The First Baptist Church of Granada Hills

“Preparing the Next Generation” (Num. 27:12-23, Deut. 34:1-9)
Christ might return today.  He also might return millennia from now.  How should we live then in light of this uncertainty?
[ Listen || Download ]

“Sainthood Made Simple” (Numbers 22:1-7, 21-38)
Sometimes the right thing to do is so obvious we choose not to see it.
[ Listen || Download ]

“Persevering to the End” (Numbers 20:1-13)
Even the best of saints can fall hard.  That God He’s taken that into consideration.
[ Listen || Download ]

“Facing Scary Realities” (Numbers 13 & 14)
Life is full of both wonderful and terrible things.  How should we react to this ambiguity?
[ Listen || Download ]

“The Seriousness of Sin and Forgiveness” (Leviticus 4:13-21)
When it comes to God, forgiveness involves more that just some nice words.
[ Listen || Download ]

“Warning: Do Not Tamper” (Leviticus 10:1-11)
God’s revelation doesn’t need our input; He can be trusted to speak for Himself.
[ Listen || Download ]

“One for All, All for One” (Exodus 33:1-17)
Solidarity has played a central role in the history of God’s people–both between man and man, and between man and God.
[ Listen || Download ]

            One sometimes hears the complaint that if God really wanted people to worship Him in a specific way He would have made His desires more obviously known than He apparently has.  The idea here is that the death and resurrection of a relatively insignificant Jew living in some backwater of the Roman Empire in the 1^st century seems like a silly way for God to initiate some worldwide plan of conversion.  Certainly God could have done better than that, says the skeptic.

            But to quote Jesus: “wisdom is vindicated by all her children.” (Luke 7:35)  However bizarre and counter-intuitive the incarnation and atonement seem to us, strangely, bafflingly even, it seems that God knew what He was doing in Christ.  As the British physicist and priest, John Polkinghorne, has said, “Perhaps the most surprising thing about Jesus Christ is that we have all heard of Him. Of course He had an impressive public ministry, saying wise things and doing compassionate deeds. But then it all seemed to collapse and fall apart. He was arrested, deserted by His disillusioned followers, painfully and shamefully executed, suffering a death that any pious 1st-century Jew would have seen as a sign of God’s rejection… Yet we have all heard of Jesus, and He has been a powerfully influential figure for 2,000 years.”   

            From an obscure cult centering on an executed criminal in Jerusalem in 33 A.D. to the single most numerous and ethnically diverse faith in all of human history with a substantial presence on all seven continents today (including Antarctica!)—it would seem that Christianity has done a very good job of “getting the word out.”  To apply Jesus’ words, the wisdom of God’s choice to work in and through Jesus and His followers has been vindicated by Christianity’s unimaginable subsequent cross-cultural evangelistic success.

The Christian faith is a complex thing with all sorts of remarkable components: theological doctrines like the Trinity and justification by faith, predictive claims like the resurrection of the dead, and ethical imperatives like turning the proverbial cheek are all part and parcel of the larger whole.  But even with all this complexity, and regardless of the direction from which one approaches it, eventually the person inquiring into Christianity will have to deal with Jesus.  Jesus stands at the center of the faith; indeed one could reasonably say that Christianity is Christ, that it is Jesus. 

Now from an evangelistic standpoint this is great.  People love Jesus; even people who hate Christianity often love Jesus!  His character, his ethic, his style—all these things are just so attractive.  I think it’s safe to say that Jesus is generally the first thing the non-Christian seeker finds appealing about the faith and the last thing that the Christian doubter finds repellant.  Even if one feels that the somewhat esoteric or supernatural elements of the faith are just so much pious superstition, that same person generally regards Jesus as a decidedly good and noble human being, as a teacher of wise and moral things. 

But there’s a trap here for such sympathetic unbelievers: the ethics of Jesus—along with his style and character and all that—seem to have utterly failed him in his own life on a non-Christian reading.  As the skeptical New Testament scholar, Dale C. Allison writes in Resurrecting Jesus:

“[T]here are reasons I should very much like to believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus and reckon it more than a symbol, more than just a way of saying that his cause continues or that he lives on in the memory of the church.

“My first reason is the conviction that the teaching of Jesus, which as a Christian I am committed to, may well hang in the air without a dramatic, postmortem endorsement… Unlike the wisdom sayings of Proverbs, Jesus’ sometimes otherworldly, sometimes ascetical, often eschatological, often counterintuitive teachings—‘Love your enemies,’ do not be ‘angry,’ do not divorce and remarry—are not self-validating.  On the contrary, they are at every turn debatable.  They further self-destruct if the humble, including Jesus himself, are never exalted.  So the crucifixion and Jesus’ cry of dereliction require a sequel.  If they do not receive one, most of Jesus’ speech loses much of its plausibility, and he becomes just another futile dreamer, a messianic pretender whose words may be dismissed as fantasy.  But if the resurrection is the sequel, then God has ‘transformed the fate of the lost Jesus by openly and finally acting out in the person of Jesus the image of God that Jesus espoused.’”

If the story of Jesus is really to be denuded of its supernatural elements (resurrection and all) then Jesus’ beautiful ethic of love and compassion is shown up as worse than useless before the harsh realities of the world as it actually is.  If Jesus’ story really does end on Good Friday, then our hope for a kindlier truth dies with him and Rome triumphs; once again Caesar prevails and the brutal logic of pragmatic violence prevails through him…  But if Christ really rose from the grave (as his disciples vigorously declared in the face of threats, beatings, and death itself) then that hope can live on.  And if Christ really did rise, then, it would seem, a great many more of Christianity’s historic claims are back on the table. 

Think about it.

“The End of Pluralism” (Exodus 19:1-8)
Some things are objective (e.g. math & science) and some things are subjective (art & music).  At Sinai, the Lord pushed “religion” into the former category.
[ Listen || Download ]

“Surrogacy of a Different Sort” (Exodus 12:1-14 & 29-32)
The Passover is often (and rightly) seen as God substituting animals for people.  The event can be seen in other ways as well, though, and these are vastly more meaningful.”
 [ Listen || Download ]