Tom Lennie reviews ‘Realities of Faith’ by M. Basilea Schlink (reprinted 2014)

Tom Lennie reviews ‘I Found the Key to the Heart of God’, by M. Basilea Schlink (2023)

German-based movement follows the way of love

How easy it is to forget God.

“As a thief is disgraced when he is caught, so the house of Israel is disgraced – they, their kings and their officials, their priests and their prophets. They say to wood, ‘You are my father,’ and to stone ‘You gave me birth.’ They have turned their backs to me and not their faces; yet when they are in trouble, they say, ‘Come and save us!’” (Jeremiah 2:27)

Jeremiah always found it amazing that a nation such as Israel, with its long history of God’s provision in the desert and his loving protection over many generations, could be involved in idolatry as they were in the 6^th Century BC.

As a nation, Israel had been in a covenant relationship with God for centuries and they had benefited enormously from his faithfulness and his amazing good deeds: yet they ran after worthless idols, declaring that bits of wood and stone were their gods. It just didn’t make sense!

Forgetting God

They had as many gods as they had towns in Judah, and God had sent them many warning signs which had all been ignored; they simply did not respond to correction, which Jeremiah found utterly irrational and almost inconceivable. He said “Does a maiden forget her jewellery, a bride her wedding ornaments?” Yet God is saying “My people have forgotten me, days without number” (Jer 2:32).

It was beyond anybody’s imagination that a bride could possibly forget to put on her jewellery and ornaments in preparation for her great wedding day. But surely it was equally impossible for the people of Israel to forget the God of their fathers, who had revealed himself to former generations of their people as the God of Creation.

It was he who had flung the stars into orbit and who from the beginning of time had intended to raise up a people of promise through whom he would reveal himself and his plan of salvation to all nations.

Jeremiah always found it amazing that a nation such as Israel, with its long history of covenant relationship with God, could forget him and run after worthless idols.

Height of Hypocrisy

The greatest anomaly was that when they were in trouble, they turned back to the God of their fathers and cried out, “Come and save us!” Jeremiah saw this as the height of hypocrisy. They ignored God all the time that things were going well with them.

In times of peace and prosperity they turned their backs upon God and joined in all the exciting festivals and pagan partying of the Canaanites and their other idolatrous neighbours. They entered wholeheartedly into the orgies of self-indulgence, sexual excesses, feasts and revelries which were part of the religious practices against which Israel had been warned from the time of Moses.

Suddenly, however, there was a change of mood among the people. Rumours were running rife across the land from village to village, spread by the 6^th Century BC version of social media – the human tongue! Rumour had it that the Babylonian army was on the move. Whole towns in Syria had been sacked and the countryside raped.

The rumours lost nothing in bloodcurdling detail of what had happened to the people in the towns and villages the Babylonians overthrew. Fear began to grip the people of Judah. Widespread panic spread among all ranks of society – priests and people alike began crying out to God to come and save them!

The Prophet Jeremiah was not impressed. In fact, he was outraged! How dare the people call out to God for help when they had been running after idols for so long? Let them call upon their bits of wood and stone and see if they will help by coming to save them!

How dare the people call out to God for help when they had been running after idols for so long?

Sins of Omission

This is just the kind of thing that we all do. Even if we don’t get into the same kind of idolatry as the people of Judah did, we commit very similar sins – sins of omission rather than sins of commission. When things are going well in our lives and we are enjoying peace and prosperity we are less fervent in our prayers, less eager to seek the presence of the Lord. We don’t actually say that we don’t need God, although this must be how it seems to him.

Sadly, it is not only individuals but whole nations that have turned away from God – the one true God of Creation revealed in the Bible – in recent years. I’m old enough to remember the shock when John Robinson, Bishop of Stepney, published his book Honest to God in 1963. He said that Christians have outgrown the traditional version of Christianity.

He said: “The only way to be honest is to recognise that we have to live in the world even if God is not there. Like children outgrowing the secure religious, moral and intellectual framework of the home, in which ‘Daddy’ is always there in the background, God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him” (pp38-39).

This began the great decline of the Church of England in Britain and it was soon followed by David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, who said that the resurrection was “a conjuring trick with bones”. Once it became clear that the clergy and preachers no longer had confidence in the God of the Bible, faith in the nation rapidly declined. In Scotland last year, more marriages were conducted by humanists than by ministers in the Church of Scotland.¹

We worship our bits of wood and stone, yet when we are in deep trouble we cry out to God for his help. The time to call is not when disaster overtakes us, but every day, in the quiet times of reflection that we all need when we can review the past, remembering what God has done in the nation and seeing his hand in our own lives, and in humility confessing our needs. It is then that we feel his arms around us to comfort, to forgive and to love, unconditionally.

References

1 BBC Radio 4, Sunday Programme, 10 March 2019.

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