Century of the Self Part 3: A Jesus Shaped Hole

Part three of the Century of the Self  BBC series discusses the various human attempts to understand and remove our cultural programming and replace it with something new. These attempts failed. Often all they succeeded in removing was the conscience. 

There is a Jesus-shaped hole in our lives. Even Christians have this hole. Hopefully they have filled it properly. It is a life-long process. Jesus talked about demons and the care needed after their casting out as something worse might replace it. Part III highlights this issue by showing what happens when one tries to fill a God shaped hole with something else. Matthew 12 (The Message) tells us:

^43-45"When a defiling evil spirit is expelled from someone, it drifts along through the desert looking for an oasis, some unsuspecting soul it can bedevil. When it doesn't find anyone, it says, 'I'll go back to my old haunt.' On return it finds the person spotlessly clean, but vacant. It then runs out and rounds up seven other spirits more evil than itself and they all move in, whooping it up. That person ends up far worse off than if he'd never gotten cleaned up in the first place. "That's what this generation is like: You may think you have cleaned out the junk from your lives and gotten ready for God, but you weren't hospitable to my kingdom message, and now all the devils are moving back in." 

You do not accomplish much if you take out Babylon from your life and then allow it to reenter by inventing a Babylon of your own choosing. Vacuums will be filled. This part of the documentary tells of the human attempts to replace the vacuum of our lives without God. (Warning: Some of these attempts involve images of naked people.) 

There was a book I read decades ago that I should have paid more attention to. Not necessarily the book itself, as it was somewhat unhelpful. But the title said it all—More of Jesus, Less of Me. 

God does not see us as we are, he sees us as He will make us. There are parts of us that do not fit the Potter's vision of us. Isaiah 29 talks about our desire to be self-designed, as this episode of the documentary focused on. 

^15-16Doom to you! You pretend to have the inside track. 

   You shut God out and work behind the scenes,

Plotting the future as if you knew everything, 

   acting mysterious, never showing your hand.

You have everything backward! 

   You treat the potter as a lump of clay.

Does a book say to its author, 

   "He didn't write a word of me"?

Does a meal say to the woman who cooked it, 

   "She had nothing to do with this"?

Imagine that you are a feeling lump of clay. It would be painfully to have your parts molded. A Christian wants to be the kind of pot God envisions for them, but there is pain involved. 

Part of this process is to "leave" Babylon the Great. But we are happy there, and we do not want to leave, like Lot's wife. Revelation 18 tell us. 

Do You See The "Handwriting On The Wall?"Get out, my people, as fast as you can, 

      so you don't get mixed up in her sins, 

      so you don't get caught in her doom. 

   Her sins stink to high Heaven; 

      God has remembered every evil she's done. 

   Give her back what she's given, 

      double what she's doubled in her works, 

      double the recipe in the cup she mixed; 

   Bring her flaunting and wild ways 

      to torment and tears. 

   Because she gloated, "I'm queen over all, 

      and no widow, never a tear on my face," 

   In one day, disasters will crush her— 

      death, heartbreak, and famine— 

   Then she'll be burned by fire, because God, 

      the Strong God who judges her, 

      has had enough.

Lot's wife did not want to leave, and suffered the consequences. If you stay in Babylon, you will suffer the consequences. If one is not careful as one leaves, what fills up the recently-vacated space will be just as bad as what has been removed. 

Those of my religious tradition every year have a period where leaven is removed from the diet as outlined in Leviticus 23. The analogy is that just as one removes leaven one should remove sin.

This is a good analogy, a Biblical analogy, but the analogy is not enough. 1 Corinthians 5 tell us this: 

^6-8Your flip and callous arrogance in these things bothers me. You pass it off as a small thing, but it's anything but that. Yeast, too, is a "small thing," but it works its way through a whole batch of bread dough pretty fast. So get rid of this "yeast." Our true identity is flat and plain, not puffed up with the wrong kind of ingredient. The Messiah, our Passover Lamb, has already been sacrificed for the Passover meal, and we are the Unraised Bread part of the Feast. So let's live out our part in the Feast, not as raised bread swollen with the yeast of evil, but as flat bread—simple, genuine, unpretentious.

We have to let God makes us into the kind of pot He sees us as. The imperfections have to go. We need to be filled with something new. We cannot just put out the old. We need something new. 

^1-2 So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

I also like what the Phillips translation says. "Do not let this world squeeze you into its mold." This world wants you as a part of its consuming, angry, but docile masses—not as an individual "pot," but as a part of a whole morass of the system. The system wants you as a slave. God wants you as a child. We have to live in the Babylonish system, but we do not have to be of that system. 

This is why I think this whole series is important as it shows what soceity is doing to keep each of us in bondage. 

God has a better plan. As the apostle Paul says we do not see exactly what this means, we see it darkly in furtive glimpses. We know that God will make us into the image of His Son—gods and goddesses of His devising.  

I felt I needed a longer introduction to part three as I disagree with attempts to fill the Jesus-shaped hole with something besides Jesus. Part three of the documentary can stand alone, but it will make a lot more sense if you watch part I and part II.

Part III here