Let us keep contending, keep trusting, keep returning to the ancient marker of the cross.

 

In 2011, there was a New York Times article that came out related to the devastating tsunamis that had taken place recently at that time in Japan says, “The stone tablet has stood on the forested hillsides since before they were born. But the villagers have faithfully obeyed the stark warning carved on its weathered face. Do not build your homes below this point.”

Residents say, “This injunction from their ancestors kept their tiny village of 11 households safely out of reach of the deadly tsunami last month that wiped out hundreds of miles of Japanese coast and rose to record heights near here.” The wave stopped just 300 feet below the stone. “They knew the horrors of tsunami so they erected that stone to warn us,” said Tamishige Kimura, 64, the village leader. Hundreds of so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, dot the coast of Japan, silent testimony to the past destruction that these lethal waves have frequented upon this earthquake-prone nation.

But modern Japan, confident that advanced technology and higher seawalls would protect vulnerable areas came to forget or ignore these ancient warnings, dooming it to repeat bitter experiences when the recent tsunami struck. The ancestors knew what they were talking about. They’d learned the hard way and they erected those markers “Don’t build past this point.” But we are arrogant. We know better. We’re more enlightened. We’re smarter. We have to accommodate more and more people. We ignore the markers. We have to be reminded that always reforming means in essence always returning to the gospel. It doesn’t mean that the faith that is delivered to us is always changing, progressing into something better.

What it means is to be continually sloughing off the baggage of doctrinal add-ons and distractions, cutting out the ever rising innovations, theological and otherwise. To be always reforming is to keep going back to the ancient markers in the face of constant opposition, temptation, even sometimes taunting from those who would have us play with heterodoxy ever newly. Let us keep contending, keep trusting, keep returning to the ancient marker of the cross. The church that is always reforming is always returning to the gospel, always conforming its message, its ministry, its methods even to the gospel. The church understands that sinners who are won to the gospel are kept by the gospel.

Jared Wilson