Download The State of the Nation what: is the Ethical response?

Michael Cassidy
It’s a daunting privilege I have to say to come into this kind of gathering and be with a distinguished
group of this nature and I must say I do praise God for the ministry of SA Theological Seminary and for
bringing groups like this together I rejoice that we at African Enterprise and our newly developing A.E
leadership training centre are in a strategic alliance with SATS and I believe that as we all seek to move
forward at this time in terms of theological training in our country we are moving into challenges that
are absolutely immense of course and you theological educators are also as a group of people who like
SATS I strongly admire, because under guard you are tasked with training the next generation of
ministers, pastors, Bible teachers, missionaries and evangelists. And you also help the church to stay
true to its calling, you help us lay-people try to think straight on issues and you explain to us things
which are in the Bible that some of us find hard to understand.
I did hear of a certain preacher, African American preacher in the US who got up in front of the
gathering to speak and he said to them, “And now brothers and sisters, I’s gonna explain the
inexplicable, I’s gonna let you see the invisible, I’s gonna speak the unspeakerable, I’s gonna define the
indefinable and I’s gonna unscrew the unsrutable”. Well, I don’t think that I will do that but that’s what
your assignment is and that gives you an enormous importance, I can’t overstress the importance of
theological educators, Bible teacher and others, because we are living in times when all the pressures
are coming against the church all kinds of levels not least theological to take us into places of
compromise, modifying the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ changing the Biblical message and so on.
The topic assigned me today is a daunting one, “The state of the Nation and what is the ethical response
to it?” In some ways it’s caused us to remember I believe, certain great truths - it calls us like the men of
Issachar to understand the times and to know what to do to be able to see ahead. We need prophetic
insights regarding the course of action that the church and nation need to take and to have an
understanding of the consequences. So in a sense we are obliging ourselves to remember certain things,
to understand certain things and to be able to see ahead.
I heard a little tale the other day which illustrates my point a bit, of an elderly fellow 91 year s old and he
is still playing golf and he said to his wife one day, “I think I’m going to have to give up golf”, and she
said, “Why?” and he said, “Because when I hit the ball I can’t see where the ball goes when I’ve hit it ” ,
So his wife says to him, “Well listen why don’t you take my brother, He is admittedly 98 but he has
wonderful eyesight, he sees perfectly”, So he said, “Okay I will try ” So he went off with the 98 year old
and the golfer hit the ball and said to the 98 year old fellow with the perfect eye sight, “did you see
where the ball went?” The 98 year old said “yes”, the golfer asked him “where did it go?” And the 98
year old said “I can’t remember.”
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In a sense I wanted to say we do need to able to see, we need to be able to see ahead and we need to
be able to remember and keep in mind certain critical and basic true’s as we contemplate this issue of
ethics and the nation.
That’s why I want to take the first section of my remarks today in talking about my own understanding
of Biblical ethics generally before talking about the nation. My thesis is this: that there is a moral
framework for life, both social and personal which is based on a moral fabric built into the universe, this
moral fabric and set of absolutes is the Christian one contained in the Bible and the reason this is so is
because Jesus is the Lord and creator of the universe as the agent of creation. Remember the scripture
says without him was not anything made which was made, as the agent of creation he stamped his way
into the very fabric of the universe itself.
In consequence, when we go His way, when we play the game of life His way it works. Whether talking
about personal behavior, personal ethics, social ethics, political ethics or whatever, sexual ethics you
name it, when we don’t play the game the Jesus way it doesn’t work , in other words as people are living
they fail to understand this as they see the Christian ethic as the friend and not the enemy of both their
joy and fulfillment and their societal welfare so they are able to arrive at a sure and stable moral
foundation for personal lives, for societies and countries. If it’s true that Jesus is behind everything as
the cosmic Christ then it is Christian ethics which must inform and determine our social, political and
personal morality.
