Seeing as Infants through the Nicene Creed: An Excerpt from Living in the Underground Church

Posted on July 31, 2017 by Pastor Foley

Each time we open the Bible to read a passage of scripture, we should begin by asking, “How does the Nicene Creed help me to see the Triune God here?”

 

In Matthew 11:25, Jesus speaks of those to whom the Father and Son are revealed. He praises the Father, saying, “you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.”[5]

Picture a wise and learned person entering a room, or a subway car, or a street, or a home. What will the wise and prudent person do? Instinctively they will look at the whole space and try to get a sense of who is present, what is happening, and what if anything they should do in response.

Now, picture an infant entering the same space. What will the infant do? Instinctively, the infant will look only for the face of the parent. Until the infant finds the parent and is in the arms of the parent, the room remains a blur and an uninteresting mystery. The mystery for the infant is always: Where is my parent? Until that mystery is solved, little else about the room is noted or engaged.

In the same way, each time we take up the Bible to read a passage of scripture, even on the very first reading, we should see it with the heart and eyes of an infant. We should ask, Where is my parent, the Triune God? The words and the whole passage of scripture should remain a blur for us while we search urgently for God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit therein. We should not rest on any other word or question or insight or theological truth about a scripture passage even for a moment. Otherwise, the Triune God will be a blur for us in the scripture while the rest of the passage will command our focus. We must first find him, always. Scripture will not serve its purpose in us until we rest in his arms within it.

That is the purpose of the Nicene Creed for those living in the underground church. It gives our lives an unwavering, uncompromising attentiveness to the one true God.

When we read the Nicene Creed carefully, we will see that it is not the work of the wise or learned, but of infants, for infants. This is quite a different perspective than how we may have previously been taught to regard the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed is often and mistakenly regarded as a work of deep theology, an intrusion of Greek philosophy into the simple beauty of scripture. But that is simply not true.

In fact, the Nicene Creed was formulated even before the infant church finalized the list of books that compose the New Testament.[6] The infant church established the Creed as a commitment to always read the Bible in a certain way: Dominated by the fullness of the Triune God, with all else as blurry backdrop. The Nicene Creed is the infant church’s joyful cry: Here is the Triune God—we have seen him! Let no part of him ever escape our sight, not even for a single moment or a single verse! Early Christians were required to memorize and thoroughly understand every statement in the creed even before they were baptized and fully admitted to the worship of the church.[7] Only in this way could the infant church be assured that an infant believer—and the infant Christian faith—would remain infants and not become captive to the wise and learned, and to all the things that hold the wise and learned captive.

The Nicene Creed tells us all the things about the nature, character, and activity of God that are necessary and sufficient to identify him in the Bible and in the world around us. Every statement in the Creed is a statement that is only true of God, and always true of God. Even the statements in the Nicene Creed that are about baptism, the church, the final judgment, and the world to come are ultimately statements about the Triune God; they gain their right meaning only in relation to him. Because the Triune God never changes, all of the statements in the Creed are always true of God in every passage of scripture and at every moment in history and eternity, including this one.

Here is what has always been most important: The Nicene Creed is what opens our eyes wide enough to see the fullness of the Triune God in each passage of scripture, and in our own lives.

Consider an example from Matthew 8:23-27.

Then [Jesus] got into the boat and his disciples followed him. Suddenly a furious storm came up on the lake, so that the waves swept over the boat. But Jesus was sleeping. The disciples went and woke him, saying, “Lord, save us! We’re going to drown!”

He replied, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm.

The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!”[8]

If we read this passage of scripture as wise and learned people, we might be drawn to examine the experience of the disciples, since we, too, are Jesus’ disciples. We might think about whether we would respond the same way as they did. We might think of situations in our own lives when we experienced metaphorical storms and waves and wondered if Jesus was present. We might wonder about why Jesus was sleeping, and how it was possible for him to sleep through a storm at sea (especially while his disciples were working so hard around him). We might decide that the purpose of this scripture is to teach us about faith and to challenge us to have more of it. We might struggle with this kind of natural miracle and whether such an event really happened, since we are so wise and learned and have never seen wind and waves calmed like this.

But if we read this passage of scripture with our infant eyes trained by the Nicene Creed, we will read it entirely differently. We will begin by looking urgently in this scripture for the Triune God as described by the Creed. Our attention will first be drawn to the words in this scripture that we have memorized from the Creed: Jesus. Lord. Save. Man. There are also words here like storm, wind, and waves that remind us of heaven and earth and their Creator, which are also mentioned in the Creed. So when the disciples ask, “What kind of man is this?”, we are already ready to give an answer, even without yet reading the rest of the passage.

