Extract From
Savage Shepherds
by Adam Harbinson
My wilderness experience had taught me that I had grown up with many profound and liberating truths having been stood on their heads. Why? I suspect it is religious people’s way of controlling free-thinking people by keeping them in fear.
I grew up in a good Christian family. We all went to a little Brethren Gospel Hall, where most of my siblings and I in turn surrendered our lives to Jesus. As I approached my teenage years my father was justifiably concerned that I might wander from the straight and narrow – which in time I did, with a vengeance. He would often beat me over the head with a text from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, 2:21; ‘Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!’ And he painted a picture of an angry God who would wreak havoc in my life if I handled, tasted or touched such things as wine, women and song, parties, cinemas and dancing: even buying sweets or reading a comic on the Sabbath were outlawed. And it worked – for a while.
Fear kept me from those deadly sins, until one day when I was in London on a business trip and I went into a restaurant for lunch. It was my first such trip away from home – I was only nineteen – and I thought I’d have my first glass of Guinness to celebrate my Irishness in a ‘foreign land.’ But I forgot it was Sunday. In my part of Ireland in the late 1960s most shops and restaurants closed to observe the Sabbath. And so I had committed two cardinal sins; I had consumed alcohol and I had bought it on a Sunday. However, since there was neither thunderbolt to crack my skull nor pillar of fire to incinerate me, it wasn’t long until I had discarded all the restraints that had hedged me in to that point.
The techniques of fear and the threat of violence are ineffective in controlling human behaviour, and the reason is this; we are instinctively rebellious. Place a number of toys on the floor in front of a child, explain that he can play with any of them – ‘Apart from that one,’ and of course we all know which item the child will reach for as soon as your back is turned – even before your back is turned!
Paul said it, the law doesn’t work: ‘No one can ever be made right with God by doing what the law commands. The law simply shows us how sinful we are.’ (Rom. 3:20). And he elaborated; ‘I would never have known that coveting (for example) is wrong if the law had not said, “You must not covet.” But sin used this command to arouse all kinds of covetous desires within me!’ (Rom. 7:7). Allow me to paraphrase; ‘Tell me not to do something, and that’s the very thing I will want to do.’
Therefore, for most Christians who recognise the utter futility of trying to observe the law in its entirety, there are only two options; they either slide into self-deception, or they give up even trying. I’m a pragmatist. I chose the latter, and from my twenties in the late sixties until my encounter with God that fateful day in November 1980 when he welcomed his prodigal back into his family, I lived a wild and profligate life.
Years later when spiritual abuse derailed my faith – or so it seemed, when all my points of reference had melted away, and when all I had was my Bible and the deep conviction that God loved me, although I had only a faint idea why or how much, I devoured my Bible in a frantic search to find something concrete on which to rebuild my life.
Religious people had failed me, but I was determined to find the kernel of truth that lay buried under thick sediments of tradition and empty ritual...
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