The Myth of a Christian Religion Read online

  Bruce Springsteen got it right: “Everybody’s got a hungry heart.”

  The hunger Springsteen is talking about goes to the core of our being. It’s a hunger not just to survive, but to feel fully alive. It’s a hunger to experience fullness of worth, significance, and security. It’s a hunger to have what I’m calling “Life.” It’s the kind of Life Jesus incarnated and came to share with us. It lies at the heart of all that the Kingdom is about.

  “I have come that they may have life,” he said, “and have it to the full” (John 10:10).

  As I look back on my youth, I now see that, more than anything else, I was trying to feel like I had worth. When I did outrageous things, I felt more alive than when I conformed to social expectations. I needed a certain group of peers to look up to me. I needed to stand out. I needed to feel significant and special. Unfortunately, my willingness to push the envelope was the only unique way I could come up with at the time. (I actually remember feeling jealous once when another student got in more trouble than I did.)

  The teen who stabs a peer is operating out of this same belief, which is why he felt his source of Life was threatened by an insult. The pastor who habitually gossips operates out of the same belief.

  The couple who purchases a bigger house than they need is operating out of an unconscious belief that their worth is defined by their possessions and the appearance of success. So is the billionaire who, despite already having more money than he could possibly spend, continues to sacrifice health and relationships to make more. It’s the same story for the man who continues to risk his family’s financial future through his gambling obsession.

  The Hindu who prays to Vishnu is operating out of a belief that her worth is associated with pleasing a particular god. So are the Christians who maliciously picket a gay Marine’s funeral.

  The middle-aged man who leaves his wife for a younger woman is operating out of an unconscious belief that his worth is linked to feeling young and sexually attractive—at least more so than it is to remaining faithful to his marriage vows. The woman who spends all her money on cosmetic surgery is operating out of this same belief, as is the person who compulsively engages in indiscriminant sexual activity.

  Why do we do what we do? There are a million, perfectly valid, social and psychological explanations. Despite the fact that few are aware of it, however, the most fundamental explanation is that we’re all trying to feel fully alive.

  Everybody’s got a hungry heart. Everybody’s trying to feel fully alive. Everybody craves Life.

  THE HUNGRY GOD

  There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel fully alive. It’s a central part of what makes us human. Animals are content with mere biological life, but humans never are. We need more.

  We’re supposed to experience a fullness of worth because, as a matter of fact, we have inestimable worth. We crave real Life because God created us to experience real Life.

  Only God himself can satisfy this hunger. It’s true, of course, that we can and should find some fulfillment in our relationships, accomplishments, and certain profound experiences (of music, nature, art, and so on). But if we’re at all self-aware, we know that even in the best relationships, the greatest accomplishments, and the most profound experiences, something is missing.

  Like the proverbial splinter in the brain that Morpheus talks about in the film The Matrix, we’re nagged by a certain sense of emptiness. And the reason is that, at the core of our being, we hunger for more. We hunger for a depth of Life only God can give.

  Why would God create us with this insatiable hunger? The answer is that he wants to feed us—with himself.

  God made us desperately hungry for him because he, out of love, is hungry for us. His hunger for us isn’t an expression of neediness or emptiness, as is our hunger for him. Rather, his hunger for us is an expression of the fullness of his perfect love. Precisely because he is a God of perfect love, he creates beings with whom he deeply wants to share himself and who desperately need him. Our in-built, insatiable hunger is simply God’s loving way of drawing us into a beautiful, eternal relationship with himself.

  If you doubt that God yearns to be in a love relationship with you, just look at what he did to pave the way for it to happen. In Jesus, the almighty God set aside the glory of heaven, became a human, took upon himself the hellish consequences of our sin, and died an agonizing death on the cross.

  If that doesn’t strike you as the behavior of a desperate lover, what would?

  Jesus dying on the cross reveals the beauty of the lovingly hungry God.

  A WORLD OF POTENTIAL IDOLS

  God creates us with a hunger only he can satisfy, but this hunger doesn’t force us to enter into a relationship with him. Love can’t be coerced. If we choose, we can try to satisfy our hunger in other ways.

  From its opening chapter, the Bible is the story of humanity’s futile attempt to find Life outside of God. This is what the story of Adam and Eve is about. Under the influence of the serpent, Eve embraced a deceptive, untrustworthy picture of God that caused her to stop trusting God as her source of Life. As a result, Eve was led to believe she could acquire Life on her own. She was deceived into thinking that the forbidden tree could give her something she thought she needed.

  This isn’t just a story of something that happened “once upon a time.” It’s the story of every one of us. Instead of relying on God to meet our needs, we try to meet them on our own. We all eat of the forbidden tree. (In the next chapter we’ll find out why its mysteriously called “the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”)

  The Bible calls this idolatry. Most westerners think that idolatry is about people worshiping a statue of Vishnu or Buddha or some other divinity. But the truth is that an idol is anything we treat as a god; that is, anything we use to satisfy the hunger in our soul that only our Creator can satisfy. An idol is anything other than God that we rely on as a source of Life.