Brothers and sisters I’m going to elaborate on this a bit, this seem to be the key thing to remember, just
a moment however, in clarifying terms. Chuck Colson has made a distinction which I think is quite a
helpful one between ethics and morality and he says historically ethics have met a universal changing
standard for human behavior it comes from the Greek word Ethos which derives from a root word
meaning a stall, conveying a dwelling place, a place of stability and a place of permanence. By contrast
morality comes from the Latin word “mores” which means the customs or manners practiced in any
given community , so we could speak of the morality of the ancient Romans or the ethics of a Polynesian
tribe and we would mean social rules and regulations, we could speak about an ANC morality, a
communist party morality, ANC youth league morality we can talk about a South African morality or a
white morality or whatever and this really describes how we behave and basically what controls the
things that we do, this is in contrast to ethics that ought to be morals in a sense and morality describes
what this is.
So in holding this view of morality those people who would say or might say murder is wrong they aren’t
then from this perspective claiming a universal principle but merely say that they don’t personally like
the idea of murder, according to this view a majority of people can say sexual promiscuity is ok then it
becomes okay so you have like modern or post modern reality which opens up the gate behavior to
anything. If a majority of people say that apartheid is acceptable then it becomes acceptable.
So then in this view there is no real ultimate transcendent Biblical principles that are violated only some
relativistic ethic or morals determined by some kind of majority vote.
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Now this of course is light years away from the Bible understanding of ethics which we will elaborate on
in just a few moments. But a very interesting thing has happened in modern times. In modern times our
culture has done almost the unthinkable and has abandoned some twenty centuries of certainly western
traditions, maybe human tradition generally anywhere anytime but there does exist a transcendence
and divinely routed standard of right and wrong; which says there are standards of right and wrong
based and are routed in a divine law which is above and beyond our own ideas of right and wrong. This
is what we mean when we talk about standards transcended, and it’s interesting to know that this is not
just a Christian idea. It was embraced by philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome; Plato for example
could insist that we can not be good unless we have a timeless and transcendent idea of goodness.
Aristotle, another Greek philosopher said there is an ethical law which is based on a universal nature
and principle which came to be known as natural law. Roman writers like Cicero and so forth could
agree with them, but what has happened today is that we have the incredible spectacle in our culture
and world where we are abandoning a near universal principle amongst the Christians and non
Christians alike that human laws and behavior must rest on a transcended standard of truth and ethics.
Coming back to Chuck Colson, he made this statement some years back, he said when the hippies of the
nineties and sixties insisted on doing their own thing it was the beginning of what I believe was the most
profound culture in our history. When the flower children indulged in cheap drugs and free sex many of
us simply thought they were revelling in old fashioned immorality. But there was something new here
he says, the hippies where not just violating accepted standards of behavior, and this notion of course
has spread across the world very very profoundly and extensively, and examples of consequences of this
are every where and are very pervasive. Fredrick Catherwood, who I happened to get to know a good
many years ago, he was a great parliamentarian in England, and when he was president of the
evangelical alliance of U.K he was doing a lot of investigation on the issue of morality and ethics in
Britain and he said at that time England is in the grip of an unprecedented and immoral crisis to which
the church must respond with clear messages about right and wrong, sin and salvation. As he toured
around England he said “I found devastating deterioration of the moral and social order” and he went
on to add “this is not a stable society and therefore it can not last, the only question is whether there
will be a turning back to the faith of our fathers or whether there will be a backlash which will throw out
the freedom which is based on Christian moral values in exchange for a hard authenterian society.” He
says the church must resist the temptation to trim its message to suit the academic skepticism of today,
we should not hesitate, he says, to preach what the Christian faith has always taught as right and wrong
we should preach sinners salvation to a world which lives in sin and sees no need for salvation. So in
other words he says Britain is in the process of forsaking Christian world views and ethical principles and
he says as it does so there are shattering social consequences. Or you might take a place like Zimbabwe,
where all kinds of traditional - so called moralities and principles and so forth seem to have broken
down, and in consequence you have a nation that has already gone into the abyss. Or you see a
situation like Nazi Germany where, when the church did not stand adequately in time against Hitler and
the nation moved off completely contrary to the Biblical ethics. It brought the most shattering
devastation, devastating ultimately long term socio political consequences. Or you might take the Soviet
Union, their government in the time tossed out the nation of God building a society where with
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whatever rules man came up with lead to phenomenal human rights abuse, suppression of the human
spirit on a massive scale, the annihilation of millions and millions of people in the Gulags or who got in
the way of the social experiment and sought to resist it but all ground down into economic collapse
along with social and personal misery.
