Thanks so much to those who have joined with us, visited with us, and prayed for us over this past year.  Without the loving support of the greater Marion community, the devoted partnership of area churches, and the ongoing blessings of our great Triune God, All Souls would never have enjoyed such a wonderful 1st year of ministry, growth, and development for the glory of God and the good of His people. 

If you are or will be in the North-Central Ohio area, won’t you please drop by on March 1, 2015 @5PM for an informal time of fellowship and goodies?  


                                     It will be great to see you!

4.    The Dragon of Confusion

My friend Alistair Begg often says, ‘the main things are the plain things.’  There is great wisdom in that, you know.  And yet, how confused we often are when it comes to the elements of our worship services.  Someone wants to do a liturgical dance.  A group of young people want to do a drama.  Here comes a man with a gift for whistling.  A cat-lady wants the pastor to add a pet-blessing element to the service once in a while.  A group of old timers suggest a concert of Southern Gospel quartette classics for Lord’s Day worship…. And on and on it goes…

What is a poor pastor to do?

He simply must point his people to the Bible…  to the main things…. to the plain things…

He should patiently ask his people, “What were Christian worship services like in the Bible?”  And together they can discuss the following points:

The Christians sang the Bible.

They read the Bible.

They preached the Bible.

They prayed the Bible.

They administered the sacraments in light of the Bible.

And the God of the Bible was pleased.

“Why don’t we just stick with that too?”  The pastor can ask.  In so doing the pastor is helping his congregants slay the dragons lurking in the shadows of corporate worship.

The above narrative is a very condensed version of the alleged experience of a child called Alex Malarkey.  His tale was published by a well known Christian publisher under the title, The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven.  Following its release in 2010 it became a New York Times Bestseller.  The only problem was that Malarkey’s story was… well… malarkey.  


According to numerous news outlets, Malarkey, who is now 17 years old is recanting his entire story about dying, going to heaven, and meeting Jesus.  According to a written statement from Malarkey, “I did not die.  I did not go to Heaven.  I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention.”    




            So what should our response be to this sort of literary and theological… er… malarkey?


Let me offer a personal disclaimer first: To begin with, I DO believe in heaven, I DO believe that the souls of departed saints immediately go to be with Christ, I DO believe in the bodily resurrection of the dead when Christ returns, I DO believe in a coming new creation...  However, I am highly suspicious of "Heavenly Tourism" books.  

Even so, as it relates to this particular "Heavenly Tourism" book, I think we need to recognize that the young boy at the center of the aforementioned book has faced quite a lot of debilitating trama in his young life due to the accident he was involved in and he deserves our sympathy and our prayers.  More than this, however, he deserves our hearty praise.  It takes guts to publicly confess that you’ve lied about something – especially when the lie took place on such a massive scale.  Young Malarkey has done the right thing even though the right thing was certainly very difficult to do.  He told the truth...  Over and above all of this there is something else about Malarkey that should determine our response to his recantation - namely, the reason Malarkey made it….  His recantation was the result of a new-found conviction about the absolute authority of Scripture.  

Yes, according to Malarkey,  The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven was/is unhelpful not merely because it was/is malarkey, but much more importantly, it is unhelpful because it is unscriptural….  (Go back and read the previous sentence again and stew on it for a while.)   Yes, that’s right, these kind of “Heavenly Tourism” Books,  represent direct (though possibly unintentional) attacks on the Word of God, The Bible.


    "'The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven' is...        unhelpful because it is unscriptural."
 
Let me suggest three unhelpful things that  “Heavenly Tourism” Books imply about the Bible.

The Bible is, of course, complete.
Since its earliest days the Church has understood Scripture to be God’s perfect and final revelation to man.  In other words, Biblical Christianity maintains that God has said all He wanted to say in the 66 books of the Bible.  There is nothing He forgot.  Nothing He put in it by mistake.  There is no further revelation to be given.  It is complete.
Heavenly Tourism books, however, add to God's revelation as if He had accidentally left something out.  These books contain specific details about death, heaven, angels, the saints in glory, and the Lord Jesus, that God did not reveal in the Bible.  But if the Bible is complete and without error, as the Church has historically maintained, then God has given us all the information that He, in His wisdom, wanted to reveal.  We do not need appendixes to Biblical revelation written by 6-year olds (or anyone else) claiming to have spiritual knowledge beyond what God has revealed in His Word.  To do so constitutes nothing less than adding to God's Word.

