Eternity calling

Here is my November magazine article:

Containing both All Saints Day and Remembrance Sunday, and with the signs of winter all around, November is traditionally a month when we remember those who have died. This year we not only have the 'usual' deaths, but we also continue to mourn those lost through the pandemic and there have also been notable 'high profile' deaths, such as Gerry Marsden, Una Stubbs, Prince Philip and Capt. Sir Tom Moore.

There is often a public outpouring of sorrow at these deaths, even though the majority of the people who express their sadness have never actually met the person in question. And along with the commiserations, there are often assertions about where they are now, which, except in a few cases, is usually heaven. When Prince Philip died there were photo-shopped pictures of him being welcomed at the pearly gates by Capt. Tom Moore, and when musicians die there are often suggestions of a super-group in heaven featuring Elvis, Buddy Holly and Jimi Hendrix. Why do we do this?

The primary reason is, as the Bible tells us, that God has “set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). No matter how hard we try, we cannot fully get away from the sense that there is more to life than the material world we see. Even at 'secular' and 'humanist' funerals the celebrant often talks in terms of the deceased person going on the next stage of their journey, or now being with previously deceased loved ones. We have an inbuilt repulsion to the idea that we will just cease to be when we die. And the 'eternity' that is placed in our hearts is that of the 'new heavens and the new earth' where there “will be no more death, or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21:4).

However, this sense of eternity should not be taken as all-inclusive promise but as an invitation. It is firstly an invitation to think seriously about this life. The writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us that “All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not” (9:2) meaning everyone dies. And he recognises that “There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve” (8:14). If there is nothing after death, there is no justice and there is no reason to be good at all. And secondly it is an invitation to do what is necessary to gain that eternity, that is to come to Jesus: “Whoever believes [i.e. trusts] in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life ” (John 3:36).

We should not be so bold as to claim to know eternal destiny of individuals no matter how good or how 'saintly' their lives were. Investigations into child sexual abuse remind us that some people look good but do evil whereas the penitent thief (Luke 23:39-43) reminds us that at the last minute even the vilest offender can receive forgiveness and eternal life. God has placed eternity in your heart and invites you to know that eternity through repentance and faith in Jesus.

A Christian perspective on sport

Here's my magazine article for August:

Photo by Einar Hansen from FreeImages

When it comes to board games, I can be quite competitive and if I'm honest, I'm not a very good loser. However, I've never got to the stage where I throw the board in a fit of rage, unlike an unnamed member of the Royal Family which is apparently why the Queen has banned Monopoly! As we enjoy another summer of sport, it is perhaps worthwhile reflecting on the themes of winning and losing, on success and failure.

It might be assumed that Christianity, if it has anything to say about sport at all, would be against the idea of competitive sport. After all, doesn't loving our neighbour mean that we want them to win and turning the other cheek mean that if they beat us at something, we should let them beat us again? Happily that's not the case, but it does help us to see how we can approach competitive sport in a Christian way.

Firstly, loving our neighbour means that cheating is not acceptable. There are many times in the Old Testament where God commands fairness in business and justice (like Leviticus 19:15 and 35), which could equally apply to sport. Paul says that “anyone who competes as an athlete does not receive the victor’s crown except by competing according to the rules” (2 Timothy 2:5). Secondly, turning the other cheek means that if we do lose we should do so graciously and not be filled with anger and a desire for revenge.

It is this second one that is sometimes very hard! The more the competition means, the more painful it is to lose. The answer is not to give up caring about winning and losing (e.g. by saying that it's only the taking part that counts) nor to dispense with the idea of winning at all (e.g. the 'non-competitive' sports days). Rather the answer is to put sport into the correct perspective.

The Latin root of the word 'competition' means 'to strive together' – by having something to strain for (i.e. victory) all competitors push each other on to improve. So in this sense it is the taking part that counts, because both winning and losing are learning opportunities, and losing is probably more instructive and character-building. This image may also lie behind the exhortation to “consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24) - church is a competitive activity!!

But sport, along with all human activity, needs to be put in its proper place: Paul reminds us that athletes “do it to get a crown that will not last, but we [follow Jesus even when it is difficult] to get a crown that will last forever” (1 Corinthians 9:25). As great as human success can be “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36). Failure in sport, in career or in exams can be traumatic but failure to respond to Jesus' invitation to repent and trust in him has eternal consequences.