In his epic novel the brother Koromusto Theodor told the story of three brothers who where debating
the source of evil in the world, finally one brother cries out to the other “if there is no God then
everything is permitted,” and that was of course what happened in the Soviet Union and it lead to all
kinds off different types of collapses within that country and within that empire.
In a sense it’s like coming back and looking at what happened: if you get the roots wrong you question
what kind of fruit it produces. Jesus spoke about that! You know them by their fruit. So you know the
right kind of true ethical or true moral order by the fruit that it brings. That’s a really important thing
because the wrong ethic or the wrong morals will bring the wrong disintegrated fruit. Isogenes said this:
“If you had spoken to the prodigal son on the day he left home would he have listened and if you spoke
to him on the day at the pig stay would he have needed to.” In other words the lesson that got learnt
about living away from the father, the father’s rules or principles where that takes you, it takes you
down hill.
Sir Augustine used to say: “See where it leads if you want to know about an ethic, see where it leads,
see where it takes you. C S Lewis, in his typical colorful way of writing, said “Follow it up to the absolute
end. See where it takes you.” Francis Schafer used to say: “Push them to the logic of their persuasions
then you have the presupposition and the final logic of where it takes you.”
So when you think of all these countries and nation’s presidents where everything has gone
catastrophically wrong I believe it presents us with the challenge of saying - well on what Christian ethic
was is based? And I want to say that I believe that the Christian ethic is based on this principle that Jesus
is the cosmic Christ, the creator of everything, without him wasn’t anything made that was made so He
has stamped his laws not just to be written in His book, He has stamped them into nature into the very
moral fabric of the universe. It ties in with Paul saying in Romans 2 verse 15 “The requirements of the
law are written on our hearts” before you even look at this, in creation the requirements are written on
our hearts. So it forces us to ask a number of interesting questions about the creation that we are in and
the universe we’re in and I want to suggest that the word “universe” is a theological notion coming from
two Latin words Uno’s (one) and versals (turned) a reality that is turned into one, so the question affirms
that we live in a universe not a multiverse which is random and chaotic but a universe which has an
internal coherence, unifying principle which is at its heart and that the God who did all of that, the God
of nature is also the God of grace.
So the God who made nature out there in the one book of revelation which is the book if you like, of the
nature then there is a second book which is a special book which is the revelation of the word of God. I
am trying to help us just get something clear here that if Jesus is behind everything then the created
order and people in it only will work and function properly if they function in His way. So it is the
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unifying coherence principle at the heart of the universe which gives us this internal unity. The Romans
could see and they spoke about a “universes” and the Greeks could see and the Greeks said yes there is
a unifying coherence principle at the heart of the universe which holds everything together and which
puts laws in place and we are going to call it the logos, and obviously you will guess where I’m going.
Because John then comes along and says yes you are right you Greeks - that there is a unifying
coherence principle at the heart of the universe and you are right to give it a name, you saw it as all
powerful all unifying, all rational, all knowing and you have called it the logos, but now you Greeks I’ve
got some special news for you that the logos in the beginning was the word the logos and the word was
with God and the word was God and the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his
glory as the only begotten of the father full of grace and truth.
