Vineyard Church | Weekly Update April 24, 2024

Science is one of those double-edged swords.… In many ways, science provides an awesome template for how to engage the natural world and leverage that engagement to understand creation and how we can live as a part of it. I often think about the dude who looked at the grainy things on the top of grass and asked, “What would happen if I ground that up into powder, mixed it with water, and then put it in a fire?” Just like that, we have bread and the amazing wrapping of meat and cheese that completes my sandwich.

Sometimes science is not so delicious. Consider the imitation crab stick. Here, science has vacuumed the floor of fish canneries and fashioned what was collected into something marketed as a replacement for the crab leg. After replacing the “c” for a “k,” the cannery next paints the resulting stick in order to give it the hue of a snow crab leg.

The lack of color is not where the differences between crab and krab end. While real crab meat and imitation krab have similar calorie counts, real crab meat has three times the amount of protein as krab, which gets most of its caloric content from carbohydrates. Also, crab is much higher in vitamins and minerals than krab, because many of the nutrients are washed away during the krab stick processing. Cheaper, easier to source, but evidenced by using the word krab, this imitation fails to deliver an experience worthy of the name “crab.”

Imitation is not always a negative, especially when that imitation is done both to reflect the real thing and with elements of the real thing. In I Corinthians 11, Paul tells us to imitate him as he imitates Christ. How do we know if our imitation (or Paul’s, for that matter) is a reflection of the genuine article rather than a spiritual krab stick?

An example of a krab stick gospel and thus, krab stick imitators of Jesus, is the gospel that resulted in the Galatian church after some traveling influencers had deconstructed the work of Paul. This gospel had no elements of the genuine article. The gospel preached by the interloping influencers does not reflect the nature of Christ, let alone the teaching of Christ.

The Galatian krab stick gospel denied access to God to anyone unwilling to become Jewish before having faith in Jesus. For a person seeking a relationship with the living God, these leaders decided that what Jesus did on the cross was not enough. A person must satisfy the old covenant before being enveloped by the new covenant.

Krab stick gospel uses human reason to dismantle the divine offering of free grace. At first glance, this type of reasoning can make sense.… If someone gets something for free, then perhaps they would fail to see the worth. To combat this, barriers are created to make sure that seekers have skin in the game before they can be accepted into the family of God. The problem with this is that it contradicts the Gospel of Jesus…which is a pretty big problem.

As we celebrated Holy Week, we talked a lot about how Jesus was far more interested in welcoming a repentant sinner than He is in punishing sin. The Gospel that we have been invited into is one that does not demand prerequisites, and when we create prerequisites, we have replaced the Gospel of Jesus with krab stick. Krab stick gospel is more focused on a person’s sin than it is on the salvation offered by Jesus. Krab stick gospel creates metrics of behavior before being willing to share the Good News of the invitation into the family of God. Krab stick gospel would not imitate Paul in Acts 14. After being stoned for preaching Jesus and left for dead, he is prayed for, healed, and gets up and walks back to those that stoned him to preach again. This is an excellent example of imitating Christ; it wasn’t about those people earning the right to be saved, it was that Jesus loves them so much that Paul wouldn’t stop engaging them.

This week, we will finish Galatians 1 and get into chapter 2.… In this passage, we see Paul deal with sin in a helpful way that can train us to approach it in the same way as Jesus did. With Jesus as an example and Paul imitating Jesus as an example, we can be the crab rather than the krab.

Adam Greenwell
Pastor | Billings Vineyard Church
www.BillingsVineyard.org