Modern Day Plagues
This week for Sunday school, I’ve been thinking about Moses and the plagues and the Red Sea. What strikes me most is the contrasts. Egypt is under the authority of a ruler rebellious against God; Israel is under Moses, who obeys God. As go the rulers, so go the nations. Everyone under their authority experiences the consequences of their leader’s attitude. It’s the same idea as in Ex. 20:5, difficult for us in the post-Jesus world to get our minds around; God relates to people groups rather than individuals.
I think we have a deep-seated tendency to think God is still working in this Old Testament way. That’s where the whole “God is punishing America because it is drifting from its Christian roots” idea comes from: the notion of an angry God dealing out destruction to nations. But Jesus was the great game-changer for that whole way of thinking. In this story we’re given a foreshadowing picture of where God is going: Jesus as our passover lamb, available to all as a shield from the destruction that inevitably results when holiness and sinfulness collide. Now salvation is available to us all, individually; it doesn’t matter what our human authorities believe.
I just started a book called The Myth of a Christian Nation. Here is a thought-provoking excerpt from the introduction that seems related to all of this:
The myth of America as a Christian nation, with the church as its guardian, has been, and continues to be, damaging both to the church and to the advancement of God’s kingdom. Among other things, this nationalistic myth blinds us to the way in which our most basic and most cherished cultural assumptions are diametrically opposed to the kingdom way of life taught by Jesus and his disciples. Instead of living out the radically countercultural mandate of the kingdom of God, this myth has inclined us to Christianize many pagan aspects of our culture. Instead of providing the culture with a radically alternative way of life, we largely present it with a religious version of what it already is. The myth clouds our vision of God’s distinctly beautiful kingdom and thereby undermines our motivation to live as set-apart (holy) disciples of this kingdom.
Even more fundamentally, because this myth links the kingdom of God with certain political stances within American politics, it has greatly compromised the holy beauty of the kingdom of God…
It promises to be an interesting read. Among other things it occurs to me that nationalistic ideas of God are one of our modern day plagues.
