Religion Month

From the LOCH A TUATH NEWS December 2000

For many people, this is religion month. In a curious mixture of paganism and Christianity, Christmas becomes the time of the year where people are willing to go to churches and to join in acts of 'worship'. Carols are sung, advent plays are performed, and our secular society pays its mock homage to Jesus.

Now, of course, the incarnation of Jesus Christ was the greatest and most defining moment in the whole of human history. While the Romans used to date their years from the point of the supposed founding of Rome, and the Greeks from the Olympic Games, the world has come to mark its calendar around the birth of Christ. It was a critical moment. The fullness of the times had come. Jesus -- the eternal Word -- became flesh and dwelt among us.

But it is one thing to have a high, orthodox, creedal commitment to the doctrine of the incarnation. This is not some peripheral, on the edge teaching -- it is the very essence of our faith. Jesus did not simply become like us, but became one of us. All we know about God is modified by that one fact. It is another thing, however, to turn the doctrine into a celebration and a religious festival.

Unfortunately, such arguments fall on deaf ears for a world governed by sentiment and by tradition. If it has always been this way, it little matters what the Bible says. Yet if the modern incarnation of Christmas in our secular world shows anything, it shows how little of the Bible people really know. Christ is fine in a manger, but not on a cross, and certainly not in the claims of the Gospel.

How easily we slip from the objective, unchanging standards of the Bible to the false, ever-changing, sentimental, materialistic notions of our modern world. The Shorter Catechism told us long ago that the only rule God had given to direct us to glorify and enjoy him is the Word of God in the Old and New Testaments. The moment we substitute anything for that we have compromised the standard.

Yet people do it all the time. My conscience, my tradition, my experience, my feeling -- even my religion becomes the rule. Too much of the peripheral issues even of church life itself is determined by tradition, or by expedience, rather than the word of God. Sometimes even notions of biblical holiness and separation from the world have more of the spirit of the Pharisees in them than the spirit of Christ and the word of God.

The great test is not whether we are willing to hold on to our most cherished practices and opinions. It is not whether we have begun well. The test is whether we are 'constantly reforming' -- bringing every new experience and every new philosophy, every new movement, church, and sect, to the testing standards of the Word of God. The opinions, traditions and sentiments of men will pass away, but not one jot or tittle of God's Word will pass away until all will be fulfilled.