November - December 2005 The Sabbath Sentinel

Many years ago, at least 30, for a church publica­tion, I wrote an article called "One-on-One with God." There was another line to that title, but I have long ago forgotten it. The point of the article was that our salvation is not dependent upon people, but upon God. In those days, church members were looking to leadership for guidance, and leadership was in chaos. Some members were losing faith; many were bolting the Church. My feeling was that if I could convince church members to build a solid one-on-one relationship with God, they'd be able to weather whatever political storms came along at the level of leadership.

I failed to take my own advice. It turned out that I too had placed too much emphasis on human leadership and not enough on my relationship with God. As a result, when my confidence in leadership vaporized, my relationship with God wasn't well-enough developed to see me through. Spiritually speaking, I lost everything. I became an atheist. I thought like an atheist, lived like one, and generally rejected the whole idea of "God" from my life. I embraced some of the bogus ideas of humanism, feminism and the New Age.

A Recent Example

Not long ago, I was talking to a long-time friend who now defines himself as a Deist. A Deist is a per­son who accepts the idea of a God, but rejects the notion of supernatural revelation. For the deist, God is ill-defined. At best he may be a "first cause" or the Intelligence behind "intelligent design." But God does not have an expressed will and he has not provided us with reliable revelation of Himself. In other words, the Bible is not his Word, and God is not personally in­volved with us.

My friend had, like me, moved through atheism and agnosticism to the position of deism. It has been a sort of personal evolutionary process. Also like me, my friend had been a minister in that old church denomination. He too had become disillusioned with leadership. He too threw out all religion on the basis of his experience with one particular one.

As I see it now, this is a mistake, no matter who does it, and not matter with which denomination.

Viewing God Anthropomorphically

God is not a man. God is love. God is spirit. God transcends man in every possible way. God cannot be reduced to a human level. To a great extent, he is be­yond all comprehension - he is ineffable. All we can know of God is what he has revealed of himself in the Bible, and what we can personally experience of him. If we anthropomorphize God, we make him all too human. There is far more that we don't know about God than that we do.

When we place church leaders between ourselves and God, we make two mistakes: 1). we replace Jesus Christ as mediator between man and God (I Timothy 2:5); and 2), we cut ourselves off from the sustaining power and life of God.

All human leadership is flawed. We all have feet of clay. There is no perfect model of ideal Christian faith but Jesus Christ himself. He alone lived a wholly exem­plary life. When we place faith and trust in human leaders, we are creating for ourselves unrealistic expectations and setting ourselves up for a fall.

Sooner or later, every human church leader is going to fail in one way or another. Church leaders are as flawed as anyone. They have biases, prejudices, subjective opinions, and sometimes absurd ideas. Some are obsessed with money and power. Some are control freaks. Some are so conservative they squeak when they walk. Others are so liberal that getting anything con­crete out of them is like nailing butter to a barn door on a hot day in August. Some are just plain intellectually and physically lazy.

Ministers also sin. They get divorced, make financial mistakes, have affairs, lose their tempers, and make errors in judgment, get in auto accidents, get drunk, use drugs and sometimes resort to violence. I've known of ministers who have robbed banks, been jailed for embezzlement, and molested children (i.e. the recent scandals in the Catholic Church).

Many ministers and even scholars are intellectually dishonest. They decide issues politically rather than objectively.

Minister's wives are no better. They too sometimes have emotional meltdowns, create "scenes" in restaurants, have fights with their husbands, have affairs, lose their grip, or say and do dumb things. Some of them even have rebellious teenagers. It's all about being human.

The greater your expectations of leadership, the greater the letdown when you encounter close up its humanity. In his excellent book Happiness is a Serious Problem," Dennis Prager writes, "...Pain in life comes from unfulfilled desires and expectations" (p. 55). When we expect more of church leaders than they can deliver, we are let down - in some cases, crushed. As the Scripture says, "Hope deferred makes the heart grow sick" (Proverbs 13:12).

I have known church members who threw their Christian faith out the window because their minister committed some political inequity in running the church softball team - i.e. he favored his own son over someone else's for a key position. I have seen others abandon Christ because of perceived unfairnesses in the church choir. For many Christians, it doesn't take much to overthrow their faith. Given the right excuse, they can abandon Christ in a heartbeat.

Trusting Men leads to Heartache

I know what you're thinking: if a minister or his wife did all of, or any of, the things listed above, he probably shouldn't be a minister. Right; but then there'd probably be no ministers. Now I realize this has probably gotten at least some of you in a tizzy. I don't mean to upset you. I'm fully aware of the qualifications for ministry found in I Timothy 3 and else­where. Consider this: How many ministers would you remove from office on grounds that he does not have "his children in subjection with all gravity" (I Timothy 3:4b). Those of you who have, or have had, your own "nightmare teens," will know what I mean. We live in a time when all of society conspires against the authority of parents. Ministers do not live in glass bubbles; they have the same kind of problems with their children that everyone else has.

