"Don't Stop Me if You've Heard This One..."
How some of the values believers in the Lord Jesus already share with those who don't believe, serve as the starting point from which we can invite them into the Lord's faith.
After the gleeful joy of celebrating the significant achievement of 100 articles last week was immediately followed by some of the heaviest “stuff” I’ve experienced in terms of spiritual attack since I was born again in the spirit; and after the ceaselessly relentless torrent of heavy “stuff” with which we’ve been bombarded in just the last few weeks alone on the news and political fronts of this World War Hell: The Movie in the midst of which we’re all caught...
I was counseled by a loving, caring, compassionate and understanding Lord, through his Holy Spirit, to take a lighter approach this week and have some fun with a nevertheless spiritually serious take concerning believers in the Lord Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah, and our relationship to the unbelieving society and culture by which we find ourselves surrounded.
So, let’s put on our thinking caps and beef up our funny bones, take a desperately-needed couple steps back from all the world’s serious “stuff,” take a look at a modern twist on some ancient fables, and see what we can learn from that about how we as believers can more effectively communicate to our unbelieving fellow citizens of this time, the truth of God’s word.
A Kentucky Fried Fable
During the reign of Jehoiakim, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, invaded and occupied Judah. When Jehoiakim realized he was going to die soon and the rulership would pass to his incompetent, 18-year-old son, Jehoiachin, Jehoiakim resolved to save the royal treasure from being plundered by Babylon. He had all the treasure from the king’s palace removed, transported to a hidden cave on the far east side of the Mount of Olives, and stored there.
Jehoiakim commissioned the Captain of the Royal Guard with supplying warriors to guard the treasure until such a time as it could be safely brought out again.
“Guard well these treasures,” the king said, to his Captain, “or the jackals shall grow fat on your carcass!”
“May God deal with me severely if I fail in my duty! No one shall pass my Guard, my king!” the Captain of the Guard vowed.
So from the time the treasure was hidden, there was always a guard at the cave with orders to kill anybody who might discover the vast fortune to be found there.
One day, two young friends, Boaz and Dodo from Bethany, were hunting in the woods east of the Mount of Olives. They’d tracked a buck and as they chased it, it disappeared into the hidden mouth of a cave.
“Got him now!” Boaz declared. “Let’s go get him!”
Cautiously, their bows drawn and strung with arrows, they entered the mouth of the cave.
Inside, they followed a narrow tunnel leading into the cave. Suddenly, dumbfounded, eyes bulging and jaws dropping along with the bows and arrows from their hands, they stopped as they emerged in a huge cavern brightly lit with many oil lamps...
Filled to the ceiling with more treasure than either of the two young men imagined existed in all the world!
Crates and bags and carts filled with mountains of gold and silver bars; bags of gold and silver coins, gold and silver implements and relics, precious stones, pearls, magnificent jewelry of all kinds.
“Where did that buck go to?” Boaz asked, searching the cave for any trace of their prey.
Meanwhile, salivating at the storehouse of wealth before him ripe for the taking, a spirit of greed suddenly seized Dodo. Picking up a stick at his feet, he smashed Boaz in the back of the head, knocking him out.
Running into the midst of the gleaming piles of treasure, Dodo exclaimed: “I’m rich! I’m wealthy! Hallelujah! I’m comfortably well off!”
He grabbed the first cart he got his hands on, loaded with bags of gold coins, and started hauling it down the tunnel towards mouth of the cave.
Meanwhile, the warrior from the Royal Guard on duty that day, who had gone around the hill to relieve himself, now returned and encountered Dodo with the cart full of treasure just as he came out of the cave with it.
“Ah! You must be the porter sent by Ba’al to help me,” Dodo said. “Take this cart and move it off to the side while I go get the next one. Don’t worry, I’ll pay you well!”
While Dodo was still smiling, the massive guard suddenly drew his sword and, scowling angrily, chopped through the turban Dodo was wearing, splitting it in two halves that tumbled off on either side of him to the ground.
Dodo let out a nervous laugh and bolted in terror back into the cave. Inside the cavern, he found Boaz on his feet, rubbing the back of his head and dusting himself off.
“Help me, Boaz!” Dodo pleaded, offering his friend a huge precious stone. “Save me from the warrior chasing me!”
