Pharisees and Publicans

It is interesting that when Jesus walked the earth, He is said to have come to save the world, and yet, in His dealings with the Pharisees, He was impatient at best, and seems to have already written them off as being beyond saving, even before He began His ministry. A lot of that, of course, comes from the fact that Jesus knew the hearts of the people He dealt with, publicans and Pharisees alike.

In Luke 18, Jesus tells a parable about a Pharisee and a publican who went to the temple to pray. The Pharisee essentially spent his prayer time bragging to God about what a good man he was, while the publican begged for mercy. Jesus said that the publican went home justified, but the Pharisee didn’t. This gives us some insight into Jesus’ attitude towards Pharisees, although I don’t think Jesus was implying that all Pharisees were like the one in the parable, but that the attitude portrayed was not what the people of the time would have expected from the Pharisees. The Pharisees were religious leaders, and they were expected to be pious and holy, examples of all the best things of their religion. Jesus, of course, realized that, although some of them may have been exactly that, many were not.

In Luke 7, it tells that one of the Pharisees, a man named Simon, invited Jesus to dinner. A woman came in and kissed Jesus’ feet, and anointed them with ointment. Simon “spake within himself” that if Jesus were a prophet, He wouldn’t let this woman touch Him. Now, it seems fairly obvious to me that the phrase indicates that Simon didn’t say this aloud, and yet, Jesus knew what he was thinking. Furthermore, it seems fairly clear that He also knew what the woman was thinking, although she said nothing. Granted, her actions showed a willingness to serve, and an acknowledgement of His position. Jesus went on to lecture Simon about how her sins, which were many, were forgiven her, and that she could be trusted to love Him much—in fact, He said that her sins were forgiven because she loved much.

In John 9, a blind man is healed by Jesus, and the Pharisees attempt to dissuade him from giving Jesus credit for his healing. This man wasn’t about to deny his healing, though. He told them flat-out, “If this man were not of God, He could do nothing.” Their response was, “Thou wast altogether born in sins, and dost thou teach us?” as if they had not been born pretty much the same way the formerly-blind man had.been. It’s remarkable that the reaction of the Pharisees to such a notable miracle was to try to deny it, disprove it, and then, failing that, make accusations against the One who preformed it. I can understand skepticism, and I would imagine that God can, too, but these guys were so determined not to believe. No wonder Jesus generally didn’t want to have anything to do with them.

The Pharisees were also critical of the fact that Jesus spent so much time with “sinners.” Of course, if you understand that Jesus came to bring salvation, it makes sense that He would start with those who were most in need of it, even before you consider how much more willing they were to accept what He was offering. The Pharisees simply assumed that these people were easily misled, since they didn’t know the law. Jesus, correctly, pointed out that if the Pharisees would search the Scriptures, they would learn of Him, but they were so secure in the own righteousness that they would only consider those passages that seemed to contradict Jesus’ claims (for example, there is a Messianic prophecy in Micah that says that the Christ would be born in Bethlehem, but the nativity story was not well known and the conventional wisdom was that Jesus had been born in Nazareth).

In Luke 19, Jesus invited himself to the house of a publican named Zacchaeus, and many murmured against Jesus, because they believed that Zacchaeus was a sinner. Jesus, again, knew his heart, and knew that, although Zacchaeus’ occupation (publicans were tax collectors) was despised, it was not inherently dishonest. Zacchaeus may well have been the exception to the rule, but Jesus judged him by his heart, not by his reputation.

In Matthew 9, Jesus explained to the Pharisees that the sick need a physician, and that He had come to call sinners to repentance. The Pharisees should have been flattered by the fact that He didn’t suggest that they needed to repent, although clearly they did, but they had a hard time with the idea that one who claims to be righteous can spend so much time with undesirable people. It’s not as though it rubs off. Granted, one can be unduly influenced if one surrounds oneself with the wrong kind of people, but Jesus wasn’t worried about them changing His mind; He wanted to change theirs.

The point is, Jesus didn’t spend much time with religious people, because He knew that their hypocrisy ran deep. He made Himself a friend to those who were not religious, and who were willing to accept the Truth without trying to square it with what they thought they knew. We, of course, need to get fellowship with other people that believe what we believe, but we also need to show ourselves friendly to those who have not yet come to know what we know. We do need to be careful to not let them drag us down, but we should be trying to help them up. Jesus is our example, after all.

After Death

            Sometimes people get very concerned about what happens to their body after death.  Some of that concern I can understand; I mean, does one’s spirit leave the flesh right away, or do they stay tied together until judgment?  I think that the real reason people get concerned about that is, if the two are joined until some indefinite time in the future (indefinite to us, of course, God knows when that will be), then what happens when bodies are cremated?  If it is not yet time for judgment, but the body has been destroyed, is the spirit then condemned to walk the earth until the appointed time? 