Without this Lord Jesus was not made anything which was made or you can say in Colossians 1 verse 17
all things where made through him and for him and in him all things hold together, in him you hold
together, in him I hold together, in him families hold together, in him countries hold together, in him
societies and nations hold together, in him all thing hold together but if you try to depart out from him
you produce something fragmenting that is going to burst outwards into chaos. No wonder then Jesus
could come along and say all power in the cosmos and on earth is committed to me I’m in charge of all
of this I made it. And so the laws I’m going to talk to you about I am only going to expose to you in my
teaching laws which are already there, I’m not going to impose a morality on you I’m going to expose to
you a morality which is already there so has he spoke and preached people said yes that is how it is they
didn’t say what a noble idea they said yes that is how it is and when it says he spoke with authority
“exusia” in Greek, he spoke out of the state of being he spoke of how things were so, as he preached
people said yes that’s right, I know that, I have discovered that, I have experienced that .
So then you see brothers and sisters what happens here is the Christian ethics becomes the challenge of
cooperating with the nature of the universe and the way things are and when you cooperate with the
moral fabric stamped into the universe you do that which is orderly, integrative, whole, harmonymaking. When you go the non- Jesus way, you commit chaos. You do that which is disintegrative, you do
that which is breaking, you do that which is fragmenting. So the moral law is the law of nature and the
law of nature is the law of life and this law is both in nature and in the good book where it is elaborated
and refined.
In the apartheid years I wrote to one of P W Botha’s cabinet members and this is what I said to him I
said “Listen my friend the real issue about apartheid and you guys in the National Party cabinet is
whether we live in a moral universe or not, it’s not whether you have got a good or a bad policy or a
good thumb suck from a number of politicians, it’s whether we live in a moral universe or not.” And I
said to him “If we do not live in a moral universe you can carry on with you discriminative and apartheid
policies and you will be able finally to get away with it, but if we do in fact live in a moral universe with
Jesus back of it all then you will not be able to continue with apartheid policies because negative and
deeply destructive consequences will catch up with you, policies will fail and the whole country will be
profoundly damaged therefore you need to change course and bring your policies into line with Biblical
principles especially the policies of justice and human equality. This may seem politically risky, but it’s
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far better to lose in the short term with that which must ultimately win, than win in the short term with
that which must ultimately lose - it can’t work.” So beloved, if we go down the same kind of track
whether it is with a government which is black, green, brown, multi colored rainbow whatever, if you
get it wrong it isn’t going to work. If it’s ANC, National party, IFP, DA whoever you name, if we get the
stuff wrong it just wont work. That’s why some of the kids come to me and ask me why I think pre
marital sex is wrong? And I respond that I don’t even need to open my Bible to answer that, I will tell
you why it’s wrong because it doesn’t work, it’s not the way of happiness or wholeness it’s not the way
of ultimate fulfillment, it’s not the way of peace and joy, the stolen waters maybe sweet for a season but
ultimately they are bitter as death, it takes you downhill it takes you away.
So it seems to me that it is so important to understand this because then it’s in our vested interest to go
the Jesus way because the Jesus way will work for us the non-Jesus way won’t. The ways of
discrimination or violence will not work, so what we have to say is what does it means to be good? We
are going to bring the ethics of Christ to South Africa to be good to be a good person to be a good
country, and this comes back to Plato’s idea the good which functions at maximum effectiveness
according to the intention of its creator or designer thus a good knife is one that cuts well, a good kite is
one that flies well, a good person is one that functions the way a person should, a good government is
one that functions the way a government is supposed to function as a servant under God propagating
his laws in society and a good leader is one who understands these principles and operates under them
in the way he or she leads.
So the challenge as far as I am concerned in terms of ethic in South Africa, is firstly to operate under the
presupposition itself, to grasp the urgency of getting people to understand that if they go the non-Jesus
way it isn’t going to work, because the moral fabric of the universe won’t cooperate with you. You will
not only be under the judgment of the Bible and of God, but you will be under the judgment of the
universe - are you getting me? I hope I’m not losing you because actually if you get this; that this is His
world - the comic Christ and creator, it only works His way it doesn’t work any other way, so we have to
tell people around us that they must refrain from going the non-Jesus way otherwise it’s going to bust
you up.
