Trying To Make Better Christians

I have a good portion of my RSS feeds devoted to Christian blogs. An incredible portion of blog posts begin with “Why the church needs to…” “Why Christians need to…”

Most Christian writing, preaching, movie making, programming is all about trying to make better Christians. There are a lot of demanding about how Christians should do better. Christians should

• Go to church more, volunteer more,
• Be better at prayer
• Know their Bibles better by reading, memorization, study, etc.
• Give more money to missionaries, the poor, etc.
• Be more hospitable
• Be more/less political
• Be more/less active on social issues like abortion, sexuality, poverty, war
• whatever deficiency you can imagine someone else has projected onto suppose morality

At the same time we know that in reality LOTS of people who identify as Christians aren’t terribly active or interested

• Nominal Christians, Christians in name only
• Uninformed Christians: they know little about the Bible, theology
• Confused Christians: they confuse “nice” with “spiritual” or godly
• Heretical Christians: A Christian that disagrees with you about theology or social issues
• Post-Christians: those who have given up on the faith because they have in their minds evolved to be more broad, more moral, more “spiritual” or more “realistic”

You can of course broaden this whole discussion to include evangelism and those who are indifferent to the Gospel or opposed to Christianity.

Christianity is a missionary religion always trying to make people who aren’t Christians into Christians or make people who claim to be Christians into better ones. Implicit in this agenda is the assumption that this is what God wants and I think that is hard to argue with.

“A Personal Relationship” vs. “A Saving Relationship”

Also implicit in this conversation is the idea of someone having “a personal relationship with God” which is usually equated with “a saving relationship with God”. Protestants who like to emphasized “saved by grace through faith not by works” are the quickest to equate “a personal relationship” with “a saving relationship” and we have in our minds an individual. If you read much church history you begin to realize that the relationship between “personal” and “saving” is not always so clear and simple.

• In the Roman Empire whole households “became Christian” when the household leader adopted the faith.
• Throughout history large people groups “became Christian” when the political, tribal or national leader adopted the faith.

This leaves us with lots of unanswered questions. I don’t think we want a bad thing when we want people brought into Christianity via family or even national relationships to grow in the faith, but we do wonder about the lousy, the nominal, the wobbly, the heretical, the lazy and the wayward.

The Hard Lines of the Book of Joshua

If there is a hard line book in the Bible it is the book of Joshua. God is kicking out the Canaanites and moving in the Israelites and He’s not taking prisoners or making compromises. It’s like Heidi Klum on Project Runway, one day you’re in, the next day you’re out. However, a funny thing happened on the way to clarity, the Gibeonites.

The book of Joshua is about how God brings his kingdom into alien world of Canaan and as we saw last week the shape of the first major narrative thread looks almost like a parable from Jesus. The prostitute and her family survive the destruction while the son of Judah with the lineage is cut off.

The pacing and selection of the book are important. Why would this book spend so much time on these strange introductory stories, Ai, Jericho and now the Gibeonite league and then leave the majority of conquest to just some brief and brutal summaries? There must be a theological reason for this.

If the message of selection is a Jesus like “the first shall be last and the last first” what is the message of the strange Gibeonite chapter?

Joshua and the Leaders get Conned

The story is fairly simple. Canaan is made up of clusters of city states who have for centuries learned how to surf the winds of imperial change as Egypt’s power rises and falls. Israel is a quandary for them. Militarily she should not be an issue, lacking modern weapons. Israel is no Egypt but there are strange tales of their god fighting for them. Jericho, the front door has been broken in and now and is in the house. The city states are aligning together to repel Israel.

More Than One Way to Skin a Cat

The Gibeonite league is very close to where Israel just conquered and they, like the seasoned opportunists they have evolved into, know that military confrontation is not the only solution. They construct and elaborate con to trick Israel into a treaty that will insure their preservation. They concoct costumes and props and convince Israel they are from a distance away, they appeal to their vanity about their reputation and Joshua and the leadership make a treaty with them.

