 Good Ole Days
Do you ever get a bit of nostalgia about those good ole days of yesteryear? I sometimes feel that way. It is maybe more common to me as I am growing older. We gaze around our lives seeing the problems and insanity that would have been unthinkable when we were children or when our parents and grandparents were young. We tend to have a robust sense of pessimism about our current situation and an inordinate optimism about the way things used to be. Maybe we could use the term “Mayberry syndrome" to refer to this particular kind of melancholy. The question we must ultimately ask is, was the past really the golden era that we think? And is getting back to the way things were really the goal for us? Days Gone By Do you ever feel like you were born in the wrong time? Like you should have lived among the Greeks learning philosophy? Or among the Bible characters in the Old or New Testaments? Or sailing the high seas in the days of discovery? Or exploring the west with Lewis and Clark and those real mountain men? Or driving cattle on those real old west cattle drives? Well let me just say one word –- dentistry, or transportation, or indoor plumbing, or electricity, or modern medicine, or air conditioning, or communication. I know we can often feel overwhelmed with the pace of modern society, but we have many advantages that those folks didn’t have and the opportunity to use this for the good of other people and God’s glory. My point is that we should not idolize the current like we have nothing to learn from the wisdom of those who have gone before, but neither should we idolize the past trying to go back to the way things used to be. Church Age I am not a dispensationalist, so I do not mean church age in the sense of the present time. Rather, I believe that the problem I outlined above can also be prevalent in the church. For example, I’ll work my way from the past to the present. First, we know that we base everything that we believe as Christians not on the word of any man but the revelation of God in the Bible. So, many Christians want to get back to the Bible, which I’m all for, however this should not mean acting like this is the first century. We live in the twenty-first century and our goal should be to make application of the principles, patterns, and promises of the text of Scripture to where we live today. New Testament Christianity does not have to mean robes and sandals and no indoor plumbing. But it should mean seeking to apply the same kind of faith, worship, holiness, and godliness of those days to our day. Next, we ought to desire to understand the complex path of the history of the church through the history of the world including the early church fathers, the ecumenical councils, the early creeds, and the notable theological influences, leading all the way to the protestant reformation. But none of these should be the context in which we are striving to get back to in. We must value the wisdom and the instruction passed down to us by these saints who have gone on to be with the Lord (Hebrews 12:1). But we must not view them or even their documents as the pinnacle of Christian practice or expression. For example, the Apostle’s creed, the didache, the Nicene creed, and the other literature from the first four centuries of the church’s history are extraordinarily important, but they are not the inspired word of God. This also means that historic confessions such as the Westminster or the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689, while of immense value for our study and consideration, are not a standard on all Christians. If you belong to a church that subscribes to one of these documents then you have bound yourself to that doctrinal position but only the Scripture is breathed out by God and binding on all believers. Finally, we must not be trying to get back to the Christianity of fifty or one hundred years ago among the folks from which we have descended. Again we should value and appreciate how the Lord used them, but they are not our stand the Bible is!
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