The Nicene Creed says that God the Father is “the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.” Because he is the maker of the wind and the waves, he is the only one they obey. But the Nicene Creed reminds us that Christ is “God from God, light from light, true God from true God.” The wind and the waves that appear in this passage of scripture know this, too, and thus they obey him. They know what the Creed teaches us: The Son is not less than or lower than the Father; he is his exact visible image. The Creed tells us, “For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven. By the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary and become man.” What kind of man is this? He is God the Son, who is fully God. The Son has come to save us. He can save us because he is God. All of creation bears witness to this and submits to him.

Through the Nicene Creed, we like infants have entered the scripture passage and first, with great urgency, found our parent, the Triune God. Having found him in his fullness, we can then go on to look at the rest of this scripture using the questions detailed in subsequent chapters in this book. Through his Holy Spirit, he will then guide us to hear the word the way he wants us to hear it and to do it the way he intends: Embraced by him, with his power pouring through us.

 

[5] Matthew 11:25, NIV.

[6] Cf. http://www.scborromeo.org/papers/nicenecreed.pdf.

[7] E. Ferguson. “Catechesis, Catechumenate.” In The Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 224.

[8] Matthew 8:23-27, NIV.

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Why Is God Jealous?

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Editor

To watch other Voice of the Martyrs videos, visit the Voice of the Martyrs Video Page!

Here’s a story for you: It’s about a darling married couple who are madly in love with each other. Well, at least the husband is madly in love with his wife. The wife, however, has wandering eyes.

Wherever the wife goes, suitors follow. Even when the husband is present, these suitors knock on the door to the couple’s home and woo the wife. The husband, of course, isn’t pleased, but he respects his wife and is certain that she’ll make the right decision.
But the wife doesn’t make the right decision. She sleeps with one (or several, take your pick) of these suitors—despite his trust in her. The husband is outraged and, most of us would say, rightly so. Why, then, do we think God is overreacting towards us when we do the same exact thing?

Today’s passage of scripture takes place immediately after Jesus has sent the twelve disciples out in a frenzy [link to Second Sunday of Pentecost blog]. His heart was moved within him when he saw that the crowds following him were like “sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). Today, however, we learn that these sheep, despite lacking a shepherd, still followed something around and, just like the wife, what they were following wasn’t any good.

During our lifetime, four things will compete for primacy in our heart, mind, soul, and strength. Our inner being can only have one master, as Jesus warns us in Matthew 6:24. To love Jesus, then, we must reject the primacy of all four suitors—or we may relegate Jesus to a lower love and elevate one of the other suitors.

As Jesus tells us in Matthew 22:37, we must “Love the Lord [our] God with all [our] heart and with all [our] soul and with all [our] mind.”

In this passage, Jesus shows us that our punishment is assured: Give your whole being to Jesus and you will certainly be punished in this lifetime by one or more of the other suitors. Choose one of the other suitors and you will certainly be punished body and soul in hell.

Who are these suitors? The first may surprise you.

  1. The Religious Authorities (Including our church or pastor) (Matthew 10:25)

As Christians, our religious authorities include the church, our pastors, our priests, our Bible study leaders—any Christian leader, denomination, or congregation can fit into this category.

Religious authorities aren’t bad in and of themselves. Many want nothing more than to help us grow in Christ. On a good day, they’re servants and shepherds: they direct us away from themselves and toward God.

On a bad day, however, they can be the ones who woo us away from our husband.

Sometimes our church may ask us to make an unbiblical sacrifice. Say, for example, that your family is a little dysfunctional. You are constantly arguing with your spouse and the two of you are close to splitting up. Your children (who know about the possible divorce despite your best efforts) have become reserved and fearful. Your family needs help.

Your church, however, has another plan for you. There is a new opening in the church’s ministry—and you’re the perfect candidate. Sure, they know about your marital troubles, but who else can do the work? God has called you to do it, and the church tells you that if you make sacrifices for God, God will make sacrifices for you.

We know that God tells us in 1 Timothy 3:5 that we cannot manage his church unless we know how to manage our own households. But we also know that the church has given us so much. And the ministry is for a good cause…

So we take the job. Our family suffers, but we don’t have the time to deal with the problem. When people ask, we just say that we’re sacrificing for God. But, really, we’re just making a sacrifice for the church.