The worst thing about A&E waiting rooms

Here's my article for the March magazine:

Sitting in a hospital A&E waiting room is a great chance to think - that is, as long as you're not in agony! All sorts of people come and go; you see the doctors, nurses and other staff beavering away; and you catch snippets of why people have ended up there, then try to fill in the gaps.

In one way the A&E department is a great leveller. Young and old, rich and poor, clumsy and careful - anyone can find themselves there, often through no fault of their own. And you get prioritised for treatment there on the basis of how urgent your need is, not on how clever or pretty or popular you are. But this fact is also what makes A&E waiting rooms sometimes very frustrating places to be and ones that induce many negative feelings, alongside the physical pain.

We all understand that the order you will be seen in depends on the merits, or demerits, of your problem. But the longer you have to wait there, the more you start trying to second-guess what people's needs are. As you look around the waiting room you rank the people there according to your perception of their condition and other factors such as age, and place yourself mentally in that list too. Then when people you think are less of a priority than you get called to triage or for treatment ahead of you, feelings of disappointment and puzzlement start to well up inside you. The longer this goes on and the more this happens, those feelings of disappointment turn into frustration and anger. So when you came in you were quite willing to accept that those with more serious problems would be seen first but now every time someone else gets called, you have to fight the urge to stand up and shout “What about me? I'm more deserving than they are!!” A system that's designed to be fair ends up arousing feelings of anger and envy.

Lent is an opportunity for us to face up to our faults and failings. Although we will often say that “nobody's perfect” (or as the Bible puts it “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” [Romans 3:23]), we also like to rank ourselves in comparison with others and our perception of their sins. With this mindset the gospel of Jesus becomes very offensive. We are like the prodigal son's older brother who complains that his father forgives the rebellious son (Luke 15:11-32); or like the workers who work all day in the vineyard and complain that those who have only worked for one hour get the same pay (Matthew 20:1-16). We like the idea of forgiveness, but only when it is offered to those we think deserve it! This was the reason Jonah ran away: he didn't want God to forgive the evil Ninevehites (Jonah 4:1-2)! Whenever we feel like that, we've forgotten that God doesn't need a triage unit: all of us have the same condition – sin; all of us have the same prognosis – death sentence; and all of us need the same remedy – forgiveness through the Divine Physician, who was crushed for our sins and by whose wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:4-6).

So this Lent, let us admit to our own failings, including our feelings of superiority and good-enough-ness; ask God for forgiveness; and find in him healing and new life.

"I'm not as bad as Hitler"

Here's my article for the November magazine:

This year marks the 80^th anniversary of the start of World War Two and also, perhaps, the start of a new way to personify pure evil. During WWII, the person of Adolf Hitler was unsurprisingly used by the Allied nations in their propaganda to illustrate the immorality of the Nazi regime. However, this association of Hilter with evil continues to the present day in a way that isn't true of Kaiser Wilhelm who was used in similar propaganda in WWI. Hitler continues to be used to personify evil; perhaps because in our secular world that cannot acknowledge a supernatural realm, there needs to be something to replace the devil.

Hitler has also indirectly contributed to the field of logic. A reductio ad Hitlerum is an attempt to invalidate someone else's position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler, e.g. he was a vegetarian and against smoking. In the world of the Internet, Godwin's rule asserts that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”. This has the unfortunate side-effect that making any reference to Hitler or the Nazis, however justified, is now seen as a reason not to listen to that argument. This is particularly dangerous when it comes to issues of censorship and restrictions on freedoms of speech and belief, which were used by the Nazis to quash any opposition or disagreement and are also increasingly used today to stop any questioning of the cultural zeitgeist.

There is another way that Hitler is used in arguments. Again he is used as the embodiment of evil, but this time people use him to compare themselves with: they say “I may not be perfect, but I'm not as bad as Hitler.” This has particularly dire consequences when it comes to the subject of sin and judgement. The Bible teaches us that one day Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead (1 Peter 4:5). It reminds us that we have all sinned and fallen short of God's standard (Romans3:23) and that we all therefore need to repent in order to be forgiven (Acts 3:19) and enjoy eternal life with God (Revelation 21:27).

Now I doubt whether anyone considers themselves to be perfect, but the problem is that when we compare our sins to other peoples' sins we will always be able to think of people who do worse or more sins than us, and if we can't, we can always rely on the argument that “I'm not as bad as Hitler”! When we do this we minimise and trivialise our sins to such an extent that we don't feel the need to repent. But if we look at this from God's point of view rather than our own we see that “the person who keeps every law of God but makes one little slip is just as guilty as the person who has broken every law there is” (James2:10 The Living Bible), because Jesus tells us that the standard is to be as perfect as God himself (Matthew 5:48).

