Bertram Russell the philosopher and cynic once said, “most people would rather die than think… and most people do.” He went on to say, “When I die I rot”, which may have been true in his case, but not the whole truth. The reality is most people would rather not think about the one certainty in life. Yesterday I went to see the World Press Photo exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall. The annual competition takes entries from photojournalists, picture agencies, newspapers and magazines across the world. The winners whose photos are on display were selected from more than 100,000 entries. I was struck by two things as I walked round: How many of them portrayed people about to die, in the act of dying or afterwards. Second, by how those visiting the exhibition stood in silence, mesmerised by the photographs.  Too much reality is hard to cope with, even in black and white. It’s the same with the biographies of famous people isn’t it? Biographies always dwell on their life achievements but invariably give little or no space to their deaths. That is why it is so striking to discover that in the biographies of Jesus dedicate about one third of their space to the last seven days in the life of Jesus and specifically to the subject of Jesus’ death. Clearly, Jesus was an amazing individual. But why spend so much time dwelling on his death? And further, why is it that the mode of his death—the cross—has become the universally-recognized symbol of Christianity?

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The song popularized by Louis Armstrong ‘What a Wonderful World’ is a beautiful song that celebrates nature: Trees of green, red roses too, they bloom for me and you; Skies of blue, clouds of white, bright blessed day and dark sacred nights. Nature is marvelled at and I’m sure you have experienced that and felt the same wonder. It’s a song that also celebrates friendship, and above all it celebrates falling in love: Friends shake hands saying, ‘How do you do?’ What they are really saying is, ‘I love you.’ It’s a great song about the fantastic gifts of life: creation; friendship; falling in love. But as we saw from the pictures, there is something wrong with our world.

But in Mitch Markowitz’s film Good Morning Vietnam while the song says one thing the pictures say another. As we are told ‘the roses bloom for me and for you’, we see a bomb going off. As we hear the words ‘the colours of the rainbow so pretty in the sky’, we see protesters being beaten. And, most poignant of all, the chorus of ‘I say to myself, what a wonderful world’ is accompanied by images of the little child’s sandal. That’s the world we live in.  It should be so good and yet there is something desperately wrong. The film’s artistry is very clever because it shows us that the world is not the place it ought to be. It should be a wonderful world, but all too often it is spoilt by people. The film is summed up by the Vietnamese girl with whom Robin Williams has fallen in love.

She says that so many things do not happen the way you want them to.  The Bible actually goes deeper than that.  The Bible says that so many things don’t happen the way we want them to because people are not what they should be. People are sick, indeed dying, says Jesus, and we so desperately need a doctor.  The tragedy is, most people do not realize their condition is fatal. Before we realize how desperate we are, we need to realize three things: who Jesus is, why he came and how he alone can make us well again.

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He was a professional thief. His name stirred fear as the desert wind stirs tumbleweeds. He terrorized the Wells Fargo stage line for thirteen years, roaring like a tornado in and out of the Sierra Nevadas, spooking the most rugged frontiersmen. In journals from San Francisco to New York, his name became synonymous with the danger of the frontier. During his reign of terror between 1875 and 1883, he is credited with stealing the bags and the breath away from twenty-nine different stagecoach crews. And he did it without firing a shot. His weapon was his reputation. His ammunition was intimidation.  A hood hid his face. No victim ever saw him. No artist ever sketched his features. No sheriff could ever track his trail. He never fired a shot or took a hostage. He didn’t have to. His presence was enough to paralyze. Black Bart. A hooded bandit armed with a deadly weapon.

He reminds me of another thief-one who’s still around. You know him. Oh you’ve never seen his face, either. You couldn’t describe his voice or sketch his profile. But when he’s near, you know it in a heartbeat. If you’ve ever been in the hospital, you’ve felt the leathery brush of his hand against yours. If you’ve ever sensed someone was following you, you’ve felt his cold breath down your neck. If you’ve awakened late at night in a strange room, it was his husky whisper that stole your slumber. You know him. It was this thief who left your palms sweaty as you went for the job interview. It was this con man who convinced you to swap your integrity for popularity. And it was this scoundrel who whispered in your ear as you left the cemetery, “You may be next.” He’s the Black Bart of the soul. He doesn’t want your money. He doesn’t want your diamonds.
He won’t go after your car. He wants something far more precious. He wants your peace of mind-your joy. His name? Fear. His task is to take your courage and leave you timid and trembling. Fear of death, fear of failure, fear of God, fear of tomorrow-his arsenal is vast. His goal? To create cowardly, joyless souls.

