Australia Day is tomorrow. It is a great national holiday to celebrate ... my mother’s birthday. OK I know that it really is about the day that the first white convicts, make that “settlers” arrived at Botany Bay but so what, it is still my mum’s birthday.
It is a nonsense argument I know that the day should be subverted to a personal agenda, but we all do it in one way or another. This includes matters of faith as well. My opening statement is a throwback to something that a person of influence, my Grandfather, told me probably before I was of school age as he raised the flag at home. To me at that age it became a matter of faith – faith in what my Grandfather told me. Even at age 9 I remember being told by him that when we moved from Sydney to country Victoria that “I would have to learn a new language”, and I still believed him.
Childhood statements of faith like this are humorous. When we grow up the idea of distortion of faith statements is another issue, it can be a matter of life and death. One example from the Bible of a distortion in this regard is the story of Jonah. He was given a job by God that he chose not to do and instead thought “I will run away to where God cannot find me”. I think when he volunteered to be thrown into the sea he was thinking that death was even better than accomplishing God’s mission, but he was still to be saved by the God he was running from.
The Jonah narrative is a ripper of a yarn, especially as a story kids remember but it does have a greater significance. It shows that even prophets of God can make wrong decisions based on distortions of faith. Tarshish, his planned destination was all the way across the Mediterranean Sea, it is now called Spain. Jonah believed that the only way to get out of the job was to move out of God’s sphere of influence. It could have been a great plan but for the distortion of faith about God’s presence.
Jonah is an example of disobedience based on his beliefs about God. A far more serious example of the way we can have our faith distorted by others is by having our frame of reference limited by the majority thinking of those we associate with. This is not a decision process; in fact it is just the opposite. We are not being “disobedient or faithless” we tell ourselves on those rare occasions that we have a “crisis of faith” which is just another way of referring to the pangs of conscience. We say “live and let live” rather than stand up for Jesus when we see, or do, something just to not stand out.
This is a serious issue. Just tonight I read an article about a public meeting in a town hall that was to debate the issue of the “legitimacy of Democracy versus Sharia Law in Australia.” On the side of Islam was a convert to the belief and on the other side was a “concerned Aussie”, a proponent of the Firearms Forum, whose beef was that Sharia was that Sharia and Islam is “preaching hatred. Initially it seemed a bit of a laugh about violence in the meeting but, on reflection, it occurred to me that this was not a debate about faith – it was all about one radical getting his position across because another radical was “horrified” by the more extreme elements of Sharia.
The Christians are no shows in this debate that is all about religion and government and we should be standing up for Father not just in this extreme example but also in the more social arenas that simply corrupt society, and show dishonour to our God.
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