universe we observe is precisely what we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” However, for most of us, this bleak commentary on the nature of existence remains unsatisfactory. Most of us, perhaps even Dawkins himself (though he might never admit it), have a deep-seated sense of “something more.” One cannot look at oneself in the mirror of the cosmos and not have their heart leap as it longingly grasps for something greater than themselves. We want to be known, we want to be loved, but we must first know ourselves and our place.

Herein lies the power of the biblical story (i.e. the Gospel – the Good News). The unfolding drama of the biblical story compellingly peels back the lays of the human existence and uniquely relates them to God, to one another, and the world in a way no other story does. Why is this story significant? Because of the way we live, relate to one another, and the world around us, the way we relate to God profoundly depends on how we comprehend, perceive and understand all of these things; otherwise, Nihilism may be true. Let us then explore this narrative so that we may judge for ourselves how this story makes sense of our existence.

  • God gives meaning and purpose to all that exists and orders it out of a chaotic state (Genesis 1:1-25)
  • Humanity is endowed with God’s image (Genesis 1:26), and they’re tasked to multiply and subdue the earth (Genesis 1:27-28)
  • This image that God gives humanity is two things. It is 1. an ontological reality (a part of their nature) in which every human somehow shares in, participates, and retains something of God (separate but related to His likeness). 2. It is a task or vocation that God bestows upon humanity to live out this ontological reality. That task is to multiply, subdue the earth, and guard and keep the Garden (Genesis 2:15), the dwelling place of God.
  • Humanity fails at walking in God’s image. Instead of guarding the Garden, Adam and Eve allowed the serpent to enter God’s dwelling place and corrupt it. Adam and Eve, therefore, chose for themselves wisdom apart from God and decided to rule themselves apart from God’s love and wisdom (Genesis 3).
  • God takes Adam and Eve and removes them from His dwelling place, stopping them from eating from the Tree of Life. Humanity has now chosen spiritual death and disunity with God, and as a result, they are disconnected from one another and the creation around them.
  • However, God doesn’t let the world fall into chaos. He promises that through the line of Eve, humanity will be saved by crushing the serpents head even at the risk of the seed’s own life (Genesis 3:15).

In just the first three chapters of the Bible, we have a densely rich narrative that paints humanities reality. We were created and chosen by God for good things. For unity, for love, peace and joy. Yet we went our own way. From Genesis 3:15 onwards, the entire Bible is story after story of God rescuing the world through chosen individuals and people groups, eventually culminating in the person and work of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). In the final pages of the Bible, the Apostle John tells of a world where through Jesus the Messiah, there will be no sickness or death. There will be no separation from God, life, each other, and the world around us (Revelation 24).

At the end of the day, it is up to the individual to decide which stories they want to believe in, and which they don’t. The Bible is a big book, and it isn’t something that’s supposed to be read and understood in a day, week, or even a year. It’s complex, gritty, raw, alien, but all too familiar at the same time. I believe, if we wrestle with every page and let the Scriptures speak for themselves, this metanarrative we call the Bible makes the most sense of who we are (image bearers made to be in relationship with God, one another, and the created world), where we are (in an unjust fallen world that we all contribute to), and where we’re going (new creation free from the tyranny of sin and death). My invitation to you is to consider its message carefully, reflect, and ask yourself this critical question “does this make sense of our story?” Whether you realise it or not, you’re a character in its unfolding drama.

How will your chapter end?

Between Churches

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Let’s get real. There are many, many Christians out there that struggle going to church on a Sunday. You can’t just tell me it’s because they’re rebellious or whatever. In any given week, I speak to dozens of Christians from different gatherings where they express the same thoughts. At best going to church is something to do on a Sunday morning but it’s boring. The way we do church is very “one way.” We sit, stand, sit, listen to a speech from a person who we don’t really know about a book hardly any of us have learnt to actually read… We give money to an organisation because we think it’s what we’re supposed to do, we stand around the old dirty coffee urn and talk about the movies and how work was during the week… And at very best we go home with maybe a positive one-liner that we’ll forget by the next day like “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” We’re encouraged for all of Monday before reality comes crashing down on us and God’s wonderful plan looks more like broken despair then it does the upbeat abundant life that we’re told about. Church, as it is often done today, seems so out of touch with reality and out of touch with how it looks in the Bible. One can come and go from church for their entire lives without lifting a finger to love other people, without ever learning how to read the Bible for ourselves. We end up equating the Christian life being completed by going to a meeting for an hour or two per week. 

