Last as First

"God draws near to the lowly, loving the lost, the unnoticed, the untouchable, the excluded, the powerless, and the lowly" - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This quote by Bonhoeffer neatly summarizes the ethics of Jesus in contrast to the world. If you want to know what is radically different about the ethic of Jesus than those of the modern world this is it.

You see God sees value differently. Status of birth, wealth, education, prestige, accomplishment are all irrelevant to God.

You see God is sovereign and all a man has is from God. Men often delude themselves that there is something in them that causes them to have success. In a sense it is true but ultimately it is a gift. The gift is from God not man.

But you see men often do not see value. They will be satisfied with many things when only one matters knowing Christ and Christ crucified.

You see God looks past the gifts he has given men. A man is not great because God has loaned the man many things. A man is great because he is an image bearer of God.

The low and unnoticed bear the image of God as much as the wealthy. Sometimes more so as the wealth often have ignored God. You see with the great suffering and poverty in the world it is difficult to truly be a person of love with huge stock piles of wealth such that men notice.

If you wonder why the bible says few of the rich will enter the kingdom of heaven you need only realize that the rich if they saw spiritually would live less exuberantly and give more if they truly saw spiritually.

You see great wealth that one can be seen and known for is often a sign of spiritual sickness. This is why the bible says the first will be last and the last first. Often to be spiritually health is to do with less than we could have had others may have, but you see our culture always jabbing at charity because of flaws.

Well move past the flaws. The bible had charity and expounds the goodness of it. Because this or that method has flaws the principle is affirmed. You see it is often unbelief that causes people to throw up their hands because of flaws in certain systems.

You see the principle is affirmed and if this or that attempt at the principle is flawed it does not mean the principle is flawed only that the methodology needs to be re-examined.

What to Say About Ignorance Being Blamed for All Great Injustices Today

Ignorance is blamed for all great injustices today.  If we knew more about poverty we would be moved to help.  If we truly understood hunger we would feed the poor.  If we truly understood racism we would fight against it.  The ‘problem’ is that we just don’t know enough.

What should we say about this?

The more major issue though is sin.  Christian’s actions are meant to flow out of their faith.  When we give Christians emotional reasons to act without first grounding these actions in Christ we set them up to disobey the bible.  The bible says all actions must flow from faith.  We must look though Christ to deal with sin in any pleasing way for God.  It helps to be informed of need so that our efforts may be the most fruitful, but it is not the root of the issue.  The root is that if our faith was deep enough we would count all things as rubbish compared to Christ and his kingdom.  When all things in the world become rubbish to us then we will be prepared to fight with all our hearts for God.  Education to eliminate ignorance might produce ‘works,’ but those works will be despicable to God if they come from anywhere else than our satisfaction in what his son has done for us.  For this reason elimination of ignorance is a very distant secondary issue compared to the elimination of sin.