Last week we began a new series “Christianity Explored” We want to discover who Jesus is and why he came. For answers we are reading the Gospel of Mark together. Continue reading →

Who would you regard as the most inspirational leader of the 20^th Century? The person you would look to as a hero in your lifetime?

Mahatma Gandhi – Resisting Colonialism non-violently
Martin Luther King – Achieving civil rights for Blacks
Winston Churchill – Defeating Fascism in World War 2
Simon Weisenthal – A life time pursuing War Criminals
Nelson Mandela – Overcoming Apartheid in South Africa

And how about Tony Blair, Barak Obama or David Cameron? –

Apart from Jesus perhaps, who would be your hero in all of world history? Of all the Old Testament characters, Moses stands out as the greatest.  He was a prophet, a politician, mediator, lawyer, historian and leader, all in one. Probably no name has ever stirred the heart of a nation as his has done. It is impossible to overrate the place of Moses in the Jewish nation. His Hebrew parentage; his forty years education in the Egyptian royal family, his forty years of solitude with God herding sheep in the wilderness. All these combined to prepare him to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt at the sprightly young age of 80 [Exodus 7:7]. Yes, 80 years old. And then what? The first 80 years equipped Moses to lead his people through the desert for the next 40 years before they entered the Promised Land.

And nowhere does the character of Moses shine out with greater dignity than in the Book of Deuteronomy. We see him at the end of a long life, still with unabated vigour, as God’s people are about to enter the Promised Land without him. Yet there is no trace of bitterness in his heart. Instead he rejoices that they will enter the land under the leadership of Joshua. The Lord’s final instructions to Moses come in Deuteronomy 32

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Signs are symbols often without words. Signs can be powerful. Clear signs are instantly recognisable. We use them to educate, to guide, to warn, to instruct, even to intimidate and change behaviour. Common signs can be understood irrespective of your language or your culture. You don’t even have to read or write to learn to recognise simple signs.

So the clearer and simpler the sign, the better. There is nothing worse than an ambiguous or a confusing sign, or one that is clear, but is ignored. Interpreting signs correctly therefore is important. That is especially true if you are driving a car, you are a cyclist, a pedestrian or you are a small child.

But discerning the difference between an interesting sign and a warning sign is very important. And obeying signs there for your safety, or the safety of other people, is most important of all.

In today’s story from the Book of Numbers we see a powerful sign God used to save his people from death. It’s a sign we still use today to symbolise somewhere or someone you can go to when you are sick.  But before we look at this particular sign, lets remind ourselves of three other signs God gave in Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus to help us understand how and why the Lord Jesus came to be our Saviour.

In our series called Christ in all the Scriptures, we are discovering how God gave signs or symbols to help his people understand how they could know him, love him, follow him and service him.

Three weeks ago in Genesis we saw in the story of Abraham and Isaac, how the Lord provided a male lamb as a substitute for Isaac. This prefigured, in a wonderful way, how the Lord Jesus willingly became the sacrifice in our place. Then in the Book of Exodus we saw how God passed over his people on the night of judgement because they hid behind the blood of the lamb sprinkled on their lintels and door posts. Thus the ‘Pass-over’ meal became an annual reminder of how God liberated his people them slavery. We saw how Jesus became our Passover lamb when he died on the cross. Then last week in Leviticus we learnt about the Day of Atonement. We saw how the High Priest became the mediator between God and his people entering the temple to sprinkle the blood of the sacrifice on the Day of Atonement. How one goats was sacrificed for sin and how one goat, the scapegoat carried their sins far away into the wilderness. Sins forgiven and forgotten. We saw how the New Testament interprets this as a wonderful symbol of what the Lord Jesus did as our mediator and scapegoat.

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