I read something somewhere last week about questions from below. These are human questions about truth or doctrine that we cannot answer from below. The answer can only come from above – from God. I found myself speaking at the weekend at a church about mission in front of church (see off the beaten track/tacking stuff) and some of the questions after were these below questions. That is not to say the questions are not valid, and maybe worth discussing but they can sidetrack us getting on with the mission at hand.
Questions from below are bit like when you are thinking about buying a car, all of a sudden the model you are looking at seems to be everywhere. Now I have become aware I would really like to build a bit of list of these questions from below. Here’s a few to get you started although not everyone will think they all constitute questions from below.

Who will be saved?
Are you saved?
How do you become a Christian?
What will happen to babies and children who die?
What is church?
The whole predestination thing?
What is hell/heaven like?
Is there more than one way to God?

After Good Friday how did the disciples cope? For us we know how the story ends, the hope of Easter Sunday. We tend to focus on the confusion and expectancy after the women have been to the tomb and discovered the body missing. Yet the in between period and turmoil must have been terrible, how do you cope after the expectancy of the previous three years, walking and talking with Jesus? Every time you see bread or wine, what is going through your mind, does it help when it seems your world has just come apart?

Trying to reflect on this in between time is hard. A way in is to try and imagine the disciples scattering after the arrest, and that feeling of loneliness. Most of us will have experienced loneliness from time to time but this must have been a loneliness of body, mind and spirit. A loneliness not just of missing the physical presence of a friend, but a loneliness of mind as all the thoughts and expect ions have gone and loneliness of spirit when God is distant or even seen to have died.

1 Cor 10:23″Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive. 24Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others.

This has been one of those weird un-understandable verses to me for a long time, but with what I am learning about law and rules I’m wondering if I’m beginning to understand it.

A couple of the problems with rules, in my mind, are:

• They can’t guide you to do the best, optimum thing at any moment, because they are generalised ideas.
• Knowing a moral rule is not the same as knowing God – following rules can in fact appear to reduce your reliance on knowing God. I say ‘appear’ because we are tempted to think that we are better because we followed the rule and perhaps if we are better then we don’t need to know God so well.

I’ve started to notice that Jesus never forces us to do what he would like us to do, he very much leaves things to our own free choice. You could say that, therefore, he permits us to do anything – which leads us to choose, ourselves, what we will actually do. By moving from a set of rules, where you were permitted to do certain things and not permitted to do others, to acting out of a changed spirit inside it would seem that everything is now permitted. Note the second verse above “Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others.” Also note that we are still capable of acting independently of God’s guidance, acting out of our will rather than His – that we can and do still do wrong.

Antinomianism P.S. I Love You trailer Clue full

is listed in Wikipedia as “Antinomianism (from the Greek αντι, “against” + νομος, “law”), or lawlessness (in the Greek Bible: ανομια), in theology, is the idea that members of a particular religious group are under no obligation to obey the laws of ethics or morality as presented by religious authorities. Antinomianism is the polar opposite of legalism, the notion that obedience to a code of religious law is necessary for salvation.”

Often antinomianism is painted as a way of life that means you can sin as much as you want to! Well, that would be a horrific lifestyle, but one that I don’t think antinomianism is responsible for. There is a big difference between “no rules” and “no rules, be as evil as you like”. To me antinomianism is “no rules, follow God’s heart in you” – where’s the evil in that?

Surely obeying a rule instead of acting out of God’s guidance is just as much an act that is separate from God as breaking a rule outside of God’s guidance. The act, whichever one it is, still comes out of a separation from God and therefore is a sinful act – sin being separation from God and sinful acts being what you do in your separation from God. Rules do not bring the desired result, in fact they tend to reinforce our ‘stuck in death’ state.

So looking at the opposite behaviour – having a relationship with God and acting directly out of it, having the Holy Spirit inside and acting from that – we see that rules have no place within our relationship with God. God breaks through the barriers and allows us to know him, meaning we no longer have to approximate what he wants, we can know what he wants and do that – in fact we will want to do that just as much as he wants us to do that.

When we are ‘in Christ’ there is no room for rules, rules which cannot bring us to doing the right thing. We are left instead with the single broad command to love – and we can only love when we are acting in God’s will that we know through his Holy Spirit… surely…