It’s no wonder then that even myself, one who has (at least in my eyes) a high ecclesiology, who stresses the importance of going to Sunday meetings and recognises the God-ordained life-changing event that is church finds it incredibly difficult to find himself at home in one. In the entire time that I’ve been a Christian, there have only been two churches that I’ve felt that I belonged and content in. The first one was a church on the Sunshine Coast and the second was in Brisbane. The two churches couldn’t be any more different from one another, yet I felt at home in them because I believe for three excellent reasons.

1. They valued other people more than themselves. One church had the motto “people matter.” That rings true throughout everything they do. From the gym to the cafe, to the swimming pool to the church on a Sunday, this church has built a community where people feel at home. Where they can kick their shoes off,  take a deep breath and try to pick up the pieces as they wander through this broken world. Sometimes they loved people so much that at times the line blurred between who were genuine Christians and who wasn’t. But I get it. When you love people so much, it can sometimes be challenging to draw distinctions because you want to always believe the best about them. My Church in Brisbane, on the other hand, was way more traditional. No community centre, no cafe, no swimming pool. Yet they carried your burdens and genuinely prayed for you. They were concerned about your holiness and love for God as well as your deep hurts and pains (1 Peter 4:8, John 15:12).

2. They loved the Bible. When I started going to the first church, they preached through the Bible in a year, twice. I got a great feed upon God’s Word and always walked away, knowing that God was speaking. The other church exposited the Scriptures with precision and clarity. Even on topics, I’d generally disagree with them on, I walked away, feeling God loved me and that He’d never forsake me. I can’t stress this enough, the importance and centrality of the Scriptures for a church. However, and this is true of almost every church I’ve been to, while in theory, they put the Bible into the hands of the people, and they encouraged the congregation to live by it there was no continuation or application on this through the rest of the week apart from a homegroup (Acts 17:11,  Colossians 3:16).

3. You felt God. At both churches, I regularly experienced the presence of God. Whether it was through the sermons, the sacraments, or through the people, God moved, and God made Himself known to His people. It was sanctifying, transformational and pushed me forward into the presence of God (John 17:3, 1 John 4:16).

So what’s my point in all this?

  1. Be merciful to those without a church. Likely, they’ve never experienced the above 3 things in a church.
  2. If you’re between churches take heart, these churches exist. Genuine love for God, the Word, and for others do abound.
  3. Finding the perfect church is like drinking the perfect cup of coffee. It doesn’t exist. No matter who you talk to, they’ve always had better. Instead, start brewing it yourself.

Seven Days that Ruled the World: Genesis 1-11 Part IV

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Genesis 1 is one of the most loved and hotly debated chapters in all the Scriptures. Probably the most famous debate has been around issues like the age of the earth. Young Earth Creationists use Genesis 1 (and of course other passages) to argue for the existence of a Creator and even go so far as to use it as a model or paradigm for their scientific method. Others interpret Genesis exclusively as mythology, seeing no authority in the text whatsoever and understanding it as an ancient Jewish origins account of the world. These people think that in light of modern science, Genesis 1 has nothing to offer its contemporary readers. Two very different understandings of the text lead to two very different ways in which you can understand the world and God. I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

In past blogs in this series, I have categorised Genesis 1-11 as mythological theological history. What I don’t mean by this is that the events in Genesis 1-11 didn’t happen. Instead, the primary point of these chapters is the divine truths the author is presenting. Mythological doesn’t mean fiction in this context. The mythological genre can be better understood as parabolic or allegorical. The events in Genesis 1-11 happened. However, the events recounted in the narrative bring out a theological point rather than a detailed account of the past. As Tremper Longman III says, “The book of Genesis is not a history-like story but rather a story-like history.” After we explore the literary genre of the chapter, we need to ask ourselves some critical questions.

  1. What is this saying about God?
  2. What is this saying about creation?
  3. What is this saying about humanity?

As we have already seen in the first verse, the Lord God is the creator, of all that exists. What we see in the rest of the chapter is that God places importance on an ordered and ruled creation rather than merely leaving it to its own devices. Unlike the other gods of the time, Yahweh is deeply concerned with every piece of His creation as He places everything in the right place and humanity has the crowning jewel.

The seven days of creation in Genesis 1 are not a scientific account of how God created the world, rather, it is a literary device standard in the Ancient Near Eastern world to describe God who is king ordering a cosmic temple to settle in and rule over. Another way to explain it is that Genesis 1 is not about the material origins of the universe. Instead, it is about the function of the things that exist with God at its centre. As John Walton explains:

I believe that people in the ancient world believed that something existed not by virtue of its material properties, but by virtue of its having a function in an ordered system.