I'm trying to make what I think is a very important point: "Thus saith the Lord; Cursed is the man that trusteth in man and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord" (Jeremiah 17:5). Let's read it in the Jewish Translation: "Thus said the Lord: Cursed is he who trusts in man, who makes mere flesh his strength, and turns his thoughts from the Lord." Do you see the implications of this verse? The more we place trust in human leaders and human strength, the more we tend to drift away from God!

If we want to be blessed, we need to heed verse 7 of this same chapter: "Blessed is he who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is in the Lord alone" (JT).

The deeper our one-on-one relationship with God, the less important human leadership and its manifest weaknesses become to us. Ever wonder why some leaders - especially authoritarian ones - want to make you dependent upon them? Ever wonder why some church members become "ministerial groupies"? They have perhaps become neurotically dependent upon the personality, charisma and charm of a given leader. Yet when that leader sins or takes off his shoes and shows his feet of clay, they are crushed, mortified, destroyed.

God, unlike man, never lets us down. He is rock solid - the same yesterday, today and forever. God, speaking of his servant David, said, "He shall cry unto me, Thou art my father, my God, and the rock of my salvation" (Psalm 89:26). Father, God and Rock! This is how we should view God. God is the perfect father. He loves us as no other. He is ever there for us. He waits with eager anticipation to hear the prayers of his children.

Our Father is God — all powerful, all knowing, all wise. Our Father is our Rock of protection and stabil­ity. When all others flake out, God is there for us, consistent, predictable and unmovable. If our faith is founded upon the Rock, then it will endure all storms. David maintained faith in the face of withering adver­sity because it was founded upon his Father, his God and his Rock. As he is recorded saying: And David spake unto the Lord the words of this song... The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; The God of my rock; in him will I trust: he is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my saviour; thou savest me from violence._”." (2 Samuel 22:1,2,3). When David was in trouble, God came through for him.

The point of all this is: the key to our salvation is our one-on-one relationship with God in Christ. It does not depend upon the vicissitudes of men. Men come and go. They gain power and lose it. All of them have feet of clay. None is perfect. If we hitch our spiritual wagons to men, we're doomed. If we hitch them to God, we are assured of success.

Dependency upon Men

The problem with authoritarian churches is that they foster cults of personality and dependence upon human leadership. That's the whole idea of authoritarianism. That's undoubtedly why Jesus for­bade it in the Church (Matthew 20:25-28). That's prob­ably why Paul discouraged cults of personality in I Corinthians 1:11 ff. That is surely why Peter wrote: "Feed the flock of God...neither as being lords over God's heritage, but being ensamples to the flock" (I Peter 5:1,3 excerpts).

Now I realize that about this time, if any authoritar­ian has read this far, he or she will be contemplating Hebrews 13:17: "Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves; for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief; for that is unprofitable for you." The emphasis will be on the words "obey," "rule" and "submit." This verse must be balanced by the other three quoted above — and look at the rest of the verse: pas­tors must be accountable. All too often, authoritarian pastors are accountable to no one. That's why they tend to strike out on their own - to escape accountability. They don't want "some board" telling them what to do. If they go astray, they don't want to be "fireable." They want to protect their nest egg.

Let us also consider Hebrews 13:17 in light of the way it might better be translated: "Remember your leaders that related to you the word of God; under­stand the results of their pathway and walk according to their faith" (Dr. Roy Blizzard translation—see www.biblescholars.org).

Paul said it best when he said, "Follow me as I follow Christ...." We need only follow our pastor to the degree that he imitates our Lord and is yielded to him. We don't need to follow his subjective opinions, his manifested carnality, or his erroneous doctrines and idea. He is only Christ's servant to the extent that he truly follows Christ.

A good pastor, to be a good pastor, must be self­less. His mind cannot be on his power over people, the size of his following, the fullness of his coffers, the extent of his influence or how many people attended his feast site vs. someone else's. His focus must be on the spiritual well-being of the flock over which he has been given charge. He must be motivated by love, care and compassion, not by money and power or personal security. To teach, he must maintain personal intellectual integrity. He cannot compromise the truth in the name of church politics or to curry favor. Most importantly, as Peter suggested, he must be willing to "walk the talk." This is the hardest qualification of all.

I am not here encouraging over-criticism of the ministry. The ministry should be respected, prayed for, and otherwise supported. Neither am I fostering neurotic dependence upon it. I'm saying that our faith cannot depend on men. It must be built primarily on our relationship with God. The best way to do that is through prayer: "intimate communication" with God. That's how David did it, and for our inspiration, God led him to record many of those prayers as psalms.

When we get to the point where we can enthusias­tically say with Paul: "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39), then we will know that our faith is not dependent upon man, but upon God. The Lord is our Father, our God, and our Rock.

TSS

November -December 2005 The Sabbath Sentinel