A few days later the jig is up and when the people learn that Joshua and the leaders didn’t do their due diligence of inquiring of the LORD or even doing a bit of legwork they are angry. The text doesn’t tell us why they are angry, perhaps they were hoping to wipe out Gibeah and the other towns and take their property. It is interesting that at the end of the book of Samuel we learn that Saul had broken the treaty and persecuted these Canaanites and God was holding Israel accountable to this, David having to make justice. This perhaps reflects that the Israelites of Benjamin who settled there likely lived in tension with the Canaanites that remained and tricked Israel into this treaty.

To make matters worse the other Canaanite cities are now upset at this cluster of cities that have signed a treaty with Israel and are marching down to punish them. This puts Israel in the uncomfortable position of not only having to live with a bad deal they signed but now having to protect them as their vassal.

The Meaning of these Canaanite Holdouts

All of this may or may not be of interest to you. The Bible of course served many purposes for ancient Israel, but how does it speak to Christians today who have little interest in the political details of bronze age Canaan?

We have to do some translating of the whole “people of God” thing between Joshua and our age. By becoming Israel’s vassal the Gibeonite league in a sense becomes property of the LORD’s literal kingdom. They are forced to do service of God’s house as water carriers and wood cutters. They in a way become low ranking temple servants. This is a very unevangelical conversion. We don’t know if they needed to get rid of their household gods. We don’t know if they started praying to Yhwh instead of Baal or whomever they served before. We don’t know how begrudging their service would be. Their less ancient counterparts might have been the servants of Lydia’s household in the book of Acts who become Christians when she does, or the residents of certain European enclaves who adopt the religion of their civil government. “Yesterday you were Catholic, today you are Lutheran or Reformed. Get used to it.”

How does God regard this kind of thing? Does this have anything to say to wobbly Christians or bad Christians or nominal Christians or even how we regard God’s posture towards non-Christians who absorb Christian ideas, practices or even morality?

Who’s In, and Who’s Out? 

So in the strange cases of Joshua Canaanite Madam Rahab is in, son of Judah Achan is out and the LORD protects the Gibeonites. Can this get more strange?

Again, just like we saw with Rahab and Achan, we also see signs of all of this in Jesus’ ministry. John the Baptist comes onto the scene pressing a hard line. Other religious groups of the time pressed similar hard lines and expected Jesus to do so.

Jesus, while not in any way compromising the demand for “a personal relationship” and “a saving relationship” (he told parables “depart from me I never knew you”) at the same time enfolds a serial divorcee and is scorned by the hard liners for associating with sinners and prostitutes. As we saw last week and as the Rahab/Achan contrast illustrated it is sometimes the wobbly ones who turn to be the ones who love most.

Read Luke 7:36-50 about Jesus and the “sinful woman”. Matthew sees Jesus as the fulfillment of Isaiah prophesy “the bruised read he does not break. The smoldering wick he does not snuff out.”

The Gibeonites also remind me of the shrewd manager from Luke 16. This guy seemingly buys his way into the kingdom with other people’s money and Jesus applauds him for his desire.

The Implicit Judgment of Self-righteous Christians

When I look down my nose at wobbly Christians I implicitly justify myself, not unlike the Pharisee praying in the temple scorning the tax collector Luke 18:9-14. We don’t know what to do with the wobbly or the rebellious but the consistent message is that we ought to be careful about condemnation because the moment we do so we have placed our confidence in our own righteous achievements as opposed to God’s mercy.

The story is told (it may be apocraphal) of the Times of London asking the question “What’s wrong with the world” and GK Chesterton responding with a very brief letter saying simply “I am. GK Chesterton”

What To Look To in a World of Wobbly, Deceitful People

My point isn’t to add the over-worn “judgmentalism” to the end of “what Christians need to do” or “what the church needs…” but when you are frustrated with people who look wobbly to you, or who frustrate you, or who are letting down you side of whatever, to consider the Gibeonites. These con men, these liars, these gate crashers that find a loophole and slip their way in out of the worst of motives and how God and Israel are forced to make good on the treaty they were deceived into, to get a sense of the goodness, the fairness, the honor and the grace of God. It is after all these qualities that should draw us to God in Jesus, like the “sinful woman” of Luke 7, and make us WANT to be with him, not out of self-preservation, but out of our desire for him.