Primitive Religion

The Punishment-Reward worldview is deeply embedded in all of us.   As children, when we pleased our parents we were rewarded, and when we were naughty we were punished.    In movies with a classic ending, the good guys win and the bad guys are destroyed.   In the Old Testament, when Israel was obedient it went well for them, and when they forsook the Lord and followed the idols, terrible troubles and judgments happened.

Obey and be blessed; disobey and be cursed.    Then we take one step further:  if life is going well for me and I am prospering and enjoying peace and comfort, I MUST be doing something right.   I AM right! And if life is not going well for me and I am suffering and losing money and failing, then I MUST have done something wrong.  I AM wrong!   As Jesus’ disciples put it, “Who sinned–this man or his parents–that he should have been born blind?”

If we are in a community that shares in the reward-punishment world view, our job is to congratulate the prospering that God is on their side, and remind the suffering that something is wrong with them and there must be some sin in their life to cause this.   Suffering is their fault, in other words.    And if we are suffering, we wrack our brains trying to find out where we went wrong or why God has suddenly turned against us.   No wonder people loathe and fear this “reward-punishment” type of god who isn’t God!

Sound familiar?   It should because this is the view of God and life and religion that Job and his three friends shared.   The righteous are blessed and shielded from harm; the wicked are cursed and experience every kind of trouble.    Job suffered.   Therefore Job is unrighteous and he needs to fess up.   And it infuriated Job because he hadn’t done anything wrong according to the standards of the time.    He felt betrayed by God, as one who had gotten the opposite of what was owed him by his Deity in light of his own exemplary behavior.    God therefore owed him an explanation.

But the problem wasn’t God.   It was this simplistic, primitive religious system that could not explain two realities:   trials and testings of the righteous; and blessings and grace for the wicked.    Job’s friends didn’t mean to be so terribly cruel, but their system had no other answer but to blame the victim for his troubles and insist he must has sinned to merit them.

Where do we find primitive religion among Christians in the USA?   Obviously, in health and wealth circles.   If you give such and such amount, God will bless you a hundred fold.    If we weren’t healed, it was because you didn’t have faith.  If you are spiritual, you will enjoy perfect health and be wealthy.  And if you are sick and/or poor, you obviously aren’t spiritual enough.  Terribly cruel and terribly manipulative, don’t you think?

Among more conservative believers, I hear it put like, “If you obey, you will be blessed.”    So we tithe.  Or we give a certain percentage to missions.   Or we volunteer in many ministries.   And, based on these merits, God is expected to bless us and take care of all our problems.    And if He isn’t, we must work harder so we can be blessed more.    A cruel treadmill, isn’t it?

And, what is worse, if we Evangelicals don’t get the expected blessings or get the opposite–undeserved suffering–God has let us down and therefore we are ENTITLED to find our blessings outside of God in the world of sinful pleasures and whatever we can grab for ourselves.    I’ve worked hard–I deserve it becomes our bottom line.

Now there is indeed a blessing from walking closely with Christ, an intimacy that is there regardless of our circumstances.    But if we ever think He owes us a blessing, or that we have done our part and so He must keep His end of the bargain, we are not practicing biblical Christianity but unbiblical, primitive folk religion that has no room for suffering saints or graced sinners.

Mature, biblical religion understands that we all start off as wicked people who are mightily blessed when we deserved nothing but God’s curses.   God confers on us the unearned status of righteousness, and as the grace-righteoused, he tells us we will suffer in this life just like Jesus did–even when we’ve done rightly and especially when we’ve done rightly.   And we will see other people, people just like we used to be, who will be blessed mightily even though they are so wicked–while we ourselves are suffering and especially when we ourselves are suffering.

It will challenge our primitive understanding of reward and punishment, and require us to let go of the neat and tidy worldview that eliminates personal suffering and offers no grace to others.    In other words, we lose all control and God owes us nothing.  There is no system we can work to guarantee blessedness and prevent all suffering.   God now has all the cards–blessing whoever He wants to bless and giving everyone whatever He wants to give or not give.

Primitive religion keeps all the cards in our hands.    Grace religion places them all in God’s hands and humbly accepts the mystery of undeserved suffering and undeserved blessing.    To which religion do you belong?