So now if we come back from there to South Africa, I believe we had a great miracle in 1994, I think that
God did an amazing thing amongst us and I praise God for what happened then and for a lot of good
things that have happened since, but I think the fact is all of a sudden in South Africa people are
dismayed, confused, restless, increasingly anxious, pretty fearful as well as being morally and ethically
adrift and at sea and the democracy that we are seeing is unlike a democracy we read or dreamed about
way back then. But the miracle of ‘94 looks like it is slipping through our fingers how? why?
Yesterday we had a meeting as the NIRSA council at O.R Tambo airport for most of the day and we went
round and we asked people to give their thoughts and these are leaders from around the country and I
couldn’t believe it was a consistent expression of deep concern, no denying our potential, no denying
what we could or should be but recognizing that we are in trouble and I try to thing about when or
where we got into this position. One of my only little theories for what it’s worth, is that we took out of
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the constitution, which a number of us had worked to get into the constitution, the preliminary
constitution back in 1993 early 94, we got into that constitution the words: “In humble submission to
almighty God we the people of South Africa,” in other words, we were asking the constitution makers
and we met with some of them, to put in there that we are a nation that has an accountability to God,
to a transcended principle. Mr. Abe Sacks came to me at the Kempton Park meeting when I was out
there, at the institution I had been working for, he said to me you guys will be pleased you got in, In
humble submission to God, cause he said that though I’m an atheist I can understand that 99.9% of
South African is theist. What happened was a number of people from religion departments and the
universities in South Africa went to the constitution makers said “No!” you have 0.1% of South Africans
who are atheist and we have got to have a constitution which is for everybody so you can’t have a
reference to God, so “In humble submission to God” was taken out and you know what that means. That
means beloved, that at that point the state is declaring itself autonomous and you know what that
means, “Autos” means self and “nomous” means law , it meant a law unto ourselves in that moment we
were saying that we do not have a transcended reference point, so beloved where have the ethics of the
new South Africa come from? They has come from a thumb suck of government or an executive of ANC
or a smoke filled room of politician’s who could tell us what you could do about a baby in the womb,
who will tell us “No” the understanding of marriage from the beginning is that it’s between a man and a
woman we are going to change that, and what Paul says about that in Romans 1 is that it is going
contrary to nature or to the established order of things in nature before he talks about anything that the
Bible or scripture might say there is a way of nature for sexually and marriage.
So once we did away with “In humble submission to Almighty God” we are out on our own and what I
think has happened in South Africa is a transcended judio Christian and moral ethical base to our
country has gone and in consequence we are a lawless society and all kinds of stuff is going wrong. Time
forbids really for me elaborating on this whether you think about our medical approach to AIDS,
whether you think about the orphan situation that we’ve got with 2.5 million orphans heading up to 3
million, whether you think of our education problems: and one educator said to me recently that they
calculated 80% of South African schools are dysfunctional, 30 thousand teachers leaving the profession
every year and only 6 thousand coming into the colleges now with a net loss of 24 thousand. South
African schools have been declared on the international index some of the most dangerous schools in
the world. In Natal recently we had a story of a little lady who believed in sexual purity and virginity up
until marriage and all her young friends around her were sexually active or pregnant or whatever and
she was saying “No this isn’t the way to go I’m still standing on my ground on this thing,” and she was
murdered in a classroom. I said “Hello,” what is actually happening to us or our crime rate, 62 murders a
day, 21 thousand a year. What is actually happening to us? How can people kill people for a cell phone
or for just a few rands life has become absolutely cheap.