To have a right view of ourselves is to say that we are just as bad a Hitler and that we don't deserve eternal life any more than he does, no matter how many good things we do in our lives. But the glorious good news is that even though we are that bad, Jesus died to take our punishment so that through belief in him we can enjoy eternal life with God and with no more pain, suffering or war.

The hills are alive with the sound of praising

Here's my article for Broughton's July magazine:


It's one of the greatest cinematic opening sequences. The camera swoops down over the mountains and zooms in on a woman running across a meadow; the orchestra swells and as we focus in on her she begins to sing “The hills are alive with the sound of music”. I don't know if the beginning of Broughton Primary School's production of the Sound of Music will be quite as dramatic but I'm sure that the whole of the show will be brilliant as usual.

That uplifting opening song uses the image of the natural world being alive with the sound of music and of humanity joining in with that music. But this isn't just a poetic image of how the noises in the world could be heard as musical, rather it is actually a description, perhaps unknowingly, of a deep biblical truth. Isaiah 49:13 says “Shout for joy, you heavens; rejoice, you earth; burst into song, you mountains!”, and 1 Chronicles 16:32-33 says “Let the sea resound, and all that is in it; let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them! Let the trees of the forest sing, let them sing for joy before the Lord”. Many other places in the Bible talk of creation singing and making music and the book of Psalms, Israel's hymn book, ends with this verse “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” (Psalm 150:6).

The Bible affirms that all creation has this musical quality, but unlike the song in the musical, this is not just a way of describing a joyous 'life force' that connects every part of the natural world. The musicality of creation, including humanity, has a purpose, and that purpose is to praise God. Revelation 4, echoing Isaiah 6, describes some of what goes on in heaven speaking about the angels constantly saying “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.” (Traditionally the speech of angels is said to be the same as human song). So the constant music of creation joins in with the constant song of heaven to praise God.

We praise God for who he is, but we also praise him for what he does. 1 Chronicles 16 gives two of God's wonderful acts that particularly deserve praise. Verse 23 says “Sing to the Lord, all the earth; proclaim his salvation day after day” and in verse 33 creation sings because he comes to judge the earth. So creation praises God because of his judgement and his salvation.

It may seem odd to praise God for his judgement, but deep down it's what we all crave. We see a world where to much is wrong and we long for it to be put right; we see evil seemingly unpunished in this word and long for there to be justice. However, the problem is that justice demands that all wrongdoing is punished. Jesus commands us to “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48) but Romans 3:23 reminds us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” and Psalm 130:3 asks “If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand?” Only what is holy can enter the presence of the Holy God and we are all far from holy.

Therefore, we also rejoice in God's salvation. Romans 3 goes on to say “all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood – to be received by faith.” Jesus died to take the punishment we deserve so that through repentance and faith in him we can be forgiven. And as we turn to the Lord “the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12).

Advent Reflections - The Four Last Things: 4. Hell

Easrt window of St Andrew's, Redbourne - "The Opening of the Sixth Seal" (Revelation 6:12-17)

 Finishing our meditations on the four traditional themes of Advent

Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell; this week we're thinking about Hell

Just as we need to rid ourselves of the mental image of heaven being fluffy white clouds and harps, so we need to rid ourselves of the image of hell as sulphurous fires and devils with toasting-forks doing unspeakable things to people forever. However, these images owe more to mediæval imagination than the biblical record. So what does the bible say about hell?

In the bible there are three words that are usually translated 'hell': sheol, Hades and gehenna. Sheol is a Hebrew word that can mean 'grave', 'pit' or the 'realm of the dead' and is quite neutral, but it is also used in a sense more like what we would think of as hell – a place of punishment. Hades likewise can simply mean the underworld or realm of the dead, but is occasionally used in a context that speaks of punishment. Gehenna is the name of a rubbish dump south of Jerusalem where the filth and dead animals from the city were thrown into in a fire that burned constantly. This is used by Jesus as an illustration of what Jerusalem will become like if it doesn't follow him and by extension an illustration of the outcome for everyone who rejects him.

In order to think about hell we need to remind ourselves of what was said previously about judgement. God is perfectly holy and only perfectly holy beings can be in his kingdom, and on this criteria we all fail and no-one deserves to enter his kingdom. However, because Jesus died to take the punishment we deserve, we can be forgiven and we can enter God's kingdom. But we can only be forgiven if we ask for it. God gives us the free will to be able to choose him or reject him and he honours our decision, but if we reject Jesus we also reject the way to salvation. God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4) and he “so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son” (John 3:16-18).