Suddenly, the two friends heard the guard running towards the cavern through the tunnel. “I’m going to chop you into pieces!” he shouted.
Frightened, Dodo scurried away and hid in a crevice. “Chop him! He’s the one who brought us here!” he screamed out to the guard, indicating his friend, Boaz.
The guard came running into the cavern, sword high over his head. He stopped in front of Boaz.
“Who are you?” he asked Boaz.
“I’m an angel of the LORD,” Boaz replied, calmly. “God has sent me to commend you for your faithful service. As a reward, the LORD your God is granting you all this treasure for your own.”
“He’s lying! Chop him! Chop him!” Dodo shouted, hysterically.
The guard’s eyes lit up and his mouth hung open. He dropped his sword, ran to the treasure and dove into the piles of gold coins, rolling around in them gleefully like a pig in its slop.
Boaz picked up his bow and arrow and left the cave.
Outside, he surveyed the terrain. “I wonder where that buck ran off to?”
Just then, Dodo came running out, clutching a massive diamond the size of a pomegranate in his hands.
Behind him, the guard was running towards them, shouting from the tunnel.
“Save me, Boaz!” Dodo pleaded.
Boaz regarded his friend with amused disdain. “What’s with you, anyway?”
“I can’t help it!” Dodo replied, panting. “I’m greedy! It’s my hobby!”
As the guard was almost upon them, Boaz stashed Dodo behind some bushes.
The guard emerged. “Where is he?” he demanded, shouting at Boaz.
Boaz nodded with his chin at a towering oak nearby. “He climbed up there!”
The guard ran up to the tree, scabbarded his sword and started shinnying up the trunk.
While Boaz went off to look for the escaped buck, Dodo ran back into the cave and started hoarding the treasure onto and into whatever he could push, pull or carry out the mouth of the cave.
After the seventh trip, he reentered the cavern and was met by a tall man in gleaming white clothing.
“Who are you?” Dodo asked the stranger. But before the man could answer, Dodo suddenly grew hysterical and shouted: “Oh no, you don’t! You’re trying to steal my treasure!”
He picked up a large rock and was about to smite the stranger, when the stranger suddenly grew into a towering giant before Dodo’s eyes.
Glaring down at him menacingly, he boomed out: “I am an angel of the LORD! Dog! You have desecrated the royal treasure that belongs to God’s representative to his people! Prepare to take the consequences!”
“Who cares about consequences?” Dodo declared, looking lustfully around him at all the treasure, and walking away dismissively. “As long as I’m rich!”
Then the angel of the LORD shot fire from his fingertips and the flames engulfed Dodo.
When Boaz came back into the cave to look for his friend, he found nobody there. But he did find a gold statue of a man standing in the midst of all the treasure that looked exactly like his friend, Dodo.
From Fable To Faith
Now, if you have the 6:58 to spare, please allow me to recommend you take a look at this Merrie Melodies cartoon from 1956, titled “Ali Baba Bunny.” In their usual zany way, the crazy cartoon geniuses at Warner Bros. capture the essence of a mashup of fables from 1001 Arabian Nights; itself a mashup of Middle Eastern and Indian folk tales from over the centuries and compiled in the classic literary collection.
The fables do what fables do: make moral points through the tales in which they’re told; in which moral issues like the greed “Ali Baba Bunny” humorously highlights, are also illustrated through the storytelling narrative.
Why take a look at the cartoon?
It’s a hilarious 7 minutes of worthwhile distraction that also tells us something universally true about the nature of greed and what it can turn us in our sinful nature into; and it helps support the point of all this, to which I’m now finally going to get.
I made up the fable as a biblical folk tale and based it on the cartoon (that itself is based on the fables of the nations of the Near East), to make the point that despite the spiritual differences between believers and the nations of the non-believing world, we both share a universal recognition of the superior value of what most rational humans agree are commonly acknowledged moral virtues.
We can see that if we take the genie out of the story and replace it with an angel, the same story with the same spiritually valid moral can be told to two different audiences using two different cultural traditions to make the same universal point that applies to us all.
