Medway Today column, 8th June 2001: The Manual And The Love-Letter

For an area like Medway with its great naval and military traditions, I have a confession to make. I come from an RAF family. Until I moved here, I only linked the words Army and Navy with a shop. I am the first male in the family not to join up, but my father, my uncle, and three of my cousins have all served in the air force. The fourth cousin married a soldier – whoops, what happened there? 

If you’re still on speaking terms with me, allow me to continue. One cousin spent several years working in telecommunications. Often he would be given faulty equipment to repair. He had a standard response: “First I drop it from a great height, and only if that doesn’t work do I consult the manufacturer’s manual.” 

I’m a bit like that when something goes wrong with my computer. No, I don’t drop it from a great height, but if the software crashes, I want to kind myself that I can solve the problem. I spent over £30 on a manual for Microsoft Office, but it always seems to stay on the shelf. 

Somehow in life I feel we’d rather drop things from a great height or mess around thinking we know best rather than consult the maker’s instructions. “It’s my life – don’t let anybody tell me what to do. Who do they think they are? I have a right to choose.” 

So people who stand up for moral standards in society are portrayed as self-righteous, self-appointed busybodies. And God is pictured as a spoilsport. 

I can understand some of this. You may have heard the story of the Christian who removed the swing from the budgie’s cage on a Sunday so that the bird didn’t desecrate the Sabbath. I had a school friend from a very strict religious background whose parents would let him listen to the radio on a Sunday, but not watch the television. What the moral difference between them was, I never worked out at the time and I still don’t know. 

If the Christian Church has given you this impression of being a full-time campaigner for misery, I can only apologise. But when the Church makes a moral stand on an issue in society, we intend to do so for the best reasons. We believe there is a manual from the Maker, and that what our world often does is the equivalent of dropping things from a great height and risking incurring great harm. 

So when the Bible (the manual) calls for sexual relations to be kept within the total commitment for life in marriage of a man and a woman, that is because God created sexuality as one of his most beautiful and powerful gifts. But like anything powerful, it needs to be in the right place or it will cause damage. When Christians are concerned about the increasing use of narcotic drugs in our world, it is because God went to such trouble to create our lives that putting our pleasure ahead of looking after those bodies is ingratitude to him. When politicians, businesses, and social institutions think that the poor can be trampled on and it can just be covered by talk of an ‘enterprise culture’, the Church will rise up against them, because God has a special concern for the vulnerable. 

But the Bible is more than a manual. It is also God’s love letter to us. God knows that we fail to follow his instructions. That is why he sent Jesus – to die in our place that we might be forgiven, and to be raised from the dead so that we might have new life. God woos us with his love. 

And when we respond by turning from our selfishness and trusting our lives to him, we experience that love. Then we follow the manual – not in order to please him (we’ll never reach his perfect standards) but out of sheer overwhelming gratitude for the immensity of his love for us.

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.