Be Assured
Di & I have been catching up on the series, Utopia, that we missed on the ABC while we were away. It’s a satire, set in the imaginary Nation Building Authority. In one of the episodes someone hires a management guru, Marvin Hudfield, to run a training course. He rattles off catch phrase after catch phrase, which in the end don’t add up to much and the upper management team aren’t very impressed. But of course everyone gets a nice certificate when the course is over.
That may be that sort of thing that Peter has in mind as he begins to talk about the validity of his own message, though more in religious terms than management training.
He wants to assure his readers that they can trust what they’ve been told.
As is true in most periods of history, there would have been many examples of people in Peter’s day who offered a solution to our human desire for religious significance. But he says he and the other apostles are not like that: “16We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.”
What’s he thinking about when he mentions “Cleverly devised myths”? Is he thinking of the virgin birth?; or Jesus’ miracles?; or the resurrection?; or maybe the coming of God’s Holy Spirit? There’d be a few people today who’d class those as cleverly devised myths I guess.
Or is he thinking of the sorts of myths we find today: new age spirituality with its idea of the god within you; the countless lifestyle gurus who have all the answers for a healthy and fulfilled life; or perhaps it’s the Forrest Gump style gurus with their catchy phrases: “life is like a boxa chocolates”. In the Christian world we get the sort of bumper sticker spirituality that gives us a nice moralising statement that sounds good but doesn’t add up to much: “Live simply, love generously, care deeply, speak kindly, leave the rest to God”; “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”; “If God is love and we’re made in the image of God then we are love”; “believe in yourself”. I don’t think the last one is actually a Christian statement.
Of course there are more problematic sorts of false teaching around today. There’s the modern forms of gnostic teaching, the sort of false spirituality that says that what happens in the flesh doesn’t matter. It’s only the spiritual dimension that counts. You find this in what’s been called spiritual or evangelical romanticism: Here’s one example of the sort of thing: "My heart wants the Father; my heart wants the Son; my heart wants the Holy Ghost....My heart says the Bible has a Trinity for me, and I mean to hold by my heart. I am glad a man can do it when there is no other mooring." What does that mean?
I’ll lose some friends by saying this, but you find it in the much loved song: “He Lives,” with the line, “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart.” You also find it in some Pentecostal songs of the 80s and 90s: what we used to call Jesus is my boyfriend songs. It’s the idea that our spirituality is personalised to the point where personal experience becomes more important than objective truth. It’s an idea that fits nicely with the individualism of our postmodern worldview: what’s true for you isn’t necessarily true for me because I feel something different. The new narcissism of our age makes us like to look inward and to trust what we find there rather than outward to objective truths. But that’s a very slippery slope to get on.
Going back further in history there was the 19th century holiness movement, also referred to as sinless perfectionism; the idea that a person could be so filled by the spirit that they were cleansed of the tendency to commit sin.
But it’s all part of the same package that says that what matters is the inner, experiential aspect of religion. As a Christian computer programmer once put it: “We all access God differently”
Can you see what’s wrong with that statement? The problem with that statement is that the Bible teaches us that we can’t access God at all. He’s unapproachable. He has to come to us. And how does he do that? Hebrews 1 tells us. God speaks to us through the Scriptures – “1God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets”; and he speaks to us by his incarnate Word: “2but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.” (Hebrews 1:1-2) So if we’re to come to God it has to be through Christ. There’s no other way to access God. And as we’ll see in a moment we won’t find him in our hearts.
Which brings us back to Peter. He says we weren’t making things up. Rather we made known to you what we saw and heard. The words he uses there for making known have the idea of them passing on a revelation of a mystery – something once hidden but now revealed. And what was the content of that mystery? It was the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Where did he learn this mystery? He says “we [were] eyewitnesses of his majesty.” Notice the plural. He wants to make it plain that this wasn’t just him, but the other apostles as well who witnessed this.