The Bible is, of course, sufficient.
Here’s a great technical term to impress your friends with – “perspicuity” – a word that simply means “clarity.”
Central to Biblical Christianity is the belief that the Bible is a clear book.  No, we do not mean that every individual passage of scripture is equally obvious in its meaning, but we do mean that the Redemptive Historical flow of Scripture is clear to the person who will only take time to read the book.  It is clear who God is.  It is clear what man is.  It is clear what God requires of us.  It is clear what God has done in Christ to redeem us.  And therefore the Bible is sufficient in and of itself to give us a full and clear knowledge of God in Christ.  And in this full and clear knowledge we see not one single account of Heavenly Tourism.  The closest we get to it is a fairly obscure statement made by the Apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 12:1-4).   He hints that he has actually seen heaven but then stops himself saying that it would be "unlawful" to say anything else about the subject.  
Ironically, though the Apostle to the Gentiles, and arguably the greatest missionary-evangelist who ever lived claimed that it was improper to share first-hand accounts of heaven, the evangelical publishing giants of modern America believe that it is perfectly fine for 6-year olds to do so...   After all heavenly Tourism books "inspire" people and lead them to saving faith in Christ.... right?
Wrong.
Sensationalistic extra-biblical data about heaven cannot be of any use to get a person into heaven.  It cannot reveal Christ to a person, cannot save him/her, cannot educate him/her accurately in the things of God…  Yes, it can give him/her a pseudo-spiritual sugar buzz and tweak his/her emotions temporarily but (as someone has said) it is perhaps best to avoid glandular Christianity.

The bible is, of course, authoritative. 
If you’ve actually managed to read thus far you might feel like shouting, “Who cares about all of this talk about Biblical sufficiency and completeness and whatnot?  Even if this Malarkey kid says that his story is false there are plenty of other people who haven't recanted their stories about heaven.  Surely just one recantation doesn't disprove all of the other stories about heaven!  And anyway, who are you to question the validity of another person's experience?”
Those are all good points and I don't have the answers to them all.  And also, it must be said that I am not an authority on other people's experiences...  But I know where an authority can be found - the Bible.... and our experience as Christians, and the alleged experiences of others  (particularly the religious and spiritual ones) are to be understood and interpreted in light of Scripture alone.

"But what about the experiences of those other people who went to heaven and came back to write books about it???"

Ah, yes!  There it is!  You've hit the nail on the proverbial head...  We live in a day where "experience" is the great idol our culture bows down to.  What we feel like or what we've felt like has become the final judge and arbiter of all reality... and even Christians are not immune this this.   Whereas we Christians are supposed to evaluate reality by what God has actually said (or left unsaid) in His word we often evaluate reality by how we feel...  My friends, there is great danger here...  You see, when we begin determining right or wrong and truth or error, by a strictly subjective standard we have replaced the objective standard of Scripture as our sole authority. 

Uh-oh!  Someone reading this is mad.

I can almost hear them say, “Crabtree, stop trying to burst my bubble.  I genuinely like these “Heavenly Tourism” Books – as you call them.  They are encouragements to me.  They inspire me.  They make me want to go to heaven one day.”

To answer you let me first point you to Malarkey, who offers a warning to those drawn to sensationalistic books like,  The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven.  According to Malarkey, “People should read the Bible (instead)…  (because) the Bible is the only source of truth.” 

Also let me say this…  I want you as a Christian to be encouraged and inspired too.  In addition to this, I want you to desire to go to heaven…

            Therefore I encourage you to read a real life-after-death drama.

            It’s found at the heart of Christianity and it’s true.  It’s a story of someone who did in fact die..  a story of someone who did in fact come back to life…  a story of someone who has gone on to leave us with a very wonderful book.  That someone is Jesus.  That book is the Bible.  Read the latter and you’ll see more of the former. 

