"AS YOU SOW .... "

“As you sow, so shall you reap.”

“Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.”

The words quoted are two fundamental principles on which the world operates; the world is designed this way, and nothing will change it. These principles are so profoundly simple (as God’s ways are) that all may understand them, and they provide absolute basic wisdom for living. This week has brought an appalling example of the truth of their warning.


The News of the World newspaper lived on scandal; it died from scandal. One might argue that the hacking scandal which killed it was probably the biggest of the scandals that marked out the lurid course of its history. Sowing to the wind, it reaped the whirlwind; so quick to put the dagger mercilessly into people who were caught up in scandal, it found itself in less than a week pierced through by scandal and gone, the most popular Sunday newspaper gone. A just nemesis!


“The most popular Sunday newspaper” is the title it earned by virtue of its much larger circulation than any other Sunday paper. Why was that? An edition of “The Times” put fifty “News of the World” front pages as a border to a number of its pages. All, apart from the earliest, had massive and course headlines for the most unsavoury acts of behaviour, and clearly majored on sexual scandal. No person, not even royalty, escaped the pointing finger and the screaming accusations. This was the source of its popularity. The “Times” (a sister paper to the “News of the World”) was not using them to reprimand the “News of the World”, of course, but to cynically use them to liven up its own copy for the day. What a comment on our own society!


A “Times” editorial, commenting on the paper’s demise, bleated on about the importance of a free popular press for democracy, of the importance of telling everybody what the few knew etc. etc. How sad, it said, that the paper had gone! But scandal mongering is never in the public interest; it simply panders to the worst in human nature. It is a compete denial to the sort of responsible attitude that true democracy demands of its free press.


How could the perpetrators of the hacking have imagined that they would always get away with their illegal and callous activity? Their arrogance and hubris is simply mind blowing; sin always blinds, however. It was a re-run of the behaviour of the bankers, and of M.P.s with their expenses. It’s a disease of the age. As one letter writer to the Times pointed out, it’s all pointing to a dangerous and increasing level of corruption within society. Society needs to take a long look at itself, not to offload guilt on to the “bad few”.


Interestingly enough, the News of the World was brought down by the newspaper world’s new rival, the Website, Face-book, Twitter world. This put the pressure on the advertisers to pull out of the paper, and so rendered it “toxic”. Where will this new media world end up, one wonders? Thank God it blew the whistle on this outrage.


Bob




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A THOUGHT FROM WIMBLEDON

Many of the prophetic pictures or visions which the prophets of the Old Testament received were very simple. Amos saw a bowl of ripe fruit and was simply told Israel was ripe for judgement; he also saw a plumb line against a wall and was told God would spare the nation no longer. It’s actually the very simplicity of the images that makes them very pointed. It’s the same with prophetic actions: Jeremiah was told to buy a clay pot and then to break it in front of the elders of Jerusalem to tell them what God would do to their city. Jesus himself uses the simplest of images for the most important of truths.


I was not, then, really surprised by what seemed a rather simple episode from the Wimbledon tennis. One afternoon, during a ladies match, there was an outburst of thunder and some torrential rain. The only match playable was on the Centre Court where the glass roof had been closed. The rain pounded the roof and seemed desperate to get inside. Only a few drops managed to get through. Apparently the players were unable to hear the ball hit their rackets (a great distraction according to the experts). Very disconcerting!


As I watched this I immediately thought, “This is a picture of God trying to get a hearing, trying to say something to a very engrossed people. He’s desperate to get a hearing, but he’s kept out by a protective glass roof. The people are hearing but not listening”. The crowd seemed to typify people everywhere in the nation, for the rich, the great and the good were there and vast numbers of people across the nation were of course watching on their screens. It was quite a strong thought, but perhaps I might have given it no further attention except that a few seconds later one of the commentators remarking on the storm said, “Somebody somewhere is not very happy about something!", and he was quite clearly alluding to the author of the weather! The commentator had also significantly discerned a note of anger in the storm. My response was very quick, “Too right he’s not!”


A further thought, however, had also been going through my mind before this incident, namely that I felt so grateful to God that he had given us physical bodies and also sorts of thing to do with them (like games) that gave great human pleasure to so many. So there was nothing fundamentally wrong at all with tennis. The tennis was OK, then, but the problem lay in what was happening to the humanity at large that was watching it. The problem was, of course, that it had switched off from God, supposed him to be in a sense irrelevant to life and was not ready to grasp things that were essential to real well-being in life. Tennis and so many other pleasures had become the absolute centre of life; pleasure was the goal and the god.


It was the “glass roof” that really laid bare the problem; this elaborate and expensive protection against anything that might interfere with the game, with the pleasure. It was so hard to penetrate. It was as though the nation had an elaborate, hard, glass roof over it – a roof of indifference, built out of sophisticated thinking and sophisticated pleasure. No way in for God! He would have to smash the roof, and even then there was no certainty that the people would listen.


Oh, well, just a simple thought? I wish that was all it was, but sadly it rang too deep a bell.




Bob




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THE OUTSIDER

Early on in his prophetic ministry Jeremiah gave vent to the following words, “To whom can I speak and give warning? Who will listen to me? Their ears are closed so that they cannot hear. The word of the Lord is offensive to them; they find no pleasure in it. But I am full of the wrath of the Lord and I cannot hold it in.” (Jer. 6:10). He was still a very young man when he said this, and had expected to be heard and thanked for his timely warning about the state of his nation and the danger it faced of judgement. He received precisely the opposite. Apart from a few companions, he was rejected, persecuted and remained so for the rest of his life. He was always an outsider to his nation.


The prophetic burden for his nation, however, burned strong and deep within, and he could never escape from it. The sin was all too plainly there in the nation, laid bare before his eyes – “From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike (all those leaders who should have known better), all practice deceit. They dress the wounds of my people as though it were not serious”. (6:11) But still he could find no audience ready to listen to his warning. He suffered a great deal of hurt and despair, and increasingly so as the years passed.


Much later on in his ministry he remonstrated with the people with these words, “For twenty three years the word of the Lord has come to me and I have spoken to you again and again, but you have not listened.” (Jer. 25:3)He had persisted with warnings of judgement, his ministry reflecting the enormous patience of the Lord much more perhaps than his own. But his word to the nation had not really penetrated. Indeed the resistance had grown harder, and now his word, prompted by God, was to become much more severe until judgement and disaster actually fell on Judah and the surrounding nations. He lived to see it happen all round him, still the outsider.


Some fifty two long chapters of the book of Jeremiah record this daunting ministry and this daunting episode of history. These were not given to us simply for historical interest, but as a record of God’s awesome dealings with nations – as important today as they ever were. Tragically the response to them is very much the same as it was in Jeremiah’s day. Even our “priests and prophets”, let alone our national leaders, treat the clear message of judgement in these chapters as outside the pale of modern acceptable thinking. They are branded as “fundamentalist” or “immoral”. For me that very fact makes them all the more relevant and incisive. It utterly verifies what this prophetic book has to say, and makes hugely relevant Jeremiah’s cry of, “Who will listen?”


God himself knows the “outsiders”, and walks with them, for that is where the nation has sought to place even him.



Bob




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