Ancient Ways

RETURNING TO THE ANCIENT WAYS

My son in law and I were talking a couple of weeks ago and he relayed to me the statement that an acquaintance of ours had made about “returning to the ancient ways,” referring to the way they served Christ in the first century. More than once I have heard statements like, “Wouldn’t it have been great to live in the time of the first century church!” I heard this first as a boy in western Canada and later, quite often, during my travels of the last four decades.

At its core, this statement is an honest expression of desire for more of God’s power and presence in our lives. There is a certain wistfulness in the desire to somehow be freed from the trappings of the complicated living of today and moved backward to a simpler time. Actually, there is a way for that to happen. It could be accomplished pretty much by moving to some area of the world, like a remote corner of China, where the development of the church and Christianity, the elevated persecution, and the more simple culture would be similar to what it was like in first century Palestine.

Palestine in the first century was really not that great a place to live—interesting, yes, but a nice place to live? No! It was a poor country; it was under the thumb of the Roman Empire; it was cauldron of religious revolt; and there were frequent uprisings that the Roman army put down with extreme violence and bloodshed. The economy of the area was weak but the average Jew paid close to 40 percent of his income to the tax collectors and to the temple in tithe. Life was not that great! In 70 AD and again in 132 AD, the Roman army moved in and the first time destroyed most of Jerusalem and the temple. In 132 AD a false messiah inspired a rebellion in Jerusalem, and the Romans completed the task of destroying the city and the nation essentially ceased to exist. Not a great time to be alive and living in that part of the world.

In John 4 Jesus had an encounter with a woman at a well in Samaria. This encounter was remarkable on several levels:

1. The Jews and the Samaritans hated each other and good Jews went out of their way not to go through Samaria, which was a part of Palestine. Was Jesus going against "the way things were" again?

2. A Jewish rabbi (teacher) did not talk to a Samaritan woman in public.

3. The unusual turn the conversation took after Jesus engaged the woman in conversation and essentially laid bare the wasted life she was living. The woman responded by saying in verse 19, “You are a prophet” and then went on to say, “We Samaritans worship at our temple on Mt. Gerizim and you Jews worship at your temple in Jerusalem.” The unspoken part of the woman’s statement was: “Where is the right place to worship?”

Jesus response was, succinctly put, “Setting is not the issue. God is a spirit and they that worship Him will worship Him in spirit and in truth.”

The romantic wistfulness of saying, “I want to get back to the ‘ways of the ancients’” or “I’ve got to identify with the ‘True Church’” is an expression of an unfulfilled hunger for more of Him.

At their worst, these are trivial cover- up expressions designed to exploit a self-willed approach to worship. At their best, they are an expression of a deep hunger to follow God that can never be fulfilled through something as mundane as changing your denomination or as childish as “going back to the ways of the ancients.”

“Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.” John 4:23-24 (NIV).