As for our pastor, sometimes we think that whatever our pastor preaches (whether it be sermon, politics, or practical advice) comes straight from the mouth of God. But God doesn’t need to give his word to our pastors—he’s already given his word to each of us through the Bible!

Can our pastors help us understand the Bible? Certainly. But our pastors still struggle to understand the Bible, themselves. So we have a responsibility—to ourselves, to our pastors, and to God—to compare our pastor’s sermon with God’s living word. If the two do not match, we should speak with our pastor.

Sometimes, we are tempted to limit God to our denomination or our local church. However, in the Bible we see that God routinely chooses not to restrict himself to specific sects or groups. Whenever we show loyalty to sects, we place religion above God. Our method of religion or our specific local church becomes our idol.

From the Reformation through European wars of religion, Christians learned that the institutional church is very different from God. We learned that the church is NOT God on Earth; it is the servant of God on Earth.

When we regard religious authorities as God, we forget what happened to Jesus in the gospels. The religious leaders of the day called Jesus a servant of the devil (Beelzebul). Their voices were the loudest during his crucifixion. Religious leaders, whether they be Jewish or Christian, can see Christ as a threat to their way of understanding the world.

Yes, you can serve the Christ through the church, and yes, you can learn about the Bible through your Pastor’s sermon. BUT you must always be aware that neither of these things are God. Paul once told us that if an angel came down from heaven and told us something contrary to the Bible, we should not believe him (Galatians 1:8)—how much less a religious leader!

  1. Our Country or Culture (Matthew 10:28)

Government and culture will always compete for our heart. After all, if we are good citizens of our country, then aren’t we a good witness for Christ? The Bible even tells us that if we are “irresponsible to the state, then [we’re] irresponsible with God, and God will hold [us] responsible” (Romans 13:2)!

When we decide to put our country or culture first, we preach political sermons on Sunday and rally behind war and destruction. Christianity becomes a religion that belongs only to our country (and perhaps those of our country’s allies). We divide our sermons along ethnic or cultural lines. We conflate service to our country with service to God.

Jesus, however, tells us that if we have to choose between what our government wants and what God wants, we should always choose the latter. If we blindly follow what our government wants us to do, we will break several of God’s commands. If the government, for example, tells us not to evangelize in public places and we obey this, we are disobeying God!

Furthermore, just as God does not limit himself to any one denomination, he does not limit himself to any one country: he is just as much the head of North Korea as he is the head of South Korea!

When your country and Christ don’t see eye-to-eye, you’ll have to choose one or the other. Either way, you will be punished. If you evangelize, you will be punished by “those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” However, if you choose to “be a good citizen” you will be punished by “the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Choose wisely.

  1. Our Family (Matthew 10:35)

Just like our churches, it is easy to put our families before Christ. After all, the Bible commands us to take charge of our families and manage them well! There is a difference between managing your family well and putting your family before Christ.

The difference is Christ, himself.

What is the foundation of your family?

Christ tells us that he did not come to make peace in our families—he came to create conflict.

Why is this?

Almost all families have been built upon the wrong foundation. Some families cannot come together without violent outbursts—so we’ve chosen to avoid one another to create the semblance of peace. Other families experience a deep trauma and, instead of dealing with this trauma, they lapse into unhealthy habits (eating in separate rooms, feigning happiness, drifting apart). But these unhealthy habits make the trauma the foundation of the family.

If we are to put Christ before our family, it means making him the foundation of our family—something that is easy to say, but difficult to do. If Christ really is the foundation of our family, it means that when conflicts arise, we resolve them in the way he intended. If Christ really is the foundation of our family, it means that we will have to confess our own faults and imperfections. If Christ really is the foundation of our family, it means that we will respect our parents and direct them to Christ.

When we try to make Christ the center of our family, everyone will resist. Man will be set against his father and daughter will be set against her mother. We may be kicked out of our own homes. Our children may tell others all sorts of nasty things about us. We may even be permanently disowned by the rest of our extended family. But Christ does not consider family to be a valid excuse not to follow him.

“If you deny me before your family,” Jesus says, “I will deny you above my family—my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 10:33; man changed to family, Father changed to family)

  1. Our Self (Matthew 10:39)

Jesus tells us that if we wish to follow him, we must first take up our cross (Matthew 16:24). However, that is the last thing that our self wants to do. When we do this, our flesh raises every objection it possibly can:

“But we’re already on bad terms! If I don’t lie, it might end things for good!”

