Born to Win Podcast - with Ronald L. Dart

Try to put yourself for a moment in the mind of one of the original disciples of Jesus. How would you have been different from what you are today? Well, in the first place, you would have been a Jew. Like Jesus himself, you would have been a regular in synagogue attendance, and you would have been a Sabbath keeper. The Sabbath, you must understand, was more than just another commandment, more than a mere doctrine. It was a matter of religious identity. Now how and when did all that get changed? Why would you, at some later time, abandon the observance of the Sabbath in favor of Sunday? And what would have been the consequences of that change?

What in the world is God doing? I suspect there are those who would say, Not very much. The world looks like God wound it up, started it spinning, and then walked away from it. And if you should ask, How is the Gospel doing in the world, someone might reply, Not very well. After all, most of the world is not Christian, and never has been. All those dead people who never heard of Jesus in their lifetime—where are they? Now I realize I am making some people uncomfortable with these questions, but they are honest questions that deserve an honest answer. Paul gives us some insight with his words to Timothy.

Would it shock you to learn that during the time when the New Testament was being written, the entire Christian Church throughout the known world observed the Sabbath day? How about the fact that the great majority of Christian churches observed the Sabbath for over 400 years? And that a substantial part of the Christian churches were still observing the Sabbath day a thousand years later. No, I don’t mean Sunday. I mean what most people would call the Jewish Sabbath. I mean Saturday. I mean the fourth commandment. As late as the 80’s and 90’s of the first century, when the last epistles of then Bible were being written, the church universally observed the seventh-day Sabbath. This is really beyond dispute. This is not a matter of a few proof texts and technical arguments. It is something that is woven into the very fabric of the New Testament. Let me start with some common ground—something that everyone will agree on.

I had a friend once who allowed that human beings were, to God, like fish eggs. We were sitting in the sun on a bass boat trying unsuccessfully to catch something and he was trying to make sense of the world. A fishing boat is a great place for philosophizing. I know, he said, that there is only one way of salvation, and that is by the name of Jesus Christ. But I also know that the vast majority of the people who have ever lived have never heard that name. My friend speculated that God, in order to bring a few sons to his kingdom, had to put billions of us here on the earth to allow for wastage. I had to admit that the idea had a perverse logic to it. But what did it say about the kind of being who would create a system like that for man? For we are not fish, we are human. We suffer. We hope, we love, we create. Is the God we read about in the Bible the sort of person who would waste people in their billions to achieve his objectives? It is one thing for God to give man the freedom to accept or reject life with God, but another thing altogether to subject man to the kind of suffering we see in this world without giving the man hope of something better. The apostle Paul was concerned about the wastage of people. It was unlike God, he thought, to just throw people away, to cast them to the wolves. There is a long passage in Romans where Paul agonizes over the question of the Jews. We would like to think that men like Paul had all the answers, but it is apparent that is not the case. Paul struggled with this, thinking out loud in his letter to the Christians in Rome. He tried to take what he knew about God and his plan, to create an explanation for his lack of success in taking the Gospel to the Jews. In city after city where Paul went, the Jews rejected the Gospel while Gentiles flocked to it. It didn't make sense to Paul. You can read the entire section beginning with Romans 9. For now, I want to focus on Romans 11.

Many years ago, before I learned better about arguing religion, I was engaged in a discussion focused on people who never even heard the name of Jesus anytime in their lives. How could it be right for God to torture these people forever? Tell me he is just going to leave them dead and we have one picture. Tell me he has arranged for their eternal torment and we have another altogether. And then, there are the children. Are all these people, including countless children, who had never had a chance to be saved going to burn for all eternity? Perhaps you say, Well, I believe that God will make a way. Well, then you and I would be in agreement. But I think it would be strange indeed if in all the pages of the Bible, we couldn’t find so much as a hint as to what that way is.

I hesitate to tell you this, because when you find out what I want to talk about, you are liable to punch the button on your radio, click a button in your browser, and head off into other pursuits. I have given this a lot of thought and study, and I have come to the conclusion that, sooner or later, one way or another, we are all going to die. See, I knew you would want to buzz off, but stay with me a minute. I take my vitamins in hope of getting rid of some of the creaks, and I follow my doctor’s instructions. But every once in a while, I stop and laugh at myself because I know I am fighting a losing battle. The battle is worth fighting, because we have a lot of work to do, but I know, and you know, that in the end, we all die. A man known to us as the Apostle Paul faced up to the same questions of mortality and suffering for different reasons (He faced death in more ways than we ever will.) and he used an interesting metaphor for the human body: a tent.

All of us are pretty well acquainted with the fact that the Holy Days, as originally given to Israel, were oriented around the concept of the harvest festival. To some extent, I think some people have tended to dismiss them for that very reason. They have looked at them as agricultural festivals which don’t have a great deal of relevance to 20-century man, 20-century urban man in particular. Now, God chose these festivals and placed them around the harvest season certainly because Israel was an agricultural society. (There wasn’t much else in that day and time that amounted to anything.) I have no idea how, if God was introducing his true religion in today’s world, he would orient his festivals or what he would call them. But there is really nothing better than the harvest festival to convey to the mind of man the real meaning behind the Holy Days of God. Today, we will examine the symbolism and meaning of the Holy Days as expressed in the life of Christ and in prophecy.

It seems to me that we of the Christian faith have lost touch with our roots in some very important ways. We are so comfortable in the modern world, so at home in it, so “in touch”, that some of our old hymns really don’t mean much to us any longer. “On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand and cast a wistful eye, To Canaan’s fair and happy land where my possessions lie.” or This world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through. If heaven’s not my home, O Lord what shall I do? What do Jordan and Canaan have to do with the Christian faith? Christians of an earlier generation found much in the history and practice of Israel that they could identify with. One of the most fundamental Christian beliefs is that we are not at home here. We are strangers and pilgrims, and we look for a better world to come.

If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. Philippians 2:1–7 NIV84