            The Bible tells us that when Christ returns, the dead in Christ shall rise first, and we that are alive and remain shall rise to meet them in the clouds.  That would suggest that spirit and flesh are tied together; that the spirit sleeps in the grave waiting to be freed from the body.  This is supported by the fact that all through the Old Testament, and even in the Gospels, people were buried in physical graves.  Abraham bought a field to bury Sarah in, Jacob placed Rachel’s body in a grave, and asked to be buried in the Promised Land, Elisha was buried, Lazarus had a grave, and so did Jesus.

            At the same time, Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians about giving his body to be burned.  In that context, it’s doubtful that he was actually giving instructions for the treatment of his remains after his death, but he does talk about it in a positive light.  There is a definite implication that he feels that it is a good thing to do, whether that would be his choice for his own body or not.  Also, we know that there were occasionally people who died in fires through no fault of their own.  At least a few of those bodies must have been left as nothing more than a small pile of ashes; would God punish those people because of their cause of death?

            I have to admit, I don’t really know what happens in between death and judgment.  I know that the Bible talks about sleeping also 1 Corinthians 15:6, and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-15), and normally when we think of sleeping, we think of the body being asleep.  It seems to me that, in this case, what we’re really talking about is that the spirit is not conscious, it is completely unaware of what is happening.  The soul, once the body is dead, really doesn’t know whether the flesh is buried, cremated, or, for that matter, fish-food.  Is there an attachment?  I’m guessing not, but I think that the soul, being unconscious, simply stays with the body, if the body is intact, or stays wherever the body was at the time of death.  Of course, part of the confusion comes from trying to tie an immortal soul to a physical place.  The soul is not a physical thing, it does not take up any physical space, and trying to establish it’s physical location is a lot like trying to nail water to the wall.  Body and soul are one as long as the body continues to draw breath, but once it becomes a corpse, there is really no reason why the spirit should remain chained to it. 

            This one thing I do know:  I don’t care what happens to my body once I am dead.  If my friends and family chose to bury me, cremate me, toss me in the ocean; I don’t think I really care.  I’m convinced that I won’t be aware of what they do to “me,” anyway, so why should I care?  Someone wise once said that they didn’t want flowers at their funeral, and indicated that if you felt that they deserved flowers, you should have the flowers delivered while the recipient was still alive to appreciate them.  I’m not really big on flowers, but I appreciate the sentiment.  If there’s something that you want to do for me, you should do it while I’m alive.  Once I’m dead, there is no changing anything.

Left Behind?

I have noticed, just in the last few years, that a lot of people have become very interested in what is going to happen after the rapture of the body of Christ. You may be familiar with the “Left Behind” series of books, some of which have been turned into movies. From what I understand, Tim LaHaye spent ten years researching the Book of Revelation, and then got Jerry B. Jenkins to fictionalize the timeline that he had developed. While I will admit that the series is, apparently (I haven’t actually read any of them, although I did watch one of the movies), entertaining, and certainly not any worse than most fiction, I just can’t help but think that there are better ways that we could be spending our time.

Let me ask you a question: If you were an astronaut, training for the first manned mission to Mars, would you spend your free time reading books about Venus? Or, to put it another way, if you were a volunteer on your way to Haiti, would you be studying Canada? Or, if you were about to go on a missions trip to a remote island in the South Pacific, would you try to learn all you could about Zimbabwe before you left? Perhaps more importantly, would you be reading books about Canada or Zimbabwe written by someone who had never actually been there?

I don’t mean to sound impassive or unsympathetic, but it’s hard for me to get all worked up over what happens here on earth after the rapture: I don’t plan on being here! There has been a lot of discussion back and forth over whether it’s possible to miss the rapture and still go to Heaven—after all, God is the God of second chances—but, honestly, do you think that it will be easier to get right with God after the church goes home? Besides that, what happens if something should happen to you before the rapture? You could get hit by a drunk driver tonight. Accidents happen all the time.

I saw a bumper sticker once that said, “People who plan on getting saved at the eleventh hour often die at ten thirty.” This is a reference to a parable that Jesus told about workers in the field, and the lord of that property paid each of them the same amount, even those that started work at the eleventh hour. The point of the parable is that it doesn’t matter at what stage of your life you give your heart to Jesus, as long as you remain faithful once you make that commitment, but the point of the bumper sticker is that you have no promise of tomorrow.

My point is that we don’t know when the rapture will be. I believe that it will happen in my lifetime, but so did John Newton. I have attended the funerals of many people who believed that they would live to see the rapture. On the other hand, there are some who have studied Revelation and have concluded that the rapture is still a long way off, as evidenced by the many prophesies that remain, as yet, unfulfilled. I personally that God is a great God and that He could fulfill many prophesies in a matter of hours (to be honest, I suspect that there will be more than a few people at judgment who will say, “But God, you said this would happen before the rapture,” only to have it explained to them exactly how they misinterpreted the prophecy).

The bottom line is, we should be doing all that we can to make sure that we are ready now, rather than worry about what might happen if we are not ready at the appointed time, or even worry about the signs pointing to the appointed time. As long as you are ready, it doesn’t really matter when the rapture will come, or what will happen afterwards.