Liturgy: “We are always in danger of being false prophets”

What is the King’s Liturgy? King’s Liturgy defines our experience together as a Christian community. It outlines the rhythms we celebrate with the Church at large: Scripture readings, Sabbath habits, and celebration of Holy Days and historical events.

This Week’s Lectionary Readings

Deuteronomy 18:15-20
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28
Psalm 111

This week’s liturgy is contributed by Dr. Phil Williams, associate professor of mathematics:

I have never been comfortable with the idea that I am supposed to know what God wants me to do. I mean, I know some things about what he wants in general terms: I am supposed to love God, love my neighbor, seek justice, truth, and peace. I know I am to repent of evil and trust Christ. And I know when I fail to live up to these things, which is every day. I am naturally doubtful and skeptical, however, whenever people say that they have a specific word, or direction, from God; I am doubtful when someone announces that this or that particular thing is something that God wants them to do. This is not because I don’t believe God ever gives people specific instructions (I believe that he does). But this belief is itself a general thing; when it comes to specific cases of God’s words or action in someone’s life (as in, “God told me to do X”), I have trouble forming an opinion.

Strangely and wonderfully, however, I do not have trouble believing Christ himself on such matters. In the gospels, I always trust that Jesus hears from God and knows exactly what he is doing, even if it is seemingly bizarre. I have no natural explanation for this confidence I have! Jesus simply speaks with authority to me. This authority Jesus has, when he speaks—the authority that astonished the crowds at Capernaum—truly is an act of grace, and this strikes me now as a great comfort, that the source of all truth enables us to trust him.

My wife, for instance, became a Christian because her neighbor, when she was a little girl, gave her a bible. She read the words of Jesus and thought that the things he said were incredible, and that he was (and is) amazing. She believed in him and has followed him ever since. Jesus has this effect on people, that he enables us to have faith in him, to trust him, even though there seems to be no obvious reason why we should listen to him. He speaks with authority, a sort of inexplicable authority.

My wife’s family, by the way, is Buddhist; they practice a version of Buddhism that seems to me to be influenced by Hinduism, in that there is an explicit polytheistic bent to it: they, to put it bluntly, worship idols. Occasionally, they even make food offerings to these idols; the food which has been offered is then consumed by the family. And so my wife and I have actually had to face the question of whether or not to eat food that has been offered to idols. I mention this because perhaps you thought that no one, at least in the modern, western world, literally faces the situation that Paul talks about when he instructs the Corinthians on how to approach food that has been offered to idols.

When Paul writes about this issue, he implies that believers in Christ ought to try to be acutely sensitive of how their actions might represent or misrepresent God to those around them. We who have been set free by the blood of Jesus can certainly, in principle, eat food that was once offered to idols, knowing that idols have no real power and that we are just eating regular food. But, if we do this around a Christian was once subject to such idols, who had believed in their power, we might risk “endorsing” that person’s former idolatry, and thus giving them cause for temptation. We see that an action that might reveal the freedom we have in Christ, by his grace, in one context, might tempt a person to bondage and slavery to sin in another context. The context is key.

Context is key and thus it is not always obvious, as a Christian, how God wants us to act in a situation. I often face such uncertainty in my own life. Does what I say and what I do reveal God to others—do I reveal his character, his laws, his desires? Do we, by our actions, really demonstrate to others what God wants, and how he is? One of the central tasks of being a Christian is to represent Christ, our Lord, to the world, and I find this to be quite a difficult thing to grasp. One issue (and it is certainly not the only issue) is that we are always in deep danger of presuming that we are representing God, when we may not be.

We are always in danger of being false prophets. I imagine that most of us don’t believe we have much in common with the lying prophets that God warns his people about in the Torah, and perhaps we do not. We know little about them, about their motives. But I do wonder how strongly they—that is, false prophets—did believe themselves to be speaking the truth of God. And that gets me thinking about the corresponding personal question that exists for all of us: am I often wrong about what I think he wants for me? And am I wrong about how I am in relation to Him? How much of what we think of as our good actions, our loving characteristics, our godliness, will turn out in the end to be foolishness, way off the mark about God, his character, and what he truly wanted of us—or worse, how much will turn out to be plain wicked self-righteousness and pride?

Psalm 111 provides, I believe, the best answer to these sorts of thoughts:

The works of his hands are faithful and just;
all his precepts are trustworthy;
they are established forever and ever,
to be performed with faithfulness and uprightness.
He sent redemption to his people;
he has commanded his covenant forever.
Holy and awesome is his name!

We will never convince ourselves that we have been faithful (because we haven’t), nor will we ever figure out just how to become faithful. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t try. But our own lack of faithfulness is not the best subject to meditate on. There is, rather, a faithfulness we can meditate on: the faithfulness of God himself. Rather than contemplating my own faithfulness to God, I’d do better to worship God and thus reflect on his faithfulness—to me, to his people, to humanity, and all of creation.