A Ready Writer

A few years ago I was speaking to a friend of mine about Jesus. This friend is a son of Abraham according to the flesh, and is also what is called a neo-pagan.

For those of you who do not know, neo-paganism is an occultic religious movement of people that have purposefully turned away from Christianity and gone back to the darkness of the ancient pagans. 'Wicca' is a familiar example of neo-paganism, although wicca itself is actually a fairly recent and contrived religion. Many neo-pagans seek to go back to the traditional gods of the Germanic, or Scandinavian, or Celtic tribes, or the gods of Greece and Rome, but it also includes eastern gods as in Hinduism, and mixes in all sorts of elements of mysticism and magic, both traditional and contemporary and 'hollywoodish'. Basically anything goes in neo-paganism as long as it is not Christianity, and is also generally anti-Christian.

Why would anybody do this? That is a good question. From my experience with this young man, I would say that it is churchiness that would inspire people to do such a thing. They get just enough of Jesus from their 'church' experiences, a small amount of Jesus mixed in with a lot of worldliness, so that instead of getting infected by the real thing they just become inoculated against it. Their 'church' experiences engender bitterness and/or anger and/or emptiness, and while they are thinking that this is what Christianity is all about satan is able to lead them away into darkness.

This particular young man and his neo-pagan wife grew up together in the Youth Program of the local Baptist 'church'. Like a great many young people who grow up in Youth Programs (somewhere around 70-80% or more depending on the exact research you are looking at) they realized it was mostly hype and cereal filled bologna. Having discovered by way of personal experience that the 'light' available in the 'churches' was really pretty dim and dull, and not knowing enough of the Bible to know that this situation is not at all the fullness of God's Ekklesia, but is actually the shrouding of God's design by human traditions and programs which His people will not let go of, they went looking for spiritual fulfillment elsewhere. I guess there is a certain perverse 'integrity' to the neo-pagan espousal of paganism in all its pagan-ness and saying, "...there wasn't any real substance in the churchiness of the church-people, so I will go and make up my own substance."

Yes, yes I know there isn't any substance there and they are really not the ones doing the making up and one cannot 'make up' substance for oneself anyway because all substance comes solely from the Author of substance Who has revealed Himself to all mankind in the person of Jesus the Messiah – but that does not change the fact that the unbearable churchiness of it all has concealed the weight of God's glory from the minds of these who think that they have seen all that Christianity has to offer.

As we have previously stated, when God's People don't do things God's Way, people get hurt. Real people, real hurt, really. That especially includes having 'churches' instead of the Biblical Ekklesia of the Living God, and no it is not just an issue of semantics.

Talking to my neo-pagan friend about Jesus, he did not question the historical reality of a man named Jesus of Nazareth, but he did question the deity and the supremacy of Jesus, and especially any claim that Jesus might have on his own life. He asserted that the writers of the New Testament wrote things to support ideas that were not really the teachings of Jesus but their own ideas that came after Jesus' death as they tried to deal with the tragic disappointment of His execution which put an end to all their hopes. He asked, "If Jesus really was God, and wanted us to know all of this about Himself and had all this insight for us about what He wanted us to do, why didn't he write it all down for us himself? Why was it all written by other men after His death?"

Now that is actually a good question, and also one which I had never heard of or considered until that moment. I felt at first the feeling of being caught flatfooted and wondering how on earth to answer that one, when I suddenly found rising up inside of me from I knew not where, "God is not a man. God does not do things like a man would do. If a man has something to say he picks up a pen and writes a book. Pens are a creation of men so they can write things to one another. But God did not create pens, He created Man. When a man has something to say He picks up a pen. When God has something to say, He picks up a man."

Some time later, I read concerning Messiah in the Book of the Psalms, "My heart is overflowing with a good theme; I recite my composition concerning the King, my tongue is the pen of a ready writer."

God has given His Word, the Bible, to all the world, for all time, to know Him and His Heart and Truth in Jesus. He did this through a handful of men chosen at various times. When God had something to say to us all, He did not pick up a pen, the creation of a men, He picked up His own creation, men, and used them.