“But if I don’t tell everyone I did it, no one will notice!”

“But this is what pleases me sexually! Research has shown that it’s actually unhealthy for me to restrict myself sexually.”

“But if I do that, it will be dangerous. I have a family. God tells me to take care of them. I need to keep myself safe.”

“But I won’t be spiritually mature until I get married! I need to find a boyfriend right now!”

“I know this woman isn’t my wife, but I don’t want to marry her or leave her! If I marry her, I might marry the wrong person and if I leave her, I might be lonely!”

 

If we let these voices rule us, then Christ has only one thing to tell us: “You are not worthy of me.” He’s deadly serious about this. Just like the spurned husband, Christ respects us. As our suitors woo us, he remains silent and trusting. If we choose to sleep with other lovers, he is, just as rightly, outraged and shall cast you out into the “outer darkness where there will be weeping and much gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 22:13).

How do we love Christ? By putting himself above everything else and ignoring the sweet calls of your suitors. Their calls never stay sweet for long, after all. The moment you turn away from them, the suitors are outraged and do everything in their power to punish you—but the power they have is negligible when compared to God.

If you think this message is too strong, I encourage you to re-read this passage. It isn’t a weak passage. In it you will find words like “sword”, “disown”, “hell”, and “deny.” It’s certainly a passage that deserves your careful consideration.

However, there is good news: Alone, you’ll never be able to love any of these things more than God. As human beings, we naturally tend to love the things we can see (our churches, our governments, our families, and ourselves) more than the God we cannot see. But Christ came to put a new heart in us.

God can give you a new heart that loves him more than anything. The first step is to repent, be baptized, and enter into Christ’s death. When this happens, you will receive the Holy Spirit and the Father and son will come to make their home in you. Then, you will be able to love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.

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“Why the Calling of the 12 Apostles is About Much More than the Calling of the 12 Apostles”

Posted on July 13, 2017 by Editor

To watch other Voice of the Martyrs videos, visit the Voice of the Martyrs Video Page!

 

Before we look at this week’s scripture, we need to remember:

The Bible was not originally divided into chapters, verses, or sections, nor did it have section headings or titles. In fact, if you looked at the original text, you would see that it was simply one enormously long string of letters, without so much as a single punctuation mark or space between words!

Why is this important? Most publishers split todays’ scripture into three parts—two chapters and three sections. If we take the publisher’s organization to be God’s divine structure, then we miss the continuity across the whole passage—and thus we miss the point of it, too. We might conclude, as many artists have over the centuries, that the selection and sending of the apostles was a formal and self-contained occasion—rather than (as the scripture shows us) a revelation of a particularly deep and recurring theme in God’s character.

With that in mind, and with our finger blotting out the section titles and chapter divisions, our scripture for the week is:

Matthew 9:35-10:8

If we read all three parts together as one episode, we understand that Jesus sent out the twelve disciples specifically because he had compassion on the crowds who were always trailing after him. Matthew 9:36 says that Jesus saw the crowds as “sheep without a shepherd”—a phrase which reveals much about God’s character.

First, it reveals that Jesus is God. Why? Because throughout the Old Testament, God keeps bringing up this very point again and again and again: The people whom God appoints to watch over his sheep are either asleep or running away at the first sign of danger. This lament can be found as early as Numbers 27:17 and continuing on in Kings 22:17 and Ezekiel 34:5. God keeps bringing it up.

Remember, the Bible was not written to be a series of stories. The Bible was inspired by God to be a continuous revelation of God’s character. So just because Numbers ends does not mean that the story ends with it. When Jesus looks upon the crowds and sees them as sheep without a shepherd, it is not an isolated event but the continuation of a millennia-old divine beef. Jesus’ compassion is built upon the anguish and compassion that God has always felt about the poor shepherding of his people—and which God will always feel about his people.

If sheep are left alone, they wander. Wandering sheep are a danger to themselves: they can fall into deep chasms or be eaten by wild beasts. A wandering sheep is never safe.

Thus, God turns to his appointed shepherds. He appointed them, but they are not looking after his people. This is one of God’s deepest ongoing concerns: not that his people be “happy” but that they be properly shepherded.

If you have ever watched a shepherd at work, you know that keeping a sheep safe does not mean keeping the sheep happy or in love with the shepherd. Shepherds even use dogs to frighten sheep into staying in a safe area. They use staves or crooks to yank the sheep back into place. If a sheep repeatedly wanders away, a shepherd may break the sheep’s leg. The shepherd will then keep the sheep close to him as it heals, so that the sheep may become accustomed to his presence.