Apart from the incorrigibly wicked and disobedient everywhere, believers and non-believers pretty much agree things like love, truthfulness, honesty, responsibility, duty, maturity, respectfulness and the like, are positive moral virtues that are personal and public characteristics promoting more balanced and harmonious living and more just, peaceful and prosperous societies and cultures.
We also agree things like pride, lust, wrath, greed, envy, sloth and gluttony aren’t, and don’t.
That the superior morality of true virtue is itself already a universally recognized given, provides us as believers, therefore, with a sympathetic common ground upon which to meet our unbelieving brothers and sisters in the human family; and through which to be able to reach them with our faith, based on the already-shared moral values we both recognize and have; and which are promoted as desirable characteristics by the principles of our faith in the Lord Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah, as well as by the unbelieving nations and the cultures through which they promote and express those values.
What we as believers can recognize is the one thing that binds all of us (believers and non) together in the same spiritual straight-jacket, is the universality of our common, sinful nature. The believer is by nature equally as sinful and responsible for it before a holy and righteous God, as the unbeliever is. The only difference between the two in that respect is the non-believer who doesn’t recognize the supremacy of God’s truth brought to us by the Lord Yeshua as the fulfillment of God’s law, is therefore ignorant of precisely that of which that truth makes the believer acutely aware.
The truth is that because we’re all sinful by nature and our sinfulness has to be judged by the holy and righteous God who created us all, no amount of our own effort can ever be enough to either eliminate all sinfulness from us, or atone for whatever sinfulness any of us has on our account. It’s in our nature and there’s nothing any of us can do to rid ourselves of it. The only judgment for that sinfulness is death, from which nobody born into this world is exempt.
Because that’s the case—and because none of us is capable of redeeming either ourselves or anybody else from the consequence of sin—our only relief from paying that penalty comes through the sacrifice made by the Lord Jesus that satisfied God enough to let him grant that salvation to all of us who believe in his Son, what he taught, what he did, follow his example, and trust in the promise of that salvation from the judgment of death; and of receiving the free gift of eternal life purchased by that sacrifice.
The disadvantage unbelievers have that causes them to miss out on the benefits and blessings of that truth, is that most of them believe their own righteous works are enough to satisfy God to get them into whatever any of them may believe heaven or the after-world may be. They fail to recognize it’s not our performance, but our nature that consigns us to the judgment of death; and so it can’t be our performance that saves us from that judgment, because of that very sinful nature that can’t be reconciled with the holiness and righteousness of God. Since it can’t be, it has to be judged.
But if we believe in the truth of the Lord Jesus and his sacrifice and resurrection, we attach ourselves by faith and through God’s approval to the payment that his sinless, unblemished sacrifice made, which gets us off death’s hook and through heaven’s door.
This is nothing any human can accomplish on their own because our sinful nature won’t allow it. No matter how much good any of us may do, it’ll never wipe out our sinful nature, or all the sins that even the best of us can’t help but commit, either consciously or unconsciously.
That’s why we all need the Lord Yeshua’s faith with which to, so to speak, beat the rap. Because he’s the only one in all of human history who ever did. Because he’s the only one in all of human history who was ever capable of doing so. Because he’s the only one in all of human history who was the living creator of the universe come to the world in the flesh to rescue us from ourselves, by sacrificing himself as a man on behalf of all of us whose no amount of goodness can ever be good enough to accomplish for anybody, what he did for all of us.
And that’s what we, as believers, can tell our non-believing brothers and sisters who already have a sense of the value of virtue (but just not of where it truly comes from), about why they should seek the Lord and find him. The starting point of that conversation can be that common ground on which both the faithful and the unsaved already stand as believers in the value of virtue—the proof of which is in the interchangeability of the stories with which both believers and non-believers promote the value of those virtues. It can become the common ground from which non-believers in the Lord can be encouraged to make the leap of faith from death to life that only their ignorance of the truth prevents them from making. Ignorance of the truth we as believers can more easily draw them away from by appealing to the spiritually valid common values we already share, as the gateway drug into the only faith that can take any of us all the way out of eternal darkness and death and into everlasting light and life.
“Wow,” you may say. “How’d we get from Bugs Bunny to this?”
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding,” Proverbs 3:5 teaches us.
That’s how.
(Photo Credits: MatthewDowling.org; Bible.com via Pinterest; Bible.com via Pinterest.)
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