Ah! Remember those heady days when we shook hands and inwardly laughed at the Asian tourists who wore masks?  It seems years ago, but it was only March 2020.   How we long to return, to undo all that Covid has done.   Some still look forward to the day when “all this is over.”  But will it be?  Will it ever really be ‘over?’ 

Epidemiologists define ‘over’ in two different ways.   First there is disease elimination.  Elimination means zero cases in a defined geographic area.   Elimination is ‘over’ with a small ‘o.’   Elimination does not mean the disease is gone, just inactive in a particular region.  Eradication is what we want.    Eradication means zero cases world-wide following deliberate efforts to prevent and treat a disease.   The only human disease considered eradicated is smallpox.  And it was only declared to be eradicated in 1980.   To be eradicated, a disease must be both preventable and treatable.   But we currently have no proven strategies for either when it comes to Covid-19.   As with smallpox, eradication, if it were to ever come, is a difficult and distant future reality.   Will we every be ‘over’ Covid-19?   

Eradication is unlikely.  Elimination is probably a distant likelihood.  But ‘over’ could come sooner in a different form factor.  Most probably being ‘over’ Covid looks like learning to live with it through lifestyle adjustments that become a permanent part of our social intercourse.   Practical eradication comes when, though still present, we by and large ignore it.   This kind of practical eradication through a willful apathy is probably the best we can achieve in the near term.   And while this may be a necessary coping strategy when it comes to Covid, it is deadly when it comes to Scripture.

Since the dawn of time, ungodly tyrants have sought to eradicate scripture.   Yet, no matter how often it has been confiscated or burned, God’s Word will not be silenced.  The Bible is eradication-proof and proves Newton’s third law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.    Every attempt to forcibly eradicate the Bible only caused it to proliferate.   Though practical eradication does occur.  Like Covid, learning to coexist with the Bible, while largely ignoring it, provides a kind of practical inoculation against its truths.   Unfortunately, this is reflective of our society today.

In his article, The Scandal of Biblical Illiteracy, Al Mohler concludes.

While America’s evangelical Christians are rightly concerned about the secular worldview’s rejection of biblical Christianity, we ought to give some urgent attention to a problem much closer to home–biblical illiteracy in the church. This scandalous problem is our own, and it’s up to us to fix it.

Researchers George Gallup and Jim Castelli put the problem squarely: “Americans revere the Bible–but, by and large, they don’t read it. And because they don’t read it, they have become a nation of biblical illiterates.” 

Christians who lack biblical knowledge are the products of churches that marginalize biblical knowledge. Bible teaching now often accounts for only a diminishing fraction of the local congregation’s time and attention. 

We will not believe more than we know, and we will not live higher than our beliefs. The many fronts of Christian compromise in this generation can be directly traced to biblical illiteracy in the pews and the absence of biblical preaching and teaching in our homes and churches.

In Jeremiah 36 we find the terrible picture of Judah’s King Jehoiakim, burning the words of the Prophet Jeremiah.  He was not open to what God’s Word had to say.   But he was not the only one.   The people of his time neither listened, nor inclined their ears to hear God’s word through the prophets.   “Neither the king nor any of his servants who heard all these words was afraid, nor did they tear their garments.”   When God’s people have little concern for God’s Word, disaster cannot be far behind.   The people of Jeremiah’s day only wanted positive messages.   Words of sin, judgment, and wrath, were not what they wanted to hear.   While Jehoiakim’s Bible burning shocks us, what should shock us more is that the people who heard all these words were not afraid, nor did they think God’s Word applied to them.

It is easy to sit in judgement on Jeremiah’s generation, but how different are we?   How careful are we to hear and heed God’s Word?   We have more flavors of the Bible than Baskin-Robbins has ice-cream.   God’s word has never been more accessible.   Mao and Stalin and Voltaire tried their best to eradicate it, but could not.  But what Mao, Stalin, and Voltaire could never accomplish, the Church effects through growing ignorance.   We profess to be a ‘people of the book,’ but is the Bible authoritative and sufficient in our lives?   The response of Judah’s king and Judah’s people to the word of God offer a warning and challenge – how careful have we been to love and live God’s Word?

Join us this Lord’s Day as we examine Jeremiah 36 and consider faithful and unfaithful responses to God’s Word. We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP. Here is the order of service.

One of the biggest challenges to space exploration is the sheer amount of time required to travel from one place to the next.   Given today’s propulsion technology, inter-stellar travel is, by necessity, multi-generational.   Project management in our digital age focuses on compressing the schedule, getting it done faster and more efficiently.  We roll out major technology platforms and build skyscrapers in months, not years.   But how good are we at project management spanning generations?   Can we maintain vision?  Sustain design commitments?  And keep our attention focused for three or four consecutive generations? 

As we turn our eyes to the heavens to think about traveling to Mars and beyond, our greatest challenge is the shortness of our life-span.    Here it is helpful to look back to our medieval past.    Men in the middle ages also had their eyes to the heavens.   But they planned to travel by building great cathedrals.    Projects that, without hydraulics and power equipment, took hundreds of years to complete.  

The cathedral in Rouen, France, took 735 years to complete and the great Münster in Cologne, 632 years.    On average the great cathedrals of Western Europe required 275 years to complete, three or four generations of craftsmen.  Andreas Hein has written a fascinating comparison between the challenges of space travel and cathedral building.  He concludes that “the products of our space program are today’s cathedrals.”

The sheer faithfulness of multi-generational craftsmen, to commit generation after generation of their families to build something they would never see finished, brings to mind the great hall of faith in Hebrews 11.

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for…. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

Hebrews 11:1-2, 39-40

How steadfast is our faith?   We often struggle to maintain “faith once for all delivered to the saints” in our own lifetimes.   Do we have a vision to see that all the generations of our family, love the Lord with heart, mind, soul and strength?   The promise annexed to the Second Commandment is that the Lord shows “love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”   Is that our vision?  Do we have a multi-generational vision for faithfulness to Christ in our families?  Are we Cathedral builders?  Do we have our minds set upon things above?  And do we desire this to be the vision that animates every generation of our progeny?

During the reign of King Jehoiakim, the prophet Jeremiah warned the people to turn back to the Lord.   They were a faithless generation and they were training the next generation to be even more faithless.  Time and time again, Jeremiah points out that even Judah’s young ones were caught up in their parent’s idolatry.    They refused to listen to the words of the living God, or even incline their ear to what he had to say.    But in their midst, God had placed a ready example to rebuke His people.   

The Rechabites had been commanded by their forefather, Jonadab, not to drink wine or live in houses or cultivate fields or have vineyards.    They were to live a simple, pastoral life, avoiding the settled comforts of contemporary culture.   For over 250 years, they had carefully followed the instructions of their dead ancestor.   God instructs Jeremiah to publicly challenge their convictions.  Yet their commitment to Jonadab’s instruction was unshakable.   While the Lord does not specifically commend their commitments, He does commend their commitment.

It is rare in scripture for God to commend men for their faithfulness.  Jesus commends a centurion in Matthew 8:10, saying, “truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith.”  And in Jeremiah 35, the Lord commends the example of the Rechabites.  In faithless Judah, they are a remarkable example of steadfast commitment.    They provide a powerful illustration of one generation discipling the next.   

What do our lives illustrate?   Can the Lord point to us in the midst of a faithless generation as an example worth nothing?  What will the world know of our faith by observing our descendants in 250 years? Join us this Lord’s Day as we examine Jeremiah 35 and consider the power of multi-generational faithfulness. 

We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP