[BIBLE] Slavewalking

[Lou Ruppert]

This week is on Galatians 4:8-11:

    Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by
    nature are not gods. But now that you know God—or rather are known
    by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and
    miserable principles? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over
    again? You are observing special days and months and seasons and
    years! I fear for you, that somehow I have wasted my efforts on you.


Before we were Christians, we were among the sleepers. We practiced 
blind obedience to the customs, values, and rules of the world without 
questioning it, acting with the same automatic motion as rolling over in 
our beds. This is not a new thing. It's where God finds all of us.

Paul is frustrated with the Galatians. He'd built up a church when he 
was recovering from an illness in their town, and had seen them break 
free from life before God. In the same way he was invigorated and freed 
up from his sickbed with their patience, they were invigorated and freed 
up from a life without awareness and purpose. Being asleep is all about 
breathing in and out, watching an imaginary world play like a movie in 
the insides of your eyelids, unaware that it will end when morning 
comes, and that your reality will be exposed as the dream it was. Paul 
had coaxed them to life, and given them a glimpse of what the real truth 
was, but as soon as he left, they stumbled back to bed and went back 
asleep again. They were immobile, complacent, and easily manipulated by 
those around them.

Before the Galatian church was started, its members were only concerned 
with life on earth and the vague demands of the demonic Roman state 
religion. They worried about career, family, politics, and attending the 
national holidays and ceremonies, because that's all that existed for 
them. That's all there was to life. Where was the big picture? The 
biggest picture they had was doing what society expected of them. You 
rolled off of your bed, did your job, enjoyed yourself, and rolled back 
onto the bed when it was done. Are people celebrating the equinox? 
Celebrate the equinox. Do people care about what happens to Carthage? Go 
to a rally. Is mom bugging you to take a wife? Go put an offer down on 
your friend's sister from a good family. Breathe in. Breathe out. Snort 
and roll over.

When Paul was there, though, things changed. People began to realize 
that something bigger was going on. We could know the creator of the 
universe. All of the indigenous spirits we'd been making sacrifices for, 
and celebrating in parties, were fantasies or worse. It didn't really 
matter what time of the year it was, because God is the same yesterday, 
today, and tomorrow. He'll bring springtime whether you open up a cow's 
veins onto a statue or not. We have access to better healing than 
doctors can provide, greater riches than kings, truer wisdom than the 
most celebrated oracles. It was as if they'd awakened from a dream, and 
realized that it was completely ridiculous to go work without pants and 
be able to fly. Life was still important and all of that, but it was 
just bodily function compared to the full experience of eternity. 
Priorities changed, thanks to some good conversations with the sick guy.

After Paul left, things began to break down. Twilight came and it was 
time to lie down, pull the covers over, and get realistic. Prayer and 
missions are important, but they can wait until after the games and the 
circus, saturnalia celebrations, foreign military campaigns, poetry 
readings, philosophical discussions, and public executions. Maybe we 
should just worship God as a concept rather than continuing to spend so 
much on maintaining a personal relationship. Maybe the church would be 
more profitable to us if we saw it as more of a social networking 
organization, or maybe as primarily an instrument of social or political 
change? And so the Galatian church nodded off, and snored loudly enough 
for Paul to hear it all the way back in Rome.

We can look condescendingly at this early group of Christians, and pat 
ourselves on the back over the fact that few, if any, of us have ever 
made a blood sacrifice to an pagan god, or skipped work to watch a 
public lynching. But that doesn't mean that the modern church, and the 
modern Christian, doesn't suffer from the same dangers as the Galatians 
did. If we're such serious Christians, and as dedicated to God as we 
say, then why do we concern ourselves so much with what's going on with 
the presidential elections, with Britney Spears, the war in Iraq, what's 
on TV this week, what college we're going to get into, who is going to 
win the game tonight, what kind of car the neighbors are driving, what 
the ten steps really are that will make your man go crazy for you, and 
so on?

We don't have an official state religion, but people do care whether 
their food is organic, whether there is a vegan option offered on their 
flight, whether someone has ever used the word "nigger" in anger, 
whether we have to wear seatbelts or not, whether we can own as many 
guns as we like, and so on. Is the fact that your favorite band has a 
new album out, or that women get paid 5% less than men for similar work, 
or that someone elected to tell people what they want to hear was 
actually caught lying, nearly as important as the fact that your 
neighbor is going to burn in hell for eternity if someone doesn't wake 
him up from his "retirement death-march" coma? We're taught to say "Of 
course not!" but if you line up how much time, money, and emotion you've 
spent on the two, you might be surprised.

The Galatians went from being enslaved into a daily regimen of values, 
goals, and world perspectives imposed on them by their secular and pagan 
culture from birth, to being unchained and enlightened, to going back to 
life on religious and social autopilot. They relapsed. They went back to 
their dysfunctional relationship with mainstream society, resigned to 
doing whatever it asked of them, no questions asked, and no complaints 
to outsiders when it still couldn't manage to keep them from "falling 
down the stairs" again. Paul was so frustrated with them.

Paul wants to know how the Galatians could taste freedom and go back to 
being slaves again. He really doesn't need to look any further than to 
the Israelites who God delivered from Egypt. They didn't care that they 
were free and headed for the promised land. They just cared that the 
walk tired their feet out, that they didn't have the same meat selection 
as they did in the brick factory, and that camping required way too much 
thinking compared to the easy life in the cell block. These were people 
who could look at God's pillar of holy fire every single night, and 
still choose the glory days in shackles over being able to walk towards 
the free gift God had for them. Like I said, this is not a new thing. 
This is the state we all devolve towards if we're not careful.

Take a look at your life and consider whether it's being spent the way 
it should. Are your values the values God has, or have you gone back to 
obediently following things which by their very nature are not gods?


-Lou