  Historically, many people have tried to get Life from religious idols. Religious idolaters attempt to get Life from whatever mistaken picture of God they happen to embrace—including the mistaken idea that divinity can be found in or through physical objects (such as a statue of Vishnu or Buddha). The ultimate worth of religious idolaters is rooted in the religious activities they do or religious doctrines they believe, both of which they think please their gods. Even when Christians try to get Life from (what they assume is) the rightness of their behaviors and beliefs instead of from God himself, they are guilty of idolatry.

  But there are as many nonreligious idols as religious ones. In Western culture, sex, wealth, and power are the most common idols. But others make idols of their nation, race, talents, looks, or fame. In fact, just about everything in this world is a potential idol, for just about anything can be used as a means of trying to feel fully alive.

  THE MISERABLE FEEDING FRENZY

  When the thing that makes you feel fully alive is something as iffy as sexual vigor, wealth, or power, it wreaks havoc on your soul. On some level you know that you may never attain the sexual experiences, wealth, or power you’re striving for.

  Even if you manage to get what you’re seeking, you know that it’s just a matter of time before you lose it. There’s a multitude of competitors for the wealth, power, and fame you’ve acquired, and at some moment they might gain an advantage over you. And even if you manage to stay on top of the hill, you know that you’re slowly going to waste away and die. Aging and death are never kind to idols.

  Not only this, but even if you’re successful at acquiring all the worth you can from your sexuality, wealth, power—or whatever idols you happen to embrace—you know it doesn’t even satisfy you while you enjoy them. We can distract ourselves from our inner emptiness but it never goes away.

  The Bible describes living this way—which Paul calls “the flesh”—as a miserable affair. Life in “the flesh” is full of anxiety, hopelessness, envy, strife, anger, and bitterness. The idolatrous world of “the fles
h” is a competitive feeding frenzy of desperately hungry people trying to scarf up a morsel of fleeting worth from a limited number of idolatrous sources. Idolatry is at the root of most of the misery in the world.

  Trace your own despair, anxiety, or bitterness back far enough and, more likely than not, you’ll discover there’s something other than God that you’re clinging to as a source of Life.

  Not only this, but throughout history idolatry has been at the root of all the hatred, conflict, and bloodshed in the world. People will kill to acquire and protect their source of feeling fully alive and worthwhile. Idolatry and violence go hand-in-hand.

  THE BEAUTIFUL TRUTH ABOUT GOD—AND US

  Jesus came into this oppressed, idolatrous world to reintroduce us to the true source of Life and thereby rescue us from this futile, miserable, idolatrous feeding frenzy. The reason he can do this is because he reveals who God truly is—and who we truly are.

  In contrast to the pathetic picture of God that the serpent gave to Eve, Jesus reveals the true character of God. This is why the New Testament refers to Jesus as the Word, Image, and perfect expression of God. It’s why Jesus himself insisted that if we see him, we see God the Father. And it’s why the New Testament repeatedly encourages us to fix our spiritual eyes on Jesus. The outrageous love and mercy displayed throughout Jesus’ life, and especially in his death, is the love and mercy of God himself.

  If we are willing to trust him, Jesus frees us from the bondage of the enemy’s deceptive picture of God. He frees us to return to God as our one and only source of Life.

  At the same time, Jesus confronts the lie that there’s something humans need to do, and can do, to acquire Life on our own. The fact that God himself became a human and died for our sin reveals that we can’t find Life on our own. If we had the ability to save ourselves, it wouldn’t have been necessary for God to go to this radical extreme to save us. But the fact that God did this out of love reveals we don’t need to try to find Life on our own. Jesus reveals that, despite our sin, God remained desperately in love with us and as a result opened up the way for us to enter into the eternal relationship with him that he’s always wanted.

  In Jesus we discover the beauty of the true God and the beauty of what he created and saved us to be. In Jesus we discover the unsurpassable and unconditional worth, significance, and security our hearts were created to enjoy. In Jesus, our hearts finally find what they’ve been hungry for, so we are empowered to break our miserable addiction to idols.

  FREEDOM

  A “kingdom,” as I wrote earlier, is a king’s domain. To belong to the Kingdom of God means we surrender our life to God and make it part of the domain over which he rules. When we do this, we immediately begin to experience the Life that comes from God and begin to be transformed into the image of Jesus.

  Just as the Jesus-looking Kingdom begins as a mustard seed and slowly grows to take over the whole earth, so the Kingdom begins as a mustard seed in our own life and gradually grows to take over our entire existence. We become citizens of the Kingdom the moment we genuinely surrender our lives, but we experience and manifest the true Life of the Kingdom only as we learn to yield to him on a daily basis.

  As the Kingdom grows in us, our addiction to idols wanes. As we grow in our capacity to experience the true God and our true worth in Jesus Christ, we increasingly find that the idols of the world lose their power—and even their appeal. When a person truly experiences their unsurpassable worth as a child of the King, what could all the wealth, power, sex, or fame in the world possibly offer? Nothing.

  Jesus said we shall know the truth and the truth shall set us free. This is the freedom he was talking about. To the extent that our longing for worth, significance, and security is fully satisfied by our relationship with Christ, we crave nothing and fear nothing. We are literally a people who have nothing to gain and nothing to lose. Having lost our life, we’ve found true Life. This is true freedom!

