I was thinking about common grace an awful lot lately when my place got swamped, and all sorts of people from my neighbours (they were closest and helped out first - after all, we were cut off from the rest of the world for about two or three days) to my family to people in my Apex club and my church, as well as some kind people from the local school who just turned up one afternoon and wanted to lend a hand and help clean up.  Some of these people were Christians.  Some were not.  Some I have no idea.  What I do know is that in a time of need they helped me, and I am grateful to them all.

This would be an argument from some (not that anyone who helped out was into a gabfest on philosophy - you had to keep your gob shut to keep the silt out) that religion is irrelevant and that as long as in times like this we all pull together and help each other out that is the important thing.  I don't think so - it didn't was with me before and it doesn't now. 

I was raised as an atheist.  My parents are both members of the 'good person religion' - they claim that either nothing is out there or if there is they don't know what it is.  And I don't know what it is, either, even if I think I do.  The most important thing is that you are a 'good person'.

Being a good person is important - I received help from all sorts of people who were doing a good thing - helping out someone who couldn't help themselves (ie, me).  At times in the past I've had the chance to help other people out, and I hope I will have the chance to do so into the future.  It makes me fell good, and it is the right thing to do - it accords with my conscience.  In addition to this, I know as a Christian it is what God wants me to do.  That is why he gave us all a conscience to begin with. 

When we do good, or when we see other people doing good to us, what we see is image bearers of a good God doing good, just as their Creator did before them and does beside them.  No matter if people deny that they were made by a good God with their words, yet they cannot help but do good things at least some of the time because they bear His image still.  What I see when I see people of whatever religion doing good to help someone in need is that this is the goodness, the grace, of finite, fallen, imperfect people.  How much more, then, should we not be open to the grace that comes from the perfectly good and incredibly strong God who made us?

Acts of God

One of my neighbours grew a crop under contract to supply a certain quanity to a designated buyer.  It has rained like Billy-oh on it for the last couple of months (basically since it came out of the ground) and even though it has dried up and it has started to grow again he isn't likely to get his required tonnage.  However, he has a clause in his contract that allows him to default if it is an 'Act of God' that prevents him from harvesting the right amount, and the unusually high rainfall (which led to the unusually high flood we've just had) will certainly qualify for that.

Hmmm.

If one of my neighbours can't grow a decent crop because it rains far in excess of what it usually does around here (or it doesn't rain at all), and we collectively blame God, who gets the credit when he does the same work with the same inputs and gets an average yeald in an average year?  Is that solely an 'Act of Dave'?

I know that Greg and Dave and Jason and so on work hard and smart to grow what they can, and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't, but is it only the really crook weather that God is in charge of, or does He deserve some credit when things go right, too?

Submission

Authority is an interesting thing to think about. We all have at least one, whether we like to admit it or not. Having been reading a bit of the Uniting Church's Basis of Union and some commentaries upon it has raised the issue of the authority of scripture. As Davis McCaughey notes, the Uniting Church recognises the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments have been recieved by the church and are an authority over the Church, but the Basis is intentional in not getting bogged down in what kind of authority the scriptures are.

Along the lines of authority I can't help but reflect back on a discussion during a class in which one of the teachers, reflecting on the rape of Dinah, pointed out the treatment of Dinah as property by both the Canaanites and her own family and how she was abused on virtually every front as a human being. As she became more emotional and vehmenent, she closed her discourse by saying that this (and other similarly violent passages in the Old Testament like it), for her, was not the word of God.

This raised one immediate concern on my part, which was that I had been too flipant in my reading of these passages (it was one of my favourites when I was 18 and just starting to read the Bible because of the successful against the odds revenge by Dinah's brothers) and of the abuse that women are especially vulnerable to, and more so in a society like the Ancient Near East.

It also raised another concern which I thought about more as time passed: how was my teacher able to distinguish what parts of the Bible were and were not the word of God, relevant to the teaching and building up of the church? What if she had a passage which she considered to be the word of God but I did not consider to be the word of God? Who then would be the arbiter of what was authoritative in such a dispute? It seemed then, as it does now, that my teacher was displacing the Bible and the God who inspired it from the rightful place of authority over the church. Such 'nasty' passages are in the Bible, I believe, not because God condones despicable behaviour (either by those who are his covenant people or those who are not) but because the Bible is a real book for the real world, and in the real world despicable things happen. Thankfully, God recognises the problem and himself ultimately provides the solution.