On Judgement Day we will see God face-to-face and we will know his verdict on us, and we will know it to be absolutely just and fair. Those who choose to reject Jesus in this life will have that decision honoured in the next; those who choose to be judged on the basis of how good they are will be judged on that basis and be found wanting; those who choose to accept the forgiveness offered by Jesus and unite themselves with him will be judged as he is and be found acceptable to God.

So what happens to those who reject Jesus? In rejecting Jesus they reject his offer of taking the punishment for their sins, therefore in order that justice may be done, punishment is still required. We know that this justice does not come before death so it must come after death. So the question is, what form will this punishment take? The simple answer is that we don't know for sure. Jesus and other parts of the bible use language to describe it, with fire and torment being common images, but it is not clear whether this language is meant to be literal or symbolic. The 'torment' may not mean physical pain but mental anguish at the realisation of the consequence of rejecting Jesus, as Charles Wesley graphically describes it: “deeply wailing shall the true Messiah see.”

The good news of Christianity about hell is that whatever it is, it is not where we're meant to be. God created us to be with him forever and although because of our sins we spoilt that plan, because of Jesus' death that relationship with God for eternity is possible again. Thinking about the 'Four Last Things' reminds us that our future lies in our hands, Jesus invites us to repent and believe in him. What is your response?

Advent Reflections - The Four Last Things: 2. Judgement

 Continuing our meditations on the four traditional themes of Advent

- Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell; this week it's Judgement.

Divine judgement often makes us feel very defensive if not angry - “who are you to judge me?” is an unspoken question in our minds. And this is particularly so in a society where any notion of an absolute moral standard is dismissed. Society believes that the morality of an action depends on the situation rather than any concept of rightness or wrongness. Added to which is the relativist idea of something being “right for me” so that what is right for you is not necessarily right for me and you shouldn't impose your 'rightness' on me.

Yet at the same time we cry out for justice. Our world is seemingly full of people who do bad things and get away with them, things like murder, fraud, dishonesty or hurting us in a more personal way, and we want justice for that. The Psalmist wrote “it made me jealous to see proud and evil people and to watch them prosper” and as if to add insult to injury “all goes well for them, and they live in peace. What good did it do me to keep my thoughts pure and refuse to do wrong?” (Psalm 73:3,12-13 CEV). Evil goes unpunished and good goes unrewarded, so we want justice.

But we can't have it both ways, either we want judgement and justice or we don't – we can't ask God to judge other people's sins if we don't also let him judge our own. But whether we like it or not the justice that is clearly missing in this world will happen at the end of time, when Jesus comes to judge the living and the dead.

So the question is, on what basis will he judge us? The common view of Judgement Day is that Jesus will have a set of scales and on one side he'll put all the bad things we've done and on the other he'll put the good things and if the good outweighs the bad we'll be OK. And of course the bad things that 'other people' do, like murder, paedophilia etc., hugely outweigh the little bad things we do!

But that's not the criteria for judgement. Jesus, when talking to the lawyer in Luke 10:25-28, says that you could earn eternal life if you perfectly love God and your neighbour constantly, knowing that “whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (James 2:10). Therefore Jesus is saying it's impossible to pass the judgement on the basis of the good things we do because we can never be good enough.

And deep down we know this is true. In the Christianity Explored course we heard the illustration of seeing the whole of our life as a film; every thought, word and deed and all the things we should have thought, said or done. Although there would be many times we were proud of, there would be more times that make us ashamed. Rico Tice, the presenter, said that if we're honest we fail to live up to our own standards, never mind God's! When Jesus comes to judge the world, we all deserve to fail.

The good new of Christianity about judgement is that Jesus, the only perfect human being, died to take the punishment we deserve. He calls us to “repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15). 'Repent' means recognising and saying sorry for the things we do wrong (sins) and resolving not to sin in the future, and 'believe' means accepting God’s forgiveness made possible by Jesus’ death on the cross, putting Jesus at the centre of our lives and living in line with his teaching. If we repent and believe, in the words of the hymn: “Because the sinless Saviour died, my sinful soul is counted free, for God the Just is satisfied to look on him and pardon me” ('Before the Throne of God Above' - Words by Charitie L. Bancroft). The consequences of our response to Jesus' invitation to repent and believe are the subject of the next two weeks.