Australia is a big country. Actually, it is a continent in itself, and also arguably the world’s largest island. Australia is the sixth-largest country in the world at 7,686,850 sq.km., but the population density is among the lowest in the world at 2.7 /sq.km. In comparison, Ukraine is the 44th largest country at 603,700 sq.km., with a population density of 76.2/sq.km. Ukraine will fit easily within my home state of NSW, here (800,642 sq.km.).
What some of you may not know is that we have a bit of an obsession in Australia with big things! It started and continues mainly as an advertising gimmick. I am not sure what the first ‘big’ thing created was, but one of the most famous is the Big Banana, in Nambour, Queensland.
I like the Big Merino in Goulburn, NSW. It stands 15 metres high and is a great replica of the type of sheep that made Australia famous for sheep, and they were my passion for 30 years.
The farmers of Rockhampton, Queensland, a big beef centre, would not be outdone, and so erected this Big Bull. One of the late-night pastimes of the local lads is to steal the reproductive parts of this fine animal! They have been stolen and replaced numerous times.
Krys the crocodile is a full-size model of an 8.6 m (28-foot 4-inch) saltwater crocodile with a girth of 4 m. (13 feet). The real croc had been shot by crocodile hunter Krystina Pawloski in the Norman River in July 1958. I imagine she must have unloaded a magazine full of bullets into it before it capitulated. If I were these children, I don’t think I would be getting too close to his mouth.... just in case!
Three Big Differences
But I am interested in other ‘big’ things this morning. I want to ask you what are the two big differences between Adventism and the rest of the Christian community, indeed, between biblical Christianity and almost all other religion? What sets biblical Christianity (and Adventism) apart from all other systems?
I anticipated some of you would say either the Sabbath or the Investigative Judgement. The Sabbath is extremely important, and it becomes included in one of my categories, which you will see shortly. The IJ certainly makes us distinctive, because it is unique in Christianity. It is unique because apparently no one in the long history of Christianity even dreamt of it until 1856. I will leave it aside for the moment because I want to concentrate on the two most important umbrella categories that cover many others. Some may even suggest the Great Controversy, but this is a theme, and not unique to Adventism.
In fact, there may be a third umbrella difference that sets biblical Christian teaching apart from nearly all other Christian teaching, but I will deal with it separately another time, under the designation the “Openness of God.”[1]
I am sure you have come across people who say to you that it really doesn’t matter which religion you follow. After all, we all worship the same God, goes the reasoning. Well, of course, that is patent nonsense, since much of the non-Christian world worships myriad gods. I don’t want to worship rats as a manifestation of god, as Hindus do. Buddha strictly forbade his followers to worship him – what a waste of breath. And I am sure the God of the Bible is not much like Allah, the Moslem god.
But even within Christianity, and including Judaism, there are large differences in belief, and while the God we worship might be said to be the same, differences in belief keep some of us miles apart. Yes, I call all Christian believers my brothers and sisters; I have many friends in many confessions; I fellowship with them whenever I can, and I choose to focus on our commonality in belief. However, biblical truth must be defended, especially in key areas, and so like Francis Schaeffer I must stand apart in this sense. Apart from the false understanding of God and life these different beliefs engender, we are reminded by Paul that the last manifestation of Antichrist will arise within the Christian church (2 Thess 2:4), and so we must be wary.
What I want to do now is try to give you an overview of how these two big differences affect many of our other beliefs and our understanding of how we live our Christian life.
The big ‘umbrella’ differences in biblical Christianity are The Unity of Man and The Unity of Scripture. So what do I mean by these? We will leave the second big difference, the Unity of Scripture, till next time. It encompasses as much as the Unity of Man, so I hope you will come to hear what other teachings it covers, and how it affects them.
Let’s deal today with the Unity of Man. According to traditional Christian teaching man is a combination of a body and a soul, and when we die our body decays to dust, but our soul goes to either heaven, if we have followed Jesus, or to hell if we have turned our backs on God.