We have said that the Bible’s way on sexual ethics is not right, so now as soon as many of our young
people reach puberty they go into sexual activity, and we have a situation now, the HIV situation of 1013
per day dying, that’s two high schools dying per day 317 thousand last year and this year there will be
5010 plus cases, 1400 new ones per day, this is more dangerous than apartheid, this is a pandemic of
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high proportions and the answer is not just to talk anti retrovirals, the answer is not to talk a condom
culture, not to say that there is never a place for that but it is a hierarchy to preach that as the answer
that that is safe sex, when we know that only one kind of safe sex which is abstinence before marriage
and faithfulness with in it. The only country in Africa that has had the courage to take the Biblical ethic
and try to work it out publicly is Uganda, what happened? They brought their HIV ADIS incidence down
from 35% to 4%, why don’t we listen? That’s why we brought the presidents wife to SACLA in 2003, we
said Janet come and tell us the story, because they pushed for a Biblical ethic, through government,
through media, through schools, they had a virgin pride program which went into their schools to say to
kids you don’t have to be running around boasting that you came sexually active at an early age, why
don’t you become proud of the fact that you kept yourself from marriage?
I mean it’s a whole different approach, they probably do have some anti retroviral and some condoms
teaching you know I suspect but to see if we are doing it this way we haven’t got it right because it
doesn’t line up with this, it doesn’t line up with the way God has created us. That just living in sexual
immorality will be okay. If He made the universe He made sex and He wrote it all in the scriptures then
that is the way to go; then any other way is wrong and the Bible doesn’t say it’s wrong in an arbitrary
way it says it’s wrong because it doesn’t work and it’s not in our interests, so you know we have to
pause and we have to say to ourselves, “What are we saying? And what are we doing?” And we have to
think about what the Bible says about things like words, you know the Hebrew understanding of word is
an extremely powerful piece of energy which once uttered changes the universe. The universe can never
be the same after you and I have spoken certain words there are now out there.
So it’s a very powerful thing, it is not just some youthful exuberance to say kill for Zuma, you are
throwing out words of energy and notions which are picked up, so Mr. Julius Malema with his words is
not just a political hot-head. What he has said is something extremely dangerous. Having said those
words when Mr. Zuma was being tried in Pietermaritzburg or a preliminary thing about his trial, I saw all
these people with things on their backs saying kill for Zuma.
We eliminate the opposition, who are becoming revolutionaries, is that a Christian notion? To kill or to
eliminate? Because if it isn’t it isn’t going to work it’s going to do us damage and if he could say not even
Chief Justice Langa will not get Jacob Zuma to prison without killing half the youth of South Africa. Bhuti
Malamela the South African youth league chairperson said “Jacob Zuma will remain innocent while we
declare him to be,” so abrogating the cause, and that is a completely false notion about how guilt is or
isn’t established. You know Beloved what has made me quite anxious, is that our leaders have not come
out and condemned this kind of rhetoric, only about one or two in the new ANC, but by a large amount
of rhetoric has been allowed to go and when you throw out that kind of wrong rhetoric and language,
not the language of love, not the language of forgiveness, not the language of racial reconciliation you
are going the non-Jesus way and it becomes profoundly damaging.
So what do we need to do in our response? Well I want to give first of all just six headline pillars that I
believe on which our ethical response must rest and then I just want to talk about the NIRSA declaration
giving some details and possible ways of working out things.
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Six pillars on which I believe our ethical response must rest are,
1.
Divine unchanging sovereign Christ who is Lord over all and supreme authority in the universe.
Jesus is God, Jesus is creator of the universe, and Jesus upholds his universe by his words of power
Colossians 2:9, so if that is the case then our Jesus has the key to everything and we have to know who
He is and we dare not put Him as a panting in religious options. It’s not that we have nothing to learn
from people with other faiths, we can learn things from them but all of those guys are on the same kind
of level and turf as St Paul but Jesus is in a completely different category, this is our God in comet in
planet earth who shows us the way on how things are meant to go. I had the privilege once of sharing
the platform with James Erwin who was the first astronaut from the USA to drive the moon buggy on
the moon and a wonderful experience he had seen searching fro many realities in plane and flying space
program and all of that and the very interesting story that he told on how he found Christ on the moon,
it’s good to know that you don’t have to go to the moon though, send our kids to the moon but why not
because after all if Jesus made everything he made the moon, when I consider the heaven the work of
thy fingers, the moon, the stars that thou admire, So he found the Lord on the moon and then I saw a
picture once when I was preaching in a church in London, John Vestry and there was a picture 12x14 of
James Erwin driving a little moon buggy on the moon, marvelous picture incredible, and underneath it
he had inscribed these words, “man walking on the moon”, it’s not nearly as significant as God walking
on the earth.
