I once was both pro-ANC and pro-Desmond Tutu. The Lutheran Church where I had been baptised was asking us to collect money for the peaceful projects of ANC — like schools and so.
I was at a boarding school. Another pupil, whom I was in love with, was born in Zuid-Africa. I did not know that, I asked her for a coin for ANC's peaceful project, and she told me about ... well, what Maarten found out:
After high school, Maarten worked briefly for the railway before entering the South African army for compulsory military training. While there, his distrust and hatred of other races, particularly tribal Africans, grew considerably. Army training sessions often featured footage of widespread unrest in black townships during the 1970s and 80s. The films often portrayed graphic violence, including the infamous public ‘necklacing’ of suspected collaborators. This involved placing a tyre doused in gasoline around the victim’s neck and lighting it. His reaction, he said, was always,
“These perpetrators are sub-human! Just animals! Otherwise, how could they act like this?”
I did certainly not conclude that black Africans were subhuman, just that ANC was making them act in highly unchristian ways (like the kind of things that the Christian Beowulf poet left out: he made no remarks about "Hygelac" — "Hugleik" to us — Beowulf's uncle on his mother's side, actually dying as a robber trying to pillage and possibly rape Christians). I had collected my last Swedish Krona for ANC.
But to the point:
In September 1998, in utter desperation, Maarten cried out to God: “God, you have to change me!”, even challenging God’s right to send him to Hell if He failed to do this.
My cry was mingled with doubt over whether God was real or would respond. But it was utterly genuine, a recognition that I could not save myself. I didn’t then understand the assurances His Word gives for the repentant heart, but I certainly knew that Hell was real, and I didn’t want to go there.
Did he have the right to make this challenge? This is what I asked in the title. Actually yes.
You see, he had been baptised as a child. Baptism had done two things, since he posed no obstacle by clinging to heresy or personal sins when he was baptised:
- it had cleansed him from Adam's sin (though not cured all of the consequences, like mortality and being subject to illness and aging and mood swings);
- it had also given him the character of baptism.
Actually, it would have given him the character of baptism even if he had posed an obstacle to being then and there justified. What does this character mean?
It does not mean that your name being written in the book of life can never be blotted out from it. But it does mean, as long as you are alive, that you have a right to ask God for the graces needed to repent. You have a personal right to call Jesus your Saviour. A person who is already justified, and who then sins mortally, certainly has no right in and of his state of mortal sin, to get justified again. However, he does have a standing through his baptismal character to appeal to God to help him out of sin.
This is obviously so whether the sin involved gang violence like that of Maarten's former life, or gang violation 1 Tim 4:11 by stamping someone else as a sinner and mixing oneselves in his affairs when clearly not asked to and when repeatedly told it annoys him. Perhaps some guys over here in Paris should take note.
As his Christian faith grew, he was baptized and went to Bible College. He was also a pastoral counsellor at one of the biggest drug rehabilitation centres in South Africa.
I was already supposing he was baptised as an infant, i e his parents were of Presbyterian and not Baptist confession. If I was not wrong, I cannot congratulate to this re-baptism, since it is objectively a sacrilege. I'd suggest he repent of that, and get out of congregations that re-baptise when the only reason to doubt an already extant baptism is, he was supposedly too young for it.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
II Lord's Day of Advent
10.XII.2023
Clips of Maarten's story are from:
CMI : From radical racist to passionate preacher
https://creation.com/racist-to-preacher
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