Of course today, society looks at Christ and the Christian church and the Bible, and it says, ‘Unscientific’, and it dismisses us. And it looks at Christ and the church and the Bible and it says – and this is even hateful to modern society – it says, ‘Moralistic. We do not approve of them, we do not agree with them. They say you should have one husband, one wife, and stick to him and be faithful and loyal. No! They say adultery is wrong, they say homosexuality is wrong. But we have changed society’s values. When we talk about British values now we mean you can do what you like, you change sex, you can live as you like, you can ignore Scripture, you can ignore all moral tradition and you can completely freewheel. We hate the restrictions of Christ and his church and the word of God, the Bible. We detest it.’ So we are looked at, and Christ is looked at, through eyes which are now deeply in favour of the alternative moral society, and the free-for-all which we are moving into. And people have no context of the fall, that this is a fallen world. And they have no context of alienation from God, no realisation of it, and the need for redemption and eternal life.
Some time ago, one of my books was published in the United States and the publishers asked me some questions, and I was a bit startled by the questions. One of the questions was – Do you have any connections of distinction? And they elaborated – either the son of a duke or an earl or something of that kind. Any distinguished connections. Another question was – do you have a sporting past, perhaps when you were younger, at school, college, or any. Were you champion of anything? And then there were other questions – if you did military service, do you have any medals for gallantry? And I looked at these questions and, well these publishers were publishing an exposition of Scripture, what on earth have any of those things to do with the exposition of Scripture. There were a few years ago, a preacher in the USA and he had apparently starred in a film, a Hollywood film, a major film about a golf star. And this was all over the dust jacket of a book, an exposition of some part of Scripture. What had that got to do with his capacity to expound the Scripture? Some of the people that get hired to promote books and to do the jacket descriptions or blurbs, all this kind of thing, they are thinking according to the flesh.
‘Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.’ Listen to that – ‘yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh.’ Now actually it is very strong in the original Greek. The apostle Paul states this virtually as a fact, and our King James Version translators have done their very best to reproduce it as it appears. So the interesting question is debated – did the apostle Paul know Jesus Christ in the time of his flesh? Well whether he knew him or not, let us modify it a little – had he seen him? Maybe he did not know him, but had he seen him literally? And the answer is that it is not at all unlikely because the apostle Paul has spent years in Jerusalem, and he was a theological student there, and he had sat at the feet of Gamliel, one of the foremost Jewish teachers, and been educated there at the very time that Christ once, twice, three times, four, had visited Jerusalem and had spent time there and had drawn the great crowds. And do you not think that this one whom many said was the Messiah, who wrought amazing miracles, who spoke as no other man spoke, who occupied the courts of the temple and the authorities could not prevent it with vast crowds; do you not think that a theological student in Jerusalem would not have been there and heard and been plugged in to all this? Of course he would have been. The apostle Paul was not that many years younger than Christ and in AD possibly 33 in his late twenties he was converted. So he overlapped, he is at the same time as Christ. So it is likely he saw him, though we cannot be sure. But he saw him through the eyes of a zealous young Pharisee. That is what he was. Christ, he thought, is not one of us. And in fact he is against us; he is not one of the clergy. He has not studied in the rabbinical schools. He has not sat at the feet of Gamaliel or any other of the great Jewish teachers. He called people to repentance. We call people to obey the ceremonial law and the ceremonies. We say that we are already saved as Jews, and what we must do is comply to the detail with the ancient ritual. He calls people to a change of heart and repentance and a new life. He is different from us, and he wears poor clothing and that is a disgrace to us. So the young Saul of Tarsus, with his nationalism and his prejudice, looked at Christ and he hated him. So he saw him through the eyes of a Pharisee.