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 Re: Here's the deal... |
bradfreeman |
| Aaron Scott wrote: | | If the new convert is WORSHIPING Buddha (I don't believe Buddhists worship Buddha), that is OF COURSE wrong. If it is a matter of simply being respectful, as was with Naaman, I'm not going to lose any sleep. |
Precisely!
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I'm not saved because I'm good. I'm saved because He's good!
My website: www.bradfreeman.com
My blog: http://bradcfreeman.tumblr.com/ |
Acts-dicted
Posts: 9027
11/22/17 10:00 am
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UncleJD |
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| Re: Here's the deal... |
Link |
| Aaron Scott wrote: | If the new convert is WORSHIPING Buddha (I don't believe Buddhists worship Buddha), that is OF COURSE wrong. If it is a matter of simply being respectful, as was with Naaman, I'm not going to lose any sleep.
Consider this: If you were invited to a meal with a Muslim family, would you not show respect by, say, keeping silent while their prayer of thanks is prayed? Would you, to show your Christian bonafides, draw a picture of Mohammed just to aggravate them? |
I've been around Muslim prayer quite a bit. I was invited once to a political event in Indonesia that had a banquet. I didn't know all that was involved. It was my wife's non-blood-related 'aunt' who invited.
At the end of the event, they had prayer from Muslim, Christian, Catholic, Hindu, and Buddhist clerics. I don't mind the Muslim prayer so much, but I don't want to stand around for Buddhist or especially Hindu prayer. My instinct is to get my kids and get out of there.
I find religious events that equate the different religions as offensive, and I would suspect religious Muslims would feel the same way. The leaders of the party were probably Muslims. Again, what were they thinking? Of course, with Pancasila, politically, Muslims and Hindus claim to worship the one god. At least Muslims are claiming to worship the God of Abraham.
East Asian Buddhists do actually worship Buddha. The words most often translated 'worship' in the Bible refer to prostration. The ten commandments fforbid bowing down to graven images. And east Asian Buddhists bow down to the Buddha statue and pray to Buddha, or that is my understanding of it. Probably the original Buddhism did not treat the man they called Buddha as a god, and some versions of Buddhism are like that.
Buddhism is a branch of and an extension of Hindu philosophy. I heard a Hindu cross-cultural psych. professor in a graduate school, and Hinduism is also concerned with the idea of eliminating desire or want. Apparently, the man they called a Buddha, or his followers, though that he'd gotten out of the Hindu cycle of reincarnation.
The religion may have been about to die off when some east Asians adapted it and made it very idolatrous, bowing down to statues of the so-called Buddha as if he were a god and naming one or more of their own people as other Buddha's.
The Indian Buddhists also had the ten hands of fighting. That tradition was taken to China and evolved into the Shaolin, warrior monks who did Kung Fu, and that marital arts. One opinion was that the ten hands of fighting came from the cultural influence of Alexander the Great, who taught certain foot movements to his troops. So Alexander the Great may have been the great-great grandfather of Kung Fu and the source of other eastern martial arts. That has little to do with religion, but it is interesting.
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Paul said something along the lines of "If someone puts food before you, but doesn't tell you it has been offered to an idol, ask no questions and eat. But if they TELL you that it was offered to an idol, THEN refrain (NOT because you would be worshipping the idol, since an idol is nothing)." |
Paul says to refrain for the other person's sake, and for conscience sake. The reader might have some conscience issues as well.
Paul gave other reasons for not participating in idolatry in addition to conscience.
1. It's the sort of thing Israelites died in the desert over.
2. Do not provoke the Lord to jealousy.
3. He did not want them to have fellowship with demons.
Conscience was one issue. The apostles in Acts 15, probably 10 of the original 12 apostles, Matthias, Paul, and Barnabas with St. James and the elders of the church in Jerusalem sent a letter that said to abstain from the pollutions of idols. Jesus was displeased with churches that tolerated those who taught the people to eat meat offered to idols.
Paul makes one exception: when you don't know that the meat is offered to an idol.
The, apparently influential, ethnic Chinese Bible college professor from the Philippines who advocated teaching new converts and seekers to bow to idols for the sake of family harmony and keeping doors supposedly open for evangelism thought a new convert bowing to a Buddha statue would be good for evangelism. He said he'd recommend the same if it were a statue of Satan when I asked him. As far as conscience goes, his advice runs contrary to Paul's advice about the man at the feast. The dad of the son bows believes the idol is a god, and he would advise the young man to bow anyway.
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Americans seldom have had to wrestle with such things. About the worst in living memory would be Pentecostals being castigated by mainline churches. |
Some of them got beaten up and run out of town.
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Acts-perienced Poster
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12/4/17 9:26 am
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Tom Sterbens |
| If the guys is NOT actually "worshiping" Buddha but going through the motions to establish relationships...do Hezekiah's words apply: "It's just a piece of brass"?? (sincere question) |
Golf Cart Mafia Capo Famiglia
Posts: 4507
12/4/17 11:05 am
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| Tom Sterbens wrote: | | If the guys is NOT actually "worshiping" Buddha but going through the motions to establish relationships...do Hezekiah's words apply: "It's just a piece of brass"?? (sincere question) |
And here is how Hezekiah treated that piece of brass because the people burned incense to it.
II Kings 18:4
He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan.
If you are not suppose to just eat a piece of steak after your host says it is offered to an idol for his sake, then how much more should you not bow down to the idol? Paul says to give no offense to Jew, nor Gentile, nor the church of God. They aren't even to help the Gentile unbeliever sin. If the new convert commits idolatry in front of his parents, he's cooperating with their sin and participating in it. And what new believer who grew up worshipping Buddha would have a clean conscience doing so?
Paul said that if a believer sat at meat in an idols temple, the one with conscience of the idol, who saw him do so, might be emboldened to do the same. To lead a brother to sin like this is to sin against Christ.
Paul doesn't leave the argument there. He also warned against eating in an idols temple because he did not want his readers to have fellowship with demons. He also did not want them to provoke the Lord to jealousy.
The ten commandments actually say not to bow down to graven images.
I joined a men's class at a local congregation here using a curriculum from the US. It was put together by some kind of Baptist church I think. It dealt with 'idols' in men's lives. Just about any problem a man had was labeled an 'idol' or the source was an idol. The need for security was an 'idol.' Basically, the message was that we were all idolators. We had idols and we always would. But their program would help free us from the idols. Certain Baptist views on sanctification can seem rather hopeless and defeatist.
But this reminded me of something I notice with some western Christians. I haven't heard this as much with Pentecostals as with other groups, but some Christians will label anything a Christian struggles with as an 'idol'. Watch football? It's an idol. Do you hug a security blanket your mommy gave you when you were little? They may call that an idol, too. You don't want to miss a news show at night? They call that an idol.
Paul does call greed idolatry, and Job says something similar. So idolatry is not just limited to bowing to statues, but most of the time it is used of that sort of thing in the Bible. I think some Christians really, really overuse it.
But the actual physical statue that is worshipped as a god may be treated as not that big of a deal. Having a statue of Buddha or Shiva on the desk is seen as just art for a well-traveled or cultured person to have. But Paul saw idols, and it really disturbed him.
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Acts-perienced Poster
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12/4/17 11:57 am
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