Now beloved you are Bible teachers, theologians and all of that, there are places and Bible colleges
where Jesus is minimized from being that when he is down graded, when he is put as just one of a
number of different potions and our response interims of the ethics in South Africa are needed must be
to start with Jesus and uphold Jesus way, it must mean that getting this back out to the schools and all
of that somehow needs to be upheld in a way, out of the NIRSA conference recently we had 50
educators talking about how to get moral and spiritual education really right back to schools. How do we
win the battle beloved to help people get their own biblical ethics internalized by coming to know Jesus
Christ and that means that at the very least one of our responses has to be on going evangelism and
sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with people whenever we can.
The 2nd Pillar-A reliable authoritative and divinely inspired scripture. Beloved I hope as theological
educators you aren’t amongst those who undermine the Bible as the word of God, there maybe
difficulties of how we understand. I believe that once we move way from the Bible as the word of God
we are in trouble we don’t hold to the authourity of scripture Paul’s word in 2nd Timothy 3:16. All word
is breathed out by God, all scripture and to hold onto that, our ethics are drawn from scripture and I
believe myself the scriptures have what the reformers call clarities. Clarities is a word for clarity which
means if you allow the text to speak for itself it’s straight forward meaning can come to the ordinary
reader. That was a problem pre reformation whether the clergy said you can’t, the Bible was in Greek
obviously but it was in basically golga Latin, so it was locked away from ordinary people and the priests
took them into the indulgences and all kinds of weird and wonderful things that adjusted the way of
salvation, but then when Luther came along he translated it into the language of the people into
German, Kelvin came along and translated it in to French, Tyndale came along and put it into English and
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the reformation became a prefer between ordinary people reading the text and finding it had clarity,
you could understand what it was saying on basically all major issues of life.
The 3rd pillar-Biblical world view. Somebody said that we need to do our apologetics world viewishly so
we need to have a biblical world view out of which we bring our ethics. So this is a world vie of which we
bring our ethics. So this world view of which God is the father and creator and of which there are
spiritual forces also there, Satan is there, evil spirits are there, even principalities and powers are there
and God, father and Holy Spirit are also there, so that all nature is impregnated by super nature and
there are forces, spirit forces that are out there as well as those that are God angels, the Holy Spirit and
all of that. So if we are thinking about South Africa we have to really raise our eyebrows when certain
political leaders go off and slaughter 10 or 15 cattle and have animals sacrificed and calling ancestors
before they go into some political meeting or big situation. A thing is not just okay because it’s African or
black anymore than anything is not okay because it is whites, white western culture and black culture
has to be critised and our ethical responses must understand that the Bible will affirm culture where it
aligns with the word of God, it will critic culture where it is deviating and it will judge culture where it is
in contradiction with scripture and we need to have a handle on this that’s why the whole thing of
gospel and culture is so important, whether it’s white culture, black culture or brown culture and our
ethics need actually to be infused with this understanding, so a biblical world view and Jesus not
ancestors is the only mediator between God and man and these things beloved we actually have to have
the courage to say.
The 4th Pillar-A Christian mind, most of you would know Henry Blemurs famous book which is called the
Christian mind and what he says is this, that a Christian mind is not the mind of a schizoid Christian who
hops in and out of his Christian mentality as the topic of con changes from the Bible to the news paper,
the Christian mind is a mind trained and informed and equipped to handle the data of circular
controversy with in the framework of reference which is constructed of Christian supposition. So you
educators need to try to teach those that are in your care to think christianly, that’s what Reuben was
talking about when it comes to things like bio ethics, how do we think Christianly about the things
happening in our country, how do we think Christianly about it’s take on the judiciary and things of that
nature so Lord help us to have a Christian mind that we have in South African.