 In a bygone day children came to church dressed like little adults.  They sat in pews alongside of adults.  They sang the same hymns as adults.  They were expected to be quiet, attentive, and reverent just like the adults.  Of course, this arrangement required patience and charity on the part of the congregation... but I think this model made the Church of a bygone day much stronger than the average contemporary congregation. 
  
Today in many parts of the church world the expectations we have of children are abysmally low.  Is this because American Christianity’s view of children has been shaped more by American culture than by the Bible?  I’m not sure.  Whatever the reason, the result is that we no longer dress children like adults, we don’t ask them to sit alongside of the adults, and we certainly don’t think they are capable of singing the same hymns as adults….  And so we simply whisk our little prepubescent blobs of sunshine away to something called Children’s Church. 

            Is this wise?

            Is this helpful? 

            More importantly, is this practice Biblically defensible? 


 Yes, I know that children are children and they can be restless and even disruptive during church services but is this sufficient reason to amputate children from Christ’s Body?

 At All Souls Church we believe it is NOT.  We believe children are to be welcomed into the Body of Christ just like adults.  Yes, children do need to be instructed at their level, and we have special times set aside for this, but these times do not interfere with the corporate worship of Christ’s Body. 

 Here are a few reasons for our rationale:

I’ve sometimes heard preachers talk about children as being “the future of the church.”  But that is only half right…  Surely they are the present of the church too.  Therefore, if they are in the church shouldn’t they be ministered to as part of the church.

Someone from the peanut gallery objects, “But kids don’t have the understanding to get Big People Church.”  This may be so, but since when have intelligence tests ever determined who we let into our services?  Should the fact that children have the understanding of children be held against them?  By this reasoning we could argue that the senile, the mentally retarded, or even the person who lacks a high school diploma should be excluded…  but this would obviously be wrong.  If there is any place on earth where the “weak and foolish” should be accepted with open arms, it is the church.

I contend that the church of the future depends upon children being ministered to in the church of the present.

By this I mean that what happens in a typical Lord’s Day service needs to become part of a child’s regular experience.  Yes, I understand that this is easier said than done.  Kids are rambunctious and church is…   well…  strange.  That is to say, what happens in church each Lord’s Day is NOT normal.   Pastoral prayers, public scripture readings, corporate singing, sermons, etc., do not typically happen outside of a church setting and therefore MUST become normalized in the lives of our children.  How does this happen?  I can think of no better way than by simply giving children regular exposure to these things – i.e. having them sit through church services.

Unless children grow up in an environment where it is normal to see a man read the bible and where it is normal to listen to a sermon, they are very unlikely to see these things as normal when they become young adults.  We’ve all heard teenagers dismiss church services as “weird” and perhaps we’ve wondered why.  But wouldn’t you think church was weird too if you had spent the totality of your formative years being whisked away from normal Church to a world of flannel graphs, vacuous songs, and moralistic stories?  I would…  and for a long while I did, thanks to Children’s Church.

I contend that church must be normalized in the minds of children through their regular attendance of and participation in Lord’s Day Worship Services.

The Lord has given His Church regular means of grace for their collective benefit.  According to ch.21 of the Westminster Confession of Faith: 

“The reading of the Scriptures... sound preaching…   singing of psalms…  receiving of the sacraments instituted by Christ, are all parts of the ordinary religious worship of God.”

Elsewhere we read that these things are done “to put a visible difference between those that belong unto the Church, and the rest of the world.”  As far as I can tell this must include both the old and young of a given congregation.  The Lord has placed no age limits on the means of grace.

I contend that the regular means of grace are for both big people and little people and are to be received together as one body.

For Americans, segregation is a painful word…  that’s why I deliberately use it here.

America has a dark history of racial segregation and thankfully great strides have been made to right the wrongs associated with it.  Sadly there were even many churches in the past who were segregated along the “color-line.”  But as anyone with a modicum of Biblical knowledge knows, the Bible lends no support to the idea of racially segregated congregations.  It’s bitterly ironic therefore, that we Christians are not quite as quick to recognize other forms of segregation.   Surely age segregation within the Church has no more biblical warrant than racial segregation and I would contend that it is equally as destructive to the Church because it fragments the body of Christ.  Surely, the old and the young are members of one body – Christ’s body.

I contend that God has designed it this way and that we need each other. 

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