In many cases, the sheep he watches over might not belong to him. Despite this, he will constantly put himself in harm’s way to ensure the sheep’s safety.

In the Old Testament, we read that King David was “a man after [God’s] own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14). Part of the reason for this is because King David began life as a shepherd. In 1 Samuel 17:34-35, David tells Saul about his life as a shepherd:

I used to keep sheep for my father. And when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and struck him and delivered it out of his mouth. And if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard and struck him and killed him.

Whenever a wild animal attacked the sheep, David would come between the creature and his sheep. He would hazard his own life to save his father’s sheep. This was why when God saw David, he said, “This is the man I want in charge of my people.” This was why the Bible says that David has God’s own heart.

How do we know? Because when God became man, this was exactly what he did for us.

This is God’s leadership standard for anyone: the pastor, the youth leader, the politician, the mother, and even the friend. Over our lifetime, God entrusts a myriad of people—his people—to our care. He gives us family members, friends, and co-workers. He does not give us these people to benefit us. We are not supposed to use them to please ourselves or submit ourselves to please them. They were given to us to shepherd: God wants us to keep them on the narrow path to him.

If they wander, we are expected to grab our shepherd’s crook and drag them back. “The Lord holds me accountable for your wellbeing,” we need to tell them. “And I’m willing to lay down my life for that.”

This highest standard of care arises from God’s heart. In fact, in Ezekiel 34:25, God becomes so frustrated with human leaders that he promises, “I myself will tend to my sheep and have them lie down.”

Then Jesus comes.

“I am the good shepherd,” Jesus says (John 10:11). When Jesus says this, he isn’t just painting a pretty metaphor: he’s revealing that he is God.

In the Old Testament, God promised that he would shepherd over Israel. Now he is here—in the form of a man—and this is exactly what he is doing in our scripture this week.

Immediately before the scripture this week, Jesus was teaching in the Synagogue. The religious leaders had seen him strengthen the legs of a paralyzed man, raise a girl from the dead, give sight to two blind men, and, most recently, heal a demon-oppressed man. Yet they muttered, “He does this through the devil” (Matthew 9:34).

The religious leaders, who God had charged with leading people to him, could not recognize God—even when he stood right in front of them. They even said he was in league with the devil!

Yet wherever Jesus went, God’s people followed.

When Jesus saw these people, he was “moved with compassion” (Matthew 9:34). The original Greek is much more graphic: When Jesus saw the crowds, his guts twisted in pain. What Jesus felt was much deeper than compassion. Because of this gut-wrenching instinct, he ordered his twelve closest followers out on the road.

The “Sending of the Twelve” was not a glorious and formal affair. There was no ceremony on the mountaintop. It was instead an event birthed in the deep, biting pain that Christ felt upon seeing his lost sheep. It was more like an emergency than a graduation ceremony. Jesus barked out rapid-fire instructions: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons” (Matthew 10:8).

Then Jesus reminds us of a crucial truth: “You received without paying; give without pay” (Matthew 10:8). In other words, never forget that everything you have came from me. If God tells us to go out—if God entrusts us with people—it does not mean that we have special standing or that we should be treated well, or that we should expect anything (like sheep-gratitude) in return.

More than anyone, we leaders should be humble. We should know that everything that is given to us comes from Christ and that Christ is the shepherd—not us. We are sheep. Sheep who have travelled with the shepherd long enough to recognize his voice, but sheep first and last.

If we are only sheep, how can we possibly lead other sheep?

Think about cows that live on a farm. Every morning, a bell is rung and the cows are released into the grazing lands. Without the urging of the rancher, the cows walk out to the pasture in a long and tidy line. Why? Because the cows leading the line have followed the rancher to the pasture so many times that they know where the pasture is and why they are headed there.

Notice, the lead cow does not snap orders at the other cows. He does not have a special costume or live in a special barn. He does not demand that other cows bow down to him. He simply knows where he is going and why. As Christian leaders, all we are is the lead cow. We are in front because we have travelled this path for so long, not because we are more worthy or holy.

Christ has returned to shepherd his people. He has reached out to us and walked with us. Because he has walked with us, he expects us to lead others along this path as well. However, we should know that leading others along this path will cost us everything—just as it cost Christ everything to lead us.

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