The 5th Pillar-A Godly life both individually and nationally, Beloved we can’t have situations where on
every second corner there are major Christian leaders have immoral train smashes, it needs compassion,
understanding, it needs pastoral care and all that I grant you but the same time we need to be
challenging ourselves that our individual lives as far as the Lord can enable us are examplinary, because
if you try to bring your ethics out of our personal life which is in shambles it’s going to lack credibility,
likewise when you come to the nation we need to be trying to make South Africa be comprised of good
people. Alexis a 19th century French philosopher once toured America, when he got back to France he
was asked, where in lies the greatness of America, I sought for the genius of America in the Commodus
harbors and apple rivers and it wasn’t there, I sought it in the fertile fields and barn less forests and in
the rich mines and it wasn’t there, I sought for the genius in the mind of a democratic congress and it
wasn’t there, the matchless constitution and it wasn’t there, not until I went into the churches of
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America and heard her pulpit’s a flame with righteousness did I understand the secret in the genius and
power. America is great because America is good and if Americans seize to be good the America will
seize to be great.
Beloved this is as true now as it was then, America is great now, could be up for discussion or Britain or
Western Europe or any of the places just don’t single out the states, but I go to America probably once a
year sometimes often the past 40 years I think America is on a moral slide whether that can be turned
around I don’t know but if it stay on a moral slide it will seize to be great and the same principle apply to
us. Unless we have a nation made of good people young and old we will find that 20 years from now we
could find ourselves in a Zimbabwe type scenario. If you pick a newspaper and you read between the
lines there is enough to shiver your spine I think because all it indicates is that we are turning our backs
on what I have been talking about this morning.
The 6th Pillar-A committed and balanced involvement in Christian mission and evangelism we need to be
going with an evangelistic message I wish people are born again, saved, redeemed, converted whatever
language you want to use but then to that we have to add a real and true and practical socio-political
concern and beloved that is what has lead a few of us in April to call together at the NIRSA gathering in
Boksburg, National Initiative for the Reformation of South Africa. You have the document please read it
and pass it on.
I want you to revisit 18th century English revival under the Wesleyan’s and Wilberforce and Shaft springs
and the clapper group and see what happened there, I’m reading a book right now titled the 18th
century Christian reformers by JC Riel it was written in 1869 an old book an I love the Wesleyan’s and
I’ve also embarked on my own biography of Wesleyan and I don’t know how many biographies of
Wesleyan I haven’t read and also Clifford Hill’s new book called A Wilberforce connection, this 18th
century Wesleyan revival is one we need to be seeking to. Beloved what a revival because there was
preaching, people got born again, people where saved all across England there was teaching, there was
discipleship, what does it mean to be a Christian? How to live like a Christian, the Wesleyan class
meetings and all of that but then there was social reform, England at that time was beyond the telling of
wickedness, for drunkenness, for immorality, for debauchery, honestly in the parliament 120 crimes for
which people could get the death penalty it was a shocker, 84 000 children where down in the mines for
18 hours a day working naked, it was a heartless society the stories tell us and along came the
Wesleyan’s and Wilberforce and those guys the Clapper group and they put together evangelism socio
Politian plan and action will lead to enormous social change and interaction, the children were brought
out of the mines, education reforms, prison reform, every kind, economic reform and off course slavery
was abolished.
I believe that, that one great model is one that you need to be teaching your students and studying
yourselves it is such a place of inspiration and hope. So I commend these rather scrambled thoughts to
you as the kind of thing that one needs to do over a couple of sessions.
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Beloved I want to say you don’t have to run off to New Zealand or some place, I have nothing against
New Zealand or Australia it is lovely, I’ve been to these places and they are fantastic but we have the
opportunity here almost second to none to do something unique and special.
Africa I believe is going to become the major pilgrim of world mission sometime in the 21 st century and
South Africa can lead the change on that and so instead of packing for Perth I want to encourage you,
your ethical, spiritual, ethical response to the church I want you to say Our God be thanked who is with
us at this hour, may the Lord bless you and thank you for letting me share.
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