Where had they witnessed Jesus’ majesty? Clearly he’s referring to the transfiguration where they saw him revealed in frighteningly bright glory; so much so that they fell on their faces before him. He refers to this as Jesus coming and, again, he uses an interesting word: the word parousia. That’s a word we normally use for Jesus’ second coming, in glory to judge the world. It seems that Peter has interpreted Jesus’ appearance on the mountain top as prefiguring not just Jesus resurrection glory but the glory that’ll be revealed to the whole earth when he returns; when, in response to his glory, every knee shall bow and every tongue proclaim him Lord of all.
But it wasn’t just what they saw that matters. They also heard the voice of God speaking about Jesus, giving him honour and glory, conveyed, he says, by the Majestic Glory, that is God himself. And the message from God is that “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” The glory Jesus receives comes from the fact that he bears God’s very nature and therefore the glory that comes with it.
Peter says “18We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain. 19So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed.” This is a twofold confirmation: first that what they saw was real; Jesus glory is a divine glory, but secondly what they saw was a confirmation of what the prophets had foretold. Did you see that? “19So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed.” I guess if you’d asked the disciples who they thought Jesus was before this, they’d have said, as they did when Jesus asked them, “He’s the Messiah the son of God.” They could have worked that out from their understanding of the Old Testament when they saw the miracles and heard the teaching that Jesus did, but the transfiguration was the ultimate confirmation that Jesus was indeed the promised Messiah, the Son of God.
So if the things we find reported in the gospels are eyewitness accounts that show clearly that Jesus is the Son of God what difference should that make to us?
Peter says: “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” There will come a day when the truth of God will shine in our hearts above all other truths, but until that day we need to pay attention to the revelation that God has given us through his word. We still live in dark days. There are still things we can’t understand or don’t see clearly. We don’t always know which way to go, what choices to make. That’s why people look to gurus for advice; why self-help books are so popular. But he says until the day comes when all is made clear, God has given us his word to act as a light shining in the darkness to show us the way. As the Psalmist said “You word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”
And he’s talking here not just about the gospel message about Jesus; not just about his own witness to the transfiguration. He’s primarily talking about the Old Testament prophets. He’s saying pay attention to what God has revealed in the Scriptures. They matter. Get to know God’s revelation to us. And remember that that revelation is an objective revelation. It isn’t dependent on how you interpret it any more than it was the creative work of the prophets themselves. No, “men and women, moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” This is why we should pay attention to God’s word. Because it’s God’s word; given to us through the medium of faithful servants who passed it on for us.
And be careful, he says, how you read it. Don’t try to interpret it in a way that will make you happier or more comfortable. Don’t try to explain away the hard bits. He might even say don’t put little bits of it on a bumper sticker. Take it as a whole and read it as it is. Read it carefully and pay attention to what it’s saying to you. Read it always in the context of the rest of Scripture. There’s an old rule of thumb, that you let Scripture interpret Scripture rather than us doing the interpreting. That seems to be what he has in mind here.
He doesn’t say this but there is an implication, I think, that as we read it, the Holy Spirit will help us understand it, just as he led the prophets to write it down in the first place.
You know, people flock to hear certain speakers, usually people with very charismatic personalities, who have a great ability to move their hearers by their words, by their way of presenting. But the things those people are saying may have no validity at all. It’s just the powerful personality of the speaker that convinces people whether or not they’re speaking the truth.
But here we have the opportunity to hear God speaking through his own revelation of himself to us. Why wouldn’t you pay attention when that’s happening?
So make sure you test what you hear by whether it agrees with what God’s word tells you. If not you may just be hearing a cleverly devised myth designed to suck you in. And remember that to test what you hear you first need to get to know all of God’s word, Old Testament and New. That’s why we encourage people to use Scripture Union notes or some other reading plan so you get to read right through the Scriptures over time.
As Peter says here be assured, this is worth doing because you can trust the Scriptures because they come from God; they’re not some human invention.