Risky Obedience to a Shameless God

Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. Hebrews 11:16b.

In its objective sense, that is, when we speak the words "shame on you" to others, it is usually experienced as disagreement with disapproval of, or revulsion at the behaviors or verbal expressions of another. Shame in its subjective sense, when we hear the words directed at ourselves, "shame on you" it is usually experienced as guilt, unworthiness, or embarrassment.

Shame, no question about it, is a powerful tool for inducing guilt, self reflection, and a plea for obedience and conformity. One would think that an all powerful God would certainly have shame in the bag of methods He uses for dealing with His unruly and disobedient creatures.

Creatures like Noah, for example. Noah has the honored distinction of being the first biblical case of drunkenness. Shame on you Noah!

Then there was Lot. Besides having a wife who was turned to salt, Lot is known for having impregnated his own daughters. Shame on you Lot!

And we must not leave out David. He was sexually attracted to Bathsheba who was already married. But that did not bother David. He simply arranged to have her husband Uriah killed. Shame on you David!

Drunkenness, incest, murder, grounds for God to say, "I am ashamed to be your God." And yet, while that would be logical, it would not be biblical. While it would definitely be human, it would not be divine. If heaven is the height of God's love, then this verse in Hebrews reveals the depth of God's love. "Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them." Whose God? Noah's, Lot's and David's God; the God of a drunk, of a perpetrator of incest and the God of a murderer. And if these things do not make God ashamed, one wonders just what it would take. It appears that this God of the Bible knows no shame, that He is indeed a shameless kind of God.

Does this mean then that the author of Hebrews thinks that the lack of shame on God's part indicates God's approval of man's shameful behavior? I think not. God's response toward shameful activities was and continues to be different and much more radical that the "shame on you" approaches. Perhaps this radicalism can best be illustrated with an example.

Nazi Germany during the holocaust of the 1940's put Jews in particular and other nationalities in general through a literal hell. They were used as human guinea pigs for medical experiments, cremated alive, made to inhale poisonous gas, eye gorged out, starved, shot, hanged, hacked, scorched, frozen and so on. One of the saddest tragedies is best told by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a doctor who worked to save a little girl who body was found alive at the bottom of a pile of corpses:

"I grabbed my instrument case, which was always ready, and dashed to the gas chamber. Against the wall, near the entrance to the immense room, half covered with other bodies, I saw a girl in the throes of a death rattle, her body seized with convulsions. The gas commando men around me were in a state of panic. Nothing like this had ever happened in the course of their horrible career.

We moved the still-living body from the corpses pressing against it. I gathered the tiny adolescent body into my arms and carried it back to the room adjoining the gas chamber, where normally the gas commando men change clothes for work. I laid the body on a bench. A frail young girl, almost a child, she could have been no more than fifteen. I took out my syringe and, taking her arm – she had not yet recovered consciousness and was breathing with difficulty – I administered three intravenous injections.

My companions covered her body which was as cold as ice with a heavy overcoat. One ran to the kitchen to fetch some tea and warm broth. Everybody wanted to help as if she were his own child."

They saved the life of the young girl, who tried to reconstruct in her mind what had happened. She could only remember bits and pieces of the past that amounted to nothing. But the SS officer in charge believed the child had seen too much and would tell others. So he shot her in the back of the neck and she died.

Cruelty toward children abounded in Nazi concentration camps. At the Auschwitz trials, witnesses testified to seeing a mountain of children corpses, rats scurrying over them. Others remembered the SS breaking the spines of children over their knees or smashing a child's skull against the wall. Some, not wanting to waste bullets just threw them into the fire alive. Newborns were drowned in small barrels of freezing water. The whole holocaust experience is one of the world's greatest shames.

When we think about man's inhumanity to man and the grossest horrors we are capable of inflicting on one another, we cannot help but wonder with the Psalmist as he inquires of God, what is man that you are mindful of him? Or perhaps we should ask, what is man that you are not ashamed to be called his God?

What kind of love is this, that God was not ashamed to become one of us in the Person of Jesus Christ, who Himself was subjected to shameful treatment which not even animals inflict on each other? What kind of a God is it who is not ashamed of His people who inflict suffering, death, and destruction on others in the name of nationalism, ideology or to prove some superiority?

It is the God of Lot, the fornicator, of Noah, the drunk, of David, the murderer. It is the God who is shameless. The God who rather than shame us into His image; into His likeness; took our shameful likeness on Himself in the Person of a Man who was despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows, One acquainted with grief, as One from whom men hid their faces. Not only did Jesus bear our sin, our alienation on the cross, He also bore our shame, and God is revealing to us a God who is so steadfast, so faithful, and so shameless, that He is still willing to be our God.

How does one respond to this shameless God? We respond in risky obedience. God calls us to another way of life as He did His servants before us. They responded in faith to that call though it entailed considerable risk. And that response is the reason they are mentioned in the Hebrew's hall of faith:

Abraham – took the treasure in Sarah's womb, that gift from God, to the mountain to sacrifice, because the Lord told him to, that was risky business.

Moses – presented himself before the very person who wanted him dead because God mandated it, that was risky business.

Rahab – the harlot of Jericho helped the foreign spies and subversives who had entered her city to destroy it, because the Lord wanted her to. That was risky business.

And we could go on and on. But the common thread is risky obedience as a response to the God who is not ashamed of who we are; or what we are or what we have done in our past. Yet, He is calling us in the present, right now, as we are, to risky obedience.

Being a witness for Christ is risky business because we are at risk of being rejected, losing friends, alienation from family members, looked upon as "strange" people. Obedience to God is ALWAYS risky, but if God is for us, who can be against us?

So where do we go from here saints? We go the city, "Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them." God's lack of shame is related to His great plans for the Kingdom. This shameless God has something up His sleeves that is so vast, so grandiose, and so all-encompassing, that He uses drunks, murderers, and prostitutes to bring it off, not as last resorts, but as first picks. In people like Rahab, Sarah and Lot, we begin to see revealed the true meaning and nature of God's city.

When Jesus talked of the Kingdom, He stretched language to the breaking point. While He spoke of the Kingdom as a small seed which grows into a giant tree, and as a pearl of great price worthy of any sacrifice, His main image was that of a meal. A feast, a banquet, where those intentionally sought out, seated and served first, were people with whom most of us would not want to share a table. Who are these quests who get choice seats at the feast in the Gospels, but the poor, the crazy, the fornicators, the weak, the rejected?

Understand, it is no accident that the beginning and end of Holy Writ offers a vision of the Garden of Eden and the Kingdom respectively. People in and out of the church feel more comfortable talking about Eden than New Jerusalem. Eden is comfortable, the Kingdom, scary. Eden is this world as we know it. The Kingdom is this world as we know it, turned inside out. Eden is where the man and woman were both naked and were not ashamed. The Kingdom is where God works through naked drunks, murderers and adulterers, and is not ashamed to be their God. And He is not ashamed to be God even to people like us.

Now understand, even though we know that God uses the most vile, the most wicked, the most evil to bring about His will, it does not mean the vile, the wicked, the evil will see heaven. Only those who respond to the call of the shameless God, only those of us who are willing to make an about face and obediently follow Christ and accept the risks involved, will ever step foot in the City of God.

God is not ashamed to be called our God but He asks that we, in turn, not be ashamed to be and LIVE as His people. AMEN?

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. Romans 1:16