This traditional teaching emanates from ancient Persian and Platonic philosophy and entered the Christian church through Augustine around 400 A.D. Through Persian Manichaeism came the idea of the divine origins of the soul and its painful captivity by the body and mixture with matter, with the idea that the body and matter are evil and will pass away, and with Plato, that the soul will fly away to heaven when this life is done.[2]
But the Bible teaches something quite different on this subject, and this truth affects many areas of our life and thinking. You know it is a whole study in itself to unfold what the Bible teaches precisely on this, but this morning I want to give you a couple of key texts and we will then jump to an overview of how this teaching affects our life here and now and what it means for the future.
Gen. 2:7
then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.
This text summarises what mankind is made of. When God shapes him out of a lump of clay, like a potter, and then breathes into him the breath of life, he becomes a “living creature,” just like the other animals. Is that correct? Yes, it is, with one difference, the man is made in the image of God. Notice the difference is not that the man has a soul, and the animals don’t. The Hebrew word here for the creature man is nephesh, and it is the same word used for the animals. It is translated “soul” in the KJV, but ‘creature’ or ‘being’ in most other translations. Man is just like the animals except that he is somehow more like God than them. So man does not have a soul, man is a soul. The whole person, body+mind+heart (or the spiritual side) = soul. No part can ever be separated from the other parts. Man is just a mortal animal that is somehow a little more like God than the other animals.
This life is meant to lead us on a path to become more like God than we started out. But some of us seem to become more like the animals, instead.
Luke 23:46
Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Having said this, he breathed his last.
Jesus committed his spirit to God (that is, he entrusted himself to God’s care as he was about to die), breathed his last, and dies! Just like we must. If he was not resurrected, his body would start to decay to dust very quickly, and he would cease to existgain! That was the only prospect he could see at this final hour – non-existence! The end! Finito! He was prepared to submit to this so we could be saved.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!”
But Jesus was resurrected – bodily! And he is the paradigm for all believers. Here is what happens to us. We commit ourselves to God’s care, we breathe our last, our consciousness ceases, and we decay to dust – until the resurrection. At the resurrection we resume consciousness and bodily activity again. The two never happen independently. We do not have a soul – we are a soul.
I have a friend in Australia, in my home town, and he is a wonderful soul. He doesn’t have a wonderful soul, he is a wonderful soul. This is what I mean by the Unity of Man. He is an indivisible unity. And this understanding stands diametrically opposed to nearly all other belief systems, and it affects many other aspects of our faith and life practice.
Firstly I want you to notice that Hell is Finite. If we are not immortal by nature, but mortal, as the Bible continually maintains, then if we do not follow God, we simply cease to exist in the end. The Bible uses so many metaphors for this that some theologians even say there is no fiery end at all. I am not so sure about this, but the Bible puts the end state of those who turn away from God variously, as being ‘excluded from the presence of God,’ ‘cast into outer darkness,’ it says we will ‘perish,’ ‘die,’ or be subject to ‘destruction.’
1 John 5:12 tells us, “He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.”
The final judgement is always and only in terms of life and death. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 6:23) It does not say, “For the wages of sin is eternal torture in fire.” You are ‘excluded from the source of life,’ and you die! Once, and for all.
The wicked do not writhe in a molten volcanic fireball forever and ever, as many would have us believe. If there is a fire for the wicked, it only lasts till they lose consciousness. And then they ‘perish.’ The teaching of an eternal fiery hell has done immense damage to Christianity.
The only place the Bible points to as the eternal home of the saved is a re-created earth. You can search the Bible from front to back and you will never find anywhere that our eternal home will be heaven, or even that we will be taken to heaven. If you find it anywhere, please show me, because I have never seen it. Both the OT and the NT talk in terms of an ideal earth as the permanent home of the saved. You can look at Isaiah 65:17-25 in the OT, and Revelation 21-22 in the NT. They both teach the same.
And this teaching of the Unity of man also affects how we live life now. The Bible is not just about “Pie in the sky when you die, bye and bye!” It also says you can have a “Piece on the plate while you wait!”
When Christianity adopted the ancient Greek philosophy that we have a separate soul, around 400 A.D., there were two aberrant understandings about the body that became acceptable. One said that if the body was somehow evil, or of a lower nature, and that only the soul would survive for eternity, then it didn’t matter what you did with the body. So that if you had sexual relations with abandon it didn’t really matter that much, because it was only the body, the “flesh” which was aberrant and the soul could remain pure. Likewise, if you indulged your appetite and neglected your health, it would not affect the soul. So you could live how you liked in the body.
The almost opposite also seemed to hold true, that if the body was doomed to decay, then you could starve it, and also deny the sexual nature. So asceticism took hold with some. This is part of the reason the Catholic practice of celibacy for the clergy came about, and we all know the problems that has caused the Catholic Church and the many victims of abuse.
As we have seen, though, the Bible has a different teaching. It teaches that God created this physical universe with physical beings to live in it. As he finished creating each segment of it, he announced that it was “good,” and when he had finished his week of creation, he said it was “very good.” (Gen. 1:31) God created us as sexual beings and told us to go to it and procreate! Of course with some guidelines for our protection! He even told us what our ideal diet should be. And all of this right in the first two chapters of the Bible, so we wouldn’t miss it! Unfortunately, many still miss it! And we suffer if we miss anything God tells us for our own good.
God made us an indivisible unity. And what God has joined together, man should not separate. Man thinks he can separate the mental from the physical, and the spiritual from the physical. He thinks he can think sexually about another woman or man and it will not really matter because he hasn’t really “done” anything, physically. But Jesus says differently. One of the biggest challenges in the Christian life is to keep the unity! To hold the man together!
You cannot separate the spiritual from the physical, mental and social. You will have great pain and cause great pain if you try. Sexual sin has consequences physically, mentally, socially and spiritually. All sin is the same.
One of my favourite authors, Francis Schaeffer, says, “Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.” And when you see that the Bible has a teaching on all the key areas in life, not only about the big questions of religion, like where we came from, and what will be our end, but also about how to live on the journey between the two – on the questions about sexuality and relationships, the way to live healthfully, on how to survive financially – there are even teachings for politics!
Then you start to understand how powerful a book it is for life. It really does provide a unified answer for the whole of life. But the key is that we must follow its teaching by putting it into practice, and not just hold it in our mind for safe keeping.
As I said, this teaching even has important implications for politics. “Love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you.” (Luke 6:27) Because mankind is a unity, a family. Difficult to put into practice, but that is the command.
When Russia walked into Crimea recently its soldiers were told by someone to fire on Ukrainian soldiers held up in their barracks and refusing to surrender. But a Russian General rushed out between them and said, “No, no, you can’t shoot these men, because these men are your brothers!” I wish Putin would understand this instead of sowing division between these brothers. In the centre of Kiev there is a huge statue of two men standing with their hands joined in triumph. These are a Ukrainian and a Russian man standing together in a symbol of brotherly unification. But the unity will be shattered if Putin continues on his present egotistic course.
And that is where this teaching about the Unity of Man comes to the fore again. You see, if man is an intrinsic whole, then we cannot just hold truths spiritually. We must put them into practice mentally, physically and socially. If we do not we will not claim the benefit. If you say you believe in good health, yet you smoke tobacco, drink alcohol and eat anything your eye fancies – what will happen to you? You will suffer the effects on your health, and possibly die much younger than you needed to! Life is physical! Or should I say the physical, mental, social and spiritual are all rolled into one, not only for this life but for the life to come.
If we say we love our enemy, as Jesus commands us, but we take up arms in time of war to kill him, we do not love him.
The Bible paints man as a unified whole, and that is why it provides a unified answer for the whole of life. Isaiah gave us some of the most succinct advice in the Bible when he summed up the task of man:
“This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.” (Isa. 66:2)
[1] This category could include the calling of Israel as God’s answer to mankind’s sin (which necessitates war in some sense), the great controversy theme (which necessarily includes the war theme), and the openness of God. [2] Some modern scholars have suggested that Manichaean ways of thinking influenced the development of some of Augustine's ideas, such as the nature of good and evil, the idea of hell, the separation of groups into elect, hearers, and sinners, and the hostility to the flesh and sexual activity.
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