Thursday, June 29, 2006

Got Teleology?

There’s no healing for my hope. I am hopelessly hopeful, incurably whole and beyond help for the view I hold of the God I love and the world He loves. I'm positively giddy about the future and drunk with a Holy Spirit induced high that won't let me go! And yes, I've seen the end-times forecasts on Christian TV. I've heard the gleeful singing about getting ready to fly away from this soon to be incinerated planet.

But my good cheer just will not let me go there with these bell ringers ding-donging doomsday. God has given me a theology with a teleology that has a methodology of an ontology rooted in the very nature of God as revealed in His Christology. It's just that simple. If you need any help on those terms, just do some research....you've got time.

Hmm...research and time; those are commodities that the sleazy salesmen of end-times products won't encourage you to use. Its just too costly to their bottom line. Trust me on this one; their "product-line" is generating a healthy profit that they can not afford to surrender. Bluntly stated, if they admit they are wrong, on any level, it costs them millions of dollars.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality”. In a speech following his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950, William Faulkner said, “I decline to accept the end of man….man will not only endure, but prevail….because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

There are voices in the church today who, with unchained reach and unfettered volume, are declaring the opposite. To them, there is a violent "end” of human life based solely on the evil nature of humans. Nuclear holocaust like hail stones from God with a garnish of devinely inspired 15.0 earthquakes......and those are just the appetizers! Their teleology welcomes the thief whose goals are killing, stealing and destroying.

"But pastor! Haven't you read the Book of Revelations?" Nope; but I have read the Revelation of Jesus Christ, if that's what you are talking about. And, my oh my, the optimism I live just rides ever higher. That part, where God says to John, "Come up here and I will show you what must take place after these things" just makes me squeal with delight, like a kid in a school yard recess "free for all" snow ball fight.

When John gets yanked out of his earth-bound funk by the power of the Holy Spirit, he sees a rainbow laced throne, glimmering with jewel like magnificense. That report alone makes me sound like a pessimist. What I'm trying to say is that in the face of the true dangers of the world in which we live, the Church can not afford an anemic teleology that plays into the plans of the enemy of God's creation! If you believe "it all blows up" in the end, then, whether you know it or not, you welcome and possibly subconsciously enjoy every incident that confirms your ultimate and final view of God's purposes. I just read in Ephesians that everything in heaven and earth will be summed up in Christ. Therefore, my teleology is producing a sky-high faith for everyday events that will lead to that summation!

Now, before I close this chapter, lets go back to William Faulkner's quote and speech. It's loaded with a healthy teleology. Google the speech with the quote, "I decline to accept the end of man". His warning 56 years ago was that if authors of any kind of literature stood among and watched the end of man, they would write not of the heart, but of the glands. They would write not of love, but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion.

In my view, even so-called Christian literature (Left Behind come to mind?) slides into this morass and has unwittingly contributed to the pessimistic immoral culture we so despise! So, tell me....Got Teleology? Is it brimming with unarmed truth and unconditional love? Is Christ risen from the dead and victorious over the grave? Or is His resurrection just an anecdotal historical event for your personal future pleasure safely distant from this blue planet turned to ashes from God's fury?

YOUR TELEOLOGY MATTERS!!!!

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