  This freedom is what empowers Jesus followers to imitate his radically self-sacrificial lifestyle. While others live out of a center of emptiness that forces them to strive to acquire and protect their idolatrous sources of Life, Kingdom people live out of a center of fullness that frees them to live with abandon as they focus on carrying out God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven.”

  This is the heart of the Kingdom revolution Jesus unleashed in the world. It manifests the beauty of God’s free Life while revolting against the ugliness of idolatrous bondage.

  Viva la revolution!

  CHAPTER 4

  THE REVOLT

  AGAINST JUDGMENT

  A man cannot raise himself up above any other man

  or set himself before him as a model,

  for he knows himself to be the greatest of all sinners.

  He can excuse the sin of another, but never his own.

  DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

  WAKING UP TO MENTAL GOSSIP

  About ten years ago I was shopping in a mall with my wife, Shelley. Now, I don’t know if this is a male-female thing, or if it’s unique to Shelley and me, but shopping tends to excite her while it makes me profoundly tired. As soon as I walk into a store—unless it’s a bookstore or a drum shop (I love drums!)—I get sleepy. So, as usual, Shelley ended up going from store to store while I parked my tired behind on a bench in the center of the mall.

  For about ten minutes I just watched people. Then suddenly, as if someone had placed a megaphone to my thoughts, I heard my own running commentary about almost everyone and everything I saw. Much of it was positive, but some of it was, frankly, complete trash. I heard myself say things like:

  “What kind of parent would treat a child like that?”

  “Could her dress make it more obvious what she wants guys to notice?”

  “Definitely gay.”

  “What a nag.”

  “Ohhh. Tough guy aren’t we?”

  “Like that person needs that Big Mac.”

  It was like I was gossiping in the privacy of my brain. I was surprised by this since I’ve always thought of myself as a tolerant, nonjudgmental person.

  When I started paying attention, I found that in most cases the person I watched triggered an association in my mind. For example, something about the lady I judged to be a “nag” reminded me of the stepmother who raised me.

  But beneath these psychological reasons I discovered an even deeper motivation for my internal gossip: I was engaging in mental gossip because it gave me a heightened sense of worth. Contrasting myself with others made me feel more fully alive. I was trying to get Life from an idol, and the idol was my judgment of others. The motivation was profoundly subtle, which is why I’d never noticed it before. But once I woke up to it, it was undeniable.

  Like all judgment, my mental gossip was predicated on the assumption that I am qualified to be the insightful arbiter of other people’s parenting skills, dressing styles, sexual orientation, dietary habits, and the like. It presupposed my superiority. However imperfect I may be, at least I wasn’t like that person. And though I was unconscious of it before then, on some level this private judgment game made me feel significant.

  Some might think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, I didn’t actually verbalize my thoughts to anyone, so was I really judging them? And doesn’t everybody think like this at times? Sure, having private judgments may not be ideal and, technically speaking, may even be sinful—but it’s surely not a serious sin. What’s the big deal?

  This is a big deal. The fact that everybody does it, and that we tend to minimize it, simply demonstrates how serious a problem this is and how hard it is to confront.

  JUDGMENT AND DISCERNMENT

  First, we need to be clear about what “judgment” is and what it is not.

  On the one hand, Jesus and the New Testament writers repeatedly and emphatically forbid us to judge others. On the other hand, we’re repeatedly and emphatically told we can, for example, know a tree by its fruits. Doesn’t that
involve judgment? We’re also instructed to grow in our ability to distinguish between good and evil, and we’re told to hold one another accountable. In fact, in cases where a brother or sister will not turn from a seriously harmful behavior, we’re told to remove them from our fellowship. Don’t these instructions involve judging people?

  The answer is no, not in the sense that I am using the term—and here’s why. The Greek word usually translated “judgment” is krino. We get the word “critic” from this word, and it literally means “to cut, divide, or separate things.” A movie critic, for example, is one who helps us separate good movies from bad ones.

  Now there’s a kind of separating (krino) that is appropriate and necessary, and a kind of separating that is utterly inappropriate and sinful. For the sake of clarity I’ll label the good kind discernment and the bad kind judgment. Every day we need to discern whether certain things are helpful or unhelpful, godly or ungodly, wise or stupid. We need to continually discern the difference between a good use of time and money and a bad use of time and money. We need to discern whether we’re safe or in danger, whether we think its going to rain or not, whether we think a person should be hired for a job or not, whether it’s wise to trust a person or not, whether we look better in the blue dress or the hot pink one, whether we agree with an author or not, and a million things of this sort. This sort of discernment is obviously good and natural. We couldn’t live without making such practical distinctions.

  This sort of discernment obviously is not what Jesus and New Testament authors are talking about when they forbid us to “judge.” For when we judge, as I was doing in the mall that afternoon, we aren’t distinguishing between things. We’re rather separating ourselves from other people and placing ourselves (or “our” group) above them. We’re contrasting ourselves favorably with others as a way of making ourselves feel more worthy, more significant, or more secure.