The problem is God starts looking like a monster or worse, one can’t really tell the difference between God and the Devil in the end because they almost look like identical twins. People today tend to forget that the Bible Jesus read and studied and interpreted is the same Older Testament we have to interpret today. The question arises and the topic of the book, is how did Jesus interpret the Old Testament and why don’t we read the Bible like Jesus did?
Jesus actions and teachings have become censored today by many well meaning Bible scholars and lay ministers in supporting the institutional religion we call Christianity and even worse, a certain tribe within called the local “church.” It is no surprise to many that the modern church in North America is in trouble because of all the ways we try to make Jesus respectable, seeker-friendly, and to make people feel comfortable with the Jesus of scripture. When we look closer at the Bible, the Jesus we discover is none of these. Jesus is scandalous at times, a trouble-maker, breaker of the status-quo, and leader of a revolution that has changed the world since his entrance into it.
Despite popular beliefs, Jesus never attended a church nor started a new religion. He was a Torah observant Jew who would not even understand why we celebrate Christian holidays today. Morgan Guyton in his provocative book, How Jesus Saves the World From Us says,
He’s saving the world from our disingenuous
posturing . . . our moral cowardice,
our ideological certitude, our prejudices,
and our quest for uniformity (p.4).
These are the things Jesus came to transform our
lives from and save us not from other people or polarized politics but mainly
from ourselves. Guyton goes on to talk about what Jesus is saving us towards.
He is wounding us with his mercy, emptying our
spiritual clutter, breathing vitality into our bodies, captivating us with his
beauty . . . liberating us from social conventions, modeling his way of
servanthood, and calling us deeper into his kingdom (p.4).
What I love about Guyton’s book is he challenges us to encounter the real
Jesus of scripture and not the water-down Jesus of conventional religion. He is
calling us towards an intuitive encounter with the Living Christ and not to
some politically correct church doctrine which does not save us in the end.
There are many of us on this water to wine journey
that Brian Zahnd in his book Water to Wine, speaks about the
many wounded, battered, hurt Christians are tired of drinking koolaid and want
the deep nourishing substance of aged wine. Even Jesus came to liberate us from
the angry vengeful hell fire brimstone view of God. The Jewish way Jesus
interprets the Older Testament and even leaves key parts out will challenge us
to read the Scriptures with not just Jesus focused glasses on but with a heart
ablaze by the fire of the living God in the face of Jesus Christ.
(These are some of my first thoughts in regards to this new book Idea I have)
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