Beginning in a state of chaos, in days 1-3 light, darkness, the sky, the earth, and the sea are all formed, separated and ordered. In days 4-6, God fills these spaces with the Sun, moon, stars, animals and humans to rule over them. In other words, God gives them a function. On day 6, humans are made in the image of God. The image or the imago Dei is another debated issue, but two things are clear in the text. The imago Dei is an ontological reality that is reflected in the function of flourishing humanity. They’re to have dominion over the earth (God’s cosmic temple), they’re to multiply and fill the earth.

On day 7 (the Hebrew number for completion – a recurring theme throughout the entire Bible), after having ordered His cosmic temple, Yahweh rests. The word rest here is important because as the story of the Bible progresses, it takes on developed meaning. Here, though, the word rest, according to John Walton, has royal and divine significance. It’s not merely God stopping or ceasing from His work (though that’s, of course, the apparent meaning of the text), instead, it’s God sort of sitting on the throne after completing the structuring of His cosmic temple where He now dwells.

In Genesis 1, the scene is set, the cosmic temple has been ordered, and God rules amid humanity and His good creation. Good though creation may be, it isn’t perfect. There is untapped potential that God wants humanity to cultivate and produce. This is the functional role that humanity is supposed to live in. Humanity in the world, God’s cosmic temple, is supposed to act as proto-priests as they tend to His good creation in harmony and peace. Genesis 2 fleshes this out more where Adam and Eve are to keep guard the Garden which is designated roles given to priests in Israel later in the Biblical story. For now, however, we see both male and female, and indeed all of creation was meant to live in an ordered world where God dwells and reigns from.

So what do these observations say about God? God is a divine king who wants to dwell imminently with His good creation as opposed to the ANE common understanding that gods were separate tyrannical rulers. What does this say about creation? That all of creation is good but has the capacity for more as it’s given to humanity to cultivate and rule over. What does this say about humanity? That humanity as God’s vice-regents, they were to live in harmony with God’s and the created order as they reign alongside God over the rest of creation and cultivate it.

As John Walton summarises

The key features of this interpretation include most prominently: The Hebrew word translated “create” (bārāʾ) concerns assigning functions. The account begins in verse 2 with no functions (rather than with no material). The first three days pertain to the three major functions of life: time, weather, food. Days four to six pertain to functionaries in the cosmos being assigned their roles and spheres. The recurring comment that “it is good” refers to functionality (relative to people). The temple aspect is evident in the climax of day seven when God rests—an activity in a temple. The account can then be seen to be a seven-day inauguration of the cosmic temple, setting up its functions for the benefit of humanity, with God dwelling in relationship with his creatures.

Human

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“The man here tells us a truth that is awful – we baptise ourselves with names that are far from the only truth about ourselves.”
― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

One of life’s biggest question’s is who are we? What does it mean to be human? What is our purpose in life? What is the meaning to all of this? Essential questions, unfortunately, not quickly answered.

The Scriptures tell a story about us that starts on the first few pages of this ancient book. Humanity is made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26), from the dust of the ground, from the breath of God’s nostrils (Genesis 2:7), and from one another (Genesis 2:22). Humans were created to be like God and relate to Him by ruling over God’s creation. They were created with a connection to the earth as they were to cultivate and protect it (Genesis 2:15). Finally, they were created from one another as it is not good for anyone to be alone (Genesis 2:18). In Genesis 3, we became something less than human as we failed to be like God, and we allowed the serpent to rule over us. We became less than human as we failed to protect the Garden from evil. Then, we failed in our relationship with one another as we immediately turned to blame one another for our mistakes.

At the Fall, something happened to humanity where we lost our identity. We don’t know who we are anymore, we don’t really understand what we’re meant to be doing because of that loss of self. So in an attempt to recover our lost sense of self, we grab anything that seems to offer an answer to the big question “who are we?” A lot of us, at least in the West, have bought into the modern cultural meta-narratives of capitalism, scientism, gender equality, and probably dozens of ideas I can’t really think of right now. Why? Because even those these in and of themselves aren’t bad, these things help us make sense of who we are yet never really give us the complete picture. Each little story or philosophical idea makes us feel safe for just a fleeting moment. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much science discovers, whether we find peace in the Middle East or if climate change is solved tomorrow, we’d still end up feeling sense of restlessness and loss of who we’re truly meant to be.

The Bible tells us that because we’re incapable of being human ourselves, God has to send someone who can fix that problem for us. Jesus is the perfect human. He was truly human in that He was completely like God (Colossians 1:15) He ruled over the serpent and evil (Matthew 4:1-11). He loved God and others as Himself (Matthew 22:36-40), even His enemies (Matthew 5:44). So as we’re united to Christ by His Spirit, we start to recover a real sense of who we’re all meant to be (I’m thinking the beatitudes here as an example). It’s only in Jesus that we truly begin our journey on becoming truly human, which will culminate in glory.