Christianity is often seen as complicated and difficult to understand, but the reality is that it is very simple.
The complications arise when people start trying to justify their position of authority by adding things that benefit them or their ideas, when in actuality the only power belongs to God. At the end of the day we are all servants.
In the UK we have a government, overseen by the Prime Minister. The mistake is to assume that this means leader. That is incorrect, the very name ‘Prime Minister’ means ‘first or principle servant’. It is their role to help and maintain the country for the benefit of its people. The people who work for government departments are known as Civil Servants, which also means that they are there to help other people. This may involve advising people what to do, as long as it is for the benefit of everyone.
For just over 12 years I worked in conservation management and as part of the training, was sent on a Public Awareness course. The course started with “the customer is always right”. I’m afraid I upset the trainer, as I disagreed. I looked after a site which got roughly 500,000 visitors each year. I said that if every visitor just took one flower, then there would be nothing left. I saw it as my role to advise visitors, as I had an understanding of the environment that others may not. I could not enforce anything so had to rely on persuasion, as even the bylaws could only be enforced by police officers and courts.
It all comes down to education.
When I started working there, we had a chronic litter problem. We would have to spend at least two hours every day picking up rubbish. Then for a few years we started working with schools, bringing them to the site and showing them around, telling them how important things were and explaining some of the issues, especially the problems that litter can create. The issue with litter gradually began to reduce until we hardly had any litter to pick up each day.
One day a family came to visit, and the dad dropped a crisp packet on the ground. I was pleased to see the reaction of his children, as they explained just how bad dropping litter was. He picked it up and put it in the bin.
Knowing the important things paid off. Explaining scientific principles of soil properties, nutrient affects or the breeding habits of lizards may be interesting, but it’s the things we can do that is more important.
It’s the same with religion – being able to recite the kings of Israel or quote biblical poetry is great, but knowing what we need to do is more important.
The Bible is full of examples and goes into lots of details and sometimes we need to work out how things can apply to us or what the lesson to be learned is, but occasionally we have a short summary. There’s such a one in 2 King 17:7-21, which can be summarised as "they didn’t do what God wanted, so He ignored them and let them get taken captive".
The Laws of Moses were quite complex and required priests, scribes and teachers to explain it to the people. Even then, some of basics seem to have been forgotten. In fact, the whole law seems to have been forgotten. 2 Kings 22 tells use that the book of the law was found by accident during the temple repairs during the reign of Josiah and chapter 23 tells us all the things that he had to put right. Deuteronomy 17:18 says when the kings were instigated, it was supposed to be part of the kings appointment that he write his own copy of the law. This obviously hadn’t been taking place.
Another example is about keeping the feast of the seventh month and they “found it written that the children of Israel should dwell in booths in the feast” (Nehemiah 8:13-17) It was supposed to be part of their culture that they learned about God on a weekly, if not daily basis, yet this had not been done. They were too involved with worldly aspects to put God first. Can the same be said of us?
While Christians don’t need to follow the full law of Moses, we still need to keep the fundamentals. We need to understand and do them. There’s no point in knowing what they are, if we don’t do anything about it.
Jesus said that all the law could be summarised as
All the laws can be kept if we follow both at the same time.
These are things we can do, and have to do, if we want God to care about us.